The same sadly held true for the greenbacks she’d come by in unofficial ways. She felt guilty about that private grave-robbing, but not very guilty. It wasn’t as if she were the only one. Oh, no—not even close. Some of the card games the scavengers got into . . . That much cash wouldn’t have paid off the national debt, but it sure would have made some Vegas blackjack dealers raise an eyebrow.
So here she was. She could eat for a while. She could stay at a Super 8 motel that seemed pathetically eager to get her business. And she could shop for a clunker at used-car lots whose salesmen made the Super 8 desk clerks seemed stoic by comparison.
“Yes, ma’am, I would be dee-lighted to sell you a vee – hick-le,” said one fellow whose plaid jacket was plainly made from the skin of a particularly gaudy 1970s sofa. And he explained why he would be so dee-lighted, too: “Business ain’t been what you’d call brisk lately.”
“I believe that.” Vanessa tried to sound as cutting as she could—which was saying a good deal. She assumed any and all used-car salesmen were there to shaft her. She waved at the lot. “Your cars are sitting there gathering dust.”
That was the exact truth. Red cars, blue cars, green cars, black cars, white cars? No—they were all grayish brown cars. Some of them showed hints of their original color. None showed more than hints.
“You know how it is, ma’am.” The salesman spread his hands in resigned embarrassment. “We clean ’em off, an’ then we get more wind outa the north or the west. Still an awful lot of that horrible dust.”
He wasn’t wrong. Having spent so long closer to the eruption site than this, Vanessa knew as much. She was damned if she’d admit it, though. Give a salesman an inch and he’d take your wallet. Her mouth twisted into a sneer. “Chances are you don’t clean them because this way you can hide a lot of what’s wrong with them.”
He clasped both hands over his heart, as if he’d just taken a mortal wound. “Now, ma’am, that just ain’t fair. Not even slightly, it ain’t. Let me show you this here Ford. Honest to Pete, it’s as good as the day it was made, or even better.”
“How many recalls has that model been through?” Vanessa retorted, and the salesman looked wounded again.
He tried for a comeback: “That particular vee-hick-le, I happen to know, has been supervolcano-ized.”
Vanessa had never quite made up her mind whether she hated the language of hucksterism worse than the language of bureaucracy or the other way round. She withered the man in the bad jacket with a glance. “Oh, cut the crap, why don’t you? If it’s got a heavy-duty air filter, just say so, for Christ’s sake.”
“I don’t speak of our Lord and Savior that way,” he said stiffly.
“I told you to cut the crap,” Vanessa said. “You need me worse than I need you, but you won’t get me.” She walked off that lot.
Two days later, she found a Toyota a few years newer than the one that had perished in her escape from Denver. The salesman there didn’t speak of Jesus at all. He wore a corduroy coat that hadn’t been stylish for a long time but wasn’t aggressively ugly. The Toyota was more expensive than she liked, but not impossibly so.
“I think we’ve got a deal,” he said at last. “I’ll need to see some ID before we finish the formalities.”
“Here you go.” She showed him her license from Colorado.
He looked at it. “Miz Ferguson, this expired three months ago.”
“Well, so what?” Vanessa said. “If you expect me to go back to Denver and renew it, you’re out of luck.” She didn’t say shit out of luck, and patted herself on the back for her restraint.
He sighed. He might have been showing restraint, too. “I can’t sell a car to anybody with an expired license. The second you drive it onto the street, you’re in violation of the law.” He spread his hands. “You see my problem?”
“I see it, all right. What the hell am I supposed to do about it?” Vanessa’s tone took on a certain edge. She’d traded favors for favors before. She hated herself every time she did it—how could you not? But she wanted wheels. She needed wheels. If she had to do it one more time, maybe she could turn off her mind and not think about it while it was going on. She’d sure tried to do that with Micah Husak. Afterwards? She could worry about that, well, afterwards.
Instead of pulling down the Venetian blinds in his miserable little office, the salesman said, “You wait right here. I’ve got to go talk to my manager.”
Vanessa sat there and fumed. If he thinks I’ll take care of them both, he’s got another think coming, she told herself. No way I do gang bangs, God damn men and their horny souls to hell.
But the salesman’s manager turned out to be a woman. She was about fifty. She didn’t try to hide it. She was short-haired and looked tough. Her pinched mouth said she was used to beating men in their own ballpark. It also said she didn’t especially enjoy winning—or anything else.
“Carl tells me you don’t have a current license,” she said.
“That’s right,” Vanessa answered. “I got to Camp Constitution with the clothes on my back. I’ve been there or in a scavenging detail since right after the eruption. I wasn’t really worried about renewing the damn thing, you know? There’s got to be some kind of way you can sell me a car. It’s not like this outfit doesn’t need my money.”
By the way Carl’s eyebrows lifted, she’d nailed that one. The manager’s face never changed. Vanessa wouldn’t have wanted to play poker against her, even for nickels. “You could get a license from the Oklahoma Department of Motor Vehicles,” the gal said. “You might be able to, anyhow. It would take some time. I don’t know if they’d want to issue you one with only that to show for ID.”
“Or?” Vanessa said. “C’mon. There’s got to be an or. It’s not like I don’t have this year’s license because I’m a fuckup. I don’t have this year’s license ’cause there’s nothing left of Colorado.”
“I understand that. It’s not like we don’t know about the supervolcano here, either.” The manager clicked a fingernail against the arm of her chair, considering. “How would this be? We’ll charge you an additional out-of-state identity-confirmation fee of, say, a thousand dollars. In exchange for that, we will overlook your lack of documentation and we will try to contact Colorado authorities to make sure you are the person your expired license says you are.”
Chances were those Colorado authorities were dead, dead and buried under volcanic ash. The knowing gleam in the woman’s hard gray eyes said she knew as much. She’s making this up, Vanessa realized. It’s an excuse to screw an extra grand out of me, that’s all. Even with inflation making the dollar leak value the way a blown-out tire leaked air, a grand was still a fair chunk of change.
“How about making your fee five hundred?” Vanessa said.
The manager smiled. No one would ever accuse her of owning a sweet smile. No, it was more like a piranha’s. “A thousand,” she said flatly. Vanessa realized something else: this wasn’t the first time she’d played this game. More like the eleventy-first, or the hundred and eleventy-first. Sure as hell, the woman went on, “You can take it down the street if you want to. You won’t get off cheaper anywhere else, and you’ll end up with a crappier car than that Toyota.”
“At least fill the gas tank all the way to the top,” Vanessa said, throwing in the sponge.
“I think we can do that much,” Carl said. The manager sent him a flinty stare: Vanessa’d won back something over ten percent of the bribe, anyhow. She got the strong, strong feeling not many people did so well against this gal. Would the cost of the fill-up all come from Carl’s share? Vanessa wouldn’t have been a bit surprised.
That was Carl’s problem, though, not hers. The mountain of forms you had to fill out to buy a car in Oklahoma was every bit as tall as the one California made you climb. Vanessa signed on a great many dotted lines. Carl drove the Toy
ota off the lot and came back a few minutes later with a pained expression and, presumably, a full tank.
Vanessa laid out the cash, including the thousand-dollar fee (nowhere, she’d noticed, was it mentioned in all that paperwork: one more surprise—not!). She got into the car and headed south. She hadn’t been behind a wheel for years, but she still knew how. And she was on her way at last!
XV
If you went barefoot in the park in Guilford, Maine, you’d get frostbite, and in a hurry, too. Rob Ferguson didn’t much care. He had rubber overshoes on over his New Balances. He wore a fur cap with earflaps and a red star. It was ratty, but he didn’t care—it kept his ears warm. All of him was warm enough, in fact, except his nose. He didn’t think his nose would ever be warm again. As long as it didn’t turn black and fall off, he’d have to be content.
Kids slid down toward the river on sleds. Kids on ice skates spun on the frozen Piscataquis. The river had a deep, stone-hard crust even though it was past the alleged first day of spring and well on its way to Tax Day. Rob’d tried ice skates a few times. He was convinced the Devil had invented them to punish sinners’ ankles. They sure punished his. If you weren’t ice-skating by the time you were two, you’d never get the hang of it. That was his theory, and he was sticking to it.
He refused to abandon it even though both Biff and Charlie could propel themselves pretty well on skates with blades. They were no threat for Olympic gold. They’d never hoist the Stanley Cup. But they could get from hither to yon without going ass over teakettle. And neither one had ever strapped on skates before coming to Guilford. It didn’t seem fair.
A snowball flew past Rob, not quite close enough to make him duck. Everybody from age four on up threw them all the time. One angry town meeting had resulted in an ordinance against using a rock core. A good many people had wanted an ordinance banning any and all snowball-flinging. That failed—too many folks enjoyed it. The failure helped make the meeting angry.
Rob enjoyed snowballs. There went Jim Farrell, with his charcoal-gray fedora—the most recognizable one, perhaps, since Fiorello La Guardia’s—just aching to be knocked off. To scoop up snow in mittened fingers took only a few seconds. To let fly seemed to take no time at all.
The snowball flew straight and true. It paffed into the side of Farrell’s hat. There it exploded. The hat ended up at Farrell’s feet. His own hair wasn’t much lighter than the snow through which he walked.
He stooped to retrieve the fedora, carefully brushing what was left of the snowball from it before setting it back on his head at the proper jaunty angle. Only then did he look around to see which miscreant might have assailed him.
He looked no farther than Rob. “Oh. You.” He might have found half of Rob in his apple. “Why am I not surprised?”
“Why, Professor Farrell, sir, whatever could you be talking about?” Rob exuded innocence the way an EPA toxic-waste site exuded dioxin.
“So you deny it, do you?” Farrell rumbled. He stooped again. When he came up, he came up firing. The snowball caught Rob dead center. The retired history professor beamed. “That’ll teach you, you rapscallion! I couldn’t have done better with a catapult.”
Instead of reretaliating, Rob clapped his hands in muffled admiration. “I’ve been called a lot of things, but never one of those before. Sounds like a hip-hop onion, you know?”
Farrell made a face, more at the music than at the pun. “Loud obscenity never appealed to me, even with a heavy bass line.”
“Well, not to me, either,” Rob admitted. “If you’re white and you aren’t Eminem, you’ve got no business rapping.”
“No one has any business rapping,” Farrell said firmly. He sighed. Vapor gushed from his mouth and nose. “I have always taken it as an article of faith that the Founders knew what they were doing when they added the First Amendment to the Constitution, but some of what’s passed for music the past twenty years does make me wonder.”
Rob bowed, which made him need to grab his cap to keep it from falling off. “At your service, Professor.”
Farrell shook his head. “I wasn’t referring to you and your fellow demented Darwinian amphibians. I truly wasn’t. You’re amusing, even clever—not something I say lightly.”
“I know. Thanks.” Rob bowed again, more sincerely than he’d expected. A compliment from Farrell was praise indeed, not least because the old man didn’t give forth with them very often.
“And you don’t seem to feel obligated to blow out every eardrum within a furlong,” Farrell added.
“That depends,” Rob said judiciously. “Since we got to Guilford, the power hasn’t been on much around here. Hard to knock crows out of the sky with acoustic guitars.”
“You would if you could, you’re telling me.” Jim Farrell sighed again. “At my advanced age and state of decrepitude, I didn’t think I could be so easily despoiled of one of my few remaining illusions.”
“Yeah, right. Now tell me another one.” Rob couldn’t match Farrell’s syntax or vocabulary, and sensibly didn’t try.
“We’re going to come through this winter with the greatest of ease.” The de facto boss of Maine north and west of the Interstate threw back his head, almost far enough to make that trademark fedora fall off again. He laughed to show he was telling another one. He put enough vinegar in the laugh to show he didn’t expect to be taken seriously.
“Yeah, right,” Rob repeated. He hadn’t come through this winter with the greatest of ease himself, not with that bullet grazing his leg he hadn’t. But that wasn’t what the professor was talking about, and they both knew it.
Farrell adjusted the hat. His extravagant eyebrows twitched. “This past winter was colder than the one before it. Fool that I am, I hadn’t dreamt it could be. Those who are alleged to know about such things claim the one ahead will be harder yet.”
One of the people alleged to know about such things was the stepmother Rob still hadn’t met. He wondered, not for the first time, if this wasn’t the right moment to make tracks for the opposite corner of the country. Things in SoCal weren’t . . . so bad. What came out of his mouth, though, was “As long as we’ve got firewood and meese and MREs, we’ll get by.”
“Why anyone would want Reagan’s attorney general . . .” Farrell held up a gloved finger. “He was a fat fellow—I give you that. Tubbier than I am, which isn’t easy. Render him down for oil, and he could likely keep the lamps burning quite a while.”
Rob hadn’t been talking about the Meese called Ed, and knew Farrell knew as much. The professor enjoyed, even reveled in, being difficult. Rob eyed him. “You’ve dropped a good bit of weight since I first met you,” he said truthfully.
“So have you. So has everybody in these parts,” Farrell replied. What twisted his mouth wasn’t a smile, even if it tried to be. “We’re eating less and working harder. Once upon a time, large parts of the world had so very much that even poor people could become obese, and commonly did. As recently as a hundred years ago, that would have been unimaginable. My Greeks and Romans would never have believed it.”
“Huh,” Rob said. Farrell was good at teasing, or sometimes startling, thoughtful noises out of people. “Hadn’t looked at it that way, but you’re not wrong.” When the illegal immigrants who mowed lawns in L.A. sported double chins and potbellies—and a lot of them had—the traditional meaning of poor needed revising.
Well, the supervolcano had gone and revised it, all right. It sure as hell had.
“‘Once upon a time,’ I said.” Farrell sounded as academically mournful as if he were discussing the fall of Rome. “No more, not around here. They say we may be able to plant the Midwest again in a few years. But if the weather keeps getting worse, how much will grow even if we can? We are still working through our pre-eruption surplus, and sooner or later—sooner, now, I fear—we’ll come to the bottom of that.”
“We
’ve got the mooses.” Rob tossed out another possible plural. The word wasn’t so bad as mongoose, but it came close.
“We’ve barely had enough to feed us this time till warmer weather comes again.” Farrell gestured with that index finger once more. “Nota bene: I do not say warm weather. This benighted part of the world won’t see warm weather till long after I’m dead and buried—or perhaps I should be cremated, if I ever aim to warm up in this world. But I digress.”
“You do? I’m shocked, Professor. Shocked, I tell you!” Rob hadn’t seen Casablanca for nothing.
“If digression was good enough for Herodotus, it’s good enough for me,” Farrell said. And he digressed some more: “There are two kinds of modern historians of the ancient world, you know.”
“Now that you mention it,” Rob said, “I didn’t.”
He slowed Jim Farrell down not a jot. “There are those who like Herodotus, and there are those who like Thucydides. They’re easy to tell apart. The ones who like Thucydides are the ones with the tight assholes.”
Rob didn’t know what he’d thought Farrell would come out with. Whatever it was, that wasn’t it. He barked surprised laughter. Then he said, “I thought we were talking about moose.” Maybe doing it right would keep the professor on track.
“No, we were talking about the absence of moose,” Farrell said with relentless precision. Maybe doing it right wouldn’t, too. “And more and more of them are absent, too. Unless I’m very much mistaken, we’re hunting them far faster than they can breed. We’re having to go farther and farther afield for firewood, too.”
That, Rob knew. Maine had abundant second-growth woods. Not many people had farmed its stony soil in the second half of the twentieth century, or in the twenty-first, and trees reclaimed fields by the multiple square mile. An awful lot of those trees, though, had gone up in smoke the past few winters. Many more would burn when the weather worsened again.
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