Things Fall Apart

by Harry Turtledove

  “Thanks.” Colin meant it. “The only thing is, I really and truly don’t want to do it. It’d drive me nuts.”

  She grinned crookedly. “And who’d know the difference?” He laughed. He wouldn’t have kept laughing if she’d gone on with it. But she didn’t. She’d said her piece. He’d said his. Now it was over . . . as much as something like this could ever be over. He sat down at his desk, started going through the latest robbery and homicide reports, and did his best to pretend he was nothing but an ordinary police lieutenant on an ordinary kind of day.

  His best, he feared, wasn’t close to good enough. He wondered if it ever would be.

  • • •

  The calendar swore it was spring. Rob Ferguson was more inclined to swear at the calendar, or else to burst into hysterical laughter. The only double-digit temperatures Guilford had seen since the beginning of the year were the ones in negative numbers. When your lows were below zero, that was one thing. When your highs couldn’t jump the hurdle, you were talking about a whole ’nother ballgame.

  He moved on snowshoes as easily as he would have in socks across a bare floor. He remembered how, when he first came to Guilford, the splay-legged, shuffling gait had left his thigh muscles sore, and how he’d had to think about every step before he took it. No more. As with Shakespeare’s grave diggers, familiarity lent a quality of easiness.

  He tramped through a barer, more open landscape than the one he’d known just after he got here. The pines and broad-leaved trees that had grown this close to Guilford were long gone now—literally gone up in smoke. You could chop and burn or you could freeze. Not a pretty choice, but a real one.

  He didn’t expect to see a moose around these parts. To put it another way, he would have been astonished to see a moose around these parts. They’d been hunted out for a while now. But the Piscataquis River ran into Manhanock Pond east and a little south of Guilford. Most of the big pond was frozen hard enough for hockey. Hell, most of it was probably frozen hard enough for tank battles. But there’d be, or there might be, a little stretch of open water where the river came in.

  Where there was open water, there’d be, or there might be, waterfowl. Mallards, maybe, or geese: Canada geese or the snow geese that grew more common in these parts as snow did, too. Rob’s mouth filled with spit at the thought of roast goose. All dark meat—and all that lovely goose grease, too. If you were going to live in a climate like this, you needed fat. Vegans in Guilford—there were some—had a rough time because so little olive oil or even corn or soybean cooking oil came in. Corn and soybeans grew in the Midwest, or they had. Not much of anything grew there now.

  Rob carried a shotgun in the crook of his left elbow. He wore an electric orange vest over his L.L. Bean heavy-duty anorak and backpack. His fur cap with earflaps had an electric orange nylon cover. He looked around and behind him every so often just the same. He’d used all the Day-Glo crap when he got shot, too. Just fool luck he hadn’t lost a leg or got killed instead of only picking up that scar. If somebody was gaining on him now, he wanted to know about it as soon as he could.

  Trust but verify. That had been a disarmament-negotiation mantra back about the time Rob was born. He wanted to verify, all right. Trust? After you’d got shot once, trusting wasn’t so easy. He was glad when he didn’t see anybody else.

  He also peered ahead. Guilford wasn’t the only small town that could send hunters to Manhanock Pond. Sangerville and Dover-Foxcroft might try it, too. Sangerville was so tiny, it had almost frozen up and blown away. Dover-Foxcroft lay farther off but, bigger even than Guilford, remained very much a going concern. It had a real hospital, for instance, not just an urgent-care clinic.

  He didn’t see anybody coming from the east, either. Not even the Three Wise Guys, he thought. Maybe over there they figured the whole pond would be frozen up. And maybe they were right, and he was just wasting his time hiking out here. As with any hunting, that was the chance you took.

  His chuckle sent gusts of vapor spurting from his mouth and nose. What would I be doing if I’d stayed back in Guilford? The most likely answer was Sitting around twiddling my thumbs. He might be playing music with the other guys in the band, assuming they had nothing else shaking this morning. Or he might be over at the Mansion Inn, shooting the shit with Dick Barber.

  But twiddling his thumbs was the best bet. He wouldn’t be jumping on his wife’s bones—he knew that only too well. Lindsey had a genuine, honest to God job: she taught chemistry at the high school east of the Inn. How useful that was in subarctic Maine might be a different question, but getting kids out of their folks’ hair several hours a day several days a week had to prevent all kinds of child abuse.

  There was some open water where the Piscataquis flowed into the lake. Rob clapped his mittened hands together. They made a Zennish almost-noise. (One of the mittens had a slit so he could stick out his index finger and fire the shotgun.) The only trouble was, no waterfowl swam in the water or waddled around by the edge of the lake.

  Even more than trying to make a living in the music biz, hunting taught you patience. Either that or it drove you crazy, one. In his pack, Rob carried a little white pop-up tent. He took it out and popped it up now. Voilà! Instant nylon igloo. He turned it so one of the mesh squares that did duty for windows pointed toward the water. The mesh had been cut at the bottom and sides. He could push out the shotgun when he needed to. If he needed to.

  He crawled inside. His six-one frame was crowded in there, but not terribly crowded. He settled down to wait. Maybe he would trudge back to Guilford empty-handed when evening came around. Or maybe he would be the primeval huntsman, bringing fat geese back to his mate. (The primeval huntsman probably wouldn’t have toted his kill home in dark green Hefty trash bags, though.)

  This whole business of killing your own food felt weird to a guy who’d spent most of his life grazing at roadside diners, and who’d always figured venturing into a supermarket and coming out with something raw was getting back to nature. Just as strange was having to think hard to remember the last time he’d actually spent money.

  No, when you got right down to it, that was even stranger. He’d scuffled for cash ever since he went out on the road with Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles. Almost any band that toured all the time scuffled for cash. Yeah, there were exceptions, but SF and the ETs hadn’t seemed likely to turn into one even before the supervolcano went kablooie.

  Since then . . . With some wonder, Rob reminded himself that he hadn’t filed a tax return since the eruption. The IRS and the FBI hadn’t indicted him and dragged his evading ass to Leavenworth on account of it, either. Partly, that was because the Feds had written off this part of Maine as not being worth the bother. They kept trying to rehab the huge swath of the Midwest the blast had trashed: it would be worth something if they did. This piece of the country? Who cared? Washington sure didn’t. Rob knew exactly nobody who had paid taxes the past few years.

  Another reason for not paying was that precious little cash money had passed through his hands lately. He did spend some in the brief, chilly time alleged to be summer, when the roads thawed out and luxury goods from the south could come up. And he got a little sometimes when the band gigged in far-off places like Dover-Foxcroft and Greenville.

  Mostly, though, the money economy in this cut-off part of the country had collapsed. Barter was the new king. You needed something done, you paid off in moose meat or paperback books or guitar lessons or whatever else you had that whoever was doing something for you wanted. A couple of women in Guilford had lost their reputations—or got new ones—by paying for things they needed in the oldest coin of all. So had one guy, a variation that might not have been seen so openly back in the old days.

  Rob peered out through the mesh screen. Snow. Ice. Green water. No ducks. No geese. Not even any coots, though you had to be hungry even to think about shooting a coot. Rob had been hungry enough to do it a couple of times. He’d had coot roasted and boiled. Both took a long
time and used up a lot of fuel. Neither was a success.

  And coot soup made turkey soup smell good by comparison. Turkeys were such nice, tasty birds. Why their boiled carcasses smelled so nasty, Rob had no idea. But they did. Coot soup was worse yet. Boiled skunk might outdo it, but Rob wasn’t even sure of that.

  Time meandered by. “Patience,” Rob muttered. “Yeah, right.” That was also another game for solitaire. And it made a decent enough way to waste an hour or so. You found your fun where you could when TV and the Net and video games were only memories.

  He pulled a beat-up British paperback about the Miracle at Mons out of his pocket. He’d got it from the Mansion Inn. Thanks to Dick Barber’s book collection, he knew a hell of a lot more now about military history than he had when he got to Guilford. Like his own old man, Barber was an ex-Navy man who had a built-in excuse to be interested in such things. Rob didn’t, but he’d discovered he was anyway.

  Every so often, he looked up and looked out. When he saw nothing interesting, he went back to the British Regulars and their Lee-Enfields. Then noise outside told him he wouldn’t see nothing if he looked out again, so he did. Half a dozen Canada geese were stumping around the edge of the water and cussing at one another the way geese did.

  Rob slowly and carefully slid the shotgun’s muzzle out through the window. He let fly with both barrels. The shotgun roared and slammed against his shoulder. The honking turned to frantic screeching. Two geese were down, one still, one thrashing. The others madly taxied on the open water to pick up enough speed for takeoff.

  He hurried over to the thrashing goose. It still had plenty of fight left. A buffet or a peck from a goose was no laughing matter. Well, the shotgun had a butt end, too. He did what needed doing, then cleaned the butt in the snow. He never would have done anything like that if he were hunting for fun. He never would have gone hunting for fun: he didn’t think it was. But hunting to eat was a different story.

  He gutted the geese. The offal went into a trash bag, too. He’d take it over to Dick Barber, who’d feed it to the Maine Coons he semiprofessionally bred at the Inn. He owed Dick plenty. Cat food would pay back a bit of it. Money or not, you did need to take care of debts.

  And he and Lindsey and maybe some friends would feast on goose. He’d trade the meat they didn’t eat. He wasn’t sure what he’d trade it for, but he was bound to come across something he wanted or needed. Money or not, that stayed true, too.

  • • •

  Dad and Kelly didn’t get excited about the mail. Bills, ads, even the occasional letter . . . They didn’t rush out to the mailbox as soon as the carrier had pedaled on by. Snailmail correspondence was alive again, like Frankenstein’s monster, because e-mail here remained so unreliable. Even that wasn’t enough to get Marshall Ferguson’s father and stepmom off their duffs when the mail came.

  It was more than enough for him. Some of the snailmail correspondence came from editors. Marshall was stubborn about putting stories in the mail and keeping them in the mail if they came back rejected. He needed to see what the ignorant editors had bounced today. He needed to do that every single today except Sundays, and he needed to do it as soon as he possibly could. Sure as hell, he had writer’s disease, and he had it bad.

  One of the reasons he had it so bad was that he didn’t always get rejected. Every so often, he wouldn’t find the folded manila SASE he’d stuck in whatever submission this was. Instead, one editor or another would use his or her own envelope and postage (usually keeping the stamps on the SASE) to let Marshall know he’d made a sale.

  He was not going to get rich doing this. The odds that he’d never make a living doing this seemed much too good. Editors hadn’t paid well when the supervolcano blew, which was just before he started selling. What they paid now hadn’t come close to keeping up with inflation.

  Of course, these days money needed a bicycle pump if it was going to stay even with inflation. Oil was through the roof. Food was even further through the roof. You paid up the wazoo every time you laid greenbacks on the counter for anything. And if you didn’t grab it today, you’d pay even more tomorrow, and more still the day after.

  Then again, as things went these days, Marshall didn’t require a hell of a lot of money. He had a place to sleep and a place to work. If those were the room he’d grown up in, well, most of his friends were in the same boat. It beat sleeping in your car, especially when you couldn’t afford the gas to move your car out of your folks’ driveway. He had enough to eat. It wasn’t always fancy, but it was what Dad and Kelly ate, too.

  If he had to babysit for Deborah, he’d had to babysit for James Henry, too. By now, he was about as good at it as anyone who hadn’t had his own kid could be. He did dishes, too, so Kelly wouldn’t have to. That was part of paying his rent.

  The other part was, thirty percent of what he grossed went to his father. It wasn’t thirty percent of a lot. It wasn’t nearly what a furnished room with board would have cost him. It was a reminder to him—and, no doubt, to Dad—that he wasn’t a total freeloader.

  “What happens if I write a bestseller and make, like, a zillion bucks?” he asked Dad after doing dishes following yet another dinner by candlelight because the power was shot to shit. “Am I gonna give you thirty percent of that?”

  “It’s a problem I’d like to have. I bet it’s a problem you’d like to have, too,” Colin Ferguson answered. He always took questions seriously. Maybe that went with his being a cop. Or maybe he was a cop because he’d always been the kind of person who took questions seriously. After a beat, he added, “So you know, of course you won’t give me thirty percent of that. You’ll bail out of here, buy yourself a big house, and pretend you never heard of me.”

  “Dad . . .” Marshall blew air out through his nose. It was something he did when he got pissed off. It was also something his old man did, but he didn’t think about that. Then he made a different noise: a sheepish chuckle. “Y’know, if I’d hit it big when I was, like, twenty-one, I might’ve done that. But I’m not twenty-one any more.”

  “I noticed that,” his father said. “I wasn’t sure you had.”

  “’Fraid so,” Marshall said mournfully. “If I let my mustache grow, there’d be a couple-three white hairs in it.”

  Dad only laughed. “Welcome to the club.” His hair was iron-gray, and the gray gained and the iron faded with every passing year.

  “It’s not one I want to join,” Marshall said.

  “Your only other choice is not lasting long enough to join it,” Dad said. “Most people think that’s worse, and most of the time they’re right. Or that’s how it looks to me.”

  “Me, too.” Marshall nodded. “Um, if I do hit it big some kind of way, chances are I would move out.”

  “Makes sense. Moving out because you can afford to and because you need your own place is one thing. Moving out because you think this is worse than the city jail and you can’t stand any of the other people who live here, that’s a different story. It’s one that gets told a lot, but it’s not such a great one.”

  “You guys are okay.” Marshall realized, too late, that he might have been warmer.

  Even if he hadn’t been, his father laughed. “Hey, compared to what you could’ve said, that’s a five-star review on Yelp. So when are you gonna write that bestseller?”

  “Um, it’d have to be a novel. Nobody makes eating money on short stories—you’ve seen that from the little bits of money I give you, right?” Marshall said.

  “Right,” Dad agreed. “Too right, as a matter of fact. Are you going to take a swing at it, then? It’s your chance to make a living without working for anybody else. Nice work if you can get it.”

  “I guess,” Marshall said reluctantly. Kelly had been after him to work on a novel, too. Doing something that somebody else had suggested wasn’t his favorite plan in the whole wide world, though. He had some ideas. He had some notes. He didn’t yet have any firm notion of how they all fit together, though, or even if they
did.

  And Dad, for a wonder, didn’t keep pushing at him the way he would have when Marshall was younger. All he said was, “Well, either you’ll figure it out or you won’t. And if you don’t, you’ll just have to come up with something else instead.”

  “Uh-huh.” To Marshall, something else instead translated into moving boxes from a truck to a warehouse, or maybe from a warehouse to a truck. Or he could stand near a cash register with a mindless smile pasted on his face and go Hi! Are you finding everything you need? to every third man, woman, or zebra that wandered by. If the power was on, a surveillance camera would tape him to make sure he didn’t slack off on the important question. If he did, they’d dock him. If he did it too often, they’d can him.

  Dad didn’t try to talk him into following in his own flatfooted footsteps. To give him his due, he’d never tried to do that with any of his kids. Marshall laughed to himself. How many dope-smoking cops were there? Probably more than Dad wanted to admit, even to himself. But no. Dad had got himself a bass player, a graphic artist, and a wannabe writer. And whatever he thought about that, he never bitched where his offspring could hear.

  Kelly came downstairs. “She’s asleep,” she said in tired triumph. Then she knocked on the first wood she saw. “With a little bit of luck, she may stay that way. So I get to be a human being for a while.” She yawned. “A sleepy human being, but hey, you take what you can get.”

  “Hello, sleepy human being,” Dad said. “We were just psyching out what to do with Marshall’s millions after they make the Johnny Depp movie from his New York Times blockbuster.”

  “Hey!” Marshall said. “I wish!” What writer in his right mind—hell, what crazy writer—didn’t wish for the exact same thing? “All we need is the movie. Oh, and the novel to make the movie from.”

  “Details, details.” Dad waved them away. He could do that with the greatest of ease—he wasn’t currently not writing a novel. “You should go upstairs and pound on the antique I found you.”