VIII
It wasn’t snowing. There was still snow on the ground, but not everywhere. Rob Ferguson savored the sun shining wanly down out of a sky exactly the color of a high school girlfriend’s gray-blue eyes. Here and there, hopeful green grass sprouted through the dead yellow tangle of last year’s halfhearted growth. A few deciduous trees showed new little leaves.
It should have been April, or maybe early May-Rob wasn’t a hundred percent sure how the weather had worked in Guilford before the supervolcano went off. It was. . the middle of August. It was the second year in a row without a summer, the second of nobody knew how many.
The roads were open. For the time being, till the blizzards clamped down again, Maine north and west of the Interstate was reconnected to the rest of the country. The Shell station down the street from the Trebor Mansion Inn had gas-not a lot of gas, and twelve bucks a gallon, but gas. Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles could have got the hell out.
Plenty of people had. Most of the ones who’d left had relatives in warmer parts of the country. (There weren’t many colder ones, not in the Lower Forty-eight. What was happening to places like Fairbanks and Nome and Anchorage, Rob didn’t want to think about.)
Dick Barber was glad to see individuals and families pull up stakes. So was Jim Farrell. “The fewer mouths we have to feed when we’re on our own again, the better off we’ll be,” he declared to anyone who would listen. Barber spread the gospel of flight, too-without packing up and leaving himself.
The band was still here, too. Every once in a while, Justin would make wistful noises about hitting the road again. Sometimes Charlie Storer would nod, but not in a way to make anybody think he really meant it. One reason he didn’t was that Biff wasn’t going anywhere. Biff cared more about Cindy down at Caleb’s Kitchen than he did about touring. Well he might: she was going to have a baby. They hadn’t tied the knot yet, but that also looked to be in the cards.
And Rob wasn’t eager to vamoose from the land of moose, either. He’d been going with Lindsey ever since they literally bumped into each other outside the Episcopal church. She wasn’t carrying his child, but not for lack of effort. If it came down to a choice between her and the band. . Rob was glad it hadn’t come down to that.
Justin and Charlie had also found friends of the female persuasion. That, no doubt, was one reason why they didn’t sound more serious about bailing out. Yes, they were musicians. Yes, they were used to temporary attachments. But, whether or not they’d intended to, they’d put down roots here.
Roots. . Every house had a garden. All the gardens were trying to grow potatoes and parsnips and turnips and mangel-wurzels and anything else that had a prayer of maturing in a growing season abbreviated even for Maine. Extravagant mulch and plastic sheeting fought the cold as best they could. And maybe there would be a crop and maybe there wouldn’t. Everyone would find out when the weather turned really bad again.
In the meantime. . In the meantime, Rob ambled down the semigrassy slope to the Piscataquis. The stream had thawed out enough to chuckle over its rocky bed. It had probably been born from glacial runoff. Rob stuck his finger into it, then jerked the digit out again. “Brr!” he said. By all the signs, the river was getting back to its roots.
A blue jay scolded him from a pine tree. A lot of birds had flown south for the winter and not come back. Jays and robins and ravens lingered. So did ospreys-one plunged into the frigid water and came out with a fish clamped in its talons. Another jay flew after the fish hawk, screeching.
Some kids threw a football around. The slope that led to the river meant only sidehill sheep could have played any proper kind of game. The kids didn’t care. They threw and kicked and yelled and laughed. It was summer vacation, even if it was summer only by the calendar.
They’d missed a lot of school even when it wasn’t vacation. Lindsey made sorrowful noises about that. Sometimes it was because they couldn’t get to class themselves. When the snowdrifts were taller than they were. . More often, though, their teachers couldn’t make it. Not all the teachers lived in Guilford. The ones who didn’t had relied on the quaint concept known as motor transportation. Here and there in the U.S. of A., roads still stayed open. Not in this part of the country, though. Nowhere close. The joke for Siberia had been ten months of winter and two of bad skiing. The joke, these days, applied all too literally to this part of Maine.
As he had with Alaska, Rob wondered how things were in Siberia right now. Cold: the one-word answer immediately supplied itself. Bloody fucking cold, if you wanted to get technical. Though it might seem hard to believe, there had been places with climates worse than the one Guilford didn’t enjoy. If Guilford had turned into a pretty fair approximation of Siberia, what had Siberia turned into?
The South Pole, Rob thought. Then he tried to imagine penguins roaming the tundra. It made him want to giggle.
A kid missed the football. It took three crazy bounces and stopped right at Rob’s feet. “Throw it back, man!” the kid yelled. He was about twelve-no beard on his cheeks, and his voice hadn’t broken.
Rob picked it up. “I’ll do better than that,” he said. The shape and the pebbly feel of the leather or rubbery plastic or whatever the hell it was combined irresistibly. Like a certain deranged beagle, what red-blooded grown-up doesn’t want to be the Mad Punter, even if only for a moment?
He let fly. He hadn’t played football since PE in high school, and he hadn’t been the punter then. By rights, he should have squibbed it off the side of his foot. By dumb luck, he caught it square. It flew long and straight. It would have been a forty-yarder on any NFL gridiron-well, any NFL gridiron except Mile High Stadium, which was still deeply buried in volcanic crap.
“Wow!” The kid who’d called for the ball wasn’t the only one to stare at him, wide-eyed. He tried not to preen. Damned if he hadn’t had standing O’s at club gigs that he’d enjoyed less. Being applauded for skill was one thing. Being applauded for skill and strength. . He felt as if he’d grown shoulder pads under his flannel shirt.
After the kids retrieved the ball, they brought it back to him. One of the kids flipped it his way. “Do it again!”
He didn’t think he could do it twice in a row. Hell, he hadn’t thought he could do it once in a row. But he’d always been able to resist anything but temptation-a line his old man had used more than once. He punted again. It wasn’t as good as the first try, but it went a lot farther than any kid who hadn’t reached puberty could manage.
They swarmed after it and brought it back like retrievers. He didn’t want to play punting machine. If once was experiment and twice was perversion, what was three times? Boring, that was what.
They didn’t ask him for another punt, though. Instead, one of them said, “When are you guys gonna play again?”
“I dunno,” Rob answered. “Next town meeting, maybe, if they want us to.” That was a week away.
When you were eleven or twelve, a week was as good-no, as bad-as forever. “Wish you’d play here in the park again, sooner than that,” the boy said.
“In the daytime,” one of his friends added.
There was a lot of daytime at this season of the year, just as nights here stretched like Silly Putty during wintertime. More than just the weather told you Maine lay a lot farther north than L.A. or Santa Barbara, which were Rob’s standards of comparison.
“Well, we’ll see,” he said.
“Puhleeze!” Three of them squealed it at the same time.
Hearing them, he realized how starved for entertainment they were. They’d grown up with TV and the Net and PlayStations and Wiis and Xboxes. All of that stuff took electricity, though. Guilford had power for three or four hours a day during the summer. During the winter. . Well, people tried-you had to give them that. But it was mostly no go, and no juice.
If they wanted to listen to a band they’d surely never heard of before it washed up on their frozen shore-and wanted to badly enough to beg for music-they really had it bad. If
Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles could tour the local towns, towns that hadn’t had an almost-rock band get stuck in them, it might clean up. It might clean up as much as anybody in this part of Maine could right now, anyhow.
“We’ll see,” Rob repeated, but in a different tone of voice this time. Biff wouldn’t mind that kind of tour. Rob wouldn’t mind it himself. It might work. It was definitely worth talking about.
The kids caught the difference. “Yeah!” they said, or rather, “Ayuh!” It was Maine, all right. One of them waved for another to go out on a pass pattern. The ball spiraled after him. The boys raced away.
But when Rob looked out the windows of his tower garret in the Trebor Mansion Inn the next morning, the sky had gone gray and gloomy and dark. Snow swirled through the air. It wasn’t a blizzard, but it also wasn’t the kind of weather that would let the band draw a crowd, even from the hardy folk who’d stayed in Guilford. He still intended to talk about playing, but this wasn’t the day for it.
* * *
Colin Ferguson looked wistfully at the Taurus in his driveway. It still ran. He fired it up every now and then and took it around the block to keep the battery alive and to make sure the tires stayed round. He’d drive it if he went out to dinner with Kelly, especially when it was raining. And these days it rained more often in the L.A. basin than he’d ever dreamt it could.
But he didn’t go to work in the Taurus every day any more, even though it wasn’t far. Gas was too hard to come by, and too expensive for anyone on a civil-service salary to use very much. A San Atanasio police lieutenant made a pretty good civil-service salary. What Kelly brought in from Cal State Dominguez didn’t hurt, either. All the same. .
All the same, he put his briefcase in his bike’s cargo basket, climbed aboard, and pedaled away. He hadn’t ridden a bicycle very often between the time when he was fifteen or sixteen and the day the supervolcano erupted. They said you never forgot how. Like a lot of things they said, that had holes that would have sunk it if it were a boat. He’d wobbled all over the place when he started riding again. He’d had a good fall, too. Luckily, he’d blown the knees out of an old pair of sweats, not the pants from any of his suits. Even more luckily, though he’d pedaled home scraped up and bruised, he hadn’t broken anything.
It did come back in a hurry. The mysterious they were right about that much. Colin had got to the point where he enjoyed the wind in his face as he rode. (The rain was a different story. He’d quickly bought a plastic slicker that covered him from head to foot, and a broad-brimmed hat to keep most of the raindrops off his bifocals. Bicycling with an umbrella, he’d rapidly discovered, was an invitation to suicide.)
He wasn’t the only two-wheeled commuter. Oh, no-not even close. Bikes, and especially bikes with adults in business attire on them, had been uncommon sights on L.A.-area streets before the eruption. No more. As gas prices zoomed up like a Trident missile, more and more people said to hell with their cars and started doing without infernal combustion.
Colin had dropped five pounds since he started biking more than he drove. His wind was better than it had been. That was the good news. The bad news was the San Atanasio PD’s Robbery Division was trying to deal with an explosion of bicycle thefts. So was every other police department in Southern California-and in a lot of other places, too.
A car whizzed by. It didn’t come particularly close, but he sent it a resentful stare even so. Now that he rode the bicycle, he looked at automobiles in a whole new way. The goddamn things were dangerous. If you tangled with one, you lost. It was as simple as that. And so many people drove with their heads up their asses. Bike? What bike? they might have been saying.
He’d probably driven that way himself. As a matter of fact, he was sure he had. How many times had he almost creamed some green ecofreako with delusions of Lance Armstrong? Plenty-he knew as much. And he’d blamed the skinny morons on the bikes every single time.
He stopped at a light, then turned right onto Hesperus. That was a bigger street. It had more cars on it. Not a whole lot more, though. Even L.A. and its auto-based suburbs could do without the sacred conveyance if they had to. They sure were trying to make like they could, anyhow.
“Pothole coming,” he muttered, reminding himself. It was right in front of a tropical-fish place run by a Japanese couple who, he happened to know, also owned about a quarter of the real estate down in Torrance-a bigger, richer burb than working-class San Atanasio. But they just plain liked tropical fish, so they went on selling them.
The pothole was a doozy. He would have felt it in the Taurus. On the bike, it might have sent him ass over teakettle. Not for the first time, he told himself to call Street Maintenance and give them hell. One of these days. In his copious spare time.
He had to get out into the middle of the street to turn left into the police station parking lot. The bike rack there was new since the eruption. Colin chained his mount to a hitching post. The bike was secondhand, and had seen better times. The chain was new, and industrial-strength. Marshall had had a bike disappear from a UCSB rack on account of an el-cheapo chain. Colin made his share of mistakes, but usually not the ones he could see coming six miles down the road.
Gabe Sanchez was standing outside the door poisoning his lungs. Colin nodded to the sergeant. “What do you know?” he called.
“I know I’d rather do this inside,” Gabe answered. “It’s cold out here, dammit.”
Colin didn’t feel cold. “You must have driven this morning,” he said. No, he didn’t feel cold at all. Antiperspirant was still getting into SoCal. The world would turn less pleasant if that supply ever failed.
“Way to go, Sherlock,” Sanchez said. “Anybody would guess you were a cop or something.”
“You think maybe?” Colin said. He looked like a cop. He dressed like a cop. He talked like a cop. He thought like a cop. So what was he gonna be? A tropical-fish merchant? An auctioneer? Like Popeye, he was what he was, and that was all that he was.
Well, almost all. If he hadn’t been a post-divorce tourist, he wouldn’t also be a middle-aged guy trying to start a second family. Rob, Vanessa, and Marshall might end up with a new half-brother or half-sister. Another new half-brother or half-sister, that is. And one with exactly zero biological relationship to their last new half-brother.
“Life gets fucking weird sometimes, you know?” Colin said: no great originality there, but plenty of feeling.
Feeling or not, Gabe shook his head. “Unh-unh, man. That’s a negative. Every once in a while, life stops being fucking weird. That’s when you think it starts making sense. And when you do, it drops the hammer on you but good. Because the rest of the time. .” He shook his head again, and crushed the coffin nail under his heel. Then he looked mournful. “I want another one, dammit.”
“I’d go easy, if I were you.” Colin left it there. Like antiperspirant, tobacco reached L.A. from points east. Like antiperspirant and everything else coming in from points east, it reached L.A. in limited amounts, with prices inflated to match. Or maybe to more than match. People who had the cigarette jones had it bad.
Take Gabe Sanchez, for instance. He looked more sorrowful still. “Tell me about it. I’m smoking, like, half as much as I used to. That means I always need the next one twice as bad.” His laugh was singularly-almost plurally-devoid of humor. “The weenies who get on your back for liking the shit at all say you’ll live longer if you smoke less. It sure as hell seems longer-I’ll tell you that.”
“Ready to earn your next pack?” Colin asked, stepping toward the door.
“Way prices are now, that’s about two weeks of work.” Gabe exaggerated, but less than he would have a year earlier, and a lot less than he would have before the eruption. He followed Colin into the station.
Before long, Colin wasn’t so warm as he had been right after he chained his bike to the rack. You couldn’t crank up the heat the way you had in the old days. You also couldn’t roll the AC like nobody’s business on a scorching summer
day. That turned out not to be such an enormous issue. The next scorching summer day here after the eruption would be the first.
Supervolcano or no supervolcano, people still robbed banks and liquor stores and even a laundromat. That one croggled Colin. The perp had escaped with over a hundred pounds of quarters in four large sacks.
“What the hell’s he gonna do with all of ’em?” he asked, not at all rhetorically. “You can’t spend ’em more than maybe five bucks at a time. Take your girlfriend out to a fancy restaurant and pay in rolls of quarters, people will talk.”
“Watch out for some dude buying everybody games at the arcade,” Rodney Ellis suggested. The black detective mimed working a joystick.
“There you go,” Colin said. “Makes more sense than anything I thought of.”
“Perp was in his forties, the crime report says,” Gabe pointed out. “So that’s kinda less likely, know what I mean?”
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Rodney answered. “But what did that guy say? You’re only young once, but you can be immature forever.”
Colin thought of Louise, and of her adventures and misadventures with her younger man. But if he told her anything like that, she’d go off the way the hot spot under Yellowstone had. Except in the line of duty, he tried not to talk to her these days.
Back to business. “What are we going to do about this asshole?” he said. “It’s not what you’d call a good description.”
“Wait till he hits the next Stop-and-Rob,” Rodney said. “And if he gets away with quarters again, right after that he’ll show up at the San Atanasio Memorial ER with a double hernia.”
“Everybody’s a comedian,” Colin said, but he and Gabe were both laughing.
It had started raining by the time they went out to lunch in Gabe’s car. The Honda stank of cigarette smoke, but that was better than getting drenched. “You’re gonna have fun riding home tonight,” Gabe remarked.
“Tell me about it,” Colin said gloomily. Poncho or not, he’d get wet. Sighing, he went on, “Once upon a time, it didn’t rain this time of year.”
Supervolcano: All Fall Down s-2 Page 14