“Thanks.” She gathered up her papers. “I’m just glad it’s over.”
“I always feel that way, and I’ve been doing this about as long as you’ve been alive,” he said. “So, how’s your job?”
“Terrific,” she replied. Having one was terrific. She had no doubt he was responsible for it.
He didn’t let on. He never had. “How’s everything else? How’s your life? How do you like being married?”
“So far, so good. Better than so good,” Kelly said. One day at a time. That was how you did anything.
VI
Thunk! The axe bit into the pine log. Rob Ferguson raised it and let it fall again. Little by little, trees turned into firewood. You could work up a sweat chopping wood even in a Maine winter. And the way Maine winters were these days, that was really saying something.
Thunk! Rob got the axe to do what he wanted now. When he’d first started with it, he’d counted himself lucky for not amputating anyone else’s fingers or his own leg. These days, it was just a tool-a tool you had to respect, sure, but a tool all the same. Thunk!
Biff came out of the Trebor Mansion Inn. He held up his left wrist to display a windup watch. Rob wore one, too. They’d had electricity through what was laughably called the summer in these parts, but it was out again now that the Ice Age had returned. Without it, they had no cell coverage, and without coverage their phones were nothing but little plastic bricks.
To amplify the message, Biff said, “Town meeting’s in half an hour.”
“Gotcha.” Rob swung the axe again. Another billet of what would be firewood jumped from the log.
Biff eyed it and the ones lying in the snow nearby. They were all of pretty much the same size and shape. “Dude, you’re getting to be like Conan the Barbarian with that thing.” The rhythm guitarist jerked a mittened thumb at the axe.
“Practice makes pregnant, same as with anything else.” Rob hefted his implement of destruction. “What I think is, it’s goddamn funny to be using a genuine axe for a change, instead of-” He mimed pulling hot licks from a guitar.
“Axe. . axe. . Yeah!” Biff grinned. You took the nickname for your instrument for granted until you did a compare-and-contrast with the real Craftsman article.
Rob went on chopping wood for another ten minutes or so. You had to earn your keep, all right. As soon as the power failed, Guilford and the rest of Maine north of the Interstate fell back in time to the land of Currier and Ives. What those nostalgia-filled prints didn’t tell you was how much goddamn work that nineteenth-century life took. You had to find that out for yourself. Rob had, and his hands had new ridges of callus to prove it.
He walked to the town meeting with the other guys from Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles, and with Dick Barber and the swarm of his relations who lived on the family side of the inn. They’d had a couple of paying customers when some of the snow melted, but only a couple. Given that the all-time high summer temperature was sixty-one degrees, and that it snowed on August 3, ten days after that tropical afternoon, having any paying guests at all approached the miraculous.
Barber didn’t seem to worry about it. “Are they going to foreclose on me and toss me out in the snow?” he asked, and answered his own question: “I don’t think so! That kind of crap is all over, at least for now. Half the country isn’t making any mortgage payments now, probably more. Hell, there are whole states where nobody’s making any mortgage payments.”
He was bound to be right about that. Nobody was living in Wyoming, for instance, much less keeping the bank happy about the loan on the condo. Montana, Colorado, and Idaho were almost as badly screwed, and it got better only in relative terms as you moved farther away from what had been Yellowstone National Park and was now the world’s biggest, hottest hole in the ground.
The unwritten rule was that everybody shoveled the snow off the sidewalk in front of his own house or shop. The snow that got shoveled went into the street. Back in the day, plows had kept the roads cleared. They’d mostly given up on that now. If you wanted to go from town to town in wintertime now, you could take a sleigh or ski or snowshoe.
Children and people like the guys from the band amended the unwritten rule. If you were an old man with heart trouble or a woman with a bad back, you didn’t shovel your own walk. You gave somebody something to do it for you: food or warm clothes or firewood or sometimes even cash. Even with the roads opening up in the alleged summer, it was an economy of scarcity. Things counted for more than money did. And Rob had got some of his calluses with a snow shovel.
Biff ducked into Caleb’s Country Kitchen and came out with the waitress he’d fallen for. Cindy was a short brunette who hardly ever said anything. That had to appeal to Biff. Rob and Justin and Charlie were all full of themselves and full of their own opinions. So was Dick Barber. With Cindy, Biff could get a few words of his own in edgewise.
Caleb, the guy who ran and cooked for the diner, also came out. He turned the sign on the front door to CLOSED. “Won’t do no business till the meetin’s over, anyways,” he said. He’d stayed open where the Subway, more dependent on outside supplies, went under. He raised chickens and a couple of pigs, and cooked lots of eggs. That improved the overall level of his cuisine; eggs were harder to screw up than some of the things that had been on the menu.
Guilford held its town meetings in the Episcopalian church, one of the few buildings big enough for the crowds. Everybody came; no one made noises about the separation of church and state. Locals nodded to the guys in the band as they came up. They were tolerated just fine, though they’d stay outsiders forever. Dick Barber had lived here for years. He remained an outsider, too, though not one who was shy about speaking his mind. As far as Rob could see, Dick wasn’t shy about anything.
A fancy sleigh was hitched outside the church. Rob turned accusingly on Barber. “Why didn’t you tell us Jim was in town?”
“Because I didn’t know till just now,” Barber answered with a broad-shouldered shrug. “The landline’s out. I can do all kinds of things, but I don’t read minds.”
“It’ll liven up the meeting, anyway,” Charlie said, and no one was rash enough to try to contradict him. They walked inside.
“Boy, anybody’d think there were people here or something.” Justin made like Phil Collins: “I can feel it in the air tonight. . ”
Feel it wasn’t quite right. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t in the air. Regular baths and showers were modern luxuries that had gone by the wayside along with so much else. If you wanted to get clean, you heated a basin of water over your fire and washed one body part at a time till the stuff in the basin got too frigid to stand. If you had the patience to do that once a week, you were about average.
Rob didn’t notice how he smelled when he was by himself. He hardly noticed how the other people at the Trebor Mansion Inn smelled, either; he’d got used to them. But he sure did notice a whole bunch of strangers gathered together in one place. He noticed them for about five minutes, anyhow. After that, his nose forgot about them. When everybody was funky, nobody was funky.
The mayor of Guilford was a stocky, middle-aged fellow named Josh McCann. He also ran the local independent hardware store. Rob gathered that, before the eruption, it had been one step this side of a junk shop, and a small step at that. Since the supervolcano blew up and Maine north of the Interstate was mostly forgotten by the rest of the country, junk and being able to do things with junk suddenly became worth their weight in gold-sometimes, even worth their weight in pork spare ribs.
Swaddled in a bulky wool sweater, McCann took his place at the pulpit, where the minister usually stood. He brought down his gaveclass="underline" once, twice, three times. People packing the pews quieted down, the way they would have at a church service. Democracy here was a secular faith, and the folks took it much more seriously than they did in SoCal. These towns were small enough that everyone knew or knew about everyone else. Money and slick advertising didn’t matter the way they did in the big city.