“Instead of reading them, though, let’s look at the Confederate Constitution. That was the law the South set up for itself to live by. A lot of it’s modeled after the U.S. Constitution, but some isn’t. Here’s Article One, Section Nine, Part Three: ‘No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.’ The Confederate Constitution talks about the right of slaveholders to keep their property in a couple of other places, too.”
He looked at her. “So. Is that evidence?”
“It is.” She nodded gravely.
Right then, he was a little relieved to have no black kids in the class. Reminding them Southern whites had been sure enough that their ancestors were no more than cattle with hands to fight a war about it wouldn’t have been comfortable, which was putting things mildly. Easier to sound dispassionate about it while they were out of the room, so to speak.
Or maybe the fact that he still worried about it meant the country had taken longer to dig out from under the burden of slavery than it would to clean up after the supervolcano eruption. And if that wasn’t a scary thought, he didn’t know what would be.
Latin was cleaner. It didn’t seem so intimately connected to the world they lived in. (Well, yes, the Romans were slaveowners, too. Well, yes, the Hispanic kids, or most of them, spoke a language that was one of today’s versions of Vulgar Latin. Details, details. .)
Trying to explain what cases were all about took up a lot of his time. When he was in college, he’d taken German before Latin, so the dead language had confused him less, anyhow. The kids might well have had an easier time with calculus. Some of them were having an easier time with calculus.
Then there was Sasha Smyslovsky. He spoke Russian at home, and Russian had more cases than Latin. His trouble wasn’t grammar-it was vocabulary. People who grew up with English (and, even more so, people who grew up with Spanish) could figure out a lot of Latin words from their modern cognates. Russian, though, didn’t have that kind of relationship to Latin.
Sasha was a junior, so he was sixteen, maybe seventeen. To Bryce, he looked about thirteen. All the boys in his classes, even the football players who could have cleaned his clock without breaking a sweat, looked like kids to him. He worked hard not to show it. He’d hated his teachers condescending to him when he was in high school. That had to be a constant of human, or at least teenage, nature.
Some of the girls in his classes looked like kids to him, too. Some of them struck him as seventeen going on thirty-five. He also worked hard not to show that. He didn’t want to give them ideas, and he didn’t want some of the ideas they gave him. More than he ever had before, he understood how high school teachers slipped every once in a while.
He never said word one about that to Susan. He didn’t want to give her ideas, either. If he had, he knew what she would have given him: a piece of her mind, and a sharp-edged one at that.
World history struck him as an exercise in political correctness. Every ethnic group made its contribution-its important contribution, its wonderful contribution-to the way things ended up working out. Kalmuks? Papua New Guineans? You betcha, and you’d better be able to give them back on the test.
Female Kalmuks? Gay, lesbian, and bisexual Papua New Guineans? Of course there’d be a question about them. Two questions, more likely.
Maybe history courses had been all about dead white males once upon a time. No, certainly they had. World history was supposed to be the antidote to that. From time to time, Bryce wondered if the cure wasn’t worse than the disease.
They were paying him not to wonder about such things. No, they were paying him to keep his big trap shut if he did wonder about them. And keep it shut he did-where the students and the people who were paying him could hear, anyhow.
Susan got an earful, though. When his cell phone had power, so did Colin Ferguson. The police lieutenant laughed his gruff laugh. “Didn’t you take Hypocrisy 101 in college?” he said. “Well, even if you didn’t, this is your postgraduate course.”
“Tell me about it!” Bryce exclaimed. “Is the whole world like this?”
“Pretty much.” Colin wasn’t laughing any more. Bryce remembered he’d been passed over for chief of the San Atanasio PD not least because he had the dangerous habit of saying what he thought. And I just stuck my foot in my face, Bryce thought unhappily. After a beat, Colin went on, “You get used to it after a while. . most of the time, anyhow.”
“I guess.” Bryce wasn’t nearly sure he wanted to get used to it. He wondered if he had any choice. No, there were always choices. Socrates had made his. Sure, and look what it got him. Changing the subject looked like a good idea: “You ever hear anything from Rob and Vanessa?” He asked about his ex with no more than a momentary twinge.
“Well, Rob got shot,” Colin answered.
“Shot!” That was the last thing Bryce expected to hear. “Jesus! What happened?”
“I got a card from him a few days ago. He says somebody mistook him for a moose. He says he isn’t eating that much. He says there isn’t that much to eat where he’s at in Maine. And he says he’s healing up, which is the most important part.”
“Uh-huh.” Bryce nodded, not that Colin could see him. That sounded like Rob, all right. It also sounded quite a bit like Colin himself. His firstborn would have got pissed off had anyone told him so, though. Bryce tried again: “And Vanessa?”
“Still on the scavenger circuit. She doesn’t write much, and she’s not any place where she can power up her phone-or where she can get bars even if she does. I keep reminding myself she’s good at landing on her feet. You know about that.”
“Now that you mention it, yes.” Bryce tried to sound light, and feared he made a hash of it. On the way to one of those landings on her feet, Vanessa’d kicked him in the teeth. The Bulgarian judge gave her a 9.85 for technical ability when she did it, too, and 9.9 for artistic merit.
Well, what could you do? She’d walked out of his life four and a half years ago now. He couldn’t do a damn thing, that was what. What he ought to do was forget he’d ever known her and spend all his time thinking about Susan, who actually wanted to be with him. Much as he would have liked to, he’d long since discovered he couldn’t do that, either. Colin still had Louise on his mind, too, even if he wished he didn’t. No wonder they’d stayed friends. No, no wonder at all.
What Bryce could do now was grade papers. As a matter of fact, that was what he had to do. And so, as soon as he got off the phone with Colin, he went ahead and did it.
* * *
The late, not so great town of Fredonia, Kansas, wasn’t quite in the middle of nowhere. It was in the southeastern part of nowhere, or at least of Kansas. Since the supervolcano blew, Kansas and nowhere had become effectively synonymous.
As far as Vanessa Ferguson was concerned, Kansas and nowhere were synonymous long before the supervolcano blew. Since she’d escaped Camp Constitution to pick the bones of people who’d made the mistake of feeling otherwise, she kept quiet on that score.
Fredonia, Kansas, also wasn’t in the middle of a Marx Brothers movie. Vanessa made the mistake of mentioning it to the rest of the refugees from the refugee camp she worked with. They all looked at her as if she’d just sprouted an extra head, even-no, especially-when she started singing “Hail, Hail, Fredonia!”