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 Toyota 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.