“And you don’t seem to feel obligated to blow out every eardrum within a furlong,” Farrell added.
“That depends,” Rob said judiciously. “Since we got to Guilford, the power hasn’t been on much around here. Hard to knock crows out of the sky with acoustic guitars.”
“You would if you could, you’re telling me.” Jim Farrell sighed again. “At my advanced age and state of decrepitude, I didn’t think I could be so easily despoiled of one of my few remaining illusions.”
“Yeah, right. Now tell me another one.” Rob couldn’t match Farrell’s syntax or vocabulary, and sensibly didn’t try.
“We’re going to come through this winter with the greatest of ease.” The de facto boss of Maine north and west of the Interstate threw back his head, almost far enough to make that trademark fedora fall off again. He laughed to show he was telling another one. He put enough vinegar in the laugh to show he didn’t expect to be taken seriously.
“Yeah, right,” Rob repeated. He hadn’t come through this winter with the greatest of ease himself, not with that bullet grazing his leg he hadn’t. But that wasn’t what the professor was talking about, and they both knew it.
Farrell adjusted the hat. His extravagant eyebrows twitched. “This past winter was colder than the one before it. Fool that I am, I hadn’t dreamt it could be. Those who are alleged to know about such things claim the one ahead will be harder yet.”
One of the people alleged to know about such things was the stepmother Rob still hadn’t met. He wondered, not for the first time, if this wasn’t the right moment to make tracks for the opposite corner of the country. Things in SoCal weren’t. . so bad. What came out of his mouth, though, was “As long as we’ve got firewood and meese and MREs, we’ll get by.”
“Why anyone would want Reagan’s attorney general. .” Farrell held up a gloved finger. “He was a fat fellow-I give you that. Tubbier than I am, which isn’t easy. Render him down for oil, and he could likely keep the lamps burning quite a while.”
Rob hadn’t been talking about the Meese called Ed, and knew Farrell knew as much. The professor enjoyed, even reveled in, being difficult. Rob eyed him. “You’ve dropped a good bit of weight since I first met you,” he said truthfully.
“So have you. So has everybody in these parts,” Farrell replied. What twisted his mouth wasn’t a smile, even if it tried to be. “We’re eating less and working harder. Once upon a time, large parts of the world had so very much that even poor people could become obese, and commonly did. As recently as a hundred years ago, that would have been unimaginable. My Greeks and Romans would never have believed it.”
“Huh,” Rob said. Farrell was good at teasing, or sometimes startling, thoughtful noises out of people. “Hadn’t looked at it that way, but you’re not wrong.” When the illegal immigrants who mowed lawns in L.A. sported double chins and potbellies-and a lot of them had-the traditional meaning of poor needed revising.
Well, the supervolcano had gone and revised it, all right. It sure as hell had.
“‘Once upon a time,’ I said.” Farrell sounded as academically mournful as if he were discussing the fall of Rome. “No more, not around here. They say we may be able to plant the Midwest again in a few years. But if the weather keeps getting worse, how much will grow even if we can? We are still working through our pre-eruption surplus, and sooner or later-sooner, now, I fear-we’ll come to the bottom of that.”
“We’ve got the mooses.” Rob tossed out another possible plural. The word wasn’t so bad as mongoose, but it came close.
“We’ve barely had enough to feed us this time till warmer weather comes again.” Farrell gestured with that index finger once more. “Nota bene: I do not say warm weather. This benighted part of the world won’t see warm weather till long after I’m dead and buried-or perhaps I should be cremated, if I ever aim to warm up in this world. But I digress.”
“You do? I’m shocked, Professor. Shocked, I tell you!” Rob hadn’t seen Casablanca for nothing.
“If digression was good enough for Herodotus, it’s good enough for me,” Farrell said. And he digressed some more: “There are two kinds of modern historians of the ancient world, you know.”
“Now that you mention it,” Rob said, “I didn’t.”
He slowed Jim Farrell down not a jot. “There are those who like Herodotus, and there are those who like Thucydides. They’re easy to tell apart. The ones who like Thucydides are the ones with the tight assholes.”
Rob didn’t know what he’d thought Farrell would come out with. Whatever it was, that wasn’t it. He barked surprised laughter. Then he said, “I thought we were talking about moose.” Maybe doing it right would keep the professor on track.
“No, we were talking about the absence of moose,” Farrell said with relentless precision. Maybe doing it right wouldn’t, too. “And more and more of them are absent, too. Unless I’m very much mistaken, we’re hunting them far faster than they can breed. We’re having to go farther and farther afield for firewood, too.”
That, Rob knew. Maine had abundant second-growth woods. Not many people had farmed its stony soil in the second half of the twentieth century, or in the twenty-first, and trees reclaimed fields by the multiple square mile. An awful lot of those trees, though, had gone up in smoke the past few winters. Many more would burn when the weather worsened again.
Sooner or later, the woods would get logged out. Sooner or later, the ground would be bare and smooth as a baby’s backside-only much colder. Or maybe all the people would give up and move away before that happened.
From what Rob had seen of Mainers, he doubted that. They would hang in there till a glacier grinding down out of the north drove them away. Even then, they’d dynamite the leading edge of the ice as long as they could.
The wind picked up. Farrell stuck his hands into the pockets of his overcoat. After a moment, Rob followed suit. That glacier didn’t feel very far away at all.
On my way home! The words chimed inside Vanessa. They should have had four exclamation points, to say nothing of a heavenly choir singing hosannas. “California, here I come!” she caroled, not exactly in tune but with great sincerity.
Every mile she drove took her farther south, farther from Oklahoma City, farther from the supervolcano. Those miles didn’t take her all the way out of the ashfall zone, though. She’d have to go way the hell down into Mexico to manage that. She would sooner have gone to hell for real. Not that she had anything enormous against Mexico, but she was all done with detours.
She hoped so, anyhow. The Toyota didn’t sound as smooth as it had when she drove it off the lot, and she wasn’t even out of Oklahoma yet. Would it keep running all the way to L.A.? “You fucker, you’ll keep running if I have to push you across Texas,” she told the machine.
It kept running. She supposed-she hoped-that meant it got the message. Southern Oklahoma didn’t look too bad. It mostly wasn’t coated in volcanic dust and ash. If it had been right after the eruption, rain and wind had got rid of the bulk of the shit. People were trying to grow crops here, which would have been unimaginable up in Kansas.
But what you could see wasn’t always what you got. It wasn’t all of what you got, either. How much invisible crud still fouled the breeze? How much was getting sucked into her air filter? Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, how much was getting sucked through the air filter and into her engine’s innards?
If she got into trouble, what was she supposed to do? Get a tow back to Oklahoma City and complain to Carl and the tough broad who told him what to do? That was pretty goddamn funny, wasn’t it? She had no AAA. What point to keeping it up in Camp Constitution or while she was playing vulture in Kansas?