He hated getting rejected. He never would have submitted the first story that sold if Professor Bolger hadn’t required it. In high school, he hadn’t dated much because he hated it when girls turned him down. This was the same kind of thing, and the noes hurt just about as much.
He had dated. Eventually, he got too horny not to. When a girl let him get lucky, the reward made up for all the failures that came before it. Now he felt the same way when an editor let him get lucky.
Here, for once, he’d gone someplace Vanessa wouldn’t follow-or wouldn’t push ahead of him. Vanessa could get into a revolving door behind you and come out in front. But she said, “I couldn’t stand people telling me no all the goddamn time.”
“They don’t tell you no all the time,” Marshall said. “Sometimes they tell you yes. That’s the payoff.”
She shook her head. “Too much of one, not enough of the other.”
He didn’t want to argue with her, so he let it alone. Arguing was her thing, not his. She’d argue at the drop of a hat, and she’d drop the hat herself if she needed to. But deliberately put herself in a spot where she might get rejected? That, no.
Of course, when she dated she was the one getting the attention, not the one giving it. She wasn’t used to coming on to somebody and getting shot down in flames. Maybe that had something to do with how she felt. Or maybe I’m full of crap, Marshall thought. It wouldn’t be for the first time if he was.
He was a writer. He called himself one, anyhow. The world believed him, to the extent that it was willing to give him money for what he wrote. It didn’t give him as much as he wanted or needed, but it gave him some, so it did believe him. And he had no idea what went on inside his sister’s head, even if she was somebody he’d known his whole life. No idea. Hell, half the time he had no idea what went on inside his own head. More than half the time, it often seemed.
Did other writers, real writers, writers who honest to God made a living slapping words on paper, feel the same way? If they didn’t, how could they know? If they did, how could they write so well? Questions came easy. He wished he knew where God, or Whoever, stashed the answers.
XVIII
Winter in Maine. Back before the supervolcano erupted, back before Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles found themselves stuck in Guilford with the Greenville blues again, that would have meant Norman Rockwell paintings, or more likely Currier and Ives prints, to Rob. He would have thought of Christmas trees (or, being the cynical sort he was, of pine-scented air freshener).
These days, winter in Maine brought two things to his mind. No, three things, he told himself, starting his own mental Python routine. They were, in no particular order, not freezing to death, not starving to death, and marrying Lindsey.
He knew the third one was coming. He had a date and everything. He’d asked Lindsey, and she’d said yes, fool that she was. He would have been a lousy marriage bet in ordinary times. But then, in ordinary times he never would have wound up stuck in Guilford and got to know her to begin with. Jim Farrell had already agreed-or threatened, depending on which way the wind was blowing-to perform the ceremony. Life would go on.
It would if he, to say nothing of the whole region, could manage not to freeze and not to starve. A hell of a lot of second-growth pines had already gone up in smoke so the stubborn souls who wanted to keep living north and west of the Interstate wouldn’t freeze to death. These days, people had to cut down trees a lot farther away from the little towns that dotted the countryside. Then they had to bring them back to the towns to go up in smoke. They mostly had to do it without help of the internal-combustion variety. Life got interesting sometimes. Not warm, but interesting.
Life got hungry, too. Just as there weren’t so many trees running around nearby these days, there also weren’t so many moose on the loose. Rob had eaten some things he never would have imagined downing in pre-eruption Los Angeles. Squirrels, for instance, weren’t just for cats any more. They were surprisingly tasty, though there wasn’t much meat on a squirrel carcass. The same went for robins, though the weather had got so nasty that not many robins came this far north any more.
Rob wore snowshoes on his feet. He had a rifle in his hands. A DayGlo orange vest told the world-and, more particularly, the numskulls also prowling this part of it with rifles-that he wasn’t a moose, a squirrel, or any other refugee from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. He’d been wearing that vest when he got shot. Did wearing it some more make him an optimist or a fool? Was there any difference?
Moving on snowshoes was like riding a horse. For a while, your thigh muscles had to do things they weren’t used to doing. They pissed and moaned about it, sometimes loudly. Then they did it often enough to decide you weren’t trying to torture them after all.
So he glumped along between the Piscataquis and Manhanock Pond. The river was frozen. So was the pond-which, being several miles long, would have done for a major lake in SoCal. Here, it was just one more souvenir of the retreating glaciers. Like Minnesota, Maine was littered with lakes and ponds and puddles. To an L.A. guy, so much fresh water sitting around doing nothing seemed perverse.
At the moment, most of Manhanock Pond was a king-sized ice cube sitting around doing nothing. If the weather was any indication, the glaciers had just stepped around the corner for lunch, and they’d be back any minute. Scientists loudly insisted the eruption wouldn’t trigger a new Ice Age. They couldn’t have proved it by Rob.
A crow flew by, or maybe it was a raven. Rob watched it go without moving the rifle. Even if he could have hit a crow on the wing with a rifle, a.30–06 round would have turned it into no more than an explosion of black feathers against the sky. Birds were for shotguns. With his piece, he had to go after bigger game.
Except for the faint crunch of his snowshoes over the drifts, it was eerily quiet. Winters up here were like that. Get away from town and it was as if you were the only living thing as far as your eye and your ear could reach. No, not as if. Very often, you were.
Rob was now. No cars on the roads, that was for sure. Route 6 to the north and Route 23 to the east (to say nothing of Route 150 to the west, which was exactly what Route 150 deserved to have said of it) were covered with as much snow as the rest of the landscape. If you had to travel these days, you went by snowshoes or skis or horse-drawn sleigh-or, in a desperate emergency, by snowmobile. Those beasts murdered the silence for miles around.
Off in the distance, coming up from the southeast, something moved. Rob was immediately alert. It might be a moose. He didn’t think that was likely: there were more towns, with more hunters, down in the direction of I-95. Moose had been scarcer in those parts before the eruption, too. But, while it was unlikely, it wasn’t impossible.
He stood very still. Moose didn’t see in color, so if this was one it wouldn’t be able to tell how hideous his DayGlo vest was. It might mistake him for a Christmas tree or something, even if he wasn’t loaded down with tinsel and tacky ornaments.
He needed no more than a few seconds to realize that whatever was coming his way wasn’t a moose. He needed a little more time, but not a lot, to figure out what it was: a dogsled, straight out of the Yukon. A slow grin spread across his face. That was another way to get around in this frozen part of the world, at least if you had enough moose meat or kibbles or whatever the hell to keep your huskies happy.
Right behind the first sled came another one. Rob could pick out the exact moment when the passengers saw him-the dogs of the lead sled swerved in his direction. More slowly than he might have, he realized he didn’t have to keep standing there as if frozen by the weather. He waved, feeling stupid.