The Nebraskan picked up the veteran first, then put-putted over to Bryce. Strong, sunburned arms helped him out of the lake and into the bottom of the boat, where he lay like a just-caught bluegill-except he lacked the energy to flop around. “You okay, man?” his rescuer asked. “Everything in one piece?”
“I… think so,” Bryce answered after taking stock. “Thank you.”
“Yeah!” the Afghan vet said. “Thank you! Amen!” He sounded as if Bryce had reminded him of something important he’d been too rattled to remember on his own. And that was probably what had happened.
“I’m gonna see how many more folks we can get aboard,” the local said, and got the boat going again. Bryce didn’t care. He’d made it.. so far.
XI
Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles were on I-95, heading north toward Portland, Maine, when the boom from the superano roared over their van. They weren’t taken by surprise; by then, NPR was tracking the progress of the enormous sound wave. “The biggest noise this poor old planet has heard in tens of thousands of years,” one of their correspondents declared.
“Yeah-except for Congress,” Rob Ferguson said.
Justin Nachman followed a snort with a reproachful look. “Piss and moan, piss and moan. Five minutes ago, you were bitching about paying the toll before they let us onto this stretch of the Interstate.”
“Well, it sucks,” Rob said.
“It’s how they pay for keeping the road up,” Justin said, as if reasoning with a possibly dangerous lunatic.
The van chose that moment to bounce on a pothole. Rob, who was driving, said, “They do a great job, too. We manage okay back home without this toll-road bullshit.”
The lead guitarist rolled his eyes. “Give me a break, man. How many years in a row is it that the California budget’s been fucked up?”
Rob didn’t know how many consecutive years it had been. He did know he couldn’t remember a year when the budget hadn’t been a disaster area. And he could remember further and further back as he got older: close to twenty-five years now, though he hadn’t cared about the budget when he was a little kid. Twenty-five years seemed a hell of a long time to him. He’d never had the nerve to say anything like that to his father, though. He had what he was all too sure was an accurate suspicion the older man would have laughed in his face.
Since he didn’t have a good comeback for Justin, he concentrated on making miles. Charlie and Biff were in the other van, right behind this one. They were on their own. Snakes and Ladders had dissolved in New York City, and they hadn’t booked another opening act.
Rob wondered what his bandmates thought of the supervolcano. They knew about it: everybody’d been talking about it when the band stopped at a roadside Hardee’s for lunch. Seeing the star on something called Hardee’s weirded Rob out every time he came East. In his part of the country, the chain that served those same burgers went by Carl’s Jr. Well, Best Foods mayonnaise was Hellman’s back here, too. Bizarre, all right. He wondered if there was a song in it.
“Devastation continues to spread across wide stretches of Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana,” the NPR newsman continued gravely. “There are as yet not even the vaguest estimates of lives lost or property damage. Nor is there any way to stop the spreading ash cloud. An astronomer has calculated that the supervolcano eruption might well be observable from the planet Mars.”
“Wow,” Justin said. “Can you imagine the Martians going, ‘Bummer, man! The Earth is screwed big-time!’”
Rob could imagine it. “Write that down,” he said. “We should be able to do something with it.” It sure as hell made a better song idea than artery-cloggers with the wrong names.
The band always took Write that down seriously. Stuff that was supposed to stay in people’s heads too often didn’t. Justin produced a notebook and wrote. Better than even money nothing would come from the jotting, but at least it wouldn’t get lost.
They had reservations at a motel not far from the airport. Rob had spent enough time on the road that he was good at it, which didn’t mean he got off on it. There were times when he’d wake up cold sober, not wasted on anything, but still without the faintesg aea of where the hell he was. The feeling didn’t always disappear right away, either. Rooms rarely gave a clue. Cable stations were the same everywhere, pretty much. If a paper was shoved under the door or waiting outside, odds were it would be USA Today. Hotel management types commonly felt it was better than the local rag. The sad thing was, they’d be right more often than not.
By the time he got down to breakfast, he’d usually have things figured out-usually, but not always. He liked playing. He liked performing. He liked the small-scale celebrity status being in a halfway successful band brought. Travel… He wasn’t so sure about travel.
There were guys older than his father who’d play a gig, hop in a car, and play at another club five hundred miles away the next night. Some of them had been big once upon a time and were still hanging on. Some had made a career out of being second-stringers. They had their fans-not enough to get rich from, but enough to pay the bills. Most of them. Most of the time.
That seemed to be about what Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles had to look forward to. Do I want to wake up wondering where I am when I’m fifty? Rob asked himself that question, and another one, every time he checked in somewhere. The other question was, Do I want to wake up wondering where I am when I’m seventy?
So far, he hadn’t found anything else he wanted to do more. He hadn’t found any place where he wanted to grow roots, either. So tonight here he was in Portland, Maine. He’d played in the other Portland, too.
Justin sometimes got sick of life on the road, the same way he did. As far as Rob could tell, Biff and Charlie didn’t care where they were. For guys in a band that needed to stay on tour-and, in this age of MP3s and iTunes, how many bands didn’t? — that was the right attitude.
After they checked in, Justin asked the desk clerk, “Where can we get some dinner around here? Doesn’t have to be fancy. Just, y’know, food.”
She named a place, adding, “They’ve got the best lobster rolls in Portland, I think.”
“How do we get there?” Rob asked eagerly. He was in favor of lobster and shrimp and crab. If the rest of the guys weren’t, well, the menu was bound to have other stuff on it they could eat.
Directions didn’t sound too complicated. The band kept talking about getting GPS. God knew the systems were cheap these days. But Rob and Justin both liked to navigate. Finding a place on your own made arriving mean something it didn’t when a computer held your hand all the way there. Even getting lost could be interesting. Rob thought so, anyhow. Charlie and Biff thought their bandmates were full of it. But they’d never missed a gig because they’d got lost, so the rhythm guitarist and drummer didn’t grumble. Much.
A roll, split in half. A little mayo, even if under an assumed name. Lobster-lots of lobster. A lobster roll. A Maine specialty. The finest invention since the wheel, as far as Rob was concerned. Maine was one of the few places where lobster didn’t cost an arm and a leg. Rob was happy to pay a mere arm for such concentrated deliciosity.
Justin had a big bowl of clam chowder-creamy, of course, with not a tomato in sight. Tomato chowder was a New York City thing, not a New England one. The divide was as fierce as Yankees and Red Sox. Rob actually liked both kinds, which made him either a neutral or a heretic, depending.
Charlie got a chicken pot pie. You could do that anywhere. Biff ordered the brrito. Rob didn’t think he would have chosen a lobster roll in Phoenix. A burrito in Portland, Maine, struck him as an equally bad idea. But it wasn’t his stomach. Sometimes the less you said to the guys you played with, the better off you were.