Some of the crowd were leftover summer people. Not all of them went back to Boston and New York City right after Labor Day. Some stuck around and kept partying till… what? Till their money ran out? Not likely-they weren’t the kind whose money ever seemed likely to run out. Till the cows came home, was the way it looked to Rob.
The rest were Maine townies. Summer people and townies. It reminded him of Eloi and Morlocks in The Time Machine. And why not? Wells had been talking about the class system in Victorian England. The class system remained alive and well on the East Coast of the modern USA.
For the summer people, the band was just background noise. The townies saw amplified instruments and expected-hell, demanded-straight-ahead, raucous rock. Neither was what Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles was all about. You needed to pay attention to the band, and it wasn’t about head-banging or about ears that stayed stunned three days after the show.
A good time was had by few.
Afterwards, Justin put the best face on things he could: “Maybe Bangor will be better.”
“Or Orono,” Rob said. “Orono’s got a University of Maine campus. Our kind of people will be listening to us.”
“Stoned freaks and geeks, you mean?” Biff Thorvald said.
Rob made as if to bow to the rhythm guitarist, but there wasn’t room in the cramped dressing room. “Precisely,” he said.
“You know what the real trouble is?” As Justin often did, he answered his own question: “The real trouble is, there aren’t enough stoned freaks and geeks running around loose to supt us in the style we’d like to get accustomed to.”
“If you mean we ain’t gonna get rich like Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber, why don’t you come out and say so?” Charlie Storer demanded.
“We ain’t gonna get rich like Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber,” Justin said obligingly.
“We don’t have some corporate dickhead telling us what to do next, either,” Rob said.
“Of course not. We know what to do next: go on to the next town,” Charlie said. “Play there, then head for the one after that.”
Rob remembered his own uneasy thoughts of not too long ago. Did he like doing this enough to keep at it the rest of his life? Could he make a living at it if he did? If he didn’t, what would he do instead?
They got to stay in Bar Harbor; with most of the summer people gone, prices dropped like a stone. The desk clerk at their motel said, “We’ve had a Secretary of Labor stay in one of your rooms.”
“Not after Labor Day, you didn’t,” Rob answered. She gave him a dirty look, but didn’t try to tell him he was wrong. Afterwards, he was sorry he’d pissed her off; he’d seen plenty worse. As usual, afterwards was too late.
Summer weather seemed to have gone home with the summer people. The sun came up in blood-drenched splendor from the Atlantic, tinting the stacked clouds every shade of red and purple and red and pink and orange imaginable. Sunsets had been just as spectacular since the supervolcano let go. When TV pundits weren’t bemoaning everything else about the disaster-deaths were well up into six figures, and damage estimates heading toward the trillions-they talked learnedly about particulate matter.
Eyeing the sunrise, Justin put it a different way: “My grandfather went to sea in freighters for a few years when he was about the age we are now. He always used to say, ‘Red in the night-sailors’ delight. Red in the morning? Sailors take warning.’ ”
“A bunch of nervous sailors out there, then,” Rob predicted.
“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Justin shivered in the parking lot. “Brr! That’s one nasty wind.”
“Yeah. Well, welcome to Maine,” Rob said. But nervous sailors wouldn’t have surprised him, either. He wished he’d put on something heavier than an old UCSB sweatshirt. The wind seemed to have taken a running start from Baffin Island.
“How soon does it start snowing here?” Justin asked. Sure as hell, other cloud fortresses, these more ominous gray and less pretty pink, were stacking up to the north and west.
“I’d say tomorrow, or maybe this afternoon,” Rob answered. “We’ve got chains for the vans, right?”
“Uh-huh,” Justin said without enthusiasm. They weren’t practiced at putting them on. They weren’t practiced at driving in snow and ice, either. They were California kids. What did they need to know about that kind of stuff?
Trying to cheer up the lead guitarist-or something-Rob said, “Bangor and Orono are north of here, right?”
“Fuck you,” Justin explained. He pointed to the diner across the street. They’d had dinner there the night before. It was okay. “C’mon. Let’s go feed our faces.”
“You don’t want to wait for Charlie and Biff?”
“Nah. Let ’em sleep if they want o. They’ll eat sooner or later. And Bangor’s not that far north from here.” Justin used the word with more irony than Rob had. “Even if we leave later than usual, we’ll make our next date.”
Breakfast was pretty good. You never could tell with local places. They were like the little girl with the little curl. With Denny’s, you always knew what you were getting-which was both the good and the bad news. This proved a step, even a step and a half, up from that. The potatoes that went into the hash browns were fresh, not frozen, and not too greasy. The same with the sausage, which had a hint of something-fennel? — you didn’t taste every day. And the over-medium eggs came to the table hot and exactly over medium.
Biff and Charlie ambled in when Rob and Justin were getting close to done. Biff ordered coffee. “You never do that, dude,” Rob said.
“Unless you got some meth, I hafta get my heart started some kinda way,” the rhythm guitarist answered. Rob shook his head. Crank was not his drug of choice. Neither Charlie nor Justin volunteered any. Biff spread his hands. “See?” he said. When the coffee came, he poured in lots of cream and sugar so it wouldn’t taste like coffee any more. Then he gulped it. The sugar rush would help wire him for the morning, too.
The waitress brought Rob and Justin more toast to give them something to nibble on while their buddies chowed down. Rob smeared strawberry jam on his. It came in the same little foil-topped plastic package you saw everywhere. Oh, well. As he ate, he stared out the tinted window and across the street at the motor lodge they’d just come from.
After a while, he said, “Is it the glass, or is the light funny?”
“It’s the light,” Charlie said. “I noticed it when I was coming over here. Did you, Biff?”
“Huh?” Biff said. Rob didn’t need to be Hercule Poirot to figure out that Biff hadn’t noticed much of anything till he surrounded his coffee.
They paid for breakfast and walked out. A guy about their age coming down the street on a bike stopped and said, “Hey, I was at your show last night. I don’t know about anybody else, but I liked it.”
“Thanks-I think,” Rob said. Not enough people had. The guy gave a vague wave and pedaled off.
“The light is funny.” Justin was looking at the sun. No clouds were close by or in front of it, but he looked at it anyway. Rob could do the same thing. The sun was uncommonly weak, uncommonly white, as if seen through fog. But there was no fog. You could see for miles without channeling the Who. Rob turned and looked at his shadow. He had one, but not the kind he should have had on a sunny day.
They all started across the street. Not much traffic in Bar Harbor, not after the end of the season. “Is this, like, Maine weather or volcano weather?” Charlie wondered.
“Volcano weather.” Rob heard something peculiar in his own voice, something he didn’t think he’d ever found there before: a sad certainty. A doctor might have had that tone after seeing a chest X-ray with a dark spot on the lung.
All of a sudden, particulate matter wasn’t just a pompous phrase to Rob. There wasn’t any fog down here, no. But way the hell up there? That was liable to be-no, that was bound to be-a different story. How much crud had the supervolcano flung into the stratosphere? How much sunlight was it blocking? How bad would that screw up the weather? And for how long?