“Of course I am,” Barber answered easily. “And if I turn out to be wrong, I promise I’ll do my best to haunt you.” He laughed a spectral laugh better than any Rob would have guessed he had in him.
After the town meeting broke up, they agreed he would show off—that was the only way to put it—in the strip of forest that still ran along the southern bank of the Piscataquis. They hadn’t cut that down because people hunted the birds and squirrels which used those trees. The test would take place in two nights’ time.
“If a blizzard comes in then, you don’t gotta do it.” Dave didn’t want blood, even frozen blood, on his hands.
“Thanks for your generosity,” Barber said.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Rob asked him as he started back to the Inn.
“I will by night after next,” Barber told him. “You can bet your life on that. Why not? I’m betting mine.”
“You weren’t… just making that stuff up about the Russian soldiers and their coats, were you?” Rob asked hesitantly. Maybe because Barber had experience in politics, every once in a while he would exaggerate. He didn’t do it often, but Rob had seen it happen.
This time, though, he raised his right hand as if taking an oath. “Not guilty, your Honor,” he intoned. “Not guilcup, even, if you remember your Pythons. I read it in a book by a defector. A Red Army man froze to death, and a general who’d been a front-line junior officer in the war against Hitler got pissed off when he found out about it. Weren’t they teaching the troops anything any more? He went out in his greatcoat to show the rest of the brass it really could be done, and then they went back to teaching the draftees how to do it.”
“Sweet,” Rob said. “Does the book tell how to do it, then?”
All of a sudden, Dick Barber didn’t sound so sure of himself. “Er—I’m going back to the Inn to find out. Been a while since I read it, and I don’t remember.”
“Sweet,” Rob said once more, sardonically this time.
“Well, I’ll find out one way or the other,” Barber said. “If this were the good old days, I’d go online and Google it. Or if I lived somewhere like Florida, I could still—probably—go online and Google it. Of course, if I lived somewhere like Florida, I wouldn’t need to worry about freezing to death in a snowstorm. I don’t think I would, anyhow.”
“Florida,” Rob said in a wondering voice. When Maine’s laughable excuse for a summer started, he could go there if he wanted to. But he couldn’t imagine wanting to. Guilford was home now, and his horizons had contracted around it. Florida might as well have been another planet, not another state. Some memories lingered, though. Not quite apropos of nothing, he went on, “I dreamt about guacamole the other night.”
“Guacamole.” Barber sighed—the word sparked nostalgia in him, too. “There used to be a Mexican and Italian place down on Highway 7, between here and Newport. It wasn’t good Mexican food, not with the ingredients they could get in the middle of Maine, but still… . They’ve gone under now.”
“I remember driving past that place when we first came up here,” Rob said. “Justin was driving. Right after we went by, a fox ran across the road. I’d never seen one before—I’d sure never almost turned one into roadkill before.”
“Not something we need to worry about much any more,” Barber said. “If by any chance my greatcoat doesn’t do its job, I won’t get squashed. You can use me for a fence post till I thaw out. The way things are, that should be quite a while from now.”
“Heh.” Rob’s chuckle sounded uneasy even to him. Most of the time, Dick Barber knew what he was doing. Most of the time. When he didn’t, the results could be interesting—as in the Chinese curse.
It wasn’t a blizzard two nights later, but it was snowing again: dry, powdery stuff that stung and then numbed any skin it touched. The mercury read eleven below. It could have been worse. Rob had seen a mercury thermometer freeze, a new experience he could have done without.
On the appointed night, Barber looked like something out of Red Dawn if Red Dawn had been filmed in Nome rather than the Lower Forty-eight. He had a fur cap with earflaps, a wool Navy watch cap under it, a thick wool sweater with a denim jacket over it and his Red Army greatcoat over that, jeans (probably with long johns underneath, but Rob didn’t know that for sure), two pairs of wool socks, and L.L. Bean winter boots.
Pointing down at his feet, he said, “They’re what worries me. I don’t think those boots are as warm as real Russian valenki.”
Dave the junk-shop man surveyed him and said, “I expect you’ve made your point, Dick. You don’t got to go through with it if you don’t have a mind to.”
“Damn right I’m going through with it,” Barber answered. “I may as well. Pulling off all this shit would take me half the night anyway.”
“Don’t be a hero,” Rob told him, wondering how many times his father had given testosterone-fueled young cops the same advice. “If you feel too cold—or if parts of you stop feeling anything at all—for Christ’s sake come on back and warm up.”
“Who appointed you my mommy?” Dick Barber inquired. No matter how cold it was, Rob’s cheeks felt on fire. Barber thumped him and Dave on the back with a mittened right hand, then stumped across the bridge over the Piscataquis. He quickly vanished into snow and darkness.
Rob rounded on the junk-shop man. “You and your goddamn big mouth.”
“I’m not the only fella around here who has one,” Dave answered. “Still and all, I got to say I didn’t reckon he’d take me up on it like this. I figured he was all talk, and I’d shut him up for a while.” He kicked at the snow under his own booted feet. “Hope he comes back. Guilford’d be a boringer place without him—not that I’d say so to his face, mind.”
“Right,” Rob said wearily. He’d seen more than he ever wanted of small-town squabbles and feuds here. He reflected that Dick Barber wouldn’t have said anything good to Dave’s face, either. Feuds and squabbles ran both ways.
Even after he went back to the apartment he shared with Lindsey, he didn’t sleep much. The night seemed very long. In this season, at this latitude, the night was very long. It would be even longer in Russia. Those Red Army men had lived. Dick Barber… No, Rob didn’t sleep much.
In his own warmest clothes, he hurried to the bridge at the first hint of twilight. More snow lay underfoot; as he slogged through it, he wondered if he should have put on snowshoes. He wasn’t surprised to see Dave making his best speed toward the bridge, too.
“He didn’t come in during the night, did he?” Rob called. The junk-shop man shook his head. Rob swore under his breath. Dick Barber was somewhere in the trees on the south bank of the Piscataquis, then. Where? No way to tell; snow and breeze would have swallowed his tracks. The bridge looked as if no one had walked across it for a thousand years.
Barber was somewhere in the trees, all right. But as man or fur-capped icicle? Did he know what he was doing? Rob hurried over the bridge, Dave at his heels. Several other people who’d been at the town meeting followed them. Some were getting down bets on how they’d find Dick Barber. The odds were against him.
Rob really wished for snowshoes on the far bank of the river. The going there was heavier, and the snow thicker. A jay screeched at him from the top of a pine. Why don’t its feet freeze? Rob wondered. Somehow, the bird had got through the frigid night without a Red Army greatcoat to keep it warm.