And food, in this long winter of the planet’s discontent, was something you had to be practical about. Wayne, Nebraska, sat in the middle of what had been some of the finest farming country the world had ever known. Had been, unfortunately, was the operative phrase. Land that used to bring in bumper crops of wheat and corn now barely had enough of a growing season for the quickest-ripening strains of oats and rye.
“Potatoes,” Bryce repeated, this time with resignation in his voice.
Potatoes they were, with a little pork sausage to perk them up. You could still get pork, and Bryce didn’t let the religion he’d been born into keep him from eating it. Sometimes you could still find chicken without a bank loan. Beef? Lamb? The eruption had massacred the flocks and herds, and without corn and soybeans a lot of the animals it didn’t directly kill starved. Milk and cheese and butter were hard to come by, too.
After a few bites, Bryce said “Potatoes” yet again, this time thoughtfully. “They don’t taste quite like the regular kind, do they? I mean, they wouldn’t even without the sausage.”
Susan nodded. “I was thinking the same thing. Potatoes from before the eruption, ordinary potatoes, don’t taste like anything much.”
“Ain’t that the truth? Born to be blaaand!” Bryce cheerfully goofed on a Steppenwolf song much older than he was.
His wife winced, whether at the lyric or the singing he didn’t want to guess. Susan went on, “They’ve probably been bred not to taste like much for hundreds of years. These haven’t. They’re still—”
“Real roots,” Bryce broke in.
“Something like that,” Susan agreed. “If our regular potatoes are cows, these things are buffaloes.”
“Cows,” Bryce said wistfully. Then, more wistfully still, he said, “Buffaloes.” Yellowstone National Park was the big reason the bison hadn’t gone extinct at the end of the nineteenth century. No more wild bison there, not when the park literally fell off the map to form the supervolcano’s latest and greatest caldera. As far as Bryce knew, no more wild bison anywhere. He supposed a few still lingered in zoos, but that wasn’t the same.
A lot of things weren’t the same, and never would be again—not for the rest of his life, anyhow, which was as much time as mattered to him.
“When you get a job,” he said, “try really, really hard for something in Florida, or maybe Houston.”
“Yeah, right.” Susan rolled her eyes, the way one spouse will when the other comes out with something really, really dumb. “Nobody else wants jobs in places like those, of course, so getting one will be super easy.”
His ears heated. He wouldn’t have taken this slot in beautiful, romantic, subtropical Wayne, Nebraska, if he could have landed one in any warmer place. Given a choice between a slot in Wayne, Nebraska, and one in hell, he would have thought seriously at least one day in three—one day in two during Wayne’s long, long winter—about taking Satan as his department chair.
When he said so, he got a snort out of Susan. Snort or no snort, though, she said, “If something does open up, it’s likely to be somewhere like Winnipeg or Edmonton.”
“Oh, joy,” Bryce said. “We can wave hello to the glaciers when they roll down out of the north. Those are places that make Minneapolis look like it’s got good weather.”
Climatologists kept insisting at the top of their lungs that the supervolcano eruption wouldn’t touch off the next Ice Age. They told anyone who would listen that this was only an episode. Even if they were wrong, the glaciers wouldn’t start chasing musk oxen down toward Chicago and Philadelphia within a human lifetime.
Bryce hoped like hell they wouldn’t, anyhow.
While he was ruminating, so to speak, on that, Susan said, “There’s another problem with going north of the border, you know.”
“Oh? What is it?” Bryce asked.
He thought she would talk about work visas or currency conversion or something like that. Instead, he got a pie in the face: “Neither one of us speaks Canadian,” she said.
“Ouch!” He sent her a reproachful stare. “That’s the kind of thing I usually come out with, not you.”
“You’re rubbing off on me. It must be love, or something,” Susan said.
“Gotta be something,” Bryce said. “I hope it’s something you can take something for.”
“I already did.” She held up her left hand. The diamond in the ring on her fourth finger wasn’t much bigger than a chip, but it sparkled all the same.
Bryce smiled. “I like the way you talk.” His own wedding ring, a florentined gold band, had felt funny on his finger for a little while. Now he hardly noticed he had it on.
And he walked straight into another one. “Good,” Susan said. “You wash dishes tonight, and I’ll dry.”
He made a face. But then he said, “Ha! Mwahaha, in fact. I’m the one who gets to put hot water on his hands.”
“If there is hot water,” Susan said. Wayne did have power and natural gas most of the time. That put it ahead of Los Angeles, but they were hideously expensive. The landlord at the apartment building reacted the way landlords have reacted to anything that costs them money since the beginning of time. He raised his tenants’ rent and he set his water heaters so they didn’t heat much water, and so what they did heat didn’t get very hot.
Showers could be an adventure. So could dishes. Getting rid of grease with water that felt as if it came from some polar bear’s pet iceberg at the North Pole wasn’t Bryce’s idea of fun. As a matter of fact, if he ever wrote a poem about modern labors for Hercules—an idea that had been bouncing around in his head for a while—there was one of them.
Tonight wasn’t too bad, though. The water was still tepid when he got done. Susan put the dishes and glasses and pans and silverware in their places. Then she carefully shut all the cabinet doors. Dead-air spaces helped insulate the apartment. Better to insu late than never, Bryce thought vaguely. Colin would have appreciated that. He didn’t have the gall to try it on Susan.
He spent the next little while reading his students’ midterms. Any hope he might have had that the disaster could somehow make students write better had foundered during his gig at Junipero High. They were going to write things like it’s for its and effect for affect (and the other way around) and even you’re for your, and you couldn’t do one goddamn thing about it. Half their alleged sentences looked as if they came from text messages.
Bryce was (almost) resigned to that. Languages did change. Thucydides would commit seppuku if he saw what Greek looked like these days. The tongue of Caesar and Cicero and Virgil had morphed into Spanish and French and Italian and Pig Latin. Buck the trend and you were shoveling shit against the tide.
But why did so many of the kids sound as if they’d never had a thought in their lives? They could give back the textbook, and sometimes even chunks of his lectures. Give them back, yes. Analyze them? Draw conclusions? Like the number five in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, those were right out.
He waved a bluebook—a C+ bluebook—at Susan. “I can’t flunk them all, no matter how much they deserve it. People would talk,” he said. They wouldn’t just talk, either. They’d fire his nitpicking ass for disturbing the peace. “If this is what’s up and coming, the country’s in deep kimchi.”