star. It was ratty, but he didn’t care-it kept his ears warm. All of him was warm enough, in fact, except his nose. He didn’t think his nose would ever be warm again. As long as it didn’t turn black and fall off, he’d have to be content.
Kids slid down toward the river on sleds. Kids on ice skates spun on the frozen Piscataquis. The river had a deep, stone-hard crust even though it was past the alleged first day of spring and well on its way to Tax Day. Rob’d tried ice skates a few times. He was convinced the Devil had invented them to punish sinners’ ankles. They sure punished his. If you weren’t ice-skating by the time you were two, you’d never get the hang of it. That was his theory, and he was sticking to it.
He refused to abandon it even though both Biff and Charlie could propel themselves pretty well on skates with blades. They were no threat for Olympic gold. They’d never hoist the Stanley Cup. But they could get from hither to yon without going ass over teakettle. And neither one had ever strapped on skates before coming to Guilford. It didn’t seem fair.
A snowball flew past Rob, not quite close enough to make him duck. Everybody from age four on up threw them all the time. One angry town meeting had resulted in an ordinance against using a rock core. A good many people had wanted an ordinance banning any and all snowball-flinging. That failed-too many folks enjoyed it. The failure helped make the meeting angry.
Rob enjoyed snowballs. There went Jim Farrell, with his charcoal-gray fedora-the most recognizable one, perhaps, since Fiorello La Guardia’s-just aching to be knocked off. To scoop up snow in mittened fingers took only a few seconds. To let fly seemed to take no time at all.
The snowball flew straight and true. It
He stooped to retrieve the fedora, carefully brushing what was left of the snowball from it before setting it back on his head at the proper jaunty angle. Only then did he look around to see which miscreant might have assailed him.
He looked no farther than Rob. “Oh. You.” He might have found half of Rob in his apple. “Why am I not surprised?”
“Why, Professor Farrell, sir, whatever could you be talking about?” Rob exuded innocence the way an EPA toxic-waste site exuded dioxin.
“So you deny it, do you?” Farrell rumbled. He stooped again. When he came up, he came up firing. The snowball caught Rob dead center. The retired history professor beamed. “That’ll teach you, you rapscallion! I couldn’t have done better with a catapult.”
Instead of reretaliating, Rob clapped his hands in muffled admiration. “I’ve been called a lot of things, but never one of those before. Sounds like a hip-hop onion, you know?”
Farrell made a face, more at the music than at the pun. “Loud obscenity never appealed to me, even with a heavy bass line.”
“Well, not to me, either,” Rob admitted. “If you’re white and you aren’t Eminem, you’ve got no business rapping.”
“No one has any business rapping,” Farrell said firmly. He sighed. Vapor gushed from his mouth and nose. “I have always taken it as an article of faith that the Founders knew what they were doing when they added the First Amendment to the Constitution, but some of what’s passed for music the past twenty years does make me wonder.”
Rob bowed, which made him need to grab his cap to keep it from falling off. “At your service, Professor.”
Farrell shook his head. “I wasn’t referring to you and your fellow demented Darwinian amphibians. I truly wasn’t. You’re amusing, even clever-not something I say lightly.”
“I know. Thanks.” Rob bowed again, more sincerely than he’d expected. A compliment from Farrell was praise indeed, not least because the old man didn’t give forth with them very often.
“And you don’t seem to feel obligated to blow out every eardrum within a furlong,” Farrell added.
“That depends,” Rob said judiciously. “Since we got to Guilford, the power hasn’t been on much around here. Hard to knock crows out of the sky with acoustic guitars.”
“You would if you could, you’re telling me.” Jim Farrell sighed again. “At my advanced age and state of decrepitude, I didn’t think I could be so easily despoiled of one of my few remaining illusions.”
“Yeah, right. Now tell me another one.” Rob couldn’t match Farrell’s syntax or vocabulary, and sensibly didn’t try.
“We’re going to come through this winter with the greatest of ease.” The de facto boss of Maine north and west of the Interstate threw back his head, almost far enough to make that trademark fedora fall off again. He laughed to show he was telling another one. He put enough vinegar in the laugh to show he didn’t expect to be taken seriously.
“Yeah, right,” Rob repeated. He hadn’t come through this winter with the greatest of ease himself, not with that bullet grazing his leg he hadn’t. But that wasn’t what the professor was talking about, and they both knew it.
Farrell adjusted the hat. His extravagant eyebrows twitched. “This past winter was colder than the one before it. Fool that I am, I hadn’t dreamt it could be. Those who are alleged to know about such things claim the one ahead will be harder yet.”
One of the people alleged to know about such things was the stepmother Rob still hadn’t met. He wondered, not for the first time, if this wasn’t the right moment to make tracks for the opposite corner of the country. Things in SoCal weren’t. . so bad. What came out of his mouth, though, was “As long as we’ve got firewood and meese and MREs, we’ll get by.”
“Why anyone would want Reagan’s attorney general. .” Farrell held up a gloved finger. “He was a fat fellow-I give you that. Tubbier than I am, which isn’t easy. Render him down for oil, and he could likely keep the lamps burning quite a while.”
Rob hadn’t been talking about the Meese called Ed, and knew Farrell knew as much. The professor enjoyed, even reveled in, being difficult. Rob eyed him. “You’ve dropped a good bit of weight since I first met you,” he said truthfully.
“So have you. So has everybody in these parts,” Farrell replied. What twisted his mouth wasn’t a smile, even if it tried to be. “We’re eating less and working harder. Once upon a time, large parts of the world had so very much that even poor people could become obese, and commonly did. As recently as a hundred years ago, that would have been unimaginable. My Greeks and Romans would never have believed it.”
“Huh,” Rob said. Farrell was good at teasing, or sometimes startling, thoughtful noises out of people. “Hadn’t looked at it that way, but you’re not wrong.” When the illegal immigrants who mowed lawns in L.A. sported double chins and potbellies-and a lot of them had-the traditional meaning of
Well, the supervolcano had gone and revised it, all right. It sure as hell had.
“‘Once upon a time,’ I said.” Farrell sounded as academically mournful as if he were discussing the fall of Rome. “No more, not around here. They say we may be able to plant the Midwest again in a few years. But if the weather keeps getting worse, how much will grow even if we can? We are still working through our pre-eruption surplus, and sooner or later-sooner, now, I fear-we’ll come to the bottom of that.”
“We’ve got the mooses.” Rob tossed out another possible plural. The word wasn’t so bad as
“We’ve barely had enough to feed us this time till warmer weather comes again.” Farrell gestured with that index finger once more. “Nota bene: I do not say
“You do? I’m shocked, Professor. Shocked, I tell you!” Rob hadn’t seen
“If digression was good enough for Herodotus, it’s good enough for me,” Farrell said. And he digressed some more: “There are two kinds of modern historians of the ancient world, you know.”
“Now that you mention it,” Rob said, “I didn’t.”
