Time meandered by. “Patience,” Rob muttered. “Yeah, right.” That was also another game for solitaire. And it made a decent enough way to waste an hour or so. You found your fun where you could when TV and the Net and video games were only memories.
He pulled a beat-up British paperback about the Miracle at Mons out of his pocket. He’d got it from the Mansion Inn. Thanks to Dick Barber’s book collection, he knew a hell of a lot more now about military history than he had when he got to Guilford. Like his own old man, Barber was an ex-Navy man who had a built-in excuse to be interested in such things. Rob didn’t, but he’d discovered he was anyway.
Every so often, he looked up and looked out. When he saw nothing interesting, he went back to the British Regulars and their Lee-Enfields. Then noise outside told him he wouldn’t see nothing if he looked out again, so he did. Half a dozen Canada geese were stumping around the edge of the water and cussing at one another the way geese did.
Rob slowly and carefully slid the shotgun’s muzzle out through the window. He let fly with both barrels. The shotgun roared and slammed against his shoulder. The honking turned to frantic screeching. Two geese were down, one still, one thrashing. The others madly taxied on the open water to pick up enough speed for takeoff.
He hurried over to the thrashing goose. It still had plenty of fight left. A buffet or a peck from a goose was no laughing matter. Well, the shotgun had a butt end, too. He did what needed doing, then cleaned the butt in the snow. He never would have done anything like that if he were hunting for fun. He never would have gone hunting for fun: he didn’t think it was. But hunting to eat was a different story.
He gutted the geese. The offal went into a trash bag, too. He’d take it over to Dick Barber, who’d feed it to the Maine Coons he semiprofessionally bred at the Inn. He owed Dick plenty. Cat food would pay back a bit of it. Money or not, you did need to take care of debts.
And he and Lindsey and maybe some friends would feast on goose. He’d trade the meat they didn’t eat. He wasn’t sure what he’d trade it for, but he was bound to come across something he wanted or needed. Money or not, that stayed true, too.
Dad and Kelly didn’t get excited about the mail. Bills, ads, even the occasional letter… They didn’t rush out to the mailbox as soon as the carrier had pedaled on by. Snailmail correspondence was alive again, like Frankenstein’s monster, because e-mail here remained so unreliable. Even that wasn’t enough to get Marshall Ferguson’s father and stepmom off their duffs when the mail came.
It was more than enough for him. Some of the snailmail correspondence came from editors. Marshall was stubborn about putting stories in the mail and keeping them in the mail if they came back rejected. He needed to see what the ignorant editors had bounced today. He needed to do that every single today except Sundays, and he needed to do it as soon as he possibly could. Sure as hell, he had writer’s disease, and he had it bad.
One of the reasons he had it so bad was that he didn’t always get rejected. Every so often, he wouldn’t find the folded manila SASE he’d stuck in whatever submission this was. Instead, one editor or another would use his or her own envelope and postage (usually keeping the stamps on the SASE) to let Marshall know he’d made a sale.
He was not going to get rich doing this. The odds that he’d never make a living doing this seemed much too good. Editors hadn’t paid well when the supervolcano blew, which was just before he started selling. What they paid now hadn’t come close to keeping up with inflation.
Of course, these days money needed a bicycle pump if it was going to stay even with inflation. Oil was through the roof. Food was even further through the roof. You paid up the wazoo every time you laid greenbacks on the counter for anything. And if you didn’t grab it today, you’d pay even more tomorrow, and more still the day after.
Then again, as things went these days, Marshall didn’t require a hell of a lot of money. He had a place to sleep and a place to work. If those were the room he’d grown up in, well, most of his friends were in the same boat. It beat sleeping in your car, especially when you couldn’t afford the gas to move your car out of your folks’ driveway. He had enough to eat. It wasn’t always fancy, but it was what Dad and Kelly ate, too.
If he had to babysit for Deborah, he’d had to babysit for James Henry, too. By now, he was about as good at it as anyone who hadn’t had his own kid could be. He did dishes, too, so Kelly wouldn’t have to. That was part of paying his rent.
The other part was, thirty percent of what he grossed went to his father. It wasn’t thirty percent of a lot. It wasn’t nearly what a furnished room with board would have cost him. It was a reminder to him—and, no doubt, to Dad—that he wasn’t a total freeloader.
“What happens if I write a bestseller and make, like, a zillion bucks?” he asked Dad after doing dishes following yet another dinner by candlelight because the power was shot to shit. “Am I gonna give you thirty percent of that?”
“It’s a problem I’d like to have. I bet it’s a problem you’d like to have, too,” Colin Ferguson answered. He always took questions seriously. Maybe that went with his being a cop. Or maybe he was a cop because he’d always been the kind of person who took questions seriously. After a beat, he added, “So you know, of course you won’t give me thirty percent of that. You’ll bail out of here, buy yourself a big house, and pretend you never heard of me.”
“Dad…” Marshall blew air out through his nose. It was something he did when he got pissed off. It was also something his old man did, but he didn’t think about that. Then he made a different noise: a sheepish chuckle. “Y’know, if I’d hit it big when I was, like, twenty-one, I might’ve done that. But I’m not twenty-one any more.”
“I noticed that,” his father said. “I wasn’t sure you had.”
“’Fraid so,” Marshall said mournfully. “If I let my mustache grow, there’d be a couple-three white hairs in it.”
Dad only laughed. “Welcome to the club.” His hair was iron-gray, and the gray gained and the iron faded with every passing year.
“It’s not one I want to join,” Marshall said.
“Your only other choice is not lasting long enough to join it,” Dad said. “Most people think that’s worse, and most of the time they’re right. Or that’s how it looks to me.”
“Me, too.” Marshall nodded. “Um, if I do hit it big some kind of way, chances are I would move out.”
“Makes sense. Moving out because you can afford to and because you need your own place is one thing. Moving out because you think this is worse than the city jail and you can’t stand any of the other people who live here, that’s a different story. It’s one that gets told a lot, but it’s not such a great one.”
“You guys are okay.” Marshall realized, too late, that he might have been warmer.
Even if he hadn’t been, his father laughed. “Hey, compared to what you could’ve said, that’s a five-star review on Yelp. So when are you gonna write that bestseller?”
“Um, it’d have to be a novel. Nobody makes eating money on short stories—you’ve seen that from the little bits of money I give you, right?” Marshall said.
“Right,” Dad agreed. “Too right, as a matter of fact. Are you going to take a swing at it, then? It’s your chance to make a living without working for anybody else. Nice work if you can get it.”
“I guess,” Marshall said reluctantly. Kelly had been after him to work on a novel, too. Doing something that somebody else had suggested wasn’t his favorite plan in the whole wide world, though. He had some ideas. He had some notes. He didn’t yet have any firm notion of how they all fit together, though, or even if they did.