Rob went back to the apartment he shared with Lindsey. A wood-fired stove vented to the outside had replaced the useless electric range long before he married her. Not only was it far more practical these days, it also helped heat the place. A delicious smell wafted out when he opened the door. Lindsey was using some hoarded nutmeg and cinnamon on a pumpkin pie. Rob didn’t know what she’d swapped for the pumpkin flesh. None of the furniture seemed to be missing, so he wouldn’t worry about it.
On an end table by the door stood a bowl of oat-flour cookies sweetened with maple syrup. Before the eruption, they would have been organic, gluten-free, super-expensive delights from Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s. Now they were just what Lindsey’d made to give to trick-or-treaters. The kids old enough to remember packaged chocolate bars would rather have had those. Rob fiercely missed chocolate himself. Well, you did what you could with what you had, that was all.
He filched a cookie. “Good stuff, hon,” he called to his wife, who stayed in the kitchen to tend to the pot-bellied stove. It was a lot more fickle than the old electric, but it had the advantage of still working.
She made an exasperated noise, not at the stove but at him. “Try to leave a few, please,” she said. “They’ll start knocking on the door any minute now.”
“You know me too well,” Rob said.
“Much too well,” Lindsey agreed cheerfully.
Before he could crank his dudgeon up to high, they did start knocking—pounding—on the door. In case he had any doubts, they also yelled “Trick or treat!” in a chorus of earsplitting trebles.
He opened up. The costumes were homemade, and warm. One kid was dressed as a polar bear, another as an Eskimo. Rob hadn’t known there were any blue-eyed, freckled Eskimos, but who was he to criticize? He handed out cookies. “Thank you!” the boys piped. Gone—at least in these parts—were the days when mothers rejected any treats that weren’t factory-wrapped.
Lindsey brought him a bowl of stew reheated from the day before and the day before that. By now, the pork was meltingly tender and all the chunks of root vegetables had kind of mooshed together. “Yum!” he said, and made everything in there disappear.
The libation that went with the stew was homemade whiskey turned out by a distiller in Dover-Foxcroft. It wouldn’t knock single-malt scotch off the shelves any time soon. But it was here, while single-malts were only a memory. “Let’s hear it for moonshine!” Rob said.
“I don’t think he needs to worry about revenuers smashing up his still,” Lindsey answered. Since Rob didn’t, either, he let that go. Lindsey continued, “Want some pie?”
“Wow! She’s sexy and she cooks!” Rob exclaimed. She not only cooked, she gave him a dirty look—and some pumpkin pie, still warm and a little gloopy. He sounded as appreciative as he could with his mouth full. He must have done a good enough job, because after a while she went from glowering to giggling.
They expended almost all the oat-and-maple cookies by the time the trick-or-treaters stopped coming to the door. Then Rob got into his own costume: a tweed jacket, a shirt with a button-down collar, and a tie he’d got for an hour of guitar lessons. Since he never wore clothes like that of his own accord, they had to be a Halloween getup. Lindsey dressed in white from hat to shoes, and put white face paint on all her skin that showed: she was going as a snowdrift.
“Hottest snowdrift around,” Rob said, which won him another dirty look. He grabbed his guitar. Lindsey carried a torch—an electric one with LEDs—to light their way to the Trebor Mansion Inn.
From somewhere, Dick Barber had got a big box of tiny Hershey bars. “Magic,” he said smugly when Rob asked him how he’d pulled that off. For all Rob knew, he meant it. The taste of one brought tears to his eyes, so vividly did it evoke the bygone days before the eruption. You can’t go home again. Someone had written a book by that name. Whoever he was, he’d known too well what he was talking about.
Lubricated by more moonshine and homebrew beer, Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles played for a while. They still gigged every now and then, here and there in this cut-off part of Maine. But the years when Rob and Justin and Charlie and Biff had lived in one another’s pockets seemed almost as far from the here-and-now as the taste of a Hershey bar. And the music just didn’t feel the same when it was all acoustic.
Again, you did what you could do. Or, if you decided you just had to have chocolate and electricity and the other marvels of what had been Western civilization, you got the hell out of Guilford and headed for a warmer clime. Rob had thought about it now and again, especially during summer snowstorms. But Lindsey didn’t want to leave. And, by now, he had more roots here than he did anywhere else. He wondered how his folks and his brother and sister were doing, but he hadn’t seen any of them since before the supervolcano blew, and he hadn’t talked much with them since, either.
When he mentioned that to Jim Farrell, the retired history prof said, “If things matter to you, you’ll do better somewhere else. If people matter to you, this is the place to stay. I could be watching TV in Florida, but I’m having more fun here.”
“Hey, here you get to be on television, even if you don’t get to watch it,” Rob said. “That CNN crew that came in by dogsled last winter, to interview the Führer of Maine north and west of the Interstate…”
“No fair, Rob,” Dick Barber said, wagging an indignant finger at him. The lord and master of the Trebor Mansion Inn went on, “That segment never aired. The CNN newsie was a lot cuter than Jim—”
“I resemble that remark,” Farrell broke in.
“A lot cuter than Jim,” Barber repeated, unfazed, “but she wasn’t too dumb to see how dumb he was making her look. And in case she had been, her director and the camera guy saw it, too.”
“It wasn’t a beauty contest, or I would have been in over my imperfectly lovely head,” Farrell said. He wasn’t half bad—except for a certain glint in his eye, distinguished would have suited him as well as his outfit—but a broadcasting anchorwoman did have some unfair advantages. Chuckling, Farrell continued, “No, fool that she was, she wanted to talk with me. This sorry world has a great many things in it that I do poorly or not at all, but by God, gentlemen, I can run my mouth.”
“It’s why we love you so,” Barber said. Farrell tipped his fedora: as much a trademark with him as it had been with Fiorello La Guardia a lifetime earlier. His silver hair shone, even in the relatively dim light of the fireplace and tallow candles.
Rob grinned. “Nobody talks this way down where things are still within shouting distance of what they used to be.”
“Of course not. Nobody down there needs to,” Farrell said. “Down there, they can still call a million songs and a thousand talk-show hosts—to say nothing of hot and cold running porn, which is all that should be said of it—out of the air whenever it strikes their fancy. They don’t need to talk.” His rich baritone freighted the word with scorn. “Here, now, this is a land where we have to make our own fun. And so we do.”
“Speaking of fun, how about another song from you sociable Darwinists?” Barber said.
Thus provoked, Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles launched into “Justinian II,” an underappreciated ditty about an equally unappreciated Byzantine Emperor: