They went through the little down of Monson on the way to Greenville. Any town that looked little after Guilford had to be, well, little. Monson might or might not have had a hundred people before the eruption. If it held half that many now, Rob would have been amazed.
“Trees around here still grow pretty close to the road,” Charlie said. That was another way of noticing the same thing. Where there were people in any numbers, the second-growth pines fell for the sake of firewood. Without warmth through the winter, you couldn’t live. And, where winter stretched from September into April, a lot of trees went up in smoke.
The twin towns of Greenville and Greenville Junction, though, had had a pre-eruption population of over two thousand. Like Dover-Foxcroft, that made them a metropolis next to Guilford. Moosehead Lake was something to see, too. Manhanock Pond, on the way to Dover-Foxcroft, was a lake by the standards of someone from L.A., even if not to the locals. Moosehead Lake was a lake by anybody’s standards. On the map, it actually looked like what it was named for. That made it as unusual in geography as the constellation Scorpio was in astronomy.
At the moment, Moosehead Lake looked like a frozen moose. The sleigh glided past what could have been a movie director’s dream of an Old West Indian trading post: all logs and rococo type on the sign. It had been a you-can-get-anything-here kind of place even before the eruption: grocery store, hardware store, clothing store, and drugstore all in one. These days, all things secondhand passed through it. Just about every surviving store north and west of the Interstate dealt in secondhand things, because so damn few firsthand things were running around loose in these parts.
Doug Kincaid and the promoter, a fellow named Bill Gagne, greeted the band closer to the lake. The promoter pronounced his name Gag-nee. “Yeah, I’ve got cousins in Quebec,” he said. “They go Gahn-yay. But my people’ve been in Greenville since Maine was part of Massachusetts. So we’re Gag-nees.”
“Looking forward to the show tomorrow,” Rob’s father-in-law said. “Never figured Lindsey would marry a guy in a band I’d heard of. I still think it’s awesome.”
“These days, we’re just glad to get a chance to play,” Rob said. Justin, Charlie, and Biff all nodded. “Reminds us of what we used to be once upon a time.” They could have got out of Guilford the first summer after the eruption. Biff was the only one who’d had a local girlfriend then. But they’d stayed, and now it didn’t look as if they’d be going anywhere.
“You could be in plenty of worse places right this minute,” Doug Kincaid remarked. “Here, at least, we know what to do with really cold weather.”
“We know how to hunker down, too,” Gagne put in. “You live where things were tough before the supervolcano screwed the pooch, you learn that shit. So we know how to do without, ’cause we already were. The folks farther south, they’re only starting to find out.”
“Ayuh,” Charlie said, so naturally that neither local even gave him a funny look. When Rob meant yeah, he said yeah. He didn’t try to fit in by talking like the natives. If Charlie wanted to, though, Rob supposed he had the right.
However you said it, the agreement was deserved. Some power had come on in parts of the Northeast and upper Midwest. A lot of places still went without, though. Their winters weren’t quite so horrendous as the ones here, but they weren’t anything delightful, either. And places like New York and Pennsylvania and Ohio had a lot more people to try to feed and keep warm than upstate Maine did. Things were bad, and not getting better very fast, if at all. Battery-powered radios brought Jim Farrell’s domain such news of the wider world as it got.
Doug said, “Sylvie’s really looking forward to hearing you guys play, too. She had you on her iPod back when iPods worked all the time.”
“How about that?” Rob said—one of the few phrases, his father had told him, that were safe most of the time. His bandmates didn’t let their tongues hang out like hungry hounds, either. He was proud of them.
The bed-and-breakfast where they spent the night plainly didn’t do much business any more. But their room had a wood-burning stove and enough fuel for it to keep them not too cold till morning. Rob had long since decided that being not too cold was as much as anyone could hope for in post-eruption Maine.
They played in a high-school auditorium. It had no windows. The doors stayed open, which let in some light but also let in the cold. Torches burned in sconces that had plainly been mounted on the walls after the supervolcano blew. Soot streaked the industrial-strength paint above them and darkened the ceiling. Such soot stains were part of life here. Rob suspected they would get to be part of life over much wider stretches of the country.
They didn’t practice enough. Their harmonies were ragged. They fluffed chords. Measured against any of their recordings, they were crappy. The audience didn’t seem to care. People weren’t measuring them against their recordings. Unless you used up precious batteries, or unless you had vinyl and a windup phonograph, you couldn’t listen to anybody’s recordings any more. People compared them to a day without entertainment. By that standard, they were dynamite.
Rob felt almost embarrassed to take his bows. He didn’t think they’d ever got such a fervent reception. They played four encores, and got out of doing more only by miming exhaustion.
“Wow,” Justin said as they left the stage at last. “I mean, wow. That really happened. And we weren’t even loaded.” Maine north and west of I-95 remained something close to an anti-pot zealot’s dream. Except that once the summer before when some weed showed up, Rob hadn’t got loaded on anything but alcohol for a hell of a long time. And with alcohol, less was definitely more. A little buzz was great. When you got massively drunk, you acted like an asshole and then you felt like dogshit the next day. Not worth it—not for him, anyhow. Other people did look at it differently.
Bill Gagne said “Wow,” too. “You guys filled the joint. We’ll clean up on this one.”
“That’s cool,” Rob said. A concert like this did operate on cash. He’d have to find something to do with his greenbacks. Well, there were worse problems to have.
His father-in-law brought Sylvie backstage. Not even multiple layers of warm clothes—the kind of things that turned most folks into the Michelin Man—hid her emphatic curves. “You guys were awesome,” she said.
“She’s right,” Doug Kincaid agreed.
“Hey, at least,” Charlie said. Everybody laughed. Rob knew they hadn’t been that great, not by pre-eruption standards. They’d prided themselves on their tightness then. It was nowhere to be seen now. By all the signs, though, no one who wasn’t in the band noticed or minded.
Wayne, Nebraska, still had electricity. With the Siberian Express’ aunts and cousins howling in every winter now, Bryce Miller was damn glad of that. It meant the heat worked. It also meant the computers and TV and cell phones worked, keeping them connected to the outside world.
TV was a less vast wasteland these days. Much of the American product came out of New York City. With the Northeast having so many power outages, a lot of channels on the cable package were blank a lot of the time.
The Omaha PBS station picked up the BBC by satellite and rebroadcast it. Even before the Northeast’s troubles, Bryce had liked BBC news better than American versions. Unlike those, it presumed its viewers had something better than a room-temperature IQ.
These days, room temperatures in Wayne rarely got above forty-five. American news did its best to live down to them. If it bled, it led. The other staple was assurance that the climate would go back to normal any day now. American news shows ran stories like that about twice a year. They didn’t seem the least put out when each one proved untrue, any more than they ran retractions about medical “breakthroughs” that somehow didn’t confer immortality after all.