After a while, little Colin woke up. Rob changed his diaper. The fresh one, like the wet one it replaced, was cloth. Pampers didn’t get up here, nor had they for quite a while. He’d got pretty good with safety pins. He’d stuck himself a fair number of times, but the baby only once.
When his son was dry, Rob carried him and the letter over to the Trebor Mansion Inn. His bandmates had met his dad back in the days before the eruption, but all they would do now was make Oh, wow! noises. He hoped for more from Dick Barber. No guarantees, but he hoped. Dick was ex-military himself, and was within shouting distance of Rob’s father’s age. He reminded Rob of his dad, too, maybe more than Rob realized with the top part of his head.
He was chopping wood when Rob got there: chopping wood without a shirt on, as a matter of fact. “Showoff!” Rob called. It wasn’t all that warm. One of the Maine Coon cats the folks at the Inn bred also watched in disapproval—though more, Rob judged, from the scary noises than from the sight of a bare-chested Dick Barber. Dick was lean and fit these days. Most people around here were. Surplus calories didn’t grow on trees any more.
“As long as I keep working, it’s not bad,” Dick said. “Since I’m not…” He pulled on a sweatshirt. “What’s up?” Rob showed him the letter. Barber held it out at arm’s length to read it. “Good God! At least they got the bastard with the Kalashnikov.”
“Yeah. But that doesn’t do Dad a whole lot of good,” Rob said.
“True. At least it was an AK-47, not a more modern military piece with a small-caliber round and a really high muzzle velocity,” Barber said. “Some of those, the shock of a hit can kill even when the wound itself might not.”
“Happy day!” Rob exclaimed.
“I know.” Dick skimmed through the letter again. “Your dad sounds like someone with his head on tight. If he does have to retire, my guess would be that he’d be able to find something interesting to do with his time, not just sit around and wait to die of boredom.” He reached out and gently touched little Colin on the end of the nose with his right index finger. “Not easy to be bored when you’ve got a small child in the house, is it?”
“Now that you mention it,” Rob said, “no.”
“That should help,” Barber said. “If he were a certain kind of man, he might make some money by writing a book about what led to unmasking the South Bay Strangler. But, from things you’ve said, he’s not that kind of man, is he?”
“Now that you mention it,” Rob repeated, “no.” He got a chuckle from the proprietor of the Mansion Inn. His father was about as far from being that kind of man as anyone could get. If a person could be aggressively private, that was Dad. And Rob gave Dick Barber points for seeing as much.
“With the weather this good, you might want to think about going down to Newport or over to Bangor to see if you can find a working phone line and call California,” Dick said.
“There’s an idea.” It was one that hadn’t occurred to Rob. The twenty-first century, or some of it, was only a couple of days’ travel away. He would have to find a pay phone, of course, or someone whose cell he could borrow. Even if he could charge his old one, he hadn’t paid a bill for years. No cell-phone company would keep anybody on the books for that long. He wouldn’t have himself. “I may do that before it starts snowing again.”
“Bite your tongue,” Dick said, so Rob did. The older man laughed. Little Colin didn’t know what was funny, but he laughed, too. Rob sketched a salute and turned to go. Dick Barber returned it with, well, military precision.
When Lindsey got back from the high school, Rob showed her the letter, too. She made horrified noises, which was reasonable enough. “Do you want to fly back and see him?” she asked. “The airport at Bangor should be open.”
“Umm…” he said.
“Oh,” his wife replied.
“Yeah.”
He could scrape together enough cash for a phone call. For airfare? Not likely, and the airlines didn’t run on barter. His credit cards were at least as expired as his cell phone. So was his driver’s license, come to that—and the clean-shaven guy on it bore little resemblance to the shaggy fellow he’d become. Even if he could have paid for a ticket, with that for an ID they might not have let him on the plane.
He shook his head, marveling. “I don’t belong to that world any more. Nobody in Guilford does, or in Dover-Foxcroft, or Greenville, or… anywhere up here. It is what it is, and we are what we are, and what we are is on the outside. If we got connected up again, the first thing the Feds would do was charge everybody with tax evasion. Most people would lose their houses, too—who’s sent mortgage money to Chase every month?”
“Nobody,” Lindsey said.
“You got that right,” Rob agreed. “Maybe over the weekend, though, I will hop on my bike and go to Newport and see if I can make like ET and phone home. Lord! I wonder if I still know the number!”
“If you think you can get back by six Monday morning, you should go,” Lindsey said. But it had started raining by the weekend, so he didn’t. He wrote a letter instead.
When Bryce Miller walked into his apartment, Susan pointed to a fat envelope on the kitchen table and said, “Looks like your article’s finally in print.”
“Woohoo!” he said, and tore the envelope open. Sure enough, inside were two copies of The Journal of Hellenic Studies with his comparative analysis of the prosody of three of Theocritus’ pastorals. One copy would go on the brag shelf that housed his and Susan’s scholarly publications and the little magazines that had printed a handful of his poems.
The other copy, he would send to his mother in California. She had a brag shelf of her own, one she used to impress her relatives and the neighbors. The article would be Greek to her in more ways than one. She wouldn’t care. It was a sign that Bryce was doing well for himself. She would care about that.
Bryce cared about that, too. Publishing articles was one of the hoops you had to jump through to win tenure. That this one made a Congressional budget report seem exciting by comparison, that perhaps three dozen scholars in the whole world would give a flying fuck about what he was saying… Next to jumping through the hoops, those were details.
“Anything else in the mail?” he asked.
“Utility bill.”
“Do I want to know?”
“Unh-unh. And it’ll get worse with fall coming on and winter right behind.”
“Yeah, I know. Well, we’re still here.” He’d walked away from a secure job at the Department of Water and Power to teach Latin at a Catholic high school in the San Fernando Valley for a lot less money. He’d left that job to teach at a college in rural Nebraska. If he’d worried about getting rich, he never would have spent so much time memorizing irregular Greek verbs.
Susan had encouraged him to bail from the DWP. She’d married him while he was getting on people’s cases—especially the ablative—teaching Latin. She’d come to Nebraska with him, and if that wasn’t love, what the hell would be? She’d finished her own thesis while she was here. She’d looked for a job of her own, and looked, and looked.
She was still looking. People cared no more about the Holy Roman Empire than they did about Hellenistic poetry. By all the signs, they cared even less.
Or maybe that wasn’t fair. Bryce had landed the Wayne State job by luck: good luck for him, bad luck for the previous holder. Professor Smetana, who had been teaching here, died of lung disease brought on by breathing crud from the supervolcano eruption. He’d been one of several hundred thousand—no, probably over a million by now. The list got longer every day, and would keep getting longer for years to come.