‘And who do you think set the fire at the McCausland cabin?’
‘We’ll never know for sure, but were I forced to guess, I’d say it was Massimo’s boys, before sunrise. Put some of their own unused fireworks next to the stove – or right on top of it – and then stuffed that Pearl full of kindling so it would burn nice and hot. Not much different from putting a bomb on a timer, when you think about it.’
‘Damn,’ Ardelle said.
‘What it comes down to is drunks with fireworks, which is bad, and one hand washing the other, which is good.’
Ardelle thought about that, then puckered her lips and whistled the five-note melody from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. She tried to do it again, but began to laugh and lost her pucker.
‘Not bad,’ Andy said. ‘But can you play it on the trumpet?’
Thinking of Marshall Dodge
What better place to end a collection than with a story about the end of the world? I’ve done at least one sprawling book on this subject, The Stand, but here the focus is narrowed to little more than a pinprick. I don’t have much to say about the story itself, other than that I was thinking about my beloved 1986 Harley Softail, which I’ve now put away, and probably for good – my reflexes have slowed enough to make me a danger to myself and others when I’m on the road and doing 65. How I loved that bike. After I wrote Insomnia, I rode it from Maine to California and remember an evening somewhere in Kansas, watching the sun set in the west while the moon rose, huge and orange, in the east. I pulled over and just watched, thinking it was the finest sunset of my life. Maybe it was.
Oh, and ‘Summer Thunder’ was written in a place much like the one where we find Robinson, his neighbor, and a certain stray dog named Gandalf.
Summer Thunder
Robinson was okay as long as Gandalf was. Not okay in the sense of everything is fine, but in the sense of getting along from one day to the next. He still woke up in the night, often with tears on his face from vivid dreams where Diana and Ellen were alive, but when he picked Gandalf up from the blanket in the corner where he slept and put him on the bed, he could more often than not go back to sleep again. As for Gandalf, he didn’t care where he slept, and if Robinson pulled him close, that was okay, too. It was warm, dry, and safe. He had been rescued. That was all Gandalf cared about.
With another living being to take care of, things were better. Robinson drove to the country store five miles up Route 19 (Gandalf sitting in the pickup’s passenger seat, ears cocked, eyes bright) and got dog food. The store was abandoned, and of course it had been looted, but no one had taken the Eukanuba. After June Sixth, pets had been the last thing on people’s minds. So Robinson deduced.
Otherwise, the two of them stayed by the lake. There was plenty of food in the pantry, and boxes of stuff downstairs. He had often joked about how Diana expected the apocalypse, but the joke turned out to be on him. Both of them, actually, because Diana had surely never imagined that when the apocalypse finally arrived, she would be in Boston with their daughter, investigating the academic possibilities of Emerson College. Eating for one, the food would last longer than he did. Robinson had no doubt of that. Timlin said they were doomed.
He never would have expected doom to be so lovely. The weather was warm and cloudless. In the old days, Lake Pocomtuck would have buzzed with powerboats and Jet Skis (which were killing the fish, the old-timers grumbled), but this summer it was silent except for the loons … only there seemed to be fewer of them crying each night. At first Robinson thought this was just his imagination, which was as infected with grief as the rest of his thinking apparatus, but Timlin assured him it wasn’t.
‘Haven’t you noticed that most of the woodland birds are already gone? No chickadee concerts in the morning, no crow music at noon. By September, the loons will be as gone as the loons who did this. The fish will live a little longer, but eventually they’ll be gone, too. Like the deer, the rabbits, and the chipmunks.’
About such wildlife there could be no argument. Robinson had seen almost a dozen dead deer beside the lake road and more beside Route 19, on that one trip he and Gandalf had made to the Carson Corners General Store, where the sign out front – BUY YOUR VERMONT CHEESE & SYRUP HERE! – now lay facedown next to the dry gas pumps. But the greatest part of the animal holocaust was in the woods. When the wind was from the east, toward the lake rather than off it, the reek was tremendous. The warm days didn’t help, and Robinson wanted to know what had happened to nuclear winter.
‘Oh, it’ll come,’ said Timlin, sitting in his rocker and looking off into the dappled sunshine under the trees. ‘Earth is still absorbing the blow. Besides, we know from the last reports that the Southern Hemisphere – not to mention most of Asia – is socked in beneath what may turn out to be eternal cloud cover. Enjoy the sunshine while we’ve got it, Peter.’
As if he could enjoy anything. He and Diana had been talking about a trip to England – their first extended vacation since the honeymoon – once Ellen was settled in school.
Ellen, he thought. Who had just been recovering from the breakup with her first real boyfriend and was beginning to smile again.
On each of these fine late-summer post-apocalypse days, Robinson clipped a leash to Gandalf’s collar (he had no idea what the dog’s name had been before June Sixth; the mutt had come with a collar from which only a State of Massachusetts vaccination tag hung), and they walked the two miles to the pricey enclave of which Howard Timlin was now the only resident.
Diana had once called that walk snapshot heaven. Much of it overlooked sheer drops to the lake and forty-mile views into New York. At one point, where the road buttonhooked sharply, a sign that read MIND YOUR DRIVING! had been posted. The summer kids of course called this hairpin Dead Man’s Curve.
Woodland Acres – private as well as pricey before the world ended – was a mile further on. The centerpiece was a fieldstone lodge that had featured a restaurant with a marvelous view, a five-star chef, and a ‘beer pantry’ stocked with a thousand brands. (‘Many undrinkable,’ Timlin said. ‘Take it from me.’) Scattered around the main lodge, in various bosky dells, were two dozen picturesque ‘cottages,’ some owned by major corporations before June Sixth put an end to corporations. Most of the cottages had still been empty on June Sixth, and in the crazy ten days that followed, the few people who were in residence fled for Canada, which was rumored to be radiation-free. That was when there was still enough gasoline to make flight possible.
The owners of Woodland Acres, George and Ellen Benson, had stayed. So had Timlin, who was divorced, had no children to mourn, and knew the Canada story was surely a fable. Then, in early July, the Bensons had swallowed pills and taken to their bed while listening to Beethoven on a battery-powered phonograph. Now it was just Timlin.
‘All that you see is mine,’ he had told Robinson, waving his arm grandly. ‘And someday, son, it will be yours.’
On these daily walks down to the Acres, Robinson’s grief and sense of dislocation eased; sunshine was seductive. Gandalf sniffed at the bushes and tried to pee on every one. He barked bravely when he heard something in the woods, but always moved closer to Robinson. The leash was necessary only because of the dead squirrels and chipmunks. Gandalf didn’t want to pee on those; he wanted to roll in what was left of them.
Woodland Acres Lane split off from the camp road where Robinson now lived the single life. Once the lane had been gated to keep lookie-loos and wage-slave rabble such as himself out, but now the gate stood permanently open. The lane meandered for half a mile through forest where the slanting, dusty light seemed almost as old as the towering spruces and pines that filtered it, passed four tennis courts, skirted a putting green, and looped behind a barn where the trail horses now lay dead in their stalls. Timlin’s cottage was on the far side of the lodge – a modest dwelling with four bedrooms, four bathrooms, a hot tub, and its own sauna.