Justin and Charlie had also found friends of the female persuasion. That, no doubt, was one reason why they didn’t sound more serious about bailing out. Yes, they were musicians. Yes, they were used to temporary attachments. But, whether or not they’d intended to, they’d put down roots here.
Roots . . . Every house had a garden. All the gardens were trying to grow potatoes and parsnips and turnips and mangel-wurzels and anything else that had a prayer of maturing in a growing season abbreviated even for Maine. Extravagant mulch and plastic sheeting fought the cold as best they could. And maybe there would be a crop and maybe there wouldn’t. Everyone would find out when the weather turned really bad again.
In the meantime . . . In the meantime, Rob ambled down the semigrassy slope to the Piscataquis. The stream had thawed out enough to chuckle over its rocky bed. It had probably been born from glacial runoff. Rob stuck his finger into it, then jerked the digit out again. “Brr!” he said. By all the signs, the river was getting back to its roots.
A blue jay scolded him from a pine tree. A lot of birds had flown south for the winter and not come back. Jays and robins and ravens lingered. So did ospreys—one plunged into the frigid water and came out with a fish clamped in its talons. Another jay flew after the fish hawk, screeching.
Some kids threw a football around. The slope that led to the river meant only sidehill sheep could have played any proper kind of game. The kids didn’t care. They threw and kicked and yelled and laughed. It was summer vacation, even if it was summer only by the calendar.
They’d missed a lot of school even when it wasn’t vacation. Lindsey made sorrowful noises about that. Sometimes it was because they couldn’t get to class themselves. When the snowdrifts were taller than they were. . . . More often, though, their teachers couldn’t make it. Not all the teachers lived in Guilford. The ones who didn’t had relied on the quaint concept known as motor transportation. Here and there in the U.S. of A., roads still stayed open. Not in this part of the country, though. Nowhere close. The joke for Siberia had been ten months of winter and two of bad skiing. The joke, these days, applied all too literally to this part of Maine.
As he had with Alaska, Rob wondered how things were in Siberia right now. Cold: the one-word answer immediately supplied itself. Bloody fucking cold, if you wanted to get technical. Though it might seem hard to believe, there had been places with climates worse than the one Guilford didn’t enjoy. If Guilford had turned into a pretty fair approximation of Siberia, what had Siberia turned into?
The South Pole, Rob thought. Then he tried to imagine penguins roaming the tundra. It made him want to giggle.
A kid missed the football. It took three crazy bounces and stopped right at Rob’s feet. “Throw it back, man!” the kid yelled. He was about twelve—no beard on his cheeks, and his voice hadn’t broken.
Rob picked it up. “I’ll do better than that,” he said. The shape and the pebbly feel of the leather or rubbery plastic or whatever the hell it was combined irresistibly. Like a certain deranged beagle, what red-blooded grown-up doesn’t want to be the Mad Punter, even if only for a moment?
He let fly. He hadn’t played football since PE in high school, and he hadn’t been the punter then. By rights, he should have squibbed it off the side of his foot. By dumb luck, he caught it square. It flew long and straight. It would have been a forty-yarder on any NFL gridiron—well, any NFL gridiron except Mile High Stadium, which was still deeply buried in volcanic crap.
“Wow!” The kid who’d called for the ball wasn’t the only one to stare at him, wide-eyed. He tried not to preen. Damned if he hadn’t had standing O’s at club gigs that he’d enjoyed less. Being applauded for skill was one thing. Being applauded for skill and strength . . . He felt as if he’d grown shoulder pads under his flannel shirt.
After the kids retrieved the ball, they brought it back to him. One of the kids flipped it his way. “Do it again!”
He didn’t think he could do it twice in a row. Hell, he hadn’t thought he could do it once in a row. But he’d always been able to resist anything but temptation—a line his old man had used more than once. He punted again. It wasn’t as good as the first try, but it went a lot farther than any kid who hadn’t reached puberty could manage.
They swarmed after it and brought it back like retrievers. He didn’t want to play punting machine. If once was experiment and twice was perversion, what was three times? Boring, that was what.
They didn’t ask him for another punt, though. Instead, one of them said, “When are you guys gonna play again?”