Supervolcano All Fall Down(9)

“Sure. We can,” Rob said, again with that mismatch between tone and voice. “I bet we blow up the band if we do, though.”

Justin had expressive features. Right now what they expressed was annoyance verging on disgust. “Biff will come along if the rest of us decide to go back to civilization,” he said.

“Don’t bet anything you can’t afford to lose,” Rob said. Biff Thorvald played rhythm guitar. He was also the guy in the band who trolled hardest for girls. They all did some of it. What the hell was the point of playing in a band if it wasn’t to help you get laid? But Biff took it further than Justin or Rob or Charlie Storer, the drummer. The phrase hard-on with legs hadn’t been coined with him in mind, but it might as well have been.

Justin still looked annoyed. “He’s not that serious about Sarah or Cindy or whatever her name is.”

“Bullshit he’s not,” Rob retorted. Cindy—he thought that was her name—was a waitress at Caleb’s Kitchen, on Water Street. If Rob turned his head, and if the snow eased up a little, he could see the diner from where he stood. It was tolerable for breakfast, but hadn’t been much for lunch or dinner till they put moose stew and venisonburgers on the menu. Whatever her name was, Biff was all head over heels for her, and she was just as crazy about him.

“Oh, man!” Justin waved in frustration at the trees on the far bank of the Piscataquis. The ones that weren’t pines were mostly bare-branched. All the late frosts and snowfalls had screwed their leaf-growing to the wall. Rob wondered if they’d die. This was a town park, so nobody’d chopped them down over the winter. But if they were nothing but firewood waiting to happen . . . Justin went on, “This is Nowhere with a capital N.”

“Uh-huh.” Rob admitted what he couldn’t very well deny. But he also said, “I kinda like it, y’know?”

The look Justin gave him had Et tu, Brute? written all over it. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said.

“Nope.” Rob shook his head. “Right after we got stranded, I would’ve kissed a pig for a plane ticket to, well, anywhere. But it grows on me, honest to God it does.”

“Like a wart.” Justin was not a happy camper.

“Look, dude, if you just gotta go, then you gotta go, and that’s all there is to it,” Rob said. “We’ll be sorry and we’ll miss you and all that good shit, but we won’t hate you or anything. The band’s not worth squat if the only reason you’re in it is you think you have to stay in it. If you leave, well, hell, we had a better run than most outfits do. We even made a living at it for a while.”

“Up from obscurity,” Justin muttered.

“Most outfits never make it that far,” Rob said. “They don’t call ’em garage bands by accident. The drummer’s loud and crappy and annoys the neighbors, and the guys say fuck it and get on with their lives. Coming as far as we have, we beat the odds.”

“We got all the way up to cult band,” Justin said.

He didn’t mean it in any good way, but Rob nodded even so. “We sure did, and it paid the bills. What’s wrong with that? I mean, would you rather play gigs or sit in a cubicle next to Dilbert and stare at a monitor all day?”

Justin flinched. He might have been stuck in a lab, not a cubicle—he was an escaped biologist. But one of the reasons you got into a band was so you wouldn’t get trapped in a nine-to-five. Of course, you could get trapped in a band, too. “Up from obscurity,” he repeated. “And then down to obscurity again.”

That was how it went. It wasn’t so exact as calculating where a missile that went up on this course at that angle with the other velocity would come down, but it came close. Nobody’d ever heard of you. Then people did hear about you, and you were as hot as you ever got. Then they started forgetting about you and looking for something new. But if enough people got to like you while you were It, you could still make a living on the afterglow.

Like really powerful missiles, a few bands went into orbit and never did come back to earth. Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles never would have been one of those; it was too quirky, and probably too smart for its own good. As long as everybody in the band accepted that, they could have fun anyhow.

Justin sighed now. “I know what it is. That Farrell guy’s got a mojo on you.”

“Oh, give me a break!” Rob said. “Everything around here would have gone to hell if he hadn’t pitched in.” Jim Farrell was a retired history prof; Dick Barber had helped run his failed campaign for Congress in the last election. The successful Democrat stayed in Washington. He showed no interest in sharing his constituents’ frigid fate. Farrell was still here, and better adapted to the new reality than most younger people. He also had a buglelike baritone that made people—people on this side of I-95, anyhow—take notice of him.