Supervolcano All Fall Down(98)
Kids slid down toward the river on sleds. Kids on ice skates spun on the frozen Piscataquis. The river had a deep, stone-hard crust even though it was past the alleged first day of spring and well on its way to Tax Day. Rob’d tried ice skates a few times. He was convinced the Devil had invented them to punish sinners’ ankles. They sure punished his. If you weren’t ice-skating by the time you were two, you’d never get the hang of it. That was his theory, and he was sticking to it.
He refused to abandon it even though both Biff and Charlie could propel themselves pretty well on skates with blades. They were no threat for Olympic gold. They’d never hoist the Stanley Cup. But they could get from hither to yon without going ass over teakettle. And neither one had ever strapped on skates before coming to Guilford. It didn’t seem fair.
A snowball flew past Rob, not quite close enough to make him duck. Everybody from age four on up threw them all the time. One angry town meeting had resulted in an ordinance against using a rock core. A good many people had wanted an ordinance banning any and all snowball-flinging. That failed—too many folks enjoyed it. The failure helped make the meeting angry.
Rob enjoyed snowballs. There went Jim Farrell, with his charcoal-gray fedora—the most recognizable one, perhaps, since Fiorello La Guardia’s—just aching to be knocked off. To scoop up snow in mittened fingers took only a few seconds. To let fly seemed to take no time at all.
The snowball flew straight and true. It paffed into the side of Farrell’s hat. There it exploded. The hat ended up at Farrell’s feet. His own hair wasn’t much lighter than the snow through which he walked.
He stooped to retrieve the fedora, carefully brushing what was left of the snowball from it before setting it back on his head at the proper jaunty angle. Only then did he look around to see which miscreant might have assailed him.
He looked no farther than Rob. “Oh. You.” He might have found half of Rob in his apple. “Why am I not surprised?”
“Why, Professor Farrell, sir, whatever could you be talking about?” Rob exuded innocence the way an EPA toxic-waste site exuded dioxin.
“So you deny it, do you?” Farrell rumbled. He stooped again. When he came up, he came up firing. The snowball caught Rob dead center. The retired history professor beamed. “That’ll teach you, you rapscallion! I couldn’t have done better with a catapult.”
Instead of reretaliating, Rob clapped his hands in muffled admiration. “I’ve been called a lot of things, but never one of those before. Sounds like a hip-hop onion, you know?”
Farrell made a face, more at the music than at the pun. “Loud obscenity never appealed to me, even with a heavy bass line.”
“Well, not to me, either,” Rob admitted. “If you’re white and you aren’t Eminem, you’ve got no business rapping.”
“No one has any business rapping,” Farrell said firmly. He sighed. Vapor gushed from his mouth and nose. “I have always taken it as an article of faith that the Founders knew what they were doing when they added the First Amendment to the Constitution, but some of what’s passed for music the past twenty years does make me wonder.”
Rob bowed, which made him need to grab his cap to keep it from falling off. “At your service, Professor.”
Farrell shook his head. “I wasn’t referring to you and your fellow demented Darwinian amphibians. I truly wasn’t. You’re amusing, even clever—not something I say lightly.”
“I know. Thanks.” Rob bowed again, more sincerely than he’d expected. A compliment from Farrell was praise indeed, not least because the old man didn’t give forth with them very often.
“And you don’t seem to feel obligated to blow out every eardrum within a furlong,” Farrell added.
“That depends,” Rob said judiciously. “Since we got to Guilford, the power hasn’t been on much around here. Hard to knock crows out of the sky with acoustic guitars.”
“You would if you could, you’re telling me.” Jim Farrell sighed again. “At my advanced age and state of decrepitude, I didn’t think I could be so easily despoiled of one of my few remaining illusions.”
“Yeah, right. Now tell me another one.” Rob couldn’t match Farrell’s syntax or vocabulary, and sensibly didn’t try.
“We’re going to come through this winter with the greatest of ease.” The de facto boss of Maine north and west of the Interstate threw back his head, almost far enough to make that trademark fedora fall off again. He laughed to show he was telling another one. He put enough vinegar in the laugh to show he didn’t expect to be taken seriously.