“Yeah, right,” Rob repeated. He hadn’t come through this winter with the greatest of ease himself, not with that bullet grazing his leg he hadn’t. But that wasn’t what the professor was talking about, and they both knew it.
Farrell adjusted the hat. His extravagant eyebrows twitched. “This past winter was colder than the one before it. Fool that I am, I hadn’t dreamt it could be. Those who are alleged to know about such things claim the one ahead will be harder yet.”
One of the people alleged to know about such things was the stepmother Rob still hadn’t met. He wondered, not for the first time, if this wasn’t the right moment to make tracks for the opposite corner of the country. Things in SoCal weren’t . . . so bad. What came out of his mouth, though, was “As long as we’ve got firewood and meese and MREs, we’ll get by.”
“Why anyone would want Reagan’s attorney general . . .” Farrell held up a gloved finger. “He was a fat fellow—I give you that. Tubbier than I am, which isn’t easy. Render him down for oil, and he could likely keep the lamps burning quite a while.”
Rob hadn’t been talking about the Meese called Ed, and knew Farrell knew as much. The professor enjoyed, even reveled in, being difficult. Rob eyed him. “You’ve dropped a good bit of weight since I first met you,” he said truthfully.
“So have you. So has everybody in these parts,” Farrell replied. What twisted his mouth wasn’t a smile, even if it tried to be. “We’re eating less and working harder. Once upon a time, large parts of the world had so very much that even poor people could become obese, and commonly did. As recently as a hundred years ago, that would have been unimaginable. My Greeks and Romans would never have believed it.”
“Huh,” Rob said. Farrell was good at teasing, or sometimes startling, thoughtful noises out of people. “Hadn’t looked at it that way, but you’re not wrong.” When the illegal immigrants who mowed lawns in L.A. sported double chins and potbellies—and a lot of them had—the traditional meaning of poor needed revising.
Well, the supervolcano had gone and revised it, all right. It sure as hell had.
“‘Once upon a time,’ I said.” Farrell sounded as academically mournful as if he were discussing the fall of Rome. “No more, not around here. They say we may be able to plant the Midwest again in a few years. But if the weather keeps getting worse, how much will grow even if we can? We are still working through our pre-eruption surplus, and sooner or later—sooner, now, I fear—we’ll come to the bottom of that.”
“We’ve got the mooses.” Rob tossed out another possible plural. The word wasn’t so bad as mongoose, but it came close.
“We’ve barely had enough to feed us this time till warmer weather comes again.” Farrell gestured with that index finger once more. “Nota bene: I do not say warm weather. This benighted part of the world won’t see warm weather till long after I’m dead and buried—or perhaps I should be cremated, if I ever aim to warm up in this world. But I digress.”
“You do? I’m shocked, Professor. Shocked, I tell you!” Rob hadn’t seen Casablanca for nothing.
“If digression was good enough for Herodotus, it’s good enough for me,” Farrell said. And he digressed some more: “There are two kinds of modern historians of the ancient world, you know.”
“Now that you mention it,” Rob said, “I didn’t.”
He slowed Jim Farrell down not a jot. “There are those who like Herodotus, and there are those who like Thucydides. They’re easy to tell apart. The ones who like Thucydides are the ones with the tight assholes.”
Rob didn’t know what he’d thought Farrell would come out with. Whatever it was, that wasn’t it. He barked surprised laughter. Then he said, “I thought we were talking about moose.” Maybe doing it right would keep the professor on track.
“No, we were talking about the absence of moose,” Farrell said with relentless precision. Maybe doing it right wouldn’t, too. “And more and more of them are absent, too. Unless I’m very much mistaken, we’re hunting them far faster than they can breed. We’re having to go farther and farther afield for firewood, too.”
That, Rob knew. Maine had abundant second-growth woods. Not many people had farmed its stony soil in the second half of the twentieth century, or in the twenty-first, and trees reclaimed fields by the multiple square mile. An awful lot of those trees, though, had gone up in smoke the past few winters. Many more would burn when the weather worsened again.