Supervolcano: All Fall Down

XVIII

Winter in Maine. Back before the supervolcano erupted, back before Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles found themselves stuck in Guilford with the Greenville blues again, that would have meant Norman Rockwell paintings, or more likely Currier and Ives prints, to Rob. He would have thought of Christmas trees (or, being the cynical sort he was, of pine-scented air freshener).

These days, winter in Maine brought two things to his mind. No, three things, he told himself, starting his own mental Python routine. They were, in no particular order, not freezing to death, not starving to death, and marrying Lindsey.

He knew the third one was coming. He had a date and everything. He’d asked Lindsey, and she’d said yes, fool that she was. He would have been a lousy marriage bet in ordinary times. But then, in ordinary times he never would have wound up stuck in Guilford and got to know her to begin with. Jim Farrell had already agreed-or threatened, depending on which way the wind was blowing-to perform the ceremony. Life would go on.

It would if he, to say nothing of the whole region, could manage not to freeze and not to starve. A hell of a lot of second-growth pines had already gone up in smoke so the stubborn souls who wanted to keep living north and west of the Interstate wouldn’t freeze to death. These days, people had to cut down trees a lot farther away from the little towns that dotted the countryside. Then they had to bring them back to the towns to go up in smoke. They mostly had to do it without help of the internal-combustion variety. Life got interesting sometimes. Not warm, but interesting.

Life got hungry, too. Just as there weren’t so many trees running around nearby these days, there also weren’t so many moose on the loose. Rob had eaten some things he never would have imagined downing in pre-eruption Los Angeles. Squirrels, for instance, weren’t just for cats any more. They were surprisingly tasty, though there wasn’t much meat on a squirrel carcass. The same went for robins, though the weather had got so nasty that not many robins came this far north any more.

Rob wore snowshoes on his feet. He had a rifle in his hands. A DayGlo orange vest told the world-and, more particularly, the numskulls also prowling this part of it with rifles-that he wasn’t a moose, a squirrel, or any other refugee from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. He’d been wearing that vest when he got shot. Did wearing it some more make him an optimist or a fool? Was there any difference?

Moving on snowshoes was like riding a horse. For a while, your thigh muscles had to do things they weren’t used to doing. They pissed and moaned about it, sometimes loudly. Then they did it often enough to decide you weren’t trying to torture them after all.

So he glumped along between the Piscataquis and Manhanock Pond. The river was frozen. So was the pond-which, being several miles long, would have done for a major lake in SoCal. Here, it was just one more souvenir of the retreating glaciers. Like Minnesota, Maine was littered with lakes and ponds and puddles. To an L.A. guy, so much fresh water sitting around doing nothing seemed perverse.

At the moment, most of Manhanock Pond was a king-sized ice cube sitting around doing nothing. If the weather was any indication, the glaciers had just stepped around the corner for lunch, and they’d be back any minute. Scientists loudly insisted the eruption wouldn’t trigger a new Ice Age. They couldn’t have proved it by Rob.

A crow flew by, or maybe it was a raven. Rob watched it go without moving the rifle. Even if he could have hit a crow on the wing with a rifle, a.30–06 round would have turned it into no more than an explosion of black feathers against the sky. Birds were for shotguns. With his piece, he had to go after bigger game.

Except for the faint crunch of his snowshoes over the drifts, it was eerily quiet. Winters up here were like that. Get away from town and it was as if you were the only living thing as far as your eye and your ear could reach. No, not as if. Very often, you were.

Rob was now. No cars on the roads, that was for sure. Route 6 to the north and Route 23 to the east (to say nothing of Route 150 to the west, which was exactly what Route 150 deserved to have said of it) were covered with as much snow as the rest of the landscape. If you had to travel these days, you went by snowshoes or skis or horse-drawn sleigh-or, in a desperate emergency, by snowmobile. Those beasts murdered the silence for miles around.

Off in the distance, coming up from the southeast, something moved. Rob was immediately alert. It might be a moose. He didn’t think that was likely: there were more towns, with more hunters, down in the direction of I-95. Moose had been scarcer in those parts before the eruption, too. But, while it was unlikely, it wasn’t impossible.

He stood very still. Moose didn’t see in color, so if this was one it wouldn’t be able to tell how hideous his DayGlo vest was. It might mistake him for a Christmas tree or something, even if he wasn’t loaded down with tinsel and tacky ornaments.

He needed no more than a few seconds to realize that whatever was coming his way wasn’t a moose. He needed a little more time, but not a lot, to figure out what it was: a dogsled, straight out of the Yukon. A slow grin spread across his face. That was another way to get around in this frozen part of the world, at least if you had enough moose meat or kibbles or whatever the hell to keep your huskies happy.

Right behind the first sled came another one. Rob could pick out the exact moment when the passengers saw him-the dogs of the lead sled swerved in his direction. More slowly than he might have, he realized he didn’t have to keep standing there as if frozen by the weather. He waved, feeling stupid.

The people in the dogsleds waved back. As the sleds neared, Rob decided he was glad he had the rifle. The huskies seemed no more than a step removed from wolves, and a small step at that. If they hadn’t been hitched to the sleds, they might have decided to hunt him.

When the sleds stopped, one of the passengers pushed back the hood of his-no, her-furry, Eskimo-style parka. To Rob’s amazement, styled blond hair cascaded out. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Marie Fabianski, from CNN. Can we interview you?”

She spoke slowly, with spaces between her words. She might have been going into a foreign country where the natives couldn’t be expected to speak or understand English very well. A cameraman in the second sled aimed his weapon at Rob’s bearded, none-too-clean face.

“Um, okay,” Rob mumbled. He wasn’t usually thrown for such a loss, but he’d been away from anything wider than small-town gossip since not long after the supervolcano blew.

“Terrific!” Marie Fabianski smiled a multikilowatt smile. She had dazzlingly perfect teeth, whether on her own or thanks to a talented dentist Rob couldn’t even begin to guess. “We’re here to do a feature to show the rest of the country-to show the rest of the whole wide world-how the people in these parts are getting along. Isn’t that exciting?”

Sure as hell, she was treating him like a native, and a dimwitted native at that. “What if we’d rather be left alone?” Rob said. There wasn’t much point to staying on the wrong side of the Interstate if you wouldn’t rather be left alone.

So it seemed to Rob, anyhow. Marie Fabianski’s smile never wavered. “The public has the right to be informed!” she said in ringing tones. “It wants to know what’s going on in these forgotten corners of the country.”

“Oh, horseshit,” Rob said. With luck, that would spoil some of the footage the cameraman was getting, though they might just bleep over it. He went on, “The American public doesn’t give a rat’s ass about us up here. It’s proved that ever since the supervolcano went off. And you know what else? We have the right to remain silent.”

He might as well have saved his breath. She sure kept on with her spiel as if he hadn’t spoken: “Do you know, uh. .?” Then she did pause. She had to look down for a second to check her notes. Nodding to herself, she started over: “Do you know Professor James Farrell, former unsuccessful Republican candidate for the House?”

“Yeah, I know Jim,” Rob answered.

“He is virtually the tsar of this new Siberia, isn’t he?” Marie Fabianski rolled on. She had all her preconceptions neatly lined up in a row. If only they were ducks!

“Now that you mention it,” Rob said, “no.”

“Do you know where in this frozen wilderness Professor Farrell is currently residing?” she asked him. “We’d like to get to the bottom of his extraconstitutional authority.”

When everybody with Constitutional authority forgets we exist, what are we supposed to do? But Rob didn’t come out with it. What was the use? What was the point? Marie Fabianski wouldn’t listen to him. Chances were she didn’t intend to listen to Jim Farrell, either. CNN wouldn’t have come up here to listen. It was coming up here to talk. Of course, she’d never met Jim. If she had to make sure she got his name right, she didn’t know much about him. The confrontation might prove interesting, in the matter-antimatter sense of the word. And. .

“As a matter of fact, he’s right over there in Guilford.” Rob pointed in the direction from which he’d set out. “If you give me a lift back to town, I’ll introduce you.”

“That would be wonderful!” Marie Fabianski exclaimed, which definitely proved she didn’t know what she was getting into.

Rob rode with the cameraman and the writer. God forbid he should pollute the talent with his touch, though both Marie and he wore enough layers of clothing to make any contact between them strictly a rumor. He’d never been in a dogsled before. The running huskies pulled it along at an amazing clip. They leaned into their harness for all they were worth. Dogs got off on working. No wonder I like cats better, Rob thought.

When they stopped in front of the Trebor Mansion Inn, the huskies stood there panting, pink tongues lolling out of their mouths. They were ready-hell, they were eager-to run some more.

Dick Barber came out, wearing a Navy peacoat and watch cap. One corner of his mouth turned up slightly as he said, “You brought me some summer people, Rob? Way to go!”

Guilford hadn’t seen much in the way of summer people (or, for that matter, summer) since the supervolcano erupted. Rob snickered. To a Californian, the whole idea of summer people had always seemed bizarre to begin with. The CNN crew looked blank. One of the prerequisites for working in TV had to be a vaccination against irony.

“Who, ah, are your friends?” Barber asked.

“We’re from CNN,” Marie Fabianski said brightly. “We understand that James Farrell is staying here. We’d like to interview him and learn more about current conditions in this part of the country.”

A Maine Coon cat studied the huskies from a safe distance. The dogs saw it and barked furiously. The cat, perhaps a coward but for sure not a fool, decided somewhere else was a good place to be and departed thither at high speed. Dick Barber seemed as bemused by it as he was by the descent of the media. “You would?” he said. “Are you sure?”

“Would we have come all this way if we weren’t?” she returned. All this way was a couple of hours’ drive up from Portland in good weather. Not much of that since the eruption, and Guilford was indeed a long way from the rest of the world.

“Who knows?” Barber said. “But if he wants to talk to you, I won’t try to stop him. Just remember, you brought it on yourselves. Why don’t you come into my parlor? I’m not even a spider.” He didn’t say anything about whether Marie Fabianski was a fly.

A fire burned in the fireplace there. That meant it wasn’t frigid: it was just cold. And just cold, in the middle of a post-eruption winter, felt wonderful to Rob.

While the cameraman photographed the room and set up his tripod and some battery-powered lights across from the couch, Barber whispered, “You went out after moose.”

“Yeah, well, this is what I found,” Rob said defensively. “Or I mean, they found me.”

Jim Farrell swept into the parlor. He was elegant in his trademark fedora and a dark gray topcoat that remained dapper even if it showed it hadn’t been new for a while. Not much clothing north and west of the Interstate had been new any time lately.

“An invasion by the Fourth Estate!” he boomed in his resonant baritone. “How quaint! How outdated!”

He didn’t faze Marie Fabianski. She must have got a double dose of the antisarcasm serum. Before long, they sat side by side on the couch. The lights went on. So did the little red LED on the camera. “I’m CNN correspondent Marie Fabianski, speaking to you from the Trebor Mansion Inn in Guilford, Maine. With me is retired Professor James Farrell, who some call the de facto dictator of half the state of Maine.”

“Whom, dear. Whom some call the de facto dictator,” Farrell said genially.

“I didn’t think you were an English professor,” she retorted.

“I wasn’t. But I do prize accuracy-which is more than a lot of people and organizations can claim these days.” Farrell named no names. He didn’t even name any initials. The jab went home even so.

Standing quietly beside Rob, out of the shot, Dick Barber grinned. That mention of the Trebor Mansion Inn would have been worth a lot to him back when there were summer people. Now it was no more than a might-have-been.

“I’ve heard it said that you are the big boss in this part of the country,” Marie Fabianski tried again. “Is that true or isn’t it?”

Rob expected Farrell to come back with something like I’ve heard it said that CNN hires lady reporters because of how pretty they are. Is that true or isn’t it? Instead, the old man complained, “A minute ago, you said I was a dictator. Now I’m only a big boss? Make up your mind, please!”

“Well, are you a dictator?” She sounded flustered. Things weren’t going the way she’d expected. She’d never tried dealing with Jim Farrell before, which had to explain a good deal.

He beamed at her like your kindly grandfather, if your kindly grandfather happened to be a retired history prof and a political gadfly. “Do I look like a dictator?”

“Dictators can look like-”

He overrode her: “Do I sound like a dictator? More to the point, do I act like a dictator? If I am a dictator, where’s my army? Where’s my harem? Most important of all, where are my tax collectors? Hard to be a dictator without what I believe the heathens term a revenue stream.”

“If you’re not a dictator, what would you call yourself?” Out of her depth, Marie Fabianski did her best to swim. She was game, anyhow.

“Someone who knows a little something about how to live without the so-called modern conveniences,” Farrell answered. “Someone who didn’t go to Washington and hole up there, unlike a certain Congresscritter I could mention. Someone the people around here trust. And I’m entertaining. We mostly can’t watch CNN and the other comedy channels any more. The poor, benighted citizenry has to content itself with me.”

She gaped. She gestured to the cameraman. He killed the bright lights and the video camera. Sighing, she said, “I don’t think we’ve got much of a story here.”

“I don’t think you want your network to look like a pack of fools,” Dick Barber said.

“Of course she doesn’t, Dick,” Farrell said. “They’re trying to get by as best they can, just like us. We don’t want to get to the point where we start eating each other, and they don’t want to lose ratings. No matter where you are in the world, it’s not easy. It never was, even before the eruption.”

Before the eruption. Rob wondered how many times he’d said that and thought that in the days since. He was starting to take the new, harder, life for granted, but he still remembered the old one. He remembered the difference. He knew how big it was. Things wouldn’t be the same again, probably not till long after he was dead.

If they ever were. That they looked bigger every day.

* * *

A Hawthorne cop had got killed in a shootout with a bank robber. The robber was also deceased, which didn’t surprise Colin Ferguson a bit. The police tended not to take prisoners in those situations.

When the coroner finally released the robber’s corpse, a few grieving relatives and friends might lay him to rest. Funerals for officers slain in the line of duty were much bigger affairs. Cops and politicians from all the surrounding towns came to pay their respects. Fallen soldiers often didn’t get such a fancy sendoff.

Colin hadn’t known the dead policeman. He was here at Chief Pitcavage’s behest, as the official representative of the San Atanasio PD. He hadn’t worn his uniform for a while. It felt scratchy. The navy blue cap with the shiny brim was an unfamiliar weight on his head.

The casket was closed, so he didn’t have to go through the macabre ritual of filing past the body. From what he’d heard, the poor bastard in there had stopped a charge of double-aught buck with his face. The undertakers couldn’t make him look even half-way presentable.

And so Colin sat on the uncomfortable wooden pew while the minister told the audience and the TV cameras from several local stations what a fine fellow the late Office McClintock had been. McClintock left behind a wife and two boys who were too little to understand what was going on. Their mother did; she sobbed quietly through the eulogy.

Of course the minister did his best to dance around the question of why God had let Officer McClintock stop a shotgun blast with his face if he was such a fine fellow. What could you do but dance around that question? It had no answer, or none Colin could see.

But if it had no answer, what was the point of the church? Maybe the ceremony made the widow feel a little better. Maybe it just made her remember more and hurt worse. He had no answers to that one, either.

He listened to the pious phrases and kept his trap shut. More often than not, that was the best thing you could do. He wasn’t here to argue religious questions. He was here to show the San Atanasio Police Department’s flag, or he would have been if only the San Atanasio PD had a flag.

After the eulogy ended, he did have to go up and murmur words of condolence to Mrs. McClintock. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorrier than I know how to tell you.”

She nodded jerkily. Behind a black veil, her face was paper-white. “Thank you for coming,” she whispered. Her boys stared up at her. The older one might have been three. He knew something wasn’t right. What it was hadn’t sunk in yet.

Not for him it hadn’t, anyway. He didn’t know how lucky he was to be so little.

The cops milled around, talking to people they knew in other departments. It was a bad scene. They all knew they might have drawn the short straw the same way. Police work wasn’t soldiering, but it came as close as anything inside the USA.

A lean LAPD sergeant came up to Colin and said, “You’re that Ferguson guy, right? From San Atanasio?”

Colin nodded. “Guilty. Um, do I know you?” The other guy’s face didn’t look familiar.

But the sergeant answered, “Oh, we’ve met, all right. You bet your sweet ass we have.” He did lower his voice to make sure the widow couldn’t hear that.

“Tell me where?” Colin said. He was usually good at placing people. This time, though, he drew a blank.

With a sour chuckle, the guy from LAPD said, “At the Braxton Bragg offramp to the 110. You were gonna have your troops machine-gun me if I didn’t get the fuck out of the way.”

“Oh.” Colin chuckled, too, in mild-but only mild-embarrassment. “We really needed that oil.”

“I guess!” the LAPD sergeant exclaimed. “I promised myself I’d punch you in the nose if I ever ran into you again.”

“Well, you can try.” Colin unobtrusively shifted his weight. He hadn’t been in a fistfight since his patrol-car days, but if this guy wanted to work out his grudge. .

He didn’t, or not enough to start something here. “Nah,” he said. “You were doing what you thought you had to do. I’ll tell you, though-it rubbed me the wrong way when you made me back down.”

“You’re LAPD. You’re used to telling the little departments what to do,” Colin said. “Gotta feel funny when the shoe’s on your foot and not the other fellow’s.”

“It’d look that way to you, wouldn’t it?” the LAPD sergeant said. “I’m not talking about how the San Atanasio PD made my department back down. I don’t want to slug the San Atanasio PD. You made me back down. But hell, you were just doing your job, same as poor damn McClintock was doing his. Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug, that’s all.”

“Mm.” Colin would rather it were department to department, not man to man. “I don’t know your name,” he said. Knowing it-and remembering it-might prove worthwhile.

“I’m Jack Winters.”

“Good to meet you, Jack. For whatever it’s worth to you, it wasn’t personal.” Colin held out his hand. After a moment, Winters took it. He squeezed with brief, controlled strength, then let go. Colin decided he might have been lucky the LAPD man didn’t feel like brawling.

“Take care,” Winters said, and walked away. Before long, he was lost in the throng of dark blue uniforms.

His duty and the department’s done, Colin drove back to the station. He had to go slowly, because bicyclists made up almost all of the traffic. They gave him curious looks as he went past them-not, he judged, because he was in uniform in an unmarked car, but because he had a working automobile. He saw only a couple of others on the twenty-minute trip. There were many more people on skateboards on the sidewalk than drivers.

Nobody was buying new cars, either. Not only was nobody buying them; hardly anyone was making them. GM had declared bankruptcy again. Ford had tossed in the sponge. Toyota and Hyundai were shuttering American plants. The massive layoffs in the auto business after the eruption only planted another lily on the economy’s chest.

When Colin got back, he walked into Mike Pitcavage’s office. “How was it?” the chief asked.

“About as gruesome as you’d expect,” Colin answered. Both men grimaced, almost identically. Colin went on, “The widow’s. . stunned. That’s the only word that fits. Never gonna be the same for her and those kids.”

“They nailed the son of a bitch who shot McClintock, anyhow,” Pitcavage said. “That’s over. She won’t have to wait for them to try him and convict him and then wait another twenty years till they stick a needle in his arm.” He made a disgusted noise, down deep in his throat.

“Yeah.” Colin nodded. He felt the same way. Any cop would-justice deferred was justice denied. An awful lot of justice was being denied in California these days. He didn’t want to dwell on that, so he told the chief about his encounter with Jack Winters.

“Heh,” Pitcavage said. “He should’ve swung on you. That would’ve given everybody something to talk about besides the sermon.”

“It wasn’t worth talking about,” Colin replied. “And the gossip would’ve been about my busted snoot.”

Pitcavage waved that aside. Sure-why wouldn’t he? It wouldn’t have been his ox getting gored or his nose getting punched. And his department would have scored the publicity. LAPD would have got egg on its face. If Colin had got blood on his. .

When you were a chief, maybe you didn’t worry about such minor details.

You had to look at the whole picture, right? That was what it took to run a department, even a small one like San Atanasio’s, right? Mike Pitcavage sure seemed convinced it was. Colin? Colin had one more reason to count his blessings for not winning the chair Mike was sitting in now.

* * *

Whenever Bronislav drove into the L.A. area, he stayed down in San Pedro. That was partly because he hoped to pick up more hauling work at the port, partly because a good-sized Serbian community had settled there. He could hear his own language, and speak it. He could eat familiar food. He could drink familiar booze. It wasn’t the old country, but it was as reasonable a facsimile as he was likely to find on the shores of the Pacific.

He could introduce Vanessa to all those things, too, and show her off to his friends. She rode the bus down there every chance she got. When she landed a job, she told herself, she would drive. In the meantime, she had better things than gasoline to spend her money on.

She’d fallen in love with a guy she knew in high school-in love enough for him to pop her cherry, anyhow. She’d been living with him when she met Bryce. And then, in short order, she’d fallen in love with Bryce and was living with him. She really had thought that would last. For a while, she had. For a while, it had, too. She remembered telling him If I can’t make it with you, I can’t make it with anybody.

But she couldn’t make it with him. How on earth could you get excited about, or even interested in, poetry written a million years ago in a dead language? When he did make brief forays into the real world, all he wanted to do was screw. He didn’t want to go out to dinner, he didn’t want to go shopping at the mall, he didn’t care about movies, he didn’t dance.

He did go to the occasional baseball game. He approached baseball the same way he approached his ancient poetry: as an archaeological problem. Vanessa’s interest in sports was almost as great as her interest in spiders.

So-Hagop. She hadn’t fallen in love with him, no matter how much she’d tried to tell herself she had. He was a lifeline when she got sick of boring Bryce. If only she hadn’t followed him to Denver. .

Well, now she was starting to think even that might have been worthwhile. If she hadn’t gone to Denver, she wouldn’t have been coming back to L.A. from the east and stopped in at that Denny’s outside Las Cruces. She never would have met Bronislav Nedic.

And that, obviously, would have been the biggest tragedy since Shakespeare hung up his quill pen. Bronislav made her happy in ways she hadn’t even imagined before they met. She wasn’t used to being happy. She still complained, but her heart wasn’t always in it.

In self-defense, she’d learned bits and pieces about Hellenistic poetry. She’d learned bits and pieces about the rug business, too-mostly about how everybody who had anything to do with it was the biggest robber not currently residing in San Quentin.

And she learned from Bronislav, too. They were walking along a street not far from the harbor when she saw a restaurant with way too many consonants in the name. Nobody from the former Yugoslavia seemed to have heard of Vanna White. “Is that place any good?” she asked, pointing.

His expressive eyebrows came down and pushed together in the center. “I don’t know,” he said. Plainly, he didn’t care for the question.

Vanessa couldn’t see why he didn’t like it. “Shall we find out, then?” she said.

“No.” Bronislav picked up his pace to hurry past the restaurant.

Vanessa had to almost trot to catch up with him; his legs were longer than hers. “Why not?” she demanded when they were level again.

He stopped short-so short that she took an extra step and a half past him and had to turn back, feeling foolish. He was angry. No, he was furious. She needed a couple of seconds to realize how furious he was. Unlike hers, his rage burned cold. “The people who run that place, they are not Serbs. They are Croats,” he said.

By the way the last three words came out, they might as well have been They are baby-butchering, carrion-eating filth. Vanessa didn’t get it. “So?” she said. She knew just enough about the old, deceased Yugoslavia to recall that almost everybody in it had spoken a language called Serbo-Croatian. If both groups had used it-and they must have, or they wouldn’t have given it their names-how different could they be?

She proceeded to ask Bronislav that very question. He stared at her for close to half a minute with those disconcertingly sharp eyes. At last, he said, “You are an American.” He spoke softly and with great care, as if reminding himself. Vanessa got the feeling that that was just what he was doing.

It pissed her off, because the way he said it meant You don’t know jack shit. “You are, too,” she reminded him-he’d already told her, more than once, that he was a U.S. citizen, and that he was proud of it. “What’s so awful about Croats?”

He patted his left arm with his right hand. “They gave me this.” Then he stretched out his right arm so his cross-and-four-C’s tattoo came all the way out from under his sleeve. “If I go in there and they see this”-he tapped the tat with his left forefinger- “maybe we just fight. Or maybe they kill me, or I kill them.”

He spoke as matter-of-factly as if he were talking about the chances of rain tomorrow. That made what he was saying more scary, not less. “Why?” Vanessa asked. She wasn’t used to feeling out of her depth, but she sure did now.

Bronislav gave her why, in great detail. He hated Croats with the bitter passion someone could only feel for a close relative. She tried to imagine hating her little half-brother that way, tried and felt herself failing.

Bronislav had no trouble at all. He hated the Croats because he was Orthodox and they were Catholic. He hated them because they used the Roman alphabet and he used the Cyrillic. He hated them because he used hard vowels while they used soft ones.

“Say what?” Vanessa asked-that one meant nothing to her, not as a reason to hate and not at all. Nothing. Zilch.

“For milk, they say mleeyehko.” Bronislav said the word very slowly, and looked as if he wanted to wash his mouth out with soap while he did it. “We say mlehko. You see the difference? You hear, I mean?”

“Yes, but-”

He talked through her answer: “Mleeyehko. Peh!” He spat on the sidewalk in disgust. “It is how fairies talk.”

That was even less PC than her old man. Then Bronislav talked about how, during the war, the Croats had jumped into bed with Hitler with open legs. They’d tried to murder everybody they could reach who wasn’t a Croat, and they’d done a damn good job of it. If you listened to Bronislav, the Croat irregulars, the Ustasha, had been vicious enough to horrify the Gestapo.

“And the Croats, they still have Ustasha today,” Bronislav said. “They are as bad as their grandfathers were, too. I fight-fought-them in Eastern Slavonia. It is part of the Serb homeland that the Croats stole when they ran out of Yugoslavia. They always steal everything they can grab, Croats.”

“What would they say about Serbs?” Vanessa asked, perhaps incautiously.

With great dignity, Bronislav replied, “I do not know. I do not care. Whatever it is, it would be a lie.”

They didn’t eat at the Croat-run restaurant. Where there was one, though, there were bound to be more. Vanessa wondered if she’d already seen some and assumed they belonged to Serbs. Did all the Serbs and Croats in San Pedro feel about each other the way Bronislav felt about the people from the other side of the tracks or the border or whatever you wanted to call it?

She didn’t ask him. She didn’t think she wanted to know badly enough to put up with another frozen explosion. And he’d intimidated her. She didn’t realize that till she was riding home on the bus the next morning. Even after she did realize it, she didn’t want to admit it to herself. But it was true.