The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

About such wildlife there could be no argument. Robinson had seen almost a dozen dead deer beside the lake road and more beside Route 19, on that one trip he and Gandalf had made to the Carson Corners General Store, where the sign out front – BUY YOUR VERMONT CHEESE & SYRUP HERE! – now lay facedown next to the dry gas pumps. But the greatest part of the animal holocaust was in the woods. When the wind was from the east, toward the lake rather than off it, the reek was tremendous. The warm days didn’t help, and Robinson wanted to know what had happened to nuclear winter.

‘Oh, it’ll come,’ said Timlin, sitting in his rocker and looking off into the dappled sunshine under the trees. ‘Earth is still absorbing the blow. Besides, we know from the last reports that the Southern Hemisphere – not to mention most of Asia – is socked in beneath what may turn out to be eternal cloud cover. Enjoy the sunshine while we’ve got it, Peter.’

As if he could enjoy anything. He and Diana had been talking about a trip to England – their first extended vacation since the honeymoon – once Ellen was settled in school.

Ellen, he thought. Who had just been recovering from the breakup with her first real boyfriend and was beginning to smile again.

On each of these fine late-summer post-apocalypse days, Robinson clipped a leash to Gandalf’s collar (he had no idea what the dog’s name had been before June Sixth; the mutt had come with a collar from which only a State of Massachusetts vaccination tag hung), and they walked the two miles to the pricey enclave of which Howard Timlin was now the only resident.

Diana had once called that walk snapshot heaven. Much of it overlooked sheer drops to the lake and forty-mile views into New York. At one point, where the road buttonhooked sharply, a sign that read MIND YOUR DRIVING! had been posted. The summer kids of course called this hairpin Dead Man’s Curve.

Woodland Acres – private as well as pricey before the world ended – was a mile further on. The centerpiece was a fieldstone lodge that had featured a restaurant with a marvelous view, a five-star chef, and a ‘beer pantry’ stocked with a thousand brands. (‘Many undrinkable,’ Timlin said. ‘Take it from me.’) Scattered around the main lodge, in various bosky dells, were two dozen picturesque ‘cottages,’ some owned by major corporations before June Sixth put an end to corporations. Most of the cottages had still been empty on June Sixth, and in the crazy ten days that followed, the few people who were in residence fled for Canada, which was rumored to be radiation-free. That was when there was still enough gasoline to make flight possible.

The owners of Woodland Acres, George and Ellen Benson, had stayed. So had Timlin, who was divorced, had no children to mourn, and knew the Canada story was surely a fable. Then, in early July, the Bensons had swallowed pills and taken to their bed while listening to Beethoven on a battery-powered phonograph. Now it was just Timlin.

‘All that you see is mine,’ he had told Robinson, waving his arm grandly. ‘And someday, son, it will be yours.’

On these daily walks down to the Acres, Robinson’s grief and sense of dislocation eased; sunshine was seductive. Gandalf sniffed at the bushes and tried to pee on every one. He barked bravely when he heard something in the woods, but always moved closer to Robinson. The leash was necessary only because of the dead squirrels and chipmunks. Gandalf didn’t want to pee on those; he wanted to roll in what was left of them.

Woodland Acres Lane split off from the camp road where Robinson now lived the single life. Once the lane had been gated to keep lookie-loos and wage-slave rabble such as himself out, but now the gate stood permanently open. The lane meandered for half a mile through forest where the slanting, dusty light seemed almost as old as the towering spruces and pines that filtered it, passed four tennis courts, skirted a putting green, and looped behind a barn where the trail horses now lay dead in their stalls. Timlin’s cottage was on the far side of the lodge – a modest dwelling with four bedrooms, four bathrooms, a hot tub, and its own sauna.

‘Why did you need four bedrooms, if it’s just you?’ Robinson asked him once.

‘I don’t now and never did,’ Timlin said, ‘but they all have four bedrooms. Except for Foxglove, Yarrow, and Lavender. They have five. Lavender also has an attached bowling alley. All mod cons. But when I came here as a kid with my family, we peed in a privy. True thing.’