A History of the Future Read Online Free PDF Page A

front of him. The child stopped shrieking and eyed the offering. Dennis held it in front of the child’s face, allowed him to get a grip on it, and watched him first sniff it and then nibble it. A moment later, the child jammed the rest of the tater tot in his mouth, chewed and swallowed, and smiled broadly with delight. Then he commenced bobbing up and down in his backpack and waving his stubby arms. Mandy turned quickly to face Dennis.
    “He likes ’em real well,” Dennis said, and put a tater tot in his own mouth.
    Mandy nodded. Julian shrieked again and bobbed violently in his pack.
    Dennis circled around to him again and offered another morsel, which the child snatched out of his fingers. He ate it rapidly and made it clear he wanted more. As Dennis Fontana continued to feed tater tots to Julian, Mandy drained her second pint of cider. It was stronger than the manufactured beverages of yesteryear. Soon other people were giving the baby other tidbits: little pieces of cheese, sausage, a meatball, and even some pickle, which made him cough. Dennis held his glass up to Julian’s lips and the baby managed to gulp some, though quite a bit of the cider flowed down his neck and into his clothing.
    “That’s enough for you now,” Dennis said and circled back around to Mandy. She was easy on the eyes, he thought. She wore a long patchwork skirt with wild highlights in turquoise and scarlet satin. The backpack straps tugged against the fabric of her ancient wool mackinaw jacket, outlining her figure nicely. Her hair, unwashed for a week, was tucked under a knitted wool cloche, but wisps leaked out appealingly around her neck and forehead. Dennis knew that she was the wife of Rick Stokes, Ned Larmon’s field foreman, and he wondered why she was downtown on her own—though he understood that the opening of the tavern was a special occasion as for years the people of Union Grove had not had any place to congregate in the evening besides the church. “Rick must still be up to the farm, huh?” he said.
    Mandy nodded.
    The effect of the cider was to make Caym’s voice a bit lower, a bit harder to hear, as if he were speaking to her through a long drainpipe. The warmth of the scene in the tavern had replaced the bleak landscape of her mind with a more pleasing new topography and rich yellow light. Dennis’s lips were moving. Mandy didn’t understand a word he said but she enjoyed his attention. She just kept nodding her head.
    Then, she heard Caym say, “Take this man outside.” Mandy didn’t quite understand what this meant but the spirit guide added, “Show him that you are love incarnate.”
    A moment later, she reached for Dennis’s hand. It was warm and a little sticky from the cider. She gestured at him with her eyes to come. His uncertainty prompted a half-smile back at her. She jerked her head toward the door. He pointed at himself and raised his eyebrows. She nodded. He made yet another face that signified he was open to suggestions. Still holding his hand she turned and led him through the crowd out of the bar. Outside, snow coated the sidewalks and streets and flakes fell sparsely in the still air. A few dim lights burned upstairs in the buildings of Main Street, but there were no streetlights anymore, with the electricity down for good, and no automobile traffic, with Happy Motoring over forever. The townspeople who were not in the tavern or over at the church now had all gone home. A raucous silence filled the streets.
    “Give this man what he wants,” Caym said. “Find a place.”
    There was an alley between the tavern building and its neighbor, the Sohn Building (1905), where the storefront, once a bridal shop, was empty. Mandy led Dennis by the hand down the alley to a mid-block service courtyard filled with stacks of lumber, old plastic barrels and the new wooden ones that were coming to replace them, snow-covered tarpaulins in turn covering unused extra tables and chairs, and a four-wheeled horse