Gaudeamus by John Barnes

Author:John Barnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2011-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The day after Christmas, I’d gotten up at five-thirty in the morning, though it hadn’t snowed. It had snowed, and heavily, a couple days before Christmas—if you want to be assured of having a white Christmas with icicles on the eaves, all the houses looking like melted cakes, all the trees holding big armfuls of snow, all the emergency rooms full of heart attacks and thrown-out backs, and all the streets full of nasty gray slush, you could do worse than move to Gunnison, Colorado (though you’d do even better in Crested Butte, a bit farther up the road). The town looks like Christmas looks on television and in most people’s childhood memories (which, nowadays, are mostly of television).

Kara was going to see her family for the holidays, on a cheap flight at 6:35, Gunnison to Montrose to Tucson, where her sister was going to pick her up and they’d drive to LA together. It’s a great flight—a glorious view of the “America’s Switzerland” area around Telluride, and it nicks a corner of the Grand Canyon, and those are just the high points, on the way down to the soft warmth of the winter desert.

“Don’t be jealous,” Kara said when I kissed her good-bye at the airport. “You’re the one that decided the book had to get done.”

“One British publisher, the IRS, a bunch of doctors, and the credit card companies are the ones deciding that,” I said. “I’m outnumbered. Have a good trip, hunh?”

“I’ll try.”

I stuck around the airport long enough to watch her plane take off and to start feeling sorry for myself; kicked myself in my mental butt for that; and drove home, about a three-minute drive. On the way I saw that the W Café was closed, so I went around the block, back onto Tomichi, and saw that the Quarter Circle, the other good breakfast place in Gunnison, was open. It was even a shorter walk from my house.

I parked, went inside, and fed the cats. They were all wandering around mewing, the way they did when they were disappointed by my having allowed Kara to escape, which they regarded as very poor management. Since I hadn’t bothered to take off my coat, I walked right out the door and down Colorado Street, the packed snow crunching under my boots; it’s easier to walk in the street than on those sidewalks, where the city plow trucks leave headhigh mountains of snow, and fresh sheets of ice form every afternoon.

If you like it quiet, you owe it to yourself to try Gunnison, Colorado, just before dawn on December 26th. It seemed as if I could hear the bits of carbon banging against each other in the smoke rising in slow, perfectly vertical columns from every chimney, and the crackle of my breath freezing onto my beard. I could hear the occasional crunch or squeal of my duck galoshes on the snow, my own breathing, and almost, it seemed, the slow soft beat of my heart.

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