He frowned. “You aren’t on the list.”
“I’m supposed to be,” she declared—again, at least truthy if not true.
He inspected her. Was she going to have to do him, too? Pretty soon she’d be swimming out to meet troopships if she wasn’t careful. But all he said was “Well, get on. We’re a couple people short, and you look like you can do the work. Ferguson, your name was?”
“That’s right. Vanessa. Thank you.” She didn’t usually dole out gratitude so casually, but she made an exception here. As the man added her to the roster, she happily hopped into the bus. She didn’t care where it took her. She was out of Camp Constitution at last!
* * *
When Marshall Ferguson wasn’t babysitting his little half-brother, he had the family house pretty much to himself. His father went to the cop shop early every morning, and Kelly—Marshall couldn’t think of her as a stepmom, not when she was as close to his age as to his old man’s—headed for CSUDH not a whole lot later. Peace. Quiet. If he wanted to make like a writer, all he had to do was sit in front of the screen and let the words pour out.
In theory, anyhow. Theory was wonderful. Practice, he was discovering, was a little different. Yeah, just a little. Theory was all about inspiration and how to court it. As he was discovering, practice turned out to involve a lot more of figuring out what the hell you did after the fickle bitch upped and left you.
Because she damn well would. Inspiration had launched Marshall into a couple of stories that seemed like surefire winners. Inspiration took him 1,500 words into one of them, maybe 2,500 words into the other. Then he had to work out what happened next and what, if anything, it meant. And he had to work out how to put it across without being obvious or boring.
Somehow, neither of those masterpieces of Western literature ever got finished.
But Marshall did finish one piece he started with no inspiration whatsoever. Well, almost none. His father’s dubious stare at the dinner table every evening kept Marshall busy. Where art and brilliance failed to serve, stubbornness and craft got him to the end.
Then he had to put the story on the market. Being forced to submit by Professor Bolger at UCSB was one of the best things that ever happened to him: he’d started early on getting hardened to rejection. The prof said straight-out that some people would rather submit to a root canal than to an editor.
Marshall had never had a root canal, but he understood the feeling. He’d sold a story during that quarter, which freaked him and the prof almost equally. But you didn’t sell every time. And getting rejected sucked.
He tried to think of it like dating. If you didn’t hit on girls, you’d never get laid. Yeah, sometimes they shot you down. That didn’t mean you didn’t pick yourself up and ask somebody else out. It might not even mean you didn’t try again with the girl who’d told you no before.
Or with the market that told you no. Marshall’s stubborn story went out and came back five times before it found a home at a Web site that put the munificent sum of two and a half cents a word in his PayPal account.
Two and a half cents a word wouldn’t make anybody rich. Marshall knew that only too well. In case he didn’t, his father rubbed his nose in it: “I don’t think you’ll have Tom Clancy or Bill Gates trimming your oleanders any time soon.”
“Right,” Marshall said, and then, “Pass the potatoes, please.” Was Dad cynical because he’d been a cop for too long, or had he become a cop because he was already cynical? Could you answer all of the above? That was how it looked to Marshall.
“He sold it,” Kelly said. “Two and a half cents a word is better than nothing. It’s more than I’ve ever got for an article. In academic publishing, all they give you is the glory of your name in print—usually with a raft of coauths.”
“Yeah, well, you’re advancing human knowledge,” Colin Ferguson said, “not just—” He stopped short.
“Bullshitting?” Marshall suggested.
“You said it. I didn’t.” Dad wouldn’t, either, not with Kelly across the table from him. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t thinking it.
Kelly was less touchy about that kind of thing than her husband. “God knows there’s plenty of bullshit in the academic journals,” she said. “How about the ones for criminal justice?”
One reason you had to respect Dad was that he would ’fess up when you caught him out. “Well, you’ve got me there,” he admitted now. “You read those things, you’d think we caught every perp, and that about day after tomorrow we can talk all the bad guys into staying good guys and put ourselves out of business forever.” He smiled crookedly. “And rain makes applesauce.”
“Is that what they call pie in the sky?” Marshall had run into the phrase, but he wasn’t sure exactly how it worked.
His father nodded. “That’s what they call it, all right. Come the revolution, they used to say. Then the revolution came, and things were just as nasty afterwards as they were before. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” He got that from some old rock song.
“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others,” Kelly said, which sounded like agreement.
It also sounded familiar. “That’s from Animal Farm!” Marshall exclaimed. “I had to read it in Western Civ. It’s by the guy who wrote 1984, back when 1984 seemed a long way away.” It seemed a long way away to him, too—lost in the distant past like 1945 and 1865 and 1776 and 1066.
“The 1984 we got wasn’t too great, but it was better than the one Orwell wrote about,” Dad said.
“If you say so,” Marshall answered. He had no memories of 1984. Kelly would have been a little kid back then, so she wouldn’t remember much, either. For Dad, it seemed to feel like the week before last. Getting old, having all that stuff to remember, to try and keep track of, had to be a terrible thing.
Thinking about what a terrible thing it was and trying to work out exactly what kind of terrible thing it was must have shown on Marshall’s face. Kelly murmured, “He’s getting an idea for a story.”
“Or indigestion, one.” But Dad didn’t sound disgusted. Coming out with snide cracks was as much a reflex with him as breathing was. All the other cops Marshall knew—and he naturally knew more cops than most stoners ever wanted to—talked the same way. It had to help shield them from some of the nasty shit they ran into on the job.
“Well . . .” Marshall stood up.
He paid rent—a third of what he grossed. Not netted: grossed. Between babysitting and writing, he wasn’t grossing one whole hell of a lot. But he was a cash customer, so his old man didn’t ride him too hard. With most of his high school buddies scuffling even harder than he was, he didn’t feel embarrassed about living at home. Misery really did love company.
He went up to his room. He kept it tolerably clean and neat; he’d learned how taking care of himself at UCSB. It wasn’t so much for his sake. Like a lot of young males on their own, he didn’t mind living like a slob. What guys didn’t mind, though, grossed girls out. Some guys were too dumb to learn from failure and frustration. Marshall wasn’t.
No one in the house minded if he brought a girl upstairs. No one was going to pound on the door with the crime-scene tape while he had company. Things could have been worse. He kept telling himself as much. He kept looking at apartments, too. Unfortunately, landlords were less adaptable about rent than Dad was.
Earbuds and his iPod made the outside world go away. Or they would have, but the first song that came out was from Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles: a strange, droning chant called “Justinian II,” an Emperor of Byzantium who got his nose chopped off. Listening to it reminded Marshall how much he missed his older brother. He hadn’t seen Rob since before the supervolcano blew. Maine? OMG! Maine was the Devil’s personal icebox these days.
In the song, Justinian II came to a bad end. Singing about it, Justin Nachman soun
ded unwholesomely amused. He had a knack for that. Something more innocuous but less evocative shuffled onto the iPod next. Marshall closed his eyes and listened.
After a while, he shut it off and started noodling on a story. Not much inspiration, no. Maybe perspiration would do. One thing sure: the elves wouldn’t write it for him, no matter how much he wished they would. Wondering why they didn’t make elves the way they used to, he soldiered on. Once he finished the first draft, he could read it over and see just what he had, or if he had anything at all.
VII
Dwip. Dwip. Dwip. Bryce Miller didn’t know whether everybody who worked for the Department of Water and Power sounded like Elmer Fudd impersonating a leaky faucet. He did know he wasn’t the only one, though.
And he knew the noise fit the weather much too well. The dirty-gray heavens dwipped dwizzle as he pedaled his bicycle toward the bus stop. He couldn’t afford to drive downtown, not with gas through the roof and into the ionosphere—and not with most stations showing red flags to let people know they had no gas at any price. Long, long lines—old farts talked about 1979—marked the ones with a little to sell.
It wasn’t supposed to rain in L.A. in June, not even a little bit. Well, it hadn’t been supposed to. Mother Nature was reading a new rulebook these days. Bryce rode on, keeping a wary eye out for cars. Not so many of them on the road these days, and a lot more bikes like his. Some of the people on the two-wheelers were as nonchalant as if they’d been doing it for years. A few might even actually have been doing it before the eruption—a few, but not many. Others looked as if they’d borrowed some kid’s bike they almost remembered how to handle.
Bryce figured he fit somewhere in the middle. It was his bike, and he had ridden it before the supervolcano blew. He hadn’t ridden it to work, though. And he wouldn’t have ridden it in the rain. Biking was supposed to be fun, right?
The bus stop on Braxton Bragg Boulevard had a big new parking rack bolted to the sidewalk next to the bench. Bryce chained his bike to the steel. The stop, like a lot of others, also had a new armed guard: a guy who looked as if he was recently back from combat on distant shores and had had trouble finding work here in the States. Bryce nodded to him. The guard gravely dipped his head in response. No, he wouldn’t have got that polite anywhere but in the military.
Other people already stood at the stop. Bryce nodded to them, too; he saw a lot of them several times a week. The rather cute Hispanic chick, the hulking black guy, the Asian fellow who never quit texting . . . They’d been regulars on this route longer than he had.
Up grumbled the bus. People stepped away from the curb as it neared, not wanting to get splashed. The doors hissed open. They filed aboard. The black guy found a seat, then lifted his hat. He had a half pint of Southern Comfort under there. Sudden Discomfort, Bryce thought, remembering a collection of Mad Magazine pieces older than he was but still funny. The guy took a quick knock, then stowed the booze again.
The bus took off. A couple of blocks later, of course, it stopped again. More people got on. By the time it reached the Red Line station near the Harbor Freeway, it was packed. Most of the passengers climbed off there, Bryce among them.
He got his ticket from the automated kiosk. He felt automated himself; once you’d done it a couple of times, boarding took next to no conscious thought. He walked out onto the platform—which did boast a roof—and waited for the next train to pull in.
Along with the other commuters, he got on when it did. The train headed north, toward downtown. The tracks ran along the middle of the 110. In other words, they went straight through South Central L.A. People—most of them either African-American or Hispanic—got on and off at several stops.
Bryce kept his head down and his nose buried in the Times. Like most white kids raised not far from South Central, he’d heard a lot about the area—none of it good—and had gone there never. The most horror he’d experienced on the train was a couple of guys a little younger than he was yelling at each other in Spanish. The yells soon subsided to dirty looks. Neither young man pulled out a Glock and shot up the car, or seemed likely to. Yells and glares Bryce could live with.
No yells today. Nobody even fired up a joint. That happened now and again, although you weren’t supposed to smoke anything inside the train. Funny—he’d never seen anybody light up an ordinary cigarette. People always waited till they got off for that. Harder to wait to get baked, evidently.
He left the train and headed for the DWP building. Skyscrapers—some office complexes, others hotels—turned the streets into corridors. His mother and Colin Ferguson talked about their childhood days, when, for fear of earthquakes, City Hall was the only building allowed to rise higher than twelve stories. Modern architects and engineers had convinced the powers that be that their efforts would stay up no matter what the San Andreas Fault did.
Even if they were right, Bryce wouldn’t have wanted to be where he was when the Big One hit. The skyscrapers might not topple. Sure as hell, though, razor-sharp spears of glass would rain down from their sides. And the glass would slice anybody walking along here into hamburger in nothing flat.
“Hey, guy?” A homeless woman of indeterminate age tried to look alluring. What she looked was skinny and dirty and strung out: desperate, in other words. You’d have to be even more desperate yourself to want to go to bed with her. But turning tricks was probably the only way she could get the cash for whatever drugs had washed her up on life’s lee shore—and maybe, if she was lucky, for a little food, too.
Bryce walked by as if she weren’t there. He wasn’t particularly proud of it, but what could you do?
“Stinking fairy!” she whined after him. He could see the logical fallacy. That was what he got for doing classics in grad school. Just because he didn’t want her, that didn’t mean he didn’t want any woman. Plato would have tried to convince this gal that she’d understood the flaw in her own thinking all along.
She wasn’t likely to care much for philosophy, though. All she cared about was the next fix. And if she could wound him a little for ignoring her charms, such as they were, so much the better. No doubt she’d come on to someone else in a little while, and then cuss him out, too.
DWP headquarters wasn’t in a skyscraper: just an ordinary blocky office building at the edge of the fancy-shmancy built-up area. You could walk past it without noticing it was there. No doubt thousands of people did every day. Bryce would have if he’d worked anywhere else.
He showed his ID to the security guard at the front entrance. The man had been seeing him five days a week for several months now, but still carefully inspected it. Only after he was satisfied did he nod and say, “Morning, Dr. Miller.”
“Morning, Hank.” Bryce didn’t know how Hank knew he had his Piled Higher and Deeper. He didn’t go around calling himself Dr. Miller. As far as he was concerned, Doctor was the right title for M.D.s, dentists, and veterinarians; people with Ph.D.s who glommed on to it were pompous asses.
That wasn’t the DWP mindset. Here, if you had a doctorate you flaunted it like a well-built girl in a spandex tank top. Somebody must have tipped Hank off about Bryce’s sheepskin. He became Dr. Miller to people here almost in self-defense, even if he didn’t use the title himself; otherwise, he would have seemed like a security guard.
He climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. Have to keep my girlish figure, he thought vaguely. He didn’t boast one of the offices with windows around the outside of the building. Nope. He had himself a cubicle with fuzzy walls in a big room in the middle, straight out of Dilbertland.
Jay Black was already hard at it in the Skinner box next to Bryce’s. He was a computer whiz, a balding, fortyish guy who wondered why he had trouble finding a girl he liked. Because all you’re looking for is a twenty-five-year-old supermodel didn’t seem to have crossed his mind. Finding one who also appreciated the fine points of iPhone app-writing (to say
nothing of a cross-stitched sampler on the wall that read CUBICLE, SWEET CUBICLE) would take some doing.
He looked up from what Bryce hoped was his first Mountain Dew of the day. Sugar in the morning, sugar in the evening, sugar at suppertime—you’ll get diabetes, and you won’t be worth a dime.
“Welcome to another day in paradise,” Jay said.
“Could be doing anything out there. We’d never know it,” Bryce answered.
“Used to be, that was a crying shame,” Black said. “The way things are now, we’re lucky to be in a building where the lights and the heat work.” He grinned crookedly. “This is the last place in town that’ll go cold and dark.”
“Yeah.” Bryce hadn’t looked at it that way, which didn’t mean Jay was wrong. The coffee machine by the copier still worked, too. Bryce got some caffeine and a little sugar of his own, then sat down at his desk for the day’s important project. And other fantasies, he thought—he’d sure had plenty that were more enjoyable.
He cut down the text on a newsletter so it would fit on one sheet of paper. He did his best to translate a brochure from bureaucratese into English. He changed the small print on DWP electric bills to keep up with revised state and city conservation rules. When nobody was paying attention to him, he fiddled with a new pastoral: Theocritus meets the supervolcano, in effect. When he finished, he planned to send it to the New Yorker. After they told him no, he’d start going through all the markets that didn’t pay. Marshall Ferguson wasn’t getting rich, but he was selling things now and again. Bryce wished he could say the same himself.
Since he couldn’t, he had this day job. The DWP was the kind of place where you could look up after a quarter of a century and wonder where the hell the best years of your life had gone. Jay hadn’t been here that long, but he was starting to get those moments.
Bryce hoped he wouldn’t stick around long enough to have them. You’d never go toe-to-toe with the Donald or Bill Gates on what they paid you, but you could live and even raise a family on it. Medical, dental, vision, retirement plan . . . When you got all that good stuff, would you really worry about where the time was going and why you were bored out of your skull?
Supervolcano: All Fall Down Page 12
