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.
XIX
Even these days, sometimes you really wanted a car if you could possibly get hold of one. Colin didn’t care to think about taking Kelly to San Atanasio Memorial on his bike when she went into labor. Bringing the baby back that way didn’t seem any too practical, either. The bus also wasn’t the best bet. Talk about jumping on the kid’s immune system with both feet!
A
nd so he made damn sure the Taurus was in decent working order well before the due date. As it had when he went to Officer McClintock’s funeral, the mere act of driving felt funny. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten how or anything; he hadn’t. But it wasn’t part of his routine any more.
“I don’t take it for granted the way I did once upon a time,” he told Kelly when he pulled into the driveway after taking the car to Jiffy Lube for a tuneup. Then he nodded to himself. That was a big part of the change he’d noticed, all right.
Kelly nodded with him. She knew what he was talking about; it wasn’t as if she’d driven to CSUDH every day before she went on maternity leave. “I bet they were glad to see you when you rolled in,” she remarked.
“Oh, boy, were they ever,” Colin said. “They sure don’t do the kind of business they used to. We thought gas was expensive before the eruption? Lord! What did we know?”
“Who can afford it now, except for something special?” Kelly agreed. She set one hand on the shelf of her belly. She had quite a shelf to set it on. It wouldn’t be much longer.
“I was shooting the breeze with the manager while they were working on the car,” Colin said. “Probably lucky I went in when I did. Their parent company is talking about filing for bankruptcy.”
“How many more people will that throw out of work?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Manager wasn’t happy about it, I’ll tell you that. I guess he’d be one of them.”
San Atanasio Memorial, by contrast, was part of one of the few industries the supervolcano hadn’t ruined. People got sick and broke bones and had babies after the eruption, just as they had before. If anything, they got sick more often than they had before, thanks to extra lung problems and more hunger and colder weather coupled with less heat.
Unlike most of America, the hospital had power all the time. It was heated to sixty-five degrees, which felt tropical to Colin. Such extravagance cost, of course. He thanked heaven for the good medical plan that went along with his line of work. Without it . . . Without it, he might have been filing for bankruptcy along with Jiffy Lube.
He’d stayed with Louise when all three of their children were born. Now he tried to coach Kelly through the breathing exercises she’d practiced getting ready for the day. He hadn’t told her that they’d done Louise no good he could see. Everybody was different. They were supposed to help some women have an easier time.
It wasn’t fun for her. He hadn’t figured it would be. They called it labor for a reason. Louise had been younger than Kelly was now when Marshall was born. Then again, she’d had James Henry, too, and she was quite a bit older then. It could be done.
Done it was, after nine tough hours. In the process, Kelly called Colin some things he hadn’t suspected she knew how to say. As things turned serious, she also yelled, “I’m shitting a goddamn bowling ball!” That one cracked up the maternity-ward nurses, who evidently hadn’t heard everything after all.
The bowling ball turned out to weigh eight pounds one ounce and measure twenty-one and a half inches. Colin cut the umbilical cord after the doctor tied it off. He’d done that with his older children, too. The feel of the surgical scissors slicing through that finger-thick cord was like nothing else he’d ever known. He’d always thought that that cut ought to hurt the mother or the baby or maybe both of them, but it never seemed to.
Deborah Michelle Ferguson rooted at Kelly’s breast when the nurse set her there after she went on the scale. “How are you, babe?” Colin asked.
“Hammered,” she answered. Even though it wasn’t warm in the delivery room, greasy sweat made her face shine under the fluorescent lights and matted her hair. “I want to sleep for a month.” Her mouth twisted into a wry, weary grin. “I know—good luck.”
“Well, I wasn’t gonna say that,” Colin told her.
“No, but you were thinking it.” Kelly’s gaze traveled down to the little pink critter in the crook of her left elbow. “I’ve got milk! How about that? Me and Elsie the Borden Cow.”
“Elsie’s got milk,” a nurse said. “For the next couple of days, you’ve got colostrum. That’s what the baby needs right now.”
“Uh-huh,” Kelly said. “The supervolcano probably took care of Elsie, anyway. Didn’t quite get me.”
“Elsie’s still around. She’ll last as long as she moves milk and cheese and glue and whatever,” Colin said. “After that, she’s short ribs.”
“Short ribs! Oh, my God! I just realized how hungry I am! That’s hard work to do on an empty stomach!” Kelly’s eyes swung toward the nurse in appeal. “What can I eat? When can I eat it?”
“We’ll bring you a tray after we take you back to your room. Dinner tonight is sliced chicken breast, boiled potatoes and gravy, and stewed carrots and raisins. Jell-O for dessert,” the nurse answered.
Colin thought that sounded much too much like hospital food. Kelly exclaimed, “Wow! It sounds wonderful!” She was ready to eat a horse and chase the guy who’d been riding it.
“I’m gonna call Marshall and Vanessa and your folks,” Colin said. He leaned down and kissed Kelly on the forehead. She tasted sweaty, too. He also kissed his new daughter, who paid no attention to him whatsoever.
“Mazel tov!” Stan Birnbaum said when he heard the news. Kelly’s father relayed it to her mother. Colin could hear Miriam Birnbaum burst into tears before she got on the line.
“Awesome!” was Marshall’s comment, which would do for an English rendering of mazel tov. “Tell Kelly I’ll spoil the little brat rotten. Woohoo!”
Vanessa sounded more restrained than her brother: “Congratulations, Dad. They’re both all right?”
“They sure are,” he answered proudly. “And the old father isn’t doing too bad right now, either.”
“Okay,” she said. If he was on Cloud Nine, she was on Cloud Three—Three and a Half, tops. She got off the phone fast enough to annoy him. What was she doing? Waiting for an important call instead? To her right now, the Serbian hit man or whatever the hell he was would probably qualify.
Sighing, Colin called Gabe Sanchez. “You’re a lucky bastard, you know that?” Gabe said as soon as he heard that mother and daughter were doing well.
“Thought had crossed my mind,” Colin admitted.
“I’m jealous, is what I am.” Gabe was bound to be kidding on the square. His own love life hadn’t been nearly so fortunate as Colin’s since his divorce. And the divorce itself was nastier than the one Colin went through. They said it couldn’t be done, Colin thought, but what the hell did they know? Gabe went on, “I’ll let the rest of the troops know.”
“Thanks, buddy,” Colin told him.
He went back to the room Kelly was sharing with a gal who was about to have twin boys. The mere idea was plenty to make him cringe. He pulled the curtain around Kelly’s bed to give them the illusion of privacy. No sooner had he got there than an Asian gal from the kitchen carried in a tray.
“Food!” Kelly cried, like stout Cortez or Balboa or whoever it really was discovering the Pacific. Only the conquistador didn’t make the ocean disappear. The way Kelly inhaled the hospital dinner was a sight to behold. She gulped the apple juice that went with it, too. Then she delivered her verdict: “That was the best lousy meal I’ve ever had.”
Colin actually knew what she meant. He didn’t tell her so, for fear she wouldn’t believe him. But hard work and crappy chow in his Navy days made him understand.
A nurse brought in the baby, wrapped in a pink blanket. “You can have it sleep by you tonight if you want,” she said. “Or we can just bring it in when it needs feeding.”
“Do that, please,” Kelly said. She’d been all for keeping the kid by her side through the night till Colin talked her out of it with tales of how frazzled Louise had been after doing that with Rob.
“Okeydoke,” the nurse said now. “Mig
ht as well get what sleep you can, dear.”
“Right,” Kelly said. After the nurse went away, she muttered, “If I get any sleep at all on this miserable hospital mattress.” She punctuated that with a yawn. “If I can’t sleep on it tonight, I never will.”
“Hope you do,” Colin said.
“Tonight. Tomorrow night. Then I go home, and the fun really starts,” Kelly said.
“We’ll manage,” Colin told her.
“You already know what you’re doing. You’ve done it before. For me, it’ll all be on-the-job training.” Kelly rolled her eyes. “Christ, Marshall knows more about taking care of babies than I do. He’s sure had more practice.”
“We’ll manage,” Colin said again. “And you’ll do great.” He believed that right down to his toes. Kelly wasn’t as aggressively organized in everything she took on as he was. But whatever she tried, she did a good job at it. He couldn’t imagine motherhood being any different.
* * *
Louise Ferguson and James Henry walked into the Carrows on Reynoso Drive. “Hello,” said the smiling young woman who seated people. “One and a high chair?”
“Two and a high chair,” Louise answered, looking around. “We’re meeting somebody, but I don’t see her yet.”
“Okay. Come this way, please.” The young woman took her and James Henry to a table. “Is this all right?”
“Sure,” Louise lied. She’d sat at this table when she told him she was pregnant with James Henry right after Teo skipped on her. She couldn’t remember a less pleasant lunchtime, even if the BLT had been pretty good. But ingrained politeness kept her from asking to sit somewhere else. Death before being difficult might have appeared as the motto on her family crest.
She held her son on her lap till a Hispanic kid brought the high chair. She wondered if he was legal, and how closely Carrows checked. Just closely enough to keep from getting into hot water with Immigration, odds were. A waitress brought a menu for her and a children’s menu for James Henry. She also doled out a couple of crayons so he could color on it.
Supervolcano: All Fall Down Page 33
