Supervolcano: All Fall Down s-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “Oh, wow,” Bryce said.

  “Yeah.” Moretti nodded. “You were talking about how things are these days yourself. Some people watch too much poker on TV. They think they can bluff their way through anything. Maybe they hoped they could stay half a chapter ahead of the kids the first year, and then they’d have it psyched out. With priests on the faculty, though, that doesn’t fly.”

  “I guess it wouldn’t,” Bryce allowed. “I can do the Latin. I can do the history, too. They make you learn it at UCLA.” He probably would have to stay half a chapter ahead of the kids for some of the more modern stuff, but that was one more thing he didn’t say.

  “Professor Harriman thinks you can,” Moretti said.

  Even though Bryce hadn’t expected anything else-he wouldn’t have listed his chairperson as a reference if he had-hearing that still warmed him. It also told him his chances of landing this job were pretty decent. Sure as hell, Moretti started talking about money, and about benefits. No, neither was on a par with what Bryce had now.

  “When will I hear back from you?” he asked. Do I really want to do this?

  “Within a week, I expect,” the older man replied. “We do have two or three other people who we think are legit, and we need to talk to them, too.”

  “Okay. Fair enough.” Bryce said the polite thing. Whether he meant it. . As far as he was concerned, all those other people could geh kak afen yam, one of the handful of Yiddish phrases he knew.

  Or could they? Do I really want to do this? he wondered again. He would be doing something he enjoyed a lot more than sitting in the DWP’s cubicle farm. And they would pay him a lot less for doing it, too. Could he scrape by on what they did pay him? If he didn’t think so, what was he doing here? Besides wasting his time and Vic Moretti’s, that is?

  “Let me run you back to the bus stop,” Moretti said. “Boy, that’d be a hellacious commute from the South Bay. It wouldn’t be any fun if you could drive it, and bus and subway are a lot slower.”

  “Unless the 405 clogs up,” Bryce answered dryly.

  The teacher chuckled. “Yeah, there is that. But you probably would think about moving up here, huh?”

  “It has crossed my mind,” Bryce said. As they walked down to the Prius, he went on, “I never thought I might end up at a Catholic school.” He didn’t say he was Jewish. Miller could be anything. Some people knew at a glance he was a Landsman. Others, especially the ones his red hair threw off, hadn’t a clue.

  “It’s a Catholic curriculum, yeah,” Moretti said. “The kids-the kids are Valley kids. We’re maybe ten percent Jewish, including the quarterback on the football team. We’ve got Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Koreans. You name it, they’re here. Anybody who figures the Los Angeles Unified School District stinks-”

  “Which means just about everybody,” Bryce put in.

  “How right you are. And there’s a reason for that: LAUSD does stink. It’s great if you shuffle papers. But if you’re a student and you actually want to learn something. . I spent six years working at L.A. Unified. The nonsense you’ve got to put up with made me glad to take the cut that went with coming here. I can accomplish something here, you know?”

  “That’d be nice.” Bryce wondered if he’d accomplished one single goddamn thing at the DWP. He’d kept a roof over his head and food on his table. In the larger scheme of things? Not so you’d notice.

  He talked things over with Susan that night. They ate at a Chinese seafood place a couple of miles from his apartment. That was the kind of thing people used their cars for these days. “Whatever you want to do is fine with me,” she said. “Money. . If I worried about money, would I be messing around with the Hohenstaufens?”

  The Western medieval world was a lot closer in time to the here and now than Bryce’s period was. In attitude? He doubted it. The Hellenistic Greeks could seem amazingly modern-and amazingly cynical. Of course, from what Susan said, so could Frederick II. But the Holy Roman Emperor spectacularly didn’t fit into his own time. Chances were he would have been right at home amongst the clever cutthroats who ruled Ptolemaic Egypt, Seleucid Syria, and Antigonid Macedonia.

  Their food came. Seafood was local. Next to beef or lamb or chicken, it was also a bargain. People screamed about that all the time. They wanted Washington to Do Something. They wanted it louder every day, too. Just what Washington could do, they didn’t seem so sure. Retroactively declare the supervolcano hadn’t erupted, maybe.

  People like that probably ordered unscrambled eggs when they sat down to breakfast at Denny’s, too.

  All of which was beside the point. Bryce swallowed a tiny squid braised in hoisin sauce and came to the point: “If I take the job, looks like I’ll have to move up to the Valley. Will you come up there with me?”

  “Live with you, you mean?” she asked. A squid of her own paused halfway between her plate and her mouth. She frowned a little; a vertical crease formed between her eyebrows. They never had lived together-she was old-fashioned about that. She’d spend the night at his place, and let him spend it at hers, but no more.

  Bryce nodded, anyhow. “Uh-huh. It’s no farther to UCLA from there than it is from the South Bay. Closer, I think.”

  She ate her squid. Then she said, “I don’t know,” in a way that told him she did know but was still looking for a way to soften the blow.

  He took a deep breath. “It’d be okay if we got married, right?” He’d figured he would propose to her one of these days. He hadn’t figured this would be the one. Sometimes his mouth lived a life of its own, wild and free.

  By the way Susan’s eyes widened, she hadn’t figured this would be the day, either. “Are you sure?” she asked.

  Weren’t women trained not to give men a second chance when they popped the question? But if Bryce said he wasn’t sure now, they were finished. He nodded. “You bet I am.” He meant it, too. “Even if it means telling your dad I proposed at the same time as I was talking about taking a job that didn’t pay so well.”

  “Could be worse. You might not have a job at all-plenty of academics these days don’t. Pop would really love that.” Susan paused, as if remembering she hadn’t answered the relevant question. She took care of that: “Yes, I’ll marry you, Bryce. You can even invite Lieutenant Ferguson if you want to-but not Vanessa, thank you very much.”

  Not inviting Colin to his wedding had never occurred to Bryce. Neither had inviting Vanessa, even if she were in this part of the country. Had he been rash enough to invite her, he knew she would have said no. Actually, chances were she would have told him to fuck off and die. Once Vanessa was through with somebody, she was through with him. Forever and twenty minutes longer.

  But thinking about one girl when he’d just successfully proposed to another one wasn’t the smartest thing he could do, even if Susan had been the one to bring up Vanessa. He reached across the table and took her hand. “I love you, you know,” he said. “The best I can.”

  She nodded. “I know,” she said, accepting the qualification. “And I know that if you keep working for the DWP much longer, you’ll go right out of your tree. So if Junipero calls and tells you they want to teach their kids Latin, you do it, you hear?”

  Bryce sketched a salute. “Yes, ma’am!”

  Susan stuck her tongue out at him. “Just don’t let your eyeballs stick out on stalks when you stare at the cute ones.”

  She tried to sound severe, but he knew she was kidding.

  They went back to his apartment. He did his best to show where she satisfied his appetites. By all the signs, he satisfied hers, too. And wasn’t that the point of the happy exercise?

  Vic Moretti called back five days later. He considerately waited till Bryce was home from the DWP. “You want the position, it’s yours,” he said without preamble.

  “I want it,” Bryce said.

  “You sure you know what you’re getting into?” Moretti asked. Maybe he was joking, and then again maybe he wasn’t.

  Bryce didn’t care. . too much
. “I know what I’m getting out of,” he replied.

  Moretti paused. “Yeah, that counts, too,” he agreed thoughtfully. “Well, semester’s starting soon. It’s good to have the slot filled.”

  “Good to fill it.” Bryce wondered whether he’d mean that five years-or even five weeks-from now.

  * * *

  James Henry Ferguson sneezed. Yellowish snot leaked from his right nostril. Dried, crusted boogers clogged the left one. He coughed and almost choked, but then didn’t quite.

  “You poor thing,” Louise said. If anything was more pathetic than a sick baby, she had no idea what it could be. James Henry didn’t know what was wrong with him. He didn’t know he’d be okay again in a couple-three days. He didn’t know what a couple-three days were, or how to wait them out. All he knew was that he felt crappy.

  “Mama!” he said, and started to bawl. That did nothing to improve the situation. His eyes leaked tears. His snot got runnier, which meant it oozed from both nostrils. Looked at objectively, he made a most uninspiring spectacle.

  Louise wasn’t objective-nowhere close. Mothers weren’t equipped to be. If they had been, the human race would have died out long before it ever escaped from the caves.

  Colin, now. . She remembered Colin surveying a sick kid-had it been Rob or Marshall? why couldn’t she remember? — and going, “Boy, he’s an ugly little son of a gun, isn’t he?” She remembered the clinical interest in his voice, and how much it had infuriated her.

  If she’d been in touch with her feelings then, she would have walked away from the marriage on the spot. And if she had, her life now would sure as hell be different. Better? Worse? She hadn’t a clue. Different she was sure of.

  The other thing she was sure of was that the OTC meds she was stuffing into James Henry weren’t worth shit. She was definitely in touch with her feelings about that. It made her mad, was what it did. Back when her other kids were little, you could buy stuff that actually made snot dry up. Sure, it’d come back as soon as the dose wore off, but it went away for a while.

  No more, dammit. The FDA, in its infinite wisdom, had decided that the drugs that helped most kids also messed up fourteen in a million, or whatever the hell the number was. And so, to keep the fourteen in a million safe, the other 999,986 sniffled for a solid week whenever they caught a cold.

  And they did catch them. Boy, did they ever! Babies and colds went together like ham and eggs. All the cold medicines on the drugstore shelves looked pretty much the way they had back when Louise was taking care of Rob and Vanessa and Marshall. Their boxes said things like SAFER THAN EVER! What that meant was, they didn’t do squat.

  She cuddled James Henry. “Mama!” he said mournfully. He got snot on her shoulder even though she’d put a cloth diaper there to try to block that mucus. One more blouse she’d have to wash. At least snot didn’t stink the way spit-up did.

  Her phone rang. James Henry jerked. He wasn’t as jumpy about the phone as a cat was, but he didn’t like it. The phone made her pay attention to something besides him, and he didn’t like that, either.

  She fished the phone out of her purse. Marshall’s number was showing. “Hello?” Louise said.

  “Yo.” That was Marshall’s way of talking, but it didn’t sound like him. It was too deep and too slow, and punctuated by a sneeze: “I better not come over there tomorrow. I’m-ah-choo! — sick.”

  “So is James Henry,” Louise said. She didn’t quite remember how she’d got into the habit of always using both his first and his middle name, but she had. “Did you give him the cold, or did he give it to you?”

  “Probably,” Marshall said. Again, the answer sounded like him even if the voice didn’t. Again, he sneezed. This time, he blew his nose right afterwards: a long, sorrowful honk. I wish James Henry could do that, Louise thought. Her older son went on, “Either which way, I feel like dog shit.”

  Unlike his father, he wasn’t shy about swearing where women could hear. Chances were he hardly noticed he was swearing; to people of his generation, it was just the way they talked. Louise wasn’t offended. As far as she was concerned, Marshall’s casually foul mouth only proved Colin had wasted time and temper smacking him for cussing.

  Right this minute, that was beside the point, no matter how gratifying it might have been some other time. Louise didn’t want to think about Colin, not when she could-and needed to-think of herself instead. “What am I supposed to do?” she asked. “How can I go to work tomorrow if James Henry’s sick and you can’t come take care of him?”

  “Beats me, Mom.” Marshall sounded nearly as chilly and indifferent as his father might have. Maybe the cold helped, or maybe it was the triumph of one heredity over another. Then he added, “Don’t forget-I’m sick, too.”

  Lost in her own worries, Louise had forgotten. She was briefly embarrassed, but only briefly. “What am I going to do?” she said-not quite a repetition, but close enough.

  “Whatever it is, don’t put me in it.” Yes, Marshall could sound too damn much like Colin. And he’d always blamed Louise for walking out and getting free. He got only the first part, not the second. He took care of James Henry for money. He didn’t really care about his little half-brother. As if to underscore that, he went on, “I’ll check with you when I’m not so rancid any more. ’Bye.” Silence echoed in Louise’s ear: the Zen sound of a seashell that wasn’t there.

  “Shit!” she said, most sincerely.

  James Henry looked at her. “Shit,” he echoed, the way babies will.

  She laughed so hard, she almost dropped him. He laughed, too, till he coughed and choked and sprayed boogers all over his cheeks. She wiped him off, saw he could have more of the worthless decongestant, and spooned it into him. He made a horrible face. It all seemed so unfair. If the crap didn’t do any good-and it didn’t-couldn’t it at least taste halfway decent?

  She still didn’t know what she was going to do tomorrow. She couldn’t take James Henry to the ramen works. He’d only make everybody else sick. That’d thrill Mr. Nobashi, wouldn’t it? But she didn’t want to stay home, either. Waste a vacation day? She didn’t get enough of them to be happy squandering one on a sick kid.

  Which left. . what? Anything? The Yellow Pages weren’t worth shit those days. She wouldn’t find a babysitting service there. She went online instead. She came up with several in the area. All of them said Se habla espanol. Which was great, no doubt, but how about ingles? Well, the only thing she could do was start calling and find out.

  So she did. Sure enough, most of the people she talked with had accents flavored with Spanish. You got used to that in Southern California. What she had more trouble getting used to were the prices they wanted. If Marshall ever found out what they were asking, he’d yell for more himself.

  “That’s just about what I bring home!” she yelped to one service that was particularly outrageous.

  “Sorry, ma’am. We got to make a living, too,” replied the woman on the other end of the line. That might have been politer than Fuck you, lady, but it amounted to the same thing.

  She ended up burning the vacation day. The professional babysitters were too goddamn professional for a mere human being to afford. Then she had to burn another one, because Marshall was still sick the next day. That got her through Friday. She dared hope things would be at least near normal by Monday.

  Back when she first found out she was pregnant, her OB had asked her if she would take it out on the baby for blowing up the life she’d had. She’d denied the possibility-denied it indignantly, in fact. Now. . Now she would have been a liar if she said the idea of punting James Henry didn’t cross her mind.

  She didn’t do it. By Saturday afternoon, the baby was pretty much his old cheerful self again. . and Louise had a scratchy throat and a tickle in her nose. You couldn’t win. The way things looked, you couldn’t even break even. That crossed her mind just before she started sneezing.

  * * *

  There were times when Marshall Ferguson felt as if
he’d never gone to college. Here he was, in the house where he’d grown up-in his old room again, for God’s sake! He had more money in his pocket than he’d enjoyed before he went up to Santa Barbara, but not enough more to move out on his own. If his mother hadn’t had her little bastard, he wouldn’t even have had that. The economy had fallen, and it couldn’t get up. He wondered-and wondered seriously-whether he’d die of old age before it managed to climb to its feet again.

  And there were times when he thought he’d fallen into the looking glass, just like Alice. Dealing with his mother as a near-enemy would do that to him. However much he tried, he couldn’t think of her any other way now. She’d blown up the family. What else was he supposed to think about her?

  His dad’s new wife. . He liked Kelly. He liked her better than he liked the woman who’d given him birth. But she didn’t seem like a mother to him, or even like a stepmother, however a stepmother was supposed to seem (what he knew about stepmothers was a weird mash-up of fairy tales on the one hand and friends and acquaintances whose folks had divorced and remarried on the other).

  What she really reminded him of was a new older sister. He also liked her better than he’d ever liked Vanessa, though. Why not? She didn’t try to boss him around the way Vanessa always had. She didn’t make as if she knew everything there was to know, either. She just. . got along with him. He wasn’t remotely used to that.

  He would have liked to talk it over with Dad. His father was the one unchanged point in his life. Dad might be a little grayer, a little jowlier, than he had been when Marshall was in high school, but how often did you notice that? His style hadn’t changed, not a nickel’s worth. And wasn’t the style the man himself? Somebody’d said that. Marshall couldn’t remember who. So much for the bachelor’s degree they’d finally made him take.

  But, because Dad was Dad, Marshall couldn’t imagine talking to him in any serious way. Dad would listen. He’d listen hard, like the cop he was. And then he’d give forth with something that might as well come from Mars. Which was one reason Marshall didn’t try talking with him: he’d had that happen before. The other reason, of course, was much older and more basic. Marshall had expended a lot of time and testosterone gaining such flimsy independence as he had. Was he going to risk that for the sake of conversation? Like hell he was.