“A likely story,” Susan answered darkly. “I said, how do you want me to make the potatoes tonight?”
“I dunno. Cooking them ought to be good,” Bryce replied. She rolled her eyes. So did he, for different reasons. You could do only so much with potatoes. Whatever you did, they were still potatoes when you got through with them. He supposed he should have been glad they had enough potatoes, and didn’t need to worry about going hungry.
He should have been, and in a way he was. But he remembered better times. So did his whole generation. If the climate didn’t improve by the time they died off, they’d bore the living shit out of the cadre rising behind them by going on and on about the good old days. Well, yeah, every generation did that, so why should his be any different? The difference was, for them the good old days really would have been good.
* * *
There was a joint on Hesperus, a little north of the police station, with a name Colin Ferguson had loved for years. HEINRICH’S HOFBRAU AND SUSHI BAR, the sign over the door declared. It had always drawn a fair number of cops at lunch and dinnertime. The way things were these days, it was crawling with blue uniforms and off-the-rack suits. You could walk there from the station. You could, and the policemen and — women did.
As a waiter led Colin and Gabe Sanchez to a table, Colin remarked, “I always wished this joint served pizza, too.”
“Oh, yeah?” Gabe said. “How come?”
“’Cause then you’d have the whole Axis, all in one place.”
That got the kind of disgusted snort he’d hoped for. They sat down. The waiter set menus on the table in front of them and went away. The menus had two sides-not Column A and Column B but German and Japanese. “More soba noodles than ever,” Gabe said, eyeing the Japanese side.
“Soba’s buckwheat,” Colin answered. “Kasha, if you’re Jewish.”
“Sure, man. Hell of a lot of Hebes named Sanchez.”
“Mm, right.” Colin had to remind himself what he was talking about. “Buckwheat’s one of those grains that grow quick, so you can raise it in the kind of crappy weather we’ve got nowadays.”
“Oh. Is that where you were going with that? I gotcha,” Gabe said. When the waiter came back, he ordered some of the soba noodles. Colin went Teutonic, with sauerkraut, potatoes, and pork.
The dish proved heavy on the spuds and kraut, light on the pork. You could raise pigs anywhere, on almost anything. What meat there was these days was mostly pork. Some chicken remained, though the corn that had fattened hens was mostly a memory.
Beef? Lamb? Rare and even more expensive than everything else. Good fish was scarce, too, which didn’t do the sushi part of this operation any good. Squid, though. . There was lots of squid. By all the signs, squid were oceanic cockroaches. If you dropped an H-bomb on the Marianas Trench, somehow the squid would survive.
“And when you’ve been squid, you’ve been did,” Colin murmured.
“What’s that?” Gabe cupped a hand behind his ear.
“Nothing,” Colin said. “Believe me, nothing. My brains are dribbling out my ears, that’s all.”
“And I’m supposed to notice this on account of. .?” Gabe asked.
“Who said you were supposed to notice it?” Colin returned.
Gabe let out another snort. Then he found a question Colin had been asking himself a good deal lately, too: “What’s it like having your daughter home again?”
“It’s-interesting, anyway.” Colin wished he’d ordered a beer with lunch, even if department regs frowned on such things and even if barley shortages made beer almost as expensive as gasoline. He almost left the answer short and unresponsive. But Gabe had been his buddy as long as they’d both been on the San Atanasio PD. If he could vent to anybody, Gabe was the guy. Sighing, he went on, “I wish to Christ Vanessa and Kelly’d hit it off better.”
“That’s not good,” Gabe said.
Colin clapped silently, applauding the understatement without making everybody in the place stare at him. “It wouldn’t be good even if Kelly wasn’t expecting. Since she is, it’s doubleplus ungood.”
“It’s what?” But then Gabe’s heavy features cleared. “Oh. From that book. 1984.” He chuckled self-consciously. “Dunno if I’ve even looked at it since 1984. Sometime in high school-I’m pretty sure of that.”
Colin had read it more recently-quite a bit more. The politics were out of date. Nobody could deny that. The politics had been out of date well before the Cold War went bye-bye. But the thoughts on the way corrupt and narrow politics produced a corrupt and narrow language seemed more important than ever in this age of pious bullshit. They did to him, at any rate. Most people, by all appearances, didn’t give a rat’s ass.
If he was going to vent, he was going to vent. Not much point to doing things halfway, was there? With another sigh, he said, “And she’s got herself a new boyfriend.”
“A punk? A gangbanger?” Gabe’s older daughter was in high school. Those were the kinds of boyfriends that gave him nightmares.
But Colin shook his head. “Well, no.”
“Oh,” Gabe said again. As he had with 1984, he remembered slowly, but remember he did. “Please, Jesus, not another guy older than you are.”
“Not that, either,” Colin admitted. “This one’s, I dunno, maybe forty.”
“Not too bad, not for the age she is now,” Gabe said. Colin nodded this time; that was true. Gabe asked the next logical question: “So what don’t you like about him?”
“It’s not even that I don’t like him,” Colin said, which was also true. . to a point.
“Huh,” Gabe said, as if a perp gave him an unexpected reply in the interrogation room. “He got a record?”
“Not any place I can find,” Colin answered. He wasn’t surprised Gabe would assume he’d checked. He had, as soon as he’d got Bronislav Nedic’s name. Did that mean he didn’t trust his darling daughter’s taste in men? Now that you mentioned it, yes.
“Huh,” Gabe said again. “What is it, then?”
“You wanna know what? I’ll tell you what-he scares the crap out of me, that’s what.” There. Colin had said it. He sure hadn’t said it to Vanessa, or even to Kelly. That was one he’d kept bottled up ever since he’d met Bronislav. He hoped like hell the big Serb hadn’t noticed it, too.
He succeeded in surprising Gabe, anyhow. Sanchez’s graying eyebrows leaped toward his hairline. “Scares you?” By the way Gabe repeated it, he could hardly believe his own ears. “How come?”
“I did my hitch in the Navy-you know that.” Colin waited for his friend to nod before continuing, “I never saw combat. But I knew some guys-Navy and Marines-who’d been nasty places and done nasty things. Heap big nasty things, if you know what I mean.”
“Uh-huh.” Gabe nodded again. “This dude is like that?”
“In spades, doubled and redoubled.” Colin tried to put what he felt into words: “Those guys, whatever they were up to, they were doing it ’cause they had orders to do it, whatever it was. And maybe things got hairy, but they got hairy because that kind of stuff was what they did. You with me so far?”
“Yeah. Or I think so.”
“Okay. This fella, he did that kinda stuff, too. He’s got an ugly old scar to prove it, but you don’t need the scar to know. You just need to see the eyes. Only I don’t think he did whatever he did because those were his orders. He did it ’cause he went looking for it and he found it.”
After another pause for thought, Gabe said, “Not a German shepherd. Not a police dog. A wolf.”
“Bingo!” Colin exclaimed. “That’s better than I worked out for myself-a lot better, matter of fact.”
“You scared he’ll take it out on Vanessa, whatever it is?”
“It wasn’t that kind of vibe, or I don’t think it was,” Colin said after some thought of his own. “But I don’t think she’s got a clue about what she’s hanging out with, either. I don’t want her getting hurt.”
Gabe laughed a singularly mirthl
ess laugh. “You fall for somebody, man, that’s the chance you take. Me and my ex. .” He shuddered; he had more than his share of godawful memories to go with the good ones. “You and yours, too. And it’s not like this is Vanessa’s first race around the track, right?”
“Right. Right, right, right.” Colin still wished Vanessa could have stayed together with Bryce Miller. But she damn well hadn’t, any more than Louise had stayed together with him or Gabe’s then-wife with him. If Vanessa hadn’t gone to Denver to stay with that gray-haired rug seller. . That hadn’t lasted even as long as Bryce had. This one, now? “Everything you say makes good sense, but I’m worried just the same.”
“Well, then, you don’t need to worry about lunch.” Gabe put money on the table. “Come on. Let’s get back to work.”
“Why not? — and thanks. Maybe it’ll take my mind off things.”
“Hope so. But that’s not why I said it. I want my cancer fix, and I’ll get it on the way back to the station.” Gabe gave forth with a theatrical sigh. “Hard times for a smoker these days. If you’re in a building that’s not your own house, they’ll bust you for lighting up. I tell you, man, it’s almost easier to smoke dope.”
Colin kept his mouth shut tight. Every one of his children used weed-Vanessa less than her brothers, but she did, too. The only good thing about it, he thought as he and Gabe tramped along Hesperus toward the station, was that the smoke smelled better than tobacco. Gabe wouldn’t even have agreed with him about that.
* * *
Some people set out to be writers from the time they were small. Marshall wasn’t any of them. He’d chosen creative writing as a major at UCSB because it would let him stay in school an extra quarter or two. He’d submitted for the first time because that prof made him do it.
And he’d got accepted because. . Maybe God knew why. Marshall had no idea.
He’d sold several more stories after the first one, too. He was good enough to be a professional writer. That much seemed plain. What also seemed plain, unfortunately, was that he wasn’t good enough, or maybe productive enough, or maybe just lucky enough, to make a living at it.
That was how come he’d wasted so much time babysitting his tiny half-brother, a kid whose very existence weirded him out. His father gruffly insisted that time you got paid for wasn’t time wasted. Marshall wasn’t convinced. Dad didn’t care. The next time Dad cared about Marshall’s opinions would be the first.
Now, though, Mom was out of work herself. That meant she had much less need for babysitting services. It also meant Marshall’s income tanked.
Dad did not approve. Marshall had to care about Dad’s opinions, because the house belonged to Dad. His old man was willing-not eager, but willing-to feed him and let him keep sleeping there as long as he looked for work. And, with a cop’s relentless thoroughness, Dad checked up on him to make sure he did.
Some of the interrogations were almost as sharp as if he were under suspicion of knocking over a McDonald’s. He complained about it once: “The state unemployment office isn’t as tough as you are!”
His father just looked at him. Somehow, Dad could make his blunt features do an amazing impression of a snapping turtle. “The unemployment office doesn’t have you sleeping under its roof,” he said tonelessly. “I darn well do. If you aren’t happy about the situation, you’re welcome to pack your bags and go somewhere else.”
Marshall shut up. Without money, where was he supposed to go? He could sleep in his car. . Yeah, right, the car he couldn’t afford to gas up. Or he could apartment-surf among his friends. Only most of them were in the same boat. They were crashing on one another, or back with their folks, or seeing what sleeping in their cars was like.
Everybody was in that same boat. Trouble was, it was the Titanic. No-what was the name of that other liner, the one that got torpedoed? To Marshall’s amazement, he dredged it up from the depths of U.S. history boredom. The Lusitania, that was it. When the supervolcano blew up, it torpedoed the whole goddamn economy.
Marshall pointed that out, with profane embellishments. Dad went right on looking as if he were paddling along in the Mississippi, waiting for a fish to swim by so he could bite it in half. “I know it’s hard to find anything,” he said when Marshall ran down. “But you’ve got to try. Vanessa’s trying.”
“She sure is,” Marshall agreed. Having his big sister home again had not proved an unmixed blessing.
Dad stopped doing reptile impersonations and looked quite humanly pained at the pun. “She’s looking for work,” he said, so there could be no possible misunderstanding. “She’s looking hard, too. The least you can do is try as hard as she does.”
“She’s not writing,” Marshall said.
“Look, son, it’s great that you’ve sold some things. I’m proud of you for that. I’m bust-my-buttons proud,” his father said. “But you aren’t exactly James Michener yet.”
“I hope not! Isn’t he dead?” Marshall said.
“You’re not George Carlin, either, and he’s dead, too,” Dad said. There he surprised his son-Marshall would have bet he’d name Bill Cosby. Even dead, even after a long, successful career alive, Carlin seemed too edgy, too freaky, to appeal to a cop. You never could tell, could you? Dad went on, “Neither one of them died broke, though, and neither one of them needed to scuffle for an outside job. Till you don’t need to, you’re gonna scuffle.”
So Marshall scuffled. Every once in a while, he got a day’s work moving stuff off a truck and into a warehouse or out of the back of a store and into a truck. That didn’t happen very often, though. Most of the guys who got those jobs were browner than he was and spoke Spanish. The people who did the hiring figured those guys were less likely to piss and moan about doing hard work, wouldn’t complain about their shitty wages, and wouldn’t start yelling about workers’ compensation if they screwed up their backs.
They were right, too. They knew it. So did Marshall. And so did the brown, Spanish-speaking guys who got hired instead of him. Their part of the deal was to do as they were told and shut up about it.
He tried to get a job that would let him write. By now, he had enough sales to put together a decent resume. No large American corporation seemed to be looking for anybody who could turn out a respectable short story, though. No small American business seemed to be looking for anyone with that skill set, either.
Jesus H. Christ, no escaped lunatics seemed to be looking for somebody who could crank out a respectable short story. Well, no: a few lunatics remained on the loose. They ran the e-publications and print magazines that occasionally-much too occasionally, as far as Marshall was concerned-bought the stories he did write.
He kept sending stuff to Playboy and The New Yorker. You sold something to a market like that, it paid no-shit eating money. Of course, all the writers in the world who used English knew as much (so did some who had to get their stuff translated from Japanese or Russian or Hebrew). The top mags could pick and choose. They could, and they did. Marshall got rejected over and over again.
He hated getting rejected. He never would have submitted the first story that sold if Professor Bolger hadn’t required it. In high school, he hadn’t dated much because he hated it when girls turned him down. This was the same kind of thing, and the noes hurt just about as much.
He had dated. Eventually, he got too horny not to. When a girl let him get lucky, the reward made up for all the failures that came before it. Now he felt the same way when an editor let him get lucky.
Here, for once, he’d gone someplace Vanessa wouldn’t follow-or wouldn’t push ahead of him. Vanessa could get into a revolving door behind you and come out in front. But she said, “I couldn’t stand people telling me no all the goddamn time.”
“They don’t tell you no all the time,” Marshall said. “Sometimes they tell you yes. That’s the payoff.”
She shook her head. “Too much of one, not enough of the other.”
He didn’t want to argue with her, so he let it alone. Ar
guing was her thing, not his. She’d argue at the drop of a hat, and she’d drop the hat herself if she needed to. But deliberately put herself in a spot where she might get rejected? That, no.
Of course, when she dated she was the one getting the attention, not the one giving it. She wasn’t used to coming on to somebody and getting shot down in flames. Maybe that had something to do with how she felt. Or maybe I’m full of crap, Marshall thought. It wouldn’t be for the first time if he was.
He was a writer. He called himself one, anyhow. The world believed him, to the extent that it was willing to give him money for what he wrote. It didn’t give him as much as he wanted or needed, but it gave him some, so it did believe him. And he had no idea what went on inside his sister’s head, even if she was somebody he’d known his whole life. No idea. Hell, half the time he had no idea what went on inside his own head. More than half the time, it often seemed.
Did other writers, real writers, writers who honest to God made a living slapping words on paper, feel the same way? If they didn’t, how could they know? If they did, how could they write so well? Questions came easy. He wished he knew where God, or Whoever, stashed the answers.
XVIII
Winter in Maine. Back before the supervolcano erupted, back before Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles found themselves stuck in Guilford with the Greenville blues again, that would have meant Norman Rockwell paintings, or more likely Currier and Ives prints, to Rob. He would have thought of Christmas trees (or, being the cynical sort he was, of pine-scented air freshener).
These days, winter in Maine brought two things to his mind. No, three things, he told himself, starting his own mental Python routine. They were, in no particular order, not freezing to death, not starving to death, and marrying Lindsey.
He knew the third one was coming. He had a date and everything. He’d asked Lindsey, and she’d said yes, fool that she was. He would have been a lousy marriage bet in ordinary times. But then, in ordinary times he never would have wound up stuck in Guilford and got to know her to begin with. Jim Farrell had already agreed-or threatened, depending on which way the wind was blowing-to perform the ceremony. Life would go on.
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