She meant to get back to the piece when she came home the next day, but she was too damn tired. The same thing happened the day after that. Then the weekend arrived, and she had to run around and do all the shit she couldn’t do during the week because she was stuck at the stinking widget works.
Monday, Mr. Gorczany was particularly fuckheaded. Vanessa swore in English. She swore in Serbo-Croatian. She swore in the half-remembered bits of Armenian she’d got from her rug-merchant ex-boyfriend. She would have sworn in Swahili had she known any. Her face must have been a sight—nobody on the bus wanted to sit next to her.
After she choked down another uninspired supper, she turned on the laptop again. “There’s got to be a better way to make a living,” she said once more, grimly. “I mean, there’s fucking got to be.” She was talking to herself, but that was all right. She was the one she needed to fire up.
She opened the story and read what she’d written before. She made a face. It was melodramatic. The prose felt purple. She’d have to clean it up before she went any further. An hour later, it didn’t seem that different. She wanted to make some progress on the night, so she wrote a couple of new paragraphs. Then she stopped and tried to neaten them up.
“Hell with it,” she said at last. She saved the document and went to bed.
Bronislav was in town the next weekend, so she couldn’t very well write then. She could grumble about how the story was—or rather, wasn’t—going, could and did. He listened with grave attention. That was one of the things she liked about him. When she finally ran down, he said, “Will you let me see this story, please?”
Vanessa hesitated. Some ways, that request was more personal, more intimate, than a lot of what they did in the bedroom. Yes, she wanted people to read what she’d written… after she got it just the way she wanted it. If she ever did. If she ever could. Till then, showing it off was like walking down the street not only naked but without any makeup. Who wanted to show off the zits on her ass?
If Vanessa had zits on her ass, Bronislav had seen them. She sighed. “Okay,” she said—reluctantly, but she did. She started the computer and opened the filled she’d named Story1.docx. “Here.”
While he read, his face showed nothing of what he thought. He would have made a dangerous poker player. He probably did, at truck stops along I-10. He scrolled through the piece, then said, “You should finish. Is good.”
She would have put more faith in that if English were his first language. How many subtleties flew over his head? Still, she knew she would have been horrified—to say nothing of furious—if he’d told her it was lousy. That he could see the same thing, and that he could see which side his bread was buttered on, never crossed her mind. What surer sign she was in love?
“I don’t know exactly where I’m going with it,” she said. Up till now, she hadn’t admitted that to herself, much less to anyone else. Love, indeed.
“You will find way to do it.” When Bronislav said something like that, he sounded as certain as a judge passing sentence. When he said it, he sounded certain enough to make Vanessa believe it, too. Whether she’d keep on believing it once he had to go back on the road… Well, she’d find out after he did.
• • •
When the computer worked, Marshall Ferguson lurked on several boards for writers and wannabes. Some of them were just sad—the blind leading the deaf, so to speak. Others, though, offered what seemed like good advice. One bit that struck him as sensible was to start at the top when you were trying to sell something, to aim for the highest-paying, most prestigious markets. If they said no, you could set your sights lower. But if you started with the bottom feeders, you’d never find out for sure how good you could be.
So Marshall first submitted his stories to either The New Yorker or Playboy, depending on what they were like. This latest one, called “Almost Sunset,” went to Playboy, because it had a guy and a girl in it and they were fooling around while a spectacular post-eruption sunset painted the walls of the guy’s place. Marshall wondered what had happened to Jenny, the girl at UCSB he’d fooled around with at a time like that. He couldn’t remember her last name, which meant he couldn’t find her on Facebook—and, if she’d got married since then, she might have a different last name anyhow… and might not want to be found by people like him.
He didn’t think that much of Playboy. It might have been cool when his dad was his age… or it might already have jumped the shark by then. But he totally admired the kind of money the magazine paid. Some postage and a wait till the story came back were a reasonable investment. It was like buying a lottery ticket, only with somewhat better odds.
Since he’d moved back in with his father and Kelly and now Deborah, he was almost always the one who went to get the mail. In Animal Farm, which he’d read for Western Civ, the “liberated” farm beasts had learned to bleat Four legs good, two legs bad! His bleat when he opened the mailbox was Little envelopes good, manila envelopes bad! A manila envelope was his story coming back rejected. A little envelope might be an acceptance letter or a contract or a check. It usually wasn’t, but it might be.
He didn’t think anything special was up when he grabbed the mail on a day that was trying to be springlike but didn’t quite remember how. A couple of bills, a couple of catalogues, a Netflix DVD for Kelly to watch while she was up in the middle of the night with Deborah (if there happened to be power), and an envelope from Chicago he didn’t even notice as he carried the stuff to the house.
Deborah pointed at him when he went inside. “Masha!” she announced. She came closer to his real name every day. Dad said little kids weren’t human till they got potty-trained, but she was gaining on it.
He pointed back at her. “Vacuum cleaner,” he said.
She shook her head. “No! Deb’ah!” She giggled. She knew who she was. She also knew part of her big half-brother’s job was trying to mess up her mind.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Pork rinds.”
“No! Deb’ah!”
“You’re bizarre, Marshall,” Kelly said, more affectionately than not. “So what did the Post Awful inflict on us today?”
“You’ve got the latest Hornblower from your Netflix queue,” he answered, which made her squee—she thought the actor who played him was majorly hot. Marshall went on, “Some people trying to sell us stuff, some people who want money, and… whatever this is. Oh, it’s for me.” He opened the envelope from Chicago.
He’d forgotten Playboy’s editorial offices lived there. The rabbit logo on the letterhead reminded him in a hurry. He read the letter. The farther he went, the more his jaw dropped.
“You okay?” Kelly sounded anxious. “You look kinda green around the gills.”
“They’re… They’re…” Marshall had to try three times before he could get it out. “Playboy’s gonna buy ‘Almost Sunset.’ Holy crap! I mean, holy crap!”
“That’s awesome! Freaking awesome!” Kelly hurried over and hugged him. “What are they giving you? Playboy pays good, doesn’t it?”
“They’re…” Again, Marshall had to try more than once before he could talk straight. “It says they’re gonna pay me ten thousand bucks. That’s their standard rate for a short story, they say.”
This time, Kelly didn’t squee. She let out a war whoop instead. Marshall felt grateful. She was acting out what he felt. He was too stunned to take care of it for himself. Even in these times of galloping inflation, ten grand was real money.
She hugged him one more time. Then she poked him in the ribs, which made him jump. “Who knows?” she said, mischief in her voice. “Maybe the centerfold for the issue your story runs in will be cute, too. Like a cherry on top of your sundae—only she probably lost her cherry a long time ago.”
“Meow,” Marshall said.
Kelly stuck out her tongue at him. Then she said, “Call your dad. You’ll make the buttons pop off his shirt, and he could use some of that right now.”
“Things at the cop shop are better than they
used to be,” Marshall said. “Half the force doesn’t hate him for making Pitcavage snuff himself any more, and Pitcavage isn’t sneaking around killing old ladies, either.”
“I know, and I’m glad,” Kelly answered. “But it’s still a slog, and he’s not as happy there as he was before things hit the fan. Trust me—he’ll be glad to get good news from home.”
“Okay.” Marshall hadn’t noticed Dad any glummer than usual, but he just lived with him—he wasn’t married to him. Noticing stuff like that was what wives were for. Husbands, too, Marshall supposed vaguely.
He took out his cell phone and smiled to discover he had bars. If he did, his father would, too, so he called Dad’s cell. “What’s going on, Marshall?” Colin Ferguson asked without preamble. Dad always hated beating around the bush.
Well, this time Marshall could be equally brusque: “I just sold a story to Playboy.”
“Hey!” Dad did sound pleased, more pleased than Marshall had expected him to. Then, predictably, he asked how much they paid. When Marshall told him, he let out a low whistle. “Even with the dollar as messed up as it is, that comes pretty close to eating money, doesn’t it?”
“Sure feels like it to me,” Marshall agreed.
“And you know what else is cool about that?” Dad asked.
“What?” Marshall said, perhaps incautiously.
His father’s chuckle wasn’t quite a mwahaha, but it came close. “A good-sized chunk of that check’ll be mine, to make up for the lean times.”
“Oh,” Marshall said, and then, “Right.” He sounded as unenthusiastic as he was.
Dad laughed again, more wholesomely this time. “Believe me, the thing I hope for most is that you make enough to move out on your own and quit paying me rent. I’ve told you that before. I don’t mind having you around—don’t get me wrong. But if you do well enough to move out, you’re really making it.”
“Uh-huh.” Marshall nodded, which his father couldn’t see. Up until he opened that letter from Chicago, making enough to snag a place of his own had been no more than something he wished for when he got good and baked. Now… Now it suddenly felt possible, if not too likely.
“Way to go, son. I’m going to spend the rest of the day bragging on you,” Dad said. “It’s a lot more fun than grilling a wife-beater and an armed-robbery suspect—you’d better believe it is.”
Marshall did believe it. He said his good-byes and powered down the phone. He didn’t leave it on all the time, the way he had before the eruption. When you weren’t sure when or if you could charge it again, you stretched the battery as far as it would go. You stretched everything as far as it would go, and then a little further besides.
One of these days, Marshall knew, he would make like an old fart—no, he’d be an old fart—and go on about the days before the supervolcano blew, and how there’d been so much of everything and it never snowed in L.A. And all the people under forty-five, the ones who’d grown up after the eruption—his half-sister and half-brother, for instance—would wish he’d shut the fuck up.
“Was he happy?” Kelly asked. Sure enough, she worried about Dad in ways that just never crossed Marshall’s mind. Wifey ways, whatever those were.
“Y’know, I think he was,” Marshall said. Had his own mother worried about his father in wifey ways? Much as he didn’t want to—he was still furious at Mom for walking out—he supposed she had. She’d been ready to bite nails in half when Mike Pitcavage got named chief instead of Dad. Yeah, and look how that turned out, Marshall thought.
“Cool!” Kelly sounded happy herself, happy because Dad was happy. That was pretty cool in and of itself. Then she found another question, a sly one: “What will your buds think when they find out you sold Playboy something?”
“It’s a ginormous check—I mean, it will be,” Marshall said. “They’ll like that. So will I.” And if anybody paid quick, it was likely to be the rabbit magazine. A lot of publishers seemed to like—or to need—to play catch-me-if-you-can before they finally coughed up cash. He went on, “Otherwise… I dunno. I mean, I don’t think any of ’em read it or anything. It’s not, like, the latest thing.”
“No, I guess not.” Kelly’s voice was dry. You could find much nastier babes in other magazines. And, when the power worked, online you could find anything anyone was weird or horny enough to imagine.
But hey, it was still a big market even if it wasn’t the latest thing. The best writers from all over the world—well, the English-speaking world—busted their balls to get into it. They were all after those juicy checks. Writers could be as greedy as anybody else when they got the chance, and Playboy was one of the few places that gave it to them.
Now one of those checks had fallen into Marshall’s lap. He shook his head. That wasn’t right. I earned that one, he thought. I wrote a story good enough so they pulled it out of the slush pile and bought it.
“Wow!” he said as that slowly sank in. “Maybe I really am gonna be a writer after all.”
“Maybe you are,” Kelly said. “What would be so funny about that?”
“Only everything,” Marshall answered. “I was just using creative writing for a major to keep from graduating as long as I could. I never would’ve submitted anything if Professor What’s-his-name—Bolger, that’s who he was—hadn’t made everybody in his dumb class do it. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather the first time somebody bought something.”
“Okay, you fell into it by accident,” Kelly said. “But once you found out you were good at it, why shouldn’t you take it as far as you can?”
“No reason… I guess. But if somebody’d told me Bolger would make us send our stuff out to an editor, I never would’ve signed up for his class.” Marshall shook his head again, this time in wonder. A slow smile spread across his face. How totally green would Vanessa turn when she found out?
• • •
Colin Ferguson and Gabe Sanchez pedaled toward the scene of the crime. Gabe puffed away while he did it. Other riders and people on the sidewalk stared at a guy smoking a cigarette while he rode a bike, as if Gabe cared what other people did.
“You know what we need on these goddamn things?” Sanchez said, shifting the cigarette to the side of his mouth, tough-guy style, so he wouldn’t have to lift a hand from the handlebars to take it out.
“Slaves to do the pedaling would be nice. I’m getting old.” Colin was joking, and then again he wasn’t. Gas shortages and astronomical prices had made pedicabs a popular way to get around for people who didn’t feel like hauling themselves from where they were to where they needed to be.
He startled a laugh out of Gabe, who said, “Now that you mention it, so am I. But that’s not what I was thinking of. Naw—what we need on these fuckers is a light bar and a siren so people will know we’re cops.”
“You don’t figure maybe they suspect?” Colin said dryly, and Gabe laughed again. Many, many bicycles were on the streets. Except during commuters’ hours, hardly any of them were ridden by middle-aged men in suits. If you looked closely at Gabe, you could see the bulge under his left shoulder. If you look at me, you’ll see the same goddamn thing, Colin thought. Designers had talked about the invisible shoulder holster for more than a hundred years. The next guy who actually made one would be the first.
They both turned right from Hesperus onto Reynoso Drive. That was San Atanasio’s most important street for businesses and shops. In the early days of the city, San Atanasio Boulevard, farther south, had filled that niche—which was why the city hall and the police station and the library were all either on or near San Atanasio Boulevard.
“If it wasn’t for all the work I’m doing, though, I wouldn’t mind this so much, you know?” Sanchez said. “You see the town better on a bike than you do from a car.”
“You see it slower, that’s for sure,” Colin said. People on the sidewalk weren’t just blurs. You noticed faces, clothes, attitudes. But you did take longer to get where you were going. With cell phones so unreliable,
Colin and Gabe also carried little two-way radios in an inside jacket pocket. If they needed backup, they could call the station.
The bicycles were straight out of 1910. The radios were twenty-first-century gadgets. The mix, and using the one to make the other more effective, was a small part of the report Colin had done for Malik Williams. The new chief liked the report, or said he did. How much he’d use… Colin didn’t worry about too much. Some of it struck him as plain, obvious common sense. Some was his own more left-handed thinking.
What Williams would make of that, Colin didn’t worry about too much, either. The absolute worst thing the new chief could do was drive him into retirement. Colin didn’t want that to happen, but it wouldn’t be nearly so bad as if he’d had to quit because Mike Pitcavage killed himself. He’d go home, he’d enjoy his wife and his tiny daughter, and he’d cultivate his garden. You could do worse.
Meanwhile, he pedaled past the big B of A near Sword Beach. The gas stations at the corner of Sword Beach and Reynoso all flew the red flags that meant they had no fuel. Those flags were ragged and faded—they flew most of the time.
Past Sword Beach to the east was a shopping center a bit spiffier than a strip mall. The anchor store, such as it was, was a Vons supermarket that had been there since dirt. Colin and Louise and now Kelly all got their groceries there. The Vons was the place that had been knocked over. The armed robber had blown a plate-glass window to hell and gone; sparkling shards littered the concrete walk out front. A middle-aged woman who could only be the manager waited there for the cops to show up.
She gave her name as Rudabeh Barazani—Iranian, Colin guessed. One more ingredient in the SoCal ethnic stew. Her English had a ghost of an accent, no more. “Anybody get hurt?” Colin asked.
“No, thank heaven,” she said.
“Okay, that’s good,” he said, both because it was true and to calm her down—although she didn’t seem too flustered. “Tell me what happened, then.”
“A man filled one of our hand-carry baskets with cans of hash and chicken and tuna. He filled it as full as he could. When he got to a checker, he did not take the items out. He tried to set the basket in front of her instead. When she asked him to take the cans out so she could see how many there were, he pulled a gun instead and told her to put all the money in the register into a bag. Since we have no bags any more, she just handed it to him. He left with the money and the canned goods, and fired a shot through the window to make sure no one would try to chase him.”
Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart s-3 Page 12
