Supervolcano: Eruption

XV

Every time Colin picked up the Times from his driveway, it got thinner and lighter. It might almost have been an African famine victim, slowly wasting away. It had started shrinking long before the Yellowstone supervolcano, of course; the Internet had been sucking the life out of newspapers for years. But less and less per was making its way to the presses these days. The Times did wry stories about its own struggles for survival. And the Breeze, which remained Web-only, no doubt envied its bigger rival.

That wasn’t the only struggle going on. When he drove to the cop shop in the morning, gas stations reminded customers ODD or EVEN: the governor had reimposed the every-other-day rationing scheme not seen since the Arab oil embargoes. Mother Nature could embargo Los Angeles, too. More and more stations flew red flags to show they had no gas at all. Thanks to Gabe’s swoop right after the eruption, San Atanasio’s police department still had a tolerable supply. How long that would last, and what the police would do when it ran low… Colin preferred not to dwell on yet.

A Burger King had a big sign in the window-SORRY, NO FRIES. TRY OUR ONION RINGS! When not enough spuds were making it into town to support the fast-food business, L.A. was in deep kimchi. Colin hadn’t heard of a kimchi shortage, and San Atanasio abounded in Korean restaurants. Maybe they brought their Napa cabbage down from the nearby Central Valley.

It got cold-highs refused to climb into the sixties. A rainstorm came down from the Gulf of Alaska, and then another one, and then another one still. Anything could happen in the fall; everybody who’d lived here for a while knew that. People kept hoping things would warm up. Colin eyed the pale sun and the washed-out sky and the unbelievable sunsets. He hoped things would warm up, too, but he didn’t expect it. That was what he got for falling in love with a geologist.

He doggedly kept on with his own job. If snow fell below 2,500 feet and didn’t want to melt right away, if the mountains ringing the Los Angeles basin were white, white, white, he couldn’t do anything about that. His own little corner of the world? There, he stood a chance.

Gabe Sanchez felt the same way, though he pissed and moaned more than Colin did. “Man, you figure the Honolulu PD’s got any openings for an experienced cop?” he asked as he and Colin drove through chilly rain to a liquor store that had just been held up by a shotgun-toting robber.

“You can always hit Craigslist,” Colin answered. “You want to get out of town, though, I bet there’s less competition in Fairbanks.”

“Fairbanks?” Gabe made a cross with his two forefingers, as if repelling a vampire. “Funny, man-funny like a colostomy bag. That fuckin’ town was in the fuckin’ deep freeze before this stupid superwaddayacallit blew its stack. What’s it gonna be like year after fuckin’ next? The July ice-cube harvest’ll be terrific, that’s what.”

Maybe you didn’t need to fall in love with a geologist to know how screwed up things were, and how screwed up they were liable to get. Maybe you only needed your normal complement of working brain cells. Colin flicked on his turn signal and pulled into the cramped liquor-store parking lot. A black-and-white was already there, red and blue and yellow lights flashing in the overhead bar.

He grabbed his umbrella and got out. “One thing,” he said as he and Gabe squelched toward the entrance. “Rain’s washed away most of the ash.”

“Oh, boy,” Gabe said. “Besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how’d you like the goddamn play?” Colin shut up.

The clerk inside the liquor store was a short, plump Filipina. She looked pissed when Colin asked for her story. “I already tell it,” she said, pointing to the two uniformed policemen in there with her.

“Well, tl it again, please,” Colin said. “Maybe you’ll remember something new.”

“I don’t think so,” the woman said. Colin looked at her. It was the kind of look that got the message across. She changed her mind: “Okay, I tell. This motherfucker come into the store. He point big old gun at me. ‘Give me your money or I blow your ass away!’ motherfucker say. I open cash drawer. I put money on counter. Motherfucker grab it and run. I call police.”

English as she is spoke, Colin thought. The Filipina used the twelve-letter endearment as if it meant guy. For all he knew, she thought it did. One of these years, maybe it would. He’d heard plenty of other people use it the same way.

“Do you have surveillance video?” he asked her.

“What you say?” she returned: English as it wasn’t spoke.

Colin tried again. “A camera,” he said patiently. “A TV camera.” Was there anybody in the world who didn’t savvy TV? Maybe a few luckless natives stuck in the bad reception of the Papua New Guinea mountains. Everyone else bowed down before the great god of the modern age and his holy name.

“Oh. TV!” Yes, the Filipina got that. She pointed up and behind her, to a brushed-aluminum box with a lens at the business end. “Right there.”

“We’ll check that out, ma’am,” Gabe said. “Was the robber wearing a mask?” He had to do a show-and-tell to get across what a mask was. When the clerk understood, she shook her head.

“Something, anyway,” Colin remarked. “Have to find out what the footage looks like. If it shows the perp’s face, and if he’s nasty with that shotgun, maybe we can get one of the TV stations to run it. That’ll help if somebody makes him.” He might-he did-despise TV news, but he wasn’t too proud to use it.

“There you go,” Gabe said. “Maybe it’s the same jerk who blasted that other clerk a while ago.”

“Maybe it is,” Colin agreed. “That’d be good. Well, we’ll see.”

“That motherfucker shoot somebody?” The clerk’s voice rose in understandable horror.

“We’re not sure if it’s the same guy yet,” Colin said.

“You catch him! You put him in jail! You keep him in jail!” she said shrilly. “This not first time we get robbed. Nobody never get caught. What kind stupid motherfuckers work for police, huh?”

Colin would have got pissed off if he hadn’t already figured out she didn’t mean much by the word. Sighing, he answered, “Ma’am, there are smart cops and dumb cops, same as there are at any other kind of work.”

She eyed him. “You smart cop or dumb cop?”

“Probably,” he said. Let her make whatever she wanted of that. Back to business: “Let’s see what the camera picked up.”

After some fiddling with the controls, they played it back and watched it on the monitor next to the now-gutted cash register. It was in color and highly detailed. Colin remembered the black-and-white blurs you got from early-model surveillance cameras. No more. This was plenty good enough to ID the perp-and his shotgun-in court.

He was about eighteen, African American, in a cheap knit watchcap, a hoodie, and jeans. He had earrings and a tattoo on the left side of his neck, just below his ear.

“Damned if I don’t think that’s the same guy,” Gabe said.

“It’s been a while,” Colin answered, but he suspected the sergeant was right.

Whoever he was, the way the robber yelled and waved the shotgun around ought to be plenty to rouse a TV anchorman’s righteous indignation. Colin knew the numbers to call.

Channel 7 sent a gal out to look at the video. “Oh, yes, we can use this,” she said, beaming at Colin and showing off teeth undoubtedly capped. “Do you have a hotline number where people can call if they know something?”

“Sure do.” He wrote it down on the back of one of his cards. Under it, he printed SAN ATANASIO PD HOTLINE. She might not think to turn the card over and remind herself where she’d got it. She didn’t especially look like a dummy, but you never could tell.

“Thanks.” She stuck it in her purse. “Now, what was the name of the liquor store? Where exactly is it? When did the robbery take place? The clerk was a woman?” She could see that on the video, but he didn’t mind if she made sure. By the time she left, they were both pretty well pleased with themselves.

The only trouble was, the footage didn’t run. The big headline on the evening news was that the governor had ordered mandatory statewide rolling blackouts. “We have to conserve energy because less is reaching us due to the impactful nature of the supervolcano eruption,” he declared earnestly.

Just because he’d ordered blackouts and power cutoffs didn’t mean he’d get them right away. Half a dozen different groups-right, left, and center-converged on his mansion, waving picket signs and demanding that he change his mind this instant, if not sooner. A judge way the hell up in Siskiyou County had already issued a preliminary injunction against the blackouts. Colin felt a certain amount of sympathy for him. Siskiyou County was cold and mountainous. Without electricity for several hours a day, it would be colder yet.

And there was a car chase on the Long Beach Freeway. The station had to cover that live-or thought it did, anyway. So the people out there in TVland never got a glimpse of the robber with that shotgun and the tat.

It turned out not to matter. One of the San Atanasio cops took a look at the video and said, “Fuck me if I don’t know that asshole. That’s JerWilliam Ellis. I busted his sorry butt for armed robbery year before last. I didn’t know he was outa juvie.”

“JerWilliam?” Colin said.

“That’s his name. One word, capital J, capital W,” the cop said. “Don’t ask me why. I just work here. Ask his mama.”

“O-kay.” Colin shrugged. It wasn’t his business. He’d seen plenty of names stranger than that. “Know where he lives?”

“Last I heard, in the projects on Imperial.”

That was north and east of San Atanasio. The big housing projects there had gone up after the 1965 Watts riots, a monument to LBJ’s Great Society. They’d been breeding gangbangers ever since. As projects went, there were plenty of grimmer examples back East. That didn’t make the Imperial Gardens a garden spot.

“Have to talk with LAPD,” Colin said unenthusiastically. The projects were in the Big City’s jurisdiction. Sometimes LAPD cooperated well. Sometimes the Big City cops treated their small-town cousins like a bunch of scrounging hicks. You never could tell till you tried.

“Better call quick,” the cop said. “Way things are going, they’ll start canceling phones pretty soon, too.”

“Heh,” Colin said, for all the world as if it were a joke.

Louise Ferguson grabbed a shopping cart and headed into Vons. The supermarket on Reynoso Drive had been there for as long as she could remember, and for longer than that, too. Some of the regulars who’d come in when she was just getting started were still regulars now: regulars whose hair had gone white or light blue or pink, regulars with wrinkles and bent backs and polyester tops. Microfiber, my ass, Louise thought. I say it’s polyester, and I say the hell with it.

Was that how it ended up? Was that how she’d look twenty-five years from now? Would that cheery newlywed going up the produce aisle see her a lot further through the century and shiver as if a goose had walked over her grave? Probably. You couldn’t win. The only way you could get out of the game was by walking in front of a truck or something. Louise didn’t want to do that.

But she didn’t want to get old, either. She especially didn’t want to get old with a lover so much younger than she was. Men turned distinguished as they aged. You respected their experience. Women went invisible or grew hideous, one. Who gave a flying fuck, or any other kind, about some old broad’s experience?

Did you come to the store to piss and moan, or are you going to shop some, too? Louise asked herself. She chuckled wryly. She had the cart. She had her list-she was an organized shopper. Might as well drop some cash.

As usual, she headed for the produce first. The newlywed looking unhappy now, not cheery, had her reasons. Not much filled the bins. Most of what was there didn’t look very good. The prices were through the roof. A sign above a bare bin that should have held potatoes said

SORRY! WE’RE DOING THE BEST WE CAN!

The scary part was, Louise believed it. Nobody who could get his hands on higher-quality veggies would have put these sorry specimens on display.

“Sucks, doesn’t it?” the newlywed said.

“I couldn’t have put it better myself,” Louise answered. They smiled at each other and rolled their eyes. At least for a moment, misery loved company.

Things got no better in the rest of the market. The shelves had lots of odd, spotty gaps. Louise had noticed a few of them the week before. Now they came right out and poked her in the eye. She didn’t need long to see what the pattern was. You could still buy local stuff. Anything that came from back East was in short supply.

She got what she could. Some of what she couldn’t get, she could work around. No tissues in sight, but they had plenty of TP for some reason. If you had to, you could use it on your nose as well as your rear end. And rice could substitute for potatoes: oh, not exactly, but close enough. Where there’s a will, there’s a lawyer, she thought. Then she tightened her lips so her mouth turned into a thin, bloodless line. That had been-and no doubt still was-one of Colin’s jokes.

Well, what’s-her-name-Kelly-was listening to them now. She hadn’t heard all of them a million times yet. Only a few hundred, say. If she stuck with him as long as Louise had… He’d be pretty ancient by then, and Kelly would be no spring chicken herself.

People said you were crazy for two years after your marriage sank. Much of what people said was bullshit, nothing else but. That, though, seemed pretty much true. Louise felt a lot more stable, a lot more grounded, than she had when she walked out the old front door for the last time.

Grounded or not, she couldn’t get away from what had been so familiar for so long. Would Colin and the things he’d done and said keep bubbling up inside her for the rest of her life? It sure looked that way. On the outside, the break was clean. On the inside… She could still hear him, dammit.

She steered the cart to a checkout stand. As she displayed her Vons Club card for the discounts, the Hispanic kid bagging groceries said, “Hope you don’t mind plastic bags. They’re the only ones we were able to get.”

“That’s okay,” Louise said. They were supposed to be phasing out plastic. No, they were supposed to have phased it out. Maybe they’d won some kind of dispensation on account of the supervolcano.

The Pope gives dispensations. You mean an exemption. Damn straight she could still hear Colin in her head. Oh, Vanessa would have said the same thing, but not in the same tone of voice. And she hadn’t heard one damn thing from Vanessa since Yellowstone fell in on itself.

Reminding herself of that made her miss whatever the bagger said next. “I’m sorry?” She tried to look interested and attentive.

“I said, if you’ve got some of those cloth totes with the handles, it might be a good idea to bring them the next time you come in. Who knows how much longer we’ll be able to get any bags at all?”

“Okay. I’ll do that.” Louise had several of them in a drawer. Who didn’t? Some people were bound not to. And they’d be the ones who raised a stink when the market didn’t-couldn’t-help them corral their groceries.

Louise stowed the Vons Club card and took out her trusty Visa. She was signing the store copy of the register printout when the checkout gal remarked, “Maybe you’re lucky to get plastic bags today. It’s coming down in buckets out there.”

“It is?” Louise hadn’t paid any attention to what the weather was doing. Now she looked out through the big plate-glass windows. “It is!” she agreed in dismay. It hadn’t been when she got there. “Can I run back and buy an umbrella?” That would make the two women behind her in line love her to death.

The checker turned to the bagger. “Run get Mrs. Ferguson an umbrella, Orlando. Hustle!”

“ Si, Virginia,” Orlando said, and he was off like a shot. He came back with an umbrella-an umbrella with a tacky floral pattern, but what could you do? — a lot faster than Louise could have got it for herself. She paid cash; it was quicker than plastic, and she did care what people thought, even if they weren’t people she knew.

Buckets was barely the word for the way it was pouring. L.A. didn’t usually get deluges like this. The umbrella kept her top half dry. From the waist down, she was soaked anyhow; it was blowing almost horizontally out of the northwest. The plastic grocery bags were a blessing. Brown paper would have disintegrated in rain like this. Louise threw the sacks into the trunk and waded around to the driver’s door.

Getting in, wrestling the umbrella shut, tossing it down in front of the passenger seat, and slamming the car door took only a few seconds. All the same, Louise let in enough water to fill a hazard on the golf course down the street. Quite a bit came down on her in the process, too. “Yuck!” she said. That wasn’t nearly good out throh. She tried again: “Shit!”

Better. Definitely better. She’d given up trying to understand why people told you not to swear. It didn’t help the human condition as much as getting drunk or screwing, but it made a pretty fair Band-Aid.

Then she said “Shit!” again. Getting in, letting in all that water and wet air, and having the gall to go on breathing had steamed up the inside of the car windows. For all the seeing out she could do, she might as well have been in the middle of her own private fog bank.

She turned on the motor and hit both front and rear defrost. Blowing warm air across the inside of the windshield made things worse before it improved them. She’d known it would, so she didn’t bother cursing. Weren’t a couple of old paper towels hiding under the passenger seat?

They were, and they weren’t too wet, either. She used them to wipe off the side windows, or as much of the side windows as she could reach. Once she finished, she started to wad them up so she could give them the old heave-ho once she got home. Thoughtfully, she caught herself. Kleenex was gone from the shelves. How long would paper towels last? These would dry out, and she could use them again. She shoved them back under the seat un-crumpled.

Start the windshield wipers. Turn them up to high. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d done that, but she sure needed to now. Turn on the headlights. If the wipers were going, you had to do that. It was the law. As a cop’s wife-yes, yes, dammit, a cop’s ex-wife-she not only knew about stuff like that, she took it seriously. And in a downpour like this, you needed to give the other jerks out there all the chance to see you they could get.

A ginormous SUV was shoehorned into the space on her left. As it always did, that made backing out a special delight. She wondered why the damn things had got so popular and stayed so popular so long. She shrugged. Nothing she could do about it now but escape this one without getting rear-ended.

She managed that. She pulled out of the parking lot and onto the street. She started back toward the condo, trying to look every which way at once. She’d been driving for thirty years. She’d seen from experience that people in L.A. didn’t know how to handle rain. They went too fast and they tailgated. If she hadn’t seen it for herself, the stories Colin brought home from the cop shop would have rammed the lesson home.

So she wasn’t astonished when things ground to a halt halfway home. Disgusted? Yes. Ticked off? You betcha. Astonished? No way. It was about time for the news station to run its traffic report. On the off chance, she hit the third button on the radio.

“-fic on the fives,” came out of the speakers. Freeway crashes-and there were a slew of them-came first. Then the announcer said, “And there’s a bad surface-street accident in San Atanasio, near the corner of Sword Beach and 169th Street. At least four cars are involved, and a light pole is down across the road. That’ll put a hitch in your git-along.”

He sounded absurdly cheerful. Of course, he wasn’t stuck in it. Louise was. She slid into the right lane, ignoring the horn from the asshole who didn’t care for it. Then she got off Sword Beach with almost as much relief as soldiers must have felt escaping the genuine article in 1944.

Stores and restaurants and gas stations and banks and all the other impedimenta of Western civilization fronted the avenue. As soon as you got away from it, things changed. White clapboard houses from before the war sat side by side wit faded stucco ones from not long after. The house where she’d raised her family with Colin was only a couple of miles away, but in a much better neighborhood.

A much whiter neighborhood, too. Louise might be living with a Hispanic man, but when she didn’t watch herself she still eyed faces darker than her own with suspicion. That was one more inheritance from being married to a cop, even if it was one she wished she could have escaped.

Not many white faces here. Mexicans, Salvadorans, blacks, Koreans, Filipinos… You could find everybody, and every kind of hole-in-the-wall eatery, in San Atanasio. A lot of lawns hadn’t been mown any time lately. Some of these men mowed other people’s lawns for a living, and had no time or energy to worry about their own. Before the rains started, the grass would have been yellow or brown. It greened up in a hurry, though. A few lawns had cars on them.

An Asian woman with an umbrella pushed a stroller along the beat-up sidewalk. A black guy who’d got up onto his roof with an aluminum ladder secured a blue plastic tarp with broken bricks to bandage a leak till the roofers showed up. That wouldn’t be till after it quit raining, of course, if it ever did.

Nobody paid any attention to her as she drove along. It wasn’t a neighborhood like South Central, where people stared at any white face. San Atanasio’s everybody included honkies, too. And when you were in a car, especially a car closed up against the rain, you were halfway towards invisibility anyhow.

She hit the brake as a boy on a bike zoomed out from nowhere. Plenty of kids ran here and there, rain or no rain. Well, okay. It was Saturday. No doubt their older brothers had scrawled the graffiti that marked fences and garage doors the way cat pee marked toms’ territories. San Atanasio had a graffiti-abatement program. You could call in and get them painted over for free. You could, but nobody here seemed to care.

And how long would a program like that last now that times were hard and getting harder? Probably not long. But then again, who could say where spray paint came from? If it wasn’t made here, the gangbangers would have trouble getting any more.

Would they go back to buckets and brushes? Or would they…? Cut it out, Louise told herself sternly. It wasn’t her worry. Even if it had been, she couldn’t do anything about it these days. Back when she was married to Colin, she’d fed him tips, and he’d used some of them. She was damned if she’d call him or e-mail him now. Unless it was about the kids, she wanted nothing to do with him. She didn’t want that, either, but she knew she was stuck with it.

If she turned left here, she ought to be able to get back on to Sword Beach beyond the accident. She turned-carefully. The rain was really coming down in buckets. You never saw rain like this in the fall. You hardly ever saw rain like this in January or February, as wet a season as L.A. had.

There was the stop sign at Sword Beach. Louise didn’t California it, the way she would have in good weather. It wasn’t only that she’d lost the immunity to tickets cops and cops’ spouses enjoyed in their hometown. Some jackass barreling along the street after going slow for so long was liable to cream her.

She made good time after she turned on to the thoroughfare. The accident receded in her rearview mirror. She saw a lot of smashed sheet metal, two black-and-whites, an ambulance, a fire engine, and a yellow truck with a cherrypicker from the Department of Public Works. A mess, all right. She supposed the Public Works guys were in charge of the downed light pole.

Back to the underground parking lot that had become as familiar as the old driveway used to be. She popped the trunk and grabbed as many sacks of groceries as she could carry. Rainwater dripped from the bumper. It rilled down to the center of the concrete expanse and vanished into a softball-sized drainage hole with a metal grate over it.

Louise got soaked all over again lugging the groceries up to the condo. “Oh, you poor thing!” Teo exclaimed when she came in. “Are there more? Let me fetch the rest.”

“Don’t bother. Why should you get wet, too?” Louise said. But he wasn’t listening to her. He plucked the keys out of her handbag and vanished down the stairs. He came back with the rest of the sacks a couple of minutes later. Sure as hell, he was as wet as if he’d just come out of the shower. The keys clanked when he put them back in her purse.

“Forty days and forty nights,” he said, more happily than the sentiment deserved.

Louise was already putting stuff in cupboards and the fridge. She missed her old kitchen; she didn’t have room to swing a cat in here. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” she agreed. “There was a godawful wreck on Sword Beach, too. I had to kinda go around it to get home.” She told him about it.

“Did you?” Teo said. Louise nodded. So did he, as if that explained something he’d wondered about. And it did: “I thought you were taking a while getting back.”

“Well, I was. Couldn’t help it,” Louise replied. “Hand me that chub of ground round, will you?” She stuck it in the freezer. “You can still get beef,” she said. “I know it’s fatty and everything”-Teo worried much more about nutrition than anybody she’d known before-“but you can still get it.”

“The earth is angry at us,” he said. “Who would have imagined a volcano could throw all our plans for a loss?”

He was a football fan. Louise… tolerated that. As for who would have imagined-well, Colin had been tiresome about it even before the supervolcano erupted. Of course, that was because his new squeeze worried about such things. People rubbed off on each other as they rubbed against each other. You couldn’t help it.

She smiled. Teo smiled back, and ran a hand through her wet hair. As far as Louise was concerned, she’d got the best of the bargain.

There was a technical term for what riding a bike through heavy rain was like. It bit the big one, was what it did. Marshall Ferguson had a plastic poncho that kept him at least partially dry. It bit the big one anyhow.

But so did the UCSB parking policy. There weren’t nearly enough spaces on campus. The ones that were there cost too bloody much. A bike was a lot more practical.

Most of the time. This past week, riding the bike to school tempted Marshall to take the bus instead. But he would have got drenched waiting for it, and it stopped three blocks from his place, so he would have got drenched walking to and from, too. You couldn’t win.

A car zoomed by. It kept its distance; most Santa Barbara drivers, unlike their counterparts in a lot of Southern California, at least had some notion that they shared the road with people on two wheels. That didn’t mean the tires didn’t pick up water and plaster it against Marshall’s side, then splash him in the face as the Toyota got ahead of him.

This happened at least half a dozen ties before he finally got to campus. As he did every day when he arrived, he wondered if the bus wasn’t a better idea after all. He wondered the same thing every time he pedaled home in the rain. Maybe I should suspect a trend, he thought. Somehow, though, he climbed aboard the bike every morning instead of walking to the bus stop. He always figured things would get better this next time. He might have been like that annoying song about tomorrow, tomorrow. Or he might have met one of the short definitions of insanity: doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result.

“Hey, at least I have fun,” he muttered as he escaped the nasty traffic at last. Whether getting cold, dirty water flung in his kisser from speeding Michelins honest to God counted as fun was something he’d worry about some other time.

Campus bike racks took up less room than parking lots did, but they filled up just as fast. He found a space, put his bicycle in it, and locked the machine to the rack. He used a lock and a chain his father approved of. He’d got el cheapos at first-and, one unhappy day his sophomore year, he’d had to take the bus back to his place after biking in that morning. His old man made him pay for the new bike, lock, and chain out of his own money, too. He hadn’t appreciated that. He also hadn’t had his bike stolen since.

Everybody else on campus looked as wet and miserable as he did. Well, almost everybody. A tweedy prof strolled along under an umbrella big enough to keep the supervolcano crater dry. The guy was almost bald on top, but his gray hair came down to his shoulders all the same. He’d probably grown it out when he was a kid around 1973, decided it looked way cool, and never bothered to change his mind in spite of changing styles and changing hairline. Tenure could do that to you. You stopped needing to change, so you didn’t. And if people snickered at you behind their hands, so what? You still had tenure.

Marshall wished students could get tenure. That was what he’d been trying to do all his years here. He liked imagining himself at fifty-five, paunchy, maybe balding, too, still living in an apartment with ratty furniture in Ellwood or Goleta, still soaking up units, still smoking dope, and still laying coeds whenever he got the chance. What more could anybody want?

He was mournfully aware it wouldn’t happen. For one thing, his father wouldn’t keep fronting him cash forever, and you couldn’t make enough money odd-jobbing it to pay for your place and your food and your car and all the other shit you needed, to say nothing of university fees. One more thing that bit. Bigtime, in fact. For another, even if his old man had been willing to leave him on the gravy train for the next thirty years, UCSB wasn’t. By rights, he should have graduated long since. He’d passed-way passed-the ordinary limits on time of attendance and total units. Adroit major-changing and a couple of petitions the administration had carelessly approved left him still working toward his sheepskin.

Pretty soon, though, he’d graduate no matter how much finagling, how much wiggling, or how much kicking and screaming he did. He hadn’t had many expectations before the supervolcano knocked the economy flat and stomped on it. Now life with a bachelor’s degree looked depressingly like going back to San Atanasio, back to his room at the old house, and sponging off his dad while he flailed around looking for work that wasn’t there.

Rain or no rain, people were out on campus collecting donations for all the millions who’d had to evacuate on account of the eruption. Cash, canned goods, old clothes-they’d take anything. Marshall had given them money. He couldn’t see how canned gooor beat-up jeans would make it from Santa Barbara to the Midwest.

He’d even asked about that. “They won’t,” an earnest guy with a Red Cross pin on his pocket replied. “But there are plenty of refugees at the western edge of the ashfall, too.”

“Oh.” Marshall hadn’t thought about that. The next day, he’d donated a can of roast-beef hash and a can of mandarin oranges. So they didn’t exactly go together. BFD.

Today, he walked past the wet volunteers. He was low on funds, and he hadn’t stuck any cans in his backpack. The rain lowered everyone’s spirits. The volunteers didn’t try very hard to get people to stop. They stood or sat under polyethylene sheeting that didn’t keep off enough of the rain, and looked as if they would have donated their souls to go somewhere warm and dry.

Marshall could actually do that. Campus buildings weren’t very warm, because thermostats got pushed way down after the eruption. But it wasn’t raining indoors. He could shed his poncho. He could even go into a men’s room and use a paper towel to dry off a little. New stickers in there warned DON’T WASTE PAPER GOODS! What wasn’t in short supply these days?

On to the room for the creative-writing class. Professor Bolger wasn’t what Marshall had expected. He made the students write. Well, surprise! But he also made them submit what they wrote: submit it to markets where they were competing against people who’d been freelancing longer than they’d been alive.

When Bolger had announced that requirement, a girl bleated, “We’ll get rejected!” Marshall would have beaten her to it if he hadn’t been exhaling at the moment instead of inhaling.

The prof answered a squawk with a question: “Suppose you do. How are you worse off?”

“Because!” the girl explained. Marshall nodded. That sure made sense to him.

“Listen to me,” Bolger said grimly. “You are here to learn something about writing. And you are here-with luck-to see if you can make money writing. To make a living at it, even, if you’re good enough and stubborn enough and lucky enough. You cannot possibly sell your work if you never submit it. And so… you will.”

“How often do you get rejected?” Marshall asked. He assumed Bolger did; if the answer came back never, what the hell was the guy doing teaching here? Why wasn’t he all over the best-seller list?

“I have a stack of slips this high.” The prof held his hands six inches apart. “And that doesn’t even count e-mails. Nobody’s going to like your work all the time. You have to get hardened to that. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It just means that editor didn’t like that piece that day.”

He made it sound simple and logical. Marshall still quailed at the idea of some hard-bitten, probably cigar-chewing, editor laughing at something he’d worked hard on. Logic would take you only so far.