Supervolcano All Fall Down(103)

“Hunh!” Her father couldn’t have snorted better than this guy did. “You listen to the bullshit we hear here, you wouldn’t go of course.”

“You sound like a cop, all right,” Vanessa said.

“Yeah, well, you’d know, wouldn’t you?”

“Can I go on, then?” Vanessa itched to floor the gas pedal. If she drove fast enough, maybe she could get back to L.A. before this piece of junk crapped out on her. Maybe.

“I . . . suppose so,” the uniformed man answered reluctantly. “If you haven’t got a place to stay and a job to look forward to, though, you’re a damn fool for heading that way.”

“The last place I had to stay was Camp fucking Constitution,” Vanessa said through clenched teeth. “Whatever I end up with in L.A.—even if I sleep under a goddamn freeway overpass and dumpster-dive for dinner—it can’t be worse than that. NFW.”

“Hunh!” the guy said again, even more dubiously than before. But he stepped back and jerked a thumb to the west. “Go ahead, then. You’ll find out.”

Vanessa didn’t waste time thanking him. She mashed the accelerator with her foot. Smoke spurted from the Toyota’s tailpipe. So what? she thought, and burst into more verses of song nobody but her could hear: “California, here I come! Right back where I started from!” Had anybody from Stephen Foster to Irving Berlin to John Lennon to Bob Dylan to Stephen Sondheim ever penned a finer lyric? She didn’t believe it, not even for a minute. She sang it again, louder yet.

* * *

It wasn’t as if Marshall had never seen a typewriter before. He had. Old people kept them around as souvenirs of bygone days. A few offices even had electric ones, for dealing with carbon-copy forms. But he’d never expected to discover one on his desk next to the iMac.

“Found it in a pawnshop on San Atanasio Boulevard,” his father said, not without pride. “You’ve been bitching about how you have trouble writing when the power goes out. Well, now you can.”

“Yippee skip,” Marshall said. “Um—most places these days want you to submit your stuff in Word or RTF. How am I supposed to get those out of this—thing?” It was a Royal manual portable, what a college student might have used in a 1970s dorm room.

Dad exhaled through his nose, which meant he was bent out of shape—he must’ve thought Marshall would fall on the ancient machine with a glad cry. He sounded hyperpatient as he answered, “You can get words out of it, right?”

“Maybe.” If Marshall seemed dubious, well, he was. He poked one of the keys. It went down partway, then stopped—he’d taken up the slack, or whatever. He poked again, quite a bit harder. Clack! The key hit the black rolling pin (he supposed it had a real name, but what that was he didn’t know). The carriage advanced a space. For somebody used to effortless computer keyboards . . . “I dunno, Dad. It’s got a monster touch.”

“You’ll get used to that,” his father said, though how he knew it or whether he knew it Marshall couldn’t have guessed. “And you can get words out of it. People got words out of them for more than a hundred years.”

“Words, yeah, but not Microsuck Word.”

Dad waved that aside. “Incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial,” he said, like a lawyer objecting in court. “So you send somebody a hard-copy manuscript. If he likes it and he’s got power, he can scan it to OCR and get his own Word file. And if he doesn’t have power, he won’t be able to do anything with Word or RTF files any which way.”

Marshall opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. He couldn’t think of anything to say to that. After a moment, he tried, “Suppose I get something halfway done on the computer while we’ve got electricity, but I do the rest on this—thing?”

“Then you scan it and clean it up and do your twenty-first-century thing on it.” Dad had all the answers. He also had all the reasons: “But you can’t use ‘The power’s out again’ for an excuse so you don’t write. If you’ve got to, you can use legal tablets and a ballpoint.”

“You’re shitting me!” Marshall’s experiments along those lines had not been happy ones. He’d tried, yeah, but he thought writing by hand was as primitive as branding. Some people thought branding was cool—one step past tats, they called it. He couldn’t imagine anyone finding writing by hand cool.

But Dad just shook his head. “Nope. Pen and paper were good enough for Shakespeare and Abe Lincoln and dudes like that. I know they aren’t in your league as a literary artist, but—”