Supervolcano All Fall Down(104)

“Oh, give me a fucking break!” Marshall knew when he was whupped. “Look, I’ll try the tripewriter, okay? There! You happy now?”

“Dancing in the daisies.” If Dad was, his face and his voice hadn’t found out about it. He glanced east. He’d been doing that a lot lately; Marshall didn’t think he realized how much. He did say why, though: “Your sister will be back in town in a few days.”

“Yeah. How about that?” The last time Marshall’d seen Vanessa was when he’d helped load her U-Haul so she could move to Colorado to be with her rug merchant. Old Hagop hadn’t worked out any better than Bryce Miller did before him. She’d been goddamn lucky—and goddamn quick, which went with it—to get out of Denver alive when the supervolcano blew, too. Hundreds of thousands of people hadn’t.

Her father coughed. “God knows how long she’ll need to land work. Not a lot of it around. She may have to stay here for a while.”

“How about that?” Marshall repeated tonelessly. Vanessa would quarrel with Dad—they were too much alike not to. Marshall knew she’d quarrel with him, too. She always bossed him around, and he wasn’t going to take it the way he had when he was a kid. He tried a question of his own: “How’s Kelly like the idea?”

“She’s not jumping up and down about it,” Dad allowed. Marshall would have bet she wasn’t. He didn’t think his stepmom had ever actually met his sister. Vanessa would quarrel with her, too. Maybe Vanessa didn’t quarrel with everybody, but she came pretty close. Sighing, Dad went on, “We don’t always do what we want to do. Sometimes we do what we’ve got to do.”

“Right.” Marshall left it there. Since he had no steady work and was living here, he didn’t see how he could claim having Vanessa do the same thing wouldn’t fly. But he sure thought so.

“It will work out,” his father insisted. If that wasn’t the triumph of hope over experience, then Marshall didn’t know what the hell it was. A ham sandwich, maybe. Dad lumbered out of his room, shaking his head like a bear bedeviled by bees.

For lack of anything better to do, Marshall fiddled with the typewriter. When he ran in a sheet of paper, it came up crooked. He messed with the little chromed levers till he found the one that loosened things and let him straighten it.

He started typing. Christ, the thing was noisy! Clack, clack, clackety-clack! And you had to punch every key hard. With his index fingers, he managed okay right away. His pinkies, though, should have done more barbell work. He had to make himself mash them down. When he goofed, he couldn’t just run the cursor back and retype. He had to fix the mistake. Somewhere—maybe at the pawnshop where he’d found the typewriter—Dad had come up with a little bottle of correction fluid.

The stuff smelled as if it ought to get you high. The fine print on the label swore it was nonaddictive. With a stink like that, it was missing a hell of a chance if it was.

Marshall finished a page and then, to his surprise, another one. This antiquated gadget wasn’t what he was used to, but it might not be so bad. It was kind of like Diplomacy compared to World of Warcraft. Bells and whistles? Fuhgeddaboutit. But you could manage without them. If you didn’t already know about them, you wouldn’t even miss them.

“Fuck me,” Marshall said softly, and scribbled a note to himself. There might be a story in that—however he wound up writing it.





XVI




Las Cruces behind Vanessa. Snow on the mountains ahead of her. They weren’t great big mountains—nothing like the Rockies when you saw them from Denver—and didn’t look as if they ought to have snow so far down them. This was only a little north of the Mexican border, after all, and it was allegedly spring.

No matter what the season, they had snow halfway down them. On the other half, streaked and patchy now but still there, lay the gray-brown of volcanic ash, a color she knew much too well and hated much too much.

A red light on her dashboard flashed to life. Alarm flamed in her—flamed and then faded. This one was shaped like a gas pump, and warned her of nothing worse than that she was getting low. She already knew that. She’d been sending the fuel gauge baleful looks since well before she rolled through Las Cruces.

Here came an offramp, with a truck stop by it. Vanessa pulled off I-10. She’d get gas for the car. And she’d buy some lunch. With the kind of food you could find at places like this, she’d probably get gas for herself, too.

She’d never had anything to do with truck stops till she drove the U-Haul from L.A. to Denver. On the way there, she’d discovered they were less awful than she’d always thought. Not great, necessarily, but less awful. Nowadays, you took whatever you could get, because too goddamn often you couldn’t get anything at all.