Supervolcano All Fall Down(114)

Bryce nodded. “I know that song.” The classical holdings here were severely limited, too.

“Sure.” She smiled at him. “If you didn’t know what I was going through, I’d drive you totally up the wall instead of just three-quarters of the way.”

“Yeah, right,” he answered. “Like I’m not already up—or off—the wall any which way.” Susan thought that was funny. Bryce wished he could have said it without dredging up uncomfortable memories. Vanessa had had no idea how crazy he’d get when he was studying for his orals. How could she have? She’d never done anything like that. She’d bailed out of college before she graduated and started working instead. That had hassles of its own—Bryce discovered some of them later—but they weren’t the same hassles. The differences had only made for more friction between them.

He wondered how Vanessa was doing. He’d have to ask Colin next time he talked to him or e-mailed him. He hadn’t done that as often as he should have since he moved to Nebraska. Hell, he hadn’t done it as often as he should have after he moved up to the Valley and couldn’t get over to the Ferguson place so easily any more.

Susan had said something. She stood there, waiting expectantly for him to answer. Woolgathering about your ex was not a good thing to do, not when it made you zone out on your current squeeze. “Sorry.” Bryce spread his hands in what he hoped would be apology enough. “Brain fuzz.”

“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.”