Supervolcano All Fall Down(117)

Marshall pointed that out, with profane embellishments. Dad went right on looking as if he were paddling along in the Mississippi, waiting for a fish to swim by so he could bite it in half. “I know it’s hard to find anything,” he said when Marshall ran down. “But you’ve got to try. Vanessa’s trying.”

“She sure is,” Marshall agreed. Having his big sister home again had not proved an unmixed blessing.

Dad stopped doing reptile impersonations and looked quite humanly pained at the pun. “She’s looking for work,” he said, so there could be no possible misunderstanding. “She’s looking hard, too. The least you can do is try as hard as she does.”

“She’s not writing,” Marshall said.

“Look, son, it’s great that you’ve sold some things. I’m proud of you for that. I’m bust-my-buttons proud,” his father said. “But you aren’t exactly James Michener yet.”

“I hope not! Isn’t he dead?” Marshall said.

“You’re not George Carlin, either, and he’s dead, too,” Dad said. There he surprised his son—Marshall would have bet he’d name Bill Cosby. Even dead, even after a long, successful career alive, Carlin seemed too edgy, too freaky, to appeal to a cop. You never could tell, could you? Dad went on, “Neither one of them died broke, though, and neither one of them needed to scuffle for an outside job. Till you don’t need to, you’re gonna scuffle.”

So Marshall scuffled. Every once in a while, he got a day’s work moving stuff off a truck and into a warehouse or out of the back of a store and into a truck. That didn’t happen very often, though. Most of the guys who got those jobs were browner than he was and spoke Spanish. The people who did the hiring figured those guys were less likely to piss and moan about doing hard work, wouldn’t complain about their shitty wages, and wouldn’t start yelling about workers’ compensation if they screwed up their backs.

They were right, too. They knew it. So did Marshall. And so did the brown, Spanish-speaking guys who got hired instead of him. Their part of the deal was to do as they were told and shut up about it.

He tried to get a job that would let him write. By now, he had enough sales to put together a decent résumé. No large American corporation seemed to be looking for anybody who could turn out a respectable short story, though. No small American business seemed to be looking for anyone with that skill set, either.

Jesus H. Christ, no escaped lunatics seemed to be looking for somebody who could crank out a respectable short story. Well, no: a few lunatics remained on the loose. They ran the e-publications and print magazines that occasionally—much too occasionally, as far as Marshall was concerned—bought the stories he did write.

He kept sending stuff to Playboy and The New Yorker. You sold something to a market like that, it paid no-shit eating money. Of course, all the writers in the world who used English knew as much (so did some who had to get their stuff translated from Japanese or Russian or Hebrew). The top mags could pick and choose. They could, and they did. Marshall got rejected over and over again.

He hated getting rejected. He never would have submitted the first story that sold if Professor Bolger hadn’t required it. In high school, he hadn’t dated much because he hated it when girls turned him down. This was the same kind of thing, and the noes hurt just about as much.

He had dated. Eventually, he got too horny not to. When a girl let him get lucky, the reward made up for all the failures that came before it. Now he felt the same way when an editor let him get lucky.

Here, for once, he’d gone someplace Vanessa wouldn’t follow—or wouldn’t push ahead of him. Vanessa could get into a revolving door behind you and come out in front. But she said, “I couldn’t stand people telling me no all the goddamn time.”

“They don’t tell you no all the time,” Marshall said. “Sometimes they tell you yes. That’s the payoff.”

She shook her head. “Too much of one, not enough of the other.”

He didn’t want to argue with her, so he let it alone. Arguing was her thing, not his. She’d argue at the drop of a hat, and she’d drop the hat herself if she needed to. But deliberately put herself in a spot where she might get rejected? That, no.

Of course, when she dated she was the one getting the attention, not the one giving it. She wasn’t used to coming on to somebody and getting shot down in flames. Maybe that had something to do with how she felt. Or maybe I’m full of crap, Marshall thought. It wouldn’t be for the first time if he was.