Supervolcano All Fall Down(4)

From what Kelly said, the Yellowstone supervolcano had belched out over six hundred cubic miles of rock—say, a hundred times as much as Krakatoa, which wasn’t east of Java. There’d been a couple of years of spectacular sunsets in the 1880s. They’d probably last longer yet this time around.

How long they would last wasn’t the first thing in Colin’s mind as he knocked on the door. He wondered if his son had ever used one of those over-the-top sunsets as background music, so to speak, to help get himself laid. If Marshall hadn’t, he’d missed one hell of a chance.

He opened the door now. He had on slacks, a dress shirt, and a tie: not his usual choice in clothes, but you were supposed to spiff yourself up under your robes. He was an inch taller than Colin’s five-eleven, a good deal slimmer, and also sharper-featured. Of Colin’s three kids, the one who most resembled him was Vanessa. Somehow, though, on her it looked good.

“Hey, Dad. Hi, Kelly.” Marshall shook hands with Colin and hugged his new stepmother. Then he moved aside. “C’mon in.”

The apartment was imperfectly neat. A sweater lay across one arm of the sofa. The kitchen table was all over papers. (Kelly worked the same way, which made Colin a little more willing to cut his youngest some slack.) Colin would have bet dishes filled the sink, though he didn’t go check it out. A stretch in the service might have worked wonders for Marshall. It wasn’t the first time that had crossed Colin’s mind.

His son grabbed one of those papers and held it up. “Here—check this out,” he said.

Colin tilted his head back to look through the bottom half of his bifocals. Kelly just leaned forward; that indignity of age hadn’t caught up with her yet. The sheet Marshall was showing off looked like a printout of some e-mail.

It said something called Storytastic was buying a piece called “Sunset Beach” and would be sending a check for $286.65, which was five cents a word. The story would be going up on their Web site as soon as Marshall made a couple of what sounded like tiny changes.

This time, Kelly hugged him. “Awesome!” she said. “That’s twice now!”

“Pretty amazing, huh?” Marshall said.

“It is.” Colin wasn’t kidding. Marshall had sold another short story near the end of the year before. Anybody, Colin figured, could do it once. Well, maybe not anybody, but lots of people. Doing it more than once probably took both talent and stubbornness: a good combination. He said, “This isn’t as much per word as you got for the first one, is it?”

“Colin!” Kelly sent him a reproachful look.

“You would remember that, wouldn’t you?” Marshall said. Colin only shrugged; remembering details was part of his job. His son continued. “I sent this one to New Fictions, too, but they turned me down. So I tried some other places, and it stuck here. A nickel a word’s not bad.”

“Okay. Congratulations, believe me.” Colin set a hand on Marshall’s shoulder. The kid hadn’t let getting rejected keep him from sending his story out again: more than once, by the sound of it. Stubbornness, sure as hell. And Marshall was bound to be right about the pay rate. Colin had stayed friends with Bryce Miller, Vanessa’s old boyfriend, even after she dumped him. Bryce was a published poet, and had yet to be paid in anything more than copies.

Of course, Bryce’s poems were modeled after Greek pastorals from the third century B.C. That was one way to use the Ph.D. he’d just earned, but not one likely to make Hollywood start banging on his door and seducing him with armored trucks full of cash.

“What’s ‘Sunset Beach’ about?” Colin asked. It had to have more to do with here and now than the stuff Bryce turned out.

Sure enough, Marshall answered, “A guy who’s just graduating from college and trying to figure out what to do with himself when he’s got like zero chance of landing any kind of real job.”

“Sounds cheerful,” Colin said. Marshall’s first sale—which still hadn’t seen print, though he’d gone over the galleys by now—had been about a college student caught in the middle of his parents’ divorce. If he could write about his own life and get paid for it . . . well, that was a real job, if he could do it often enough. Not the smallest if in the world, not even close.

Still, other prospects were bleak. Nothing like getting the country’s midsection trashed to shoot the economy right behind the ear. The stock market had fallen and couldn’t get up. The crash wasn’t so spectacular as 1929, but things sure didn’t look good. And, with the weather going to hell in a refrigerated handbasket, heaven only knew when, or if, things would ever straighten out.