Supervolcano All Fall Down(43)

“He sold it,” Kelly said. “Two and a half cents a word is better than nothing. It’s more than I’ve ever got for an article. In academic publishing, all they give you is the glory of your name in print—usually with a raft of coauths.”

“Yeah, well, you’re advancing human knowledge,” Colin Ferguson said, “not just—” He stopped short.

“Bullshitting?” Marshall suggested.

“You said it. I didn’t.” Dad wouldn’t, either, not with Kelly across the table from him. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t thinking it.

Kelly was less touchy about that kind of thing than her husband. “God knows there’s plenty of bullshit in the academic journals,” she said. “How about the ones for criminal justice?”

One reason you had to respect Dad was that he would ’fess up when you caught him out. “Well, you’ve got me there,” he admitted now. “You read those things, you’d think we caught every perp, and that about day after tomorrow we can talk all the bad guys into staying good guys and put ourselves out of business forever.” He smiled crookedly. “And rain makes applesauce.”

“Is that what they call pie in the sky?” Marshall had run into the phrase, but he wasn’t sure exactly how it worked.

His father nodded. “That’s what they call it, all right. Come the revolution, they used to say. Then the revolution came, and things were just as nasty afterwards as they were before. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” He got that from some old rock song.

“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others,” Kelly said, which sounded like agreement.

It also sounded familiar. “That’s from Animal Farm!” Marshall exclaimed. “I had to read it in Western Civ. It’s by the guy who wrote 1984, back when 1984 seemed a long way away.” It seemed a long way away to him, too—lost in the distant past like 1945 and 1865 and 1776 and 1066.

“The 1984 we got wasn’t too great, but it was better than the one Orwell wrote about,” Dad said.

“If you say so,” Marshall answered. He had no memories of 1984. Kelly would have been a little kid back then, so she wouldn’t remember much, either. For Dad, it seemed to feel like the week before last. Getting old, having all that stuff to remember, to try and keep track of, had to be a terrible thing.

Thinking about what a terrible thing it was and trying to work out exactly what kind of terrible thing it was must have shown on Marshall’s face. Kelly murmured, “He’s getting an idea for a story.”

“Or indigestion, one.” But Dad didn’t sound disgusted. Coming out with snide cracks was as much a reflex with him as breathing was. All the other cops Marshall knew—and he naturally knew more cops than most stoners ever wanted to—talked the same way. It had to help shield them from some of the nasty shit they ran into on the job.

“Well . . .” Marshall stood up.

He paid rent—a third of what he grossed. Not netted: grossed. Between babysitting and writing, he wasn’t grossing one whole hell of a lot. But he was a cash customer, so his old man didn’t ride him too hard. With most of his high school buddies scuffling even harder than he was, he didn’t feel embarrassed about living at home. Misery really did love company.

He went up to his room. He kept it tolerably clean and neat; he’d learned how taking care of himself at UCSB. It wasn’t so much for his sake. Like a lot of young males on their own, he didn’t mind living like a slob. What guys didn’t mind, though, grossed girls out. Some guys were too dumb to learn from failure and frustration. Marshall wasn’t.

No one in the house minded if he brought a girl upstairs. No one was going to pound on the door with the crime-scene tape while he had company. Things could have been worse. He kept telling himself as much. He kept looking at apartments, too. Unfortunately, landlords were less adaptable about rent than Dad was.

Earbuds and his iPod made the outside world go away. Or they would have, but the first song that came out was from Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles: a strange, droning chant called “Justinian II,” an Emperor of Byzantium who got his nose chopped off. Listening to it reminded Marshall how much he missed his older brother. He hadn’t seen Rob since before the supervolcano blew. Maine? OMG! Maine was the Devil’s personal icebox these days.

In the song, Justinian II came to a bad end. Singing about it, Justin Nachman sounded unwholesomely amused. He had a knack for that. Something more innocuous but less evocative shuffled onto the iPod next. Marshall closed his eyes and listened.