He spent the next little while reading his students’ midterms. Any hope he might have had that the disaster could somehow make students write better had foundered during his gig at Junipero High. They were going to write things like it’s for its and effect for affect (and the other way around) and even you’re for your, and you couldn’t do one goddamn thing about it. Half their alleged sentences looked as if they came from text messages.
Bryce was (almost) resigned to that. Languages did change. Thucydides would commit seppuku if he saw what Greek looked like these days. The tongue of Caesar and Cicero and Virgil had morphed into Spanish and French and Italian and Pig Latin. Buck the trend and you were shoveling shit against the tide.
But why did so many of the kids sound as if they’d never had a thought in their lives? They could give back the textbook, and sometimes even chunks of his lectures. Give them back, yes. Analyze them? Draw conclusions? Like the number five in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, those were right out.
He waved a bluebook—a C+ bluebook—at Susan. “I can’t flunk them all, no matter how much they deserve it. People would talk,” he said. They wouldn’t just talk, either. They’d fire his nitpicking ass for disturbing the peace. “If this is what’s up and coming, the country’s in deep kimchi.”
“You’re right,” she said. “You know what else, though?”
“What?”
“Everybody in college could turn into a cross between Shakespeare and Einstein tomorrow, and the country’d still be in deep kimchi.”
He thought about that. He didn’t need long. He nodded. “Well, you’re right,” he answered. He couldn’t think of anything worse to say.
• • •
Marshall Ferguson clacked away on the manual typewriter his old man had found him. He didn’t like it for beans, but it let him write when power outages left his Mac blind, deaf, and dumb.
He had all kinds of reasons for disliking the typewriter. If you’d learned at a computer keyboard, typing on a manual meant practically spraining your fingers every time you pressed down. That was bad enough. Worse was how user-friendly a typewriter wasn’t.
If you made a typo on the Mac, a couple of keystrokes and it was gone. It you decided to rework a sentence, you selected it, deleted it, and rebuilt it to your heart’s new desire. If you needed to put this paragraph above that one instead of below, Command-X and Command-V were all it took.
If you needed to do that stuff on a typewriter . . . He had a circular, gritty eraser with a green nylon brush sticking out of the metal holder for disposing of small mistakes. Correction fluid eradicated words, sometimes even sentences. For anything bigger than that, you needed to retype the whole stinking page, even if you were down near the bottom.
It sucked, was what it did. Bigtime.
Almost anything was better than retyping a page. He’d got to the point where, when he could see trouble coming ahead, he’d fiddle with things in longhand till he got them the way he wanted them. Then he’d transcribe his scribbles. The method wasn’t elegant. It was butt-ugly, in fact. But it worked. He figured anything that let him turn out tolerably neat copy on a typewriter put him ahead of the game.
When the house had power, he would scan his typewritten pages to OCR. The copy that produced wasn’t perfect—the scanner didn’t care for the manual typewriter’s imperfections. But it was, to borrow one of his father’s favorite pungent phrases, close enough for government work. He could clean it up and then go ahead on the computer till the next time it went dark without warning. He learned to save very often. He never lost more than about a third of a page of text.
The next interesting question was whether the latest story was worth doing. It was about a guy whose friends kept looking at him out of the corner of their eye because he’d snitched when he found out somebody he knew was embezzling from the place where he worked.
Whether the story was worth doing in a dramatic sense mattered only so much. He knew damn well he’d finish this one. What he didn’t know was whether it was more exorcism or expiation.
If Tim hadn’t told him he’d bought dope from Darren Pitcavage, and if he hadn’t told his dad . . . If that hadn’t happened, Darren’s father would still be alive. He’d still be chief of the San Atanasio Police Department. And, when the urge struck him, he’d still be raping and strangling little old ladies all over the South Bay.
Everybody was glad the South Bay Strangler was out of business. Everybody was especially glad the South Bay Strangler wasn’t running the San Atanasio PD any more. In the ordinary run of things, passing on the information that made the South Bay Strangler shuffle off this mortal coil should have made Marshall a minor hero, or not such a minor one.
But he smoked dope. He’d ratted out a dealer. He’d never come right out and told his friends he’d done that, but they could add two and two even when they were baked. He knew what those sidelong glances he kept talking about in the story were like. He knew in the most intimate possible way—he’d been on the receiving end of too many of them.
His main character—a guy quite a bit like him—wondered if he’d have any friends left by the time things finally blew over. Marshall knew that feeling, too: knew it much too well. If he worked it out on the page and on the computer monitor, maybe he could work it through inside his head as well. Maybe.
He obviously couldn’t talk about it with his buds. He couldn’t talk about it with his father, either. Colin Ferguson just said, “You did the right thing.” He was a hundred percent convinced of that. No doubt his certainty was meant to kill Marshall’s doubts.
Only it didn’t. It made them worse. Marshall was nowhere near a hundred percent convinced he’d done the right thing. Having somebody—especially somebody of the cop persuasion—tell him he’d absolutely done the right thing made him believe it less, not more.
His older brother might have understood him better. But Rob had been in Maine ever since the eruption. Maine was dimly, distantly connected to the rest of the USA a couple of months a year, when some of the roads sort of thawed. The rest of the time, it might as well have fallen off the map, or back into the nineteenth century.
And Rob went out and did things. He didn’t worry about them as much as Marshall did. In a million years, Marshall wouldn’t have had the nerve to try to pay his bills as a bass player in a band that would never make anyone forget Green Day or even Weezer any time soon. Marshall enjoyed hanging out with the guys in Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles. He enjoyed getting wasted with them. Hitting the road with them? That was another story.
So maybe Rob would have just told him to get over it and to get on with it. Good advice. Marshall knew as much. But he would have bet Rob couldn’t tell him how to go about it.
He didn’t ask his sister. Vanessa wouldn’t even see there was a problem. She was about herself, first, last, and always (well, sometimes about whatever guy she was with, but she eventually decided each one in turn didn’t measure up to what she figured she was entitled to). Besides, she had her nose out of joint at him right now because he kept writing and even selling stories every so often, where she talked a good game but never applied her behind to the seat of a chair long enough to produce anything.
Which left Kelly, pretty much by default. His dad’s second wife wasn’t the mother he should have had. She was too young for that, and too sensible. But she did seem like the older sister he might have had, all the more so when he compared her to the one biology had actually stuck him with.
And, like him, she was home most of the time. Taking care of a baby would do that for you—or rather, to you. She didn’t mind listening to him. She said, “Hey, you could talk about the horses in next year’s Kentucky Derby and I’d listen to you.”
“You don’t know anything about the Kentucky Derby,” Marshall said. “Uh, do you?”
“Nope.” Kelly shook her head—carefully, because she had Deborah on her shoulder. “But the other choice is talking about poopy diapers. I’ve got to change the
goddamn things. I don’t want to talk about ’em.”
“I hear you.” Marshall had changed some for his half-sister. Earlier, he’d changed some for his half-brother, his mother’s child by the guy for whom she’d left Dad. Both kids were related to him. They weren’t related to each other at all. How weird was that?
Kelly didn’t try to tell him that of course he’d done the right thing when he squealed on Darren Pitcavage. She saw more shades of gray in the world than his father did. “I don’t blame you for feeling funny,” she said. “How can you help it? You didn’t know all this was going to drop on your head. Nobody knew. Nobody had any idea. Darren’s dad had been covering his tracks for a long time, and he was good at it.”
“I guess,” Marshall said. “It was even worse before we found out why he killed himself, you know? I thought getting Darren busted was what pushed him over the edge, like. That made me feel really great.”
“Colin thought the same thing,” Kelly answered. “Don’t ever tell him I said this, but for a while I was worried about what he might do.”
“Urk.” Marshall hadn’t thought about that. If there was a rock of stability in his life, it was his father. You didn’t want to imagine that the rock could crack. Cops did kill themselves, even without reasons as good as Mike Pitcavage’s. And somebody’d said that anything that could happen could happen to you. All the same . . .
Kelly nodded. “Urk is right. I couldn’t say anything, I couldn’t do anything. If he decided to, I couldn’t even stop him. Too many chances away from me, too many ways for a cop to go, and to go quick. That was a bad time.”
“Uh-huh.” Marshall sent her an admiring glance. “You didn’t let on that anything was bugging you.”
“I was scared to,” she said. “What would that do? Just make things worse. That was how it looked to me.” Deborah made a small noise. One corner of Kelly’s mouth turned down. “And it looks like this baby’s never going to fall asleep.”
“That’s what babies are for, right? Driving grownups crazy, I mean.” Marshall stopped in surprise, listening to himself. He’d just included himself among grownups, because Deborah sure could drive him crazy.
When he was a teenager, he’d desperately wanted to get older faster so he could be a grownup himself. Once he slid past twenty, though, he’d tried to put off the evil day as long as he could. He’d stretched his time at UC Santa Barbara as far as the university would let him, and then another twenty minutes besides. But they’d finally shoved the sheepskin into his sweaty hand no matter how little he wanted it.
And here he was, out in the world. Yes, he was living in his dad’s house. No, he didn’t have steady work. Even before the supervolcano blew, though, he’d shared that boat with plenty of others his age. He shared it with many more now. He figured he was a grownup anyhow—at least, if you compared him to a baby who didn’t want to go to sleep.
III
V
anessa Ferguson was happy. Oh, not perfectly happy. That would have been too much to expect from anybody, and much too much to expect from her. Mr. Gorczany, the guy who ran the company she worked for, was a goose twit, and too big a goose twit to realize what a goose twit he was. The job was beneath her talents, and didn’t pay her anywhere near what she thought she was worth. But it did pay her enough to let her escape from the house where she’d grown up, the house she’d moved back to when she returned to SoCal. Escaping was nothing but a relief. She and her father’s second wife hadn’t hit it off, which was putting things mildly. And her kid brother seemed perfectly content to grow moss there. Marshall might still be living at home when he hit middle age. It would serve him right if he was, too.
Her own apartment wouldn’t have been enough to bring her happiness, not by itself. It wasn’t big. It wasn’t new. It wasn’t cheap. Too right it wasn’t cheap! If Mr. Gorczany had paid her what she was worth to his miserable outfit, she wouldn’t have worried about that so much. But he paid her what he paid her, and worry she did.
When she was in the ratty old expensive apartment with Bronislav, though, she didn’t care about any of that stuff. She didn’t even care that she thought Dad’s second wife was a first-class bitch. All she cared about was Bronislav. He was what made her happy.
Oh, she’d felt that way the first few months with Bryce Miller, too, before she woke up to what a loser he really was. Back when she was still in high school, before she met Bryce, she’d been head over heels over a guy named Peter. She’d lost her cherry to Peter’s peter, as a matter of fact. She’d been sure she would bear his children . . . till she lived with him for a little while. That cured her. She’d been glad—eager!—to jump to Bryce once Peter wore thin.
After Bryce, there was Hagop. Vanessa violently shook her head, the way she always did when she thought of Hagop. It wasn’t just that the miserable rug merchant had been a year or two older than her own old man. She’d moved to Denver on account of him, dammit. That put her squarely in the line of fire when the supervolcano blew. All kinds of horrible things had happened to her on account of that.
Odds were Hagop was dead, of course. Almost all the people who’d lived in Denver were. Only a few had got out—the ones who’d fled first and fastest. She was one of them.
She didn’t care about Hagop, not any more. Being dead was about what he deserved. Lousy schmuck. Lousy schmuck with his lousy schmuck . . .
Bronislav, now, Bronislav was different. Vanessa’s sharp features softened as much as they ever did. Bronislav was the Real Thing. She was sure of it. (She’d also been sure of it with Peter, and with Bryce. And she’d done her best to be sure of it with Hagop as well, though even she’d suspected then she was trying to talk herself into it. She remembered none of her earlier certainties now.)
Bronislav Nedic was different all kinds of ways. Immigrant from what had been Yugoslavia. Looks somewhere between Nicolas Cage and an Orthodox icon. Big, dark, sad eyes. Beard thick as a pelt—the beard was the first thing she’d noticed about him, there in that New Mexico truck-stop coffee shop.
He had a musical Serbian accent. God help you, though, if you called it a Serbo-Croatian accent. To Bronislav, anything that had to do with Croats came from the dark side of the Force. He’d been a freedom fighter when Yugoslavia came unglued. He had some scary scars to prove it. He also had a tat on the back of his right hand—a cross with four C’s, two forward and two backward, in the right angles. In Serbian’s Cyrillic alphabet, those C’s were S’s, and they stood for Only unity will save the Serbs.
What had been Yugoslavia was now half a dozen little countries. Serbs dominated two and a third of them. So much for unity. And Bronislav, instead of plying his trade with Kalashnikov and RPG, was a long-haul trucker in America, going back and forth along I-10 to bring Los Angeles little pieces of the Everything it so desperately needed.
He was back in town now. He’d sent her a postcard and an e-mail and a text letting her know he was on the way. With the power grid so erratic, snailmail had advantages over its electronic rivals. It might not get there right away, but it would get there.
Vanessa kept telling herself she needed to buy a satellite phone. Then she wouldn’t need to worry about whether the local plastic pseudotrees had power. But satellite phones dropped calls, too: the demand on the satellites was much worse than anyone had dreamt it could be before the eruption. And satellite plans didn’t cost an arm and a leg. Like everything else these days, they cost an arm and both legs.
Bronislav usually brought stuff into San Pedro. That and Long Beach were the L.A. area’s two main ports. Lots of warehouses and major distribution centers were there. And it worked out well for him another way—San Pedro had a sizable Serbian community.
It also had a sizable Croatian community. So far as Vanessa knew, they didn’t go around firebombing each other or blowing up each other’s churches. They limited their ancient feud to sneers and barroom brawls. Wasn’t America a wonderful place?
Now that Bronislav had a lady friend in
San Atanasio, getting in to San Pedro wasn’t so convenient for him. He had to ride the bus up or Vanessa had to come down. He almost always came north. Her apartment might be cramped, but most of the hotels in San Pedro were only a short step up from flophouses (some of them were flophouses). They catered to sailors and truckers and hookers, not to producers or Silicon Valley gazillionaires.
Vanessa glanced at her watch. A quarter to seven, plus or minus a few minutes—he ought to be on his way now. The watch was a windup job she’d taken for herself while scavenging in Kansas for the Feds. It might not keep perfect time, but it didn’t need a battery or a signal from the outside to work.
Like manual typewriters, windup watches were popular again. Unlike manual typewriters—Vanessa thought of Marshall’s annoying monster—windup watches weren’t annoying . . . except when you forgot to wind one and it lied to you about the time. That usually happened just when you most needed the truth, of course.
Footsteps on the stairs. Heavy footsteps. Bronislav was a big man. He could move quiet as a cat. He’d learned how in the fighting in Bosnia-Herzegovina. “Learn or die,” he’d said. Most of the time, though, he didn’t bother. This was America, where he didn’t have to sneak.
That might not be him, of course. The apartment building had a secured entrance, sure. With the power out at least half the time, though, it just stood open. So did most buildings’ security doors. Burglaries were way up.
A knock on the door. Four knocks on the door, in fact: one for each C/S in the Serbs’ patriotic motto. Vanessa’s heart leaped. Before she opened up, though, she peered through the little spy-eye in the door. Yes, that was Bronislav. He had a newspaper-wrapped package under one arm.
Things Fall Apart Page 4