found a home at a Web site that put the munificent sum of two and a half cents a word in his PayPal account.
Two and a half cents a word wouldn’t make anybody rich. Marshall knew that only too well. In case he didn’t, his father rubbed his nose in it: “I don’t think you’ll have Tom Clancy or Bill Gates trimming your oleanders any time soon.”
“Right,” Marshall said, and then, “Pass the potatoes, please.” Was Dad cynical because he’d been a cop for too long, or had he become a cop because he was already cynical? Could you answer
“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
“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.
After a while, he shut it off and started noodling on a story. Not much inspiration, no. Maybe perspiration would do. One thing sure: the elves wouldn’t write it for him, no matter how much he wished they would. Wondering why they didn’t make elves the way they used to, he soldiered on. Once he finished the first draft, he could read it over and see just what he had, or if he had anything at all.
VII
Dwip. Dwip. Dwip. Bryce Miller didn’t know whether everybody who worked for the Department of Water and Power sounded like Elmer Fudd impersonating a leaky faucet. He did know he wasn’t the only one, though.
And he knew the noise fit the weather much too well. The dirty-gray heavens dwipped dwizzle as he pedaled his bicycle toward the bus stop. He couldn’t afford to drive downtown, not with gas through the roof and into the ionosphere-and not with most stations showing red flags to let people know they had no gas at any price. Long, long lines-old farts talked about 1979-marked the ones with a little to sell.
It wasn’t supposed to rain in L.A. in June, not even a little bit. Well, it hadn’t been supposed to. Mother Nature was reading a new rulebook these days. Bryce rode on, keeping a wary eye out for cars. Not so many of them on the road these days, and a lot more bikes like his. Some of the people on the two-wheelers were as nonchalant as if they’d been doing it for years. A few might even actually have been doing it before the eruption-a few, but not many. Others looked as if they’d borrowed some kid’s bike they almost remembered how to handle.
Bryce figured he fit somewhere in the middle. It
The bus stop on Braxton Bragg Boulevard had a big new parking rack bolted to the sidewalk next to the bench. Bryce chained his bike to the steel. The stop, like a lot of others, also had a new armed guard: a guy who looked as if he was recently back from combat on distant shores and had had trouble finding work here in the States. Bryce nodded to him. The guard gravely dipped his head in response. No, he wouldn’t have got that polite anywhere but in the military.
Other people already stood at the stop. Bryce nodded to them, too; he saw a lot of them several times a week. The rather cute Hispanic chick, the hulking black guy, the Asian fellow who never quit texting. . They’d been regulars on this route longer than he had.
Up grumbled the bus. People stepped away from the curb as it neared, not wanting to get splashed. The doors hissed open. They filed aboard. The black guy found a seat, then lifted his hat. He had a half pint of Southern Comfort under there.
The bus took off. A couple of blocks later, of course, it stopped again. More people got on. By the time it
