Supervolcano: All Fall Down

thoroughly grim.

“Oh, wow,” Bryce said.

“Yeah.” Moretti nodded. “You were talking about how things are these days yourself. Some people watch too much poker on TV. They think they can bluff their way through anything. Maybe they hoped they could stay half a chapter ahead of the kids the first year, and then they’d have it psyched out. With priests on the faculty, though, that doesn’t fly.”

“I guess it wouldn’t,” Bryce allowed. “I can do the Latin. I can do the history, too. They make you learn it at UCLA.” He probably would have to stay half a chapter ahead of the kids for some of the more modern stuff, but that was one more thing he didn’t say.

“Professor Harriman thinks you can,” Moretti said.

Even though Bryce hadn’t expected anything else-he wouldn’t have listed his chairperson as a reference if he had-hearing that still warmed him. It also told him his chances of landing this job were pretty decent. Sure as hell, Moretti started talking about money, and about benefits. No, neither was on a par with what Bryce had now.

“When will I hear back from you?” he asked. Do I really want to do this?

“Within a week, I expect,” the older man replied. “We do have two or three other people who we think are legit, and we need to talk to them, too.”

“Okay. Fair enough.” Bryce said the polite thing. Whether he meant it. . As far as he was concerned, all those other people could geh kak afen yam, one of the handful of Yiddish phrases he knew.

Or could they? Do I really want to do this? he wondered again. He would be doing something he enjoyed a lot more than sitting in the DWP’s cubicle farm. And they would pay him a lot less for doing it, too. Could he scrape by on what they did pay him? If he didn’t think so, what was he doing here? Besides wasting his time and Vic Moretti’s, that is?

“Let me run you back to the bus stop,” Moretti said. “Boy, that’d be a hellacious commute from the South Bay. It wouldn’t be any fun if you could drive it, and bus and subway are a lot slower.”

“Unless the 405 clogs up,” Bryce answered dryly.

The teacher chuckled. “Yeah, there is that. But you probably would think about moving up here, huh?”

“It has crossed my mind,” Bryce said. As they walked down to the Prius, he went on, “I never thought I might end up at a Catholic school.” He didn’t say he was Jewish. Miller could be anything. Some people knew at a glance he was a Landsman. Others, especially the ones his red hair threw off, hadn’t a clue.

“It’s a Catholic curriculum, yeah,” Moretti said. “The kids-the kids are Valley kids. We’re maybe ten percent Jewish, including the quarterback on the football team. We’ve got Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Koreans. You name it, they’re here. Anybody who figures the Los Angeles Unified School District stinks-”

“Which means just about everybody,” Bryce put in.

“How right you are. And there’s a reason for that: LAUSD does stink. It’s great if you shuffle papers. But if you’re a student and you actually want to learn something. . I spent six years working at L.A. Unified. The nonsense you’ve got to put up with made me glad to take the cut that went with coming here. I can accomplish something here, you know?”

“That’d be nice.” Bryce wondered if he’d accomplished one single goddamn thing at the DWP. He’d kept a roof over his head and food on his table. In the larger scheme of things? Not so you’d notice.

He talked things over with Susan that night. They ate at a Chinese seafood place a couple of miles from his apartment. That was the kind of thing people used their cars for these days. “Whatever you want to do is fine with me,” she said. “Money. . If I worried about money, would I be messing around with the Hohenstaufens?”

The Western medieval world was a lot closer in time to the here and now than Bryce’s period was. In attitude? He doubted it. The Hellenistic Greeks could seem amazingly modern-and amazingly cynical. Of course, from what Susan said, so could Frederick II. But the Holy Roman Emperor spectacularly didn’t fit into his own time. Chances were he would have been right at home amongst the clever cutthroats who ruled Ptolemaic Egypt, Seleucid Syria, and Antigonid Macedonia.

Their food came. Seafood was local. Next to beef or lamb or chicken, it was also a bargain. People screamed about that all the time. They wanted Washington to Do Something. They wanted it louder every day, too. Just what Washington could do, they didn’t seem so sure. Retroactively declare the supervolcano hadn’t erupted, maybe.

People like that probably ordered unscrambled eggs when they sat down to breakfast at Denny’s, too.

All of which was beside the point. Bryce swallowed a tiny squid braised in hoisin sauce and came to the point: “If I take the job, looks like I’ll have to move up to the Valley. Will you come up there with me?”

“Live with you, you mean?” she asked. A squid of her own paused halfway between her plate and her mouth. She frowned a little; a vertical crease formed between her eyebrows. They never had lived together-she was old- fashioned about that. She’d spend the night at his place, and let him spend it at hers, but no more.

Bryce nodded, anyhow. “Uh-huh. It’s no farther to UCLA from there than it is from the South Bay. Closer, I think.”

She ate her squid. Then she said, “I don’t know,” in a way that told him she did know but was still looking for a way to soften the blow.

He took a deep breath. “It’d be okay if we got married, right?” He’d figured he would propose to her one of these days. He hadn’t figured this would be the one. Sometimes his mouth lived a life of its own, wild and free.

By the way Susan’s eyes widened, she hadn’t figured this would be the day, either. “Are you sure?” she asked.

Weren’t women trained not to give men a second chance when they popped the question? But if Bryce said he wasn’t sure now, they were finished. He nodded. “You bet I am.” He meant it, too. “Even if it means telling your dad I proposed at the same time as I was talking about taking a job that didn’t pay so well.”

“Could be worse. You might not have a job at all-plenty of academics these days don’t. Pop would really love that.” Susan paused, as if remembering she hadn’t answered the relevant question. She took care of that: “Yes, I’ll marry you, Bryce. You can even invite Lieutenant Ferguson if you want to-but not Vanessa, thank you very much.”

Not inviting Colin to his wedding had never occurred to Bryce. Neither had inviting Vanessa, even if she were in this part of the country. Had he been rash enough to invite her, he knew she would have said no. Actually, chances were she would have told him to fuck off and die. Once Vanessa was through with somebody, she was through with him. Forever and twenty minutes longer.

But thinking about one girl when he’d just successfully proposed to another one wasn’t the smartest thing he could do, even if Susan had been the one to bring up Vanessa. He reached across the table and took her hand. “I love you, you know,” he said. “The best I can.”

She nodded. “I know,” she said, accepting the qualification. “And I know that if you keep working for the DWP much longer, you’ll go right out of your tree. So if Junipero calls and tells you they want to teach their kids Latin, you do it, you hear?”

Bryce sketched a salute. “Yes, ma’am!”

Susan stuck her tongue out at him. “Just don’t let your eyeballs stick out on stalks when you stare at the cute ones.”

She tried to sound severe, but he knew she was kidding.

They went back to his apartment. He did his best to show where she satisfied his appetites. By all the signs, he satisfied hers, too. And wasn’t that the point of the happy exercise?

Vic Moretti called back five days later. He considerately waited till Bryce was home from the DWP. “You want the position, it’s yours,” he said without preamble.

“I want it,” Bryce said.

“You sure you know what you’re getting into?” Moretti asked. Maybe he was joking, and then again maybe he wasn’t.

Bryce didn’t care. . too much. “I know what I’m getting out of,” he replied.

Moretti paused. “Yeah, that counts, too,” he agreed thoughtfully. “Well, semester’s starting soon. It’s good to have the slot filled.”

“Good to fill it.” Bryce wondered whether he’d mean that five years-or even five weeks-from now.

* * *