Supervolcano: All Fall Down

still has an accent, but his English is really good. He’s got amazing eyes. Eyes like a saint’s in a painting, all big and brown,” Vanessa said.

“What does he do?” Louise asked. St. Bronislav? she wondered, but only to herself. Vanessa had never talked about any of the other men in her life in those terms-for sure she hadn’t.

“He’s a long-haul trucker here, but back in Yugoslavia he was a freedom fighter,” her daughter said.

A freedom fighter is a terrorist we like. Louise could hear Colin’s voice inside her head. He’d probably been talking back to some politician or other jerk on the TV when he said that. She didn’t quote him to Vanessa. For one thing, she would rather have passed a kidney stone. For another, even if she had wanted to do any such thing, her daughter wouldn’t have listened. She didn’t need to be Henry Kissinger to understand that much about diplomacy.

“He really was,” Vanessa said, as if Louise had spoken up. “The Croats over there, they were a bunch of filthy Fascist thugs. And the Bosnians were just like the Taliban.”

Louise knew little about the woes of the ex-Yugoslavia, and cared less. She did wonder what the Whozits and the Waddayacallems would have said about Bronislav’s cause-but not enough to antagonize Vanessa by inquiring. Some questions were more trouble than the answers were worth.

“And you know what else?” Vanessa added.

“No. What?” Louise said.

Had Vanessa announced that her new squeeze had a necklace of human ears he’d brought from the old country, she wouldn’t have been surprised. When Vanessa said, “He’s a terrific cook, that’s what,” she was- surprised enough to burst into laughter.

Vanessa looked irate. “I’m sorry,” Louise said. She meant it; good manners mattered to her. “But I wasn’t expecting that.”

“Well, he is,” Vanessa insisted, as if Louise had tried to deny it. “He makes better stuff than the chefs at the Serb places down in San Pedro.”

“If you say so.” Louise hadn’t known there were Serb places down there. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone to Speedro. To shop at Ports of Call Village before the eruption, probably. Except for Ports of Call, what reason would she have had to go there? It wasn’t one of L.A.’s better neighborhoods, which was putting things mildly.

“I do.” Vanessa knew what she knew. What she knew wasn’t always so, but she knew it anyway.

“Dear, I hope you’re happy. I hope everything works out just the way you want it to.” Louise did hope so. She’d hoped so every single time. Vanessa threw herself headlong into life, the way she threw herself headlong into all kinds of things. And she threw herself out of love as abruptly as she dove in. She wasn’t made for halfway measures.

When the waitress brought the check, Vanessa grabbed it. Louise squawked. Her heart wasn’t in it, but not even the committee that handed out best-actress Oscar nominations would have realized as much. Vanessa didn’t listen to her. That wasn’t rare, but the effect this time came out nicer than usual.

“Don’t worry about it, Mom,” she said. “I’ve got work lined up for myself, and you’re still looking. When you find something, you can take me out to celebrate.”

“Well, thank you very much,” Louise said. Vanessa’d even let her down without costing her face. What was the world coming to?

“Thank you very much,” James Henry agreed, looking up from his abstract expressionist masterpiece. Louise and Vanessa both laughed. Louise ruffled her little son’s black hair. Even Vanessa’s meeting with him had gone off better than she’d expected. A good day, all the way around.

* * *

Marshall Ferguson and his friends kept getting together to play Diplomacy. They all had a better idea of what they were doing now than they had when Lucas’ father first brought the box out of the closet. Today, Austria- Hungary and Russia were ganging up on Turkey-if the Ottomans got loose, they had a way of metastasizing through the Mediterranean. Germany and France were trying to do the same number on England, which could be even more dangerous. But Marshall, who was playing perfidious Albion, talked Italy into stabbing France in the kidneys.

So he was doing all right for himself. Tim had Turkey this game. He found a way to save the sultan’s bacon that wasn’t in the rules. Just when things looked blackest, he pulled out a fat baggie of what looked like killer dope. Experiments immediately followed. It not only looked like killer dope, it was killer dope.

It was such killer dope, in fact, that everybody stopped caring about who wound up top dog in Europe. Marshall stopped caring about almost everything. Almost, but not quite. “Dude,” he said languidly, “where’d you score such righteous shit?”

Tim giggled. Giggling was a hazard with what they’d just smoked, but Marshall wanted to know. It wasn’t urgent-nothing was urgent, or would be for a while-but he did want to. When he asked again, Tim giggled some more.

“C’mon, man,” Marshall said. “Dope like this is hard to come by these days.” The supervolcano had done the same number on weed as it had on so many other cash crops. Climates that had been just right were suddenly too cold, and production in areas that went from too hot to just right hadn’t ramped up yet. So good dope was indeed hard to come by.

But that turned out not to be why Tim was giggling-or not the only reason, anyhow. He also wasn’t giggling just because he was stoned out of his tree, although he was. “You sure you want to know? You really, truly sure? Really-o, truly-o sure?”

“Talk, already.” Marshall would have got mad if it didn’t seem like too much trouble. “I don’t want the trailer. I want the fuckin’ movie.”

He set everybody laughing, Tim included. “Okay, okay,” Tim said. “Just remember, you asked for it. You wanna know where I got the shit? I got it from Darren Shitcabbage, man. How funny is that?”

Most of the erstwhile would-be masters of early twentieth-century Europe thought it was the funniest thing they’d heard in their entire lives, or at least since they got baked. Lucas damn near wet his pants, he thought it was so hysterical. “The chief’s kid, dealing dope?” he said. “Oh, wow! That is too much, I mean way too much.” He nudged Marshall. “How come you don’t do that?”

Marshall smoked dope. Marshall bought dope. It wasn’t as if he didn’t support his local dealers. But he’d never had the slightest urge to move into the supply end of the business. You started getting into heavy shit when you did that, and dealing with some highly unpleasant people. From what he knew about Chief Pitcavage’s son, Darren had himself a head start on that.

His old man wished he would have drawn his line closer to truth, justice, and the Drugs Are Wicked American Way. Marshall didn’t draw it there, no matter what his father wished. But he did draw a line. Darren Pitcavage didn’t seem to.

Marshall fired himself another fatty. If he got wasted enough, maybe he wouldn’t remember any of this tomorrow. If he didn’t remember it, he wouldn’t have to figure out what to do about it, or whether to do anything at all about it.

He did remember. He’d known he would, no matter how much he smoked. You lost things for a while with weed-sometimes, anyway. But they mostly came back. He’d never been into drugs that bit chunks out of your life and swallowed them for good.

If he’d liked Darren Pitcavage better. . If his father had liked Chief Pitcavage better. . He still needed a couple more days to work up his nerve to go, “Dad?”

“What?” His father sounded distracted, and was-he was changing Deborah’s diaper.

“Um-you know I went to Lucas’ place over the weekend to play Diplomacy, right?”

“Yeah. How’d it go?” Dad had learned the game. He and Marshall sometimes played a cutthroat two-man version with a much newer copy of the game than the one Lucas’ dad had resurrected. Each of them controlled three countries, with weak sister Italy vacant. No real diplomacy in that variant, but it was great for testing board maneuvers.

“We, mm, kind of got sidetracked after a while. Tim-” Marshall had to stop while Dad snorted and snickered. Dad never had been able to take Tim seriously, not even for a minute. Licking his lips, Marshall made himself go on, “Tim brought out some weed, some fine weed, and-”