other, a chessboard between them. Colin had a cup of coffee in front of him; Vanessa’s ex-boyfriend, a Coke.
“I’m getting there-diss’ll be done next year, maybe year after next,” Bryce answered. He was tall and skinny and pale almost to translucence, with curly red hair and a wispy little beard. After due consideration, he pushed a pawn.
Colin took it. He played chess the way he approached most problems: with straightforward aggression. He simplified ruthlessly and tried not to make too many dumbass mistakes. Against a lot of opponents, that was plenty good enough. Against Bryce, he won maybe one game in five: enough to keep him interested, not enough to let him imagine they were in the same league.
Bryce moved a knight. Colin wagged a finger at him. That nasty horse would fork his queen and a rook if he didn’t do something about it. He moved the queen to threaten the knight and the forking square. Bryce covered it with a bishop.
Okay, Colin thought. Now I can get on with my own attack. He moved a bishop of his own, over on the other side of the board.
Bryce had long, thin fingers. He picked up the knight the way a surgeon might lift a scalpel. He took a pawn with it. “Check,” he said regretfully.
One of Colin’s pawns could wipe it from the board. But as soon as he did that, Bryce’s bishop would assassinate his queen. He eyed the board for a moment, considering his chances after losing the queen. He saw only two, bad and worse. He tipped over his king.
“You got me good that time,” he said. “I saw the bishop defending, but I didn’t see it would turn to attack as soon as you unmasked it. And the check meant I couldn’t just ignore the lousy knight.” Everything was obvious- after the fact. It usually worked that way.
“Uh-huh.” Bryce nodded-a spider encouraging a fly. “Want to play again?” He tried not to look too hopeful.
But Colin shook his head. “Not right now. That one kinda stings.” He leaned back in the dining-room chair. Something in his shoulder crunched. Bryce could sit forever in any position and never get uncomfortable. Colin hadn’t been able to do that even in his twenties. He tried a different tack: “How’s the world treating you these days?”
“Oh, fair to partly cloudy, I guess you’d say,” the younger man answered. “Maybe a skosh better than that. Writing your thesis leaves you hostile. And having a relationship blow up in your face doesn’t exactly make you want to go out and party, either.”
“Tell me about it!” Colin said with more feeling than he’d intended.
Bryce nodded. “Yeah. You know what I’m talking about, all right. So I ought to be down in the Dumpster, right?”
“Hadn’t heard anybody put it like that before, but it seems like a possibility,” Colin said. “You aren’t, though?”
“I aren’t,” Bryce agreed. “I had another poem accepted by a pretty good journal. Theocritus updated, you might say.”
Theocritus was one of the 2,000-plus-years-dead poets he studied. Colin knew that much, and not a nickel’s worth more. Still, he brought his hands together in one silent clap. “Not bad,” he said. “That’s two in a few months.”
As soon as the words came out of his mouth, he wondered if he should have left them in there. Bryce had got the first acceptance just before Vanessa threw him out. Cause and effect? Jealousy? Vanessa made a hell of an editor. She had all the tools she needed to be a writer herself except the nerve. She would rather submit to a root canal without Novocain than to an editor.
Bryce said “Uh-huh” again. He owned a pretty fair poker face. Colin couldn’t tell what he was thinking. That might have been just as well.
“They pay you anything for this one?” Colin asked.
Now Bryce snorted: derision for a silly question. “Copies.” By the way he said it, he figured he was lucky not to have to buy them. “My mom will be happy-she’ll have something to put on her shelf and show my aunts and uncles. But you can’t make a living as a poet. Or I sure as hell can’t, anyway, not with the kinds of things I write. So I do ’em as well as I can, for me. If anybody else likes ’em, cool. If nobody does, I can live with that.”
Colin wondered whether he was kidding himself or knew he was blowing smoke. You didn’t sit down and write poems if you didn’t want other people to see them. You probably wanted to end up on the New York Times bestseller list. Bryce was right about one thing, though: if you modeled your poems on ones from some ancient Greek, you damn well wouldn’t.
“Other thing is…” Bryce hesitated, perhaps almost as carefully as he would have while building and polishing one of his poems. He usually wasn’t shy about telling Colin what was on his mind. Which meant… No sooner had Colin realized what it meant than Bryce confirmed it: “I’ve met somebody I like. She seems to like me, too. We’ll see where it goes, that’s all.”
“Good for you!” Colin was glad he could say it quickly. He didn’t want Bryce thinking he liked him only because he’d been attached to Vanessa. “So have I-but you’ve heard about that.”
“Right.” Bryce raised an eyebrow. “We’ll all run for the hills when the super-duper volcano pops its cork.” Said in a different tone of voice, that would have made Colin want to punch him in the snoot. As things were, and accompanied by a disarming grin, it wasn’t so bad.
“Something’s gonna happen there. I don’t know what. I don’t know when. Neither does anybody else, including Kelly,” Colin said. “Nobody knows when the Big One’ll hit, either. I’ve got an earthquake kit in the steel shed out back, though, and a little one in my trunk. Don’t you?”
“I have one in the car. Harder to put one in the shed when you’re in an apartment,” Bryce said.
“Could be,” Colin admitted. “So who’s your new friend? What’s she do? How’d you meet her?”
“Her name’s Susan Ruppelt. She was moving into the TA office I was clearing out of. We got to talking, and I got her e-mail, and one thing kind of led to another. She’s working on the Holy Roman Empire. Tenth-century stuff, maybe eleventh-.”
“AD, you mean, not BC.”
“That’s right.”
“Too modern for you, then.”
“Hey, what are thirteen hundred years between friends?” Bryce grinned again. He looked as happy as a cat lapping up cream. He hadn’t looked that way while he was with Vanessa, not after the first few months. Maybe it would last longer this time. Or maybe not. Even if it did, things might fall apart years later. Colin had learned more on that score than he’d ever wanted to find out.
“Luck,” he said, and meant it.
“Thanks. You, too.” Bryce’s mouth twisted. “It’s as much as you can hope for, isn’t it? Luck, I mean. You grow together, or else you grow apart. I think Susan’s on the sheltered side, you know? Otherwise, she’d have more sense than to mess with a guy on the rebound.”
“Well, bring her by here one day,” Colin said. “If I can’t scare her away from you, nothing will.”
“I may take you up on that,” Bryce said. “You have been warned.”
IV
Between two and three million people came to Yellowstone every year. In July and August, they all seemed to be there at once. Cars and RVs and tour buses clogged the roads till they made California freeways at rush hour look wide open by comparison.
Kelly Birnbaum knew how to beat the crowds. Go a quarter of a mile off the asphalt and you shed way more than nine-tenths of the visitors. Go a couple of miles from the highways and you were pretty much on your own. That was bad news as well as good. Cell-phone reception in the vast park was spotty at best. If you got into trouble, you might not be able to let anybody else know.
The idea, then, was not to get into trouble. Kelly was a city girl. She didn’t hike the wilderness because she particularly loved hiking the wilderness. She went out there because that was what you did if you were a geologist
