interested in reading. Stacked up against the rest of Missoula, that made it seem like heaven on earth, even if this particular version of heaven was on the crowded side.
Daniel was out when she got there: probably at the university. They were trying to get the fall semester going, though the odds seemed poor. She envied Daniel his place here. He fit in. It made a difference.
Larry and Ruth were there, though, and greeted her with long faces. “What now?” Kelly asked, wondering if she really wanted to know.
“The gas is out,” Ruth answered. “I was going to heat up some corned-beef hash”-more stuff in cans-“but the stove doesn’t work. Nothing’s coming through the burners-you’d smell it if it was.”
Kelly found the next reasonable question: “Have you called the gas company yet?”
“No, the gas is really out. As in, there is no gas in Missoula any more,” Larry said. “The big pipeline that brings it into town comes from the east, through Montana. I don’t know how much ash and rock the supervolcano put down on top of it, but enough to finally squash it or break it, looks like.”
“That’s… not so good,” Kelly said. The other geologists nodded. No gas for stoves, no gas for heating water, no gas for heating houses? That was about as not so good as it got. Missoula was a place where you needed to be able to heat houses. Did you ever! And the weather wouldn’t get better on account of the Yellowstone eruption. Oh, no.
“I was thinking, what happens if the electricity goes next?” Ruth said.
There was a cheery notion. “Welcome back to the nineteenth century, that’s what,” Kelly said. Only the twenty-first-century world wasn’t ready to fall back more than a hundred years. Not even close. Unfortunately, the supervolcano didn’t care whether the twenty-first-century world was ready. Ready or not, here it came.
XII
It was a quiet Saturday afternoon in Ellwood. There were times when Marshall Ferguson didn’t appreciate his dad for getting him anpartment here rather than in Isla Vista, which was right next to the UC Santa Barbara campus. But his old man the cop had learned of Isla Vista’s many bars and of couch-burning and other quaint native rituals, so Marshall was out in the boonies instead.
Nothing exciting had happened in Ellwood since that Japanese submarine shelled the place. But living here wasn’t so bad. Marshall didn’t mind riding his bike to school, or hopping on the bus on the rare days when the weather was bad. He had a car-of course! — but campus parking cost two arms and a leg. He could get anything he needed at the big shopping center on Hollister, just a few blocks away. And it wasn’t as if Ellwood had no bars; it just didn’t have quite so many. It was still a student town, but a quieter student town for quieter students.
No, not so bad. It wasn’t as if Marshall never drank. Oh, no-not even close. Like his father was a teetotaler. As if! Like his mother had never got up on a Sunday morning making a beeline for the Excedrin. Yeah, right!
But he wasn’t smashed on this Ellwood Saturday afternoon. He could have been. The quarter was still new. Nothing needed turning in Monday morning. So, yeah, he could have been, but he wasn’t. He was stoned instead.
The apartment faced west, so he could sprawl on the ratty but unburnt couch in his front room and watch the sun go down through the Venetian blinds’ half-open slats. Sprawled next to him was a little dark-haired girl named Jenny. They weren’t touching right now. Sooner or later, he expected they would. No hurry, though. No hurry at all.
Not hurrying, he passed her the pipe. “Thanks,” she said. He liked the way her lips closed on the stem as she inhaled. The apartment was already fragrant with smoke. It got a little more so.
She gave the pipe back. He took another hit himself. It was all good: the dope, the company, the half-dark room, the sun slowly sliding down between the slats. Thanks to the dope, it seemed to slide slower than usual.
“Wow,” Marshall said. Jenny giggled-if that wasn’t the stoner cliche, what was? Even wasted, Marshall was embarrassed. But he pointed out through the blinds and defiantly said “Wow” again. This time, he amplified it: “That’s quite a sunset, you know?”
Santa Barbara sunsets, like a lot of Santa Barbara life, often spoiled you and made you feel every other place in the world was tacky and not worth living in. Clouds and soft, moist Pacific air painted the sky in red and orange and gold. Could nightfall in, say, Omaha come close? Not a chance.
This one was outdoing itself, even by Santa Barbara standards. Marshall blamed the good weed he’d got from a grad student in the creative-writing program. It made him feel pretty goddamn creative himself, though he would have been too languid to write even without a little dark-haired girl within arm’s reach.
But seriously, would he have seen all those wild colors if he weren’t baked? Reds and maroons and tangerines and carmines and lemons and lavenders and magentas and fuchsias and how many others the Crayola people had never heard of? He didn’t think so.
“This is good dope,” he said seriously.
“It is,” Jenny agreed. She held out her hand. Marshall’s fingers brushed hers when he gave her the pipe. They both smiled. They had time. When you’re young and wasted, time stretches like taffy. She sucked in more smoke. After a while, she blew it out. She admired day’s decline for a while. Then she said, “It’s not j the dope.”
“Huh?” Marshall said.
“It’s not just the dope,” Jenny repeated. “It’s the volcano thing in Yellowstone, too. It’s, like, put a lot of stuff in the air. Sunsets all over will be special for a while.”
“Oh.” Marshall nodded. “Cool.” He seemed to remember that big volcanoes did that. The one they’d made the old movie about… He tried to come up with the name. It was on the tip of his tongue, but chasing it down seemed like more trouble than it was worth. A lot of things seemed like more trouble than they were worth.
A lot of things, but not all. He slid the palm of his hand along the warm, smooth skin on the inside of Jenny’s forearm. It felt something like velvet, something like electricity. Some of that was normal, healthy horniness. Some of it was the dope, too. Girls were wonderful any old time. They got wonderfuler after a few bowls. Hey, what didn’t? And he was sure the volcano had nothing to do with it.
Jenny made a noise down deep in her throat that sounded more like a cat’s purr than human noises had any business doing. Her eyes sparkled. Dope definitely made it better for people of the female persuasion, too. She slid toward him.
They kissed for a while on the couch. Then they went into the bedroom. Marshall’s bed was narrow for two, but that just meant they had to press together tighter. The amazing sunset played itself out in the front-room wall, forgotten.
The gig at Bar Harbor turned out to be a mistake. The club crowd there didn’t get Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles, and it worked both ways. New England seaside vacation towns seemed different from their Pacific equivalents. Rob Ferguson tried to figure out what made these people tick. It wasn’t easy.
Some of the crowd were leftover summer people. Not all of them went back to Boston and New York City right after Labor Day. Some stuck around and kept partying till… what? Till their money ran out? Not likely-they weren’t the kind whose money ever seemed likely to run out. Till the cows came home, was the way it looked to Rob.
The rest were Maine townies. Summer people and townies. It reminded him of Eloi and Morlocks in The Time Machine. And why not? Wells had been talking about the class system in Victorian England. The class system remained alive and well on the East Coast of the modern USA.
For the summer people, the band was just background noise. The townies saw amplified instruments and expected-hell, demanded-straight-ahead, raucous rock. Neither was what Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles was all about. You needed to pay attention to the band, and it wasn’t about head-banging or about ears that stayed stunned three days after the show.
A good time was had by few.
Afterwards, Justin put the best face on things he could: “Maybe Bangor will be better.”
“Or Orono,” Rob said. “Orono’s got a University of Maine campus. Our kind of people will be listening to
