II
Not far from Marshall Ferguson’s apartment in Ellwood was a historical marker. It said a Japanese submarine had fired twenty-five shells at the oil refinery there in February 1942. No need to worry about subs now. The refinery was long gone, too.
Marshall, by contrast, intended to stay in Ellwood as long as he could. He’d started out at UCSB as an engineering major, the same way his brother had. Rob had stuck it out. Marshall switched to history in the middle of his sophomore year. Calculus was tougher than he was. It landed him on academic probation, but he didn’t quite flunk out.
He hadn’t stayed a history major long. Ancient Greece interested him most. But if you were going to study ancient Greece in any serious way, you needed ancient Greek. As far as Marshall was concerned, foreign languages were even more poisonous than calculus. He’d counted himself lucky to get a B- in Spanish at San Atanasio High. They held your hand every step of the way in high school. If you fell on your face at the university, that was your problem, not theirs.
And so… film. Vanessa’d been sweet as usual about it. “That kind of bullshit is what you’re good for, Marshall,” she’d told him.
“It’s very, um, creative. It’ll put you more in touch with your inner self, your feelings. The right side of your brain-or is it the left?” his mother had said when he told her the news. That would have made him happier if he’d taken Mom more seriously. Getting in touch with her inner self eventually meant walking out on Dad. Marshall might have rolled with it more easily had she acted happier afterwards. But she just seemed confused-more confused than usual, even.
Rob said, “You help us make videos for the band, you’ll get your fair cut.” The way Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles were doing then, that would have been a fair cut of nothing. He didn’t need calculus to understand how much a fair cut of nothing was.
Dad was the one who worried Marshall, though. For one thing, he was hard to snow. For another, he wrote the checks. He eyed Marshall the way he would have looked at someone he’d busted for running a Ponzi scheme. “I told you I’d support you till you got your bachelor’s,” he said.
“Uh-huh.” Marshall had just nodded. Sometimes the less you said, the better off you ended uWith Dad, anything that came out of your mouth could be used against you.
“I didn’t figure the sheepskin would take twelve or fifteen years,” Dad went on, an ominous mumble in his voice.
“Yeah, well-” Marshall spread his hands. But that wasn’t good enough. Dad kept staring at him, willing words out of him. He had to be a hell of an interrogator. Marshall found himself saying, “I didn’t exactly expect it would work out like this, either.” That held… some truth, anyway.
Dad grunted. “I don’t like to go back on my word. I’ll keep footing the bills-for a while. But I don’t like getting taken for a ride, either. I’m getting tired of these new majors. You hear me?”
“Sure, Dad,” Marshall said. Arguing with his father was a losing proposition, and not just because Dad wrote the checks. Colin Ferguson had never smoked, but owned a deep, raspy voice that suggested two packs a day for thirty years. Marshall had a tenor-nothing even close to a baritone. His mom’s voice was high and thin, and so was his. Hard to sound serious about stuff when you squeaked.
It wasn’t that Marshall didn’t or wouldn’t work. He’d glommed on to the usual part-time jobs at groceries and fast-food places and retail outlets. Those were great for pocket money and gas money and the like. They didn’t come within miles of making him self-supporting, not in Santa Barbara. It had some of the highest real- estate prices in the country, which made apartments similarly scream-worthy.
He had no idea how he would make his living once he did get that sheepskin. Did anybody hire people with film degrees? Or would he still be going Do you want to supersize that, ma’am? when he hit fifty? That wasn’t what he thought of as the American dream.
And so he tried to finish as slowly as he could. UCSB was a good school for that, and Goleta an even better town. If it wasn’t the party capital of the USA, he didn’t know what would be. The student newspaper listed a cocktail of the week-for people over twenty-one only, the pious disclaimer always said. One of the spring rituals was couch burning: getting publicly rid of furniture too beat up for even students to stand. The Goleta Fire Department did not approve, which probably worried nobody who didn’t work for the Goleta FD.
Another ritual was going home for summer, or at least part of summer. Going home, for Marshall, meant the house where he’d grown up, the house where Dad still lived. He’d see Mom, sure, but he couldn’t stay with her. The condo she shared with Teo Acosta didn’t have room for guests, and they’d made it plain they wouldn’t have wanted any anyhow.
Marshall didn’t know what to make of his folks’ breakup. What kid ever does? His father said as little about it as he possibly could. When he had to say something, his jaw clenched even tighter than usual. Mom would talk at the drop of a hat, or without one. But Marshall had seen long before she left Dad that you couldn’t count on everything she said.
When he came home after finals this summer, he found his father reading a book about the geology of Yellowstone Park. In a way, that wasn’t too surprising. Dad had gone there on vacation, after all. The card he’d sent Marshall featured something called the Fishing Cone, and was postmarked at Old Faithful Station. That was kind of cool. Even so…
“Geology?” Marshall pointed to the book, which had an aerial photo of some colorfully steaming pool on the cover.
“It’s interesting-a hell of alot more interesting than I thought before I went there,” Dad said. “And besides, I’ve read everything there is to read about the South Bay Strangler. None of it does any good, or we’d’ve caught the son of a bitch by now. And-” He stopped short.
“And?” Marshall prompted.
“Nothing.” By the way his father said it, it was definitely something. Marshall didn’t have Dad’s experience at questioning suspects, but he didn’t need it to know that.
“C’mon. Give,” he said. “Who am I gonna tell? The tabloids? Entertainment Tonight? The Huffington Post?”
Dad despised the Huffington Post-and, to be fair, its rivals on the right. He chuckled: uneasily, if Marshall was any judge. “I hope not,” he said.
“Well, then? C’mon!”
“I, uh, met somebody.” Yeah, Dad was uneasy, all right. What did he think Marshall would do? Tar him and feather him and ride him out of town on a rail? Tell the Huffington Post for real? Worse, tell Mom? Mom had always said she wanted Dad to be happy, but no, she wasn’t always a reliable narrator.
“Cool! How’d you meet her? What are you doing about it? Does she live around here?”
If not for the Cool! in front of them, all those questions asked at once would have made Dad clam up for sure. “We met during an earthquake at Yellowstone,” he answered after a pause to decide if it was okay. “She goes back and forth between there and Berkeley. We’ve talked on the phone a few times, and sent e-mails and texts back and forth. That’s about it.” He shrugged, as if in apology it wasn’t more.
It was more than Marshall had expected, even as things were. “Cool!” he said again. “But what’s up with the geology?”
“She studies it,” Dad said, which took him by surprise. “She was checking a seismograph when the quake hit.” Another chuckle. “Got more than she was looking for then.”
“I guess,” Marshall said. “So you’re getting into it because she is?”
“Maybe some.” His father was relentlessly honest-even about himself, as much as anyone could be. “But it turns out to be pretty interesting stuff.”
“All the geysers and hot springs and whatever.” Marshall knew he sounded vague. He’d never been to Yellowstone, and what he knew about the place came from some half-remembered National Geographic documentary. Or was it Ken Burns? One or the other.
“Yeah. All that,” Dad agreed dryly.
