some other time.
Campus bike racks took up less room than parking lots did, but they filled up just as fast. He found a space, put his bicycle in it, and locked the machine to the rack. He used a lock and a chain his father approved of. He’d got el cheapos at first-and, one unhappy day his sophomore year, he’d had to take the bus back to his place after biking in that morning. His old man made him pay for the new bike, lock, and chain out of his own money, too. He hadn’t appreciated that. He also hadn’t had his bike stolen since.
Everybody else on campus looked as wet and miserable as he did. Well, almost everybody. A tweedy prof strolled along under an umbrella big enough to keep the supervolcano crater dry. The guy was almost bald on top, but his gray hair came down to his shoulders all the same. He’d probably grown it out when he was a kid around 1973, decided it looked way cool, and never bothered to change his mind in spite of changing styles and changing hairline. Tenure could do that to you. You stopped needing to change, so you didn’t. And if people snickered at you behind their hands, so what? You still had tenure.
Marshall wished students could get tenure. That was what he’d been trying to do all his years here. He liked imagining himself at fifty-five, paunchy, maybe balding, too, still living in an apartment with ratty furniture in Ellwood or Goleta, still soaking up units, still smoking dope, and still laying coeds whenever he got the chance. What more could anybody want?
He was mournfully aware it wouldn’t happen. For one thing, his father wouldn’t keep fronting him cash forever, and you couldn’t make enough money odd-jobbing it to pay for your place and your food and your car and all the other shit you needed, to say nothing of university fees. One more thing that bit. Bigtime, in fact. For another, even if his old man had been willing to leave him on the gravy train for the next thirty years, UCSB wasn’t. By rights, he should have graduated long since. He’d passed-way passed-the ordinary limits on time of attendance and total units. Adroit major-changing and a couple of petitions the administration had carelessly approved left him still working toward his sheepskin.
Pretty soon, though, he’d graduate no matter how much finagling, how much wiggling, or how much kicking and screaming he did. He hadn’t had many expectations before the supervolcano knocked the economy flat and stomped on it. Now life with a bachelor’s degree looked depressingly like going back to San Atanasio, back to his room at the old house, and sponging off his dad while he flailed around looking for work that wasn’t there.
Rain or no rain, people were out on campus collecting donations for all the millions who’d had to evacuate on account of the eruption. Cash, canned goods, old clothes-they’d take anything. Marshall had given them money. He couldn’t see how canned gooor beat-up jeans would make it from Santa Barbara to the Midwest.
He’d even asked about that. “They won’t,” an earnest guy with a Red Cross pin on his pocket replied. “But there are plenty of refugees at the western edge of the ashfall, too.”
“Oh.” Marshall hadn’t thought about that. The next day, he’d donated a can of roast-beef hash and a can of mandarin oranges. So they didn’t exactly go together. BFD.
Today, he walked past the wet volunteers. He was low on funds, and he hadn’t stuck any cans in his backpack. The rain lowered everyone’s spirits. The volunteers didn’t try very hard to get people to stop. They stood or sat under polyethylene sheeting that didn’t keep off enough of the rain, and looked as if they would have donated their souls to go somewhere warm and dry.
Marshall could actually do that. Campus buildings weren’t very warm, because thermostats got pushed way down after the eruption. But it wasn’t raining indoors. He could shed his poncho. He could even go into a men’s room and use a paper towel to dry off a little. New stickers in there warned DON’T WASTE PAPER GOODS! What wasn’t in short supply these days?
On to the room for the creative-writing class. Professor Bolger wasn’t what Marshall had expected. He made the students write. Well, surprise! But he also made them submit what they wrote: submit it to markets where they were competing against people who’d been freelancing longer than they’d been alive.
When Bolger had announced that requirement, a girl bleated, “We’ll get rejected!” Marshall would have beaten her to it if he hadn’t been exhaling at the moment instead of inhaling.
The prof answered a squawk with a question: “Suppose you do. How are you worse off?”
“Because!” the girl explained. Marshall nodded. That sure made sense to him.
“Listen to me,” Bolger said grimly. “You are here to learn something about writing. And you are here-with luck-to see if you can make money writing. To make a living at it, even, if you’re good enough and stubborn enough and lucky enough. You cannot possibly sell your work if you never submit it. And so… you will.”
“How often do you get rejected?” Marshall asked. He assumed Bolger did; if the answer came back never, what the hell was the guy doing teaching here? Why wasn’t he all over the best-seller list?
“I have a stack of slips this high.” The prof held his hands six inches apart. “And that doesn’t even count e- mails. Nobody’s going to like your work all the time. You have to get hardened to that. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It just means that editor didn’t like that piece that day.”
He made it sound simple and logical. Marshall still quailed at the idea of some hard-bitten, probably cigar- chewing, editor laughing at something he’d worked hard on. Logic would take you only so far.
XVI
When Vanessa heard loud diesel engines outside the Red Cross shelter in Garden City, the first thing she wondered was whether she’d slipped a cog. Hardly any motor noises had been around lately. The cars that could get out of town had got. Hardly any more vehicles were coming in out of the west.
So what the devil was going on? Curiosity felt odd. She knew more about the people cooped up in room K- with her than she’d ever wanted to find out. She knew how they smelled: worse by the day. So did she. She knew how The Mill on the Floss came out. Knowing didn’t stop her from wondering why the Garden City school district inflicted it on defenseless high schoolers.
Some of the refugees passed the time by playing cards. That had already caused two fights. Money seemed like a joke when you couldn’t buy anything with it-till you started losing. Then, to some people, it stopped being funny.
And if Vanessa never saw another MRE… it was liable to mean she’d starve to death. Which was worse seemed less and less obvious.
The MREs did give her and her fellow inmates at the refugee center the strength to complain. They complained about the food, though nobody did the old Catskills shtick and added and such small portions! Not even the most dedicated complainer-and Vanessa was right up there-wanted more of the military rations. As far as she was concerned, they only proved GIs were heroes.
They complained about the accommodations. They complained about the stinking heads. They complained about having to go outside through the dust to use the stinking heads. (They complained even more about the idea of using a bucket behind a curtain in the room, not that there was enough space to set up that kind of niche anyhow.) Everybody complained about how smelly everybody else was.
They complained whenever somebody farted. Since they were eating MREs all the time, people farted a lot. Some were sound and fury, signifying nothing. Some could have cleared out Madison Square Garden. Clearing out K-1 wasn’t so easy. You had to flee into the dust. Farts were only noxious. That stuff was whatever came after noxious.
Pickles was out in it. She wasn’t the only one who complained about having to abandon a pet. Maybe somebody out there had taken in her poor, dumb kitty. She could hope so, but she couldn’t make herself believe it. Guilt gnawed at her.
One of the Red Cross people came into the classroom in the middle of the morning. That alarmed Vanessa the way a change in routine alarmed a guy halfway through a twenty-year sentence. It was different! Something had to be wrong with it!
“Grab your stuff, put on masks if you’ve got ’em, and come outside in a neat line,” the woman said, for all the world like a kindergarten teacher. But she added something a kindergarten teacher wouldn’t have: “We are going to evacuate the people at this center to a site farther east.”
“There is a God!” Vanessa exclaimed amidst the general hubbub the announcement set off.
A doughy, middle-aged woman gave her a disapproving look. “Of course there is,” she said, her voice a
