Supervolcano :Eruption Read online

  “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 us.”

  “Stoned freaks and geeks, you mean?” Biff Thorvald said.

  Rob made as if to bow to the rhythm guitarist, but there wasn’t room in the cramped dressing room. “Precisely,” he said.

  “You know what the real trouble is?” As Justin often did, he answered his own question: “The real trouble is, there aren’t enough stoned freaks and geeks running around loose to supt us in the style we’d like to get accustomed to.”

  “If you mean we ain’t gonna get rich like Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber, why don’t you come out and say so?” Charlie Storer demanded.

  “We ain’t gonna get rich like Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber,” Justin said obligingly.

  “We don’t have some corporate dickhead telling us what to do next, either,” Rob said.

  “Of course not. We know what to do next: go on to the next town,” Charlie said. “Play there, then head for the one after that.”

  Rob remembered his own uneasy thoughts of not too long ago. Did he like doing this enough to keep at it the rest of his life? Could he make a living at it if he did? If he didn’t, what would he do instead?

  They got to stay in Bar Harbor; with most of the summer people gone, prices dropped like a stone. The desk clerk at their motel said, “We’ve had a Secretary of Labor stay in one of your rooms.”

  “Not after Labor Day, you didn’t,” Rob answered. She gave him a dirty look, but didn’t try to tell him he was wrong. Afterwards, he was sorry he’d pissed her off; he’d seen plenty worse. As usual, afterwards was too late.

  Summer weather seemed to have gone home with the summer people. The sun came up in blood-drenched splendor from the Atlantic, tinting the stacked clouds every shade of red and purple and red and pink and orange imaginable. Sunsets had been just as spectacular since the supervolcano let go. When TV pundits weren’t bemoaning everything else about the disaster-deaths were well up into six figures, and damage estimates heading toward the trillions-they talked learnedly about particulate matter.

  Eyeing the sunrise, Justin put it a different way: “My grandfather went to sea in freighters for a few years when he was about the age we are now. He always used to say, ‘Red in the night-sailors’ delight. Red in the morning? Sailors take warning.’ ”

  “A bunch of nervous sailors out there, then,” Rob predicted.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.” Justin shivered in the parking lot. “Brr! That’s one nasty wind.”

  “Yeah. Well, welcome to Maine,” Rob said. But nervous sailors wouldn’t have surprised him, either. He wished he’d put on something heavier than an old UCSB sweatshirt. The wind seemed to have taken a running start from Baffin Island.

  “How soon does it start snowing here?” Justin asked. Sure as hell, other cloud fortresses, these more ominous gray and less pretty pink, were stacking up to the north and west.

  “I’d say tomorrow, or maybe this afternoon,” Rob answered. “We’ve got chains for the vans, right?”

  “Uh-huh,” Justin said without enthusiasm. They weren’t practiced at putting them on. They weren’t practiced at driving in snow and ice, either. They were California kids. What did they need to know about that kind of stuff?

  Trying to cheer up the lead guitarist-or something-Rob said, “Bangor and Orono are north of here, right?”

  “Fuck you,” Justin explained. He pointed to the diner across the street. They’d had dinner there the night before. It was okay. “C’mon. Let’s go feed our faces.”

  “You don’t want to wait for Charlie and Biff?”

  “Nah. Let ’em sleep if they want o. They’ll eat sooner or later. And Bangor’s not that far north from here.” Justin used the word with more irony than Rob had. “Even if
we leave later than usual, we’ll make our next date.”

  Breakfast was pretty good. You never could tell with local places. They were like the little girl with the little curl. With Denny’s, you always knew what you were getting-which was both the good and the bad news. This proved a step, even a step and a half, up from that. The potatoes that went into the hash browns were fresh, not frozen, and not too greasy. The same with the sausage, which had a hint of something-fennel? — you didn’t taste every day. And the over-medium eggs came to the table hot and exactly over medium.

  Biff and Charlie ambled in when Rob and Justin were getting close to done. Biff ordered coffee. “You never do that, dude,” Rob said.

  “Unless you got some meth, I hafta get my heart started some kinda way,” the rhythm guitarist answered. Rob shook his head. Crank was not his drug of choice. Neither Charlie nor Justin volunteered any. Biff spread his hands. “See?” he said. When the coffee came, he poured in lots of cream and sugar so it wouldn’t taste like coffee any more. Then he gulped it. The sugar rush would help wire him for the morning, too.

  The waitress brought Rob and Justin more toast to give them something to nibble on while their buddies chowed down. Rob smeared strawberry jam on his. It came in the same little foil-topped plastic package you saw everywhere. Oh, well. As he ate, he stared out the tinted window and across the street at the motor lodge they’d just come from.

  After a while, he said, “Is it the glass, or is the light funny?”

  “It’s the light,” Charlie said. “I noticed it when I was coming over here. Did you, Biff?”

  “Huh?” Biff said. Rob didn’t need to be Hercule Poirot to figure out that Biff hadn’t noticed much of anything till he surrounded his coffee.

  They paid for breakfast and walked out. A guy about their age coming down the street on a bike stopped and said, “Hey, I was at your show last night. I don’t know about anybody else, but I liked it.”

  “Thanks-I think,” Rob said. Not enough people had. The guy gave a vague wave and pedaled off.

  “The light is funny.” Justin was looking at the sun. No clouds were close by or in front of it, but he looked at it anyway. Rob could do the same thing. The sun was uncommonly weak, uncommonly white, as if seen through fog. But there was no fog. You could see for miles without channeling the Who. Rob turned and looked at his shadow. He had one, but not the kind he should have had on a sunny day.

  They all started across the street. Not much traffic in Bar Harbor, not after the end of the season. “Is this, like, Maine weather or volcano weather?” Charlie wondered.

  “Volcano weather.” Rob heard something peculiar in his own voice, something he didn’t think he’d ever found there before: a sad certainty. A doctor might have had that tone after seeing a chest X-ray with a dark spot on the lung.

  All of a sudden, particulate matter wasn’t just a pompous phrase to Rob. There wasn’t any fog down here, no. But way the hell up there? That was liable to be-no, that was bound to be-a different story. How much crud had the supervolcano flung into the stratosphere? How much sunlight was it blocking? How bad would that screw up the weather? And for how long?

  He shivered. The old Gaucho sweatshirt felt even thinner and rattier than it had when he pulled it on. He wanted something warmer: an ankle-length polar-bear coat, maybe, or a goose-down sleeping bag with sleeves.

  Charlie hopped up onto the curb. “Boy, you sounded like a judge passing sentence there,” he said.

  “You totally did, man,” Justin agreed. Even Biff nodded. That wasn’t quite how Rob had thought of it, but wasn’t so far removed, either. Out of the blue-the pale blue, the almost icy blue-Justin asked, “You ever hear anything from your sister, the one who moved to Denver?”

  “No,” Rob said tightly. “Cell phones are down for God knows how far. I’ve been hoping she could get to a landline or send me an e-mail or… something. But no.”

  Justin set a hand on his shoulder for a second. “That’s hard, man.”

  “Nothing I can do about it. I keep telling myself there’s more to Vanessa than you’d think. She can get out of there if anybody can.”

  Rob wished he hadn’t added the last three words. They helped remind him how enormous the catastrophe was. Denver was hundreds of miles from Yellowstone. But Denver was also not far from the middle of the area the eruption had screwed, blued, and tattooed. The TV said volcanic ash was coming down in Alberta, in Texas, in Iowa, even in California.

  He didn’t want to think about that, so he turned to Biff and Charlie and asked, “Are we ready to rock?” He knew he and Justin were; they’d cleaned out their room down to the last dirty sock.

  Charlie nodded. “Didn’t leave the drums behind, honest.” That made Biff snort. It would be easier to forget an elephant than Charlie’s kit, even if the elephant would be harder to disassemble.

  “Let’s go, then,” Justin said. They piled into the SUVs. Under that pale, unnatural sunlight, they started up the road toward Bangor. Pretty soon, all the sunshine disappeared. Rob turned on his headlights. It started to rain. By the time they got where they were going, the rain had turned to snow. Maine weather or volcano weather? What difference did that make? It was here, and they were stuck in it.

  The first thing Colin Ferguson did after sitting up in bed was check his cell for voice mail and texts from Kelly or Vanessa. Nothing this morning from either one of them-nothing at all from Vanessa since the eruption. Had anything in his own bailiwick gone wrong, the folks at the cop shop would have called on the landline and woken him up.

  After he took a leak, he went downstairs to fix coffee. He didn’t have to go in today unless something hit the fan. If Kelly weren’t stuck in Missoula… But she was, dammit. So instead of enjoying himself with good company, he’d try to catch up on some around-the-house stuff. His Navy-trained soul was dismayed by how much he just let slide.

  It’s not like I don’t work, he thought defensively, but his internalized CPO knew bullshit every time.

  He always looked out the window while he waited for his water to boil. This morning, he looked and then he looked: a double take Harpo Marx would have been proud of. Even with on-and-off water rationing, he kept his lawn green. He was proud of it, the same way he was proud of his well-organized filing system.

  Only the lawn and the flowers weren’t green any more. They were about the color of cement dust. So were the leaves on the orange tree and the lemon ts prouand the magnolia. So was the cinder-block wall, which had been pink. So was just about everything in the backyard. The supervolcano had come to L.A.

  The microwave chimed. He absently took out the water and poured it into the brown plastic cone that held the Melitta filter-the coffeenose, the kids had called it when they were little. A cat (also grayer than it should have been; he recognized the critter, which lived down the block) left almost-green footprints on the grass. It didn’t like what was going on. It would take a few steps, stop and wash, walk on a few more steps, then wash some more. How much grit was it swallowing? What would that do to its insides? Nothing good, Colin was sure.

  Rationing rules said he wasn’t supposed to water the lawn on Saturday. He’d spent most of his life enforcing rules. Now he broke one. He ducked under the sink to fiddle with the sprinkler controls. Nozzles popped up and started spraying. The cat levitated, then teleported. The lawn turned green again-except for patches still streaked with ugly brown sludge.

  Thoughtfully, Colin put on slippers before he went out to get the Times and the Breeze. He didn’t want to walk barefoot through that crud, not even slightly he didn’t. It scrunched under his crepe soles and came up in little puffs. The front lawn was gray: almost the same color as the sidewalk. The street, which should have been asphalt-dark, was doing a sidewalk impression, too, one slightly spoiled by a few tire tracks.

  His car was gray. All the cars he could see were gray-windows, mirrors, the whole deal. All but one: right across the street, Wes Jones was breaking some more rules by hosin
g his Nissan back to its original blue. Wes was a retired aerospace engineer who spent most of his time gardening. Like everybody else, he’d be playing catch-up for a while.

  Colin waved to him. “Some fun, isn’t it?” he called, and grabbed the papers. They were both wrapped in poly bags, as if against rain. Volcanic ash slid off the plastic.

  “Fun? Oh, you bet.” Wes pointed east. “Even the sun’s gone nutso.” Anything he disapproved of was nutso. But Wes didn’t disapprove of much; he was an easygoing guy.

  “Huh?” Colin hadn’t paid any attention to the sun, past noticing that the daylight looked wan and washed out. Now he did. It sat low in the sky, still red as if closer to its rising than it really was. A hellacious halo surrounded it, with a pair of sundogs-false images of the sun-on the halo. He’d seen a sundog once, while in a destroyer off the coast of Greenland, with a sky full of ice crystals. The sky above San Atanasio had a different kind of junk in it. He delivered his verdict: “Holy crap!”

  “Yeah, that’s about what I was thinking,” Wes replied. “Anything from Vanessa?” He’d watched her grow up; he’d been an honorary uncle.

  “Nope.” Colin left it right there.

  Wes grunted. “Well, I’ll tell Ida she needs to pray harder.” He was at least as skeptical as Colin, but his wife went to a Methodist church every Sunday and did good works during the week. She didn’t try to ram it down anybody’s throat, even her husband’s; she just did what she did. They’d had their fortieth anniversary the year before. Colin remembered no more than a handful of cross words between them.

  Now he said, “It can’t hurt.”

  “I expect you’re right. And I expect I’m going back in the house.” Wes scuffed at the ash on his driveway. Some of it was wet, but some came up the way it had underolin’s slippers. “Breathing this crap has to be hazardous to your health-to my health, even.”