Supervolcano :Eruption Read online

  Her building had added a security door since the last time he was here. Nodding in approval, he pressed 274-her apartment number-on the keypad and buzzed. “That you, Colin?” Kelly’s voice came out of the cheap speaker as if it were a tin-can telephone connected by a string that wasn’t taut enough.

  “Who else were you expecting?” He had to ask twice; the first time, he forgot to press the ANSWER button.

  “You might have been the Thai takeout,” she replied after he did it right. The door’s lock clicked. He opened it, made sure it closed behind him, and hurried up the stairs like somebody half his age. If that wasn’t love, it sure as hell was a reasonable facsimile.

  Kelly opened the door while he was still walking towards it. He wished he’d thought to buy flowers. He wished he were the kind of guy who thought to buy flowers before it was too goddamn late. Of course, if he were that kind of guy, he might well still be married to Louise.

  He was what he was. He was where he was, too, and damn glad of it. He grabbed Kelly and clung to her as hard as she was clinging to him. He wasn’t usually touchy-feely, either-the opposite, in fact-but holding her was like finding a life ring in the North Atlantic after a torpedo hit your freighter.

  “Jesus, it’s good to see you!” he said hoarsely.

  By way of reply, she tilted her face up for a kiss. Before he could deliver it, the buzzer in her apartment went off again. She made a face. “Sorry. Wait one,” she said, and ran back inside.

  This time, it was the Thai food. The short, skinny man who carried up the two big white paper bags had brown skin and a flat face, which probably made him a Thai. By his English, he hadn’t been here long. Colin paid him. Kelly squawked. He ignored her. She was still squawking when they went back into the apartment. The dinette table was strewn with books and journals and papers, but Kelly shoved them back to make enough space for two people to eat. Colin set the bags down on the wood-grain Formica.

  Then he held out his arms and said, “Where were we?” “When we were so rudely interrupted, you mean?” Kelly stepped into the circle that closed around her. “Right about here.”

  A few minutes later, they spooned squid salad and larb and other good things onto paper plates. One of the bags also held two Thai iced teas, sweetened with coconut milk, in styrofoam cups. Colin slathered bright red chili sauce from little plastic containers onto everything but his iced tea.

  “I’d have to eat flame retardant if I did that,” said Kelly, who stuck to seasoning with soy sauce.

  “I like it,” Colin answered, and proceeded to prove as much by making his share disappear. As he took seconds, he said, “Lord, I’m glad to see you. I told you that once already, didn’t I?”

  “Uh-huh. But it’s okay. I like to hear it. I’m glad to see you, too.” Kelly’s expression darkened. “I’m glad to see anybody. I was, like, three hundred miles from the supervolcano when it went off. Almost everybody who was-oh, God, I don’t know-say, fifty miles closer is probably dead right now.”

  A circle five hundred miles across… Colin centered it on Yellowstone and laid it over a mental map of the United States. Salt Lake City wouldn’t be far from the edge. Denver lay outside, but not far enough outside to suit him.

  “Still nothing from Vanessa,” he said, his voice harsh.

  “I’m sorry,” Kelly answered. “Still too early to know if it means anything, though. The whole middle of the country is fubar’d.”

  He stabbed a blunt, accusing forefinger at her. “That’s what you get for hanging around with an old Navy guy.”

  “Why, what ever can you mean, sir?” She batted her eyelashes fit to make Scarlett O’Hara gag. “It stands for fouled up beyond all recognition, right? Or something like that.”

  “Yeah. Or something like that.” Colin aimed the forefinger again. “But nobody your age says ‘fubar’d.’ It’s what you get for hanging around with an old Navy guy, like I said. Stuff rubs off.”

  “Suppose you let me worry about that,” Kelly said, and a CPO couldn’t have put more bite into it. She snapped the lids back onto the containers they hadn’t emptied and stuck them in the fridge. Forks clattered in the sink. She nodded to herself. “The rest can wait.”

  “The trash?” Colin knew he sounded disapproving. Being an old Navy guy helped make him Felix, not Oscar.

  But Kelly nodded again. “Yeah, the trash.” For her part, she sounded defiant. “You keep telling me you’re glad to see me. How are you gonna show me?”

  After the long drive up and a belly full of Thai food, Colin hoped he could show her. He’d seen that occasional bedroom failures bothered middle-aged men more than their women, but he was a middle-aged man, dammit, and he especially didn’t want to fail now.

  He didn’t. For a man, it’s always terrific. Kelly didn’t seem to have any complaints. She rolled over and made as if to go to sleep. “Hey, I’m the one who’s supposed to do that,” Colin protested. What with the drive and the big dinner and the exertions just past, he wasn’t far from it.

  She sat up. He put an arm around her. She leaned against him. “Everything works here,” she said in wondering tones. “We had power in Missoula, but the gas went out. Landlines were iffy. So was the Net. My cell was iffier.”

  “I know. I wish I could’ve talked to you more,” Colin said.

  Kelly nodded, but kept following her own train of thought: “Everything works. I called for Thai takeout, and half an hour later it showed up. There’s no problem with food here, not yet. And we’re on the coast, so it’ll keep coming in by ship. The weather here won’t get too bad. California’s lucky. I don’t know what’ll happen to Missoula once winter settles in.” She bit her lip. “No. I do know. I just don’t want to think about it. There’s a difference.”

  “Maybe things won’t be so bad,” Colin said. “I was wondering about that on the way up here-right after I went past Kettleman City, matter of fact.”

  “Timing!” Kelly held her nose. Colin laughed. So did she, but she quickly sobered. “It will be that bad. It may be worse. This was a big eruption, even by supervolcano standards. Just about-maybe not quite, but just about-the size of the one over two million years ago, or the one that turned Mount Toba into Lake Toba.”

  “So we’re in it for real?”

  “We’re in it for real,” Kelly agreed. “Bigtime. The ash has already taken out most of this year’s crops in the Midwest, and maybe next year’s, too. After that… After that, it’ll get cold. It’s already getting cold-not so much heat from the sun can make it through the atmosphere. Things here seem fine now, but the whole world is running on momentum. When it slows down…”

  “All we can do is all we can do,” Colin said. “We’ll pick up as many of the pieces as we’re able to, and we’ll try and keep ’em from getting any more broken than they already are.”

  “How come the politicians don’t have that kind of sense?” Kelly asked.

  “I’m a cop. Picking up pieces is what I do,” he answered. “They sling bull. I get it slung at me. Nobody asks cops what we ought to do about this, that, or even the other thing. And when somebody does ask, he mostly doesn’t pay any attention to what he hears.”

  “Nobody paid any attention to the geologists, either,” Kelly said. “I mean, I’m nothing but a grad student. But there are people in my racket with clout. Nobody in Washington wanted to listen to them, though.”

  “Then they didn’t have enough clout,” Colin said.

  “I guess not.” Kelly laughed a singularly humorless laugh. “You want to know what else? Most of my research is obsolete.”

  “How do you figure that? You’re an expert on the Yellowstone supervolcano. What’s more important right now?”

  “I’m an expert on what it did the three times it erupted before this one. I’m an expert on what that might have meant. I’m an expert on the complicated geology that used to be under Yellowstone, and on the geysers and hot springs and stuff. Well, the geysers are gone. So is a lot of the geology that
made them possible. And now the supervolcano has gone off, and everybody can see what it means. And we don’t need to worry about another eruption like this one for the next half-million years. If that doesn’t spell obsolete, what does?”

  “You’re here,” Colin said. “Too many people aren’t.” A circle five hundred miles across… “Like I told you a minute ago, all you can do is all you can do.”

  “Nobody can do anything. It’s too big,” Kelly said.

  “Gotta keep trying anyway.” Colin wished he could make love with her again. Back in the day, he would have managed a second round. But that was then. This was now. He had to comfort her with words, and words weren’t such terrific tools for the job.

  XIV

  Another motel room in Maine. But till you opened the curtains-and sometimes afterwards-it could just as easily have been in Montana or Oregon or Arkansas. The road was simply the road once you’d been on it for a while. By now, Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles were veteran road warriors.

  Justin sat at the desk, doing e-mail on his MacBook. Rob sprawled on the bed, channel-surfing with the remote. HBO was showing a prizefight. The movie on Showtime sucked. The stand-up guy on Comedy Central had only one thing wrong with him: he wasn’t funny.

  In a pop-culture course at UCSB, Rob had heard that people were calling TV a vast wasteland a generation before he was born. It hadn’t got better since, only vaster. He checked the laminated guide on the nightstand. On this system, MSNBC was channel 23.

  The President and Grand Ayatollah of Iran stood side by side in a mosque in Qom. The President was a skinny, swarthy little guy with black hair and a close-cropped graying beard. He wore a dark Western-style jacket, a dark shirt, and no tie. Omitting the tie was the only place where Rob-who wore them at weddings, funerals, and gunpoint-sympathized with him.

  In turban, flowing robes, and even more flowing beard, the Grand Ayatollah looked like a man from another century. As the camera moved in for a close-up of the two of them, though, you saw his heavy-lidded, clever eyes. The President was doing the talking. The President, in fact, was pounding his fist into the palm of his other hand to make his point. The Grand Ayatollah didn’t keep an arm behind the President’s back or anything. But you could make a pretty fair guess about which was the ventriloquist and which the dummy.

  Not that the crowd inside the mosque cared. They cheered the President’s impassioned Farsi with passion of their own. To Rob, and to 99.9 percent of other non-Iranian Americans, Farsi was just guttural noise.

  A translator who spoke almost unaccented American English spread the word to the wider world: “We have said for many years that the United States is the Great Satan. Now God is punishing the USA for its wicked war against Islam and for its poisonous support of the Zionist entity. It is a great punishment, and a punishment greatly deserved.”

  More applause from the crowd. The Grand Ayatollah nodded in approval. Rob got the idea that he might have smiled if he hadn’t had his smile muscles surgically cut to make sure he couldn’t.

  “If only the Americans, mired in ignorance and disbelief, had had the wisdom to embrace the teachings of the glorious Prophet Muhammad, peace be unto him…” the President went on.

  “Hey, Justin, you listening to this bullshit?” Rob asked.

  “Now that you mention it,” answered the band’s front man, “no.”

  “Guy’s been channeling Pat Robertson,” Rob said, and summarized the President’s remarks.

  “Nice to see we don’t have the loony market covered,” Justin observed.

  “There you go,” Rob said. “You know we’re screwed when the Iranians can laugh at us. When North Korea starts, it’s All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”

  “Yeah, that’d be something, wouldn’t it?” Justin was about to say something more when his cell phone rang. He put it to his ear. “Hello?

  … Speaking… Yes, we’re looking for gigs right now. The volcano’s thrown everything for a loop… In Greenwood, you say?.. Green ville. Sorry. We’re from the other side of the country, remember. Where exactly is Greenville?… At the south end of Moosehead Lake. Okay… When would you want us to play there, and what are you offering?”

  They were in Orono now. They’d played several shows on and near the University of Maine campus here. Rob grabbed a Rand McNally road atlas. You couldn’t get much more Maine-sounding than Moosehead Lake, could you? But Greenville was just a little dot on the map. He checked its population-a bit over 1,300. Greenville Junction, right next door, added another 850 or so. Given that the band was and intended to be caviar to the general, where would they find a crowd?

  Rob circled Greenville and Greenville Junction in the atlas, then wrote 2100 people, total next to them. He showed Justin the Rand McNally.

  Justin nodded. He held out his free hand for Rob’s pen. When he got it, he wrote a number with a dollar sign in front of it. It wasn’t an enormous number, but it could have been worse. They’d done what they could do around Orono and Bangor. Money coming in instead of going out would be nice.

  “We’ll want cash up front when we get there-assuming we can get there,” Justin said. “Like I told you, we’re from California. I’ve never seen as much snow as this in my whole life before.”

  Rob t just kept coming down and coming down and coming down. It came down early enough and often enough to bemuse the locals, and if you weren’t used to snow in Maine you had to be one of the loved-and-hated summer people. He’d heard people arguing about whether they’d ever seen so much snow so early in the season. Some said yes, and said it was just one of those things. The naysayers were inclined to blame it on the supervolcano.

  No matter what caused it, it was real. Even people who’d been driving in snow since they’d got behind the wheel were having trouble. Snow plows had already started coming out. So had rock salt and grit to try to keep roads passable. And so had anguished howls from every agency that deployed snow plows and rock salt and grit. Doing so much so early, they wailed, would wreck their carefully crafted budgets.

  Justin wrote a date beside the proposed fee: Saturday after next, ten days away. He put a question mark by it. Rob nodded without great enthusiasm. The lead time would let the people in Greenville promote the show-assuming they tried, assuming anyone paid attention.

  “Well, Mr. Walters, we’ll all give it our best shot, and we’ll see how it turns out,” Justin said. “Thanks for calling. So long.” He high-fived Rob. “A gig!”

  “Uh-huh.” Rob still wasn’t thrilled. “Biff’ll love leaving Orono. That Nicole he’s found…”

  “How many girls have all of us left behind?” Justin countered. “It goes with what we do.”

  “I know.” Rob nodded. “But sooner or later you meet a girl who counts more than the band. Even Lennon met Yoko.”

  “That goes with what we do, too,” Justin said. “I don’t think Nicole’s the one like that for Biff. If she is, well, it’s not like nobody on this side of the country ever played rhythm guitar.”

  “Mpf.” Rob wouldn’t give that more than a grunt. Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles was what it was because of all four people who made it up. The band wouldn’t be the same without Biff… would it?

  If they could get along without him, could they also do without a bass player who wrote some of their quirkier songs? Rob really didn’t care to contemplate that. It was too much like contemplating your own death after your best friend got killed in a car crash.

  Instead of contemplating it, he looked at the practical side of things: “That’s still a week and a half from now, you said? In the meantime, how do we make some money come in for a change instead of going out?”

  “Good question,” Justin said. “If this were the ’90s, we could set up a free concert in a record-store parking lot. They’d sell their albums, we’d sell ours-for cash, too-and everybody’d be happy. But”-he sadly spread his hands-“where you gonna find a record store these days?”

  “That’s a good questi
on, too. I wish I had a good answer for you,” Rob said. “Which is a more endangered species, record stores or secondhand bookstores?”

  “All of the above?” Justin suggested. “People get most of their music online nowadays.”

  “Especially the people who listen to us,” Rob said. “Our bottom line would be better off if they didn’t.”

  “Fuckin’ tell me about it,” Justin said. “And when they want used books, they hit Alibris or AbeBooks or even good old Amazon.”

  “So we don’t play in a record-store parking lot, or in a bookstore lot, either,” Rob said sadly. “We ought to play somewhere, though. You can still move CDs if you sign ’em when people buy’em.”

  “Not in Orono. Not in Bangor, either. We’ve done all the business we can do around here.” Justin had a keen sense for how much of Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles any given area could support-or stand, if you looked at it that way.

  Maybe Rob believed the lead guitarist had that keen sense because he thought the same thing about these parts. “We already played Bar Harbor,” he mused aloud. “We don’t want to go back there. And there isn’t much if we head north.”

  “There isn’t anything if we head north,” Justin said with relentless precision. “You end up in Canada, and not the part of Canada with lots of people-the part of Canada with lots of moose.”

  “How do you tell that from Maine?” Rob asked. They were going to play by Moosehead Lake (which, on the map, really did look like a moose’s head), and they’d already seen one of the big critters lumbering across a road deserted by everything except the moose and their wheels.

  But Justin knew what was what. “You head north from here, you end up in Quebec,” he explained. “In Quebec, the moose-mooses? meese? — speak French.”

  “There you go.” Rob clapped his hands. “I never would’ve figured that out on my own.”

  “I knew I was good for something,” Justin said, not without pride.

  Also not without pride, Rob answered, “Not me. I’m good for nothing. If you don’t believe me, ask my father.”