And then, just when she started getting close to the I-10, things slowed down again. Vanessa said something that should have turned all the rain pouring down on the whole state to superheated steam. That improved her attitude, but not the traffic.
In due-no, in overdue-course, she discovered this slowdown didn’t spring from an accident. Instead, an electric signboard sat on the shoulder. It said I-1 °CHECKPOINT AHEAD. PREPARE TO STOP. Then it blinked out. And then it said the same thing again. Blink. Message. Blink. Message. .
Vanessa lost track of how many times she read it before she rolled past the signboard at last. What she said about stopping for a checkpoint-what she said about preparing to stop for a checkpoint-made what she’d said about the earlier wrecks seem an endearment by comparison.
Then she said some things about the idea of checkpoints, too. What did they need them for, whoever they were? Wasn’t this the United States? Wasn’t it a free country? If it was, what business did it have checking on who drove to California? You couldn’t hijack a state and fly it into a skyscraper or a government building.
She got her answer to that when she came up to the checkpoint. STATUS EVALUATION CONTROL-SUPERVOLCANO EMERGENCY AUTHORIZATION ACT, the sign there announced. As far as she knew, the supervolcano was unauthorized. The act authorized things like Camp Constitution and its many unpleasant siblings, the scavenger programs in the Midwest, and maybe this status evaluation control thingy, too. An unnatural act, is what it is, she thought.
Trucks breezed through. Their reasons for heading west were obvious enough even for government functionaries to grasp. People in cars, though. . People in cars got the same friendly greetings Taliban terrorists toting AK-47s would have earned going through airport security.
A fellow in a uniform Vanessa didn’t recognize scowled at her expired Colorado license: not because it was expired but because it was from Colorado. “Why are you going to Los Angeles?” he demanded.
“Because I lived there my whole life till I went to Denver,” she answered, which was nothing but the truth.
Truth or not, it didn’t impress him. “Have you got any family there? Can they vouch for you?”
What if I say no? Vanessa was tempted to. Her attitude towards authority’s pushes had always been to push back as hard as she could. She was able to learn from experience, though. She didn’t always, but she could. This guy’s humorless face said any answer he didn’t like would keep her off the I-10.
And so, feigning meekness she didn’t feel, she answered, “My father is a police lieutenant in San Atanasio.” He’d never heard of her old stomping grounds; amazing how a face all slabs and angles could show such eloquent disbelief. Quickly, she explained, “It’s not far from LAX-a little south and a little east.”
“That’s what you say, anyhow,” he answered, his voice as stony as his eyes. He pulled out a cell phone. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a number where I can contact this individual?”
Vanessa could have taken the cop shop’s number off her own phone. She could have, but she didn’t need to. Dad’s work number had been ingrained in her head since she was a kid. She needed to add an area code to it now, and she did as she rattled it off. At the uniformed man’s annoyed glower, she repeated it more slowly.
He punched the number into his phone, turning his back and stepping away so she couldn’t follow his conversation. He didn’t look so sour-or rather, he looked sour in a different way-as he stuck the phone in his pocket and swung toward her again. “You appear to have been telling the truth,” he said, sounding quite humanly surprised.
“Of course I was!” Vanessa yipped. She was surprised herself, and furious, that he should doubt her. She prided herself on her honesty. She said what she meant even when keeping her mouth shut would do more good.
“Hunh!” Her father couldn’t have snorted better than this guy did. “You listen to the bullshit we hear here, you wouldn’t go of course.”
“You sound like a cop, all right,” Vanessa said.
“Yeah, well, you’d know, wouldn’t you?”
“Can I go on, then?” Vanessa itched to floor the gas pedal. If she drove fast enough, maybe she could get back to L.A. before this piece of junk crapped out on her. Maybe.
“I. . suppose so,” the uniformed man answered reluctantly. “If you haven’t got a place to stay and a job to look forward to, though, you’re a damn fool for heading that way.”
“The last place I had to stay was Camp fucking Constitution,” Vanessa said through clenched teeth. “Whatever I end up with in L.A.-even if I sleep under a goddamn freeway overpass and dumpster-dive for dinner-it can’t be worse than that. NFW.”
“Hunh!” the guy said again, even more dubiously than before. But he stepped back and jerked a thumb to the west. “Go ahead, then. You’ll find out.”
Vanessa didn’t waste time thanking him. She mashed the accelerator with her foot. Smoke spurted from the Toyota’s tailpipe. So what? she thought, and burst into more verses of song nobody but her could hear: “California, here I come! Right back where I started from!” Had anybody from Stephen Foster to Irving Berlin to John Lennon to Bob Dylan to Stephen Sondheim ever penned a finer lyric? She didn’t believe it, not even for a minute. She sang it again, louder yet.
* * *
It wasn’t as if Marshall had never seen a typewriter before. He had. Old people kept them around as souvenirs of bygone days. A few offices even had electric ones, for dealing with carbon-copy forms. But he’d never expected to discover one on his desk next to the iMac.
“Found it in a pawnshop on San Atanasio Boulevard,” his father said, not without pride. “You’ve been bitching about how you have trouble writing when the power goes out. Well, now you can.”
“Yippee skip,” Marshall said. “Um-most places these days want you to submit your stuff in Word or RTF. How am I supposed to get those out of this-thing?” It was a Royal manual portable, what a college student might have used in a 1970s dorm room.
Dad exhaled through his nose, which meant he was bent out of shape-he must’ve thought Marshall would fall on the ancient machine with a glad cry. He sounded hyperpatient as he answered, “You can get words out of it, right?”
“Maybe.” If Marshall seemed dubious, well, he was. He poked one of the keys. It went down partway, then stopped-he’d taken up the slack, or whatever. He poked again, quite a bit harder. Clack! The key hit the black rolling pin (he supposed it had a real name, but what that was he didn’t know). The carriage advanced a space. For somebody used to effortless computer keyboards. . “I dunno, Dad. It’s got a monster touch.”
“You’ll get used to that,” his father said, though how he knew it or whether he knew it Marshall couldn’t have guessed. “And you can get words out of it. People got words out of them for more than a hundred years.”
“Words, yeah, but not Microsuck Word.”
Dad waved that aside. “Incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial,” he said, like a lawyer objecting in court. “So you send somebody a hard-copy manuscript. If he likes it and he’s got power, he can scan it to OCR and get his own Word file. And if he doesn’t have power, he won’t be able to do anything with Word or RTF files any which way.”
Marshall opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. He couldn’t think of anything to say to that. After a moment, he tried, “Suppose I get something halfway done on the computer while we’ve got electricity, but I do the rest on this-thing?”
“Then you scan it and clean it up and do your twenty-first-century thing on it.” Dad had all the answers. He also had all the reasons: “But you can’t use ‘The power’s out again’ for an excuse so you don’t write. If you’ve got to, you can use legal tablets and a ballpoint.”