He shrugged. “All it means is, I wear a suit more often than a uniform. No gold-plated Mercedes. Not even tin-plated.”
“Oh, it means more than that. It means you’ve spent a lot of time working hard,” Kelly said quietly. “Later on, if either one of us decides this wasn’t such a good idea…” She didn’t go on, or need to.
To show she didn’t need to, Colin gave back a quick nod. “No harm, no foul. Sure,” he said. If he figured she wasn’t young enough or skinny enough or whatever the hell, he wouldn’t write or phone. If she thought he looked too weather-beaten to stand or that he really was a lush coming off a bender, she wouldn’t call back or return his e-mail. It would all be very clean and civilized.
He had zero intention of not getting in touch with her again. A drowning man didn’t push away the spar he’d just grabbed, did he? Not likely! What she’d do then… Again, he could only wait and see. And if she didn’t decide he was too strange to deal with, he could only wait and see how they got along, or if they got along at all.
For now, Kelly said, “You’ll want to do some more exploring, and after the quake I really need to check that seismograph. I got more data than I thought I would.” As if to underline her words, another little aftershock rattled the boardwalk.
What Colin wanted to do was hang around right here and get to know her as well as he could as fast as he could. But he saw she’d given him a test question. Between the lines, it said If you come on too strong, you blow it. If he couldn’t work that out, he flunked.
So he said, “Sure. Glad to meet you,” and went on his way. He drove up to Dunraven Pass, which he might have done anyway, and looked south across miles and miles (more than thirty of those miles, he later figured out) to the distant mountains on the far side of the caldera (the middle-sized caldera, he reminded himself). Then he left the park altogether, which he wouldn’t have done if he hadn’t talked to Kelly Birnbaum.
He drove into the town of West Yellowstone, up US 191 to US 287, and west on 287 to Hebgen Lake and on to Quake Lake. The visitors’ center there perched high on the debris that had slid down from the far side of the Madison River and dammed it after the 1959 temblor. The rangers at the center seemed impressed he’d ever heard of the quake. They didn’t worry about the supervolcano. Maybe it was too big to worry about. Hoping the world stayed lucky seemed a better way to go.
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…