“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?”