But Jared didn’t reach under her blouse or into her pants. He clinked glasses with her and asked, “What did you think of the match?”
“I don’t think I’ll ever make a big fan, but it was more interesting than I figured it would be.” Louise could say that much without worrying her nose would stretch like Pinocchio’s. She added, “I enjoyed the company.” Rather to her own surprise, she meant it.
“Good,” the pharmacist said. “So did I, very much. Just so you know, I count myself lucky you walked in looking for work.”
“Well, thank you. So do I,” Louise said. Yes, she meant it not least for the paycheck. But she’d had worse bosses. Jared might be strange, but he wasn’t high-pressure strange, the way Mr. Nobashi had been at the ramen works.
After Jared finished the drink, he said his good-byes. At the door, he pecked her on the cheek like a kid from junior high—middle school, they’d say these days. Then he disappeared into the night. Louise smiled after him. If he asked her out again, she knew she’d say yes.
XIV
Before the supervolcano erupted, Kelly Ferguson had never been in Missoula, Montana. She’d been there several times since, though, first to crash on a geologist who’d escaped the eruption with her and who taught at Montana State, and then to use it as a base camp from which to study what the caldera had done and what it was doing.
Missoula was the closest functioning city to what had been Yellowstone National Park. It had got a layer of volcanic ash after the eruption, but not a thick layer. All the prevailing winds—even the jet stream—blew from the direction of Missoula toward Yellowstone. Missoula got a layer of ash anyhow. No mere winds could completely defy the supervolcano. But Missoula, unlike a lot of places farther away, didn’t get an incapacitating layer of ash.
“Old home week,” she remarked to Geoff Rheinburg as they met for dinner before setting out into the eruption zone.
“Well, yes and no,” answered the man under whom she’d studied at Berkeley. “Back in the day, you didn’t need to worry about how your husband and your little girl would like it when you disappeared into the wilderness.”
“Colin’s okay with it,” Kelly said, which didn’t stretch the truth… too far. “Deborah… I didn’t have to worry about how much I’d miss her, either.”
Rheinburg chuckled and scratched his mustache. It had more white in it than it had the last time Kelly saw him. “I remember those days,” he said. “Enjoy ’em while you’ve got ’em, because they don’t last. If I see my kids twice a year these days, I figure it’s been a good year.”
Kelly nodded. Colin’s grown children went their own way and lived their own lives. Even Marshall was out of the house at last, though he was in someone else’s and not his own. Kelly didn’t dislike Janine, though she was damned if she understood what Marshall saw in his new squeeze.
The next morning, she stopped worrying about what was going on back home. Three helicopters thuttered out of the sky. They kicked up leftover dust as they landed in an empty parking lot at the edge of the Montana State campus. Parking lots, these days, were broad, flat spaces people used for almost anything but parking.
Geoff Rheinburg eyed the whirlybirds. “Before the eruption, people around here would have thought they were black helicopters from the UN, come to steal their liberty and lock it in a jail in Bulgaria. They would’ve started shooting first and asked questions later.”
“They may yet—if they haven’t got one or two other things to worry about in the meantime,” Kelly answered.
She had one or two other things to worry about herself. The last time she’d jumped into a helicopter, it had snatched her out of Yellowstone half a jump ahead of the eruption. She hadn’t told Colin she’d be flying in this one. I can tell him after I get home, she thought. Then he won’t have anything on his mind. Man is, always has been, and always will be the rationalizing animal.
Daniel Olson waved to her as he climbed aboard another chopper. He’d escaped from Yellowstone with her. He was the geologist with the slot at Montana State. She’d stayed with him till a cop buddy of Colin’s found a way to get her back to California.
When she strapped herself into her seat, the pilot gave her a helmet with an intercom connection. She was glad to put it on. Helicopters were godawful noisy. Flying in one without protection was too much like taking up residence inside the world’s biggest Mixmaster.
The pilot’s voice came through her headphones: “Good morning, folks, and thank you for flying Off the Map Airlines today.” Everybody thought he was a comedian. As if he’d read her mind, the man went on, “You may think I’m kidding, but it ain’t funny. Where you’re going, the supervolcano erased pretty much everything that was on the map, right? I mean, that’s why you’re going there. So for God’s sake be careful, and try not to do anything too dumb while you’re poking around in the middle of nowhere.”
His opinion of geologists was about the same as Kelly’s of three-year-olds. Kelly had her reasons. Well, maybe the pilot had his, too. This might not have been the first scientific expedition he’d flown into what was literally terra incognita.
Here be dragons, Kelly thought as the rotors began to spin. In spite of the helmet, the noise was bad. But the dragon under Yellowstone had always belched fire. Now it was asleep again. She hoped.
Up went the helicopter. Missoula dropped away and disappeared to the west. For a while, the pilot followed the line of I-90. The Interstate hadn’t completely disappeared from the map, at least this far from the eruption site. In fact…
“Doesn’t the road look a little clearer than it did when we came this way in Humvees?” Kelly’s throat mike would carry her words to Geoff Rheinburg’s headphones. Without the intercom, she would have to scream, and even then he wouldn’t hear much.
“You know, I think maybe it does,” the older geologist answered. “I didn’t want to say anything, for fear I was seeing more with my heart than with my eyes.”
“Makes sense that it should,” Kelly said. “That was a few years ago now. Enough time for the wind and the rain to get rid of some more dust, anyhow.” They’d made the trek to the edge of the caldera before Deborah was born. In anybody’s life, few dividing lines are sharper than the one between childlessness and children.
Before they went too much farther, though, the dust began to obliterate the line of the Interstate and everything else. The supervolcano had belched forth too much of it around here for the weather to have cleaned it away. Most of the landscape went brownish gray. The part that wasn’t brownish gray was grayish brown.
They weren’t flying very high. Kelly snapped a few photos. She eyed the ground first with her Mark I eyeballs, then through 8x42 Bushnell binocs. She hoped to see a bush pushing up out of the ashfall or a jackrabbit hopping across the dun-colored ground. She saw… the dun-colored ground. Maybe she was still too high and going too fast. Maybe there was nothing like that to see this far east of Missoula.
Here and there, the crowns of dead lodgepole pines did stick up through the ash. When Kelly remarked on them, Professor Rheinburg said, “Five gets you ten they aren’t altogether dead. They’re probably full of wood-boring beetles chomping away and having the time of their lives.”
Kelly nodded. “You’ve got to be right.” Those beetles had been pests in Yellowstone before the eruption. The acres and acres of lodgepole pines they killed helped fuel the enormous fires of the 1980s.