“You’re right,” she said. “You know what else, though?”
“What?”
“Everybody in college could turn into a cross between Shakespeare and Einstein tomorrow, and the country’d still be in deep kimchi.”
He thought about that. He didn’t need long. He nodded. “Well, you’re right,” he answered. He couldn’t think of anything worse to say.
Marshall Ferguson clacked away on the manual typewriter his old man had found him. He didn’t like it for beans, but it let him write when power outages left his Mac blind, deaf, and dumb.
He had all kinds of reasons for disliking the typewriter. If you’d learned at a computer keyboard, typing on a manual meant practically spraining your fingers every time you pressed down. That was bad enough. Worse was how user-friendly a typewriter wasn’t.
If you made a typo on the Mac, a couple of keystrokes and it was gone. It you decided to rework a sentence, you selected it, deleted it, and rebuilt it to your heart’s new desire. If you needed to put this paragraph above that one instead of below, Command-X and Command-V were all it took.
If you needed to do that stuff on a typewriter… He had a circular, gritty eraser with a green nylon brush sticking out of the metal holder for disposing of small mistakes. Correction fluid eradicated words, sometimes even sentences. For anything bigger than that, you needed to retype the whole stinking page, even if you were down near the bottom.
It sucked, was what it did. Bigtime.
Almost anything was better than retyping a page. He’d got to the point where, when he could see trouble coming ahead, he’d fiddle with things in longhand till he got them the way he wanted them. Then he’d transcribe his scribbles. The method wasn’t elegant. It was butt-ugly, in fact. But it worked. He figured anything that let him turn out tolerably neat copy on a typewriter put him ahead of the game.
When the house had power, he would scan his typewritten pages to OCR. The copy that produced wasn’t perfect—the scanner didn’t care for the manual typewriter’s imperfections. But it was, to borrow one of his father’s favorite pungent phrases, close enough for government work. He could clean it up and then go ahead on the computer till the next time it went dark without warning. He learned to save very often. He never lost more than about a third of a page of text.
The next interesting question was whether the latest story was worth doing. It was about a guy whose friends kept looking at him out of the corner of their eye because he’d snitched when he found out somebody he knew was embezzling from the place where he worked.
Whether the story was worth doing in a dramatic sense mattered only so much. He knew damn well he’d finish this one. What he didn’t know was whether it was more exorcism or expiation.
If Tim hadn’t told him he’d bought dope from Darren Pitcavage, and if he hadn’t told his dad… If that hadn’t happened, Darren’s father would still be alive. He’d still be chief of the San Atanasio Police Department. And, when the urge struck him, he’d still be raping and strangling little old ladies all over the South Bay.
Everybody was glad the South Bay Strangler was out of business. Everybody was especially glad the South Bay Strangler wasn’t running the San Atanasio PD any more. In the ordinary run of things, passing on the information that made the South Bay Strangler shuffle off this mortal coil should have made Marshall a minor hero, or not such a minor one.
But he smoked dope. He’d ratted out a dealer. He’d never come right out and told his friends he’d done that, but they could add two and two even when they were baked. He knew what those sidelong glances he kept talking about in the story were like. He knew in the most intimate possible way—he’d been on the receiving end of too many of them.
His main character—a guy quite a bit like him—wondered if he’d have any friends left by the time things finally blew over. Marshall knew that feeling, too: knew it much too well. If he worked it out on the page and on the computer monitor, maybe he could work it through inside his head as well. Maybe.
He obviously couldn’t talk about it with his buds. He couldn’t talk about it with his father, either. Colin Ferguson just said, “You did the right thing.” He was a hundred percent convinced of that. No doubt his certainty was meant to kill Marshall’s doubts.
Only it didn’t. It made them worse. Marshall was nowhere near a hundred percent convinced he’d done the right thing. Having somebody—especially somebody of the cop persuasion—tell him he’d absolutely done the right thing made him believe it less, not more.
His older brother might have understood him better. But Rob had been in Maine ever since the eruption. Maine was dimly, distantly connected to the rest of the USA a couple of months a year, when some of the roads sort of thawed. The rest of the time, it might as well have fallen off the map, or back into the nineteenth century.
And Rob went out and did things. He didn’t worry about them as much as Marshall did. In a million years, Marshall wouldn’t have had the nerve to try to pay his bills as a bass player in a band that would never make anyone forget Green Day or even Weezer any time soon. Marshall enjoyed hanging out with the guys in Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles. He enjoyed getting wasted with them. Hitting the road with them? That was another story.
So maybe Rob would have just told him to get over it and to get on with it. Good advice. Marshall knew as much. But he would have bet Rob couldn’t tell him how to go about it.
He didn’t ask his sister. Vanessa wouldn’t even see there was a problem. She was about herself, first, last, and always (well, sometimes about whatever guy she was with, but she eventually decided each one in turn didn’t measure up to what she figured she was entitled to). Besides, she had her nose out of joint at him right now because he kept writing and even selling stories every so often, where she talked a good game but never applied her behind to the seat of a chair long enough to produce anything.
Which left Kelly, pretty much by default. His dad’s second wife wasn’t the mother he should have had. She was too young for that, and too sensible. But she did seem like the older sister he might have had, all the more so when he compared her to the one biology had actually stuck him with.
And, like him, she was home most of the time. Taking care of a baby would do that for you—or rather, to you. She didn’t mind listening to him. She said, “Hey, you could talk about the horses in next year’s Kentucky Derby and I’d listen to you.”
“You don’t know anything about the Kentucky Derby,” Marshall said. “Uh, do you?”
“Nope.” Kelly shook her head—carefully, because she had Deborah on her shoulder. “But the other choice is talking about poopy diapers. I’ve got to change the goddamn things. I don’t want to talk about ’em.”
“I hear you.” Marshall had changed some for his half-sister. Earlier, he’d changed some for his half-brother, his mother’s child by the guy for whom she’d left Dad. Both kids were related to him. They weren’t related to each other at all. How weird was that?
Kelly didn’t try to tell him that of course he’d done the right thing when he squealed on Darren Pitcavage. She saw more shades of gray in the world than his father did. “I don’t blame you for feeling funny,” she said. “How can you help it? You didn’t know all this was going to drop on your head. Nobody knew. Nobody had any idea. Darren’s dad had been covering his tracks for a long time, and he was good at it.”
“I guess,” Marshall said. “It was even worse before we found out why he killed himself, you know? I thought getting Darren busted was what pushed him over the edge, like. That made me feel really great.”