Supervolcano: Eruption

IV

Between two and three million people came to Yellowstone every year. In July and August, they all seemed to be there at once. Cars and RVs and tour buses clogged the roads till they made California freeways at rush hour look wide open by comparison.

Kelly Birnbaum knew how to beat the crowds. Go a quarter of a mile off the asphalt and you shed way more than nine-tenths of the visitors. Go a couple of miles from the highways and you were pretty much on your own. That was bad news as well as good. Cell-phone reception in the vast park was spotty at best. If you got into trouble, you might not be able to let anybody else know.

The idea, then, was not to get into trouble. Kelly was a city girl. She didn’t hike the wilderness because she particularly loved hiking the wilderness. She went out there because that was what you did if you were a geologist working in the field.

What did the gravedigger in Hamlet say? Something about familiarity lending a quality of easiness. That was as much as she remembered. Considering that she hadn’t needed to worry about Hamlet since her undergrad days, she was moderately pleased to come up with even so much.

One of the basic lessons was never to hike alone. Since she was part of a team of researchers trudging out to Coffee Pot Springs, that wasn’t an issue. Ruth Marquez came from the University of Utah. Daniel Olson, who was younger than she was, had just landed a tenure-track job at Montana State, in Missoula. Kelly didn’t know whether to be jealous or to remember it was Missoula. And the calm, unhurried fellow who needed to buy a vowel was Larry Skrtel. He’d been with the U.S. Geological Survey the past twenty years, and headed up the team.

He enjoyed hiking. “The critters are less likely to bite you or run over you than the damn tourists are,” he declared.

“Except for the bison, maybe,” Daniel said. /They’re as dumb as the morons who bought Hummers when gas was cheap.” He was at least six-three, but Kelly had seen his car: a fire-engine red Honda the size of a roller skate.

“Keep your distance and they won’t bother you,” Larry said. “Well, usually.”

“Famous last words,” Daniel said. The other hikers laughed, as if he didn’t mean it. Bison knew they were the biggest critters in the neighborhood, and expected everything else to get out of their way. Some of the males weighed as much as Daniel Olson’s little car. They were dumb as rocks, and lots of those males had testosterone poisoning. Not a good combination.

The geologists had set out from Indian Pond. One of their colleagues took the car that brought them that far back to Lake Village. A train led towards Astringent Creek, which guided them most of the way north. Indian Pond was a good place to start. It lay near the northernmost edge of Yellowstone Lake. It was about a quarter of a mile across, and round as Charlie Brown’s head. A hydrothermal explosion had gouged it out of the ground about 3,000 years before-that was what the radiocarbon dates said, anyhow.

A bigger hydrothermal explosion had formed Mary Bay, the nearby part of the lake. Down below Mary Bay, the temperature got up over 250 degrees. The hot spot under Yellowstone might still sleep, but it was a long way from dead. Kelly shivered, though it was a nice day.

She was slathered in Deet. Mosquitoes buzzed around her just the same. Repellent or no repellent, she knew she would pick up bites. She’d even been bitten through thick socks. Now she sprayed her ankles, too. But all you had to do was miss a couple of square inches anywhere, and the mosquitoes would find them.

Larry Skrtel pointed to half a dozen lodgepole pines that lay tumbled like jackstraws. When his hand went up, a woodpecker that had been drumming on one of the trunks flew away. “Those trees weren’t down two years ago,” Larry said in a voice that brooked no argument. “Five gets you ten one of the quakes knocked them over.”

No one did argue with him. Kelly wouldn’t have dreamt of it. Arguing with somebody who was obviously right was a loser’s game.

Up the eastern side of Astringent Creek they went. They were near the eastern edge of the caldera. Kelly shook her head. Of the last caldera, she corrected herself. This one stretched most of the way across the park. The eastern edge of the one from two million years ago was also somewhere around here. That one’s western edge, though, lay well over into Idaho.

Quakes… Was that a brief rumble underfoot? Kelly had almost convinced herself she was imagining things when Ruth Marquez laughed self-consciously and said, “Did the earth move for you, too?”

Everybody groaned. But Daniel said, “Yeah, I think so. That was only a little one-maybe a 3.3.” Larry nodded.

Kelly smiled, remembering Colin guessing the magnitude of the stronger quake the year before. They might never have got together if he hadn’t. Life could be seriously strange sometimes.

“Harder to be sure when you’re outdoors,” she said. “Not as much stuff to rattle and shake. When you’re indoors somewhere, there’s less room for doubt.”

Larry paused thoughtfully. “I’m not sure I’ve ever been indoors for an earthquake,” he said. Daniel and Ruth both nodded.

“Only proves you guys aren’t from California,” Kelly said. As far as the other geologists were concerned, that made them lucky. They teased her. She sassed them back.

As the crow flies, Coffee Pot Springs was between twelve and fifteen miles north of Yellowstone Lake. There were more ravens than crows in Yellowstone, and the land route was longer than the aerial one would have been. They hadn’t got an early start. They weren’t hurrying, either. They were fit enough, but none of them except possibly Daniel was really fit. Kelly guessed they wouldn’t get there before nightfall, and she turned out to be right.

Along with the Deet, she smelled of her own sweat and the sunscreen she’d also used liberally. Up around 8,000 feet, sunburn came easy. She also smelled the chemical odor rising from Astringent Creek. Yellowstone was full of such hellish reeks. Fire and brimstone had shaped this land, and were a long way from gone even now.

Freeze-dried food could have been worse. That was as much as she could say about it. But a million stars blazed in the night sky, and the Milky Way glowed bright and ghostly. You never saw-you never imagined-the heavens like this in L.A. or Berkeley. Too much air (too dirty, too), too many lights. Too many people, was what it boiled down to.

Kelly would have enjoyed the view more if she’d stayed up longer. But she soon sought her sleeping bag, and she wasn’t the only one. Her last conscious thought was I hope the bears stay away.

They must have. She woke up undisturbed just before sunrise. Almost undisturbed: an itchy bump on the inside of her left wrist said at least one mosquito had found a place to eat.

Larry had real coffee, and was willing to share. Kelly and Ruth were glad to partake of his bounty; they’d only brought instant. Daniel declined. “I don’t drink it,” he said.

“My God!” Kelly exclaimed. “How did you get through grad school?”

“Crank,” he answered calmly. She didn’t know him well enough to tell if he was kidding.

They buried their trash, doused the fire, and went on. “I want to put in for a new set of legs,” Ruth said as she worked out the kinks.

“Oh, good. I’m not the only one,” Kelly said. Neither Daniel nor Larry complained. Maybe they weren’t feeling it the same way. Then again, they were guys, so maybe they were just being macho. Testosterone didn’t addle male bison alone.

Here and there, hot springs fumed and mud pots bubbled. A lot of them didn’t even have names. There were more features like that in Yellowstone than in the whole rest of the world. A couple of dozen hot spots burned through the earth’s crust. One of them raised the Hawaiian Islands, another the Galapagos chain.

But most of them lay under the oceans. The lava that came from those was smooth-flowing basalt. The Yellowstone hot spot alone sat under continental crust. Rhyolite was like granite, only with bigger crystals. When it melted, it didn’t spread out easily, the way basalt did. It was too viscous. It just sat where it was till the pressure got too great. Then… Then the supervolcano went off.

They tramped along Shallow Creek, getting close to the springs. A coyote eyed them from the edge of the pines, then drew back. Larry said, “If it was along the road, half a dozen cars’d stop so the jerks inside could photograph a wolf to wow Aunt Martha back home.”

He was right once more. Kelly had seen it happen. She knew the difference between the two. Most people these days, though, grew upnd stayed-so isolated from nature that any wild animal seemed exotic to them.

That was one of the things that made Yellowstone so precious. Here was a great big, not too badly disturbed chunk of what North America had been like before Europeans arrived. You couldn’t find anything like this elsewhere, and not just on account of the wildlife.

And if the hot spot sitting under it discharged, then what? Then you’d gone and dropped thousands of square miles of unspoiled wilderness into what was literally the world’s biggest barbecue. You’d never see your bison or your wolves or your grizzlies again.

The really bad news was, that would be the least of your worries.

Steam rose ahead. A small swell of ground kept the geologists from seeing the springs themselves for a little while. Kelly remembered them from the last time she’d come this way, not long before she met Colin. They’d been, well, hot springs. If they’d been anywhere close to a road, people would have stopped and snapped pictures of them and queued up to use a couple of odorous outhouses. They weren’t so showy as the ones in Black Sand Basin or Biscuit Basin, northwest up the highway from Old Faithful, but they weren’t half bad.

They lay within a rough circle of sinter: the grayish white silica that precipitated out of mineral-laden water as it cooled. All things considered, they reminded Kelly of zits on the face of the earth. On a larger scale, that was what the Yellowstone supervolcano was. She wished she knew where she could get her hands on a dab of cosmic Clearasil.

“Remember, folks-watch where you put your feet. No boardwalks here,” Larry said. Fair enough: he had more field experience than the rest of them put together. “Stay off the sinter crust. You can break through. You won’t like it if you do-trust me. Don’t count on animal tracks, either. I’ve seen more parboiled critters than I like to think about. Most places, I’d say the grass was pretty safe. Here, with everything that’s been going on, I’m not sure how good a guide it is.”

“That doesn’t leave much,” Daniel observed as they climbed the low rise. “Maybe we should walk three feet off the ground.”

“Don’t let me stop you,” Larry said. Daniel gave him a sour smile.

Going uphill made Kelly’s thighs and calves ache. Walking gave you great legs. (Better legs, anyhow; Kelly feared hers would never be great.) But you paid a price. Everything you did came with a price. The older she got, the more sure of that she became.

As if defying time (no, not as if-if only!), she pushed the pace the rest of the way. The others didn’t mind letting her forge ahead. They’d all come to Coffee Pot Springs before. It wasn’t as if she were stout Cortez (well, Balboa, if you wanted to be picky-Keats would have got a C- in Western Civ) on that peak in Darien, staring at the newfound Pacific.

Except she was. Coffee Pot Springs had gone nuts. A brand-new geyser threw water at least a hundred feet in the air. Some of the other springs weren’t just pools any more. They boiled and raged, blorping water eight or ten feet high, trying to find their inner geysers, too. Several of them, she was convinced, blorped from places that hadn’t boasted springs before.

Ruth and Daniel and Larry came up beside her. As she had done, they stopped and stood there gaping. “Holy shit,” Ruth said. Larry nodded. Recovering faster than the rest of them, Daniel pulled a camera from a pocket of his windbreaker and started snapping away.

Kelly started to reach for her own little Canon. She knew earthquakes messed with the plumbing systems under Yellowstone. After the Hebgen Lake quake in 1959, Sapphire Pool at the Biscuit Basin went batshit. It erupted so ferociously, it wrecked whatever subterranean channels that supplied it with water. Then it went back to being a pool.

Knowing about such things was all very well. Seeing Coffee Pot Springs totally transformed… that was something else again. And, as Kelly’s fingers closed on the digital camera, yet another sharp but mercifully short quake rattled the ground under her feet.

A voice said, “I’m scared.” Kelly needed a second or two to recognize it as her own.

Marshall Ferguson gripped one end of his sister’s coffee table. He hardly knew the guy on the other end-a shlub named Lemuel Something. Lemuel! Vanessa had dated him for a while in high school, and even in college till she met Bryce.

He did know that, if he weren’t her brother, he wouldn’t have done this for less than a blowjob. The table was about the size of a carrier’s flight deck, and solid wood, with planks at least three inches thick. It weighed as much as a rhino. All her furniture was like that. Why couldn’t she have bought cheap, flimsy crap, the way most people did?

“Ready?” Lemuel asked. He didn’t even go by Lem. Definitely a shlub.

“No, but let’s do it anyway,” Marshall answered. Lemuel needed a few seconds to process that. They lifted more or less together. Marshall swore. The table was even heavier than it looked. And they said it couldn’t be done! he thought. To make matters worse, they had to tilt it sideways to get it out the door.

Dad was here, and a couple of other, younger, guys Vanessa had lured with one blandishment or another. No sign of Bryce, of course. No sign of Vanessa’s current old-fart boyfriend, either. He’d already gone to Denver. And no sign of Rob, dammit. The band was gigging in some college town in-was it Montana?

Since Marshall was taller than Lemuel, he took the bottom position as they lugged the coffee table down the stairs. That kept it more nearly level. It also left him bearing more of the weight. Lucky me, he thought.

Vanessa had been carrying boxes into the U-Haul parked outside. Pickles was already in his plastic cat carrier, and yowling as if he expected them to start vivisecting him any second now. He probably did. Marshall wouldn’t have wanted to drive to Denver with a cat in a carrier on the seat beside him. Vanessa didn’t seem to worry about it. She also wasn’t too busy to play sidewalk superintendent when the coffee-table haulers came up. “Careful,” she said. “You don’t want to ding it.”

“Says who?” Marshall inquired.

“Says me,” his sister snapped. She liked dishing it out. She’d never been so good at taking it.

“C’mon,” Lemuel said-to Marshall, not Vanessa. “Let’s get this fucker into the truck before my arms fall off.”

“Okay.” Marshall was on the bottom again when they toted it up the U-Haul’s ramp. At least the truck was big enough to have one. Getting the table into the cargo space by lifting it wouldn’t have been much fun. Come to think of it, nothing about moving was much fun.

Marshall wondered how Vanessa would like driving this monster to Colorado. Even without Pickles and his editorials, she would have needed a special trucker’s license to get behind the wheel of anything bigger. God, and the gas it would burn through! And…

“Who are you gonna get to move you in?” he asked her. “Will, uh, Hagop help?” He knew a guy who said that helping somebody move was a proof of true love. He’d met Vanessa’s new squeeze a couple of times, but he wasn’t convinced the rug merchant had a whole lot.

“He’s got a bad back,” she answered.

“So do I-now,” Marshall said as he eased the table down. Lemuel covered it with a dropcloth, then shoved it into a corner of the cargo bed and stacked boxes on top of it. That made good sense. Marshall wouldn’t have guessed Lemuel had it in him.

“Funny. I’m laughing my ass off,” Vanessa said. “You don’t have to be here, you know. If you want to go back to Santa Barbara and your bong, be my guest.”

He almost flipped her the bird, hopped into his car, and roared up the Harbor Freeway to the 101. Pissing her off didn’t bother him one bit. But Dad wouldn’t be happy, which was putting it mildly. And his father already had too many reasons to be unhappy at him and at most of the world.

“Anyway,” Vanessa went on, “from what I hear, there are almost as many wetbacks in Denver as there are in L.A. Getting unloaded’ll cost me a few bucks, but not that much.”

“If you say so.” Marshall turned back to Lemuel. “Ready for the next exciting episode?”

“If you say so,” Lemuel replied. Not a bad imitation of Marshall. Maybe he was less of a dud than Marshall recalled. Or maybe he’d grown up some since. Who the hell knew?

Just after noon, Vanessa made a food run. She came back with enough Burger King burgers and fries-and, to her credit, onion rings, too-to sink a battleship, and enough Cokes to float it again. The moving crew plowed through the chow like Sherman plowing through Georgia, and left little more behind. “Grease, sugar, and caffeine,” Marshall’s father said, engulfing a Double Whopper with cheese in a couple of chomps. “Can’t go far wrong like that.”

“Amen, Dad,” Marshall agreed. His Double Whopper was lasting a little longer, because he was scarfing onion rings between bites. He patted his stomach. “I feel like I swallowed a bowling ball.”

“Yup.” His father nodded and sucked up Coke through a straw. “I’m really gonna feel it in my back and shoulders tomorrow. I’m getting too damn old to play stevedore.”

Marshall was half his dad’s age. He knew he’d be sore come morning, too. Who wouldn’t, except somebody who really was a mover? He was also amused to watch Dad look around to make sure Vanessa couldn’t hear before he cussed. Who was Dad kidding? Himself, most likely. Vanessa swore whenever she felt like it, and she didn’t care who was in range when she let fly.

Dad looked around again. Then he swiped a couple of Marshall’s onion rings. “Grand theft!” Marshall said. “You’re busted, dude.”

“No evidence,” his father said with his mouth full, and chewed harder to make sure he’d got rid of it all. After a heroic swallow, he changed the subject: “I wish like hell your sister wasn’t doing this. I’ve told her so, too, but she’s kinda hard of listening.” One of his patented dry chuckles followed. “You may have noticed.”

“Who, me?” Marshall’s wide-eyed innocence made Dad chuckle again. He went on, “You really have no use f the rug merchant, have you?” Now he glanced around warily and kept his voice down. When it came to critiques of her love life, Vanessa wasn’t sweet reason personified.

“As a matter of fact, no. DMV records say he’s two years older than I am.” Dad had the grace to look faintly embarrassed. “I mean, I’m seeing a younger woman, too, but nowhere near that much younger.” His eyes slid toward Marshall’s sack of onion rings again. Too late-they were gone. He sighed and ate French fries instead. Marshall thought he’d said everything he was going to for a while, but turned out to be wrong: “But Hagop isn’t what I’m worried about.”

“Huh?” Marshall said. Then he remembered what Dad’s new girlfriend (who, from one brief meeting, seemed nice enough-he sure liked her better than Teo) did for a living, or wanted to do for a living, or however the hell that worked. He clapped a greasy hand to his forehead. “Oh, for God’s sake! Don’t do the sky-is-falling dance again! Like Vanessa will pay attention to that. Tell me another one!”

“Well… she didn’t,” his father admitted. “But the sky isn’t falling. The ground’s getting ready to blow up. That’s worse. You have no idea how much worse. Nobody has any idea how much worse.”

Marshall cocked his head to one side. “Only you, huh? Only you and Kelly, I mean?”

To his surprise-no, to his astonishment-Dad walked right into it. “That’s right.” His father stuck out his chin and looked stubborn. Heredity, Rob thought. Anybody could see where Vanessa-and Rob, too-got it. He didn’t see it in himself the same way. But then, who ever does?

That was beside the point, though. He rubbed his father’s nose in it the way you rub a puppy’s nose right after it pisses on the rug: “You know what you sound like? You sound like you’re ready for a rubber room-or else for a really rancid TV movie, one. Only you and your sweetheart know The Truth”-he made the capital letters painfully obvious-“and you can’t get anybody to pay attention to you. Give me a break!”

Dad winced. “It’s not like you make it sound,” he mumbled.

“I understand, Lieutenant Ferguson. Please tell me how it is, then.” Now Marshall did his best to impersonate a shrink.

His best must have been good enough. He wasn’t made to be able to do what his father suggested. Dad was laughing when he made the suggestion, though. A good thing he was, too. Marshall didn’t want to mess with him. It wasn’t just training, though Dad had it and Marshall didn’t. Marshall didn’t want to hurt anybody. There were times when Dad did.

Once again, Vanessa got it from him. Marshall might be no threat to make Phi Beta Kappa at UCSB-not as long as the weed held out, anyway-but he was plenty smart enough to keep his big mouth shut on that particular pearl of wisdom.

“Come on, you lazy bums! Get busy!” Damned if Vanessa didn’t make as if to crack the whip.

She had lots of boxes of clothes, which weren’t bad to carry, and of books, which were. Paper seemed to defy the laws of physics. A 1 x 1 x 2 box definitely weighed more than twice as much as a 1 x 1 x 1. Lemuel played macho and carried a 1 x 1 x 1 box of books in each arm-once. After that, he used two arms for one box.

They finished loading about three. Vanessa hugged them all and kissed everybody on the cheek. “Thanks, kiddo,” she told Marshall. Pickles squalled mournfully in the background.

“It’s okay. That’s why you’ve got brothers and other beasts of burden.”

“Yeah, you’re beastly, all right.” She pressed an engraved portrait of Ben Franklin into his hand. “I want to get going. You guys can use this for dinner.”

He started to say they wouldn’t be hungry for a week after all the fast food they’d killed at lunch. He started to, yeah, but he sure didn’t finish. He’d been working hard enough that his appetite was already coming back to life. By dinnertime, he’d be ready to make a pig of himself. A C-note wouldn’t buy prime rib for the crew, but they could do better than Burger King.

He did ask, “Will you have enough to keep you going till you land something in Colorado?”

“One way or another, I’ll make it,” she answered. She went over to their father. He also got a hug and a kiss. He said something, too low for Marshall to catch. Then Vanessa tossed her head, the way Marshall had watched Mom do a million times. That meant Dad had come out with something dumb-again. Was the toss heredity, too, or had Vanessa just watched Mom till she imitated her without even knowing she was doing it?

Asking her wouldn’t be so real smart, either. Again, Marshall kept his mouth shut.

Besides, he could make a shrewd guess about the subject line on that hair-flipping head toss. Five got you ten Dad was going on about the time bomb ticking under Yellowstone. Marshall had poked around online. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe the supervolcano was there. Whether it was likely to go off day after tomorrow-or a week from Tuesday at the latest-was liable to be a different question.

That was how it looked to him, anyhow. He knew how much he didn’t know about volcanoes in general and the Yellowstone supervolcano in particular. By what Google and Wiki told him, though, nobody knew much about supervolcanoes. Not one had gone off in the past umpteen thousand years.

And if none went off in the next umpteen thousand years, that would suit him fine.

Vanessa stuck Pickles on the U-Haul’s front seat and fastened the belt around his carrier. Then she climbed into the cab. She started the truck. It sounded like the beater it was. How far from L.A. to Denver? A thousand miles, plus or minus. After so many thousands already on the odometer, why worry about one more?

Another clunk meant she’d released the hand brake. The emergency brake, Dad still called it. Hardly anybody younger than Dad ever did. But the way the U-Haul farted as it rolled off made Marshall think that wasn’t such a bad name after all. If you needed to use the hand brake in that truck, you might be in an emergency.

He displayed the hundred. “Do we eat dinner, or do we drink it?”

What they did was spend the next ten minutes knocking it back and forth and then splitting the difference. Kirin and cheap tempura went mighty well after moving, and they were all grubby enough that any place fancier than a Japanese greasy spoon wouldn’t have wanted their business anyhow.

“Could be worse.” Marshall didn’t remember he was echoing a book his folks had read to him when he was little. The sentiment seemed to hit the spot as well as the food and the beer.

It did to him, anyhow. His father said, “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

You knew you were starting to make it in the music business when o uuldn’t fit the whole band and everything you needed for your show into one big old SUV. The members of Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles were all bemused to be traveling with two, but there it was. Rob Ferguson knew he was the band cheapskate, but not even he’d said boo when they bought the second vehicle. When it was railroad time, it was railroad time, and that was all there was to it.

They didn’t go out of their way to look outrageous or even flamboyant; Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles wasn’t that kind of band. They were just four tired guys in their twenties when they pulled off I-90 and drove south toward the place where they’d crash tonight.

Rob was sitting in the lead SUV’s front passenger seat, which made him navigator and lookout. “There it is!” he said, pointing to the sign on the west side of the street. “Ruby’s Inn.”

“Sweet,” said Justin Nachman, who was driving. The band tried not to stay at the big national chains. With them, you knew what you were getting, all right. That was the good news. More to the point, it was also the bad news. Justin slowed down. Then he muttered under his breath: “Where’d they stick the stupid driveway?”

Rob was about to suggest where they could stick it when Justin found it. Ruby’s turned out to share an entrance with the next motel farther south. The little convoy pulled into the lot.

One of the girls behind the desk, a blonde who’d be porky in another five or ten years, had not a clue concealed anywhere about her person. The other, a skinny brunette, not only knew about the band’s reservations but whistled the start of “Impossible Things Before Breakfast,” one of the tracks from the new album.

Michael Jackson or Mariah Carey would have committed seppuku if an album sold the way Out of the Pond was doing. Well, Michael Jackson was already dead, but you get the picture. For a band like Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles, numbers that would have been disastrous for a big act looked terrific instead. They were making more money on sales from iTunes and the physical CD than they were from live shows, which had never happened before. They’d be able to afford to take some extra time getting their next release just right.

So maybe it wasn’t an enormous surprise that the registration clerk knew one tune or another from Out of the Pond. Nice, yeah. Egoboo, for sure. But maybe not an enormous surprise. “Impossible Things Before Breakfast” wasn’t a single, though. Never had been, never would be. If you knew that one, you not only had the album but you really liked it.

“Are you going to the show tomorrow night?” Rob asked her.

She shook her head. “Can’t afford it,” she said regretfully.

“What’s your name?”

“Tina Morton.”

He wrote it down. “Show up at will-call. They’ll have a seat for you.”

“Thanks!” She beamed at him. That might turn into something promising later on, or it might not. He wouldn’t worry about it now. Tickets were only twenty-five dollars, but he wasn’t far from the days when twenty-five dollars weren’t only himself. And if the next album tanked instead of taking off from what Out of the Pond was doing, he’d go right back there again.

The rooms, next door to each other, were, well, rooms. Rob had been in a lot of different rooms in a lot of different places. He’d had some that were better than these, more re worse. These were on the ground floor, as the band had requested. They wouldn’t have to shlep stuff up and down stairs.

After everything was out of the cars, Justin stretched and grimaced, miming an unhappy back. “We’re gonna be too old for all this hauling one of these days. One of these days soon,” he amended, so maybe he wasn’t faking the sore back. “What do we do then?”

“It’s not what we do then. It’s what we do in the meantime. We’ve gotta make ourselves a big enough deal so we can pay roadies to take care of all the heavy, sweaty shit for us,” Rob said. “What I want to know is, where do you go for dinner when you’re in Missoula, Montana?”

“Go ask Tina at the desk,” Justin answered. “Or I will if you don’t want to. She’s not half bad.”

“My old man always tells me Never volunteer, but I’ll do it. Not half bad is right,” Rob said. “And she knows ‘Impossible Things Before Breakfast’! How impossible is that?”

“Pretty much so, most places, but every once in a while they do let the brain-damaged ones out of the Home for the Terminally Inane,” Justin said. Rob shot him the bird and went back to the front desk to chat up Tina. When he came back, Justin gave him a sardonic hand. “Twenty minutes, man. What were you doing?”

“Like, talking.”

“Like, right! I’ve never heard anybody call it that before. That long, you probably did it twice.”

“I wouldn’t have,” Rob replied with dignity. “Some people don’t blow their load too quick the first time. Anyway, about dinner-”

“You mean you remembered dinner, too?”

Rob took no notice. It wasn’t easy, but he managed. “Back toward the Interstate half a block is something called the Stone of Accord. ‘Where the Gaelic meets the garlic,’ it says on the menu-she showed me one.”

“Corned beef and linguini! Cabbage pizza! Oh, boy!”

“Menu looked pretty good. And they’ve got Moose Drool on tap. Maybe a block and a half the other way is the Montana Club. If you haven’t lost all your money gambling, you can eat dinner there.” Rob knew about poker clubs that doubled as restaurants; San Atanasio had several. When he was little, they’d paid the town a lot in tax revenue. Now, thanks to the big Indian casinos, they’d fallen on hard times. And, without that tax loot, so had San Atanasio.

“Which is better?”

“Stone of Accord is a couple of bucks cheaper. Tina says the food’s better, too.”

“Okay. We’ll blame her if it turns out to be crappy.” Justin set a hand on Rob’s shoulder. “But don’t worry. We’ll blame you, too. If it’s good, though, she gets all the credit.”

“Have you been talking with my father?” Rob asked, not altogether in jest. The band walked up to the Stone of Accord. The food proved pretty good. The other three guys drank toasts to Tina. Draft Moose Drool stout was as good as anything this side of Guinness. And if you wanted Guinness instead, all you had to do was ask for it.

The waitress recognized them. “You look just like you do online!” she exclaimed, as if that were some kind of surprise.

“Not me,” Rob said gravely. “I wouldn’t let ’em photograph my tail.”

“We made him climb out of the formaldehyde bottle, too,” Justin said. The girl just kinda looked at him, which meant she didn’t know what the hell formaldehyde was. Fancier than in-formaldehyde, Rob supposed. He also got his low taste in puns from his old man.

“You guys are playing at the Civic Stadium, right?” she asked.

“No, over at the Golden Sluice, near the university campus,” Rob said.

“I’ve been there. No way it’s big enough!” she said. “People will be jammed in there. Lined up around the block, like. You guys are the hottest band to come to town in a long time.”

God help Missoula, in that case, Rob thought. Aloud, he said, “I like the way she talks.”

“Me, too,” Biff Thorvald agreed loudly. He sounded as if he liked it a lot. He got her name, and promised her a ticket. If they were gonna sell out the place, why the hell not? Rob liked Tina better-she got the jokes-but the waitress was a long way from terrible. No guarantees, but sometimes life on the road could be a lot of fun.