“Tell me about it!” Colin said with more feeling than he’d intended.
Bryce nodded. “Yeah. You know what I’m talking about, all right. So I ought to be down in the Dumpster, right?”
“Hadn’t heard anybody put it like that before, but it seems like a possibility,” Colin said. “You aren’t, though?”
“I aren’t,” Bryce agreed. “I had another poem accepted by a pretty good journal. Theocritus updated, you might say.”
Theocritus was one of the 2,000-plus-years-dead poets he studied. Colin knew that much, and not a nickel’s worth more. Still, he brought his hands together in one silent clap. “Not bad,” he said. “That’s two in a few months.”
As soon as the words came out of his mouth, he wondered if he should have left them in there. Bryce had got the first acceptance just before Vanessa threw him out. Cause and effect? Jealousy? Vanessa made a hell of an editor. She had all the tools she needed to be a writer herself except the nerve. She would rather submit to a root canal without Novocain than to an editor.
Bryce said “Uh-huh” again. He owned a pretty fair poker face. Colin couldn’t tell what he was thinking. That might have been just as well.
“They pay you anything for this one?” Colin asked.
Now Bryce snorted: derision for a silly question. “Copies.” By the way he said it, he figured he was lucky not to have to buy them. “My mom will be happy-she’ll have something to put on her shelf and show my aunts and uncles. But you can’t make a living as a poet. Or I sure as hell can’t, anyway, not with the kinds of things I write. So I do ’em as well as I can, for me. If anybody else likes ’em, cool. If nobody does, I can live with that.”
Colin wondered whether he was kidding himself or knew he was blowing smoke. You didn’t sit down and write poems if you didn’t want other people to see them. You probably wanted to end up on the New York Times bestseller list. Bryce was right about one thing, though: if you modeled your poems on ones from some ancient Greek, you damn well wouldn’t.
“Other thing is…” Bryce hesitated, perhaps almost as carefully as he would have while building and polishing one of his poems. He usually wasn’t shy about telling Colin what was on his mind. Which meant… No sooner had Colin realized what it meant than Bryce confirmed it: “I’ve met somebody I like. She seems to like me, too. We’ll see where it goes, that’s all.”
“Good for you!” Colin was glad he could say it quickly. He didn’t want Bryce thinking he liked him only because he’d been attached to Vanessa. “So have I-but you’ve heard about that.”
“Right.” Bryce raised an eyebrow. “We’ll all run for the hills when the super-duper volcano pops its cork.” Said in a different tone of voice, that would have made Colin want to punch him in the snoot. As things were, and accompanied by a disarming grin, it wasn’t so bad.
“Something’s gonna happen there. I don’t know what. I don’t know when. Neither does anybody else, including Kelly,” Colin said. “Nobody knows when the Big One’ll hit, either. I’ve got an earthquake kit in the steel shed out back, though, and a little one in my trunk. Don’t you?”
“I have one in the car. Harder to put one in the shed when you’re in an apartment,” Bryce said.
“Could be,” Colin admitted. “So who’s your new friend? What’s she do? How’d you meet her?”
“Her name’s Susan Ruppelt. She was moving into the TA office I was clearing out of. We got to talking, and I got her e-mail, and one thing kind of led to another. She’s working on the Holy Roman Empire. Tenth-century stuff, maybe eleventh-.”
“AD, you mean, not BC.”
“That’s right.”
“Too modern for you, then.”
“Hey, what are thirteen hundred years between friends?” Bryce grinned again. He looked as happy as a cat lapping up cream. He hadn’t looked that way while he was with Vanessa, not after the first few months. Maybe it would last longer this time. Or maybe not. Even if it did, things might fall apart years later. Colin had learned more on that score than he’d ever wanted to find out.
“Luck,” he said, and meant it.
“Thanks. You, too.” Bryce’s mouth twisted. “It’s as much as you can hope for, isn’t it? Luck, I mean. You grow together, or else you grow apart. I think Susan’s on the sheltered side, you know? Otherwise, she’d have more sense than to mess with a guy on the rebound.”
“Well, bring her by here one day,” Colin said. “If I can’t scare her away from you, nothing will.”
“I may take you up on that,” Bryce said. “You have been warned.”
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.