Read Supervolcano: Eruption for Free Online Page B

Biff bailed him out before he had to respond to it, saying, “C’mon, you guys. Give it a rest, okay? Let’s do the sound check and hit the greasy spoon next door. We dick around much longer, my belly’ll growl louder’n my axe.” He brandished his guitar.
    The so-called greasy spoon next door was an outstanding Vietnamese place. Rob remembered it fondly from the last time they were in Spokane. You couldn’t get better pho in Santa Ana’s Little Saigon. And the only place you could get better Vietnamese food than you could in Santa Ana was Ho Chi Minh City (which had been Saigon, and was likely to be Saigon again one of these years).
    An idea tickled the back of his mind. “Maybe we could do something with places that’ve had more than one name. Tsaritsyn, Stalingrad, Volgograd. St. Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, back to St. Petersburg.”
    “We’ve done songs about Russia,” Justin said.
    “Not just Russia. Saigon’s Ho Chi Minh City—I was just thinking about that—and Constantinople is Istanbul nowadays. And is it Strassburg or Strasbourg?” Rob tried to make one of those last two Germanic and guttural, the other nasally French.
    Justin’s frown warned him he wasn’t the most cunning linguist running around loose. But the lead guitarist said, “Well, write it and we’ll see what it looks like.” Most bands came up with tunes and found lyrics that went with them. Not Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles. With them, words usually came first. That had to be one more reason they wouldn’t hit the jackpot any time soon.
    “Al Stewart already did a song about Constantinople,” Charlie pointed out. “And They Might Be Giants did ‘Istanbul (Not Constantinople).’ Does the world really need three?”
    “It wouldn’t be the same kind of song as those,” Rob said. “Give me a break, man. Doctor Seuss used Constantinople, too.”
    “See? Everybody does.” Charlie could be relentless.
    “Enough, you guys.” Biff sounded more forceful this time. He struck a ringing chord to emphasize the suggestion.
    They tuned up. They’d played in Pasco two nights before, and in Portland two nights before that. They’d been on the road together since forever—it sure seemed that way, anyhow. They didn’t need long to get ready for what they would be doing later that night. Then it was off to the place next door. “Fee, fie, pho, fum,” Rob said happily. Not even Charlie called him on that one.
    Pho had to be the best comfort food in the world, even better than chicken soup. You could put almost anything into it. Rob’s favorite was beef tendon. Before he started eating pho, he wouldn’t have imagined you could boil beef tendon long enough to make it meltingly tender. He wouldn’t have imagined it turned so delicious when you did, either.
    The waiter and the cook and the proprietor were all the same little guy. He had a wispy mustache and iron-gray hair. His English was good, but no one would ever mistake it for his native tongue. Had he got out of Saigon just before it turned into Ho Chi Minh City? Rob wouldn’t have been surprised.
    “Not many Americans like that one,” he said. “Round-eyed Americans, I mean. They see it on the menu, they make a face.” When he made a face, he showed more wrinkles than he did with his features in repose.
    “They’ve never tasted it, then,” Rob said. He left a big tip, although the place was so cheap it was a big tip on a small bill.
    They went back to the dressing room and passed joints around. Rob couldn’t prove using weed made him play better, but he sure thought so. Time slowed down when he was loaded. There seemed to be more of it between the notes, so he had as much as he needed to nail them one by one. And he could hear—he could almost see—how they fit together ever so much better than he could straight. Everything sounded better stoned, too.
    Justin stepped into the corridor and checked the house. A few shouts out there said people spotted him