T. Boyle - Drop City

The snow sifted through the needles with an admonitory hiss. Marco stumbled forward, one shot left, the slug in the Winchester, praying that the thing was dead, that he wouldn't have to sacrifice it all over again, because this was enough for one day, more than enough. And then he was there, by the tree with its black skirts of tightly woven needles and the bark that smelled of pitch, of air freshener and Pine-Sol, and saw that there was no moose, wounded or otherwise, lying heaped in the snow. He heard a sudden sharp heartrending cry then, the cry of a human baby spitted by some fiend on the point of a bayonet, and looked down at his feet. There _was__ something there, a black weakly thrashing living form, a thing he'd shot while it clung to the bark of the tree eight feet from the ground, impersonating the head of a moose. And what was it? Weak and bristling, the life sucking out of the hole he'd put in it-a porcupine, that's what it was, the humped and hobbling old man of the woods, fit only to feed to the dogs.

For a long moment he stood there, watching the thing thrash its spiked head against the ground, back and forth, back and forth, a metronome keeping time with its agony and its unbelief-or was that its tail? All the while, the dark thumping kept time to the beat of his own unavailing blood. He felt foolish, felt lost and hopeless and incompetent, felt ashamed, felt guilty. And then, as the night deepened and the snow struck down at the unprotected flesh of his face, he hammered the dark form at his feet with the heel of his boot until it stopped moving, then hurried off to find the way he had come.

She'd always been a night person, or that was how she liked to think of herself. A night person haunted the clubs, slept late, sucked all the glamour out of the dwindling dark hours when the straight world was asleep and dreaming of mortgage payments. Nobody wanted to be a morning person, or at least nobody wanted to admit to it. Morning people grinned and mugged and threw cheer in your face at seven-thirty A.M. when you barely knew what your name was and your blouse with the Peter Pan collar was on inside out and the kids, the students-morning people all-were already filing into the room to let their oversubscribed hormones go to war with their metabolic disorders. Her mother was a morning person. Reba-Reba was a morning person.

Star was sitting at the table in the meeting hall preparing yet another community meal-dried salmon stew, with rice for consistency and tomatoes and peas out of the institutional-sized can for color-and she was smiling to herself as Merry chopped onions and Maya hammered at the stiff jerked slabs of fish with the butt of her knife. Night person. Morning person. The distinction didn't mean much up here, since it was night pretty much all the time now, the kind of night they gave you in the casinos in Las Vegas so you'd never stop handing over your money, the night of the POWs with the black bags pulled down over their heads, black night, endless night. It was three o'clock in the afternoon, according to the only timepiece in Drop City's possession, Alfredo's Timex with the two-inch-wide tooled-leather band that never left his wrist, and it was dark, had been dark for some time now. Somebody said it was snowing outside. Somebody else said it had been snowing for the past hour. The dog looked up briefly and laid his head back down again, as if it were too heavy a burden to bear.

People were scattered around the room in a funk of unwashed clothes and matted hair, down, dejected, disheveled, the energy level hovering around zero-they didn't even look as if they'd be able to lift the forks to their mouths come dinner, and Star had a brief fantasy of feeding them all by hand, then changing their diapers and putting them to bed one after the other. It was depressing. When they spoke, it was in a whisper, as if nobody really wanted to express their thoughts aloud, and the cramped space of the meeting hall buzzed with an insectoid rasp of timbreless voices sawing away at the fabric of the afternoon. Faces were vapid, eyes drained. It was a day for getting stoned, and Drop City had been diligent about it. Star was floating right along herself, drifting like the cottonwood fluff on the river, back when there was a river-and cottonwood. She got up to fuel the fire and get some oil sizzling in the bottom of the pot. Three steps from the table to the stove, but she saw the pale slashes of the snow against the window like interference on a black-and-white TV. Marco was out there somewhere, that was what she was thinking. He should have been back by now.

Merry was saying, “I'll never speak to Jiminy again, I swear. Not unless he tells me who it was, and I already know, I mean, I'd have to be blind not to-”

Maya, chopping: “Dunphy.”

“-I just want to hear it from him, like the truth, just once. Just once I'd like to hear the truth come out of his mouth.”

Both of them looked across the room to where Lydia, wrapped in her fur coat, sat against the wall leafing through one of the magazines she'd brought back as a communal offering-_Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone__-along with pounds and pounds of chocolate, French milled soap and Canadian whiskey. And crabs. Crabs too.

Star threw a handful of chopped garlic into the hot oil and everybody perked up visibly because there was no denying that scent, and then she went to Merry for the onions. People froze to death up here, that was what she was thinking-and what was that story she'd read in high school, the famous one where the guy, the cheechako, can't get a fire going and tries to kill the dog to warm his hands? The dog was too smart for him, that much she remembered. But he was a cheechako, that was the telling point, a greenhorn who didn't know the harshness of the country or the implacability of the night, a tenderfoot, a novice. Like Marco. There were animals out there in the woods, wolves, bears, that writhing dark buzzsaw of a thing that jerked across the ground as if it had been set on fire-the wolverine, the glutton, the intimidator-and if it could eviscerate a goat in ten seconds flat, then what could it do to a human being? People shot each other up here too, over guns, with guns, but then Ronnie would never- “Smells good.” It was Lydia, looking over her shoulder now. “What's it going to be tonight, the salmon surprise?”

Star smiled, pushed the hair away from her face with the back of her hand. “What else?” she said, stirring garlic and onions around the snapping of the oil. “It's the specialty of the house.”

She looked up then, past Lydia, to the door. She'd heard a noise, a thump at the frame as if someone had fallen dead on the doorstep-_Marco,__ she was thinking, _Marco__-and then suddenly the door flung open and slammed to again, and Jiminy was there in his Salvation Army greatcoat, stamping and blowing. He was wearing a knit hat that clung to his skull and came down tight over his ears and he'd wrapped his scarf round his head and face like a chador. Snow had crystallized in his eyebrows, it was caked atop his hat and batter-spread across the padded shoulders of the coat. “Jesus,” he muttered, unwrapping himself layer by layer, “it's cold enough out there to piss and lean on it.”

Star saw him exchange a glance with Merry-“Hi, Mer,” he said, but her eyes just bored right through him-and then it was his turn to say “Smells good” and he was crowding in at the stove, working up some friction between his palms and peering into the pot as if he were thinking about folding up his limbs and climbing into it.

“Snowing hard?” Star had inverted the Spiracha bottle over the pot with one hand while she shook white pepper out of the big rust-topped can with the other, spice for the hordes, and it could never be spicy enough.