T. Boyle - Drop City

The air was sweet with the smell of it. Birds lighted on the split-wood railing and peered at them as if they were just another extension of the tree, some unlooked-for fruit or shell-less nut, or maybe some canker working its way out of the bark. She lay back, dissolving into herself while the sounds of the stirring commune-soft voices, the splash of the pool, music on the radio-drifted up to them from what seemed like miles away.

“Laundry day,” he said, appending a strained little chuckle that was meant to set them both at ease, and it might have if it hadn't turned to dust in his throat. Behind him, a limp array of jeans, T-shirts, ragged underwear and mismatched socks lay spread-eagled over the branches as if they'd dropped down out of the sky. She pictured a sudden cataclysm, a whirlwind that had ripped the clothes off people's backs and spared the flesh beneath. Or bombers, high overhead, on their way to Vietnam, dropping soggy underwear instead of death.

“Yeah,” was all she said, but it seemed as if the word stretched to eight syllables.

“It's been a week, at least. I was beginning to smell like roadkill.”

“Tell me about it,” she said, and suddenly all her burners were on high, “because when Ronnie and I drove across country it was exactly like that-you know Ronnie? _Pan,__ I mean? Every town, we were trying to get our quarters together for the laundromat, but we either got lost or they'd never heard of washing machines and dryers and those little one-scoop boxes of Tide and bleach-remember those? They just say _Bleach,__ that's it. No brand name or anything, just _Bleach.__ Don't you hate that?”

“Yeah,” he said, staring at a place just over her shoulder and nodding as if he'd been there with them through every turning in every soulless gloom-blasted dead-end town Oklatexahoma could offer. “I guess. But isn't that what's wrong with the whole consumer society-brand names? — as if my soap's better than yours? See the U. S. A. in your Chevrolet. Buy, buy, buy, kill, kill, kill, eat, eat, eat. That's what the war's all about-products, brand names, keep the economy going and who gives a shit if a couple hundred women and children get napalmed every day?”

She sat up and put a hand on his arm. “Whoa,” she said, “whoa. I'm just talking, that's all.”

“That's okay,” he said, and he was looking into her eyes now, no problem at all. “So am I.”

“All right,” she said, “all right, if we're just talking, then I was just wondering what you think about being nude in front of a girl you've never met before, and stoned on top of it at something like half past eight in the morning. Is it a statement or something, or are you just out of clothes?”

She'd expected him to laugh, but he looked away from her. He shrugged, eloquent shoulders, hard muscle, a cord flashing in his neck. “I don't know,” he said, and caught her eyes again. “Does it embarrass you? The human body, I mean?”

All the leaves held steady, then jumped, as if somebody had slipped a new slide into the projector that was the world. “Maybe,” she said. “Sometimes.”

They were silent a moment, the bleating of the goats rising up to them, a distant shout, the rumble of a car on the dirt road. Then he said, “Why don't you take your clothes off, see what it's like?”

“I know what it's like-I was naked in the shower at six o'clock this morning. Why don't you put yours back on?”

“They're wet.”

She laughed then-he had her there. His clothes _were__ wet, pasted to the branches like papier-mâché and dripping arrhythmically on the goat party below.

“Listen,” he said, “Star,” and he used her name for the first time since she'd given it to him, “you want to maybe just hang with me up here for a while, kick back-”

“And ball?”

He shrugged again, rubbed at an imaginary spot on his calf. “Sure. If you're into it.”

She gave it a minute, thinking of Ronnie and the new girl, Merry, and the big-tits woman and everything that was hers to taste at Drop City and in the redwood forests and anywhere else she wanted to go outside the rigid stultifying confines of the straight world, and she considered Marco, his smile, his manner, the way he put things, and then she said, “No, I don't think so.”

He dropped his head, let his voice go loose till it sounded like something that had pitched out of a basket and rolled across the floor: “I was just asking-”

“What am I trying to tell you?” she said, and she propped herself up on one elbow and took hold of his arm just above the wrist. “I'm involved with somebody right now, I guess, okay? That's all.”

She watched him gather up his legs, two balls of muscle flashing in his calves, and even as he stood he was careful to keep himself turned from her. “I don't know,” he said, and he was apologizing now, “you never know unless you ask, right?”

She gave a laugh, but it wasn't the kind of laugh she'd intended, because it had Ronnie and the teepee cat all tangled up in it. “No,” she said, “you never know.”

The night was darker than any night had a right to be, no moon, no stars, the sky locked up tight with the fog seeping in off the river. She couldn't see Marco or Ronnie, though they were three feet ahead of her, feeling their way around the trikes and tools and discarded saltillo tiles, but she could smell the dust beneath her feet and the fishy stagnant odor rising from the pool somewhere off to her right, and she could hear the goats softly rustling their chains as they changed position beneath the oaks. A lone cricket kept opening and shutting a tiny door in the deep grass. There was nothing else.

Verbie had decided to come along, as referee, and Jiminy, adamant Jiminy-he was ten feet behind them, cursing softly in the dark. “Shit. Fuck. I can't see a thing. Hey, Verbie, where are you? Verbie? Star?”

There was a hiss from just in front of her and Ronnie swung round on them, the pale ball of his face hanging there in the night like a broken streetlight. “Keep it down, will you?”

“Why?” Verbie's voice bloomed in the darkness. “What do you mean keep it down? Why should we? You think this is a raid or something? What are we, commandos? These are our brothers we're talking about here, and this is our place, all of it, free to everybody, power to the people-why should we have to keep it down, huh? _You tell me, huh?__”

Lydia and Merry were back in the main house, sitting round the scrapwood fire Norm had made to take the chill off the night, curled up, out of it, hunkering down with the rest of them to watch Charlie Chaplin eat his own shoe (“No, no, it's really a gas, like he boils it in a pot and serves up the laces like _spaghetti__”). People were helping themselves to brownies and tea, settling into little groups, stretching out on quilts, thumping the taut bellies of the dogs as if they were drumskins. Nobody made a move as the posse formed behind Marco (and Ronnie, who had no choice but to go if he was going to have any credibility with anybody), because it was too much trouble, let's plead laissez-faire and kick back and let the problem take care of itself. Star didn't want any hassles either-she hated confrontation, hated it-but this was something she had to do, not just for the family or because Marco had stood up and taken it all on himself, but for the girl, for _her.__ Because it had to stop someplace.

Star hadn't even seen her. She'd been baking, scrubbing, gardening, dreaming. People came, people went. Half the time she didn't recognize the faces round the dinner table, especially on weekends. It didn't matter. She might not have seen her, but she knew her from the inside out, somebody's little sister, skin the color of skim milk, the orthodontically assisted smile and the patched jeans and R. Crumb T-shirt, grubby now from the road and the leers and propositions and big moist hands of all the _cats__ who'd stopped for her out-thrust thumb and she didn't even need to turn and face the traffic because they would stop for her hair and the shape and living breath of her. Her boyfriend was an asshole. Her mother was a clone. There was verbal abuse, physical abuse maybe. She didn't fit in. She wanted something more than diagramming sentences and _Mi casa es su casa,__ and she'd come to them, to the hip people, the people she'd heard about till they were legends of redemption and hope, and found out that in the end she was just another _chick,__ so roll over and make it bald for me, honey.