T. Boyle - Drop City

Star stretched her hands out before her, red light, green light, moving forward one step at a time. It couldn't have been more than a couple hundred yards between the two houses, but it seemed like miles, their footsteps shuffling through the beaten dust and the clenched brown leaves of the oaks that were like little claws, everybody quiet for the first time since the door had shut behind them. “Man, it's dark,” Jiminy muttered after a moment, just to break the silence, but now there was the low thump of music up ahead, and they moved toward it until two faintly glowing windows floated up out of the shadows. Ronnie tripped over something and kicked it aside in a soft whispering rush of motion. Candlelight took hold of the gutted shades in the windows, let go, took hold, let go.

This was it, the back house, a place the size of a pair of trailers grafted together at the waist, with a roof of sun-bleached shingles and an add-on porch canted like a ship going down on a hard sea. Migrant workers had been housed here in the days when Norm's father ran the place, or so Alfredo claimed, pickers moving up and down the coast with the crops, apples in Washington, cherries in Oregon, grapes in California. Star could believe it-the place was a crash pad then and it was a crash pad now, the single funkiest building on the property. The windows were nearly opaque with dirt, there was no running water or electricity, and somebody had painted DROP CITY DROPOUTS over the door in a flowing swirl of Gothic lettering. She'd been inside maybe half a dozen times, attached to one movable feast or another-until Lester moved in, that is.

Marco didn't knock. He pushed the door open and they all just filed in, more like tourists than an invading army, and she tried to put on her smile, but it failed her. It took a minute for her eyes to adjust, a whole flurry of movement over the stale artificial greetings of the tribe, _what's happening, bro,__ candles fluttering, the soft autonomous pulse of Otis Redding, sitting on the dock of the bay. Who was there? Lester, Franklin, three cats, two black and one white, she'd never seen before, even at mealtimes when everybody tended to get together, and-this was a surprise-Sky Dog. It was a surprise because he hadn't shown up for the noon meal or dinner either and everybody assumed he'd gone back to the Haight, or Oregon-wasn't he from Oregon originally, and what _was__ his real name, anyway? She looked at him sitting there cross-legged on the floor, bent over his guitar and playing along with the record as if he didn't have a care in the world, as if nothing had happened, as if forcing yourself on fourteen-year-old runaways was no more sweat than brushing your teeth or taking a crap, and she felt something uncontainable coming up in her.

“Hey, man,” Verbie was saying, “how's it going? All right? Yeah? Because we just, you know, felt like dropping in and seeing what the scene was over here, you know?” She was five foot nothing, red hair clipped to the ears, with a tiny pinched oval of a face and a black gap where her left incisor should have been. The face paint clung like glitter at her hairline and she was twirling the cape and shuffling her feet as if she were about to tap dance across the room. “I mean, is it cool?”

No one offered any assurances, and it didn't feel cool, not at all. It felt as if they'd interrupted something. Star edged into the room behind Ronnie.

There was no furniture other than a plank set atop two cinder blocks, and everyone was sitting on the floor-or not on the floor exactly, but on the cracked and peeling vinyl cushions scavenged from the rusty chaise longue out by the pool and a khaki sleeping bag that looked as if it had been dragged behind a produce truck for a couple hundred miles. Someone had made a halfhearted attempt to sweep the place, and there was a mound of brown-paper bags, doughnut boxes, shredded newspapers and broken glass piled up like drift in the far corner. The only light came from a pair of candles guttering on either end of the plank-calderas of wax, unsteady shadows, a hash pipe balanced atop a box of kitchen matches-and as the jug of cheap red wine circulated from hand to hand it picked up the faintest glint, as if a dying sun were trapped in the belly of the glass.

“So what is it,” Lester said, looking up from the floor with a tight thin smile, “Halloween?” Beside him, Franklin ducked his head and gave out a quick truncated bark of a laugh. “It's trick or treat, right?” Lester said. “Is that what it is?”

“Yeah,” Franklin said, and he lifted the jug to his lips but had to set it down again because the joke was just too much, “but we ain't got no candy.”

Ronnie found a spot on the floor and eased himself down as if he belonged, and maybe he did, but the others just stood there, shifting from foot to foot. “It was a meeting,” Ronnie said, and then Verbie, who never knew when to shut up, started in on a blow-by-blow account of who had said what to whom, going on about the shit in the woods, the weekend hippies, the septic fields that needed to be dug, and she was just working her way around to the point of the whole thing, trying to soften the impact, when Marco spoke up for the first time.

He was leaning against the wall, arms folded against his chest. He was wearing a clean white T-shirt and a pair of striped suspenders that stretched taut over his chest. “We want you out,” he said, “all of you.” He gave Sky Dog a look. “And that includes you, my friend.”

Sky Dog never even lifted his head, but Lester made a face. “Ooo-ooo, listen to you,” he said, “and what's your sign, baby-Aries? Got to be-the ram, man, right? Ram it on in, huh? Ram it to 'em. Or is it that other _Ares__ I'm thinking of, god of war, right? Is that it? God of war?”

There was a snicker from Franklin, but the others just sat there. The record rotated. The jug wine went from one hand to another.

“But listen, you want to know about war, and I don't mean this SDS shit and setting the flag on fire on your mother's back lawn while us niggers go on over to Vietnam and smoke gooks for you, you talk to my man Dewey here”-and he indicated the man seated to his left-“because Dewey was dug in at Khe Sanh for something like eight fucking months and he can kick your white ass from here to Detroit and back.”

“That's not the point,” Verbie was saying.

“Nobody wants to get violent,” Jiminy put in, and he loomed over Verbie like the representative of another species, all bone and sinew, the white shanks of his legs flashing beneath the cutaway tails and Donald Duck grinning in endless replication from the hard little knot of his little boy's briefs, “it's just that we all, I mean, for the sake of the community-”

This was hard-going, very hard, and Star couldn't contain herself any longer. “You raped that girl,” she said, and it was as if she'd ripped the wiring out of the stereo or shot out the candles with a pair of smoking guns. The room fell silent. She looked at Lester, and Lester, hands dangling over the narrow peaks of his knees, looked back at her. This wasn't peace and love, this wasn't brothers and sisters. This was ugly, and she could have stayed home in Peterskill, New York, if she wanted ugliness.

“Come on, Star,” Ronnie said finally, but Lester cut him off. “I didn't _rape__ nobody,” he said, “because if anything happened here last night it was consensial, know what I mean? Shit, you were here, _Pan__-you know what went down.”

“Fuck it,” Marco said. “You're out of here, all of you.”

“Right,” Jiminy seconded the motion. “Look, I'm sorry, but we all-”

“All what?” Lester snarled. “Consulted the _I Ching__? Took a vote, let's get rid of the niggers? Is that it?” His voice was like the low rumble of a truck climbing a hill, very slow and deliberate. “Shit, you're just trying to tell me what I already know-peace and love, brother, do your own thing, baby, but only if your precious ass is white.”