T. Boyle - Drop City

The pick rose and fell, rose and fell. Marco was out in the heat of the day-a hundred-plus, easy-stripped down to his jeans and boots, sweating, working, feeling it in his upper arms and shoulders. Jiminy had been working beside him all morning, tearing away at the skin of the soil where the new leach lines for the septic tank were going in, but when the sun stood up straight overhead he'd set down his shovel as gingerly as if it were a ceramic sculpture and shambled across the yard in the direction of the swimming pool. He'd been good company, rattling on about books and records and all the places he wanted to visit-Benares, Rio, Nairobi, some town in Wisconsin that featured the world's biggest wheel of cheese, and if it had already gone moldy by the time he got there, well, he was sure they'd just make another one-but Marco didn't mind working alone. All the communities he'd been part of, or tried to be part of, had fallen to pieces under the pressure of the little things, the essentials, the cooking and the cleaning and the repairs, and while it was nice to think everybody would pitch in during a crisis, it didn't always work out that way.

And this _was__ a crisis, whether people seemed to realize it or not-the toilets in the main house were overflowing and there was a coil of human waste behind every rock, tree and knee-high scrap of weed on the property, and that was primitive, oh yes indeed. _In__voluntarily primitive. Nobody even had the sense to bury it, let alone dig a latrine. They didn't think, didn't want to get hung up on details. They'd dropped out. They were here. That was enough, and the less said about it the better. But before long, as Marco knew from experience, the county health inspector would have plenty to say, and it wouldn't reflect a higher consciousness either.

He was down in the trench, waist-deep, flinging dirt, when Alfredo came across the yard with a fruit jar of lemonade in one hand and a spade in the other. Marco saw him coming, but he kept digging, because for the moment at least digging was his affliction, his tic, the process that made his blood flow and his brain go numb. Simplest thing in the world: the pick rises, the pick falls; the shovel goes in, the dirt comes out.

“Hey,” Alfredo said, and he was showing his fine pointed teeth in a smile that cut a horizontal slash in the wiry black superstructure of his beard, “I thought you could use something to drink-and maybe some help too.”

Well, he could. And he appreciated the three precious ice cubes bobbing in the super-sweetened fresh-squeezed lemonade too, but there were probably twenty people at Drop City he'd rather spend the afternoon with. Nothing against Alfredo, except that he lacked a sense of humor-it was as if someone had run a hot wire through his brain, fusing all the appreciation cells in a dead smoking lump-and when he did manage to find something funny, he ran it into the ground, repeating the punch line over and over and snickering in a bottomless catarrhal wheeze that made you think he was choking on his own phlegm. He was older too-twenty-nine, thirty maybe-and that was a problem in itself, because he used his age advantage like a bludgeon any time there was a difference of opinion. His favorite phrases were: “Well, you were probably still in high school then” and “I don't want to tell you what to do, but-”

Alfredo got down into the trench, stripped off his shirt to reveal a pale flight of ribs, and started digging, and that was all right. They worked in silence for the first few minutes, the penetrable earth at their feet, the smell of it in their nostrils like the smell of fossilized bone, bloodless and neutral, the sun overhead, sweat pocking the dust of their shoes. At some point, there was a sudden high whinnying shout from the direction of the pool, a splash, two splashes, and then Alfredo, in the way of making idle conversation, was asking about his name. “Marco,” he said, “is that Italian?”

“Yeah, I suppose-originally, that is.” Marco straightened up and swiped a forearm across his brow, and what he should have done was dig a bandanna out of his pack, but it was too late now. He'd cool off in the pool, that's what he'd do-but later. Much later. “My father named me for Marco Polo.”

“Really? Far out.” There was the crunch of the shovel cutting into the earth. “What'd he name your brother-Christopher?”

Marco acknowledged the stab at humor with a foreshortened smile-he'd been responding to that joke since elementary school. “I don't have a brother.”

“My father's Italian,” Alfredo said, and he grunted as he heaved a load of dirt up over his shoulder. “My mother's Mexican. That's why I can take the heat-like this? This doesn't bother me at all.”

Right. But Marco was thinking of his own father, the man he'd known only as a voice over the long-distance wire these past two years and counting. _Where you now?__ his father would shout into the receiver. _Twentynine Palms? Hell, I was there during the war-desert training. For Rommel. Paradise on earth-in winter, anyway… Your mother wants to know when you're coming home-isn't that right, Rosemary? Rosemary?__

There were no hard feelings. It wasn't the usual thing at all, the sort of adolescent fury that goaded his high school buddies to ram their screaming V-8s down the throat of every street in the development and answer violence with violence across the kitchen table. In fact, he missed his father-missed both his parents. There were times, hefting his pack, sticking out his thumb, waking in a strange bed or in some nameless place that was exactly like every other place, when it infected him with a dull ache, like a tooth starting to go bad, but mostly now his parents were compacted in his thoughts till they were little more than strangers. He'd skipped bail. There was a warrant out for his arrest, the puerile little brick of a misdemeanor compounded by interstate flight and the fugitive months and years till it had become a towering jurisdictional wall-with a charge of draft evasion cemented to the top of it. Home? This was his home now.

_Sorry, Dad, but the answer is never.__

European history-that was what defined Marco's father, and he'd taught it, chapter and verse, out of the same increasingly irrelevant textbook to an endless succession of unimpressed faces for thirty years, thirty years at least. _This new class of tenth graders?__ he'd say at the dinner table, still in his brown corduroy jacket with the elbow patches that shone as if they'd been freshly greased, the only father in the whole development of two hundred and fifty-plus homes to wear a mustache. _They're more like the Visigoths than the Greeks. Not like in your day, Marco-and what a difference five years makes. You people were scholars!__ he'd roar, as if he meant it, and then he'd laugh. And laugh.

“We're Irish, mainly. My last name's Connell. Everybody thinks it's Mark O'Connell, but my father was a joker, I guess. And I guess he saw me going to distant lands.”

“Really? Ever been out of the country?”

Marco set down his shovel to work at an embedded stone with the business end of the pick. He glanced up and then away again. “Not really.”

And then Alfredo was onto travel, the names of places clotting on his tongue like lint spun out of a dryer, no two-thousand-pound Wisconsin cheeses for him-it was London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Venice, Florence-he was an art student at one time, did Marco know that? Yeah, and he'd sketched his way across Europe, from the Louvre to the Rijksmuseum to the Prado. That was the only way to do it, like a month in every city, just living there in some _pension__ or hostel, meeting people in cafes, scoring hash on the street and going straight to the bakery after the cafes close for your _pane__ and your baguette. He must have talked without drawing a breath for a solid fifteen minutes.