T. Boyle - Drop City

If he'd thought he was ending something, he was wrong, and he should have known better, should have calculated and looked to his best chance, but none of that mattered now. What mattered was Dewey, who clapped an arm around his throat and snatched his head back as if he were rebounding the ball after an errant layup; what mattered was Lester, puff-faced Lester, in his platform boots and wide-brimmed pimp's hat with the silver chain flashing at the crown, who gathered himself atop the mounded dirt and shot two clean balletic kicks to Marco's midsection as Marco fought the hammerlock at his throat and Sky Dog-_Bruce!__-came up out of the trench with both fists flailing. Ten seconds passed, twenty, all three of them going at Marco where he stood immobilized, caught up in Dewey's grip like a man of straw, Alfredo shouting “Break it up! Break it up! Come on, man, _break it up!__”

Marco had no illusions. It was power against power, what they wanted against what he wanted, and what he wanted was Drop City, nothing less. He twisted, churned his legs, kicked out at Sky Dog and fought the arm clamped round his throat. It was a dance, that's what it was. A jerking, twisting, futile dance punctuated by the wet dull thump of one blow after another. Sky Dog was sloppy, near tears, half his punches glancing off muscle or bone, but Dewey was made out of hammered steel and Lester kept stepping up and aiming his kicks, one after another, as if he were climbing a ladder. “Motherfucker,” he kept repeating, softly, almost tenderly, as if he'd confused the act and the epithet, “you motherfucker.”

It might have gone on even longer than it did, no usual end to this, blood on top of blood, the knife in its sheath, the sheath on the belt, the wet slap of flesh on flesh, if it hadn't been for the tourists. Two of them-a couple, denim and leather, bronze peace signs dangling from their throats, just in the night before to see how the counterculture lives, maybe write an essay or a book about it, promiscuity and peace, granola, goat's milk, marijuana under the stars. Marco had met them that morning-they were from Berkeley, he was a professor and she was a poet, and they'd donated two dollars each for runny oatmeal and scones that were like loofahs, and it was worth every penny because they were making the scene. The professor was bald on top, but he'd wrapped a bandanna round his head and greased up the long stiff hairs at the back of his neck so they trailed down over his collar in what must have been a royally hip display for his colleagues in the Sociology department. The poet was forty maybe, nobody he'd ever heard of, with a pair of big collapsing breasts in a sleeveless T-shirt, bird feathers for hair, a parsimonious mouth and mean little inquisitive eyes that dug and probed everywhere, because everything was a poem in the making. Well here was another one unfolding right before her eyes, and what would she call it-“The Fight for the Leach Field Ditch”? Or maybe just “The Ditch”? Marco wasn't thinking. He dodged and writhed and absorbed the blows as best he could. But yeah, “The Ditch” sounded just about right. “The Ditch” said it all.

What happened was this: they were out for a stroll, professor and poet, grooving on the heat, the dust, the fence lizards puffing up their tiny reptilian chests in the blissed-out aura of peace and love and communal synergy, when suddenly she-the poet-let out a scream. And this was no ordinary scream-it wasn't the kind of semi-titillated pro forma shriek you might expect from a female poet announcing a fistfight among hippies in a half-dug ditch in a blistering field above the Russian River; no, this was meant to convey shock, real shock, a savage tug at the cord strung taut between the two poles of existence. The poet's scream rose above the heat, airless and impacted, and everything stopped right there. Dewey let go, Lester snatched back his foot, Sky Dog and Alfredo swung their heads first to her, then to the dense stand of woods at the edge of the lot. And Marco, unsteady on his feet, riding the adrenal rush till it was a hot cautery run through his veins, Marco was the last to turn and look.

What he saw was Ronnie-Pan-staggering out of the shadows in a suit of blood, wet blood set afire by the hard harsh light of the sun, and something slung across his shoulders, swallowing him up in the fresh red wetness. It was-it was a living thing, or no, a dead thing, clearly dead. And bleeding. _The girl,__ Marco thought, _the girl,__ and it wasn't enough that they'd raped and humiliated her, now they'd-but this wasn't a human form at all. What did he see? Fur, dun fur. Had he killed one of the dogs, was that it?

“Hey, man,” Ronnie's voice came stunting across the field, weak with excitement, “we got _meat!__”

“Meat?” Alfredo said, already moving toward him-they were all, all of them, moving toward him. “What are you talking about? What is that?”

Marco climbed up out of the ditch. Ronnie was closing now, a hundred feet, maybe less, staggering under his burden of blood, meat, hair, bone. “The fuck you mean, man? I got me a deer!”

You would have thought he'd shot Bambi or something the way some of the chicks carried on, and Merry was the worst-or no, Verbie, Verbie was even worse than that, as if she hadn't spent the first eighteen years of her life cruising the meat department at the supermarket and gorging on fifteen-cent burgers and pepperoni pizza like every other teenager in America. And _Alfredo,__ with his meat-is-murder rap and how could you just slaughter one of your fellow creatures and live with that kind of karma, and _blah, blah, blah.__ It was a joke, it really was. All they talked about was going back to the land, living simple, dropping out, and yet if there wasn't a supermarket within ten miles they'd have starved to death by now, every one of them. There were fish in the river, there was game in the woods, and so what if it was out of season, so what if he'd wound up with a doe that couldn't have weighed more than ninety pounds dressed out? It was meat, free meat, and it could feed everybody on the place for a week at least. Did they really expect to go through life choking down soy patties and eggplant on rye? Falafel? _Tofu kabobs,__ for Christ's sake? Shit, they should have given him a medal.

As it was, he spent the whole afternoon skinning and quartering the thing, slippery, ugly work, no doubt about it, and the only one who'd give him a hand was Marco, because Marco understood what going back to nature was all about-he'd been hunting and fishing since he was eight years old, grouse, rabbit, squirrel, duck blinds on a morning made out of ice, standing waist-deep in water that shot by like a freight train and nothing but two stunted half-developed swaybacked hatchery trout to show for it, and you'd better hope your mother made meat loaf. He'd been there-there and back. Just like Ronnie. Like _Pan.__ And while Che and Sunshine stuck their fingers up their noses and stood there gaping and half the commune seemed to just drop what they were doing and drift by to scold and kibitz and feature the way a few nice venison steaks might look sizzling on a grill over a bed of hot coals, Ronnie tugged at the hide in a blizzard of flies-he was thinking he might make a doeskin jacket maybe, with a fringe-and Marco bent to sever the thin tegument that held it all together with the slick glassy edge of his hunting knife.

“What happened to your face?” Ronnie asked in the course of things, his hands dipped in gore, the sun quavering in the trees like some novelty item from Japan. The butt end of a joint clung to his lower lip; a quart of beer, slick with bloody palm prints, tilted out of the stiff yellow grass beside him. It was late in the afternoon, and the smells from the kitchen were strictly vegetarian.