T. Boyle - Drop City

Marco looked up, grinning, but it was a lopsided Floyd Patterson sort of grin. His left eye was swollen up like a sausage in a pan and a crusted-over gash dropped down into the facial hair below it. “A difference of opinion,” he said, and that was all right, because Ronnie wasn't prepared for any heavy trip about the spades and Sky Dog and who did what to whom in the back house night before last, so he just nodded and let it go.

The two of them kept sawing away, first one side, then the other, and before long the hide pulled back from the flesh like a wet rug, but didn't you have to salt it or rub it with lye or something? And for leather, you had to get the fur off too, and that was a drag, a lifetime sentence, no less… That was what Ronnie was thinking as the fat bluebottle flies scorched the air and the voice of Tracy Nelson, strong and true, rose up high over the currents of the main house. They were out behind the pool on a dead bleached strip of grass, and they'd hung the carcass from a branch, to bleed it, but just for an hour-they were both afraid of the heat, because who'd ever shot a deer this time of year? Nobody. Nobody but Pan. Yes, and here it was, in the flesh. This morning it had been down by the river, pawing around in the mud, pulling up tender shoots of this and that, off on some trip of its own no one could ever have imagined or predicted, and now it was dead, now it was his.

Pan was feeling it-the grass, the beer, the pure streaming uncontainable _rush__ of accomplishment, his _deer,__ his _first deer__-and he began to sing along with the music, _When it all comes down, you got to go back to Mother Earth.__ Oh, yes. And he let it rip too, no reason to be shy about it because everybody told him he had a nice voice and you couldn't hold back when you were trying to sing any more than you could when you were trying to talk French or bring a ten-speed bicycle down Potrero Hill with a full pack and a load of groceries on your back. _I don't care how rich you are, I don't care what you're worth__-he threw his head back, really getting into it, on a roll, unbeatable, when the record choked off with a screech and almost instantaneously somebody put on some frantic self-congratulatory raga that was like _compulsive masturbation__ or something. “Fuck,” he said, “I hate that. I really hate that.”

Marco took the joint from his lips with two bloody fingers. “Hate what? Ravi Shankar?”

“No-I mean, yes. Shit, yes. It's utter crap. But what I mean is when you're really like into a song, you know, and somebody just”-he waved a hand, his own bloody knife, as if to say _You know what I mean,__ and Marco did, because he nodded in sympathy, say no more.

They listened in silence to the blooming sitar and the tablas that seethed under it like rain on a tin roof, Marco squatting beside him, inhaling, holding it in, then taking a good churning hit from the bottle. The beer sizzled yellow, so warm at this point it was like carbonated piss, but when Marco passed him the bottle Ronnie put his lips to the aperture and tilted his head back. The knives slashed, the flies rose. They were cutting out crude steaks now, and this was a learning process for both of them. “You've got a good voice,” Marco said.

“Oh, that? You like it? I mean, that was just singing along with a record. You should of heard me with this band I almost got into back in New York-I mean, I sang with them a couple times at rehearsals, the guitar player and I were like really tight, and the drummer was this cat I went to high school with…” He went on in that mode for a while, enjoying himself, thinking of Baracca and Herlihy and the other guys in the band and the sense of flying without wings he got every time he stood at the microphone with all that electric surge of the band behind him and Eddie Herlihy's voice twisting round his own like two _veins__ out of the same body. How could he ever explain that to anybody? Yeah, sure, and the scag that went with it, in the three- and five-dollar bags you got from the spades out back of the burned-out, boarded-up storefronts downtown, taste it, cook it, shoot it, just to come _down__ from the rush of the music, and that was brotherhood, the brotherhood of the syringe copped from somebody's old lady the nurse that was so dull you had to hammer it into your arm- “So what do you think,” Marco was saying, “should we try smoking the rest of the meat-have you ever done that? Or salt it. I hear you can salt it.”

“What about the freezer?”

“Are you kidding? It's full of Tofutti and six kinds of ice cream and cookie dough and what, fifty trays of ice? If we can squeeze three roasts in there it'll be a miracle, and I don't know how many people are going to want steaks tonight-but I say we grill up as much as we can.”

“Right on,” Ronnie said, and he was already picturing it, the smoke rising like a forest ablaze, the sweet meat scent permeating everything, another joint maybe to mellow out and goose the appetite, and all of them-even Alfredo-lined up at the grill with their tin plates and a shriveled-up pathetic little scoop of rice and veggies, and Pan, magnanimous Pan, hunter and gatherer, essential cog, man of the hour, dishing it up.

As it turned out, it was nearly dark by the time the coals had died down enough to do the steaks without igniting a firestorm on the grill, and Ronnie, who was feeling pretty loose by then, really heaped them up. A little salt, a little pepper, a smear of _Pan's__ famous barbecue sauce (two parts ketchup, one part mustard, garlic powder to taste and upend the bottle of apple cider vinegar over the whole mess for ten seconds, _glug, glug, glug__), and that was that. Before he'd got the job in the record department at Caldor, he'd worked at a steakhouse called the Surf 'N' Turf, two days a week on the grill, three behind the bar, and he had a pretty good idea of what to do with meat, once it looked like meat, that is, and he kept the steaks moving with all the flair of a pro.

He was feeling expansive, flipping steaks with both hands and talking everybody up, accepting the odd hit from this pipe or that, and then he was telling Jiminy about this hitchhiker who'd invited Star and him to a party one night in Iowa, he thought it was-yeah, Iowa-and there were maybe ten or twelve improbably hip people gathered round a big picnic table in the middle of a field, crickets going at it, the moon rising fat over the horizon, very calm and soulful. All the plates-tin plates, just like these, exactly, _and isn't that a trip?__-were nailed to the table, just crucified there with a single nail dead center all the way down both sides of the table. When the party was over, when they were all done gnawing on their pork bones and corn cobs and the rest, the hitchhiker's brother-he was the host-just stood up and hosed off the table.

“Really? And how was that?”

“Utterly fucking cool.”

“No problem with like grease and germs and all that?”

“The ants would be at it next day, the birds and the flies and whatnot. The sun. Rain.”

“Let nature take care of it, right?”

“Yeah, that's right: let nature take care of it.”

Most of the brothers and sisters had already eaten-dinner was at six-but they lined up nonetheless, all except for Merry and Alfredo and a couple of the hard-core vegetarians like Verbie. (That hurt him-_Merry__-but she was adamant, every creature is sacred, wouldn't slap a malarial mosquito if it was perched on her wrist, and did he know about the Jains in India who went around with gauze over their faces so they wouldn't inadvertently inhale so much as a gnat?) Norm was there, though, glad-handing and effusing, ripped on something and shouting “Loaves and fishes! It's a miracle!” every two minutes. Somebody dragged the big speakers out onto the back porch and dropped the needle on _Electric Ladyland,__ and pretty soon people were dancing out across the lawn in a kind of meat frenzy, and by the time it was over the steaks were gone, and a good time had by all.