T. Boyle - Drop City

Star was feeling it, right down to her toes, the first fluttering euphoric rush of the drug. She didn't want hassles, she didn't want possessiveness, jealousy, anger, bad sex and bad feelings-she wanted to let loose and watch the day play itself out, one swollen luminous minute after another. She looked at Merry, and it was as if Merry were underwater, her hair floating in gentle undulations, her face, her eyes, seaweed riding the currents and seahorses too. “I don't know,” she heard herself say, “I guess Pan's having a bad day.”

That was when Lester's face hove into view, big smile, gold in his teeth, his skin as slick and worn as the leather on the speed bag Sam had hanging in the garage back at home. His eyes were huge, as if he'd been groping in the dark his whole life-and what were they, a lemur's eyes, an owl's-and his hair was teased out till it stood straight up off his head like Jimi Hendrix's. Franklin was with him, and they both had their shoulders hunched, as if they were stalking through a rainstorm. “Hey, Star, Merry, what's happening?” Lester said. “Just wondering if, uh, you might have some of that _juice__ left for a couple of hermits? Maybe some eggs too-wouldn't some eggs be nice, Franklin?”

“Sure would,” Franklin said.

Star couldn't seem to summon a response-try though she might, no response was forthcoming, not right then, not a yes or a no or a see you in hell first, nothing. Zero. She was drawing blanks. Sky Dog had moved on, as had Dewey and most of the others, but Lester and Franklin had persisted, though everybody treated them like lepers. They hadn't showed up for a meal in weeks, and hardly anyone ever saw them. But they were there, and everyone was aware of it, whether they pretended differently or not. Go out to the parking lot, and there was the Lincoln, dusted over till it could have been some spontaneous excrescence of the earth itself. Take a stroll at night, and the music came at you from the back house, deep-bottomed and mysterious. And every once in a while you'd look up from what you were doing, and there they'd be out on their tumbledown porch, stripped to the waist and passing a joint or a cigarette or a jug of wine from one adhesive hand to another.

Merry spoke up first. “I don't think so,” she said.

Lester turned to Franklin, as if to interpret for him. “You hear that, Franklin? The girl doesn't think so. What do you say to that?”

Franklin stood a head taller than Lester. He was wearing a wide-collared polka-dot shirt, yellow on black. He had bags under his eyes, as if he'd been up for a hundred nights straight, and he was letting his processed hair grow out in reddish wisps. He looked at Lester when he spoke. “I don't say nothin'.”

“Well, I say it's a bunch of racist hippie-dippy shit,” Lester said, swinging round on them. “What's a matter, us niggers ain't good enough for you?”

“Fuck you, Lester,” Merry said, and there were faces at the door now, people jerked up short as if they had leashes fastened round their throats. And where was Marco? In Santa Rosa, with Norm, getting supplies.

Lester thought this was funny. “Fuck me, huh? There's peace and love for you.”

_Irate,__ that was a word, wasn't it? Star was irate-first Ronnie, and now this. “Look,” she said, stepping into the breach, “you know perfectly well this has nothing to do with whether you're black or white or, or-”

“Red or yellow?”

Somehow, she had the spatula in her hand. Or no, it was the serving spoon, a stick of dried-out tessellated overcooked pine, and she was waving it like a conductor's baton. “Norm said-”

He threw it back at her, but softly, softly, his voice a whisper: “ 'Norm said.' Listen to her. Norm didn't say shit. Norm said everybody's welcome here, and if you're so hot on niggers, you tell me how many more brothers you got hiding out there in the woods just in case we do decide to move on out of here one of these days? Huh? How many? Ten? Fifteen?”

She could feel her heart going into overdrive. She dropped the spoon on the table and backed away from it. “I'm not going to argue with you, I'm not going to get involved in your trip at all, because you can just do what you want and I don't care, I really don't.”

“What about _Marco__-he care?”

And now she said it too: “Fuck you, Lester. Just go fuck yourself.”

But Lester was pouring juice, Lester was scooping up eggs and biscuits. He took enough for three people, mounded it up on a plate till it was spilling over and handed it to Franklin, then served himself, and no one said a word. One scoop of eggs, two, three. He took his time, and he wore a tight little smile on his face that made her feel nothing but sad and ashamed. Had it really come to this? Were they fighting over _food?__ Or was it something else, something ugly and dirty, something that made Drop City the biggest joke in the world?

So go ahead and define your bad trip, because here it was. She just turned and walked out of the kitchen, through the meeting room and out the front door, no eggs for her, no washing up with her sisters, no dancing and joy and flowers in her hair, no bonding with the clan and letting the acid strip her clean, inside and out. She crossed the pale dirt drive to the treehouse, climbed the ladder and pulled it up after her, and she lay there on Marco's sleeping bag, staring up into the leaves till she could identify each and every one of them individually and her heart slowed through all the gears from overdrive on down to neutral.

Later-it might have been five minutes or five hours, she had no idea-she pushed herself up and looked around her. There was a dragonfly perched on the rail, a single bolt of electric color like a driven blue nail, and beneath it, a built-in shelf aflame with the spines of the books Marco had been collecting-_Soul on Ice, Ficciones, Cat's Cradle, Trout Fishing in America, Steppenwolf__-and a Coleman lantern in a shade of green so deep it cut a hole through the wall. The books were incandescent, burning from the inside out. She picked one up almost at random, for the color and the feel of it, and she opened it on words that tacked across the page like ships on a poisoned sea. She couldn't make sense of them, didn't want to, hated in that instant the whole idea of books, literature, _stories__-because stories weren't true, were they? — but the books reminded her of Marco, and so they were good and honest and valuable, and she stroked the familiar object in her hand as if it were a cat or a pet rabbit, stroked it until the paper became fur and the living warmth of it penetrated her fingertips.

Small sounds came to her, intimate sounds, as if she'd lifted out of herself and become an omnipresence-a cough, a giggle, a sigh, the faint soughing of Jiminy's breath catching in the back of his throat as he rocked against Merry's sweat-slick skin in the downstairs bedroom of the main house a hundred yards away. She could hear the leaves respiring and the sap creeping through the branches in the way of blood, slow blood, blood like paste. Termites whispered in the duff, the hooves of the goats grew and expanded with a sharpedged sound that teemed and popped in her ears. And then the book, the one in her hand, rematerialized in a ripple of color, pink and yellow and a single human eye staring out of the page, and she knew it at once, Julio Cortázar's _Blow-up and Other Stories.__ It was a book Ronnie had turned her onto, back in New York, and she in turn had bought it for Marco-there was the imprint of the secondhand book shop in Sebastopol, FREEWHEELIN__' BOOKS__, 25¢, right there in a faded pink blur on the inside page. All right. At least she had that, and though the words still wouldn't cooperate, though they grouped and regrouped and pitched and bucked across the page and every mouth in the forest buzzed in her ears with tiny voices that kept burning and screaming out their testimony till it was all just a blur of white noise, she could dream the stories, dream of the axolotl and the man who kept vomiting up bunnies, and she did, until she had to pull out all the books, one after another, and let the stories infest her.