T. Boyle - Drop City

Sky Dog was out on the porch, and Sky Dog saw them coming. What he did was get up out of the swaybacked kitchen chair he'd been sitting in and call out to somebody inside the house-to Lester, Franklin, Dewey-but no one answered the call, and now Marco was coming up the steps in a furious headlong rush and Sky Dog, all hands and extruded eyes, was backing away from him. “I got no problem with you,” he said, narrowing himself in the corner, ready to flinch and duck and throw out a warding arm. Marco went straight at him.

She didn't know how long it went on, but there was never any doubt as to the outcome. It took Alfredo, Jiminy and Mendocino Bill combined to pull Marco off Sky Dog, who went down in the first rush and never got up again. Standing there in the dirt with a cored-out shaft of sunlight hammering at her head, she could hear the impact of each blow, relentless, bone on flesh, bone on bone, and it was almost as if Marco was giving him a massage too, very thorough, very diligent, with special attention to the head and throat. But this was no massage, this was murder. Or the closest thing to it. There was blood where there wasn't supposed to be blood, on the dried-out floorboards, on the bleached walls, imbued in the fabric of Sky Dog's denim vest and smeared like finger paint across the cavity of his breastbone. Her own blood was racing. She hated this, hated it, but she couldn't take her eyes away and she never once called out for help.

But that was then, and then didn't count for much.

Now was what counted, and she flashed open her eyes on the nodding trees, the festival of the river, a pair of kingfishers swooping low. It was just a day, a kind of garment you could crawl inside of and use for your own purposes, and it was brightening now, brightening till all the colors stood out in relief against the shadows gathered along the far bank. Numbers, she told herself, numbers, not stories. Two birds, one river, three hundred and sixteen trees, seven thousand wildflowers, one earth, one sky: there was nothing to be afraid of here, nothing to get hung about. _Strawberry fields forever.__ She pushed herself up and started back.

Norm had a pocket watch that had been in the family for three generations, a tarnished silver disc on a tarnished silver chain he kept tucked away in the front flap of his overalls. By Marco's count, he must have consulted it at least once every thirty seconds since they left the ranch, his free hand draped casually over the wheel, the radio giving back static and the van skating through the curves on River Road as if the usual forces in operation-gravity, velocity, wind resistance-had been suspended in honor of the day. “What I want,” he was shouting, “is to coordinate this so we're in tune with everybody else, I mean, right on the stroke-and don't call me crazy because it's a karmic thing, is all. And for the rush. I mean, what's the sense of tripping if you're not having a blast? Am I right?”

He didn't need Marco to tell him he was, but Marco told him anyway.

“All right. So ten o'clock is what we're shooting for, one cup of OJ for me, one for you, then we pick up the stuff for the feast-cream soda, that's what I'm into, man, I really _crave__ cream soda, especially when I'm tripping-and then we're back like by eleven-thirty, twelve, you know, and let the party commence, longest day, man, longest day. Whew! Can you believe it?”

They'd just pulled into the parking lot at the supermarket, life beating around them, kids on bikes, old men crawling out of pickup trucks like squashed bugs, planes overhead, dogs scratching, mothers pushing shopping carts as if they were going off to war, when Norm's watch gave out. It froze at five of ten, the hands immobilized as if they'd been soldered in place. “I can't believe it,” he muttered, tapping at the crystal. He put the watch to his ear, tapped it again. “I just wound it this morning.”

“Well, there you go,” Marco told him, “too much attention to detail. Go with the flow.”

Norm looked puzzled. He squinted at Marco out of the depths of his walled-in eyes as if he couldn't quite place him. He murmured something unintelligible, some sort of prayer or chant, and then, out of nowhere, he said, “You know, not that it's any of my business, but just out of curiosity-you've been getting it on with Star, haven't you?”

The question took Marco by surprise-_Star? Who was talking about Star?__-and right away, it filled him with suspicion. He looked at Norm, at the feverish brown eyes dodging behind the distorting lenses, and wondered, What does he care? Was he even paying attention? And if he was, what was he really asking? As chief guru and presiding genius of the ranch, he recycled women pretty efficiently-at one time or another practically all the Drop City chicks had slept with him. Lydia had gone around for a week talking about his lingam and what a perfect fit it was, Verbie called him “Pasha Norm” behind his back and Star-well, Marco couldn't speak for Star, but from what he knew about her and what he felt for her, he doubted she and Norm had got it on, but anything was possible. Of course, either way it was all right, because everybody was enlightened and the flesh existed to be celebrated, didn't it? If anybody was jealous, if any of the usual bourgeois hangups festered beneath the surface of the long irenic dream that was Drop City, Marco never saw it. But then he wasn't all that observant, as he'd be the first to admit. “I think we're really attuned to one another,” he said, and his voice seemed to be caught in his throat. “Star and me.”

Norm, leaning in close: “You mean like in a spiritual way? Agape instead of eros?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you balling her?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“A practical one.” Norm's breath was stale, or worse than stale-rotten. The teeth were rotting in his head and his head was rotting on his body. He didn't believe in dentists-only shamans-because it wasn't caries that caused your teeth to fall out, but the evil spirits of dentists gone down, and he had the gold in his mouth to prove it.

“What,” Marco said, and he felt his face flush, “-you interested?”

Norm shifted his weight in the seat, gave a shrug. “She's a groovy chick.”

Sure she was. Everybody was groovy, every_thing__ was groovy. This was the world they were making, this was the new age, free and enlightened and without hangups, climb every mountain, milk every goat. “Yeah,” Marco heard himself say, “yeah, she is.”

There was a moment's silence, the van's engine ticking off to sleep somewhere beneath and behind them. Norm made no move to get out. He pushed the glasses up his nose and they slid back down. He sighed. Lifted his hand as if in extenuation, then dropped it. “You know, there's something I never told you,” he said. “Or anybody, really, except for Alfredo. And it's not good, not good at all.” He tapped the watch again, then gave it a rueful glance, as if it were the source of all the world's sorrow and misery.

“What do you mean?”

“They don't like heads in this town, is what I mean-in this whole fucking fascist county, for that matter, and you better pay up now and worship the rules and regulations or you are _fucked,__ believe me. They don't want to see people living in harmony with the earth and each other-they just want Daddy, Mommy, Junior and Sis, all shoved into a tract house with a new blacktop driveway and a lawn that looks like it's been painted right on the dirt.”

“You having trouble with the county?”

“Bet your ass I am.”

“Board of Health? Fire and Safety?”

Bent over the watch, his head lolling weakly on his shoulders as if it were floating on the upended mass of his hair, Norm just nodded. “Bunch of shit,” he said finally, but all the animation was gone from his voice. “I didn't sign on for this, no way in hell.”