T. Boyle - Drop City

Mendocino Bill-he was a loudmouthed know-it-all like Alfredo, up to his ears in _Popular Mechanics__ in high school, no doubt a ham radio operator and an eagle scout on top of it, and here he was writhing in the dust on the fulcrum of his belly like a bowling pin set spinning by a strike right down the middle of the alley. So what if he'd been to Selma, so what if he could eat four plates of mush to anybody else's two, so what if he was one of the brothers and sisters of Drop City and the cops were the pigs? Despite himself, Pan felt something soar inside him to see the loudmouth brought low-until the second cop, the silent one, herded everybody off the porch and lined them up, hands against the wall and legs spread.

“What's the problem, Officer?” Dale Murray was saying as the first cop patted him down. “I mean, what'd we do? A little kidding? Is that it? I mean, I was only joking. Can't you take a joke? You want to tell me jokes're against the law now?”

“Norm's not here,” Maya kept repeating in her thin strand of a voice. She had her head down, her hands framed on the wall and the dried-out ends of her hair dangling, and she was talking to the ground. She was no beauty, and if it weren't for the very loose scene at Drop City, and all those strung-out horny cats like Mendocino Bill and Jiminy, she'd never have gotten laid in a million years. “He's not. I mean, _really.__ He went to Santa Rosa for like supplies and things and he never-”

“What was he driving?” the cop wanted to know, the first one, the talker. “VW van, right?”

“Don't tell him anything,” Merry said, and Ronnie saw that she'd clenched her face against the whole world, even as her eyes bled out of her head with the residue of the acid. He felt something for her then, something that took in her straining legs, her arched back and the painted breasts that stood up firm under the pressure of her out-thrust arms, and it wasn't just lust. She was all right, and more than all right-she was like Star, only better.

“You got ID?” the second cop repeated. “You? And you?”

Ronnie showed him his New York driver's license-_Ronald Daniel Sommers, 8 Crestview Avenue, Peterskill, New York, D.O.B.12/2/48, eyes hazel, hair brown, 5'10", 162 lbs.-__and kept his mouth shut. They weren't interested in him. They were interested in Dale Murray, who had the better part of a lid of grass tucked down the front of his pants in a crotch-warmed plastic bag, and they were even more interested in Merry, who was wearing nothing but body paint from the waist up. If Norm had been in the house when the commotion started up, he was long gone by now-out the back door, across the yard and into the trees-and whatever he'd done with the van, the cops weren't going to find it here. They weren't going to find anything beyond Dale Murray's pot, Mendocino Bill's sweating carcass and Merry's tits-which was plenty, for one day-and as the people out back began to drift round the house and surround them, the cops lightened up noticeably.

Ronnie was still flying high, way up there at thirty-five thousand feet, cruise control, the billowing clouds-_leavin' on a jet plane__-and none of it really affected him, though he resented the prodding and poking. Resentment, that was what he was made of, and the realization made him bristle inwardly, just a bit. He resented the cops, resented Mendocino Bill and Alfredo and Reba and her tripped-out filthy little suicidal brats, resented his parents and Star and Marco and maybe even the teepee cat out in the desert. Standing there in the late sun, with his hands spread flat against the outside wall of the house and his brothers and sisters gathered all around him and the cops starting to hedge their bets, he drifted back to that aching sorrowful high-crowned day when he went looking for Star, just to see her, to be with her, and his resentment took him across the yard and up the ladder and into the treehouse. How long had it taken him-five minutes? Ten? The space was empty, neat, rug on the floor, books on the shelves, guitar in the corner, backpack, clothes, Marco's hairbrush, his nail clippers, his toothpaste. The whole world was holding its breath. Pan didn't stint. He let the resentment come up in him till it was a kind of spew, and when he spewed, the violence of it surprised even him.

But now it was Druid Day and everybody was coming down in the fading afternoon and the cops were tucking Dale Murray's head into the black-and-white cruiser as if it were some precious object they were returning to its rightful owner. They let their eyes burn into the crowd for a long moment, Mendocino Bill rubbing at his liberated wrists and Merry jeering without opening her mouth, and then they ducked into the car, fired it up in a rapture of turbocharged power and made their slow sure way back down the dust-laden road.

The evening wore on. The light grew denser. Pan was roasting hot dogs on the slim green wand of a willow stick, woodsmoke tearing at his lungs and Lydia propped up on a log beside him, already eating, when Norm came loping out of the woods. _Norm,__ he thought, _here comes Norm,__ and something tightened inside him. Ronnie always felt at a loss with Norm, because Norm was older-_an older cat__-a kind of guru whose approval he sought, though he was hardly aware of it himself. He always straightened up when Norm was around, though, and he found himself trying to exaggerate his own grasp of things, as if the only way he could relate to the man was through an intervening lens of cool. Was he trying to impress him? Sure he was. Trying to get him to take note, lean on him, single him out? Sure. So what did he say now but “Hey, Norm-man, hey, you want a hot dog?”

Norm didn't answer right away. He looked dazed, as if he'd been lost in the woods for a month. There was a crust of dried blood over his left eyebrow. His glasses clung awkwardly to his face. “The man,” he said, and he was gasping or wheezing or both. “The man was here, right? Looking for me?”

Lydia glanced up from her hot dog. Her bare feet were splayed out in the dust and you could see up the crotch of her cutoffs. She was sloppy, that was what Pan was thinking, sloppy and overweight. She said: “They took that new guy, what's his name-Dale? — and nobody's been down to bail him out or whatever. Alfredo said to wait for you.”

“Dope,” Ronnie said, and he sucked at his cheeks. Serious business. He was standing here by the open fire talking serious business with Norm Sender.

“Dope?” Norm's face dropped. “You mean they searched him? Right here, on private property? Right on my front lawn, for shitsake? Is that what you're telling me?”

The sky was lit with tracers of fire from the setting sun and bats had begun to hurl themselves through the air. The first mosquitoes were making their forays. A jay screeched from the line of trees behind them.

“They searched us all, everybody on the front porch.”

Norm gazed off toward the shadow of the house as if he could detect them there still. Ronnie gripped a bun, squeezed a hot dog from the willow stick and handed it to him. “You want mustard?” he asked. “Relish? We got relish too.”

“Jesus,” Norm murmured, and he took the hot dog without comment, no mustard, no relish, just meat and bun, and lifted it to his mouth. “Jesus,” he repeated, and it sounded as if he was praying, “they're killing me here, that's what they're doing, they're killing me.”

The smoke shifted then and came back at them, twigs snapping in the flames, and both Ronnie and Norm had to step to one side.

“It was Bill,” Ronnie put in, and he couldn't help himself. “If he didn't go and open his big mouth, nothing would've happened. He pushed them. 'You got a fucking warrant, man?' That's what he said.”

Norm was eating, his gaze vacant, the hot dog bun an extension of his face. Lydia scratched her inner thigh, slapped idly at a mosquito and contracted her shoulders in annoyance. “Fucking bugs,” she said. And then, musing: “I wasn't there. I missed the whole thing.”