T. Boyle - Drop City

“You didn't miss much,” Ronnie said, and he was wondering where she'd been-on her back someplace, no doubt, tripping her brains out and balling anybody who could manage to get his zipper down. “What do you think, Norm-think they'll be back?”

It was a stupid question, and Norm didn't respond-and if he had, it probably would have been with some put-down like _Where do you think they'll come looking for me, city hall?__ He didn't respond because he hadn't come down all the way yet-he was just a little too jittery and bug-eyed-and in a rare moment of empathy, Ronnie saw how the day must have cut through him, what with the accident and watching the horse breathe its last and then having to hightail it into the woods. _Hightail it. And where had that expression come from? Some cowboy movie?__ Pan had a brief glimmer of Hopalong Cassidy spurring a big white horse through the sagebrush, a round black-and-white screen the size of a fishbowl and his father screaming from the kitchen because some ingrate-that's what he used to say, _ingrate__-had used up all the ice in the tray without filling it again. Norm just stood there. He fed the rest of the bun into his mouth and chewed mechanically, and when Ronnie handed him a second hot dog nestled in a fresh bun, he took it wordlessly.

It was a moment, and Ronnie was enjoying it. But then Reba came dragging her six-hundred-pound face across the back lot like some sort of bled-out zombie, already complaining from a hundred feet away, and the moment was gone. “Norm,” she was hollering, “did you hear? The cops. They were here. They're looking for you.”

Norm had heard. He'd been crouching in the woods in an acid coma for three hours with the blood crusting on his face and his glasses snapped in two, hadn't he? What did she think-he was hiding out there for the sheer thrill of it? They watched her, all three of them, as she made her way toward the flash and snap of the fire. “You heard about Che?” she called from twenty feet away.

Norm grunted something in response, something vaguely affirmative, and then she was right there, swaying over the balls of her feet, her pigtails unraveling round twin ligatures of pink rubber bands. “He's all right, he's going to be cool, but I tell you, he really freaked us out… I mean, for a while there he wasn't even breathing.” There was a pause, and nothing filled it. Her eyes were like grappling hooks, tearing at them, tugging and heaving and pulling. “But Charley Horse,” she said, “what a bummer.”

Lydia said, “Yeah, bummer,” and nodded her head.

Norm looked at his feet. “You know what you do with a dead horse?”

“Beat it,” Ronnie said.

“Render it. They use it for dog food, glue, whatever. I never liked the thing anyway. It was just this big, stupid, four-legged sack of shit my ex-wife just had to have. _You got a ranch, don't you? Well then you gotta have a horse.__ Brilliant logic, huh?”

Reba stood there, hard-eyed and pugnacious, her feet splayed, braids coming undone, already hurtling into middle age. Ronnie saw the two vertical lines gouged into the flesh between her eyebrows, the parentheses at the corners of her mouth: married too young, knocked up too soon, that's what she was all about. And what did she want? Answers. She wanted answers. “So what are we going to do, Norm? You know they're going to come back with a search warrant. You know they're going to close us down. What then? Where we going to go? I mean, Alfredo and me, we've given like two years of our _life__ to this place-I mean, this is it. This was where we were going to stay for the rest of our lives-and Che's life, and Sunshine's.” She looked away, as if she couldn't bear the sight of him with his slumped shoulders and bloodied face and taped-up glasses, and then she lifted her head and came right back at him. “So what's it going to be, Norm? What are we going to do now?”

Pan skewered another hot dog on his willow stick and thrust it into the flames. _Close the place down?__ He was just getting comfortable. Sure, some of his brothers and sisters might have been a pain in the ass, but they all knew him, and for the first time in his life he had a purpose, whether anybody wanted to admit it or not-he was the provider here, or one of them. One of the main ones. He'd got the deer, hadn't he? And quail-he'd shot quail too. And fish-that's all he did was fish, and even the vegetarians couldn't complain about that. They ate for free, and that was the whole point of going back to the land, wasn't it?

Reba's words hung on the air, accusatory, demanding, tragic, self-pitying: _What are we going to do now?__

Norm wasn't staring at his feet anymore. He straightened his shoulders as if he'd just woken up, tucked the remains of the second hot dog in his mouth and slicked back his hair with the palms of his hands. He was thirty-seven years old. There was gray in his beard. His toes were so twisted they looked as if they'd been grafted on. “What are we going to do now?” he echoed. “We're going to have a meeting, that's what we're going to do.”

This meeting wasn't anything like the last one. All the air had gone out of the day, a slow insidious deflation that was so wearying it wasn't even worth thinking about, and by the time Norm put out the word, half the population of Drop City had already crashed and burned. People were stretched out on sofas, stained mattresses, sleeping bags, on mats of pine boughs and the backseats of cars, their faces drawn, hair bedraggled, sleeping off the effects of simultaneously opening all those doors in their minds. Star was asleep herself, her face pressed to the gently heaving swell of Marco's rib cage, when Verbie came up the ladder to the treehouse and told her to get up, it was an emergency, and everybody-everybody, no exceptions-was due in the meeting room in fifteen minutes.

Star didn't know what to think. She was in the treehouse, with Marco, and she'd been asleep-that much was clear. Beyond that, everything was a jumble. It felt like the middle of the night, but it was light out, and for the life of her she couldn't have said whether it was dawn or dusk. The light had no source, no direction-it just held, as gray and dense as water, and the limbs of the oak were suspended in it like the superstructure of a dream. But she hadn't had any dreams-she couldn't even remember going to bed. She looked up into the branches of the tree for clues, but it was just a tree, hanging over her with all its ribs showing. It gave off a smell of gall, astringent and sharp, and whether it was a morning smell or an evening smell, she couldn't say. Birds came to the branches like dark, flung stones. Marco slept on. She couldn't find her panties-or her shorts-and something seemed to have bitten her in a series of leapfrogging welts that climbed up her naked abdomen and then vanished beneath her breasts. Where were her shoes? She sat up and looked around her.

Suddenly she was frightened. Emergency? What emergency? She summoned up a picture of the little boy then-Che-his hair kinked and wild, skin the color of olive oil thickened in the pan and his eyes sucked back into his head as if they were going to hide there forever, and she felt the impress of his cold lips on hers, lips like two copulating earthworms, like flesh without fire-but hadn't all that been settled? Hadn't she saved him? Saved the day?

It wasn't morning. That would be too much to hope for. It was dusk, and she knew it now. She could taste it on the air, hear it in the way the birds bickered and complained. It was Druid Day, the longest day of the year, and the worst, by far the worst-and it was still going on. Marco lay there beside her, his hair splayed across his face, his right fist balled up over his temple as if to ward off a blow. She listened to him breathe a moment, absorbed in the slow sure weave of it-ravel, unravel, ravel again-and then she shook him awake.