T. Boyle - Drop City

Just before the fire went up, when everybody was gathered in the field to watch Norm wave the ceremonial torch and make another of his rocket-propelled speeches-_Part of ourselves, people, let's all just step up and throw some part of ourselves on the funeral pyre of old Drop City__-Merry had retrieved the atlas from the high shelf in the kitchen where it was wedged between _The Whole Earth Catalogue__ and _Joy of Cooking.__ Star had come in to refill her glass, and Lydia and Maya were there too, mashing avocados for guacamole, and they all stood round the kitchen table as Merry traced her finger across the map of Alaska to the black dot on the swooping blue river that was Boynton. “There it is,” she said, “Drop City North,” and they all leaned forward to see that it was real, a place like any other, a destination. “And look,” she added, measuring out the distance with the width of a fingernail, “there's Fairbanks. And wow, _Nome.__”

No one said a word, but they all seemed to have caught the same fever. They'd all traveled to get here-that was part of the scene, seeing the country, the world, before you were shriveled up and dead like your parents. Lydia was from Sacramento originally, but she'd been to Puerto Vallarta, Key West and Nova Scotia, and Maya had hitchhiked all the way out here from Chicago. Merry was from Iowa, and Star had been across the Great Plains, through the Rockies and the high desert-all those rambling brown dusty miles-and that was nothing, nothing at all. Here was the chance to fall off the map, to see the last and best place and lay claim to bragging rights forever. _So you went to Bali, the French Riviera, the Ivory Coast? Yeah? Well, I was in__ Alaska.

But where was the music? Weren't they going to dance? Wasn't that what Norm had said-_We are going to dance like nobody's ever danced?__ Her eyes snapped open on the thought, and the first thing she saw was Ronnie, standing shirtless beside Dale Murray on the far side of the fire, a beer in one hand, a poker in the other. She was wondering what Ronnie thought about all this, because he was still her anchor to home no matter what happened, and the sight of him, of the neutral, too-cool-for-human-life look on his face, made her doubt herself a moment-was he in for this, was he going to commit? Or would he put them all down with some sort of snide comment and slip out the back door? She leaned into Marco. “I'll be back,” she whispered, but Marco was already in Alaska, at least in his mind-_Mud and moss? You mean that's it for insulation?__-and he never even heard her.

She skirted the fire as people rushed up out of the dark to throw branches, scraps of lumber and trash into the flames. Jiminy and Merry came out of nowhere with a derelict armchair that had been quietly falling into itself under the front porch, and she could see the guy they called Weird George-all shadow and no substance-laboring across the yard with the crotch of a downed tree.

And here was Ronnie, lit like a flaming brand, his face a carnival mask of yellow and red, twin fires burning out of the reflective lenses of his eyes. She stood at his side a moment, watching as the glowing skeleton of the fire revealed itself like a shimmering X ray, and then she said, “Hey,” and Ronnie-in chorus with Dale Murray-returned the greeting.

“Wow, you're out,” Star said, looking to Dale Murray. “We were worried.”

“Right,” he said, and he leaned over to spit in the dirt. “But it's no thanks to you, is it? Any of you. If it wasn't for my buddy here”-he jerked his head and Sky Dog's profile emerged from the warring shades of the night, a beer pinned to his lips like a medallion-“I'd still be shitting bricks in the county jail. He's the one that went to the bail bondsman. I mean, what does that take? A genius?”

Star didn't have any response to that, because everything froze up inside her at the sight of Sky Dog. She'd thought all that was done with, thought he'd gone on to infest some other family with ego and selfishness and the kind of love that was no love at all, just words, empty words. He didn't acknowledge her, just drained his beer and flung the bottle into the fire.

There was a pop like a gunshot. The flames snapped and roared.

Ronnie said, “So what do you think?”

“You mean Norm?”

“Yeah. Norm. Like as if there's anything else to discuss tonight.”

“We looked it up on the map-Boynton. It's a real place. I mean, just like all the places on the map when we were coming across country.” And she couldn't help herself-she laughed. “A dot. A little black dot.”

“What's it near?”

She was the expert here, the old Alaska hand, but she'd already reached the limits of her knowledge: “Fairbanks. Like maybe a hundred fifty, two hundred miles?”

“The fishing up there,” Ronnie said, and he wasn't really talking to her now. “Grayling, char, king salmon as long as your leg. You could shoot a moose. A bear. In fact, you know they have to shoot a bear, everybody does, every year? You know why? The fat. I mean, it's not as if you can just stroll down to the grocery store and pick up a tub of margarine or Crisco or whatever-”

“What about the goats,” she said, and she had an image of them crammed into the back of the Studebaker, shitting all over everything, stinking, drooling, making a zoo of the place. “We're taking the goats, aren't we?” And there it was, a fait accompli: _we.__

“Hey, man, you want another beer?” Dale Murray leaned into them, his face swollen in a stabbing flash of light. Ronnie held his bottle up experimentally, shook it twice and drained it. “How about you, Star?” Dale Murray wanted to know, and his voice had softened till it was reasonable, seductive even. Was this a peace offering-after all, she hadn't put him in jail; she hadn't even been there-or did he just want to ball her like all the rest of the _cats?__

“I'm okay,” she said, and Dale Murray moved off into the shadows. She took a sip from the fruit jar and turned to Ronnie. “So what happened to your shirt?”

Ronnie pulled his eyes back and stared off into the distance. He shrugged. “I tossed it in the fire. Norm said to get rid of the bad shit, right? The shit with the negative vibes? Leave it all behind, isn't that what he said?”

It took her a minute. “The shirt I made for you?”

His eyes came back to her, dwindling and accusatory. He fingered the beads at his throat. “So what did you throw in the fire, like a little voodoo effigy of me or something? Or that turquoise bracelet I bought you in Sedona? I don't see that. I don't see you wearing that anymore-”

“Okay, look: I'm sorry. I love you, I do, but you have to understand-”

“Understand what?”

“Marco. I'm with Marco now, that's all.”

“And who the fuck is he? I've known you since _junior high.__ Christ, we came out here together, we had all those adventures, remember? Doesn't that mean anything?” He bent forward to fling his empty bottle into the flames, and there was another pop as the heat took the glass down. “Shit, I don't even know if I want to go to Alaska if it's going to be like this-I mean, are we taking the Studebaker or what? And Marco, what about him-he doesn't even have a car, right? Not to mention all the rest of them. How are we going to get there, even?”

And what had she heard Lydia say in the kitchen just yesterday? _I don't watch pornography, I do it.__ Right. Chicks and cats. Free Love. He was so full of shit it was coming out his ears. She took his hand and squeezed it. “Star and Pan,” she said.

“You know, I thought you were coming over here to ask do I have any more of those downs left, because I know you right through to the bone and I was figuring you were going to want to sleep tonight, isn't that right?”