T. Boyle - Drop City

Did he miss her after one night? Did he resent the fact that she hadn't slept beside him? Was he worried? Jealous? Possessive? He didn't know. But he peeled himself out of the clammy sleeping bag, stepped into his jeans and climbed barefoot down the ladder to cross the muddy yard to the big house and find out.

He went round back so as not to track mud through the house, and came up the rear steps thinking about boots-he was going to need a new pair, a pair of work boots from the Army and Navy store, if he expected to survive a winter up north-and he paused a moment to rinse his muddy feet in the fan of water shearing off the eaves. Inside, the teapot was going and the windows were steamed over. It wasn't cold, not really, but he found he was shivering as he pushed open the door on a wall of cooked air and a complex admixture of scents: fresh-baked bread, coffee, basil, vegetable stock simmering in a bright scoured pot on the stove.

Star was there, leaning over the pot, her child's hands cupped beneath a load of chopped celery. She gave him a smile, dropped the celery into the pot and crossed the room to hold him briefly and give him the briefest of kisses. “Where were you?” he breathed. “I missed you.” And she said, under her breath, “With the girls.”

Verbie was there too, with her sister, a long-faced girl with a bulge of jaw and eyes set too close together, and Merry, Maya and Lydia, all of them hovering around the stove with coffee mugs cradled in their hands. The two yellow dogs lay on the floor at their feet. “You eat yet?” Star wanted to know, and then she was back at the chopping board, scooping up vegetables for the pot.

“I feel like I'm in a Turkish bath or something,” he said, and found himself a seat at the table, smoothing his wet hair back with the palm of his right hand. He parted it in the middle, like everybody else, but the parting always seemed ragged, as if his head wasn't centered on his body, and unless he made a conscious effort with comb and brush there wasn't much hope for it. “No,” he said, in answer to Star's question, “not yet-but what time is it, anyway, you think?”

Merry answered for her. “I don't know-two? Two-thirty?” She poured a cup of coffee, two teaspoons of sugar, a float of goat's milk, and brought it to him. “What time did you turn in last night?”

He made a vague gesture. “Norm,” he began, “I was with Norm,” and they all-even Verbie's long-faced sister-burst out laughing. He liked that. Liked looking at them, at their small even teeth, brilliant gums, eyes squeezed down to slits. The laughter trailed off into giggles. “Say no more,” Star said.

And then he was dipping warm bread into his coffee, wrapped up in the cocoon of the moment, not quite ready to start anything yet. The conversation flowed round him, soft voices, the rhythmic heel-and-toe dance of the knife on the chopping block.

“The goats are going, right?”

“I don't know. Yeah. I guess.”

“Do they need like a special, what do you call it-a wagon? Like horses, I mean?”

“Oh, you mean a goat wagon.” More giggles. “We can just go out to the goat wagon store and get one.”

“I'm serious.”

“Okay, so am I. What are we going to feed them?”

“The goats?”

“Yeah.”

“I don't know-grass?”

“In the winter.”

“Hay?”

“Where're we going to get hay in the middle of Alaska?”

“Buy it.”

“With what?”

“Barter for it, then. Like we do here. You know, dip candles, string beads, pottery, honey, that kind of thing.”

“Who's going to want beads up there?”

“The Eskimos.”

“There aren't any Eskimos where we're going. It's more like woods and rolling hills. Like Minnesota or something. That's what Norm said, anyway.”

“So Indians. They've got Indians up there, haven't they?”

“Indians make their own beads.”

“Teenagers, then. Teenagers dying to escape the grind. We'll start a revolution. Flower power on the tundra!”

“Yeah, right.”

Star was the one concerned with the goats. They were her domain now-nobody else seemed to bother with them. She even smelled of goat, and he didn't mind that, not at all, because it was a natural smell, and that was what they were getting here: nature. And if they could keep it together long enough to get to Alaska, they were going to get a whole lot more of it.

“I wouldn't be worried about goats, I'd be worried about long underwear-I mean, what are we supposed to wear up there? Mink coats? Mukluks?” Pause. “What _are__ mukluks, anyway?”

“We'll just go to Goodwill or something. Get a bunch of sweaters and overcoats. And knit. We could knit, no problem-”

“Layers, that's how you do it.”

“I hear if you get overheated the sweat like freezes on your body and you wind up like dying of hypothermia or something.”

“I don't sweat.”

“You will, once we get you your mink panties and ermine bra.”

They were laughing. They were happy. They'd go to Siberia, Tierra del Fuego, Devil's Island-it was all the same to them. It was an adventure, that was all. A lark. They were the women. They were the soul and foundation of the enterprise. And sitting there in the kitchen with the rain tapping at the windows and the stock simmering on the stove and the women's voices casting a net in the air around him, Marco couldn't help but feel that everything was going to work out after all.

It was late afternoon and raining still when the dogs lifted their heads from the floor and cocked their ears-a vehicle was coming up the drive, something big, preceded by a rumble of wheels or maybe treads and the stuttering alien wheeze of a diesel engine. Marco was still in the kitchen, sitting at the window with a book, feeling confined and constrained, but in no mood to go back and crouch over a wet sleeping bag in a leaky treehouse for the rest of the day. He was bored. Anxious to get started, to do something, see to details, arrange things, get this show on the road-Alaska, Alaska or Bust, and all he could see was a log cabin in a glade overlooking a broad flat river so full of salmon you could walk across their backs to the other side, and moose, moose standing in shallow pools with long strips of vegetation decorating their antlers. But it was raining, and he had a book, and he was going nowhere. As for the rest, the cast of characters had changed somewhat-Reba was at the stove now, making a casserole to go with the soup, and Alfredo was hunkered over a game of solitaire at the kitchen table while Che and Sunshine hurtled in and out of the room in a sustained frenzy that might have been called tag or hide-and-go-seek or gestalt therapy. Star and Merry were making piles of things in the corner-_Six teapots, do we really need six teapots?__-and Maya was sliding jars of preserves into a cardboard box with the grudging slow imponderability of a prisoner. The light was a gray slab. Things were slow.

But the dogs were on their feet now, clicking across the floor on stiff black nails. Freak began to bark suddenly, and then Frodo joined in, and everybody was thinking the same thing-the bulldozers. “Oh, shit,” Alfredo said, his head jerking up as if it were on a string. Reba gave him a stricken look. “It couldn't be,” she said, “not yet. Norm said Friday, didn't he?” Marco flung down the book without marking his place-_Trout Fishing in America,__ one of the titles Star had mysteriously interred beneath the leaves yesterday, and he still couldn't fathom what she'd been thinking-and then he was out the door, down the steps and into the battleground of the yard.

At first there was only the noise, a grinding mechanical assault tearing at his heart and his brain till he didn't know whether to stand his ground or run-and what would he tell them, what would he do when they started battering it all to pieces? He clenched his toes in the mud, heard the others gathering on the porch. “They can't just come in here like this”-Reba's voice, wound tight, spinning out behind him-“can they?” There was a flash of yellow-bright as Heinz mustard-and the shape of something moving through the trees along the road, and it was no bulldozer, it was too big for that, too _yellow…__