T. Boyle - Drop City

He watched Star climb down out of the bus with Merry, Maya and Jiminy in tow, all four of them looking conspiratorial. She'd changed into a pair of red corduroy bells and her denim shirt with the signs of the zodiac embroidered up and down the arms and across the plane of her shoulders-the archer, Sagittarius, flexing his bow back there as if to ward off any harm that might come to her. The four of them trooped across the road to him, their faces shining and triumphant under the high slant of the sun, and he could see from the way she cupped her right hand and held it close to her body that it was more than just insect repellent she was carrying. He watched her hips slice back and forth, watched her sandals compact the dust of the road. Her features were regular, her eyes luminous. She gave him a smile so serene she could have been a Renaissance Madonna-or maybe she was just stoned. Maybe that was it.

“Let me guess,” he said, “nobody could wait, right?”

They eased down in the weeds beside him, the homey familiar scent of marijuana clinging to their hair and clothing. There was a rustle of vegetation, wildflowers crushed and displaced-lupine, fireweed, what looked to be some sort of poppy-and Jiminy's knees cracking as he dropped down and inserted half a dozen joss sticks into the friable dirt at their feet. “That's right,” he said, leaning forward to touch a lighter to the tapering ends one by one, “and we're mosquito-proofing this holy shrine that surrounds you too, my good man. Be gone, bothersome insects. And for the rest, be merry and of good cheer.”

“Some of us were thinking of walking it,” Maya said, “just to see what the town's like-I mean, we're so close. But Norm didn't think so. He didn't think it would be cool.”

People were out in the road throwing Frisbees and shouting while the dogs irrigated the bushes and Norm rasped and gesticulated and tugged at his beard, and Pan-the back of his head with its thin wisps of hair visible just below the line of vegetation clinging to the far shoulder-flung a lure at the dark surface of the river that slid along the road here like the lining of a jacket. There was no traffic. There'd never been any traffic. They might as well have had a flat out on the Serengeti or the Kirghiz steppe.

“I'd walk it in a heartbeat,” Marco said.

“Me too,” Jiminy said without conviction. Smoke had begun to rise from the joss sticks, and the clear cool unalloyed air carried a freight of burnt punk.

“Just to see it, you know what I'm saying?” Marco persisted-he couldn't help himself. “I've seen it in my head to the point where I know I'm going to be disappointed. Or maybe not. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised. That happens, doesn't it? Don't you get pleasantly surprised once out of a hundred times?”

“Nothing's the way you picture it,” Star said. “The mind creates its own reality, and how could the real and actual thing ever match that? It's like a movie compared to a cartoon.” She was right there beside him, and in her palm the veined and speckled pill that looked like one of the color tablets you'd use to dye Easter eggs.

“Or a book,” Maya said. “A book compared to a movie.”

“I don't know, I think I'd listen to Norm,” Merry said, leaning back on the twin props of her elbows and stretching her legs out into the roadway as if she were sinking into an easy chair. Her pupils were dilated to the size of a cat's. She was wearing a serape over her jeans and a flop-brimmed vaquero's hat and her feet were bare and dirty and fringed with mosquitoes. Marco saw that she'd painted each of her toenails a different color, and though he wasn't stoned-not yet, anyway-he thought he'd never seen anything so beautiful, and why didn't all women paint their toenails like that? All men, for that matter? “I mean, what's the hurry?” she said. “Can't we just groove on this sky, the wildflowers, the river? I mean, look at it. Just look.”

Marco took it as an injunction and looked off down the sunstruck tunnel of the road, and there was the Studebaker and there the Bug, pulled up on the shoulder, but there was no Dale Murray on his motorcycle, and where was he when you needed him? It would be nothing to horse the thing into Boynton and back, see the river, ride right into it, snuff the breeze, all hail and hallelujah, Boynton or Bust. But Dale Murray had turned back the day after they'd crossed into Canada to see what had become of Lester and Franklin and Sky Dog, and he'd never reappeared. Marco didn't feel one way or the other about it, because when you came right down to it he hardly knew the guy and he certainly couldn't write any recommendations for the people he associated with. But Dale Murray had two legs and two arms and a pair of hands and they were going to need every pair of hands they could muster to put this thing together-it would be a long dark age before any runaways or weekend hippies found their way up here to swell their ranks, that was for sure.

There was some noise from the direction of the bus, a lively debate between Mendocino Bill and Norm as to the viability of the spare-“There's no doubt in my mind,” Norm was saying, “no doubt whatsoever, so go ahead, put it on”-and then Star was pressing the pill into his hand. He accepted it, accepted it in the way he'd been conditioned to-if somebody gave you drugs, you took them, no questions asked-and he even went so far as to bring his hand to his mouth and make the motions of swallowing. Burnt punk rose to his nostrils. The sun cupped a hand at the back of his neck. No one was watching him-their gazes were fixed across the road, on the bus, on Norm, on the black wheel laid out like a corpse in the dirt. They weren't there yet, that was what he was thinking, and he wasn't going to celebrate until they were. He slipped the pill into the bloodstained pocket of his ruined vest.

Star let out a laugh in response to something Jiminy had said, and then they were all laughing-even him, even Marco, though he had no idea what he was laughing about or for or whether laughing was the appropriate response to the situation. No matter. The smoke rose from the joss sticks, the Frisbee hung in the air like a brick in a wall and they were stretched out on the side of the road and laughing, just laughing, and you would have thought the cabins had already been built, the wood split for the stove, the gold panned, the furs stretched and the larder stocked, because nobody here had a care in the world. Merry handed a roach to Star and she held it to her lips till the stub of it glowed red and then she handed it to Marco, who pinched it from her fingers and held it to his own lips a moment, sucking in the sweet seep of smoke as he'd done a thousand times before. Everything seemed to slow down, as if the earth were transfixed on its axis and the fragment of sky overhead was all they would ever need. And then, out of the corner of his eye, the laziest, slowest movement in the world: the dogs were emerging from the strip of blue shadow beneath the bus and stirring themselves with a dainty flex and release of their rear paws. They both gazed intently up the road, and Freak, his hackles rising, let out a low woof of inquiry.

A dog had appeared round the far bend-or no, it was a wolf, with the rawboned legs that seemed to veer away from its body as if they'd been put on backward, a wolf trotting down a road in Alaska. Marco was on his feet. “Look,” he said, “look, it's a-” He caught himself. There were two figures coming round the bend now, a man and a woman striding along easily under the weight of their backpacks, and this was no wolf, or no wild wolf anyway. The Frisbee slid back down its arc, people eased to their feet. “Norm,” somebody said, “hey, Norm.”

The man was tall, hard-muscled, lean. He was wearing a weather-bleached flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of jeans so knee-sprung and tattered they made Marco's look new. His hair was short, thick, and it stood up straight from his head. He was walking as if walking were a competitive event, the steady pump of his legs and the clip of his boots reeling in the road before him, a man moving in silhouette against the bright splash of the day, and Marco couldn't tell what he was, a bum, a gas station attendant, the Scholar Gypsy himself. The woman-she was in her twenties, her blond hair tied back in a ponytail like a cheerleader's, her shorts showing off the muscles of her calves and the clean working lines of her buttocks and thighs-raised a hand to shade her eyes as if she couldn't quite decide whether the bus was a mirage or not. Up the road shot a yellow blur, paws gathering, muscles straining, and Freak and Frodo were on them, but the man never broke stride and his dog never wavered either-it just ducked its head and followed at his heels. For a moment the yellow dogs bobbed round them, dust rose, and then the gap closed to nothing and the man and woman were standing right there amongst them on the deserted road.