T. Boyle - Drop City

Tom Krishna had been busy with the axle, with the big ridged tire and the stubborn wheel that just that moment slid forward to kiss the spare. He looked up into the silence and saw the hikers standing there with their swollen backpacks and the dogs moiling around and the road dust rising. “Hey,” he said, coming up out of his crouch, “what's happening, brother,” and he reached out a greasy hand for the soul shake that never came.

The man just looked at them with an amused grin, looked at them all, while the sun glanced off Norm's glasses and Marco stood suspended at the side of the road and Merry and Maya exchanged a giggle. “You people aren't-” the man began, and then caught himself. There was flat incredulity in his tone. “You aren't _hippies,__ are you?”

Norm came forward, boxy in his overalls, rings glittering on his fingers. The bell tinkled at his neck. From the goats atop the bus, a forlorn bleat of disenchantment: they wanted down, they wanted out, they wanted to graze their way to Boynton. Norm bellowed out his name-“Norm Sender!”-and pumped the man's hand in a conventional handshake before turning to the woman and showing the gold in his rotting teeth. “We're Drop City, is what we are, avatars of peace, love and the _higher__ consciousness, come all the way up from California to reclaim my uncle Roy's place-Roy Sender's? — on the sweet, giving and ever-clear Thirtymile. And we're all of us pleased to meet you.”

The man scratched the back of his head and tossed his gaze like a beanbag from face to face. “I'll be damned,” he said. “You _are__ hippies.”

The girls giggled. The dogs danced. Mendocino Bill said, “That's right. And we're proud of it.”

And then the man in the worn flannel shirt seemed to think of something else altogether, some new concern that disarmed him totally, and Marco watched him shift his feet in the pale tan dirt of the road. Watched the brow furrow and the grin vanish. The man's gaze flitted around again and finally came back to Norm. “Did you say _Roy Sender__?”

That was what he'd said, _Roy Sender-Roy Sender's place__-and Sess tried to control his facial muscles, but his body betrayed him. He took a step back to disengage himself, ran a hand through his hair. This was crazy, purely crazy, a page torn out of one of the newsmagazines-“The Woodstock Nation,”

“Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll” or some such-torn out and given three dimensions and flesh, acres of flesh, because these hippie women sitting on the side of the road were the stuff of the wild hair's winter fantasies, and two of them, the little blonde and the brunette in the cowgirl hat with her legs stretched out in the road, could have made the pages of another kind of magazine altogether. He was thinking _Playboy,__ thinking _Dude,__ thinking _The Thirtymile? Did he say the Thirtymile?__ when the big greasy character with the gold-plated teeth-the nephew-loomed up on him with a whole string of questions: Who were they? Where were they headed? Had they ever been to Boynton? Did they know if the salmon were running yet, and what about the berries? Were the berries ripe out there?

Sess gave Pamela a glance. She'd stiffened up like some neophyte anthropologist set down amongst the wrong tribe-headhunters when she'd been expecting basket-weavers-and she wasn't giving them anything, not even a half a smile. And Lucius, Lucius wasn't giving in either-he just backed himself up against Sess's legs while the two yellow dogs pawed the dirt and poked their snouts at him. People were coming down off the bus now, a whole weird Halloween procession in mismatching colors, bells, beads, headbands, pants so wide you couldn't see their feet and hair like a river so you couldn't tell the men from the-oh, but you could, unless you were blind, and he guessed they must have all gone ahead and burned their brassieres.

Sess took hold of the nephew's hand for the second time, but this time on his own initiative, and of course he was half-lit, drinking all day and full of the hellfire exuberance of dunking Joe Bosky's car for him, and so he worked up a smile and introduced himself. “Sess Harder,” he heard himself say, and wasn't this a riot, wasn't it? “And this is my wife, Pamela. And my new dog, Lucius.” To this point he'd just answered with a grunt or a nod to the questions thrown at him, but he felt expansive suddenly and he told them that the kings were running and the berries ripening and that he'd been with Roy Sender the day he left the country. Helped him move, in fact.

“Really? Like no shit? You knew my uncle?”

He didn't tell him that Roy Sender was a father to him when he had no father of his own left breathing on this planet or that Roy Sender had taught him everything he knew or that Roy Sender was no hippie and never could be because he believed in making it on his own, in his own way, no matter how poor the odds, and that he was the kind of man who'd lie down and rot in his own skin before he'd take a government handout. He didn't tell him about the solace of the Thirtymile, the clarity of the air, the eternal breathless silence of forty below and the snow spread like a strangler's hand across the throat of the river. All he said was, “Yeah,” and Pamela, silent to this point, said, “Washo Unified? You're some kind of school group, is that what it is?”

A woman had got off the bus, dark hair in pigtails, a sharp decisive face, eyes that took you in and spat you back out again. She was thirty, thirty at least, wearing a faded denim shirt and some sort of improvised leggings that weren't exactly pants and weren't exactly a skirt either. Her feet were bare. And dirty. “We're a family,” she said, coming right up to Pamela and holding out both her hands. “Just a family, that's all.”

Pamela-and this made him smile because she was so good-natured and sweet, not a malicious bone in her body-took the woman's hands in her own a moment and held them till etiquette dictated she let go.

“See that man over there?” the woman said, and they all turned their heads to where a skinny shirtless dark-skinned man with a full oily patriarch's beard stood on the bank of the river skipping stones. “That's my husband. And over there”-she indicated a pair of half-naked children bobbing and weaving along the water's edge in two matching squalls of mosquitoes-“those are my kids. And these others, everybody else here? These are my brothers and sisters.”

The nephew could barely keep still during all this, jerking his head back and forth and doing a little dance in his sandaled feet. “Listen,” he said, “I don't know what your trip is or where you're going to camp tonight or like any of that, but what I mean is a friend of Uncle Roy's is a friend of mine, and you people are welcome, I mean more than welcome, to ride into town with us, and let me _extend__ an invitation right now to the first annual celebratory communal feast of the Drop City North pilgrims and fellow travelers, to be prepared on the banks of the mighty Yukon this very evening while the sun shines and the birds twitter and the hip and joyful music rides right on up into the _trees.__”

Pamela said she didn't think so. “We've got things to do,” she said. “And the walk's nothing, really, just a couple of miles.”

It was then that one of the hippie men, a guy in a bandanna with what looked to be blood on his shirt, handed Sess a wineskin and Sess threw back his head and took a long arcing swallow before passing it to Pamela. He looked round him. All the hippies were grinning. The nephew looked as if he'd been dipped in cream, the wildflowers jerked at their leashes, the river sang. Joe Bosky's car was flotsam now-or was it jetsam? Pamela's lips shone with sweet wine.

“Sure,” Sess said. “Sure, we'll take a ride with you.”