T. Boyle - Drop City

The Three Pup featured the usual human backdrop-Skid Denton mumbling French poetry into a shot glass, Lynette propped behind the bar with her arms locked across her breasts and no key in sight, Richie Oliver and his consolation prize drinking themselves into another dimension and grinding beer nuts between their teeth in a slow sure cud-like way. Iron Steve was bent over the pool table with a heavyset, sharp-beaked man who must have been a tourist because Sess didn't recognize him, and Tim Yule, the tip of his nose still bright with a dab of fresh mucus and the paper carnation he'd worn at the wedding still tucked into his button hole, stood there beside them, clinging to his cue stick as if it were bolted to the floor. The place smelled the way it always did, like an old boot stuffed with ground beef, fried onions and stove ash and left out in the sun to fester for a couple of days. The usual drone of mid-Appalachian self-pity spewed out of the jukebox and the usual embattled mosquitoes hung in the air.

Sess blew through the door like a hurricane, all clatter and gusto, and he had Pamela by one hand and the hippie wineskin by the other, feeling dense and lighter than air at the same time, and so what if the big greasy sack of a nephew was right on his heels and all the rest of them too? They were people, weren't they, just like anybody else? Dirtier, maybe. Lazier. They smoked drugs and screwed like dogs. But the world was changing-men had hair like women, women wore pants like men and let their tits hang loose, and who was going to argue with that? Wake up, Boynton, that was what he was thinking, wake up and join the modern world. But he wasn't really thinking too clearly and Pamela would never nag-one beer, that was all, one beer and they'd stay in the shack tonight and go upriver first thing in the morning and let Wetzel Setzler and the rest of the town fathers scratch their heads over a busload of hippies who wouldn't know a moose from a caribou. Or a hare from a parky squirrel, for that matter.

Tammy Wynette gave way to Roger Miller on the jukebox-“King of the Road,” a song Sess hated so utterly and intensely it made him want to punch things every time it came on and it came on perpetually-and in the brief hissing caesura between records everybody in the room, even Tim Yule, turned to the door. In came the nephew, roaring, and then the one with the blood on his shirt and the little blonde and then a bleached-out monster in a greasy pair of overalls and a whole spangled chittering parade that filled the room before Roger Miller could limp from one mind-numbing verse to the next. “Drinks for everybody in the house!” the nephew boomed, laying a bill on the bar. “The first round's on Roy Sender-the _legendary__ Roy Sender! Anybody here know Roy Sender?”

Nobody said a word. Nobody moved. They all concentrated on Roger Miller as if they were at Carnegie Hall listening to Oistrakh. Tim Yule cleared his throat. “These people friends of yours, Sess?”

In answer, Sess crossed the room to the jukebox and gave it a kick that sent the needle skidding across the record with a long protracted hiss of static. Then he dug out a quarter, inserted it, and hit B-9, “Mystic Eyes,” three times running. Lynette, who'd seen everything, or at least pretended she had, began cracking beers and lining them up on the bar, and by the time Van Morrison came in after the mouth harp with his black-hearted vocal everybody was talking at once.

It was a short song, no more than two minutes or so, but by the second run-through a couple of the hippies had begun to sway their shoulders and shuffle their feet; by the third time around they were dancing, throwing out their elbows and letting their arms writhe over their heads. The nephew had got hold of a thin blond girl in stacked-up shoes who looked like Twiggy's American twin, and a little five-foot girl with a missing tooth and a tie-dyed shirt grabbed Iron Steve by the hand and started pogoing around the room with him. Sess put another quarter in, hit the tune three more times. Skid Denton let out a groan, Richie Oliver put a finger to his temple and pulled an imaginary trigger, and still more hippies poured through the door and spilled back out into the parking lot where somebody cranked up the big speakers in the bus and a whole shimmering spangle of weird hippie guitar music drifted out into the muskeg. There'd been nothing like this here since the last alien visitation, and Sess was too young to remember that.

“Sess!” Skid Denton was shouting over the uproar, waving a full shot glass as if he were proposing a toast. “Where'd you find these freaks, anyway-the Ringling Brothers' circus?”

“And Barnum and Bailey,” Sess shouted back. He snaked his arm between a chinless character with a beard so sparse it was barely there and a big-shouldered girl-woman, Pamela's age at least-whose breasts were on full display in some sort of leotard thing, and said, “Excuse me,” as he reached for his second beer. But the woman reached for it simultaneously and got there first. She let the neck of the bottle sprout between her thumb and forefinger before bringing it to her lips for a long calculated swallow and then handing it to him. “Hi,” she said, and he could see the mascara caked on her eyelashes, definitely a downtown sort of girl and what was she doing in the Three Pup? “I'm Lydia,” she said. “And you're Norm's friend, right?”

Norm? Who the hell was Norm? He just smiled, and the guy with the nonexistent beard smiled, and she smiled too. “Yeah,” he heard himself say, “that's right.”

And now her face really lit up. “Well, I just wanted to thank you, that's all, on behalf of all of us, I mean, because we really didn't know how our whole trip was going to go down up here-I mean, we didn't know if it was going to be like _Easy Rider__ or _Joe__ or what.”

“Trepidatious, that's what we were,” the guy said, but he was a kid, really, twenty, twenty-one maybe, with a head that was too big and shoulders that were too narrow and a pair of eyes that were a vast delta of broken veins. He slipped his wrist inside Sess's and attempted some sort of secret hippie handshake, but the beer bottle got in his way, so he leaned back and made the victory sign with two fingers. “Peace, man,” he said, and then he started off on a monologue about how he'd always wanted to shoot a moose and skin it and a bear too and have a bear rug on the floor and maybe catch a king salmon and have it stuffed at the taxidermist's-for over the fireplace, you know what I mean? — and did he, Sess, have any idea where the moose were this time of year, like up in the hills or down by the river or what?

The thump of the bass was like friction: the floor was moving one way and Sess was going the other, even though he was standing stock still. He looked across the room to where Pamela sat at a table with the pigtailed woman, waving a beer and declaiming about something, and then the woman chimed in-it was all in pantomime over the intervening roar-and Pamela chattered right back at her. The hippies had caught on and kept feeding the jukebox quarters and the only song they played-the song of the night, the anthem-was “Mystic Eyes.” It was a joke. Hilarious. Fifteen times, twenty, twenty-five. They danced and pounded and threw back beers and shots of peppermint schnapps and whatever else they could lay their hands on. All was movement and noise and the swirling interleaved colors of the dancers' shirts and jackets and the flapping wind-propelled cuffs of their pants. _We went walkin' / Down by / The old graveyard / I looked at you-__

Sess was going to answer the kid-he was going to tell him that the season was fish, not meat, and that the average moose stood taller than any of the cabins along the river and just might be a tiny bit too much for a chinless, slack-armed, eye-bleeding, California hippie to take on before he got his feet wet and pulled his head up out of his ass-but he never got the chance, and Lynette was the deciding factor. She came out from behind the bar like the shadow of something swift-moving and vast and jerked the electric cord out of the socket beside the jukebox. The music died. Everybody froze.