T. Boyle - Drop City

“I want you out!” Lynette cried in a wild strained falsetto that made it sound as if she were trying to take the song to the next level and beyond. “All of you-out! Now! If you think I'm going to listen to that shitty rock and roll crap one more time you're out of your mind. Now get out! Everybody! This place is _closed.__”

From outside, in the mosquito-hung lot, there came the sound of the hippie guitars, more noticeable now in the absence of the jukebox. It was a mournful, contemplative music, each note plied out of a crevice to be held up and viewed from all angles before the next one allowed itself to be dug out and the next one after that. Sess stood immobilized amidst the throng, and then he felt himself moving toward the door and the sad sparkling wrung-out promise of the music. He drained his beer. He felt Pamela at his side. Then they were outside in the air that had a sweet riparian smell to it, the smell of the river recharging itself with meltwater, and the hippies were dancing like moonwalkers to the drugged-down testudineous beat. Lucius was there, nosing at his cupped hand, and he realized he hadn't fed him since he'd claimed him from the pound, and that was remiss, it was. “Come on, Sess,” Pamela was saying, tugging him toward the corner of the porch where they'd dropped their packs full of marshmallows and dill pickles and cheese graters and all the rest of the claptrap they just couldn't seem to live without. “Time to go. We've got a big day tomorrow. The garden, remember? All those logs that need to be peeled? The salmon?”

That was when he locked eyes with the woman who'd put her lips to his beer-Lydia-and she gave him a long slow re-evaluative look out of eyes the color of the lupines sprouting along the road, one thin slant of sun catching her face, and whoever made her, whoever pulled the genes up out of the parental hat, sure didn't stint, that was what he was thinking. But then the brunette in the cowgirl getup looped her arm through Lydia's and she turned her back and began a weaving in-and-out snakedance that was like dripping hot oil right down the front of his pants.

“Hello, Sess. Remember me, your wife?”

He blinked twice, grinned.

“Enjoying the scenery?”

“They sure don't waste a lot of money on underwear, do they?”

She slipped an arm round his waist. The notes fractured and burst like bubbles, bubbles of aluminum, of pewter, hard metallic bubbles made by a machine somewhere in hippie land and bursting through the hippie speakers secreted in the back of the hippie bus. What was it? What would they say? Mind-blowing. It was mind-blowing. Skid Denton came through the door then with a soft-faced girl on either side of him, talking French a mile a minute. “No,” Pamela said, leaning into him, and she was feeling pretty good herself, no offense taken and the night was young, still young, “no, I don't guess they do.”

And then it was Iron Steve, his shoulders hunched and head bowed low so as to better breathe in what the little gap-toothed girl was all about-“Oh, yeah,” he was saying, “yeah, it gets cold, _shit, yeah__”-and Sess discovered another beer in his hand even as he was helping Pamela duck into the straps of her pack.

The nephew was the agent of the beer, standing there with his crack-frame glasses and the color showing in his teeth, two more beers bunched between his knuckles, one of which he handed to Pamela; the other he kept to himself, giving it a good long suck till the foam flecked his beard. “You know something?” he said, pulling away from the bottle and grinning wide. “I like your taste in music.”

Sess gave him his grin back, then bent at the knee so Pamela could help him on with his pack. “Yeah, but Lynette-you've got to forgive her. She's new here. She's from Seattle. I guess she's just got a hair up her ass.”

“It was a gas,” the nephew said, rooting in his beard as if he'd lost something there. “What'd we play it-like fifty times? But listen, I was serious about the invitation-the chicks'll have something cooked up inside the hour, I guarantee it, and well, you know, it's been a long hard road and all that and we have just _got__ to get down and raise some pure celebratory hell tonight. Nothing fancy-lentil soup, rice and vegetables. And wine. Sweet red wine.” He took another pull at his beer and looked out into the backlit trees.

“You're camping out tonight?”

The nephew shrugged. His shoulders were bare under the straps of the coveralls, hairy, furred with mosquitoes. “Sure. Why not?”

“But Roy's place-” He faltered. How could he begin to convey the complexity of the arrangement, the untenanted cabin that might sleep five or six at most, the treachery of the Yukon with its load of silt that would pack your clothes and drag you down in a heartbeat should you give it a chance, the lack of basic comforts? What were all these people planning to eat? Where were they going to get their pink lipstick and face paint and their jugs of sweet wine and their uppers and their downers and their pot and all the rest of it? And did he really want neighbors, thirty and more of them set down on his river within shouting distance of his trapline?

“It's pretty far,” Pamela put in. “Three hours, at least, by canoe.”

The nephew lifted his beard and let it drop. His hand was like a big soft fluttering moth as he brought the beer to his lips. “Oh, I'm apprised, I'm apprised,” he said. “I know the place, though it's been something like-_Jesus__-twenty years? Oh, man, _twenty__ years, can you believe it?” He began to laugh to himself, the pale shoulders bunching and heaving beneath a layer of fat, and the strap of the coveralls slipped down his right shoulder to reveal a tattoo in three colors-a cartoon character, and which one was it? Disney. A cross-legged fawn with outsized eyes. An image rushed up out of Sess's childhood, his mother in a pink dress and his sister with her fist sunk deep in a box of extra-buttered popcorn: Bambi. The man had _Bambi__ tattooed on his shoulder. Sess had never seen anything like it. He'd seen anchors, daggers, death's heads, seen hearts transfixed with arrows and dripping blood, the cheap blue fading appellations of wives, sweethearts and ex-lovers, an eagle with a fish in its claws-but _Bambi?__

“I'm no greenhorn,” the nephew was saying, “and I can tell you I know at least a modicum of what I'm talking about when it comes to this country, because I lived three summers and the better part of two winters up here with my uncle when I was a kid-which is not to say I haven't got a lot to learn, man, you know? Because I do. But we got three canoes up on top of that bus”-Sess turned his head to contemplate the big yellow box on wheels and found himself staring into the boneheaded, slit-eyed faces of a pair of goats that could have been the templates for cartoon figures themselves-“and I made a deal with this bush pilot-Joe Bosky, you know him? — to ferry three loads of people and supplies upriver, including like tools and the _basics__ because all these people, all my brothers and sisters, need to like get their _heads__ together, you know what I mean? I mean, they think it's all going to be milk and honey, but I know better-”

The nephew went on for a while with his speech, and Sess and Pamela stood there as if they were in a lecture hall, except that they were swatting at mosquitoes and pulling at their beers while the shattered, tinkling music rained down on them and the skinny blonde with the pink lipstick came up and draped her arms over the nephew's back and held on as if he were a buoy in a swirl of darkening waters. “So what I was thinking,” the nephew said, in what seemed a valedictory sort of way, “was we'd just pull up someplace by the river and camp for tonight and the next couple of days maybe-”