T. Boyle - Drop City

Pull up where? Sess was going to ask, because there wasn't a square foot of property anywhere along the riverfront that wasn't already spoken for. You couldn't buy, beg or steal a lot in Boynton since the Feds started in with the Native Claims Settlement business, and if you set foot outside the town line you were on government property-and Wetzel Setzler, the local shill for the Forest Service, could get pretty squirrelly about that. Plus, a bus full of longhairs in mufti wasn't likely to provoke a warm response from whoever they chose to trespass on, and they were already tied up with Joe Bosky, the worst kind of river scum, and that was another strike against them-no matter how you sketched it, it wasn't a pretty picture.

The nephew sucked beer and grinned at him. He wore a halo of insects round the crown of thorns that was his greasy unbarbered hair and he looked so helpless he might have been newly hatched from the egg. “What do you say, brother?” he wanted to know. “You with us?”

Sess looked to Pamela. She was giving him the let's-go-home-and-pack-the-canoe look, and she was right: they had to get upriver, had to split and dry salmon if they were going to have fish come winter, had to tend the vegetables, haul wood, erect the new room and fit it out with a stove-and little tables, don't forget the little tables. Still, Sess reminded himself, this was Roy Sender's flesh and blood standing here in his sandals and beard like one of the lost prophets, and that had to mean something, if only for Roy's sake. Before he could think, and with his voice lubricated with all that beer and the sweet hippie wine that rode its own currents and seemed to settle flush in his ringing ears, Sess heard himself say, “Why don't you just camp at my place?”

Jiminy was limping around with his arm in a dirty sling, looking as if a tree had fallen on him, but a tree hadn't fallen on him and the sling consisted of two strips of frayed cotton that used to be the sleeves of somebody's college sweatshirt, because who needed sleeves when the sun was shining twenty-four hours a day? Was it broken? No. You sure? Oh, yeah, man, yeah-I'd _know__ if it was broken. So what's the problem, then? A sprain, that's all, man. Just a sprain.

Not that Pan would accuse him of _shirking,__ what with every able-bodied cat within shouting distance taking down six thousand trees a day and Alfredo all over the place barking out orders like the ass-faced little prick of an assistant principal they'd all had to sweat in junior high, and Norm, laid-back Norm, erupting like a volcano every thirty-seven seconds. If he'd sprained his arm or shoulder or elbow or whatever it was and sported a purple bruise that was like a birthmark creeping out from under the ragged hem of his cutoff jeans, that was understandable. Especially since Ronnie had been there when it happened.

Everybody had just got done with the evening mush (brown rice with canned peas and the odd greasy chunk of Thirtymile salmon, and praise the lord for Spiracha hot sauce in the economy-sized bottle), and a bunch of people were fooling around with the aluminum boat Norm's uncle had left behind when he decamped for Seattle. (And that was strange beyond comprehension: he'd left _everything__ behind, from his boots and folded-up piss-stained old man's underwear to his pornography collection to the.30–30 Winchester lever-action rifle and Smith & Wesson pistol with the worn black leather leg holster hanging from a hook on the wall, though Norm swore he was an old man with cancer of the prostate and had no intention of coming back. Ever. He'd even left the stove all primed to go, with paper, kindling and matches ready to hand. Why would he do that? Why would he leave all this good and valuable stuff behind, including the two bowie knives that made Marco's Sears Roebuck version look like something the Boy Scouts handed out for whittling exercise? It was the way of the country, that was why-or so Norm claimed. “You leave the cabin stocked and ready to go for the next man through, not so much as a matter of courtesy, you understand, but as a matter of _survival.__ Plus, what does he need with a bowie knife in a nursing home anyway?” Okay. Yeah. Sure. Point taken.)

Jiminy wanted in the boat. So did Merry. Mendocino Bill, the whole big mush-warmed sack of him, sat in the stern, revving the outboard engine, Verbie, Angela and Maya were squeezed into the middle seat, and Weird George was in the bow. “Room for one more,” Bill announced, sucking back the thin blue exhaust of the engine. Everybody had humped it all day, taking down trees and whacking off the branches, kicking and stumbling through the brush in a blitzkrieg of mosquitoes and hard-earned sweat, and now they'd passed round the smokes and the pot and the last of the sticky red wine, the pale green half-gallon jugs already filled back up with Tom Krishna's gaseous home-brewed beer that looked like motor oil drippings and didn't taste a whole lot better. The dogs were yapping, the goats were bleating, people were perched on stumps with guitars and books and strings of electric blue beads that froze and shattered the light as they threaded them in a dance of sunlit fingers. Merry said, “Fuck you, Jiminy, I was here first,” and Jiminy said, “No, you go next-it's my turn,” and things just escalated from there.

For his part, Pan didn't much care who went for a boat ride and who didn't. He was feeling good, feeling beyond compare, with his head primed on a sliver of the chunk of blond Lebanese hash he'd sold to Alfredo for three times what he'd paid for it and the wine working its sweet slippery magic on the wad of mush in his gut. He was tanned like a macaroon. His muscles were hard from paddling, chopping, lifting, from hauling the net full of salmon out of the current and flinging the three-inch silver lure with the wire leader out into the deep cuts under the bank for pike-_great northerns.__ He couldn't believe it. Great northern pike. He'd caught something like twelve or thirteen of them in his spare time, no effort at all, just like in the _Field and Stream__ and _Outdoor Life__ articles he'd feasted on as a kid, and so what if they were ninety percent bone? The chicks made fish soup, fish stew, fish porridge and pike à la meunière. And for the meat eaters-and their party was growing by the day-he'd brought back ducks, geese, ptarmigans, even two lean black dripping muskrats, which nobody would eat but him and Norm, the meat dark and greasy, with a subtle aftertaste of dead insects and rotting twigs. As for the boat, he had priority there anytime he wanted it-_Dibs, Pan has dibs on it,__ that's what Alfredo said at one of the eternal meetings they seemed to have every other day now-because he was the designated fisher and hunter while Marco and Bill and Norm and the rest had become full-time architects and structural engineers, at least for the time being.

“Just give me this,” Merry's voice rose up, and she was ready to sob, the grief congesting her diction and dulling her consonants like a head cold, “that's all I ask, and you are one selfish little prick, you know that? Huh, Jiminy? You are. You don't care about me. You only care about yourself.”

Ronnie was sitting on the bank in a spray of brittle wildflowers and coarse-grained sand that held the heat of the sun and gave it back to his flanks and the hard bare work-worn soles of his feet. He was feeling very calm, feeling the peace that comes of getting stoned after a hard day's work outdoors and a double helping of salmon mush, and he watched Jiminy dance round Merry as if he were Zeus looking down from Olympus. The boat bobbed in the water. The current thrummed. The two of them jockeyed for position on the vagrant log the camp used as a kind of all-purpose pier and canoe-minder. Mendocino Bill's voice rose up over the suck and sputter of the engine: “Come on, already, for Christ's sake-you'd think you were six-year-olds, both of you.”