T. Boyle - Drop City

Then Jiminy shoved her and she shoved him back and suddenly he was waving his arms and looking small-faced and embarrassed and in the next moment he lost his footing and landed awkwardly in the bottom of the boat, spilling everybody into the Thirtymile. The chicks shot up out of the current as if they'd been launched-because it was _cold__ beyond anything anybody in California had ever even dreamed of-and Mendocino Bill choked and sputtered and came up cursing with his beard rinsed and his hair showing bald on top while Weird George churned up water like a human eggbeater and fought for purchase on the slick and whirling stones of the riverbed. Merry ducked away from the splash, her bare toes digging in like fingers as the log rose and fell, and then she turned her back, made a delicate little leap ashore and stalked away through the weeds. She didn't offer any apologies.

But Jiminy. He came out of the water dragging his arm, and after the initial shock he had to go find Reba and have her bind it up and tell him it probably wasn't broken. And that was a trial, because Reba didn't know her humerus from her femur, but she was Drop City's resident medical authority by virtue of the fact that she'd dropped out of nursing school midway through her first year and could toss around terms like _speculum__ and _tongue depressor__ with the best of them. She always broke out her little black leather medical kit when anybody came down with anything, a kit Pan had taken it upon himself to look into one day when she was downriver, in the hope of turning up something interesting that she might not miss-morphine, maybe. Or Demerol. But it was just the basics: a needle and thread for suturing, Mercurochrome, gauze, the handy rectal thermometer. So Jiminy wasn't shirking, not a bit. In fact, it wouldn't surprise anybody if his arm _was__ broken in about eighteen places after Reba had got done with it.

Actually, Ronnie was more concerned with the outboard engine, whether it would start with saturated spark plugs and water in the fuel line and what to do about it if it wouldn't. Jiminy would heal, but that Johnson outboard was the key to Drop City's existence, the mechanical mule that carried every little thing upriver on its back. Still, he didn't actually get up out of the sand till the boat was righted and everybody had cursed out the principals as thoroughly as they could under the circumstances, and when he did push himself up it wasn't to fuss over a bundle of wet wiring and a starter cord that produced nothing but a nagging cough while Bill bored him into an upright grave with reminiscences of other outboard motors he'd known and loved and Tom Krishna quoted something apposite from _The Bhagavad Gita.__ No, he found himself sauntering after Merry, with the idea of calming her down and maybe just _insinuating__ himself a little because Star was off on her own trip with Marco, living in a dome tent out on the slope beyond the half-finished cabin that was going to be Drop City's new meeting hall, and Lydia was back in Boynton with a couple of the others, sleeping in the bus and taking care of things on that end, and beyond that the pickings got pretty slim. Maya, no beauty to begin with, had bloated up on a steady diet of mush, and some sort of acne or scale was eating her face up (dishwater face, that was the clinical term for it, as if she'd been scrubbing the pots and pans with her cheekbones instead of her hands), Premstar was property of Norm, at least for the time being, and Verbie and her sister were strictly for emergencies only as far as Pan was concerned. And what was that song-“Make an Ugly Woman Your Wife”? Uh-uh. No way. Not in Pan's scheme of things.

(As for the other surviving Drop City chicks-Louise, Dunphy, Erika and Rain-they just weren't his type in any way, shape or form, members of the long-faced chant-before-breakfast-lunch-and-dinner school, hairy-legged, sour-smelling, secret as thieves unless the subject of women's lib came up, and then they were onto it like Verbie. Plus, they were all spoken for, and the only passable-looking one of the group-Erika-lived in a tent with two guys, Weird George and Geoffrey, and they all three balled one another in combinations Pan might have found fascinating in the abstract, but you could forget about getting up close with anything like that.)

He found Merry out behind the original cabin, the one Norm's uncle had built all on his own with an axe, a crosscut saw and two hard-knuckled hands. She was sitting in the dirt, her legs splayed, hair curtaining her face. The furor had died down, nothing lost, nobody hurt but Jiminy-and he had it coming anyway. The peeled yellow logs of the meeting hall shone in the sun, the goats bleated and strained at their tethers. He eased down beside her and put an arm round her shoulders. “Hey,” he murmured.

Fine hairs glistened on her shins. She smelled of woodsmoke, of mush, of the river. “Jiminy can be such a prick sometimes,” she said.

He wanted to agree-as in, _Yeah, he is a prick, so why not get it on with me instead?__-but held his peace. He pulled her in tighter, began to stroke her hair. “Come on,” he said, “it's no big deal-everybody's a little tense, that's all. Once we get the buildings up, once we get things together, I mean, and have time to catch our breath-” He was talking horseshit and he knew it, but horseshit was what was called for under the circumstances-what was he going to use, logic?

She swept the hair away from her face and gave him a sidelong look. “You don't seem so tense. In fact, I'd say just the opposite.”

And now the grin, aw shucks, and yep, you got me. “Blond Lebanese,” he said, “but I haven't got enough for the whole crew and you know how they're onto the _smell__ of it like hounds-Jiminy, in particular, and Tom Krishna…” He paused to let that sink in, incontrovertible reasoning, and then tucked the most copacetic suggestion in the world under the lid of the moment: “You want to maybe just slip into my tent a minute?”

The tent was Creamsicle orange, a one-man affair somebody had left in one of the overstuffed closets at Drop City. Pan had taken possession of it when they unloaded the bus because at the moment he didn't need anything more by way of space since he wasn't really sleeping with anybody-plus, it gave him a little privacy and a place to stash his own things. He'd pitched it two hundred yards away from the main cabin, on a sandbar upriver, and no, he wasn't worried about bears, grizzly or otherwise, because he slept with the Springfield rifle he'd shot the deer with back in California and the Winchester Norm's uncle had left behind, not to mention the.44 magnum pistol he kept strapped at his side at all times. Just let a bear poke his head in the tent. Just let him.

It was warm. Merry's hand was clamped in his. Half the tribe was mewed up in the cabin now, sitting around and picking their toes as people read chapters of _Slaughterhouse Five__ aloud, smoke drifting up and away from the stovepipe and the big pan heating water for the dishes. He and Merry caught a view of them as they drifted by the open door-heads and shoulders, slumped backs, cradled arms, splayed feet-and he saw that Marco was in there. And Star. Of course, that was nothing to him, and he'd already read the book twice-and he'd rather be fishing anyway. Or fucking. Ideally, that is.

He stole a glance at Merry. Her face was neutral, chin set, eyes squinted against the sun. Her hair swayed with each step, billowing and settling and billowing again. She kept her fingers entwined in his. He saw the dogs, two streaks of liquid fire wrestling over a bone in a spray of sun on the porch, and heard Reba's kids shrieking somewhere downriver while Mendocino Bill and Tom Krishna tried to make sense of the engine that whirred and shuddered but refused to come back to life. Nobody even glanced up as he led Merry along the bank to where the tent stood slack against the ragged line of the trees.