T. Boyle - Drop City

Her face was clenched like a fist. She stepped out into six inches of water, and she was devastated, he could see that-imagine Verbie excluded from the Drop City pantheon-but then she recovered herself and shot him a look of pure and vibrant hatred. “I'm on the other side,” she said, “you want to bet on it? Or the back, look on the back.”

He wasn't looking anywhere. He really didn't give a rat's ass whether her portrait was plastered all over the bus inside and out or whether they'd raised a statue in honor of her or burned her in effigy-this was childish, that's what it was-and he crossed the yard to the bus and stuck his head in the open door.

It was deserted-you could see that at a glance. But he stepped up on the milk crate somebody had set there in the dirt to ease the transition to that first elevated step and gave a look down the aisle. Sun leaked through the curtains in thin regular bands and illuminated the dust motes hanging in the stagnant air. There was the usual clutter of clothes, books, record jackets and dirty plates, the odd smear of crushed flies and mosquitoes rubbed into the cracked vinyl seats, and a smell he couldn't quite place, something promiscuous, something _communal.__ “Anybody here?” he called.

No answer. And that was odd: Where could they all be in the middle of the day? In the shack? Up the bank of the river tossing daisies in the water? Tooling around in the Studebaker? But no, he could see the car out the window, sitting idle on the verge of the dirt road, and Harmony's Beetle humped there beside it under half a ton of dust. Verbie's voice came to him then, a little whoop of triumph from the far side of the bus: “Here I am! Look, I told you-I'm right here next to Angela and, and-this must be Jiminy!”

Pan backed out of the bus, his head as clear as it was ever going to be, since he hadn't had so much as a beer or a toke since he'd rolled out this morning, and no food either (breakfast, in its entirety, consisted of the honey-sweetened tea at Sess Harder's place and the handful of stale crackers Pamela had fanned out on the table like a deck of cards). Clear-headed? Light-headed was more like it. He was starving, that's what it was, wasting away like a mystic in the desert, and if he didn't get a burger and a couple beers in him pretty soon he was going to start speaking in tongues and spouting fire from his ears. For a long moment he stood there puzzling over the deserted bus, contemplating the pattern of footprints in the dust at his feet-the impress of bootheels, the elaborate punctuation of bare soles and the little necklaces of toeprints strung across the path that ran through the trampled weed to the road-and then he knew: they were at the bar, the saloon, the roadhouse, whatever they called it. The Three Pup. They were at the Three Pup, tipping back beers and maybe the odd shot of Everclear, getting a buzz on, salting fries, listening to the sizzle of burgers on the grill and the rattle of the jukebox as the record dropped and the stylus maneuvered into place. Pan was already making it up the road when Verbie came out from behind the bus. “Hey,” she said, her voice trailing away till it became no more noteworthy or troublesome than the routine buzz of the mosquitoes in his ears, “where is everybody?”

The clouds had closed out the sun by the time he turned the corner onto the Fairbanks Road. Somebody's dogs rose up from their chains and howled at him and somebody else's dogs took it up at the other end of town. The breeze had shifted to the north all of a sudden, as chilly as the air leaching out of the mouth of a cave, and you didn't have to be a meteorologist to know it was going to be raining like holy hell in about three minutes. He could hear Verbie panting behind him, but he never looked back. If her legs were shorter than his, that was her problem-an accident of birth, that was all, an evolutionary dead end, _survival of the fittest, baby,__ and get used to it. A faded blue pickup rolled by and he flashed the peace sign at the driver (nobody he recognized, unless maybe it was that scrawny chicken-necked old loser they called Herbert, or was it Howard?), and he ducked his head against the wind, thinking he really ought to go back to the boat for his denim jacket, but he dismissed the thought as soon as it crept into his head-going back would delay the cracking of the first beer and the sweet redolent slap of the first burger on the grill.

There was a handful of vehicles in the dirt lot out front of the Three Pup, including a tow truck with a Fairbanks logo painted on the driver's side door and what looked to be a Shelby Mustang jacked up behind it. Something was dripping from the back end of the Mustang and puddling in the dirt-water, it looked like, dirty water flecked with leaves and stripes of pond weed-and the wheels were packed like ball bearings in something that might have been grease, but wasn't. It was mud. Mud the color of shit, oozing out of the chassis and caking on the ground. Pan saw it, registered it, ignored it. In swung the screen door of the Three Pup and up rose the smell of the grill, of bourbon and scotch whiskey and beer spilled and wiped up and spilled again.

It was dark inside-why waste energy lighting up a sixty-watt bulb when you're running off a generator that runs off of gasoline hauled out the Fairbanks Road and it's light out day and night, anyway? — and at first he couldn't see whose shoulders and half-turned heads were crowded in at the bar. “Hey, Pan, what's happening?” somebody called out, and it was Harmony, Harmony there in the far corner with his rust-colored Fu Manchu and beaded headband and an arm round Alice, and then somebody else called out his name and the jukebox started up with a maddening skreel of country fiddles and where was Lydia, anyway?

But wait a minute-and this was something that really challenged his newly resensitized powers of perception-who was this looming like an apparition out of the cigarette haze with his wide-brimmed outlaw's hat cocked down over one eye and his high-heeled Beatle boots rapping at the worn floorboards like a medium's knuckles? It was Lester, that was who, Lester standing there grinning at him as if he'd just stepped out on the porch of the back house with a jug of wine in his hand and Marvin Gaye going at it on the stereo through the flung-wide door. Lester was holding a tumbler of whiskey in one hand and a joint in the other, Franklin's big head and Sky Dog's mustache framed behind him against a backdrop of astonished faces and Lynette's furiously compressed lips and bugging eyes. Dale Murray was at the end of the bar, his rings flashing, yellow-tooth necklace dangling, working on a burger and a beer and running Skid Denton as solid a line of bullshit as Denton was running him, the big tall ramrod of a guy they called Iron Steve perched up on a stool between them like a referee. “Pan, my _man,__” Lester puffed in his softest imitation of a human voice, shifting the joint to his lips so he could take Ronnie's awakening hand in his own for the soul shake that reaffirmed the identity of the tribe and plumbed the deepest pockets of brotherhood. And then he was turning to crow over his shoulder: “Hey, look who's here, the bad cat himself, Pan the child-raper, the hippest baddest cat north of what? — Fairbanks. Fairbanks, yeah.”

The sequel involved a whole riotous tornado of soul-shaking and back-thumping, and Pan was dazed, he had to admit it, because he'd forgotten these people even existed and it was a real adjustment in context to create them anew in the lost world of the Three Pup-and what had it been, a month? But the joint helped and the beer and a shot that went down on an empty stomach like flaming gasoline and pretty soon he was in close conference with all four of them, absorbing their tale of potholes, Nazis in the guise of the Canadian Mounted Police, blown tires and moose dancing down the highway like chorus girls.