T. Boyle - Drop City

“Shit, they busted Sky in some no-horse town in B. C.,” Dale Murray said, up from his stool now and waving his beer like a conductor's baton to a sudden crescendo of hilarity, Lester so far gone with it he had to set down his whiskey and brace himself against the bar.

“For what?” Ronnie wanted to know, even as the light went leaden and Verbie stumped through the door with a dumbstruck face and the first few random drops began to thump against the windows.

“He showed his big wicked thing-” Lester began, but he couldn't go on-it was too much.

“Scared them girls up there,” Franklin said, showing his teeth in a grin, and what did Pan feel? Left out. A pang of jealousy shot through him: they'd had the adventures and he'd been eating mush.

Sky Dog leaned back into the bar, lit a cigarette and managed to look rueful and put-upon at the same time. The country-inflected strains of one song faded away and another started up in its place. Everybody at the bar was looking at him, waiting for clarification. “Public indecency,” he said. “I was just-”

“He was pissing against a tree, that's what he was doing,” Lester said, panting between hoots of laughter. “Put a real fear into them girls, isn't that right, Franklin?”

“Whole town was terrified.”

A new round of laughter. Dale Murray joined in too, whinnying along with the rest of them. Sky Dog looked abashed. He ducked his head and shrugged. “It wasn't all that funny, man-it cost me a night in jail.”

“Right,” Lester said, “and this spade's twenty-five bucks, American. Which you still owe me, by the way.” Then he turned to Ronnie, took a long slow sip of the whiskey, and let his eyes drop to his boots and rise again. “And you, my friend,” he puffed, his voice so soft it was barely audible, “what are you dressed up to be-Wild Bill Hickok? Or maybe it's Buffalo Bill? One of them honky _Bills__ anyway, right?”

Lester was enjoying this. He had center stage now, as exotic in the Three Pup as a panther on a leash. They'd seen Indians up here, they'd seen Eskimos, Finns, Swedes and Frenchmen, but a _spade__ was something else altogether, and Pan could appreciate that, appreciate the strain it must have been on Lester to delve ever deeper into the redneck fastness of the last outpost of the forty-ninth state, but there were limits to what he could take. He'd let the child-raper comment pass, but now the man was mounting the balls to stand here and mock him for the way he was dressed? Well, fuck that. “I don't know what the fuck you're talking about,” he said.

“The heat,” Lester said, pointing to the holster. “And this-what's this?” and he had the knife out of its sheath before Pan could react, twisting the blade in the dull wash of light for the amusement of everyone at the bar. “Don't tell me you're a mule skinner now-or do you just use this thing for cleaning your nails?”

“Mule skinners don't skin anything,” Dale Murray put in. “Least of all mules.”

Verbie was there at his elbow, the pale muffin of her face, looking for someone to buy her a beer. “Twenty-Mule Team Borax,” was her comment.

Pan couldn't have said where the anger came from or how it rose up so quickly and luminously, but he took hold of Lester's upraised wrist-the wrist attached to the hand with the knife in it-and in the same instant snatched off his hat and sailed it across the room. Lester's eyes went cold. The hair was flattened to his head, linty, dirty, twisted into something like cornrows with a couple of sky blue rubber bands, and nobody had ever seen anything like that, not since Farina anyway. “And what are you dressed up to be? You're the one in the cowboy hat.”

Soft, so soft: “That's my Hendrix hat, man.” And Lester let him take the knife and fit it back into the sheath while Franklin crossed the room and bent to retrieve the hat. “Touchy, Pan, touchy,” Lester chided. “Don't you know I'm just goofin'? Don't you know that? Huh?”

That was when Lynette turned away from the grill, one hand at her hip, and informed them if they wanted to roughhouse they were going to have to do it over at the Nougat because any more of this sort of thing and they were out the door, all of them. “And I don't tolerate cussing in here either-you ought to know that, mister, and I'm talking to you, Ronnie. And you better inform your friends too.”

“Come on, man,” Sky Dog was saying, “come on, have a beer and forget it-you know Lester. He's just fucking with your head is all. It's a joke, man-can't you take a joke?”

And then it was all right and somebody found the only two rock and roll sides on the jukebox and the beers went round for everybody, even Verbie, who wound up sitting in Iron Steve's lap and drinking on his tab while he kneaded her breasts and licked the side of her face like a deer at a salt lick. Sky Dog produced another joint-“We brought a ton of the shit, man, and they almost nailed us at the border too if they were only smart enough to like look _inside__ the spare tire”-and the sky darkened another degree till it was like twilight. Pan didn't hold any grudges. He was glad to see them, glad to see them all, new faces, new stories-some _life,__ for shitsake-and he drank first to Lester, to put that to rest, and then to Franklin, Sky Dog and Dale. And Harmony, don't forget Harmony. And Alice too.

He had a wad of money in his pocket, and he hardly knew where it came from. It seemed to him he was a long way from home, any home, and as he contemplated his own sun-enlivened features in the mirror behind the bar he felt his life was only just beginning. Already it had taken him to strange destinations and there were stranger yet still to come. Tom Krishna was always talking about karma, and so was Norm, Verbie, Star-all of them were. What if it was true, what if he'd been a saint in some previous life and now he was set to reap the rewards? That was a thought. He smiled at his image in the mirror and tuned out what Sky Dog was saying to him about the Lincoln-they'd parked it around the corner, up in town, and hadn't he seen it? Great car. Tended to overheat and it burned oil like a hog, but… he liked the way his beard was filling in, and his hair-it was long enough to eat up the collar of his shirt. He was looking hip, absolutely, indubitably, but who was going to know about it up here? Who even cared?

The rain started to pick up and the tapping at the windows became more insistent. He lit one cigarette off another and lost count of how many shots, let alone beers, he'd had. The day seemed to concentrate itself. Verbie went off on a laughing jag, Lester sniggered, somebody slapped him on the back. And when the door swung open and Lydia walked in with her hair hanging wet and full of chaff and twigs and flecks of seed because she'd been on her back in a field somewhere, her soaked-through top layered over her tits and her hand clenched like a sixth grader's in Joe Bosky's, he hardly glanced up. It was nothing to him, nothing at all. He was liquid to the bones, he was deep down and pressurized through and through, every square inch of him, a whole new medium to swim through here, and look at the _colors__ of those fish. He fumbled in his pockets-“No, no, Joe, I do, I want to buy you a beer, I insist”-until he came up with a velvety worn five-dollar bill that looked as if it had been scooped out of the river and hung up to dry on a salmon rack. He held it a moment, working it in his fingers, and then laid it on the bar.

She was singing to herself, softly, tunelessly, a song she used to like by the Doors, the lyrics as elusive as the melody-_Break on through,__ she kept repeating-_break on through to the other side.__ That was it. That was all she could remember, and if she missed one thing, if there was one thing she could rub a magic lantern and wish for, it would be music. Alfredo and Geoffrey weren't half bad on the guitar, and the communal sing-alongs were great-_righteous,__ as Ronnie would say-but there was no comparison to flipping on the radio or putting a record on the turntable any time you felt like it and just letting yourself drift away into some other place altogether. She used to do that at her parents' house, shut up alone in her room while the TV droned in the vacuum below and her father shouted himself hoarse over some seven-foot basketball player and a tiny little hoop, or in the car with her mother nattering on about drapes or the price of veal and a single guitar suddenly emerging from the buzz of static on the radio in a moment of shimmering triumph. Music was like food, like water, like air-that necessary, that essential-and here she was in a break-on-through mood and nothing for it but her own stumbling version caught like lint on her tongue.