T. Boyle - Drop City

Jiminy said, “They'll be all right. It's the weather, that's what it is.”

“But what about yesterday,” Star said. “And the day before.” She was at the table now, trying to make salsa from canned tomatoes and a cluster of yellow onions that had lost their texture and given up their skin to a film of black mold, and even to think of chilies or cilantro was a joke. They could have drowned. Easily. In fact it was a miracle that everybody had made it upriver in one piece the first time, even with the help of Joe Bosky, who must have made five or six round-trips with gear and people and supplies while the canoes crept up against the current and Norm peeled off the hundred-dollar bills to keep the propellers whirring and the floats skidding across the water through one long frantic afternoon and a night that never came.

Premstar was concentrating on her cards and the others were just staring out the open door, mesmerized by the rain. Norm folded his hand, then looked up at Star and gave his beard a meditative scratch. “I guess I better call a meeting,” he said finally, and Star followed his gaze out the door and into the dwindling perspective offered by the rain.

The next morning was clear, the sun already high and irradiating the thin blue nylon of the tent when she woke beside Marco, her mouth dry and sour and her shoulder stiff where the bedding-spruce cuttings, no longer fresh-had poked at her through the unpadded hide of the sleeping bag. Everything was damp and rank. She was glutinous with sweat because the sleeping bag was good for twenty below zero and she'd zipped it all the way up the night before, shivering so hard she could barely stand to shake her clothes off. It had been raining still when she went to bed nearly an hour after Marco had turned in, and it couldn't have been any colder than maybe forty-five degrees, but the tent felt like a meat locker, and that, more than anything, made her appreciate the concerted seven-days-a-week effort they were all putting in to get those cabins up. Teamwork. Brothers and sisters. Everybody pulling together, one for all and all for one.

Marco had told her there were old-timers up here who'd overwintered in a canvas tent with nothing more than a sheet-metal stove and some flattened cardboard boxes to keep the wind out, but she couldn't even begin to imagine it. A tent? In the snow? At fifty and sixty below? That was when you crossed the boundary from self-sufficiency to asceticism-to martyrdom-and she had no intention of suffering just for the sake of it. There was nothing wrong with comfort, with twelve-inch-thick walls and an extravagant fire and a pile of sleeping bags to wrap yourself up in and dream away the hours while the snow accumulated and the wind sang in the treetops. And why not sketch a cup of hot chocolate into the picture-and a good book too?

They'd already sited the cabins, walked them off in the dirt and sat there to admire the prospect of the river each of them would have, a little semicircle of neat foursquare peeled-log cabins like something out of a picture book, and as soon as the meeting hall was finished, they were going to start in on them. And the big question was how would they divide up the space? Who was going to live with who and would they switch midwinter if somebody really freaked out? She was thinking she and Marco would go in with Merry and Jiminy, for sure, and maybe Maya and one of the unattached guys-_cats__-but four would be nice and two even nicer.

She stretched, careful not to wake Marco. He was hunched away from her, wrapped up like a corpse in his battered Army surplus bag, exhausted from working nonstop all day in the rain. He'd been so burned out the previous night he'd skipped the meeting altogether, and at dinner he could barely lift a fork to his mouth, all the jokes and debates and crack-brained theories that made dinner so lively and communitarian every evening just flying right by him. She was thinking she'd slip down to the cabin and see what Dunphy and Erika were cooking up for breakfast (today it was their drill, and nine'd get you ten it was going to be flapjacks, with hand-carved slices of bacon on the side for the carnivores) and bring a plate of it to him here in the tent, breakfast in bed and hello and good morning and how are you this fine day, my love?

Sometime in the night she must have flung off the T-shirt she normally slept in, though she had no recollection of it, nor of having unzipped the bag either, and her thoughts were moving slowly, as if her brain were an unfilled kettle and each thought the thinnest reluctant drip of a leaky faucet. She'd smoked the night before-pot and a couple hits of the hash Alfredo was circulating after the meeting-and as she lay there now staring at the intense unearthly blue dome of the tent's roof, she felt dragged out and sluggish, as if one of Weird George's vampires had slipped in in the middle of the night, drained her blood and pumped sand into her veins in its place.

It seemed to take her forever just to sit up-was that coffee she smelled, drifting up the slope from the cabin? — and then it hit her that there would be no milk in the coffee today, unless it was powdered, unless it was canned and tasted of tin and some Elsie Borden factory tucked away somewhere in the very rusted-out epicenter of the military-industrial complex they'd all come up here to escape. The goats were dead, that was the fact of the matter. One minute they'd been pulling up brush and tender sprouts of this and that with those dainty little jerks of their heads and staring off into the slit-eyed distance in some sort of deep-dwelling goat trance, and the next they were lying there torn inside out like a pair of bloody socks. And Frodo. Everybody loved that dog. You could throw a Frisbee a hundred feet, two hundred, and he'd be there to catch it every time, magically, as if he rode on air-he'd even learned to smile, as some dogs do, the really special ones, wagging his head and lifting his upper lip to show his front teeth in a weird canine parody of the master species' favorite greeting. He was dead too. And Ronnie-what about Ronnie? And Verbie?

They'd all decided that if the two of them weren't back by noon today somebody would have to go downriver in a canoe and see what the deal was, whether it was just a delay in getting the windows and the building supplies because maybe the Studebaker had broken down or they were having a problem with the outboard engine, a leak in the bottom of the boat, choppy conditions on the river, whatever-or whether it was something darker, something nobody really wanted to think about. And who was going to go? They couldn't spare anybody, actually, because they were racing against time here and everybody, even one-armed Jiminy, was vital to the cause, but finally Angela had volunteered-it was her sister, her mother-and Bill said he'd go with her to make sure she didn't get lost, because after all she was just recently released from the penitentiary of a whole life lived in Pasadena and her notion of wilderness to this point hadn't extended much beyond the bounds of Griffith Park.

It _was__ coffee. No smell on earth like it. Star kicked her feet free of the sleeping bag and pulled on her underwear and a pair of shorts, both so damp you could have used them to wipe up the linoleum floor back at home, then she slipped a very grungy tie-dyed T-shirt that might have been Marco's-two sniffs; it _was__-over her head and bent forward to lace up her hiking boots. It was then that the nothing sounds-wind in the alders, the willows, the cottonwoods and spruce, the erratic complaints of the birds, the rustle of the river-began to feature something else, something _un__natural, man-made, the drilling, straight-ahead monotone of an internal combustion engine.

She stepped out of the tent in time to see the shot-silver streak of Joe Bosky's floatplane dip behind the curtain of trees along the river and then emerge to skate out across the water on two flashing parabolas of light. The engine revved and then died as the plane faced around and its forward motion carried it up on the gravel beach in front of the cabin. By the time she got there Ronnie was already out on shore, securing the plane with a line looped around the big minder log. There was a dead moment, and then the sun grabbed the door of the plane and let it go again, and Joe Bosky was there beside him, in camouflage fatigues and a black beret, the two of them bent close, laughing over something.