T. Boyle - Drop City

It was early yet-no later than seven or so-but other people had heard the engine too and were poking their heads out of their tents or just standing there looking dazed in their bare feet and underwear. Star was the first one down to the water, and she was still half asleep herself, the tall grass tickling at her calves, insects springing away from the tread of her feet in revolving cartwheels of color. From somewhere in the depths of the cabin, Freak let out a sharp introductory bark. “Ronnie,” she called, coming across the strip of gravel and reaching out her arms for him, and all at once she was lit up with joy, just beaming, she couldn't help herself, “we were worried about you.”

Ronnie didn't smile, didn't say anything. He just took hold of her-_Pan__-and he wasn't settling for any brotherly and sisterly squeeze either, not this time, wrapping her in his arms and pulling her tight to his body as if he wanted to break her down right there. And then, before she could react, he threw her head back and kissed her hard on the mouth, too hard, and held it too long, so that she wound up having to push away from him while Joe Bosky stood there grinning as if he were at a peep show or something. “Don't I rate a kiss too?” he said, and the taste of Ronnie was the taste of alcohol and cigarettes and how many nights without sleep? “Jesus,” Ronnie said, “you look like shit.”

She let a hand go to her temple and she shook her hair back and away from her face, vulnerable, always vulnerable. “What do you think? — I just got up. I haven't even brushed my hair yet or washed my face or anything-”

“She looks good to me,” Joe Bosky said. “Like something I could spread with butter and just eat all day long.” His grin was even, loopily steady, his eyes poked back in his head as if an internal whip were lashing out at them. He wore a pistol at his waist, strapped down like Ronnie's, and he'd rolled up the sleeves of his shirt to show off the cut meat of his biceps. He leered at her a moment, then clapped on a pair of silver reflective glasses that gave back nothing. He was stoned, that's what he was, up there in the air stoned out of his mind, and Ronnie was stoned too. She saw it all in a flash, the money on the bar, the dirty jokes and backslapping and the cigars and joints and one more round and hey, man, let's fly upriver and drop in on Drop City.

“So where's the boat?” she asked. “Where's Verbie?”

Ronnie gave her a look she knew from Kansas, from Denver, from Tucumcari, New Mexico, poor Ronnie, put-upon Ronnie, Ronnie the crucified and ever-suffering. “She's such a _cunt,__” he said. “And I'm sorry, but I just couldn't take it anymore.”

“Yes? And?”

Bosky shuffled from one foot to the other. His face was petrified, his arms rigid at his sides. She had the sense that he wasn't with them anymore, at least not in that moment. Ronnie started to say something, and then swallowed it. His eyes were hard little pins stuck to the corkboard of his face, _too much fuel, too much.__ He glanced away from her to where people were ambling down from their tents now, scratching at their morning heads and hiking up their jeans like farmers on the way to a dance. He shrugged. “I told her to go ahead and take the boat without me. She's on her way up now, with Harmony and Alice and some of the-with the windows, at least. We passed over them on our way up. Or at least I think that was them.”

The cabin door flew open on this last bit of clarification and Freak came tearing across the yard, trailing a string of high, mournful barks-and yes, animals can mourn, she believed that to her soul-and Norm's voice rose up in a bellow from behind the screen: “Well, knock me down with a Cannabis bud, here he is, folks, the prodigal son returned in time for breakfast!” And then Norm was out on the porch in his unstrung overalls, all chest hair and fat puckered nipples.

Ronnie gave him a wave and Joe Bosky lifted a dead hand in the air too, after which they both turned back to the plane and began to unload what little Ronnie had thought to bring back with him. First it was his rucksack, bulging seductively. Then the guns-the rifles that belonged to Norm and Norm's uncle respectively, and why did he have to take both of them when a single bullet could have stopped that thing that had got at the goats? — and then a laminated white box with two handle grips that said U. S. POSTAL SERVICE on the side of it, and at least he hadn't forgotten the mail, at least you had to give him credit for that. People were milling around now, eager looks, everybody waiting for the orders they'd put in, for the magazines and candy bars and eyeshadow and honey-herbal shampoo and all the rest of it, but Pan was done, Pan was turning away from the plane empty-handed, sorry, folks, come back tomorrow, all sold out. She watched him standing there fussing over his pack, the pistol strapped to one thigh, the big sheathed knife to the other, his genuine cowhide go-to-town blunt-nosed boots with the stacked-up heels dark with river water, his workshirt open to the fourth button and his three strings of beads swaying loose-two of which she'd personally strung for him in the long, glassed-in hours coming through the dead zone of the high plains-and she thought, It's over. He's done.

But he surprised her. Because he hefted his backpack, slung a rifle over each shoulder and turned to the nearest of his brothers and sisters-it was Tom Krishna, Tom with his head bowed out of shyness and his handcrafted aluminum foil mandala catching the light at his throat-and told him, so everybody could hear, that all the rest of the stuff was in the boat, no worries, and the plane could only hold so much, dig? “We brought the mail, though,” he said, and he gave the cardboard box a nudge with the wet toe of his boot.

The morning stretched and settled. Star brought a plate and a mug of coffee up to the tent and watched Marco eat in greedy gulps, the long spill of his naked torso plunging into the folds of the sleeping bag as if that was all that was left of him, and he cleaned the plate and lit a cigarette without shifting position. “That my shirt you're wearing?” he said, and she said, “Yeah,” and went down to get him seconds. Everybody was awake by now, pushing flapjacks around their plates, tanking up on creamless coffee and sorting through the box of mail Tom Krishna had set out on the picnic table. There was nothing for her-she'd already checked-and nothing for Marco, because they'd fallen off the edge of the world here and nobody, least of all their parents, knew where they were. She loaded up the plate, drowned the flapjacks in syrup, and told herself she was going to have to find the time to write people-her mother, Sam, JoJo, Suzie-because it would be nice to get a letter once in a while, to correspond, to reaffirm that there was a world out there beyond the cool drift of the river. As she went back up the hill with the laden plate the polar sun reached out and pinned her shadow to the ground.

By ten o'clock it was eighty-seven degrees, according to the communal thermometer Norm had nailed up outside the door of the cabin, and the whole community, even Jiminy in his sling, even Premstar, was gathered in the yard out under the sun, focused on the task at hand: roofing and chinking the meeting house. “Finishing touches!” Norm sang out, slathering mud. “The first and most significant building of Drop City North rising here before your unbelieving eyes, and what do you think of that, people?”

He didn't really expect an answer-Norm was talking just to hear himself, and that was his job, as guru and cheerleader-but people were feeling good, playful, celebratory even. The mud-heavy clay dug out of the bog behind the goat pen and mixed with water to consistency in a trough fashioned of old boards-was all over everybody, and there'd been at least two breaks for mud fights, but still the trowels kept going and the dead black slits between the logs gave way to handsome long horizontal stripes of ochre mud, hardening in the sun, and yes, Virginia, this was going to keep the _wind__ out all winter. The roof poles-a whole forest of them, white spruce stripped and glistening and as straight as nature and a little planing could make them-were handed up brigade-style to Marco and Tom Krishna and then set in place against the roof beams, no nails, no ligatures or sheet metal couplings needed, thank you very much, because the weight of the sod-big peaty chunks of it two feet thick and with every sort of grass, flower and weed sprouting like hair from the surface of it-would hold them in place. Or that was the theory, anyway.