T. Boyle - Drop City

Star helped Dunphy and Erika make up sixty peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a fruit salad-two kinds of berries, Del Monte peaches fresh from the can and apple wedges with the bruised skin still intact-and five gallons of cherry Kool-Aid, mildly laced with acid, just to give the occasion the right sort of send-off, and Tom Krishna saw to the music situation, setting up a little portable Sears Roebuck stereo to run off a car battery that had to be used _sparingly,__ people, because there was no way to charge it up again. The music-so unexpected, so disorienting, so immediate and all-absorbing-put them over the top. People broke free to link elbows and do-si-do a step or two and then went right back to slinging mud, and then they had a sandwich and a cup of Kool-Aid, and through it all the steady wet thump of the Grateful Dead slinging drumbeats and converting steel strings to a rain of broken glass, _A friend of the devil is a friend of mine.__ Star found herself hugging everybody, and she'd forgotten all about the goats, about Ronnie, who'd crawled off to crash in his tent, and she would have forgotten about Joe Bosky too-creep extraordinaire-if he wasn't right there in her face every time she turned around, helping himself to the Kool-Aid and sandwiches, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet as if he were balancing on a pole, blowing her kisses, juggling a hatchet and a pair of kitchen knives in a dumb show that just went on and on.

But nothing could dampen her spirit. This was like a barn raising, was what it was, like something out of the history books, and here they were living it, doing it, making it happen in modern times because it was never so modern you couldn't take a step back. “This is like an old-fashioned barn raising,” Star said aloud, to no one in particular, and she liked the notion of it so much she said it again, and then again, but nobody really paid any attention to her because by then they were all into their own trips, the chinking trip, the roofing trip, the take-two-steps-and-swing-your-partner trip, and the only one who responded was Joe Bosky, right there at her elbow, tossing his hatchet and his knives, and what he said was, “It sure is, sweetheart, and I'd raise a barn with you anytime.”

It was late in the afternoon, the meeting house chinked inside and out, the roof in place and buried in sod so that it looked as if a whole meadow had been transposed from the earth to the air, just floating there like a magic carpet strewn with flowers-and that was a trip, it was, everybody agreed-before anybody gave a thought to Verbie. Dinner was cooking-salmon fillets rubbed with dill and roasted over the open fire, with brown rice, stewed cranberries and a pot of communal mustard on the side-and all of Drop City was feeling relaxed and confident. They'd done it. They'd come all the way up here and built a place from scratch, with the materials at hand-free materials, provided by nature-and if they could do that they could build the cabins too, and why stop at three? Why not four or five or six of them? Why not make a whole camp of the place, like Camp Minewa, where there were four girls to a cabin, bunk beds up against the wall and plenty of space for everybody? Marco was talking about a smokehouse and Norm was pushing for a sauna and maybe even a hot tub, and at lunch he went into a long, acid-fueled oration on the Swedes and hot rocks and hotter water, on Chippewa sweathouses and purification rites, until he talked himself hoarse. Sure, people said. Yeah, sure, why not? Because there wasn't anything they couldn't do, and if anybody still doubted it, all they had to do was take a look at the meeting hall standing there tall and proud where before there'd been nothing but scrub and trees and a pile of dead gray rock. And so everybody was smiling, and it wasn't just the mellowing influence of the acid either. This was genuine. This was real. And Verbie? She was on her way upriver, wasn't she?

Star was outside, setting the big split-log picnic table for dinner, when the high sharp whine of an outboard engine broke free of the trees. Verbie, she thought. And Harmony and Alice and the shampoo, magazines and flashlight batteries she'd put in an order for, and chocolate-she could die for chocolate. She dropped what she was doing and let her feet carry her down to the river.

Half a dozen people were already there, the water giving back sheets of light as it paged through its boils and riffles, the sky striped with cloud till it looked like one of the paint-by-numbers scenes she'd never had the patience to finish as a child. Weird George was perched barefooted atop a rock out in the middle of the current, wet hair trailing down his back like a tangle of dark weed, Erika waist-deep in the water beside him. The dog was there too, Freak, in up to his chest and wagging the hacked-off stump of his tail, and it was warm still, very warm, no different from high summer on the Jersey Shore. And that was what she was flashing on-the Jersey Shore, she and Ronnie and Mike and JoJo and some of the others from the stone cottages and the weekend they'd spent camped on the beach there, all sunlight and the tug of the salt drying on your skin, bonfires at night, clams steamed in their own juice-as the boat drew closer and she began to realize that this wasn't Harmony at the tiller-arm, or Verbie or Alice either. That was Verbie, there, in the bow, the pale mask of her face riding up and jolting down again, but who was that in the middle seat, and who in the rear?

The engine droned. The boat came on. Star turned her head and gave an anxious look over her shoulder to where Marco and Alfredo were kneeling atop the roof of the meeting house, inspecting their work, and she wanted to call out to them-“Look, look who's coming!”-but she checked herself. A few of the others glanced up now, curious, because two arrivals in a single day was unprecedented, and she could see their faces lighting up-Jiminy and Merry at the door of the cabin, Mendocino Bill and Creamola pausing dumbstruck over a game of horseshoes, Premstar with her hair piled up on her head and a magazine in her hand lurching out of the hammock Norm had strung for her. A breeze came down the riverbed, rattling the willows along the shore. Freak began to bark.

She turned back round just as the boat slid behind the rock where Weird George was waving his arms and shouting something unintelligible over the noise of the engine, and for an instant he blocked her view. Then the boat shot forward and she saw who it was standing up now in the middle seat, and she couldn't have been more surprised if it was Richard M. Nixon himself. “Dale!” somebody shouted. “Hey, Dale!” And then, before she could think or even react, Sky Dog was gliding by, one hand on the tiller, the other flashing her the peace sign.

They were talking nonstop, really spinning it out, and if he didn't know better he would have thought they'd just been released from separate cages, one tap on the steel bars for yes, two for no. It was a kind of verbal diarrhea-a tag-team match-Sky Dog rushing in to fill the void when Dale Murray paused for breath, and vice versa. And the thing was, people wanted to hear it, every word of it, because this was the diversion, this was the entertainment for the evening. Nobody had left the table. A bottle of homebrew made the rounds, hand to hand and mouth to mouth. Norm produced a fresh pack of cigarettes, shook one out, and passed the pack on. Bones and salmon skin stuck fast to the plates, the leftover rice went hard in the pot, flies buzzed, mosquitoes hung like ornaments on the air. People's eyes were on fire. They laughed, chatted, laid communal hands on one another's shoulders, and it was just like Leonardo's reprise of the Last Supper, except the Christ figure was two Christs, Dale Murray and Sky Dog.