T. Boyle - Drop City

“And that was a trip, the whole bike thing, because in-where was it at, Dale?”

“Dawson.”

“In Dawson, they'd never even _seen__ a Honda before, especially a beast like that, seven hundred fifty cc's, Windjammer fairing, I mean, _chrome__ everything, and the first guy out the door of the saloon offered him twenty-two hundred for it-_Canadian__-and Dale, I'll tell you, Dale never looked back.”

“That's right, man. Bet your ass.”

Marco shifted his weight from one buttock to the other on the hard split plank of the seat, thinking he could do without the heroic exploits and the thick paste of smirks, nods and asides that seemed to have everybody glued to their seats, thinking the two of them should have stayed in Dawson or Whitehorse or wherever they'd blown in from, anywhere but here. They'd shown up like conquering heroes when the worst part of the work was already finished, that was what he was thinking, and what had Dale Murray-or Sky Dog, for that matter-ever done for Drop City? He exchanged a look with Alfredo, elbow-propped across the table and two places up, but Alfredo was keeping his own counsel. And hadn't they banished Sky Dog once already? Or was he dreaming?

Up at the head of the table, seated at the right hand of Norm, Premstar was giggling, and the pot-Sky Dog's pot, Dale Murray's pot, Lester's and Franklin's pot-kept circulating. When the communal joint came Marco's way he took it like anybody else, a pinch of the thumb and index fingers, Joe Bosky's compressed fingertips giving way to Star's and Star's to his own. The Kool-Aid was gone, and he thought he felt a mild residual buzz from it-it hadn't been intended as anything intense, but just something to focus behind, and he'd had maybe two cups of it hours ago-and now Reba and Merry were hovering over the table with a big blackened pot of hot chocolate and people were dipping their cups into it and the steam lifted off the pot in a transparent crown. Freak had stopped begging-glutted finally-and he lay at Star's feet, grunting softly as he plumbed his balls and nosed under his tail for fleas. Jiminy got up and held his lighter to the pile of brush and lopped-off pine branches he'd raked together for a fire, and before long the smoke was chasing round the table at the whim of the breeze, a nuisance surely, but at least it discouraged the mosquitoes.

Dale Murray said, “Kicked his ass for him, what do you think?”

Norm said, “Public _what__? Indecency? You got to be kidding.”

Marco exhaled and passed the joint on to Dunphy, her fingers cold, spidery, bitten, thin, the briefest fleeting touch of skin to skin, and she gave him a blank-eyed look and half a smile and put the roach to her lips and sucked. He glanced down at his own fingers, at his hands laid out on the chewed plank of the table. The fingernails were chipped, the cuticles torn, dirt worked into every crack and abrasion in a tracery of dead black seams. These were the hands of a working man, a man putting in twelve- and thirteen-hour days, the hands of a man who was building something permanent. Pride came up in him in a sudden flush. And joy. That too.

“Tired?” Star murmured, leaning into him.

For answer, he pressed his palms together in prayer, then tilted them and made a pillow to lay his head on.

“And Lester,” Sky Dog was saying, “you should have seen Lester-man, they wanted to lock him up so bad, just on general principles, you know? But he gave them the old shuck and jive and smiled so hard at this one guy-I don't know what he was, a Mountie, a sheriff, something-I thought he was going to melt right down into his boots like a big stick of rancid butter. Oh, and, shit, the moose-did I tell you about the moose?”

Alfredo cut in. He wanted to know where Lester was-was he planning on coming upriver? Because if he was, it was going to be sticky, real sticky, after what went down in California, and he didn't want to sound prejudiced or anything, because prejudice had nothing to do with it- “He stayed behind at the bus,” Verbie said, picking at a crescent of white bone. “With Franklin. They're panning for gold.”

Joe Bosky let out a hoot. “Fucking greenhorns,” he said. “Cheechakos.”

“All's I know,” Sky Dog put in, “is they got this vial half-filled with gold flakes already, and all they been doing is just catching what comes out of that creek up north of town-”

“Last Chance Creek,” Bosky said, folding his arms. The pale white ridge of a scar crept out of his aviator's mustache and curled into the flesh of his upper lip. You could see where every hair of his head was rooted. “They should've called it No Chance Creek. Nothing in there but sewage leaching out of people's septic tanks.”

“Sorry, man, but I saw it, I'm telling you-that was _gold__ in there.”

“Iron pyrites,” Verbie said, and then Norm weighed in. “Could be gold, who knows? You want to talk gold country, this is it, and I fully intend to get out there and rinse a couple pans myself, me and Premstar. Once the cabins are up. Because why not? It's _money__ in the bank, people, and it's out there for the picking, just like the berries and the fat silver salmon coming up the river, and do I have to _remind__ anybody what we're doing up here in the first place?”

Jiminy said he could feature some gold-maybe Harmony could figure out a way to melt it down and make ornaments and figurines and the like-or maybe they could just sell it and use the money for things like a new generator so they could have a little music more than once a week. And lights, what about lights. Wouldn't lights be nice?

People ran that around the table a while, the gold flecks that would invariably prove to be iron pyrites growing exponentially in each Drop City head till the creek across the river ran yellow and the trees on the hills gave up their roots and toppled because it wasn't earth they were growing in, but solid gold nuggets. Marco tuned them out. He'd never been so tired in his life. And if it wasn't for the elation he was riding on-the meeting house was up, the walls chinked and the roof in place, and who would have believed it a month ago? — he'd have crawled into his sleeping bag by now. But he held on, stroking Star's bare arm with the tip of one very relaxed finger and letting the marijuana turn the blood to syrup in his veins.

They'd made the meeting house two stories, with the beams laid inside for a loft where people could sleep if the need arose, and that was good thinking, a happy result of sitting down with a sheet of paper and a pencil and talking it all out beforehand with Tom, Alfredo and Norm. Norm knew what he was doing, for the most part, at least, and Sess Harder, fifteen minutes down the river, was like an encyclopedia-he was the one who told them to lay flattened cardboard over the roof poles so none of the loose sod would leach through the cracks-and the uncle had left behind a pristine copy of _The Complete Log Home,__ copyright 1910, which they could consult as needed, but really, Marco couldn't help marveling over how _basic__ it all was. You cut and peeled the timber, notched the ends of the logs till they were no different, except in scale maybe, from the Lincoln Logs every ten-year-old in America constructed his forts and stockades with, dug down two feet to permafrost at the four corners and stacked up rock to lay the first square across and built on up from there. Then you laid the floor-with planks carved out of spruce with a chainsaw ripper-cut holes for the windows and a six-inch slot for the stovepipe, and you had it. Basically, that was it. And if they could all pitch in and build something like this-two stories high, twenty feet long and eighteen across-then the cabins would be nothing more than a reflex.

“What about Harmony and Alice?” This was Norm, leaning into the table and giving Sky Dog and Dale Murray a look over the top of his glasses. “And Lydia, what about her?”