Drop City

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “Hey, Alfredo,” Sky Dog said, “I wanted to talk to you.”

  Alfredo spread one palm flat at the top of the ditch and came up out of it then, wiping both hands on the bleached-out fabric of his jeans, trying for a grin. “Hey,” he said, as if he were happy to see him, “what’s happening, man?” and he snaked out a hand for the soul shake that never came.

  And what was Sky Dog? Five-ten, five-eleven maybe, a hundred seventy pounds, tanned till his skin was a sheath of gold, a single blue vein painted down the biceps of each arm, his eyes lighter than his face. He wore a Fu Manchu mustache that trailed a good three inches below the line of his jawbone. Usually he was in jeans and an embroidered blue jeans jacket with the sleeves removed at the shoulders, the humble hippie farmer adorned in humble hippie chic, but today he was a dude, dressed up in a paisley shirt and a silver scarf fed through a little gold hoop at his throat and a pair of elephant bells that swallowed up his feet. “I want to tell you I’m pissed off,” he said, and his face went the color of liver before it hits the pan, “because if you think you can just vote me out of here or whatever, you’re crazy. And to send this fucker”—a gesture for Marco—“to be your errand boy because you don’t got the balls—”

  “Come on, Bruce, come on, you know I wouldn’t do anything against you, me of all people”—Alfredo had his arms spread wide in renunciation—“but you’ve got to know we can’t run the risk of the law coming in here, and whether you had anything to do with that girl or not, she could still go straight to the Sonoma County sheriff and say anything she wants, and we don’t even know who she is or where she is—”

  “Aw, fuck it, man, listen to you—you’re nothing but a hypocrite. I mean, listen to yourself—if you had anything to do with that girl. Yeah, I did. And so did Lester and Dewey and a couple of other guys—including that little shit, Pan, or whatever his name is. She was asking for it—no, she was begging for it, like let’s get stoned and ball and get stoned and ball some more, and do you guys have any weed?—and I’m not apologizing to anybody. There isn’t a cat on this property that wouldn’t have done the same thing, am I right?”

  Lester said he was right. Dewey said nothing, but his eyes were lying in wait.

  Sky Dog—or Bruce, that was his name, Bruce, and to know it was to know the shibboleth that would cut him down to size—let his voice ascend the scale into the upper register of complaint. “I’ve been here, what, eight, nine months? And you send this fucker here”—again a finger stabbed at Marco, down in his hole—“who’s been here like a week to tell me I got to go? Well, I’ll tell you, I’m not going anywhere, not even if Norm himself comes knocking on the door, and you want to know why, I’ll tell you why—”

  That was when Marco stopped listening. He was thinking about a dog his uncle once had, a husky, one brown eye, one blue, the single wildest canine ever domesticated, like no other dog Marco had ever seen. It didn’t want to chase a ball or do tricks or go for a ride in the car, it never fawned or licked your hand or begged at the table, and when it was thrust into the company of other dogs at the park or on the broad humped lawn out back of the school, it wouldn’t budge, barely deigning to lift its leg or take the exculpatory sniff. But when it was pushed, when another dog crowded in too close with a ratcheting growl and a thrust of its shoulders, the thing erupted—no warning, just a pure fluid rush of violence so sudden and absolute you couldn’t be sure you’d seen it. The other dog, no matter how big, wound up on its back, and his uncle’s husky—Lobo, that was his name—was locked at its throat.

  Twice now, in the space of sixty seconds, Marco had been called a fucker to his face, and twice was two times too many. Before Bruce could air the remainder of his grievance in his high nasal wallop of a voice that was absolutely pitched to the key and tenor of the blues—and no doubt about it, the boy could sing—Marco reached up and took hold of his left foot, right at the heel of his boot, and jerked it out from under him. In the next instant, Sky Dog came down hard on the edge of the ditch, and in the instant after that he was sputtering and thrashing at the bottom of it, and Marco, with all the calm deliberation in the world, watched his own right fist rise and fall like a piston as he bent to retool this particular cat’s features in the most unbrotherly way he could imagine.

  If he’d thought he was ending something, he was wrong, and he should have known better, should have calculated and looked to his best chance, but none of that mattered now. What mattered was Dewey, who clapped an arm around his throat and snatched his head back as if he were rebounding the ball after an errant layup; what mattered was Lester, puff-faced Lester, in his platform boots and wide-brimmed pimp’s hat with the silver chain flashing at the crown, who gathered himself atop the mounded dirt and shot two clean balletic kicks to Marco’s midsection as Marco fought the hammerlock at his throat and Sky Dog—Bruce!—came up out of the trench with both fists flailing. Ten seconds passed, twenty, all three of them going at Marco where he stood immobilized, caught up in Dewey’s grip like a man of straw, Alfredo shouting “Break it up! Break it up! Come on, man, break it up!”

  Marco had no illusions. It was power against power, what they wanted against what he wanted, and what he wanted was Drop City, nothing less. He twisted, churned his legs, kicked out at Sky Dog and fought the arm clamped round his throat. It was a dance, that’s what it was. A jerking, twisting, futile dance punctuated by the wet dull thump of one blow after another. Sky Dog was sloppy, near tears, half his punches glancing off muscle or bone, but Dewey was made out of hammered steel and Lester kept stepping up and aiming his kicks, one after another, as if he were climbing a ladder. “Motherfucker,” he kept repeating, softly, almost tenderly, as if he’d confused the act and the epithet, “you motherfucker.”

  It might have gone on even longer than it did, no usual end to this, blood on top of blood, the knife in its sheath, the sheath on the belt, the wet slap of flesh on flesh, if it hadn’t been for the tourists. Two of them—a couple, denim and leather, bronze peace signs dangling from their throats, just in the night before to see how the counterculture lives, maybe write an essay or a book about it, promiscuity and peace, granola, goat’s milk, marijuana under the stars. Marco had met them that morning—they were from Berkeley, he was a professor and she was a poet, and they’d donated two dollars each for runny oatmeal and scones that were like loofahs, and it was worth every penny because they were making the scene. The professor was bald on top, but he’d wrapped a bandanna round his head and greased up the long stiff hairs at the back of his neck so they trailed down over his collar in what must have been a royally hip display for his colleagues in the Sociology department. The poet was forty maybe, nobody he’d ever heard of, with a pair of big collapsing breasts in a sleeveless T-shirt, bird feathers for hair, a parsimonious mouth and mean little inquisitive eyes that dug and probed everywhere, because everything was a poem in the making. Well here was another one unfolding right before her eyes, and what would she call it—“The Fight for the Leach Field Ditch”? Or maybe just “The Ditch”? Marco wasn’t thinking. He dodged and writhed and absorbed the blows as best he could. But yeah, “The Ditch” sounded just about right. “The Ditch” said it all.

  What happened was this: they were out for a stroll, professor and poet, grooving on the heat, the dust, the fence lizards puffing up their tiny reptilian chests in the blissed-out aura of peace and love and communal synergy, when suddenly she—the poet—let out a scream. And this was no ordinary scream—it wasn’t the kind of semi-titillated pro forma shriek you might expect from a female poet announcing a fistfight among hippies in a half-dug ditch in a blistering field above the Russian River; no, this was meant to convey shock, real shock, a savage tug at the cord strung taut between the two poles of existence. The poet’s scream rose above the heat, airless and impacted, and everything stopped right there. Dewey let go, Lester snatched back his foot, Sky Dog and Alfredo swung their heads first to her, then to the dense stand of woods at the edge of the lot. And Marco
, unsteady on his feet, riding the adrenal rush till it was a hot cautery run through his veins, Marco was the last to turn and look.

  What he saw was Ronnie—Pan—staggering out of the shadows in a suit of blood, wet blood set afire by the hard harsh light of the sun, and something slung across his shoulders, swallowing him up in the fresh red wetness. It was—it was a living thing, or no, a dead thing, clearly dead. And bleeding. The girl, Marco thought, the girl, and it wasn’t enough that they’d raped and humiliated her, now they’d—but this wasn’t a human form at all. What did he see? Fur, dun fur. Had he killed one of the dogs, was that it?

  “Hey, man,” Ronnie’s voice came stunting across the field, weak with excitement, “we got meat!”

  “Meat?” Alfredo said, already moving toward him—they were all, all of them, moving toward him. “What are you talking about? What is that?”

  Marco climbed up out of the ditch. Ronnie was closing now, a hundred feet, maybe less, staggering under his burden of blood, meat, hair, bone. “The fuck you mean, man? I got me a deer!”

  6

  You would have thought he’d shot Bambi or something the way some of the chicks carried on, and Merry was the worst—or no, Verbie, Verbie was even worse than that, as if she hadn’t spent the first eighteen years of her life cruising the meat department at the supermarket and gorging on fifteen-cent burgers and pepperoni pizza like every other teenager in America. And Alfredo, with his meat-is-murder rap and how could you just slaughter one of your fellow creatures and live with that kind of karma, and blah, blah, blah. It was a joke, it really was. All they talked about was going back to the land, living simple, dropping out, and yet if there wasn’t a supermarket within ten miles they’d have starved to death by now, every one of them. There were fish in the river, there was game in the woods, and so what if it was out of season, so what if he’d wound up with a doe that couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds dressed out? It was meat, free meat, and it could feed everybody on the place for a week at least. Did they really expect to go through life choking down soy patties and eggplant on rye? Falafel? Tofu kabobs, for Christ’s sake? Shit, they should have given him a medal.

  As it was, he spent the whole afternoon skinning and quartering the thing, slippery, ugly work, no doubt about it, and the only one who’d give him a hand was Marco, because Marco understood what going back to nature was all about—he’d been hunting and fishing since he was eight years old, grouse, rabbit, squirrel, duck blinds on a morning made out of ice, standing waist-deep in water that shot by like a freight train and nothing but two stunted half-developed swaybacked hatchery trout to show for it, and you’d better hope your mother made meat loaf. He’d been there—there and back. Just like Ronnie. Like Pan. And while Che and Sunshine stuck their fingers up their noses and stood there gaping and half the commune seemed to just drop what they were doing and drift by to scold and kibitz and feature the way a few nice venison steaks might look sizzling on a grill over a bed of hot coals, Ronnie tugged at the hide in a blizzard of flies—he was thinking he might make a doeskin jacket maybe, with a fringe—and Marco bent to sever the thin tegument that held it all together with the slick glassy edge of his hunting knife.

  “What happened to your face?” Ronnie asked in the course of things, his hands dipped in gore, the sun quavering in the trees like some novelty item from Japan. The butt end of a joint clung to his lower lip; a quart of beer, slick with bloody palm prints, tilted out of the stiff yellow grass beside him. It was late in the afternoon, and the smells from the kitchen were strictly vegetarian.

  Marco looked up, grinning, but it was a lopsided Floyd Patterson sort of grin. His left eye was swollen up like a sausage in a pan and a crusted-over gash dropped down into the facial hair below it. “A difference of opinion,” he said, and that was all right, because Ronnie wasn’t prepared for any heavy trip about the spades and Sky Dog and who did what to whom in the back house night before last, so he just nodded and let it go.

  The two of them kept sawing away, first one side, then the other, and before long the hide pulled back from the flesh like a wet rug, but didn’t you have to salt it or rub it with lye or something? And for leather, you had to get the fur off too, and that was a drag, a lifetime sentence, no less . . . That was what Ronnie was thinking as the fat bluebottle flies scorched the air and the voice of Tracy Nelson, strong and true, rose up high over the currents of the main house. They were out behind the pool on a dead bleached strip of grass, and they’d hung the carcass from a branch, to bleed it, but just for an hour—they were both afraid of the heat, because who’d ever shot a deer this time of year? Nobody. Nobody but Pan. Yes, and here it was, in the flesh. This morning it had been down by the river, pawing around in the mud, pulling up tender shoots of this and that, off on some trip of its own no one could ever have imagined or predicted, and now it was dead, now it was his.

  Pan was feeling it—the grass, the beer, the pure streaming uncontainable rush of accomplishment, his deer, his first deer—and he began to sing along with the music, When it all comes down, you got to go back to Mother Earth. Oh, yes. And he let it rip too, no reason to be shy about it because everybody told him he had a nice voice and you couldn’t hold back when you were trying to sing any more than you could when you were trying to talk French or bring a ten-speed bicycle down Potrero Hill with a full pack and a load of groceries on your back. I don’t care how rich you are, I don’t care what you’re worth—he threw his head back, really getting into it, on a roll, unbeatable, when the record choked off with a screech and almost instantaneously somebody put on some frantic self-congratulatory raga that was like compulsive masturbation or something. “Fuck,” he said, “I hate that. I really hate that.”

  Marco took the joint from his lips with two bloody fingers. “Hate what? Ravi Shankar?”

  “No—I mean, yes. Shit, yes. It’s utter crap. But what I mean is when you’re really like into a song, you know, and somebody just”—he waved a hand, his own bloody knife, as if to say You know what I mean, and Marco did, because he nodded in sympathy, say no more.

  They listened in silence to the blooming sitar and the tablas that seethed under it like rain on a tin roof, Marco squatting beside him, inhaling, holding it in, then taking a good churning hit from the bottle. The beer sizzled yellow, so warm at this point it was like carbonated piss, but when Marco passed him the bottle Ronnie put his lips to the aperture and tilted his head back. The knives slashed, the flies rose. They were cutting out crude steaks now, and this was a learning process for both of them. “You’ve got a good voice,” Marco said.

  “Oh, that? You like it? I mean, that was just singing along with a record. You should of heard me with this band I almost got into back in New York—I mean, I sang with them a couple times at rehearsals, the guitar player and I were like really tight, and the drummer was this cat I went to high school with . . .” He went on in that mode for a while, enjoying himself, thinking of Baracca and Herlihy and the other guys in the band and the sense of flying without wings he got every time he stood at the microphone with all that electric surge of the band behind him and Eddie Herlihy’s voice twisting round his own like two veins out of the same body. How could he ever explain that to anybody? Yeah, sure, and the scag that went with it, in the three- and five-dollar bags you got from the spades out back of the burned-out, boarded-up storefronts downtown, taste it, cook it, shoot it, just to come down from the rush of the music, and that was brotherhood, the brotherhood of the syringe copped from somebody’s old lady the nurse that was so dull you had to hammer it into your arm—

  “So what do you think,” Marco was saying, “should we try smoking the rest of the meat—have you ever done that? Or salt it. I hear you can salt it.”

  “What about the freezer?”

  “Are you kidding? It’s full of Tofutti and six kinds of ice cream and cookie dough and what, fifty trays of ice? If we can squeeze three roasts in there it’ll be a miracle, and I don’t know how many
people are going to want steaks tonight—but I say we grill up as much as we can.”

  “Right on,” Ronnie said, and he was already picturing it, the smoke rising like a forest ablaze, the sweet meat scent permeating everything, another joint maybe to mellow out and goose the appetite, and all of them—even Alfredo—lined up at the grill with their tin plates and a shriveled-up pathetic little scoop of rice and veggies, and Pan, magnanimous Pan, hunter and gatherer, essential cog, man of the hour, dishing it up.

  As it turned out, it was nearly dark by the time the coals had died down enough to do the steaks without igniting a firestorm on the grill, and Ronnie, who was feeling pretty loose by then, really heaped them up. A little salt, a little pepper, a smear of Pan’s famous barbecue sauce (two parts ketchup, one part mustard, garlic powder to taste and upend the bottle of apple cider vinegar over the whole mess for ten seconds, glug, glug, glug), and that was that. Before he’d got the job in the record department at Caldor, he’d worked at a steakhouse called the Surf ’N’ Turf, two days a week on the grill, three behind the bar, and he had a pretty good idea of what to do with meat, once it looked like meat, that is, and he kept the steaks moving with all the flair of a pro.

  He was feeling expansive, flipping steaks with both hands and talking everybody up, accepting the odd hit from this pipe or that, and then he was telling Jiminy about this hitchhiker who’d invited Star and him to a party one night in Iowa, he thought it was—yeah, Iowa—and there were maybe ten or twelve improbably hip people gathered round a big picnic table in the middle of a field, crickets going at it, the moon rising fat over the horizon, very calm and soulful. All the plates—tin plates, just like these, exactly, and isn’t that a trip?—were nailed to the table, just crucified there with a single nail dead center all the way down both sides of the table. When the party was over, when they were all done gnawing on their pork bones and corn cobs and the rest, the hitchhiker’s brother—he was the host—just stood up and hosed off the table.