Drop City

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Norm came forward, boxy in his overalls, rings glittering on his fingers. The bell tinkled at his neck. From the goats atop the bus, a forlorn bleat of disenchantment: they wanted down, they wanted out, they wanted to graze their way to Boynton. Norm bellowed out his name—“Norm Sender!”—and pumped the man’s hand in a conventional handshake before turning to the woman and showing the gold in his rotting teeth. “We’re Drop City, is what we are, avatars of peace, love and the higher consciousness, come all the way up from California to reclaim my uncle Roy’s place—Roy Sender’s?—on the sweet, giving and ever-clear Thirtymile. And we’re all of us pleased to meet you.”

  The man scratched the back of his head and tossed his gaze like a beanbag from face to face. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “You are hippies.”

  The girls giggled. The dogs danced. Mendocino Bill said, “That’s right. And we’re proud of it.”

  And then the man in the worn flannel shirt seemed to think of something else altogether, some new concern that disarmed him totally, and Marco watched him shift his feet in the pale tan dirt of the road. Watched the brow furrow and the grin vanish. The man’s gaze flitted around again and finally came back to Norm. “Did you say Roy Sender?”

  21

  That was what he’d said, Roy Sender—Roy Sender’s place—and Sess tried to control his facial muscles, but his body betrayed him. He took a step back to disengage himself, ran a hand through his hair. This was crazy, purely crazy, a page torn out of one of the newsmagazines—“The Woodstock Nation,” “Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll” or some such—torn out and given three dimensions and flesh, acres of flesh, because these hippie women sitting on the side of the road were the stuff of the wild hair’s winter fantasies, and two of them, the little blonde and the brunette in the cowgirl hat with her legs stretched out in the road, could have made the pages of another kind of magazine altogether. He was thinking Playboy, thinking Dude, thinking The Thirtymile? Did he say the Thirtymile? when the big greasy character with the gold-plated teeth—the nephew—loomed up on him with a whole string of questions: Who were they? Where were they headed? Had they ever been to Boynton? Did they know if the salmon were running yet, and what about the berries? Were the berries ripe out there?

  Sess gave Pamela a glance. She’d stiffened up like some neophyte anthropologist set down amongst the wrong tribe—headhunters when she’d been expecting basket-weavers—and she wasn’t giving them anything, not even a half a smile. And Lucius, Lucius wasn’t giving in either—he just backed himself up against Sess’s legs while the two yellow dogs pawed the dirt and poked their snouts at him. People were coming down off the bus now, a whole weird Halloween procession in mismatching colors, bells, beads, headbands, pants so wide you couldn’t see their feet and hair like a river so you couldn’t tell the men from the—oh, but you could, unless you were blind, and he guessed they must have all gone ahead and burned their brassieres.

  Sess took hold of the nephew’s hand for the second time, but this time on his own initiative, and of course he was half-lit, drinking all day and full of the hellfire exuberance of dunking Joe Bosky’s car for him, and so he worked up a smile and introduced himself. “Sess Harder,” he heard himself say, and wasn’t this a riot, wasn’t it? “And this is my wife, Pamela. And my new dog, Lucius.” To this point he’d just answered with a grunt or a nod to the questions thrown at him, but he felt expansive suddenly and he told them that the kings were running and the berries ripening and that he’d been with Roy Sender the day he left the country. Helped him move, in fact.

  “Really? Like no shit? You knew my uncle?”

  He didn’t tell him that Roy Sender was a father to him when he had no father of his own left breathing on this planet or that Roy Sender had taught him everything he knew or that Roy Sender was no hippie and never could be because he believed in making it on his own, in his own way, no matter how poor the odds, and that he was the kind of man who’d lie down and rot in his own skin before he’d take a government handout. He didn’t tell him about the solace of the Thirtymile, the clarity of the air, the eternal breathless silence of forty below and the snow spread like a strangler’s hand across the throat of the river. All he said was, “Yeah,” and Pamela, silent to this point, said, “Washo Unified? You’re some kind of school group, is that what it is?”

  A woman had got off the bus, dark hair in pigtails, a sharp decisive face, eyes that took you in and spat you back out again. She was thirty, thirty at least, wearing a faded denim shirt and some sort of improvised leggings that weren’t exactly pants and weren’t exactly a skirt either. Her feet were bare. And dirty. “We’re a family,” she said, coming right up to Pamela and holding out both her hands. “Just a family, that’s all.”

  Pamela—and this made him smile because she was so good-natured and sweet, not a malicious bone in her body—took the woman’s hands in her own a moment and held them till etiquette dictated she let go.

  “See that man over there?” the woman said, and they all turned their heads to where a skinny shirtless dark-skinned man with a full oily patriarch’s beard stood on the bank of the river skipping stones. “That’s my husband. And over there”—she indicated a pair of half-naked children bobbing and weaving along the water’s edge in two matching squalls of mosquitoes—“those are my kids. And these others, everybody else here? These are my brothers and sisters.”

  The nephew could barely keep still during all this, jerking his head back and forth and doing a little dance in his sandaled feet. “Listen,” he said, “I don’t know what your trip is or where you’re going to camp tonight or like any of that, but what I mean is a friend of Uncle Roy’s is a friend of mine, and you people are welcome, I mean more than welcome, to ride into town with us, and let me extend an invitation right now to the first annual celebratory communal feast of the Drop City North pilgrims and fellow travelers, to be prepared on the banks of the mighty Yukon this very evening while the sun shines and the birds twitter and the hip and joyful music rides right on up into the trees.”

  Pamela said she didn’t think so. “We’ve got things to do,” she said. “And the walk’s nothing, really, just a couple of miles.”

  It was then that one of the hippie men, a guy in a bandanna with what looked to be blood on his shirt, handed Sess a wineskin and Sess threw back his head and took a long arcing swallow before passing it to Pamela. He looked round him. All the hippies were grinning. The nephew looked as if he’d been dipped in cream, the wildflowers jerked at their leashes, the river sang. Joe Bosky’s car was flotsam now—or was it jetsam? Pamela’s lips shone with sweet wine.

  “Sure,” Sess said. “Sure, we’ll take a ride with you.”

  The Three Pup featured the usual human backdrop—Skid Denton mumbling French poetry into a shot glass, Lynette propped behind the bar with her arms locked across her breasts and no key in sight, Richie Oliver and his consolation prize drinking themselves into another dimension and grinding beer nuts between their teeth in a slow sure cud-like way. Iron Steve was bent over the pool table with a heavyset, sharp-beaked man who must have been a tourist because Sess didn’t recognize him, and Tim Yule, the tip of his nose still bright with a dab of fresh mucus and the paper carnation he’d worn at the wedding still tucked into his button hole, stood there beside them, clinging to his cue stick as if it were bolted to the floor. The place smelled the way it always did, like an old boot stuffed with ground beef, fried onions and stove ash and left out in the sun to fester for a couple of days. The usual drone of mid-Appalachian self-pity spewed out of the jukebox and the usual embattled mosquitoes hung in the air.

  Sess blew through the door like a hurricane, all clatter and gusto, and he had Pamela by one hand and the hippie wineskin by the other, feeling dense and lighter than air at the same time, and so what if the big greasy sack of a nephew was right on his heels and all the rest of them too? They were people, weren’t they, just like anybody else? Dirtier, maybe. Lazier. They smoked drugs and screwed lik
e dogs. But the world was changing—men had hair like women, women wore pants like men and let their tits hang loose, and who was going to argue with that? Wake up, Boynton, that was what he was thinking, wake up and join the modern world. But he wasn’t really thinking too clearly and Pamela would never nag—one beer, that was all, one beer and they’d stay in the shack tonight and go upriver first thing in the morning and let Wetzel Setzler and the rest of the town fathers scratch their heads over a busload of hippies who wouldn’t know a moose from a caribou. Or a hare from a parky squirrel, for that matter.

  Tammy Wynette gave way to Roger Miller on the jukebox—“King of the Road,” a song Sess hated so utterly and intensely it made him want to punch things every time it came on and it came on perpetually—and in the brief hissing caesura between records everybody in the room, even Tim Yule, turned to the door. In came the nephew, roaring, and then the one with the blood on his shirt and the little blonde and then a bleached-out monster in a greasy pair of overalls and a whole spangled chittering parade that filled the room before Roger Miller could limp from one mind-numbing verse to the next. “Drinks for everybody in the house!” the nephew boomed, laying a bill on the bar. “The first round’s on Roy Sender—the legendary Roy Sender! Anybody here know Roy Sender?”

  Nobody said a word. Nobody moved. They all concentrated on Roger Miller as if they were at Carnegie Hall listening to Oistrakh. Tim Yule cleared his throat. “These people friends of yours, Sess?”

  In answer, Sess crossed the room to the jukebox and gave it a kick that sent the needle skidding across the record with a long protracted hiss of static. Then he dug out a quarter, inserted it, and hit B-9, “Mystic Eyes,” three times running. Lynette, who’d seen everything, or at least pretended she had, began cracking beers and lining them up on the bar, and by the time Van Morrison came in after the mouth harp with his black-hearted vocal everybody was talking at once.

  It was a short song, no more than two minutes or so, but by the second run-through a couple of the hippies had begun to sway their shoulders and shuffle their feet; by the third time around they were dancing, throwing out their elbows and letting their arms writhe over their heads. The nephew had got hold of a thin blond girl in stacked-up shoes who looked like Twiggy’s American twin, and a little five-foot girl with a missing tooth and a tie-dyed shirt grabbed Iron Steve by the hand and started pogo-ing around the room with him. Sess put another quarter in, hit the tune three more times. Skid Denton let out a groan, Richie Oliver put a finger to his temple and pulled an imaginary trigger, and still more hippies poured through the door and spilled back out into the parking lot where somebody cranked up the big speakers in the bus and a whole shimmering spangle of weird hippie guitar music drifted out into the muskeg. There’d been nothing like this here since the last alien visitation, and Sess was too young to remember that.

  “Sess!” Skid Denton was shouting over the uproar, waving a full shot glass as if he were proposing a toast. “Where’d you find these freaks, anyway—the Ringling Brothers’ circus?”

  “And Barnum and Bailey,” Sess shouted back. He snaked his arm between a chinless character with a beard so sparse it was barely there and a big-shouldered girl—woman, Pamela’s age at least—whose breasts were on full display in some sort of leotard thing, and said, “Excuse me,” as he reached for his second beer. But the woman reached for it simultaneously and got there first. She let the neck of the bottle sprout between her thumb and forefinger before bringing it to her lips for a long calculated swallow and then handing it to him. “Hi,” she said, and he could see the mascara caked on her eyelashes, definitely a downtown sort of girl and what was she doing in the Three Pup? “I’m Lydia,” she said. “And you’re Norm’s friend, right?”

  Norm? Who the hell was Norm? He just smiled, and the guy with the nonexistent beard smiled, and she smiled too. “Yeah,” he heard himself say, “that’s right.”

  And now her face really lit up. “Well, I just wanted to thank you, that’s all, on behalf of all of us, I mean, because we really didn’t know how our whole trip was going to go down up here—I mean, we didn’t know if it was going to be like Easy Rider or Joe or what.”

  “Trepidatious, that’s what we were,” the guy said, but he was a kid, really, twenty, twenty-one maybe, with a head that was too big and shoulders that were too narrow and a pair of eyes that were a vast delta of broken veins. He slipped his wrist inside Sess’s and attempted some sort of secret hippie handshake, but the beer bottle got in his way, so he leaned back and made the victory sign with two fingers. “Peace, man,” he said, and then he started off on a monologue about how he’d always wanted to shoot a moose and skin it and a bear too and have a bear rug on the floor and maybe catch a king salmon and have it stuffed at the taxidermist’s—for over the fireplace, you know what I mean?—and did he, Sess, have any idea where the moose were this time of year, like up in the hills or down by the river or what?

  The thump of the bass was like friction: the floor was moving one way and Sess was going the other, even though he was standing stock still. He looked across the room to where Pamela sat at a table with the pigtailed woman, waving a beer and declaiming about something, and then the woman chimed in—it was all in pantomime over the intervening roar—and Pamela chattered right back at her. The hippies had caught on and kept feeding the jukebox quarters and the only song they played—the song of the night, the anthem—was “Mystic Eyes.” It was a joke. Hilarious. Fifteen times, twenty, twenty-five. They danced and pounded and threw back beers and shots of peppermint schnapps and whatever else they could lay their hands on. All was movement and noise and the swirling interleaved colors of the dancers’ shirts and jackets and the flapping wind-propelled cuffs of their pants. We went walkin’ / Down by / The old graveyard / I looked at you—

  Sess was going to answer the kid—he was going to tell him that the season was fish, not meat, and that the average moose stood taller than any of the cabins along the river and just might be a tiny bit too much for a chinless, slack-armed, eye-bleeding, California hippie to take on before he got his feet wet and pulled his head up out of his ass—but he never got the chance, and Lynette was the deciding factor. She came out from behind the bar like the shadow of something swift-moving and vast and jerked the electric cord out of the socket beside the jukebox. The music died. Everybody froze.

  “I want you out!” Lynette cried in a wild strained falsetto that made it sound as if she were trying to take the song to the next level and beyond. “All of you—out! Now! If you think I’m going to listen to that shitty rock and roll crap one more time you’re out of your mind. Now get out! Everybody! This place is closed.”

  From outside, in the mosquito-hung lot, there came the sound of the hippie guitars, more noticeable now in the absence of the jukebox. It was a mournful, contemplative music, each note plied out of a crevice to be held up and viewed from all angles before the next one allowed itself to be dug out and the next one after that. Sess stood immobilized amidst the throng, and then he felt himself moving toward the door and the sad sparkling wrung-out promise of the music. He drained his beer. He felt Pamela at his side. Then they were outside in the air that had a sweet riparian smell to it, the smell of the river recharging itself with meltwater, and the hippies were dancing like moonwalkers to the drugged-down testudineous beat. Lucius was there, nosing at his cupped hand, and he realized he hadn’t fed him since he’d claimed him from the pound, and that was remiss, it was. “Come on, Sess,” Pamela was saying, tugging him toward the corner of the porch where they’d dropped their packs full of marshmallows and dill pickles and cheese graters and all the rest of the claptrap they just couldn’t seem to live without. “Time to go. We’ve got a big day tomorrow. The garden, remember? All those logs that need to be peeled? The salmon?”

  That was when he locked eyes with the woman who’d put her lips to his beer—Lydia—and she gave him a long slow re-evaluative look out of eyes the color of the lupines sprouting alo
ng the road, one thin slant of sun catching her face, and whoever made her, whoever pulled the genes up out of the parental hat, sure didn’t stint, that was what he was thinking. But then the brunette in the cowgirl getup looped her arm through Lydia’s and she turned her back and began a weaving in-and-out snakedance that was like dripping hot oil right down the front of his pants.

  “Hello, Sess. Remember me, your wife?”

  He blinked twice, grinned.

  “Enjoying the scenery?”

  “They sure don’t waste a lot of money on underwear, do they?”

  She slipped an arm round his waist. The notes fractured and burst like bubbles, bubbles of aluminum, of pewter, hard metallic bubbles made by a machine somewhere in hippie land and bursting through the hippie speakers secreted in the back of the hippie bus. What was it? What would they say? Mind-blowing. It was mind-blowing. Skid Denton came through the door then with a soft-faced girl on either side of him, talking French a mile a minute. “No,” Pamela said, leaning into him, and she was feeling pretty good herself, no offense taken and the night was young, still young, “no, I don’t guess they do.”

  And then it was Iron Steve, his shoulders hunched and head bowed low so as to better breathe in what the little gap-toothed girl was all about—“Oh, yeah,” he was saying, “yeah, it gets cold, shit, yeah”—and Sess discovered another beer in his hand even as he was helping Pamela duck into the straps of her pack.

  The nephew was the agent of the beer, standing there with his crack-frame glasses and the color showing in his teeth, two more beers bunched between his knuckles, one of which he handed to Pamela; the other he kept to himself, giving it a good long suck till the foam flecked his beard. “You know something?” he said, pulling away from the bottle and grinning wide. “I like your taste in music.”