The white of the goats, the yellow of the dog, the wild shifting raging brownness of this thing that didn’t belong there in the pen, that didn’t compute, that was no bear at all but something else entirely, claws, teeth and fur in a fury of grinding perpetual motion and a keening sharp-edged growl that never faltered, and by the time Marco and Alfredo waded in on it with their clubs the goats were dead and gutted and Frodo was lying there in the dirt with his throat torn out and this thing, this emanation of the deepest hole in the blackest part of the last and wildest stronghold of the hills that bristled round her like breastworks, faced them down and in one leap was gone, a dark rumor in the high weed out beyond the silent pen. And later, even when she knew what it was—Gulo luscus, the glutton, the wolverine, the big buffed-up weasel that was so blood-crazed it had been known to drive grizzlies off their kills, she still didn’t understand. All she knew was that Ronnie had the guns downriver—all three of them—and that there would be no goats to tend, not anymore, and no milk, no yogurt, no cheese. There was a party, led by Weird George, Mendocino Bill and Norm himself, that wanted to butcher the goats and make use of the meat—the whole business regrettable, sure, a real bummer, but why let the meat go to waste, that was their thinking—but she came at them like that thing itself, raging, absolutely raging, and “Why not skin Frodo, then,” she said. “Why not eat him?”
She dug the holes herself. Marco stood off at a distance with a solemn face and two empty dangling hands, but she wouldn’t let him help. The ground was like rock. The mosquitoes drained her. Sweating till her eyes stung and the ends of her hair clung like tentacles at her throat, she dragged the carcasses of the goats—of Amanda and Dewlap, and yes, she could tell them apart now, even at this late hour when it no longer mattered and their eyes were closed on the world—dragged them across the yard and buried them.
In the morning, when she went out there in the tall weed amidst the stumps to lay a few flowers on the raw earth and gather her strength and maybe think some consoling thoughts and tell herself it was all for the best, all part of the plan, the flow, there was nothing to see but two empty holes and the naked long gashes that claws make in the dug-up dirt.
Ronnie and Verbie didn’t come back on Thursday night as planned, and they didn’t show up on Friday either. People began to wonder, and then they began to worry. This was a slippery place, wild, unbridled, full of surprises—and if they hadn’t fully appreciated that because they were so wrapped up in themselves, so focused on their hands and feet and the planing of logs and scooping salmon from the river and berries from the hills, then that thing out of the woods had served them notice. This wasn’t California. This wasn’t Indiana or Texas or New Jersey. They were here in this country and they were going to stick it out, no question about it, and it was beautiful here, paradise almost, but it was a whole lot dicier than any of them could have dreamed in their infancy back in California when there was nothing more to fret over than is there gas in the car and do they have cassava and artichokes down at the supermarket yet? They’d been lulled by the sun, by the breath of the river and the scent of the trees and the syrupy warm days that went on forever. But now there was an edge. Now they knew.
Star went out on Friday night and stared down the length of the river till her eyes felt the strain. She was worried for him, of course she was. Ronnie was the closest person in the world to her besides Marco, and she didn’t know what she’d do if anything happened to him. He was her link—her only link—to all that past history, to Mr. Boscovich and the yearbook and her parents even, and though she’d never go back to that, though she’d hated it all then and hated it now, the farther she got from it the more important it became—it was as much a part of who she was as the atoms that composed her cells and the blood material that flowed through her veins and she needed that. Everybody did. She talked about it with Marco all the time, and with Merry and Maya. To come here, to be part of this, to do what they were trying to do at Drop City, you had to sever the ties no matter how painful that might be—but that didn’t mean you had to give up the past, erase it as if it had never existed. She’d been Paulette once. She’d gone to Catholic school. She’d baked cookies with her mother, piloted her bike through the blazing blacktop streets of the development and listened to the tires peel back the tar anew with each whirring revolution, developed crushes on boys and wrote in her diary and stayed up all night talking on the phone to Nancy Trowbridge and Linda Sloniker about the most important things in the world. That mattered. It did. And Ronnie was part of it.
But Friday came and went and he was nowhere to be found. It rained all day Saturday and people hunkered down in their tents and crowded into the one workable cabin, the original one, which was really just a single tiny room no bigger than the paneled den where Star’s father and her brother Sam used to sink into the couch and watch football on Saturday afternoons. There was a chill in the air—it couldn’t have been more than fifty degrees out—but still it was too hot in the cabin, too hot by far, what with the stove going in order to cook in shifts all day and the press of bodies strewn all over like human baggage, people playing cards, grousing about the weather, getting high and generally making a shithole of the place while Star and Merry tried to find room to conjure up a pot of beans and eight loaves of bread that were destined to be doughy and raw on the inside and burned black on the bottom, and what they wouldn’t give for a couple of packages of La Estrella tortillas from the grocery back in Guerneville. Norm had taken possession of the only bunk in the place—the cabin had belonged to his uncle, after all, and the communal spirit only went so far in a pinch—and he was in it now, propped up on one elbow beside Premstar. They were playing hearts, the only game she knew, and when she slipped the black queen to him she squealed as if she’d been named Miss Watsonville all over again.
Outside in the rain, Marco and Alfredo and some of the others—it looked like Deuce, Tom Krishna, Creamola and Foster—were setting the big support beams in place for the roof of the meeting house, and wouldn’t that be nice, to have some space when the weather turned really nasty? Or just space in general. Because she might have been smiling—always smiling, two sweet chick lips pressed together in beatific hippie chick bliss—but what she really felt was that she was a heartbeat and a half from going out of her mind, and if she had to step over one more stinking sockless foot or scrub one more caked-on plate because some idiot had just flung it down in the yard without rinsing it first, she was going to start screaming and only a gag and a straitjacket were going to stop her.
She glanced up and saw them there in the intermediate distance, huddled scurrying figures in drab-colored ponchos, struggling against the mud, the pelt of the rain and the shifting uncontainable weight of the timbers, and she wanted to go out and pin medals to their chests. Everybody else had given up for the day—the ones who’d even bothered to crawl out of their sleeping bags in the first place, that is. Reba had certainly made herself scarce, but maybe that was a blessing in itself because at least the kids weren’t howling in and out the door every thirty seconds. Mendocino Bill had been working with Marco and the others all afternoon, but nobody had a poncho big enough to fit him and now he was huddled under the eaves of the cabin, paging through a finger-worn copy of Rolling Stone and shivering so hard you could hear the glass rattle in the windowframe, his overalls soaked through, his bare splayed feet like two deep corings of hard clay mud pulled up out of a drill shaft. Of course, he was blocking the light, that was the important thing, but Star didn’t have the heart to stick her head out the door and ask him to move. She swung round, two steps to the stove, and plunged a handful of dishes into the dishpan. Jiminy was right there underfoot, nursing his arm in a filthy sling and whittling little figurines out of alder—his voodoo dolls, he called them, and he had a whole collection already, one for each sister and brother in Drop City, though they were so crude only he could tell them apart. The hair curtained his face as he worked.
Star had a vision of
the future then, of the winter, music-less, dull as paste, everybody crowded into a couple of half-finished cabins with no running water and no toilets and getting on each other’s nerves while the snow fell and the ice thickened and the wind came in over the treetops like the end of everything. She held it a moment and then shook it out of her head.
“You know,” Norm said, raising his voice to be heard generally above the crackling of the stove and the steady drone of the rain, “somebody really ought to take a canoe on down to Boynton. I mean, to see what the deal is with Pan and Verbie, because I am hip to the fact that Verbs, at least, wouldn’t want to cause anybody any hassles up here by delaying delivery of the window glass and the new blades for the saws and the two-stroke oil and the drag knife and timber chisels and all the rest of the wares and objects we are all crying out with need for here . . . unless maybe her mother’s thing might have been, I don’t know, maybe heavier than she thought”—and here he looked to Angela, who was wedged into the corner beside Jiminy, working a crossword puzzle in a book of crosswords that had already been deliberated over, filled in and erased by a dozen different hands. Angela never even lifted her head and you would have thought he was talking about somebody else’s mother altogether. But then what could she do short of hopping in a canoe herself? Or sprouting wings?
Jiminy said, “They’ll be all right. It’s the weather, that’s what it is.”
“But what about yesterday,” Star said. “And the day before.” She was at the table now, trying to make salsa from canned tomatoes and a cluster of yellow onions that had lost their texture and given up their skin to a film of black mold, and even to think of chilies or cilantro was a joke. They could have drowned. Easily. In fact it was a miracle that everybody had made it upriver in one piece the first time, even with the help of Joe Bosky, who must have made five or six round-trips with gear and people and supplies while the canoes crept up against the current and Norm peeled off the hundred-dollar bills to keep the propellers whirring and the floats skidding across the water through one long frantic afternoon and a night that never came.
Premstar was concentrating on her cards and the others were just staring out the open door, mesmerized by the rain. Norm folded his hand, then looked up at Star and gave his beard a meditative scratch. “I guess I better call a meeting,” he said finally, and Star followed his gaze out the door and into the dwindling perspective offered by the rain.
The next morning was clear, the sun already high and irradiating the thin blue nylon of the tent when she woke beside Marco, her mouth dry and sour and her shoulder stiff where the bedding—spruce cuttings, no longer fresh—had poked at her through the unpadded hide of the sleeping bag. Everything was damp and rank. She was glutinous with sweat because the sleeping bag was good for twenty below zero and she’d zipped it all the way up the night before, shivering so hard she could barely stand to shake her clothes off. It had been raining still when she went to bed nearly an hour after Marco had turned in, and it couldn’t have been any colder than maybe forty-five degrees, but the tent felt like a meat locker, and that, more than anything, made her appreciate the concerted seven-days-a-week effort they were all putting in to get those cabins up. Teamwork. Brothers and sisters. Everybody pulling together, one for all and all for one.
Marco had told her there were old-timers up here who’d overwintered in a canvas tent with nothing more than a sheet-metal stove and some flattened cardboard boxes to keep the wind out, but she couldn’t even begin to imagine it. A tent? In the snow? At fifty and sixty below? That was when you crossed the boundary from self-sufficiency to asceticism—to martyrdom—and she had no intention of suffering just for the sake of it. There was nothing wrong with comfort, with twelve-inch-thick walls and an extravagant fire and a pile of sleeping bags to wrap yourself up in and dream away the hours while the snow accumulated and the wind sang in the treetops. And why not sketch a cup of hot chocolate into the picture—and a good book too?
They’d already sited the cabins, walked them off in the dirt and sat there to admire the prospect of the river each of them would have, a little semicircle of neat foursquare peeled-log cabins like something out of a picture book, and as soon as the meeting hall was finished, they were going to start in on them. And the big question was how would they divide up the space? Who was going to live with who and would they switch midwinter if somebody really freaked out? She was thinking she and Marco would go in with Merry and Jiminy, for sure, and maybe Maya and one of the unattached guys—cats—but four would be nice and two even nicer.
She stretched, careful not to wake Marco. He was hunched away from her, wrapped up like a corpse in his battered Army surplus bag, exhausted from working nonstop all day in the rain. He’d been so burned out the previous night he’d skipped the meeting altogether, and at dinner he could barely lift a fork to his mouth, all the jokes and debates and crack-brained theories that made dinner so lively and communitarian every evening just flying right by him. She was thinking she’d slip down to the cabin and see what Dunphy and Erika were cooking up for breakfast (today it was their drill, and nine’d get you ten it was going to be flapjacks, with hand-carved slices of bacon on the side for the carnivores) and bring a plate of it to him here in the tent, breakfast in bed and hello and good morning and how are you this fine day, my love?
Sometime in the night she must have flung off the T-shirt she normally slept in, though she had no recollection of it, nor of having unzipped the bag either, and her thoughts were moving slowly, as if her brain were an unfilled kettle and each thought the thinnest reluctant drip of a leaky faucet. She’d smoked the night before—pot and a couple hits of the hash Alfredo was circulating after the meeting—and as she lay there now staring at the intense unearthly blue dome of the tent’s roof, she felt dragged out and sluggish, as if one of Weird George’s vampires had slipped in in the middle of the night, drained her blood and pumped sand into her veins in its place.
It seemed to take her forever just to sit up—was that coffee she smelled, drifting up the slope from the cabin?—and then it hit her that there would be no milk in the coffee today, unless it was powdered, unless it was canned and tasted of tin and some Elsie Borden factory tucked away somewhere in the very rusted-out epicenter of the military-industrial complex they’d all come up here to escape. The goats were dead, that was the fact of the matter. One minute they’d been pulling up brush and tender sprouts of this and that with those dainty little jerks of their heads and staring off into the slit-eyed distance in some sort of deep-dwelling goat trance, and the next they were lying there torn inside out like a pair of bloody socks. And Frodo. Everybody loved that dog. You could throw a Frisbee a hundred feet, two hundred, and he’d be there to catch it every time, magically, as if he rode on air—he’d even learned to smile, as some dogs do, the really special ones, wagging his head and lifting his upper lip to show his front teeth in a weird canine parody of the master species’ favorite greeting. He was dead too. And Ronnie—what about Ronnie? And Verbie?
They’d all decided that if the two of them weren’t back by noon today somebody would have to go downriver in a canoe and see what the deal was, whether it was just a delay in getting the windows and the building supplies because maybe the Studebaker had broken down or they were having a problem with the outboard engine, a leak in the bottom of the boat, choppy conditions on the river, whatever—or whether it was something darker, something nobody really wanted to think about. And who was going to go? They couldn’t spare anybody, actually, because they were racing against time here and everybody, even one-armed Jiminy, was vital to the cause, but finally Angela had volunteered—it was her sister, her mother—and Bill said he’d go with her to make sure she didn’t get lost, because after all she was just recently released from the penitentiary of a whole life lived in Pasadena and her notion of wilderness to this point hadn’t extended much beyond the bounds of Griffith Park.
It was coffee. No smell on earth like it. Star kicked her feet
free of the sleeping bag and pulled on her underwear and a pair of shorts, both so damp you could have used them to wipe up the linoleum floor back at home, then she slipped a very grungy tie-dyed T-shirt that might have been Marco’s—two sniffs; it was—over her head and bent forward to lace up her hiking boots. It was then that the nothing sounds—wind in the alders, the willows, the cottonwoods and spruce, the erratic complaints of the birds, the rustle of the river—began to feature something else, something unnatural, man-made, the drilling, straight-ahead monotone of an internal combustion engine.
She stepped out of the tent in time to see the shot-silver streak of Joe Bosky’s floatplane dip behind the curtain of trees along the river and then emerge to skate out across the water on two flashing parabolas of light. The engine revved and then died as the plane faced around and its forward motion carried it up on the gravel beach in front of the cabin. By the time she got there Ronnie was already out on shore, securing the plane with a line looped around the big minder log. There was a dead moment, and then the sun grabbed the door of the plane and let it go again, and Joe Bosky was there beside him, in camouflage fatigues and a black beret, the two of them bent close, laughing over something.
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.”
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