Drop City

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Ronnie didn’t smile, didn’t say anything. He just took hold of her—Pan—and he wasn’t settling for any brotherly and sisterly squeeze either, not this time, wrapping her in his arms and pulling her tight to his body as if he wanted to break her down right there. And then, before she could react, he threw her head back and kissed her hard on the mouth, too hard, and held it too long, so that she wound up having to push away from him while Joe Bosky stood there grinning as if he were at a peep show or something. “Don’t I rate a kiss too?” he said, and the taste of Ronnie was the taste of alcohol and cigarettes and how many nights without sleep? “Jesus,” Ronnie said, “you look like shit.”

  She let a hand go to her temple and she shook her hair back and away from her face, vulnerable, always vulnerable. “What do you think?—I just got up. I haven’t even brushed my hair yet or washed my face or anything—”

  “She looks good to me,” Joe Bosky said. “Like something I could spread with butter and just eat all day long.” His grin was even, loopily steady, his eyes poked back in his head as if an internal whip were lashing out at them. He wore a pistol at his waist, strapped down like Ronnie’s, and he’d rolled up the sleeves of his shirt to show off the cut meat of his biceps. He leered at her a moment, then clapped on a pair of silver reflective glasses that gave back nothing. He was stoned, that’s what he was, up there in the air stoned out of his mind, and Ronnie was stoned too. She saw it all in a flash, the money on the bar, the dirty jokes and backslapping and the cigars and joints and one more round and hey, man, let’s fly upriver and drop in on Drop City.

  “So where’s the boat?” she asked. “Where’s Verbie?”

  Ronnie gave her a look she knew from Kansas, from Denver, from Tucumcari, New Mexico, poor Ronnie, put-upon Ronnie, Ronnie the crucified and ever-suffering. “She’s such a cunt,” he said. “And I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

  “Yes? And?”

  Bosky shuffled from one foot to the other. His face was petrified, his arms rigid at his sides. She had the sense that he wasn’t with them anymore, at least not in that moment. Ronnie started to say something, and then swallowed it. His eyes were hard little pins stuck to the corkboard of his face, too much fuel, too much. He glanced away from her to where people were ambling down from their tents now, scratching at their morning heads and hiking up their jeans like farmers on the way to a dance. He shrugged. “I told her to go ahead and take the boat without me. She’s on her way up now, with Harmony and Alice and some of the—with the windows, at least. We passed over them on our way up. Or at least I think that was them.”

  The cabin door flew open on this last bit of clarification and Freak came tearing across the yard, trailing a string of high, mournful barks—and yes, animals can mourn, she believed that to her soul—and Norm’s voice rose up in a bellow from behind the screen: “Well, knock me down with a Cannabis bud, here he is, folks, the prodigal son returned in time for breakfast!” And then Norm was out on the porch in his unstrung overalls, all chest hair and fat puckered nipples.

  Ronnie gave him a wave and Joe Bosky lifted a dead hand in the air too, after which they both turned back to the plane and began to unload what little Ronnie had thought to bring back with him. First it was his rucksack, bulging seductively. Then the guns—the rifles that belonged to Norm and Norm’s uncle respectively, and why did he have to take both of them when a single bullet could have stopped that thing that had got at the goats?—and then a laminated white box with two handle grips that said U.S. POSTAL SERVICE on the side of it, and at least he hadn’t forgotten the mail, at least you had to give him credit for that. People were milling around now, eager looks, everybody waiting for the orders they’d put in, for the magazines and candy bars and eyeshadow and honey-herbal shampoo and all the rest of it, but Pan was done, Pan was turning away from the plane empty-handed, sorry, folks, come back tomorrow, all sold out. She watched him standing there fussing over his pack, the pistol strapped to one thigh, the big sheathed knife to the other, his genuine cowhide go-to-town blunt-nosed boots with the stacked-up heels dark with river water, his workshirt open to the fourth button and his three strings of beads swaying loose—two of which she’d personally strung for him in the long, glassed-in hours coming through the dead zone of the high plains—and she thought, It’s over. He’s done.

  But he surprised her. Because he hefted his backpack, slung a rifle over each shoulder and turned to the nearest of his brothers and sisters—it was Tom Krishna, Tom with his head bowed out of shyness and his handcrafted aluminum foil mandala catching the light at his throat—and told him, so everybody could hear, that all the rest of the stuff was in the boat, no worries, and the plane could only hold so much, dig? “We brought the mail, though,” he said, and he gave the cardboard box a nudge with the wet toe of his boot.

  The morning stretched and settled. Star brought a plate and a mug of coffee up to the tent and watched Marco eat in greedy gulps, the long spill of his naked torso plunging into the folds of the sleeping bag as if that was all that was left of him, and he cleaned the plate and lit a cigarette without shifting position. “That my shirt you’re wearing?” he said, and she said, “Yeah,” and went down to get him seconds. Everybody was awake by now, pushing flapjacks around their plates, tanking up on creamless coffee and sorting through the box of mail Tom Krishna had set out on the picnic table. There was nothing for her—she’d already checked—and nothing for Marco, because they’d fallen off the edge of the world here and nobody, least of all their parents, knew where they were. She loaded up the plate, drowned the flapjacks in syrup, and told herself she was going to have to find the time to write people—her mother, Sam, JoJo, Suzie—because it would be nice to get a letter once in a while, to correspond, to reaffirm that there was a world out there beyond the cool drift of the river. As she went back up the hill with the laden plate the polar sun reached out and pinned her shadow to the ground.

  By ten o’clock it was eighty-seven degrees, according to the communal thermometer Norm had nailed up outside the door of the cabin, and the whole community, even Jiminy in his sling, even Premstar, was gathered in the yard out under the sun, focused on the task at hand: roofing and chinking the meeting house. “Finishing touches!” Norm sang out, slathering mud. “The first and most significant building of Drop City North rising here before your unbelieving eyes, and what do you think of that, people?”

  He didn’t really expect an answer—Norm was talking just to hear himself, and that was his job, as guru and cheerleader—but people were feeling good, playful, celebratory even. The mud—heavy clay dug out of the bog behind the goat pen and mixed with water to consistency in a trough fashioned of old boards—was all over everybody, and there’d been at least two breaks for mud fights, but still the trowels kept going and the dead black slits between the logs gave way to handsome long horizontal stripes of ochre mud, hardening in the sun, and yes, Virginia, this was going to keep the wind out all winter. The roof poles—a whole forest of them, white spruce stripped and glistening and as straight as nature and a little planing could make them—were handed up brigade-style to Marco and Tom Krishna and then set in place against the roof beams, no nails, no ligatures or sheet metal couplings needed, thank you very much, because the weight of the sod—big peaty chunks of it two feet thick and with every sort of grass, flower and weed sprouting like hair from the surface of it—would hold them in place. Or that was the theory, anyway.

  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.

  24

  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.

  “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.