Drop City

by T. C. Boyle

  “Put up a sign,” Jiminy said. He was skinny, nineteen, with a beard that might have washed up out of the sea, and he’d been here no more than a week or so. Star liked his style. She’d been sitting outside on her stump, snapping the tops off of green beans and talking bands with Merry, when he came winding up the road on a unicycle, a black Scottie dog levitating over the bumps behind him. I have arrived! he sang out, and Scottie too! Somebody ran over the dog two days later, and Jiminy had sat there in the tall weeds crying like a child. “ ‘Keep Out, No Trespassing, That Means You!’ ” he shouted now, oblivious to the irony. “That’s what they did at the original Drop City, in Colorado. And Thunder Mountain too.”

  “Yeah, right, and who’s going to decide who comes in and who doesn’t? What, are we going to like hire pigs, is that it?” This was Verbie, swirling green-pink like a fruit drink in a blender. “Norm, what do you think? You going to be our policeman?”

  Norm Sender was sitting cross-legged on the table, a cowbell suspended from a suede cord round his neck. He didn’t even look up. “No way.”

  “The problem,” Alfredo was saying, and his voice was strained now, as if he were trying to hold something back and it was choking him, “the problem is the shit in the woods. And everybody in this room is guilty—”

  “Including the dogs,” a voice boomed.

  “Right, including the dogs. But it’s unsanitary, people, and I mean, people aren’t even bothering to bury it, that’s our own people, the Drop City people—the weekend hippies just fling their trash—and their excrement—anywhere they feel like it. And, speaking of which, there was that incident last night, in the back house, and you all know what I’m talking about.”

  There was a murmur of agreement. Verbie said two words—“Sky Dog”—and then somebody called out: “It was the spades.”

  “Really?” Alfredo let his eyes creep over the faces in the room. “Well, I don’t know, maybe we better ask Pan over here—he was there, weren’t you, Pan? Why don’t you tell us about it? Come on, Ronnie, enlighten us all—tell us about peace and love, huh?”

  Ronnie had been lying there limp amongst the pillows, his feet skewed at the nether ends of his stretched-out legs, but now he came up off the floor so fast he startled her—and startled the dog too. Suddenly he was standing there trembling in his cutoffs and tie-dye, and she was wishing she had a hit of something, anything, because this was Ronnie when the finger was pointing at him, this was Ronnie the victim, Ronnie the crucified saint. “I told you once, man, and I’m telling all of you now, I had nothing to do with it—”

  “Yeah, right. It was Sky Dog, wasn’t it?” Alfredo hissed. “And the spades.”

  Ronnie let his eyes bleed out of his head, cool Ronnie, poor Ronnie, and he spread his palms wide in extenuation. “I mean, it’s me, Pan, you all know me. You really think I would do something like that, no matter how stoned I was—? Fourteen, she was only fourteen, jail bait no matter how you slice it. I’m not like that, I’m not that kind of person. You all know me, right? Right?”

  Somebody up front, one of the founding members, stood up now too. Star couldn’t see him at first, so she lifted her head up off the pillows and felt Marco adjust his position beside her. It was the guy—cat—everybody called Mendocino Bill, two hundred fifty pounds of hair wedged inside a pair of coveralls you could have used as a drop-cloth. “Listen, people, this isn’t the issue, and I’m with Pan, he’s my brother and I believe in him—I mean, what is this, a kangaroo court or something? No, look, the issue is our black brothers out there. They’ve been intimidating people, and all they want to do is drink cheap wine and score dope and have one big nonstop party—and it’s at our expense. Because they sure don’t miss a meal, do they?”

  “Racist,” Verbie said. People began to hiss.

  “It’s not like that at all, man, and that’s not fair”—Mendocino Bill’s voice went up a notch—“because I of all people was in Selma and Birmingham and I wonder where the rest of you were cause I sure as hell don’t remember seeing any of you down there, and I’m telling you I don’t care who it is, we’ve got to police ourselves, people, or the Sonoma County sheriff’ll come in here and do it for us—and I don’t think there’s anybody here wants that.”

  That was when everybody started talking at once, accusations flying, people making bad jokes, somebody hitting a sour note on a harmonica over and over and Ronnie slipping out of the spotlight and settling back into the nest of pillows like a lizard disappearing into a crevice. Lydia took hold of his hand and Merry gave him a million-kilowatt smile, but he reached over to her, to Star, to make his plea. He was shaking his head, and this was for Marco too, because Marco was right there with his eyelids rolled back and his ears perked: “I swear,” Ronnie said. “I swear I didn’t do a thing.”

  “Bum’s rush!” Jiminy shouted. “Kick ’em out!”

  “Who?”

  “The spades! Kick ’em the fuck out! Norm, come on, Norm—”

  All eyes went to Norm Sender where he sat Buddha-like in the center of the table, and for a fraction of a moment, everyone exhaled. But Norm was having none of it—he ducked his head and shrank down to half his size. “Land Access to Which Is Denied No One,” he said.

  “Somebody’s got to do something—it’s like Lord of the Flies out there, man.”

  “Oh, yeah, sure it is—and what’s it like in here, then?”

  “Hey, fuck you.”

  “No, fuck you!”

  The whole thing was too much. Star lay there, propped up on her elbows, wishing they’d all just shut up, wondering where all the harmony and joy had gone to and why everybody had to hassle all the time, and then she looked at Ronnie, looked into his eyes, and saw a cold hard nugget of triumph there, sealed in, impervious to all things hip and the brotherly and the sisterly too. She was going to say something to him, she was going to call him out, when she felt the warmth leave her side as if it had evaporated and she was looking at Marco’s frayed jeans and the dead bleached leather of his boots planted on the floor. “Hey,” he was saying, “hey, everybody,” and he put two fingers to his lips and produced one of those nails-on-the-blackboard sort of whistles you hear at ball games and rock concerts.

  The room went quiet. Everybody was watching him. “Listen,” he said, “why doesn’t somebody just go talk to them?”

  “Talk to them?” Alfredo was incredulous. “If they wanted to talk they’d be here now, wouldn’t they? But no, they’re up there drunk as usual, looking to ball some other fourteen-year-old chick.” He glanced round the room. “Who’s going to do it? You? Are you volunteering?”

  “Yeah,” Marco said, nodding slowly. “I guess I am.”

  That first day, the day when he lifted her up into his tree as if the breeze was blowing right through her, she’d felt like the heroine of some fairy tale, like Rapunzel—or no, that wasn’t right. Like Leda maybe, Leda all wrapped in feathered glory. Leda and the Swan. That had been her favorite poem in Lit class, and she’d read it over and over till it was part of her, all that turmoil and fatality spinning out of a single unguarded moment, and that was something, it was, but what made her face burn and her fingers tingle was the weirdness of the act itself. Picturing it. Dreaming it. The flapping of the wings, the smell, the violence. All the other poems in the anthology were about flowers or death or Grecian urns, but this, this was about fucking a swan. She remembered her amazement, wondering how that could be—did birds even have penises?—and not just the mechanics of it, but the scene itself. Did he carry her off into the sky, or did it just feel that way? How big was he? And whose seed was he carrying—Zeus’s, the professor said—but how did that work out, and wouldn’t Helen be half-bird, then?

  Marco had handed her a joint and she’d taken it reflexively. She’d had three days to clear her head, nothing stronger than Red Zinger running through her veins, Maya peeling onions and rattling on in her thin spidery voice about getting beyond drugs to a natural high, the oneness of the gurus,
pure bliss in an overheated kitchen, but three days was enough. She needed something to kick-start her again, a quicker way to alter her consciousness than chanting Om Mani Pema Hung a thousand times, because her consciousness was clogged like a drain with all the residue of Ronnie and the dregs of back home. Plus, she had to admit she felt awkward in the presence of this new cat with his clothes off and his red-gold hair swinging like a curtain across his face and masking his eyes, because now that she was actually up there in his aerie, everything had changed. He didn’t know what to say, and neither did she. The joint was an offering. It was the great equalizer, the holy communion, get wrecked and stare off into space and who actually needed to talk? They smoked it down to the last disintegrating nub of a roach, pressing it finger to finger, lip to lip, and neither of them said a word.

  The air was sweet with the smell of it. Birds lighted on the split-wood railing and peered at them as if they were just another extension of the tree, some unlooked-for fruit or shell-less nut, or maybe some canker working its way out of the bark. She lay back, dissolving into herself while the sounds of the stirring commune—soft voices, the splash of the pool, music on the radio—drifted up to them from what seemed like miles away.

  “Laundry day,” he said, appending a strained little chuckle that was meant to set them both at ease, and it might have if it hadn’t turned to dust in his throat. Behind him, a limp array of jeans, T-shirts, ragged underwear and mismatched socks lay spread-eagled over the branches as if they’d dropped down out of the sky. She pictured a sudden cataclysm, a whirlwind that had ripped the clothes off people’s backs and spared the flesh beneath. Or bombers, high overhead, on their way to Vietnam, dropping soggy underwear instead of death.

  “Yeah,” was all she said, but it seemed as if the word stretched to eight syllables.

  “It’s been a week, at least. I was beginning to smell like roadkill.”

  “Tell me about it,” she said, and suddenly all her burners were on high, “because when Ronnie and I drove across country it was exactly like that—you know Ronnie? Pan, I mean? Every town, we were trying to get our quarters together for the laundromat, but we either got lost or they’d never heard of washing machines and dryers and those little one-scoop boxes of Tide and bleach—remember those? They just say Bleach, that’s it. No brand name or anything, just Bleach. Don’t you hate that?”

  “Yeah,” he said, staring at a place just over her shoulder and nodding as if he’d been there with them through every turning in every soulless gloom-blasted dead-end town Oklatexahoma could offer. “I guess. But isn’t that what’s wrong with the whole consumer society—brand names?—as if my soap’s better than yours? See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet. Buy, buy, buy, kill, kill, kill, eat, eat, eat. That’s what the war’s all about—products, brand names, keep the economy going and who gives a shit if a couple hundred women and children get napalmed every day?”

  She sat up and put a hand on his arm. “Whoa,” she said, “whoa. I’m just talking, that’s all.”

  “That’s okay,” he said, and he was looking into her eyes now, no problem at all. “So am I.”

  “All right,” she said, “all right, if we’re just talking, then I was just wondering what you think about being nude in front of a girl you’ve never met before, and stoned on top of it at something like half past eight in the morning. Is it a statement or something, or are you just out of clothes?”

  She’d expected him to laugh, but he looked away from her. He shrugged, eloquent shoulders, hard muscle, a cord flashing in his neck. “I don’t know,” he said, and caught her eyes again. “Does it embarrass you? The human body, I mean?”

  All the leaves held steady, then jumped, as if somebody had slipped a new slide into the projector that was the world. “Maybe,” she said. “Sometimes.”

  They were silent a moment, the bleating of the goats rising up to them, a distant shout, the rumble of a car on the dirt road. Then he said, “Why don’t you take your clothes off, see what it’s like?”

  “I know what it’s like—I was naked in the shower at six o’clock this morning. Why don’t you put yours back on?”

  “They’re wet.”

  She laughed then—he had her there. His clothes were wet, pasted to the branches like papier-mâché and dripping arrhythmically on the goat party below.

  “Listen,” he said, “Star,” and he used her name for the first time since she’d given it to him, “you want to maybe just hang with me up here for a while, kick back—”

  “And ball?”

  He shrugged again, rubbed at an imaginary spot on his calf. “Sure. If you’re into it.”

  She gave it a minute, thinking of Ronnie and the new girl, Merry, and the big-tits woman and everything that was hers to taste at Drop City and in the redwood forests and anywhere else she wanted to go outside the rigid stultifying confines of the straight world, and she considered Marco, his smile, his manner, the way he put things, and then she said, “No, I don’t think so.”

  He dropped his head, let his voice go loose till it sounded like something that had pitched out of a basket and rolled across the floor: “I was just asking—”

  “What am I trying to tell you?” she said, and she propped herself up on one elbow and took hold of his arm just above the wrist. “I’m involved with somebody right now, I guess, okay? That’s all.”

  She watched him gather up his legs, two balls of muscle flashing in his calves, and even as he stood he was careful to keep himself turned from her. “I don’t know,” he said, and he was apologizing now, “you never know unless you ask, right?”

  She gave a laugh, but it wasn’t the kind of laugh she’d intended, because it had Ronnie and the teepee cat all tangled up in it. “No,” she said, “you never know.”

  The night was darker than any night had a right to be, no moon, no stars, the sky locked up tight with the fog seeping in off the river. She couldn’t see Marco or Ronnie, though they were three feet ahead of her, feeling their way around the trikes and tools and discarded saltillo tiles, but she could smell the dust beneath her feet and the fishy stagnant odor rising from the pool somewhere off to her right, and she could hear the goats softly rustling their chains as they changed position beneath the oaks. A lone cricket kept opening and shutting a tiny door in the deep grass. There was nothing else.

  Verbie had decided to come along, as referee, and Jiminy, adamant Jiminy—he was ten feet behind them, cursing softly in the dark. “Shit. Fuck. I can’t see a thing. Hey, Verbie, where are you? Verbie? Star?”

  There was a hiss from just in front of her and Ronnie swung round on them, the pale ball of his face hanging there in the night like a broken streetlight. “Keep it down, will you?”

  “Why?” Verbie’s voice bloomed in the darkness. “What do you mean keep it down? Why should we? You think this is a raid or something? What are we, commandos? These are our brothers we’re talking about here, and this is our place, all of it, free to everybody, power to the people—why should we have to keep it down, huh? You tell me, huh?”

  Lydia and Merry were back in the main house, sitting round the scrapwood fire Norm had made to take the chill off the night, curled up, out of it, hunkering down with the rest of them to watch Charlie Chaplin eat his own shoe (“No, no, it’s really a gas, like he boils it in a pot and serves up the laces like spaghetti”). People were helping themselves to brownies and tea, settling into little groups, stretching out on quilts, thumping the taut bellies of the dogs as if they were drumskins. Nobody made a move as the posse formed behind Marco (and Ronnie, who had no choice but to go if he was going to have any credibility with anybody), because it was too much trouble, let’s plead laissez-faire and kick back and let the problem take care of itself. Star didn’t want any hassles either—she hated confrontation, hated it—but this was something she had to do, not just for the family or because Marco had stood up and taken it all on himself, but for the girl, for her. Because it had to stop someplace.

  St
ar hadn’t even seen her. She’d been baking, scrubbing, gardening, dreaming. People came, people went. Half the time she didn’t recognize the faces round the dinner table, especially on weekends. It didn’t matter. She might not have seen her, but she knew her from the inside out, somebody’s little sister, skin the color of skim milk, the orthodontically assisted smile and the patched jeans and R. Crumb T-shirt, grubby now from the road and the leers and propositions and big moist hands of all the cats who’d stopped for her out-thrust thumb and she didn’t even need to turn and face the traffic because they would stop for her hair and the shape and living breath of her. Her boyfriend was an asshole. Her mother was a clone. There was verbal abuse, physical abuse maybe. She didn’t fit in. She wanted something more than diagramming sentences and Mi casa es su casa, and she’d come to them, to the hip people, the people she’d heard about till they were legends of redemption and hope, and found out that in the end she was just another chick, so roll over and make it bald for me, honey.

  Star stretched her hands out before her, red light, green light, moving forward one step at a time. It couldn’t have been more than a couple hundred yards between the two houses, but it seemed like miles, their footsteps shuffling through the beaten dust and the clenched brown leaves of the oaks that were like little claws, everybody quiet for the first time since the door had shut behind them. “Man, it’s dark,” Jiminy muttered after a moment, just to break the silence, but now there was the low thump of music up ahead, and they moved toward it until two faintly glowing windows floated up out of the shadows. Ronnie tripped over something and kicked it aside in a soft whispering rush of motion. Candlelight took hold of the gutted shades in the windows, let go, took hold, let go.