Drop City

by T. C. Boyle

  This was it, the back house, a place the size of a pair of trailers grafted together at the waist, with a roof of sun-bleached shingles and an add-on porch canted like a ship going down on a hard sea. Migrant workers had been housed here in the days when Norm’s father ran the place, or so Alfredo claimed, pickers moving up and down the coast with the crops, apples in Washington, cherries in Oregon, grapes in California. Star could believe it—the place was a crash pad then and it was a crash pad now, the single funkiest building on the property. The windows were nearly opaque with dirt, there was no running water or electricity, and somebody had painted DROP CITY DROPOUTS over the door in a flowing swirl of Gothic lettering. She’d been inside maybe half a dozen times, attached to one movable feast or another—until Lester moved in, that is.

  Marco didn’t knock. He pushed the door open and they all just filed in, more like tourists than an invading army, and she tried to put on her smile, but it failed her. It took a minute for her eyes to adjust, a whole flurry of movement over the stale artificial greetings of the tribe, what’s happening, bro, candles fluttering, the soft autonomous pulse of Otis Redding, sitting on the dock of the bay. Who was there? Lester, Franklin, three cats, two black and one white, she’d never seen before, even at mealtimes when everybody tended to get together, and—this was a surprise—Sky Dog. It was a surprise because he hadn’t shown up for the noon meal or dinner either and everybody assumed he’d gone back to the Haight, or Oregon—wasn’t he from Oregon originally, and what was his real name, anyway? She looked at him sitting there cross-legged on the floor, bent over his guitar and playing along with the record as if he didn’t have a care in the world, as if nothing had happened, as if forcing yourself on fourteen-year-old runaways was no more sweat than brushing your teeth or taking a crap, and she felt something uncontainable coming up in her.

  “Hey, man,” Verbie was saying, “how’s it going? All right? Yeah? Because we just, you know, felt like dropping in and seeing what the scene was over here, you know?” She was five foot nothing, red hair clipped to the ears, with a tiny pinched oval of a face and a black gap where her left incisor should have been. The face paint clung like glitter at her hairline and she was twirling the cape and shuffling her feet as if she were about to tap dance across the room. “I mean, is it cool?”

  No one offered any assurances, and it didn’t feel cool, not at all. It felt as if they’d interrupted something. Star edged into the room behind Ronnie.

  There was no furniture other than a plank set atop two cinder blocks, and everyone was sitting on the floor—or not on the floor exactly, but on the cracked and peeling vinyl cushions scavenged from the rusty chaise longue out by the pool and a khaki sleeping bag that looked as if it had been dragged behind a produce truck for a couple hundred miles. Someone had made a halfhearted attempt to sweep the place, and there was a mound of brown-paper bags, doughnut boxes, shredded newspapers and broken glass piled up like drift in the far corner. The only light came from a pair of candles guttering on either end of the plank—calderas of wax, unsteady shadows, a hash pipe balanced atop a box of kitchen matches—and as the jug of cheap red wine circulated from hand to hand it picked up the faintest glint, as if a dying sun were trapped in the belly of the glass.

  “So what is it,” Lester said, looking up from the floor with a tight thin smile, “Halloween?” Beside him, Franklin ducked his head and gave out a quick truncated bark of a laugh. “It’s trick or treat, right?” Lester said. “Is that what it is?”

  “Yeah,” Franklin said, and he lifted the jug to his lips but had to set it down again because the joke was just too much, “but we ain’t got no candy.”

  Ronnie found a spot on the floor and eased himself down as if he belonged, and maybe he did, but the others just stood there, shifting from foot to foot. “It was a meeting,” Ronnie said, and then Verbie, who never knew when to shut up, started in on a blow-by-blow account of who had said what to whom, going on about the shit in the woods, the weekend hippies, the septic fields that needed to be dug, and she was just working her way around to the point of the whole thing, trying to soften the impact, when Marco spoke up for the first time.

  He was leaning against the wall, arms folded against his chest. He was wearing a clean white T-shirt and a pair of striped suspenders that stretched taut over his chest. “We want you out,” he said, “all of you.” He gave Sky Dog a look. “And that includes you, my friend.”

  Sky Dog never even lifted his head, but Lester made a face. “Ooo-ooo, listen to you,” he said, “and what’s your sign, baby—Aries? Got to be—the ram, man, right? Ram it on in, huh? Ram it to ’em. Or is it that other Ares I’m thinking of, god of war, right? Is that it? God of war?”

  There was a snicker from Franklin, but the others just sat there. The record rotated. The jug wine went from one hand to another.

  “But listen, you want to know about war, and I don’t mean this SDS shit and setting the flag on fire on your mother’s back lawn while us niggers go on over to Vietnam and smoke gooks for you, you talk to my man Dewey here”—and he indicated the man seated to his left—“because Dewey was dug in at Khe Sanh for something like eight fucking months and he can kick your white ass from here to Detroit and back.”

  “That’s not the point,” Verbie was saying.

  “Nobody wants to get violent,” Jiminy put in, and he loomed over Verbie like the representative of another species, all bone and sinew, the white shanks of his legs flashing beneath the cutaway tails and Donald Duck grinning in endless replication from the hard little knot of his little boy’s briefs, “it’s just that we all, I mean, for the sake of the community—”

  This was hard-going, very hard, and Star couldn’t contain herself any longer. “You raped that girl,” she said, and it was as if she’d ripped the wiring out of the stereo or shot out the candles with a pair of smoking guns. The room fell silent. She looked at Lester, and Lester, hands dangling over the narrow peaks of his knees, looked back at her. This wasn’t peace and love, this wasn’t brothers and sisters. This was ugly, and she could have stayed home in Peterskill, New York, if she wanted ugliness.

  “Come on, Star,” Ronnie said finally, but Lester cut him off. “I didn’t rape nobody,” he said, “because if anything happened here last night it was consensial, know what I mean? Shit, you were here, Pan—you know what went down.”

  “Fuck it,” Marco said. “You’re out of here, all of you.”

  “Right,” Jiminy seconded the motion. “Look, I’m sorry, but we all—”

  “All what?” Lester snarled. “Consulted the I Ching? Took a vote, let’s get rid of the niggers? Is that it?” His voice was like the low rumble of a truck climbing a hill, very slow and deliberate. “Shit, you’re just trying to tell me what I already know—peace and love, brother, do your own thing, baby, but only if your precious ass is white.”

  5

  The pick rose and fell, rose and fell. Marco was out in the heat of the day—a hundred-plus, easy—stripped down to his jeans and boots, sweating, working, feeling it in his upper arms and shoulders. Jiminy had been working beside him all morning, tearing away at the skin of the soil where the new leach lines for the septic tank were going in, but when the sun stood up straight overhead he’d set down his shovel as gingerly as if it were a ceramic sculpture and shambled across the yard in the direction of the swimming pool. He’d been good company, rattling on about books and records and all the places he wanted to visit—Benares, Rio, Nairobi, some town in Wisconsin that featured the world’s biggest wheel of cheese, and if it had already gone moldy by the time he got there, well, he was sure they’d just make another one—but Marco didn’t mind working alone. All the communities he’d been part of, or tried to be part of, had fallen to pieces under the pressure of the little things, the essentials, the cooking and the cleaning and the repairs, and while it was nice to think everybody would pitch in during a crisis, it didn’t always work out that way.

  And this was a crisi
s, whether people seemed to realize it or not—the toilets in the main house were overflowing and there was a coil of human waste behind every rock, tree and knee-high scrap of weed on the property, and that was primitive, oh yes indeed. Involuntarily primitive. Nobody even had the sense to bury it, let alone dig a latrine. They didn’t think, didn’t want to get hung up on details. They’d dropped out. They were here. That was enough, and the less said about it the better. But before long, as Marco knew from experience, the county health inspector would have plenty to say, and it wouldn’t reflect a higher consciousness either.

  He was down in the trench, waist-deep, flinging dirt, when Alfredo came across the yard with a fruit jar of lemonade in one hand and a spade in the other. Marco saw him coming, but he kept digging, because for the moment at least digging was his affliction, his tic, the process that made his blood flow and his brain go numb. Simplest thing in the world: the pick rises, the pick falls; the shovel goes in, the dirt comes out.

  “Hey,” Alfredo said, and he was showing his fine pointed teeth in a smile that cut a horizontal slash in the wiry black superstructure of his beard, “I thought you could use something to drink—and maybe some help too.”

  Well, he could. And he appreciated the three precious ice cubes bobbing in the super-sweetened fresh-squeezed lemonade too, but there were probably twenty people at Drop City he’d rather spend the afternoon with. Nothing against Alfredo, except that he lacked a sense of humor—it was as if someone had run a hot wire through his brain, fusing all the appreciation cells in a dead smoking lump—and when he did manage to find something funny, he ran it into the ground, repeating the punch line over and over and snickering in a bottomless catarrhal wheeze that made you think he was choking on his own phlegm. He was older too—twenty-nine, thirty maybe—and that was a problem in itself, because he used his age advantage like a bludgeon any time there was a difference of opinion. His favorite phrases were: “Well, you were probably still in high school then” and “I don’t want to tell you what to do, but—”

  Alfredo got down into the trench, stripped off his shirt to reveal a pale flight of ribs, and started digging, and that was all right. They worked in silence for the first few minutes, the penetrable earth at their feet, the smell of it in their nostrils like the smell of fossilized bone, bloodless and neutral, the sun overhead, sweat pocking the dust of their shoes. At some point, there was a sudden high whinnying shout from the direction of the pool, a splash, two splashes, and then Alfredo, in the way of making idle conversation, was asking about his name. “Marco,” he said, “is that Italian?”

  “Yeah, I suppose—originally, that is.” Marco straightened up and swiped a forearm across his brow, and what he should have done was dig a bandanna out of his pack, but it was too late now. He’d cool off in the pool, that’s what he’d do—but later. Much later. “My father named me for Marco Polo.”

  “Really? Far out.” There was the crunch of the shovel cutting into the earth. “What’d he name your brother—Christopher?”

  Marco acknowledged the stab at humor with a foreshortened smile—he’d been responding to that joke since elementary school. “I don’t have a brother.”

  “My father’s Italian,” Alfredo said, and he grunted as he heaved a load of dirt up over his shoulder. “My mother’s Mexican. That’s why I can take the heat—like this? This doesn’t bother me at all.”

  Right. But Marco was thinking of his own father, the man he’d known only as a voice over the long-distance wire these past two years and counting. Where you now? his father would shout into the receiver. Twentynine Palms? Hell, I was there during the war—desert training. For Rommel. Paradise on earth—in winter, anyway . . . Your mother wants to know when you’re coming home—isn’t that right, Rosemary? Rosemary?

  There were no hard feelings. It wasn’t the usual thing at all, the sort of adolescent fury that goaded his high school buddies to ram their screaming V-8s down the throat of every street in the development and answer violence with violence across the kitchen table. In fact, he missed his father—missed both his parents. There were times, hefting his pack, sticking out his thumb, waking in a strange bed or in some nameless place that was exactly like every other place, when it infected him with a dull ache, like a tooth starting to go bad, but mostly now his parents were compacted in his thoughts till they were little more than strangers. He’d skipped bail. There was a warrant out for his arrest, the puerile little brick of a misdemeanor compounded by interstate flight and the fugitive months and years till it had become a towering jurisdictional wall—with a charge of draft evasion cemented to the top of it. Home? This was his home now.

  Sorry, Dad, but the answer is never.

  European history—that was what defined Marco’s father, and he’d taught it, chapter and verse, out of the same increasingly irrelevant textbook to an endless succession of unimpressed faces for thirty years, thirty years at least. This new class of tenth graders? he’d say at the dinner table, still in his brown corduroy jacket with the elbow patches that shone as if they’d been freshly greased, the only father in the whole development of two hundred and fifty-plus homes to wear a mustache. They’re more like the Visigoths than the Greeks. Not like in your day, Marco—and what a difference five years makes. You people were scholars! he’d roar, as if he meant it, and then he’d laugh. And laugh.

  “We’re Irish, mainly. My last name’s Connell. Everybody thinks it’s Mark O’Connell, but my father was a joker, I guess. And I guess he saw me going to distant lands.”

  “Really? Ever been out of the country?”

  Marco set down his shovel to work at an embedded stone with the business end of the pick. He glanced up and then away again. “Not really.”

  And then Alfredo was onto travel, the names of places clotting on his tongue like lint spun out of a dryer, no two-thousand-pound Wisconsin cheeses for him—it was London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Venice, Florence—he was an art student at one time, did Marco know that? Yeah, and he’d sketched his way across Europe, from the Louvre to the Rijksmuseum to the Prado. That was the only way to do it, like a month in every city, just living there in some pension or hostel, meeting people in cafes, scoring hash on the street and going straight to the bakery after the cafes close for your pane and your baguette. He must have talked without drawing a breath for a solid fifteen minutes.

  Somewhere there, in the space between Amsterdam and the Place de la Concorde, the crows started in, a bawling screech that came out of the trees and circled overhead as the big glistening birds dive-bombed an owl they’d flushed from its roost. “The owls get them at night when they’re helpless, did you know that?” Marco said, glad for a chance to change the subject. “That’s what that’s all about. Survival. And imagine us—imagine if there was another ape species here to challenge us, and I don’t mean like gorillas and chimps, but another humanoid.”

  Alfredo didn’t seem to have anything to say to that—he believed in universal harmony, brotherhood, vegetarianism, peace, love and understanding. He didn’t want to know about the war between crows and owls, let alone apes, or the way the crows mobbed the nests of lesser birds—sparrows, finches, juncos—to crush and devour the young. That had nothing to do with the world he lived in. “Heavy,” that’s what he said finally. Heavy.

  They bent to their work, the silence broken only by the persistent slice of the shovels, the tumult of the birds running off the edge of the sky until the pedestrian murmur of Drop City began to filter back in: the goats bleating to be milked or fed, the single sharp ringing note of a dog surprised by its own hunger, the regular slap of the screen door at the back of the house—and underneath it all, like the soundtrack to a movie, the dull hum of rock and roll leaking out the kitchen windows. “Listen, I really appreciate your doing this,” Alfredo said, pausing to straighten up and arch his back, the fine grains of dirt clinging to the flesh in a dense fur of sweat. “Taking the initiative, I mean. I know you’ve only been here like two weeks or whatever
, but this is a trip, it really is—it’s what we need more of around here.”

  “Sure,” Marco said, “no problem,” and the shovel never stopped working. It felt good to be doing something, making something, putting his back to it till there was nothing left to clutter up his head. Drifting was fine. To a point. Lying up in a treehouse with a book, that was fine too. And dope. And women. And music. But right now, in this ditch, under this sun, it was the tug of the physical that mattered, only that.

  “You know, I was at Thunder Mountain before this—me and Reba, that was before we had the kids. Or no, Che was like one or maybe a year and a half, I don’t know. But mainly what happened was everybody just wanted to ball and do dope, which is okay, don’t get me wrong, but it got to the point where nobody wanted to tend the garden or make the food. The chicks, I mean. Because they’re the key to the whole thing. If the chicks don’t have any energy and don’t want to, you know, wash the dishes, sweep up, cook the meals, then you’re in trouble, big time. There’s nothing worse than having all the dishes piled up and the pots and pans all crusted and dirty, and then everybody milling around like what are we going to do about dinner, man, and that’s where it all breaks down, believe me.”

  Marco had no chance to respond, even if he’d wanted to, because when he looked up he saw Sky Dog sauntering across the lot with Lester and Franklin in tow. Or no, it wasn’t Franklin—it was the other one, what was his name, Dewey, the war hero. They didn’t say anything, didn’t wave, didn’t smile, just kept coming across the weed-strewn lot in a slow, sure amble, miniature explosions of dust riding up the heels of their boots. Alfredo looked up too, just as the three of them reached the far end of the ditch and stood there staring down like executioners. The phrase Digging your own grave popped in and out of Marco’s head. This wasn’t going to be a happy occasion.