Drop City

by T. C. Boyle

  “Really? And how was that?”

  “Utterly fucking cool.”

  “No problem with like grease and germs and all that?”

  “The ants would be at it next day, the birds and the flies and whatnot. The sun. Rain.”

  “Let nature take care of it, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s right: let nature take care of it.”

  Most of the brothers and sisters had already eaten—dinner was at six—but they lined up nonetheless, all except for Merry and Alfredo and a couple of the hard-core vegetarians like Verbie. (That hurt him—Merry—but she was adamant, every creature is sacred, wouldn’t slap a malarial mosquito if it was perched on her wrist, and did he know about the Jains in India who went around with gauze over their faces so they wouldn’t inadvertently inhale so much as a gnat?) Norm was there, though, glad-handing and effusing, ripped on something and shouting “Loaves and fishes! It’s a miracle!” every two minutes. Somebody dragged the big speakers out onto the back porch and dropped the needle on Electric Ladyland, and pretty soon people were dancing out across the lawn in a kind of meat frenzy, and by the time it was over the steaks were gone, and a good time had by all.

  At one point, stretched out on the grass with his plate, a transient joint and the dregs of a jug of wine he kept swishing round the bottom of his fruit jar in the hope a little circulation would make it taste less like recycled lamp oil, Ronnie found himself hemmed in by the professor and his old lady, the one who’d let out that stone-cold shriek when he’d come staggering out of the woods with the deer wrapped round his shoulders, and if anybody thought that was fun they were out of their minds. Star was there too, and Marco, Lydia, Jiminy, a whole little circle of people off the main circle, and they’d been discussing weighty matters like is Hendrix an alien and how many heads fit on the pin of an angel. And suddenly here was this professor sitting right there at his elbow with a plate full of gnawed gristle, and the professor was saying things like “So, when did you drop out?”

  Ronnie wanted to tell him to fuck off and go back to Berkeley with the rest of the tourists—Can’t you see we’re having a party here, man?—but there was something about the guy—the gray in his beard, the fruity rich mellow tenor that brought back all those somnolent afternoons in English class—that just made him duck his head and mumble “A year and a half.” And it wasn’t just that he was mumbling, he was exaggerating too—six months was nearer the truth. But the professor didn’t want any six-month hippies, he wanted the genuine down-in-the-trenches peripatetic lifetime dirtbags he could awe and thrill the reading public with. He had a notepad. He had a—no, yes—tape recorder.

  “You mind if I tape this?” the professor was asking.

  Hendrix rode the night, supreme, astral, totally mind-blowing, and Ronnie mumbled Sure and the professor’s old lady moved in, thick legs in a long skirt and the joint pinched in her fingers like a deadly writhing South American bushmaster with its fangs drawn. Did she take a hit? Yes. And then she passed it on.

  “You’re how old? Here, talk into this.”

  “Into this?”

  “That’s right, yeah.”

  “I’m twenty-two.”

  “Family problems?”

  “No more than usual.”

  “Ever run away from home?”

  “Not that I can remember. Or maybe once. Or twice.”

  “You were how old then?”

  “I don’t know—nine. I went to the bowling alley and hid behind the pinball machine.”

  “Both parents alive?”

  His parents were alive, all right, but so was Lon Chaney Jr. in The Mummy’s Ghost. They were just like that, staggering from one foot to the other and grunting out hostile messages to the world and the trashed wind-sucking son they saw only at dinner because he needed that dinner to stay alive. Might as well wrap them up in mummy’s bandages too, because they were both walking disasters, his father’s nose like a skinned animal pinned to his face with the shiny metallic tackheads of his eyes, his mother a shapeless sack of organs with a howling withered skull stuck atop it. Come to think of it, she could have starred in Screaming Skull herself. And they nagged. Nagged and grunted. Pan looked into the professor’s eyes and then away again. “Yeah,” was all he said.

  “Any abuse? You use marijuana? Hard drugs? Booze? What about Free Love? Any social diseases? You vote in the last election?”

  Pan fell into it. He warmed, grew effusive. He told the professor about scoring dope on South Street and cooking it up in whatever semi-clean receptacle that happened to be handy and wouldn’t catch on fire, a spoon usually or one of those little cups they poach eggs in, an example of which he’d had and prized for about a week until it got lost, and he laid out both his arms like exhibits at the morgue to show the professor his tracks that were six months gone because the truth of the matter was heroin scared the shit out of him and he was never going to do anything other than maybe snort it ever again. Drew was dead. And Dead Mike, he was dead too. “But Free Love—oh, man, don’t get me started. That’s what this is all about—the chicks, you know what I mean?” That was when he realized Star was watching him, her knees pulled up to her chin and locked tight in the clasp of her arms, the firelight like hot grease on her face and that smirk she had, that smirk that was more of a put-down than anything she could ever say.

  “What about VD?” the professor was saying, leaning in close with the microphone, his face hanging there at the end of his veiny blistered old man’s throat like a piñata, the gift-shop peace medallion dangling like a rip cord below that and his eyes like two wriggling leg-kicking toads, and Pan—Ronnie—felt so embarrassed, so fucking mortified and put-upon, he actually jerked the microphone out of the professor’s hand and then, not knowing what to do with it, flung it into the fire in one smooth uncontested motion.

  “What the hell you think you’re doing?” the professor wanted to know, and his old lady—the poet—said, “American Primitive,” and laughed a long-gone laugh.

  Ronnie was on his feet now, not much kicking power in a pair of huaraches, but enough to send the rest of the apparatus—the big silver-and-gray box with the knobs and dials and slow-turning spools—into the fire too, and the professor shouting and grabbing for the machine amidst the coals and the black and quiescent remains of the deer.

  “You crazy son of a bitch!” That was what the professor said, but it was nothing to Ronnie, he wasn’t even listening. He heard Star laugh though, a hard harsh dart of a laugh that stuck right in him as he went off into the night, looking for something else altogether.

  Later, much later, after sitting around a campfire with some people he didn’t recognize—or maybe he did recognize them—he thought about going up to the back house and seeing what Sky Dog and the spades were up to, but then he thought he wouldn’t. Better not press his luck. There were people who wanted him gone—and here Alfredo’s face loomed up out of a shallow grave in the back corner of his mind, followed in quick succession by Reba’s and Verbie’s—and what happened the other night had split the place down the middle. Lester and Sky Dog and the rest had been voted out, and that meant they didn’t show for meals and kept strictly to themselves, running the Lincoln down to the store for wine, cigarettes and processed cheese sandwiches every couple hours, but they might as well have been in another county for all they had to do with Drop City. They’d smelled the meat—Ronnie had seen them out on the porch of the back house as the light faded, and he almost wished they would have come down and joined the party so he could show them what he’d done with a .30-06 rifle and two shining copper-jacketed bullets, but they weren’t interested, because it was war now, and you had to choose sides. And that was no contest as far as Pan was concerned. He was for the side in control, the side that had all the chicks and the food and the big house with the KLH speakers and all of those five hundred or eight hundred or however many records that were lined up on the shellacked pine bookcases in random order and was there a radio station in the co
untry with a better collection?

  The night deepened. Shouts and laughter ran at him across the lawn and the music pulsed steadily from the back of the main house. He was standing there in the bushes, where he’d just zipped up after responding to the call of nature, and he could feel a headache coming on. It had been a day, all right, and he felt pretty glorious, all things considered, but what he needed was maybe a little of that sticky Spañada Star was always drinking—or Mateus, if anybody had any. Sure. That’s what he needed, to knock down the headache and put a mellow cap on the evening, and he headed back across the lawn, toward where the shadows danced round the cookfire.

  Star wasn’t there. She wasn’t up in the treehouse either, because he hoisted himself up the ladder to see, and she wasn’t in the main house where half a dozen people shushed him because they were watching some silent movie Norm had got out of the library for the sheer appreciation and uplift of it. Ronnie stood there a minute in the darkened room, watching the light play over a frozen landscape until an Eskimo appeared, two slits for eyes, the wind tearing at the ruff of his parka, and began building an igloo out of blocks he cut from the snow. He had a knife the size of a machete, and he wasted no time, because you could see the way the wind was blowing and his breath froze into the wisps of his beard, each block perfect, one atop the other, and when he fitted the final block into a gap in the roof of the thing, everybody burst into applause. “Fuckin’ Nanook,” Norm said, and there he was stretched out on the floor with a comforter drawn up to his chin, “you want to talk about living off the land, man . . .”

  In the morning—or no, it was the afternoon, definitely the afternoon—Ronnie woke with a lurch that set the whole room rocking like a boat, and the dream, whatever it was, was gone before he could resuscitate it. Just as well, because he could feel the veins inflating in his neck with the frantic scramble of his heart—he’d been trying to escape something or somebody, dark twisting corridors and howling faces—and now, suddenly, he was awake in the apparent world, a fine sheen of sweat greasing his body and leaching into the sleeping bag that each day stank ever more powerfully of mold and ammonia and creeping decay. Beside him, breathing through her open mouth with a faint rattling snore, was Lydia, her arms stretched out as if she’d been crucified. The dark nipples were like knitted caps pulled over the white crowns of her breasts, and her breasts were like people, two slouching fat white people in caps having a conversation across the four-lane highway of her rib cage. A fine line of glistening dead black hair measured the distance from her navel to her bush. There was hair under her arms, hair on her legs, a faint stripe of it painted over her upper lip. She was sweating. Her eyelids trembled. He lay there contemplating her a minute, letting his heart climb back down from the ledge he’d left it on, feeling as if he’d been assembled from odd scraps during the night. His head throbbed. His stomach made a fist and relaxed it. He needed to find some toilet paper, fast.

  Pan rose from the sleeping bag that was stretched over a double mattress on the floor in the far corner of the back room of the main house. He rose slowly, warily, his bones as heavy as spars, and began silently shuffling through his backpack and the cardboard box that between them held everything he owned. He didn’t want to wake Lydia. He definitely did not want to wake Lydia. Because Lydia would want one thing, and that thing, in his present condition, he was unwilling to give her. In fact, as he studied her out of the corner of his eye while rummaging for any last overlooked and forgotten quarter or eighth or even sixteenth of a roll of toilet paper his brothers and sisters might not already have got to, she struck him as being fat, too fat, not at all his type. His type was Merry. His type was Star—and where was she?

  He hadn’t been able to find her the night before, though he’d looked everyplace he could think of except the back house, where the spades and Sky Dog were nursing their grudges and washing down their Velveeta cheese sandwiches with sour red wine and snuffing the last fading vestiges of grilled venison on the thin night air, but she wouldn’t be there, he knew that and the spades knew that and everybody in Drop City knew it too. He’d run into Merry—she and Jiminy were reading poems out loud to each other in Norm’s bedroom upstairs—but Merry said she didn’t feel in much of a festive mood because the whole idea of a barbecue went against everything she believed in, and then she’d called him a carnivore, or maybe it was a cannibal, but she said it with a smile, as in all is forgiven but don’t bother me now I’m reading poetry. Out loud. To Jiminy. So Ronnie found some other people and continued to abuse various controlled and illicit substances until the whole day went into extra innings and he wound up in the shadowy deeps of this room with a stick of incense and a single phallic candle burning and Lydia naked and hairy and wet and taking hold of his prick as if she owned it.

  And now he needed toilet paper. Desperately. He found his cutoffs and stepped into them, and forget the shirt, forget the huaraches, he was in the grip of something urgent here. He was thinking Leaves, I’ll just use leaves, when Lydia’s purple Elizabeth Taylor eyes flashed open. “Oh,” she said. “What? Oh, it’s you.” And then she was on her hands and knees, stretching, her great pumped-up tits suspended beneath her like airships, like zeppelins, and she was saying “Come on over here, Ronnie, Pan, come on, just hold me, just for a minute, huh? You got a minute, don’t you?”

  He didn’t have a minute. He didn’t have fifteen seconds. The deer, all that gamy protein and wild hard gristle and backwoods fat, was having its revenge. His stomach clenched again, the image of gas rising in a beaker in Chemistry class set up camp in his brain, and he was out the door, through the house—startled faces, oh, it’s Pan and what’s the hurry?—and out across the blistered lawn and into the nearest clump of bushes he could find. And then, finally, he was squatting, no thought of septic fields or clogged toilets or luxury accommodations in mind, and it was all coming out of him in a savage uncontainable rush.

  What he thought was that he’d feel better as the day wore on, but he thought wrong. His head throbbed, his insides kept churning. And though he made his slow careful way through a plate of rice mush, grain by grain, that went right through him too. He wound up lying beside the swollen green carpet of the pool through the late afternoon and into the evening, refusing all attempts at conversation and invitations to eat (Merry), ball (Lydia) or inhale drugs (half a dozen people, cats and chicks alike). Every once in a while, hammered by the sun, he’d wallow lethargically in the pool, but even that made his brain pound and his gut clench, and he didn’t really rouse himself till somebody pulled the shades down over the day and dusk came to sit in the trees like a vulture and everything went gray. Then he had a few shaky hits from a bottle of Don Ricardo special re-posado tequila he kept under the seat of the car and went out across the lawn to inspect the remains of the deer. There was no one around, and the fire he and Marco had made—the smoking fire, not the barbecue, because the meat had to be preserved somehow—wasn’t even warm. It was a circle of white ash flecked with cinders, and you could lay your palm on it and feel absolutely nothing. The deer—the unchoice cuts, the parts they hadn’t bothered with in the rush to get the blood off their hands and the party under way—dangled from a thin strand of wire like the leavings of some twisted vigilante squad, its head skewed at an impossible angle, backbone gnawed to a blue-black ripple of bone. While he’d been asleep, while he’d been lying up beside the pool as if he’d been gutshot himself, the flies had been busy making a playground of the thing, and he saw that now, but it didn’t affect him one way or the other. He didn’t even bother to raise a hand and flick them away. It was getting dark. And the meat—the deer, his triumph—had already begun to stink.

  PART TWO

  THE THIRTY MILE

  The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife.

  —St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 7:4

  7

  Cecil Harder was fortifying himself at the bar of the
Three Pup Roadhouse, half a mile down the Fairbanks Road from Boynton. He was on his third Oly and his second shot of Wild Turkey, and in about three minutes he was going to slam his way out the screen door, get into Richard Schrader’s pickup and drive the remaining hundred fifty-nine and a half miles into the city. There were a few things he needed for the cabin—a new axe handle, duct tape, kerosene for the lanterns, rice, .22 cartridges, beans, yeast, sugar—and Richard had given him a whole long list too, but that wasn’t the reason he was going.

  He gazed up from his nested hands. The air in the roadhouse was as thick as a wall with residual dimness and the dust that was nailed to it in two thin streams of sunlight. Mosquitoes faded in and out of it, all but stationary, and they beat at both sides of the windows as if it were some kind of contest, as if all they’d ever subsisted on was glass. He threw back the Wild Turkey and took a long pull at his beer.

  There was a new woman working the place, a summer person, a tourist, as lean and tall and plain-faced as a warden—a male warden out of a Jimmy Cagney movie, that is—and she came out from behind the bead curtain that masked the grill from view with his ham and cheese on very old rye wrapped up in a sheet of waxed paper. Her name was Lynette, she was in her fifties, and it would be a long cold night of a long cold winter before anybody looked at her twice. Skid Denton was sitting at the other end of the bar. Sess knew him as a denizen of the Nougat, the only other place where you could get a drink in Boynton, population 170. “Hey, Lynette,” Skid said, “Sess is going into Fairbanks for a little shopping, did you know that?”