Drop City

by T. C. Boyle

  Hot in that van. And Norm: the black clunky plastic-frame glasses, gold teeth flashing in his grin like a prospector’s dream. He was holding up the thermos as if it were the solution to every problem they’d ever known, the key, the prize, the grail brought back home on a silver salver. Marco relaxed, accepted the smudged white cup with the screw tread worked into the rim. “One for you,” Norm said, pouring till the cup would hold no more. “And one,” he said, tipping the thermos back so that the white plastic aperture was swallowed up in the dark accumulation of his beard, “for me.”

  On the way back, Marco didn’t feel stoned at all, and then abruptly he did. There was no tingling in his extremities, no dislocation, no sudden infusion of light or loss of personality—it came over him as if he’d been draped in a blanket, swaddled and pinioned and laid out in a crib, as if it were night and he was dreaming somebody else’s dreams for them. Norm, for once, was quiet. And Marco—he couldn’t have spoken if he’d wanted to. He wasn’t in the front seat of a VW van hurtling down a country road with the river trailing along behind him like a bright fluttering banner, but in a room, in a farmhouse or a rent-controlled apartment maybe, and the room was swollen with inherited and hoarded things, sideboards, stuffed chairs, a chest of drawers, quilts, antimacassars, bibelots, bric-a-brac. There was a bed in the room—a four-poster swamped with blankets—and in the bed, an old man, wasted and white, with a nose that climbed up out of his face as if it didn’t belong to him. It was a conventional scene, a deathbed scene, somebody’s future or past, utterly conventional, but for the single incongruity of a pair of snowshoes fastened to the wall above the bed. The conscious remnant of his mind drew him back: Was this a photo he’d seen somewhere? A scene from childhood? TV? Or was he outside of himself and powerless to get back in? That was the thing with acid. He didn’t like acid, had never liked acid, even when he liked drugs a whole lot more than he liked them now.

  Norm murmured something—a snatch of nonsense, or no, he was singing, soft and low, lyrics like a private language—and here they were again, under the trees and then out in the open, moving through the sensory world as if they owned it. “You feel anything yet?” Norm wanted to know. “Because I don’t feel a thing, or maybe just like the beginning of something, but what I’m wondering is did they forget to juice our juice or what?”

  Marco was about to tell him he was feeling plenty himself, feeling possessed almost, feeling stacked up and wrung out, but he never got the chance—another vision sprang right up alongside the road and flung itself in front of the van, a huge dark blur of motion that wasn’t a hallucination at all but the real and actual thing that was suddenly defeating Norm’s white clenched hands and seriously dislocating his intentions. What was it? The horse. Charley Horse. The very animal, laying claim to the road and shivering its head stupidly as Norm ran his hands helplessly round the wheel and the van did a kind of stock-car trick on two thin wailing tires.

  There were two lanes to that road, and the other one, the oncoming lane, instantly became a place of violent contraction, Norm’s sidelong van and a pickup truck featuring a pair of startled faces, one male, one female, closing fast on the same space. Thunder and lightning: the van skewed violently to the left and Marco saw the horse loom up on his right before he felt the jolt of the first collision, the one that swatted the animal off its feet with the open palm of a big steel hand, and then the more substantial one, the one that screamed with contorted metal. The pickup truck—there was an old man in a feed cap at the wheel, his face fallen away into a deep pit of astonishment and outrage—caught the van just athwart the passenger’s side door and then shook itself loose and continued on into a tree, into several trees, and the horse lost all its legs and then found them again, even as Norm’s van rebounded from the collision, described a long slow arc and came to rest in the center of the road.

  “Okay,” Norm was saying, “okay, everything’s okay,” as if he’d planned it, as if the whole thing were just another stunt he’d orchestrated to enliven the day. He was bleeding from a gash under one eyebrow, a bright reservoir of blood pooling in the orbit of his eye before draining off into his beard. His glasses had been snapped across the spine and the windshield featured a spidery mandala set in the glass like an ornament, and how clever of those German engineers, Marco was thinking, how clever—but shouldn’t there be one on his side too?

  Marco was all right, or that was his first impression, anyway. No blood, no broken bones. His right shoulder had a certain rigidity to it where he’d been flung against the dash three times in succession, and the acid seemed to be boiling up in his veins till he could hear the sizzle of it in his ears, but he was all right. All right, and out of the car—kicking open one very reluctant door and setting both his feet on the pavement, which hardly seemed to be moving at all. The horse—Charley Horse—was just standing there, trembling all over as if he’d been hosed down with ice water, Norm was a statue at the wheel of the van, and the old man—and his old wife—were camped out in the woods twenty feet from the road. Everything was still.

  Until the next car—a monster of a thing, a Buick, or maybe it was a Pontiac, staggered in the rear by the weight of the blue-flecked fiberglass runabout it was hauling—came shearing round the curve and Charley Horse bucked twice, put his head down and tried to leap it. Marco heard himself shouting, but he was shouting over the adrenal surge and the successive rippling shore-battering waves of peaking acid, and no other living thing seemed to hear or heed him, least of all the horse. Which immediately laid its thousand pounds of horseflesh across the crumpling hood of the Buick—or no, it was a Pontiac, because there was the chrome V with the stoic chief welded into it—and began a slow futile drumming of its hooves against the fenders on either side. The boat was part of the act now too—it rode up the back of the trailer, then relaxed an instant before gracefully spinning across the road till it came to rest against the bumper of the van.

  Somebody was cursing. The sound of it arose from between the clenched teeth of the crash like an incantation, the same three monosyllables repeated over and over with increasing vehemence till the curses were screams and Marco was moving toward them through a scrim of what was real and what might have been. What did he see? A woman pinned behind the wheel of the Pontiac, her hair in curlers, her face distorted. Charley Horse had managed to tear himself open on the fulcrum of the hood ornament, and he’d collapsed the roof. Marco was fighting the drug, willing his mind to retake control of his body. He ducked away from the horse’s hooves, from the horse’s hundred buckets of blood and its looping gray intestines, and forced open the back door of the Pontiac. He had the woman—one long shriek of a woman—by the shoulders and dragged her into the backseat as if she were a piece of furniture, and then he had her out of the car and onto the shifting pavement. She wore her mouth like a badge, all that noise and violence, and he stood beside her, an arm round her shoulders, while Charley Horse thrashed himself off the car and slid across the shoulder of the road like a slick black sea lion leaving the shore for good. This time the horse didn’t get up again.

  “Marco!” Norm was shouting. “Marco, do something! Shit! What is this, blood?” He was standing in the road now too, and so were the old man and the old lady, squinting into the light as if they’d come in late to a movie and were trying to find their seats. Norm looked strange without his glasses—inhuman, or no: non-human. He’d found a rag in the car—a torn T-shirt that must have belonged to one of the children—and he pressed it to his face to stanch the bleeding. “Fucking horse,” he muttered, and there it was, on its side and heaving in the ditch.

  “I just hope for your sake, mister,” the old man was saying—and there he was, like a pop-up doll at Norm’s elbow, with a white strained face and teeth that didn’t seem to fit in his head (borrowed teeth, and that was a concept)—“I just hope you got insurance is all I got to say.”

  Next thing Marco knew, he was running. Half a mile down the streaming blacktop to the Drop Ci
ty turnoff, and then up the rutted dirt road to where the main house stood rippling against the trees. “Get help!” Norm had shouted in his face. “Get Alfredo! Get anybody!” And suddenly Marco was running, heaving himself down the road in a kind of pure white-hot acid-fueled panic, his boots flapping first at the pavement, then the dust. Somebody, anybody! He vaulted a rotting fence and pounded across an open field, thinking he’d better calm himself, better do whatever it was people were expected to do in a situation like this—shake it off, wake up, take responsibility—but the drug wouldn’t let him. It was in his throat, in his head, it was strangling his heart, eating his lungs.

  There was nobody on the front porch, nobody in the front room. The music was there, though, playing all on its own, loud, raucous, a clash of metal like a whole marching band falling down the stairs, and why didn’t he recognize the tune? He saw plates of half-eaten food perched on the arms of chairs, the still-wet chopsticks like evil insects crouched over a splay of rice, beans, tofu; he saw record jackets come to ground like wind-swirled refuse, and in the back corner of the bookshelf, the black glistening puddle of a record working its way round the turntable. And that was strange, the music living a life of its own in a house with no human occupants. It was like a ghost story. A fairy tale. Nobody home and the porridge still warm on the table. The meeting room presented more of the same. Ditto the kitchen. He looked up and the square-headed orange tom looked down on him from its perch atop the refrigerator.

  And then, beneath the music—or threaded through it—he heard the human noise in the backyard, a wailing, a hush, then a clamor of voices, repeating now, slight return: wailing, a hush, clamor of voices. He took himself out the screen door and there they were, the whole tribe, gathered round the swimming pool and what appeared to be a very wet cloth doll stretched out on the flagstone coping. That was when the acid let go of him just long enough to record the scene: it was one of the kids, one of Reba’s kids, and Jiminy was pumping at the kid’s chest like a Marine Corps medic on the evening news and everybody else was wringing their hands and jumping in and out of the green murk that was the pool. He saw Ronnie inflate his cheeks and go down, and then Alfredo bobbing to the surface in a maelstrom of hair. “What’s wrong?” he wanted to know, snatching at the first person his hand led him to, but he was so full of Norm and the accident he didn’t recognize her, not at first.

  “It’s Che,” Merry told him. She was naked to the waist, shivering. She wore body paint, red and blue tendrils striating her limbs like extruded veins. Her eyes didn’t seem to be in her head—they were just floating there, three inches to the left of her face. “He drowned, or he fell in or something, and we can’t—I mean, nobody knows where Sunshine is.”

  A shriek cut the air, every mother’s nightmare. “Sunshine!” Reba wailed, drawing out the last syllable till it caught in the back of her throat. “Sunshine! Come out, baby, come out! It’s not funny!” She flung herself across the yard, beat at the stiff brush of the chaparral with angry hands. She was puffed up, furious, just coming on to boil. “It’s not a game. Come out, goddamnit! Come out, you hear me, you little bitch!”

  “She’s not in the pool,” somebody said, and in the confusion, Marco couldn’t see who it was.

  “The river, what about the river?” He glanced up to register Verbie—she was perched on the wet coping, her eyes dilated, hair glued to her head. “Did anybody search the river?”

  A look of helplessness swept over them, lost eyes, mouths agape, the slumped shoulders and agitated hands, and how could anybody be expected to do anything at a time like this? It was Druid Day. They were wiped, all of them. They didn’t want to save children, they wanted to be children. “What do you mean, the river?” Merry wondered aloud.

  “I mean the river.” Verbie flung out her hands as if she were taking a bullet on a dark stage. “She could’ve drowned. Down there, I mean.” Up to this point, she’d been going fine, but now she seemed to falter. She looked to her sister, then to Marco. “I mean, right?”

  That was when Star appeared out of nowhere, parting the crowd like a prophet, her face ironed shut, quick bare feet on the flagstones, her naked limbs, wet T-shirt, wet shorts. And then she was bent over the limp form of Che, clearing his tongue with a sweep of two fingers, pinching his nostrils and breathing her life into him. CPR. Junior Lifesavers. Mouth-to-Mouth. It all came back to him in that moment, but all he could do was stand and watch, his arms dangling as if they’d been attached with pins, and what he felt was awe. He watched Star’s knees grip the flagstones, watched her balance on the bridges of her feet. And her hair. It was a miracle, spread out over the child’s head and torso like an oxygen tent, each curl like a finger, each finger willing him back.

  People were pounding the bushes now, shouting out Sunshine’s name as if it were the only word in the language, and Norm was down there bleeding like an animal somewhere on the road with the sheriff on his way and the citizenry up in arms, and still Marco didn’t move. He watched Star’s hair, watched her lips fasten to the boy’s. Fasten and release, fasten and release. A year went by. A decade. And then Che’s left foot began to dig at the flagstones, and Marco was released. In the next moment he was running again, generating a breeze all his own, the sweating cables of his own hair beating around his head, the cords of his legs fighting the descent that sent him hurtling down the bank of madrone, bay and knobcone pine to where the river took its light from the sky. He said it too, then, pronounced the name all the others were pronouncing, as if it were involuntary, called it out till his lungs burned and his throat went dry, “Sunshine! Sunshine!”

  There was no answer. He took a path north along the bank, straining to see into the water, but the water was murky with its freight of sediment and deep here where the current sliced round a long garrulous bend. The water spoke to him, but it didn’t calm him. Birds called out. The sky rose up and slapped down again. What had he expected to see—a pale arm waving amongst the river-run debris? The ghostly body pressed against a wedge of rocks six feet down? “Sunshine!” he called. “Sunshine!”

  He was still calling when he found her. He was calling, but she wasn’t answering. She was crouched at the foot of a deep arching bush hung with berries, a red stain of juice painted on her chin and exaggerating her mouth till it was like a clown’s. Her red hands moiled in her lap. She was wearing a dirty white dress, no shoes, beads at her throat and wrist, and her hair was in two lax braids bristling with bits of twig and leaf. “Sunshine,” he said, just to hear himself say it again. She was staring past him, crouched there, just crouched. Maybe she was singing to herself, maybe that was it, because she was making some sort of noise in the back of her throat, and the noise made him uneasy. “Are you all right?” he asked her.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Look,” he said, and the words were hard to extract, “everybody’s been worried about you—your mother, she’s been worried. And your father. And Norm and me and everybody.” He paused to let the breath go out of him, just for an instant, just to escape the tedium of breath-in and breath-out. “Been picking berries, huh?”

  She didn’t look at him, but she nodded her head, or at least he thought she did.

  “Well, I’m going to take you back now, is that okay? I’m going to lift you up on my shoulders and take you back—you want a ride? You want to go piggyback?”

  He came out of the woods to a hero’s welcome, the whole clan gathered round him with their slow shy smiles and spooked eyes, yet another tragedy averted, and let’s stir up the pot of mush and get it on in a major way, sure, and crank the music too. It surprised him to see the sun fixed overhead—it was early afternoon still, though it felt much later, felt like midnight in his mind. Reba came across the yard, slid her daughter from his shoulders without a word and carried her into the house as if nothing had happened. Che was gone—presumably he was in the house too, in bed, fluttered over by half a dozen women, and that was an image Marco wanted to hold—but the blurred outline o
f him still clung to the wet flagstones as if it were a piece of some elaborate puzzle to which no one had the solution. Jiminy settled into one of the chaise longues with a pair of bongos and started a slow lugubrious slap-palmed beat. A beer—still cold from the tub—appeared in Marco’s hand, and then Star was at his side. She didn’t say a word, just leaned forward and kissed him and held her lips there until he came back to life.

  13

  When the black-and-white sheriff’s cruiser came nosing up the drive like some sort of mechanical hound, sniffing out the curves and drawing a bead on the main house, Pan didn’t feel much of anything. The day had careened right by him. There was all that hassle and hysteria, diving and diving again till he damned near wound up drowning himself, and then a lull that smoothed out all the wrinkles like a hot iron. Reba’s brats had been saved and resurrected and either punished or rewarded or both—of that much he was sure, or at least he thought he was—and then at some point Norm had appeared with a bloody strip of cloth pressed to one eye and his glasses cobbled together with a white knuckle of masking tape. Norm was wearing his ask-no-questions look and went straight for his room at the top of the stairs, so that little drama was over before it began, and after a while the party or communal navel-gaze or whatever it was had recommenced in all earnestness.

  But that was hours ago. What Pan was concerned about now was meat, and to that end he’d sequestered a package of Safeway hot dogs in the depths of the refrigerator and stashed an eight-pack of spongy supermarket buns under a pile of dirty clothes in the back bedroom, and as the cruiser worked its slow sure way up the road—moving so slowly, in fact, it barely even spun the dust off its tires—Pan was thinking he’d be building a little fire soon, after which he’d have a couple of hot dogs slathered with mustard and sweet pickle relish, and anybody who happened to be around, weekend hippies and part-time heads included, would be welcome to join him.