by T. C. Boyle
Pan skewered another hot dog on his willow stick and thrust it into the flames. Close the place down? He was just getting comfortable. Sure, some of his brothers and sisters might have been a pain in the ass, but they all knew him, and for the first time in his life he had a purpose, whether anybody wanted to admit it or not—he was the provider here, or one of them. One of the main ones. He’d got the deer, hadn’t he? And quail—he’d shot quail too. And fish—that’s all he did was fish, and even the vegetarians couldn’t complain about that. They ate for free, and that was the whole point of going back to the land, wasn’t it?
Reba’s words hung on the air, accusatory, demanding, tragic, self-pitying: What are we going to do now?
Norm wasn’t staring at his feet anymore. He straightened his shoulders as if he’d just woken up, tucked the remains of the second hot dog in his mouth and slicked back his hair with the palms of his hands. He was thirty-seven years old. There was gray in his beard. His toes were so twisted they looked as if they’d been grafted on. “What are we going to do now?” he echoed. “We’re going to have a meeting, that’s what we’re going to do.”
14
This meeting wasn’t anything like the last one. All the air had gone out of the day, a slow insidious deflation that was so wearying it wasn’t even worth thinking about, and by the time Norm put out the word, half the population of Drop City had already crashed and burned. People were stretched out on sofas, stained mattresses, sleeping bags, on mats of pine boughs and the backseats of cars, their faces drawn, hair bedraggled, sleeping off the effects of simultaneously opening all those doors in their minds. Star was asleep herself, her face pressed to the gently heaving swell of Marco’s rib cage, when Verbie came up the ladder to the treehouse and told her to get up, it was an emergency, and everybody—everybody, no exceptions—was due in the meeting room in fifteen minutes.
Star didn’t know what to think. She was in the treehouse, with Marco, and she’d been asleep—that much was clear. Beyond that, everything was a jumble. It felt like the middle of the night, but it was light out, and for the life of her she couldn’t have said whether it was dawn or dusk. The light had no source, no direction—it just held, as gray and dense as water, and the limbs of the oak were suspended in it like the superstructure of a dream. But she hadn’t had any dreams—she couldn’t even remember going to bed. She looked up into the branches of the tree for clues, but it was just a tree, hanging over her with all its ribs showing. It gave off a smell of gall, astringent and sharp, and whether it was a morning smell or an evening smell, she couldn’t say. Birds came to the branches like dark, flung stones. Marco slept on. She couldn’t find her panties—or her shorts—and something seemed to have bitten her in a series of leapfrogging welts that climbed up her naked abdomen and then vanished beneath her breasts. Where were her shoes? She sat up and looked around her.
Suddenly she was frightened. Emergency? What emergency? She summoned up a picture of the little boy then—Che—his hair kinked and wild, skin the color of olive oil thickened in the pan and his eyes sucked back into his head as if they were going to hide there forever, and she felt the impress of his cold lips on hers, lips like two copulating earthworms, like flesh without fire—but hadn’t all that been settled? Hadn’t she saved him? Saved the day?
It wasn’t morning. That would be too much to hope for. It was dusk, and she knew it now. She could taste it on the air, hear it in the way the birds bickered and complained. It was Druid Day, the longest day of the year, and the worst, by far the worst—and it was still going on. Marco lay there beside her, his hair splayed across his face, his right fist balled up over his temple as if to ward off a blow. She listened to him breathe a moment, absorbed in the slow sure weave of it—ravel, unravel, ravel again—and then she shook him awake.
“What?” he said, propping himself up on his elbows so she could see the full spill of him.
“It’s Norm. Some kind of emergency. Norm called a meeting—”
“Emergency? Now? What time is it?”
“Nine, maybe—I don’t know. I thought it was morning.”
“What kind of emergency—did the pump burn out in the well or something? Or let me guess: Reba lost her kids again. Or Pan, what about him? Did he fall into his wienie fire and get all singed around the ears?”
“Verbie didn’t say. But she sounded freaked out.”
“She always sounds freaked out.”
He was reaching for her, to pull her back down into the sleeping bag, but she pushed his hand away. “I’m scared,” she said. “After today . . . the kids, the horse, I mean. The whole thing. We’re out of control here, Marco—everybody’s out of control.”
“Yeah,” he said, giving her a smile so faint it was barely there. “But isn’t that the point?”
The main house was ablaze with the power company’s light, the light Norm and Alfredo were always hassling them to conserve—Candles, people, use candles!—and when she and Marco came up the worn steps and onto the porch, the floorboards seemed to fall away beneath her feet, as if the whole place were on the verge of collapse. She saw the gouged wood of the doorframe, the tattered mesh of the screen door, the worn spot where the embrace of ten thousand hands had abraded the paint round the latch and replaced it with dirt, human dirt—saw everything with utter clarity, though she could feel a headache coming on, a pounding, relentless, newly awakened shriek of a headache that threatened to burst her skull from the inside out, and that was what acid did for you, that was the price you had to pay. Open up your mind, feed your head. Sure. And wind up feeling like something washed up on the beach and left for dead. She took hold of Marco’s arm for support, and then the screen door was slapping behind them and they were standing uncertainly in the front room that was like a funeral parlor—no music, no candles, nobody playing chess or checkers or settling into one of the grease-slicked armchairs with a book. There was litter, though—newspapers, magazines, unwashed plates, cups and glasses, somebody’s striped shirt, a pair of muddy boots—and where there was litter, there was life. As if to underscore the point, the dogs chose that moment to waggle into the room and nose at her hands even as the faintest hushed murmur of voices seeped in from the room beyond.
Nearly everybody was there already, most of them sitting cross-legged on the floor, their faces blanched, eyes vacant. People were rubbing their temples, circulating a pitcher of iced tea or Kool-Aid, she couldn’t tell which, picking idly at their ears or toes and sprawling in the sea of all that massed flesh as if they were learning to float—or maybe levitate. Alfredo and Reba were up front, and Reba had a cigarette going, lecturing her old man about something and painting the air with the glowing ember at the tip of it. Ronnie was all the way across the room with Merry and Lydia, melting into a heap of pillows, and Jiminy was slouched over the table with Verbie and her sister and Harmony and Alice.
Star wondered how she looked—she hadn’t been near a mirror in days—and as she stepped into the room she tried to part her hair with her fingers, forcing it down like a cap over the crown of her head and looping the odd strands behind her ears. She was wearing a pair of ceramic earrings—blue dolphins with painted-on grins—that seemed to grow heavier by the minute till they felt like bricks tearing at her lobes, but she couldn’t muster the energy to pull them out. She hadn’t been able to find her sandals, but most of the tribe went barefoot most of the time anyway so that was all right, yet her T-shirt and cutoffs seemed damp, clammy almost, and when was the last time she’d washed them? Washed anything? Her head was pounding, and suddenly she was afraid again—for herself, for Marco and Drop City, for all the lost neurons and miswired synapses of a whole continent full of dopers and heads and teepee cats. Boom, the blood pounded in her temples, boom, boom, boom.
She exchanged murmurs of greeting with a couple of people, thought of crossing the room to Merry and felt so weak suddenly it was as if her bones had dissolved. “Let’s just sit here,” she said to Marco, and they sank to the
floor just inside the doorway, because really, what difference did it make? Norm didn’t call emergency meetings for nothing—this was going to be bad news, and it didn’t matter if you took it standing up or sitting down, at the periphery or at the red-hot glowing center.
She watched Alfredo rise to his feet, turn and face the gathering. His eyes glowed with a dull sheen, as if they’d been painted on and hadn’t quite dried yet. The overhead light stabbed at his face, hollowing out his cheekbones and giving him the look of the crucified Christ in the big fresco over the altar in the church back at home. He was long-faced at the best of times, but now he appeared nothing less than tragic. “Listen, people, we’ve got a problem here,” he said, and his voice was a dirge. “It affects all of us, Norm especially, but all of us ultimately, and Norm asked me to get everybody together, because he wanted to say a few words—”
She could barely hear him for the throbbing in her head. It was as if a pair of pincers had come down from the ceiling and clamped onto her temples and was slowly and inexorably drawing her up into the air, and all she could think of was one of those arcade machines where you try to extract a prize from a heap of trinkets. She was the prize, the gold ring that was really brass, and the jaws had hold of her, squeezing and pinching, and what she needed was a Darvon, or better yet, a Seconal, something to kill the pain. She’d ask Ronnie once the meeting broke up—he was usually good for something, and he always had his own little stash hidden away somewhere. She stared at her folded hands and tried to concentrate on looking normal. Or human. Just that.
Alfredo was rattling on—“Brothers, sisters, people, we’re all in this together, and now, of all times, we need to stick together . . .” She leaned into Marco, and a flare of irritation leapt up in her. “What’s he talking about? The accident? Is that it? Can’t Norm just pay a fine or something?”
Marco tucked a coil of hair behind his ear, smoothed his beard with a ringless hand (he didn’t believe in jewelry, not for men, though she saw he was wearing the string of painted wooden beads she’d given him, and for a fraction of a moment that made everything balance out). He was sitting in the lotus position, legs folded, back arched, as perfect as an illustration in one of those pamphlets by Swami Kriyananda Norm was always handing out, Yoga Made Easy, Eight Steps to Enlightenment, The Swami Speaks. “No,” he said, shaking his head, “it’s gone way beyond that. It’s—I don’t know. I didn’t want to tell you this, at least not till tomorrow, anyway, but you want to know the truth? It’s over, is what it is. He was trying to tell me this morning, when we went for the cream soda and the rest of it—and the wire for the horse, which is still in the back of the van, by the way, wherever the van is. Not that it matters.”
“Over?” She sought out his eyes, but his eyes dodged away. “What are you talking about?”
That was when Norm’s voice rang through the room and everybody looked up to see him standing there in the kitchen doorway, his arm around Premstar. “A horse!” he cried. “My kingdom for a horse!” That was all it took—two phrases—and the pall Alfredo had cast was dissolved, and they all, everybody—even Reba, even Alfredo and the Krishna cat—laughed aloud. “Or a match,” Norm said, pulling a number the size of a cigar from the inside pocket of his jacket. “Anybody got a match? Or did you forget about the bonfire? Longest day, man, longest day!”
The bonfire. Of course. A buzz went through the room. Norm could do that—he could wake people up, turn them on, change the vibe of a whole room just by striding through the door. And Star saw that he’d dressed for the occasion too, emergency or no, in a wide-brimmed suede hat with a chin strap and a fringed jacket cut from the same material. The suede was a deep amber, the color of honey at the bottom of the jar, and he’d cinched a blue bandanna round his throat to set it off. That wasn’t all: his glasses were taped together and a slash of white sticking plaster bisected his right eyebrow, not in a way that made him look like a victim or an invalid or anything, but somehow—Star couldn’t think of the word, and then she could—jaunty. And Premstar. She’d been here all of a week, and she’d done nothing but giggle and play up to Norm as if she was some kind of sex toy or something, and here she was dressed up in a sheer white nightgown like the ingenue in some vampire movie. And her hair—it was braided in two blond ropes that rose up off her brow like a layer cake.
Star turned to Marco, and for just an instant she felt the clamps let go of her. “That hair,” she whispered, feeling buoyant suddenly, feeling stoned all over again, “that’s what I call an emergency.”
The whole room watched as Norm led Premstar to the table, where he pulled out a chair for her with the kind of exaggerated gallantry that announced to everybody they’d been balling ten minutes ago, handed her the joint and leapt up onto the worn oak planks. “People,” he shouted, “brothers and sisters, this is my rap and I’m like more than grievously sorry to have to lay it on you tonight of all nights and even before we light the bonfire and dance, and I mean we are going to shake it out, believe me, we are going to dance like nobody has ever danced, I mean we are going to reinvent the whole trip of dancing for now and forever, but this has been coming down a long time now and there’s no denying it, no postponing it anymore, and I’ve just got to get it out, so bear with me . . .” He stopped right there, and nobody said a word, nobody so much as breathed.
Star found Marco’s arm and pulled it up over her shoulder like a cloak. Her heart was pounding now too, along with her head, a little hammer there striking over and over like in the TV commercials—she wasn’t going back to Peterskill no matter what happened, not if Drop City closed down tonight. She was going to stay here, right here, and she didn’t care what Norm said or how bad it was.
Norm bent low to light the joint for Premstar, and Premstar took a hit and Norm watched in a proprietary way as she passed it on to Reba before he straightened up again and looked out over the room. “I’m telling you the bad news first, but remember what the I Ching says—‘Perseverance Furthers’—and you are all, every one of you brothers and sisters, going to know that the good vibes outweigh the bad and that we will persevere in our mission and our philosophy and all the love and truth and the beautiful vibes of Drop City and everything we’ve accomplished here in spite of the fascists beating at the door.” Another pause. His voice dropped. “Only we won’t be here. Not on this property.”
If there was any air left in the room, it was gone now, sucked right out the window. Not here? What was he talking about?
“The fuck we won’t!” Jiminy jumped up out of his chair, his hair windmilling round his shoulders. His fist was balled, and he brought it down on the table at Norm’s feet, and then rocked back into himself, trembling all over. The day hadn’t been kind to him either, Star could see that.
“It’s over, people,” Norm sighed, and he never even glanced at Jiminy, just let his gaze seek out each face in the crowd, one after another, like beads on a string. “The bureaucrats’ve won the war. The pencil-pushers, the accountants, the man. We’re history here, and you better get used to it, because the straight world is moving in.”
Everybody was aroused now. Or no: they were incensed. “Bullshit!” a voice shouted from the far side of the room. “We won’t let them!” “No!” Maya joined in, nothing to her voice but textured air, her glasses flashing in the glare of the overhead lights like a shield, and what was with the lights, Star was wondering, why feed PG&E? Was Norm staging this? Was that it?
And then a voice she recognized, knew so intimately it was as if she were speaking herself: “Come on, Norm, come on, man, don’t let us down.” It was Ronnie, across the room, his face pinched and his eyes swollen in his head. He looked terrible. Looked as if he’d been buried a week and dug up again. But that voice, that tone—there was something raw and desperate in it, a quaver she recognized from all those late-night disquisitions on God, the futility of life and how impossible it was to find a good FM station in the flatlands, and she understood in that moment how much all this
meant to him. Ronnie. Pan. He needed Drop City as much as she did. “Come on, Norm,” he nagged. “Come on.”
Norm bowed his head a minute, as if all the fuss were too much for him. He dug at his beard, pushed the hat brim up off his brow so that the bandage flared out like an accusation. “The bulldozers’ll be here inside of a week. And that’s whether the pigs come back and lock me up or not, because let me give it to you straight, people—by order of the judge, and you can look it up, Judge Vincent T. Everard, the Right and Honorable, they’re going to take down every substandard dwelling on the place, and that’s their words, not mine, because I say substandard, my ass.”
“Right on!” Mendocino Bill shouted, and then they were all shouting, a dizzy reeling tightly wound gabble of voices—no, they wouldn’t budge, they’d fight, they’d chain themselves to the gates—but all Star could think of was the naked hills and the rubble of the yurts and huts and plastic sheeting all rolled up like a frayed blanket, and would they spare the treehouse? Would they see it, even?
She drifted in and out of it then, because that was when the joint worked its way to her and she touched her lips to it and tasted her brothers’ and sisters’ communion in the wetness of it and filled her lungs with the dense sweet smoke that was going to knock her headache down and out for the count and fill her every cell and fiber with bliss, the bliss she needed and deserved and wanted because that was what this life was all about, wasn’t it? Norm went on and on, ranting about the county, about Mr. Jones and the plastic society that spawned him, about conformity and hate and love and the I Ching. He must have talked nonstop for half an hour, his voice dipping and raging and looping back on itself until it was a kind of white noise and the words couldn’t touch her—she’d had enough bad vibes and negativity for one day. Enough. Enough, already. And she was about to get to her feet and say just that—Enough, and let’s sleep on it and see what the morning brings—when the room fell silent.