by T. C. Boyle
She looked round her, and it was as if she’d just awakened.
Norm was still up there on the table, the artificial light bleeding from his face. He’d just delivered the good news, the promise that was going to redeem them all and resurrect Drop City, and it came in three interconnected syllables that didn’t sound like a promise at all—it was more like a joke, or maybe a dream. She couldn’t even be sure she’d heard him right, and before she knew what she was doing, she was raising her hand, raising her hand and flapping it at the end of her wrist as if she were wedged behind a tiny shellacked desk back in elementary school. “Norm, Norm!” she cried amidst a tumult of voices, everybody talking at once, everybody shouting, but she was on her feet now and he was looking right at her through the clear hard lenses of his taped-up glasses as if she were the only one in the room. “Norm, did you say Alaska?”
Yes. That was what he’d said: Alaska. He repeated it for her, the whole long strung-together Normed-out sentence that ended with the noun that hit her like a body blow, the name of that alien, icebound afterthought of a place that had no deeper association for anyone in the room than Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, and the Yukon wasn’t even in Alaska, was it? No matter. Norm had the stage, Norm was their leader and guru and though he’d never led them before, he was leading them now, his feet dancing and his arms beating time to the silken swoosh of the suede fringe, and he was selling Alaska as if he owned it. “No rules,” he shouted, “no zoning laws, no taxes, no county dicks and ordinances. You want to build, you build. You want to take down some trees and put up a cabin by the most righteous far-out turned-on little lake in the world, you go right ahead and do it and you don’t have to go groveling for anybody’s permission because there’s no-fucking-body there—do you hear me, people? Nobody. You can live like Daniel Boone, live like the original hippies, like our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers—off the land, man, doing your own thing, no apologies. Do you dig what I’m telling you?”
Silence, stunned silence. Everybody was seeing sled dogs and tracts of rippled snow. They were seeing—what?—king crab, bears, Eskimos, Mount McKinley rising up out of a wall calendar like a white planet tearing loose from its moorings. He was joking. He had to be.
“Are you fucking crazy?” Star turned her head and Mendocino Bill was right there beside her, tottering on his swollen white feet, his beard draining the color from his face. “Are you out of your fucking mind? Alaska? It’s like sixty below up there. What are we going to do, make igloos like Nanook? Eat snow and icicles and what, seal blubber?”
“Longest day, man,” Norm said. “The sun won’t set up there tonight. I’ve seen it. For three years I saw it. And you know what that means? That means strawberries the size of apples, that means tomatoes like watermelons and zucchini you could hollow out and live in. And this”—he reached into his jacket pocket and produced another communal joint, gaudily rolled in red-white-and-blue-striped papers—“this shit grows like giant redwoods up there, like sequoias, I mean, get me to the lumber mill, man.
“My uncle Roy—and I don’t know how many of you know this, I mean, you do, Alfredo, and probably you, Verbie—he’s got a place up there, just outside of Boynton, on the Yukon River, farthest place you can drive to in the continental U.S., the last place, I’m telling you, the last frontier, and what’s the whole town built out of? Logs. You know what I’m saying? Logs! I lived there three years after I dropped out of high school in my junior year because I couldn’t take the plastic bourgeois capitalist fucking bullshit brainwashing anymore, and I know what I’m talking about.” He flipped off his glasses, wiped them on his sleeve and clapped them back on again, and then he was shaking out a folded piece of lined yellow paper and holding it up to the light.
“You see this, people? See it? This is a letter from my uncle. From Uncle Roy himself, dated two months ago, and I’ve been carrying it around ever since. You know what it says?” He paused to look out over the room. “It says he’s in Seattle, living with my other uncle, Uncle Norm—my namesake—because he’s seventy-two fucking years old and he’s got arthritis so bad he can hardly wrap his fingers around the pen. He’s not going back, not ever, and you know what that means? That means the cabin is ours, people, fully stocked and ready to go, traps, guns, snowshoes, six cords of wood stacked up outside the door, pots and pans and homemade furniture and all the rest, and it’s going to be an adventure, it is. We’re going to take down some trees, because that’s the way you do it—lumber is free up there, can you dig that, free—and we’re going to build four more cabins and a meeting house and we’re going to build right on down to the river because the salmon are running up that river even as we speak and they’re running in the millions. You dig smoked salmon? Anybody here dig smoked salmon? And the blueberries. The cranberries. You never saw anything like it. You want to know what we’re going to eat? We’re going to eat the land because it’s one big smorgasbord. And there’s nobody—I mean nobody—to stop us.”
Everyone in the room was on their feet now, and it was like a rally, like a concert, and Star was thinking about the time she’d seen the Velvet Underground live in a downtown loft that was wall-to-wall people—there was that kind of excitement, that kind of energy. A current was burning through the room, and it was burning through her too, and never mind the headache, never mind the bulldozers, this was something new, outrageous, beyond anybody’s capacity to imagine or envision, and when Norm scrambled down from the table they buried him in an avalanche of hands and shoulders and hair, and the questions never stopped. When? Where? How? That was what they wanted to know, and so many people were talking at once they might as well have been speaking different languages entirely. Verbie was right there at his shoulder, and Jiminy wedged in beside her, his eyes shining. Even Reba looked upbeat.
“Details!” Norm cried over the tumult. “Petty details, people.” He was already in motion, dismissing every rational fear and practical concern with a casual swipe of his hand. He had Premstar by the arm and he was leading her through the crush and into the kitchen, and through the kitchen and out into the darkened yard, shouting over his shoulder like an agitator leaving the arena: “The bonfire! On to the bonfire!”
“Man, has he lost it or what?” somebody said, and Star felt herself jostled from behind. “I mean, do you believe this shit?”
She looked to Marco, only to him, and he was watching her out of hooded eyes as they moved toward the door and the scent of the damp night air. He met her gaze and then he grinned and shrugged his shoulders. “You know,” he said, and he put his arm round her shoulders and locked his hip to hers, “I’ve always wanted to see the northern lights.”
Later, as the flames leapfrogged into the black vault of the sky and the hiss of Alaska sizzled up from the coals—Alaska, Alaska, the only word anybody needed to know tonight, the touchstone, the future—Star relaxed into the grip of whatever it was that was happening to her. She sipped at a fruit jar of Spañada and stood at the edge of the fire, watching the tracers rise up into the night. She felt calm, centered, as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders, the way she always felt when she came to a decision. Like with Ronnie. She remembered leaving home with him, books and records and brown bleeding bags of food piled up in the backseat, sleeping bags, kitchen things, the only home she’d known for three-quarters of her life receding in the rearview mirror, and then her mother raging barefoot down the street shouting out for the world to hear that she was throwing her life away. Her mother’s face hung there in the window even after they’d reached the end of the block, and she could see it now, the wet sheen of her eyes and all the gouges and wrinkles of a long day and a long week mobilized in grief—Paulette! You’re throwing your life away, your life away!—but she was calm that day too. She’d made up her mind to go, and that was it.
The sweet cold wine massaged her throat and condensed her headache till it was a hard black little India rubber ball come to rest somewhere in the backcourt of her mind.
She was standing in a knot of people—Marco, Norm, Alfredo, Reba, Harmony, Deuce, all of them talking at once, talking logistics, talking Alaska—and she closed her eyes and rode the wave of exuberance that was washing over Drop City even now, even as Druid Day became something else—the day after Druid Day—and that was a holiday too. Sure it was. Didn’t they have a bonfire? Didn’t they have drugs, wine, beer? And weren’t they going to dance till they dropped?
Just before the fire went up, when everybody was gathered in the field to watch Norm wave the ceremonial torch and make another of his rocket-propelled speeches—Part of ourselves, people, let’s all just step up and throw some part of ourselves on the funeral pyre of old Drop City—Merry had retrieved the atlas from the high shelf in the kitchen where it was wedged between The Whole Earth Catalogue and Joy of Cooking. Star had come in to refill her glass, and Lydia and Maya were there too, mashing avocados for guacamole, and they all stood round the kitchen table as Merry traced her finger across the map of Alaska to the black dot on the swooping blue river that was Boynton. “There it is,” she said, “Drop City North,” and they all leaned forward to see that it was real, a place like any other, a destination. “And look,” she added, measuring out the distance with the width of a fingernail, “there’s Fairbanks. And wow, Nome.”
No one said a word, but they all seemed to have caught the same fever. They’d all traveled to get here—that was part of the scene, seeing the country, the world, before you were shriveled up and dead like your parents. Lydia was from Sacramento originally, but she’d been to Puerto Vallarta, Key West and Nova Scotia, and Maya had hitchhiked all the way out here from Chicago. Merry was from Iowa, and Star had been across the Great Plains, through the Rockies and the high desert—all those rambling brown dusty miles—and that was nothing, nothing at all. Here was the chance to fall off the map, to see the last and best place and lay claim to bragging rights forever. So you went to Bali, the French Riviera, the Ivory Coast? Yeah? Well, I was in Alaska.
But where was the music? Weren’t they going to dance? Wasn’t that what Norm had said—We are going to dance like nobody’s ever danced? Her eyes snapped open on the thought, and the first thing she saw was Ronnie, standing shirtless beside Dale Murray on the far side of the fire, a beer in one hand, a poker in the other. She was wondering what Ronnie thought about all this, because he was still her anchor to home no matter what happened, and the sight of him, of the neutral, too-cool-for-human-life look on his face, made her doubt herself a moment—was he in for this, was he going to commit? Or would he put them all down with some sort of snide comment and slip out the back door? She leaned into Marco. “I’ll be back,” she whispered, but Marco was already in Alaska, at least in his mind—Mud and moss? You mean that’s it for insulation?—and he never even heard her.
She skirted the fire as people rushed up out of the dark to throw branches, scraps of lumber and trash into the flames. Jiminy and Merry came out of nowhere with a derelict armchair that had been quietly falling into itself under the front porch, and she could see the guy they called Weird George—all shadow and no substance—laboring across the yard with the crotch of a downed tree.
And here was Ronnie, lit like a flaming brand, his face a carnival mask of yellow and red, twin fires burning out of the reflective lenses of his eyes. She stood at his side a moment, watching as the glowing skeleton of the fire revealed itself like a shimmering X ray, and then she said, “Hey,” and Ronnie—in chorus with Dale Murray—returned the greeting.
“Wow, you’re out,” Star said, looking to Dale Murray. “We were worried.”
“Right,” he said, and he leaned over to spit in the dirt. “But it’s no thanks to you, is it? Any of you. If it wasn’t for my buddy here”—he jerked his head and Sky Dog’s profile emerged from the warring shades of the night, a beer pinned to his lips like a medallion—“I’d still be shitting bricks in the county jail. He’s the one that went to the bail bondsman. I mean, what does that take? A genius?”
Star didn’t have any response to that, because everything froze up inside her at the sight of Sky Dog. She’d thought all that was done with, thought he’d gone on to infest some other family with ego and selfishness and the kind of love that was no love at all, just words, empty words. He didn’t acknowledge her, just drained his beer and flung the bottle into the fire.
There was a pop like a gunshot. The flames snapped and roared.
Ronnie said, “So what do you think?”
“You mean Norm?”
“Yeah. Norm. Like as if there’s anything else to discuss tonight.”
“We looked it up on the map—Boynton. It’s a real place. I mean, just like all the places on the map when we were coming across country.” And she couldn’t help herself—she laughed. “A dot. A little black dot.”
“What’s it near?”
She was the expert here, the old Alaska hand, but she’d already reached the limits of her knowledge: “Fairbanks. Like maybe a hundred fifty, two hundred miles?”
“The fishing up there,” Ronnie said, and he wasn’t really talking to her now. “Grayling, char, king salmon as long as your leg. You could shoot a moose. A bear. In fact, you know they have to shoot a bear, everybody does, every year? You know why? The fat. I mean, it’s not as if you can just stroll down to the grocery store and pick up a tub of margarine or Crisco or whatever—”
“What about the goats,” she said, and she had an image of them crammed into the back of the Studebaker, shitting all over everything, stinking, drooling, making a zoo of the place. “We’re taking the goats, aren’t we?” And there it was, a fait accompli: we.
“Hey, man, you want another beer?” Dale Murray leaned into them, his face swollen in a stabbing flash of light. Ronnie held his bottle up experimentally, shook it twice and drained it. “How about you, Star?” Dale Murray wanted to know, and his voice had softened till it was reasonable, seductive even. Was this a peace offering—after all, she hadn’t put him in jail; she hadn’t even been there—or did he just want to ball her like all the rest of the cats?
“I’m okay,” she said, and Dale Murray moved off into the shadows. She took a sip from the fruit jar and turned to Ronnie. “So what happened to your shirt?”
Ronnie pulled his eyes back and stared off into the distance. He shrugged. “I tossed it in the fire. Norm said to get rid of the bad shit, right? The shit with the negative vibes? Leave it all behind, isn’t that what he said?”
It took her a minute. “The shirt I made for you?”
His eyes came back to her, dwindling and accusatory. He fingered the beads at his throat. “So what did you throw in the fire, like a little voodoo effigy of me or something? Or that turquoise bracelet I bought you in Sedona? I don’t see that. I don’t see you wearing that anymore—”
“Okay, look: I’m sorry. I love you, I do, but you have to understand—”
“Understand what?”
“Marco. I’m with Marco now, that’s all.”
“And who the fuck is he? I’ve known you since junior high. Christ, we came out here together, we had all those adventures, remember? Doesn’t that mean anything?” He bent forward to fling his empty bottle into the flames, and there was another pop as the heat took the glass down. “Shit, I don’t even know if I want to go to Alaska if it’s going to be like this—I mean, are we taking the Studebaker or what? And Marco, what about him—he doesn’t even have a car, right? Not to mention all the rest of them. How are we going to get there, even?”
And what had she heard Lydia say in the kitchen just yesterday? I don’t watch pornography, I do it. Right. Chicks and cats. Free Love. He was so full of shit it was coming out his ears. She took his hand and squeezed it. “Star and Pan,” she said.
“You know, I thought you were coming over here to ask do I have any more of those downs left, because I know you right through to the bone and I was figuring you were going to want to sleep tonight, isn’t that right?”
She gave him a blo
ssoming smile. “Mind reader.”
“You’re going to have to come with me,” he said, reflexively patting the pockets of his jeans. “I got a little paranoid and went and stashed everything under this rock up in the woods. It’s like three minutes from here.”
And then they were walking off into the deep pit of the night that pulled all the light down into it like a black hole, and she was feeling her barefoot way, Ronnie’s hand locked on hers like a magnet. Across the field and into the trees, and now her eyes began to adjust and she could see that there was a moon, a softness of light poured softly over every blade and leaf, pale stripes limning the dark trunks and a ghost-lit carpet spread uniformly over the ground from one corner of the night to the other. An owl hooted in the distance. The air had a taste to it, clean and cool, like a draught of water. “So where’re you taking me, anyway?”
Ronnie worked his fingers between hers, gave her hand a squeeze. “Just up here, by that rock—see that rock?”
Up ahead was a big knuckle of extruded sandstone, glowing faintly in the moonlight, a landmark you could see from the kitchen window. In daylight, it was the haunt of lizards—and Jiminy, who liked to use it as a backrest when he was reading or meditating or whatever he did off by himself. The sight of the rock—the knowledge of it, its familiarity—saddened her. She was going to miss this place.