Drop City

by T. C. Boyle

  The next five days were gypsy days, that’s what Marco and Star were calling them, their little joke, no time for sweet wine or beer or dope or meditating with your back up against the big yellow knuckle of rock in the middle of the field, no time for sleep even—the caravan was moving on, fold up your tents, untether the goats and snatch the legs right out from under the chickens. If anyone had entertained any doubts about Norm Sender’s seriousness of purpose, the bus erased them. There it was, massive and incontrovertible, dominating the mud-slick yard like some dream of mechanical ascendancy, and all day, every day, from dawn till the last declining stretched-out hours, people were swarming all over it with tools, bedding, food, records, supplies.

  The previous owner—one of Norm’s old high school buddies who’d evolved into a ponytailed psychologist in Mill Valley—had installed a potbellied stove, an unfinished counter and sink, and eight fold-down slabs of plywood that served as bunks. He’d had a dream, the psychologist, of outfitting the thing as a camper so he could take some of his patients from the state mental hospital on overnight outings, but the dream had never been realized for the reason that so many dreams have to die: lack of funds. He’d left the first half dozen rows of seats intact, and they’d each seat three adults abreast and sleep at least one, and all the way in the back, across from the stove, there was a crude plywood compartment with a stainless steel toilet in it. According to Premstar, who gave up the information in a sidelong whisper when Norm was out of earshot, the psychologist had got the bus cheap after a collision with a heating oil truck in which three kindergartners had been burned to death. The accident had left the frame knocked out of alignment, though the psychologist had tried to set it right with the help of another old high school buddy who owned a welding shop, and that was something they were just going to have to live with—the thing always felt as if it were veering sideways when it was bearing straight down the middle of the road. And no matter what anybody did by way of sprays and lacquers and air fresheners, a smell of incinerated vinyl—and maybe worse—haunted the interior.

  When Jiminy saw the bus that first night, even as the rain was folding itself back into the mist and a derelict moon crept up over the trees, he drifted barefoot through the mud and embraced the cold metal of the hood as if it were living tissue. “Magic bus,” he murmured, and then he began chanting it under his breath, “Magic bus, magic bus, hey, hey, magic bus.” Marco was holding a flashlight for Mendocino Bill, who was peering into the engine compartment with a wrench in one hand and a screwdriver in the other, and Alfredo, for lack of anything better to do, was supervising. Reba had hung a Coleman lantern from one of the hooks inside, and the women were in there, five or six of them—Star included—adjusting things, running a sponge over the seats and a mop over the floor, already seeing to the division of space.

  “You know what we can do?” Jiminy said, his cheek pressed to the front fender. “We can paint it. Like Kesey, like the Pranksters. Mandalas, peace signs, weird faces, and fish—fish all over it, like Peter Max fish, blowing bubbles. And porpoises. That kind of thing. We’ll freak them out from here to fucking Nome.”

  Mendocino Bill made an affirmative noise in the back of his throat, but it wasn’t particularly enthusiastic—here was another adolescent fantasy, and what was wrong with WASHO UNIFIED skirting both sides of the bus in black bold adamantine letters?

  “I don’t want to tell you what to do,” Alfredo put in, “but we have to cross the Canadian border here—like twice—and the last thing you want is a freak parade, you know what I mean?” He jumped down from the bench Bill had propped himself up on and gave Jiminy a look. “Like you, for instance, Jiminy—that’s how we know you, but what’s your real name? I mean, like on your draft card?”

  Jiminy looked down at his feet. “Paul Atkins.”

  “Paul Atkins? Yeah, well, that’s what they’re going to want to know at the border, and you better have a draft card to show them too. And maybe a birth certificate on top of it. What are you, 4-F?”

  Jiminy looked hurt, put-upon, and Marco wanted to say something, but he didn’t. “They don’t ask that shit at the border,” Jiminy said. “Just are you a citizen, right? And how long’ll you be in Canada?”

  “Look, man,” Alfredo was saying, “you were probably still in junior high the first time I went up to Canada—in Ontario, this was—and maybe they might have been cool about it back in those days, but believe me, with the war on and all these draft dodgers—who I support, by the way, so don’t get me wrong—it’s going to be a trip and we are really going to have to play it right. Get it through your head, man—this is no game, no three-day rock festival where you can just go on home when it’s over. This is survival we’re talking about here—they’re driving us off the ranch, for Christ’s sake. What do you think that says?”

  Marco wasn’t listening anymore, because he was seeing that border, a vague scrim of trees, a checkpoint dropped down on the highway in a pool of darkness, and what was he going to do if they questioned him? Work up a fake ID? Get out three miles down the road and sneak across through the scrub? Was there a wire? Was it electrified?

  “Keep the light steady, will you?” Bill said. “I can barely see what I’m doing here.”

  “So what are we supposed to be then,” Jiminy wanted to know. “The Washo Unified Lacrosse Team? With our cheerleaders and band along for our triumphant tour of British Columbia?” He pushed himself away from the bus and hovered over the twin craters his feet made in the mud. “Easy for you to say, but you don’t have to worry—you’re too old for the draft.”

  The rain was nothing more now than the faintest drizzle, and the flanks of the bus shone with it as if they’d been polished. The moon glistened in the mud. From inside the bus, the sound of giggling.

  Alfredo didn’t answer right away. “That’s right,” he said finally, “I’m too old by four years and three months. But that doesn’t mean I’m not looking out for you and Marco and Mendocino Bill and all the other cats here. This is a war, man, and we are going to win it. Drop City North, right? Am I right?”

  “It’s still America,” Marco said. “The forty-ninth state. They’ve got the selective service up there too.”

  “Yeah, but we’re going to be so far out there nobody’s even going to know we exist.”

  In the morning, while Marco was up atop the bus with Star, trying to fashion scavenged two-by-fours into the world’s biggest luggage rack, he reached over the side for another stick and found himself peering into the upturned faces of Lester and Franklin. “So what’s this I hear?” Lester wanted to know, his voice padded with cotton wool as if he were afraid he might bruise it. He tugged at the brim of his oversized porkpie hat to shield his eyes from the sun. “You all are really going to up and desert Franklin and me? To go where—to fucking Alaska?” And then he began to chuckle, a low soft breathless push of air that might have been the first two bars of a song. “You people,” he said, and he was still chuckling, “you are seriously deranged.”

  Marco had a hammer in his hand, so he didn’t have to say anything in reply. He just banged a couple of nails into the corner at the front of the box, and yes, the humped steel roof of the bus was going to be a problem, but he was thinking if he built the rack up high enough and they strapped everything down as tightly as possible, it ought to get them where they were going—as long as the roof didn’t crumple under all that weight. Star said, “Maybe so,” and she was smiling so wide you would have thought her cheeks would split. “But in case you haven’t heard, Alaska’s the real thing, the last truly free place on this whole continent.”

  “Shit,” Lester said, grinning now himself, “that’s what I thought about California—till my ass wound up in Oakland. And the Fillmore’s worse than Oakland, even, and the Haight’s worse than that.”

  “What about us?” Franklin asked, and he was staring up at them out of a pair of yellow-tinted shades that looked like the top half of a gas mask. “They going to take down t
he back house too?”

  “That’s what I want to know,” Lester put in. “And Sky Dog. And Dale. Because it’s going to be kind of unfriendly around here when they come in with those bulldozers, you know what I mean?” He dropped his head, kicked a stone in the trammeled mud that was already baked to texture. Then he looked up again, one hand shielding his eyes from the sun. “But what I really want to know is are we invited? Because we got the Lincoln and there’s no way you’re going to fit everybody in that bus, and Pan’s car, and whatever—that beat-to-shit Bug Harmony’s got.”

  Marco looked down from on high. He didn’t like Lester and he liked Sky Dog even less, and he hadn’t forgotten that day in the ditch either, or what they’d done to the treehouse, but this, this really strained credulity. Lester was serious. He really thought he was part of all this, really believed in the credo of the tribe, in peace and love and brotherhood. Or he wanted to. Desperately wanted to. It was a hard moment, and Marco felt like Noah perched atop the ark and looking down his nose on all the bad seed toiling across the sodden dark plains below. He looked at Star and she looked away.

  “Or maybe I’m talking to the wrong person, maybe I ought to talk to Alfredo. Or Norm.”

  “I hear they got gold up there,” Franklin said, and he was straining to look up too. “Is that what you’re going to do, pan for gold?”

  “Hey, come on, man,” Lester said, “let bygones be bygones, right? Brothers, right?”

  A long moment ticked by. No one said a word. Marco could feel the bus shift beneath him as Reba and Merry climbed aboard with two more boxes of dishes, pots and pans, tools, cutlery, preserves. They were going to mount the big KLH speakers from two racks in the back of the bus and run the record player off a car battery, so they could have music at night when they pulled the bus off by the side of the road or into a public campground. Maya was fixing up curtains for the windows and Verbie and her sister were cutting up a roll of discarded carpet and fitting it to the floor. Even Pan was contributing, doing up a fish fry with chips and coleslaw so the women could be free of the kitchen and concentrate on the business at hand. Marco could hear the soft thrum of the voices below him, the sound of something growing, taking shape in a unity of effort that made all the pimples and warts of Drop City fade away to nothing. He felt good. Felt omnipotent. Felt like one of the elect.

  “So what do you say?” Lester’s voice floated up to him, soft as a feather. “We invited or not?”

  Marco plucked a nail from his shirt pocket, set it in place and drove it home with two strokes of the hammer. The sound exploded out of the morning like two gunshots, one after the other, true-aimed and fatal. He shrugged. “Hey,” he said, and he could hear the finality in his own voice, “it’s a free country.”

  PART FOUR

  THE DRUNKEN FOREST

  Life is here equally in sunlight and frost, in the thriving blood and sap of things, in their decay and sudden death.

  —John Haines, The Stars, the Snow, the Fire

  16

  The honeymoon was over before it began, and that was a shame, worse than a shame—it was a crime. A crime committed by a man with a gun, a Remington semi-automatic .22-caliber Nylon 66, judging from the flattened pieces of lead Cecil Harder dug out of the corpses of Bobo, Hippie, Girl, Loon and Saucy. Of course, the slugs could have come from any .22 rifle, but Joe Bosky had a Nylon 66—he favored it, as many did, for the lightness of its plastic stock—and Joe Bosky was the only man on this green earth who would even so much as think of shooting somebody’s dogs. You didn’t shoot dogs, and you didn’t burn down people’s cabins or rape their wives or put a bullet between their shoulder blades as they were gliding past in their canoe. Sess Harder was trying to live off the land, and everybody knew that. The better part of his income came from furs, and without dogs to run the looping forty-odd miles of trapline he’d inherited from Roy Sender—and improved and extended on his own—he was out of luck. Everybody knew that. A child knew that.

  So instead of a homecoming, instead of lifting his bride in his arms and carrying her through the dogtrot and across the threshold, instead of sorting out the wedding gifts and stocking the larder and maybe lying out nude with her on a blanket in the sun—one of his enduring sexual fantasies—he had to dig five holes while his heart clenched with hate and regret and his head rang with the bloody whoop of revenge. Pamela tried to comfort him, but it did no good. She was in shock herself, and that was the worst of it—that just compounded the crime right there. Bad enough that the psychopathic son of a bitch of a sneaking gutless leatherneck reject had done the deed, but to expose Pamela to this kind of thing, and on the day after her wedding, no less? He was going to kill Joe Bosky, as soon as he could, and there were no two ways about it. Joe Bosky had made his declaration. Joe Bosky was asking to be killed. He was begging for it.

  “You can’t, Sess, so don’t even think about it. You’ll go to jail—it’s murder. There are laws up here too, you know—”

  He was down in a hole, breaking through permafrost, flinging dirt. He’d been back an hour, with his bride, and he hadn’t unloaded the canoe, looked to the garden, settled her in the house or even so much as pecked a kiss to her cheek. “What do you know about it?” he said, and he didn’t just say the words, he snarled them.

  She was right there beside him, in her shorts, with her magnificent legs on display, her hands on her hips. Her mouth was set. This was their first argument, one day married, a night in heaven, and now this. “I’m not going to talk to you like you’re a child, Sess, and I’m not going to remind you that I’m part of this now too . . . We’ll go to the law, like civilized people, put the law on him—”

  “The law doesn’t come for dogs.”

  “For murder? Does the law come for murder? You think I married you so I could visit you three hours a week in some prison someplace?”

  He drove his pick at the frozen earth, all his rage concentrated in his shoulders and arms and the iron-clad muscles of his chest. “I see him,” he grunted, and the pick dropped again, “I’ll kill him.”

  “All right. Fine. I can see you’re upset, so I’ll leave you to do what you have to do here and I’ll start bringing the things in. Does that sound like a plan?”

  Upset? he was going to say. You think this is upset? Wait till I get my hands on a gun, then you’ll see upset—wait till I pin that son of a bitch to the wall and make him cry like a woman. He didn’t have the opportunity, though, because she’d already turned on her heels and headed down the slope, through the sun-bright glitter of bluebells and lupines and avens and saxifrage, to where the canoe shone against the everlasting gleam of the water.

  She made supper that night, things left over from the wedding feast, salads and cold cuts and whatnot that wouldn’t keep, and they ate at the picnic table in seventy-five-degree sunshine while the silence of the world closed in around them. He was in a T-shirt and patched jeans; she wore a top that bared her midriff and she’d combed her hair out so it draped her shoulders like a golden flag, and that was something, really something. The sight of her there in his yard, at his table, living and vibrant under the stretched-away sky, moved him and humbled him and made him forget his rage for whole minutes at a time. She was his wife. He was married. Married for the first and last time in his life.

  Down the rise, two hundred feet away, the river played a soft tinkling accompaniment to the shrugs and whispers of their conversation, and it could have been the silken rustle of a piano in a dark lounge. Even the mosquitoes, their whys and wherefores beyond any man’s capacity to guess, seemed to have taken the night off. He ate cold ham and three-bean salad and listened to his wife, hungering after each inflection, watching her lips, her eyes. A bottle of wedding wine stood open on the table, Inglenook Pinot Noir, 1969, Product of the Napa Valley, and beside it, a pitcher of Sess’s own dark bitter beer. He’d become a brewer when he moved out here and built the cabin because the nearest convenience store wasn’t all that convenient, and when h
e wasn’t off getting married or spying on Howard Walpole he produced a six-pack or so a day in the big plastic trash can just inside the door. So drink up, that was his motto, because he had only thirteen quart bottles and what didn’t get bottled or consumed turned to swill in a heartbeat. He reached for the pitcher, poured himself another, then toasted her with a soft metallic clink of tin cups that echoed as sweetly as the finest crystal.

  An hour ago, when he was done with the dogs, he’d come into the cabin and saw that she’d already packed everything in and found a place for it, rearranging his own squirreled-away bachelor lode in the process, and he’d felt a flash of irritation. The canned food was on the wrong shelves, a dress was hanging like a curtain from a cord in the middle of the room and there was a tumble of boxes full of clothes and books and even an alarm clock—an alarm clock, for Christ’s sake!—crawling up the wall where the bed had to come down every night. And posters. She’d hung posters of some musician with a pageboy haircut—Neil Diamond, that’s who it was—on the back wall. What was she thinking? This was a cabin, a wildwoods cabin, not some dorm room.

  He didn’t say anything. This was her first day, their first day, and he was crazy with rage over what Joe Bosky had done, and he had to tell himself that, tell himself not to let Bosky in, not to let him spoil this, and he went over to her where she stood arranging flowers in a coffee can and hugged her from behind. And that led to kissing and stroking and her softest whispered words of melioration and surcease. “If it’s a question of money,” she said, pulling back from him to look into his eyes, “I’ve got money.”