Drop City

by T. C. Boyle

  “Oh, well, Jasmine,” and it came to her that he wasn’t going to say a thing, just so long as she played out the game with him, “she’s only like one and a half or something, you know, and she’s, uh, well, I don’t want to get her into any bad habits, if you know what I mean.”

  Oh, yes, he knew—she didn’t have to tell him. And could he help with cereals? Cream of Wheat was good, if you cooked it with milk instead of water, and farina, of course. By the way, was she from around here, because he didn’t remember—?

  So that was it. He was hitting on her, just like any other cat. Just in case. Just on the off chance.

  “We just moved in,” she said. “My husband’s in Aerospace.” And then she thanked him and found herself stuck at the checkout across from Reba and Verbie with the Quaker Oats still in hand. Her heart was doing paradiddles, but she laid a wrinkled bill on the counter and prised the change out of her pocket, and then she was out in the parking lot and heading for the Studebaker, the very Queen of Cheese.

  They got a late start out of Seattle that night, because Norm had taken Harmony’s Bug and gone to see his uncle and stayed through the afternoon and on into the evening while everybody else sat on the bus and wondered if they’d been deserted. Norm had pulled the bus off at the first exit he came to and found a spot to park in a patch of weed at the side of a two-lane blacktop road. It was an ugly spot, the trees nothing more than scrub, some sort of factory putting out smoke in the near distance and the ubiquitous ranch houses of suburban America clustered all round them. Some of the men gathered up twigs and refuse and got a fire going, and the best the women could do was throw together a kind of paella, thick with appropriated tuna and greens and whatever spices they could find that weren’t already packed away.

  Cars shot by like jet planes. The shouts of kids at play came to them as ambient noise. People ate hurriedly, guiltily even, because this wasn’t what anybody expected. Even Che and Sunshine seemed lethargic, disoriented, and they barely touched their plates. Around eight, right in the middle of the meal, two men in sport shirts made their way across the street from a white ranch house with cream-colored trim and a new red car sitting in the driveway. “There’s no camping here,” Star heard one of the men say to no one in particular, and heard the other one say, “And no fires.” After that, everybody climbed back on the bus and circled the block a couple of times, Lester and Ronnie in tow, till they wound up back where they’d started and just sat in the vehicles with nowhere to go and nothing to do, waiting for Norm as the darkness settled in. When he finally did appear and the caravan moved off again, they felt as if they’d all been rescued.

  It was past midnight when Reba broke out the crabmeat and the smoked oysters and all the rest of it, and Star delivered up the cheeses. The bus was moving through the wall of the night. There was the green glow of the dash, a soft lateral rocking as if they were all inside a giant cradle. Norm was up front, his hands clenched round the wheel, Premstar squeezed into the cracked vinyl seat along with him. Ronnie was a pair of headlights somewhere behind them, Mendocino Bill and Verbie and her sister keeping him company, taking their turn, share and share alike. Marco, who’d gone along with Norm to visit the uncle—“To keep him company, and find out exactly where that mountain of gold is located, just in case we need some spare change”—was in the back of the bus with Alfredo and some of the others, playing cards under a light Bill had rigged up. The kids were asleep. So was practically everybody else.

  And so it was Reba, Merry, Maya, Lydia and Star, the women, spread out across three seats, gossiping and feasting as the bus jostled down the road and the vague lights of single homes, gas stations and farmhouses flashed at the windows in an unreadable code. “You get tired of just plain fare all the time, you know?” Reba said. “Tofu paste. Tahini. Brown rice. Even though it’s healthy. Even though I’m committed to it. But this”—and she laid a sardine across a thin slice of wheat bread, licking the oil from her fingers—“this isn’t just a luxury, this is a necessity, know what I mean?”

  Appropriated crackers went round, more bread, a bottle of Liebfraumilch Reba had liberated from the liquor department. They all knew what she meant. And Star ate wedges of cheese and licked the oil from her own fingers—smoked oysters, that was her weakness—savoring the moment. In the inner fold of her backpack, the pouch between the frame and the main compartment, way down at the bottom and wrapped in a sock, were three one-hundred-dollar bills nobody knew about, not Marco, not Ronnie, not Merry or Maya. This was what she had left of her nest egg, the money she’d accumulated before she quit teaching, living dirt cheap at her parents’ house when her only expenses were for records and clothes and maybe a Brandy Alexander or Black Russian at the Surf ’N’ Turf, the nearest thing to a club Peterskill could offer; the rest had gone for gas and food coming across country, and everything since—food stamps, unemployment, whatever her mother managed to send c/o Drop City—had vanished into the communal pot. There was no way she was breaking those three bills, whether for luxury or necessity, and besides, Norm had guaranteed he’d float everybody through the first winter, at least as far as the basics were concerned.

  Lydia, lounging in the seat across from Star, said “Paté,” as if she’d been thinking about it for weeks. “That’s what turns me on. And those celery sticks with blue cheese inside. Swedish meatballs on a toothpick. Canapés and champagne. They used to have these parties at the place I used to work, and I’d just camp in front of the hors d’oeuvres tray and pig out.”

  “Will this do?” Reba said, and she leaned forward in the flicker of passing headlights and handed Lydia a box of Ritz crackers and two cans of deviled ham.

  “Lobster,” Merry said. “With drawn butter.”

  “You haven’t lived till you’ve had the Crab Louis at this place called Metzger’s on Tomales Bay,” Maya put in. “I went there once, just after high school, with—”

  “I know,” Reba said, “—this guy named Jack. With hair down to his ass and a Fu Manchu mustache.”

  Star laughed. They all laughed.

  Maya’s voice went soft. “Actually, it was with my parents. They took me and my brother out west on a vacation. For my graduation present.”

  No one had anything to say to that, and they were all silent a moment as the bus lurched through a series of broad sweeping turns, heading for the Canadian border. The engine propelled them forward with a steady whoosh, as if there were a big vacuum cleaner under the hood. Wind beat at the windows, a spatter of rain. They could hear Norm’s voice from up front, an unceasing buzz of fancy, opinion and incontestable fact fueled by Ronnie’s speed and Premstar’s lady-lotion skin, and who liked Premstar, who could even stand her? Nobody. On that, they were all in silent accord.

  “Shrimp cocktail,” Reba said, feeding another sardine into her mouth. “For my money,” and she was chewing round her words, “a good shrimp cocktail, with big shrimp now, shrimp as long as your middle finger, with a spicy cocktail sauce and served on a little bed of ice, that’s what I’d go for every time.”

  Star said, “Pistachios. In the shell. And your fingers get all red. Has anybody in this world ever had enough of those?”

  “You know,” Merry said, and her voice was so drawn down and muted you could barely hear her, “I haven’t seen my parents since I was sixteen. That’s like five years. I can’t believe it. And I don’t hate them or anything either. It’s just the way things worked out.”

  “Where you from again?” Reba wanted to know.

  Softly, as if it were a prayer, or the name of a prayer: “Cedar Rapids.”

  “Cedar Rapids? Where’s that?”

  “It’s in Iowa,” Lydia answered for her.

  “Oh, Iowa,” Reba said, and she made it sound as unhip and lame as Peoria or New Jersey, and Star felt the mood start to slip away.

  “There was this guy,” Merry began, her face lit suddenly by a pair of headlights, then sinking into shadow, “this cat, and he was twenty-three and he had h
is own car and money like I’d never seen before, like rolls of twenties and whatever. But that’s not what did it—I wasn’t like that. I’m not like that now. Money didn’t mean anything to me, except that it could buy you freedom—and my parents, Jesus, and my school. You know the story. Everybody does, right?”

  No one rose to the bait. Star shifted in her seat. She could hear Lydia forcing her hand down into the box of crackers.

  “His name was Tommy Derwin and he was from down south, Mobile, and his accent just killed me. The way he would say things, like ‘Ahm just honahed that you would con-sent to be mah date tonight, Miss Merra Voight,’ and then he’d take me to a bar in Iowa City where nobody ever got carded and then a motel, as man and wife, on the way back to Cedar Rapids. I never thought twice. He said let’s go to San Francisco, that’s where the scene is, and I went.”

  Lydia was passing out crackers smeared with deviled ham, and Star took one, and so did Reba, but Maya and Merry passed—ham was meat, after all, pig, dead pig, no matter how you disguised it. “So what then?” Lydia said, and she wiped her lips with the back of her hand.

  “We stayed a couple places. People he knew. We did drugs. I worked checkout at a Walgreens for a while, and when nobody was looking I’d shake pills out of bottles, you know, that sort of thing.” The cheese came round, and they all watched as Merry cut herself two thick slices and fitted them to crackers. “I don’t know,” she said. “And then we joined this commune—Harrad House? It wasn’t like this, not at all. More into sex. A group marriage kind of thing.”

  “And how was that?” This was Lydia, the resident expert. “Did you have to sleep with everybody?”

  “I’d hate that,” Star said. “I’d really hate that.”

  “Sounds groovy to me,” Lydia said. “The more the merrier.”

  Reba laughed out loud. She took a long swallow of the wine and passed the bottle to Lydia. “That’s what you say now, but believe me—I mean, before I met Alfredo, I was pretty wild, like I was in heat all the time, like the only way I could relate to men was in bed, but that got old fast. Real fast. Right, Merry? You agree?”

  “It stunk. There were way more guys than girls and Tommy was like a ghost or something—I hardly ever even saw him. I was on my back half the time, and if I refused some guy, one of the family members, I was the one who was uptight, I was the one spreading the bad vibes and poisoning the atmosphere, because that was the way it was. The bedroom down the hall. Take off your clothes. Five A.M., five P.M. Let’s ball.” She paused, and her voice sank right down through the floorboards. “Everybody had jobs, like mop the floor, cook the pasta, go out and bring in a paycheck. My job was to fuck. Like a machine. Like a goat.”

  “Where’s Verbie when we need her—Women’s Lib, right?” Reba said, missing the point. As usual.

  Star could feel her heart going, and it was as if she were back in the supermarket again with fifteen dollars’ worth of cheese shoved down her coat. “It’s the Keristan Society all over again.”

  “The who?”

  But she was staring out the window now on a scene from another century, the sharp-edged pines and a farmhouse framed in its own pale glow and the shadow of the barn beyond. They were asleep in there, the farmer and his wife, the kids, the dog. There would be an old oak table in the kitchen, heavy pink Fiesta ware set out for breakfast, a calendar on the wall. The refrigerator would clank on, it would hum, and then shut down, and no one would even notice, not even the dog.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not important.”

  They reached the border sometime after two. Star was asleep, curled up awkwardly in one of the bunks, and she felt the bus shift beneath her as if the whole world were in motion, then it shuddered and came to a halt, and she was awake. They were off on the side of the road, parked beneath a sign that said INTERNATIONAL BOUNDARY 2 MILES. Norm was coming down the aisle, rousing people from sleep. “It’s the border, people, come on, wake up,” he was saying, his face a pale bulb hanging in the gloom, his shoulders hunched and arms dangling as if he’d lost the use of them. This was it. This was the big moment. If they couldn’t get into Canada, then they couldn’t get to Alaska, and Drop City was dead.

  Marco was in the bunk beneath her, and he woke with a start. She reached a hand down to him, her hair trailing, and edged over the side of the bunk so she could see him. He was staring at nothing, the moistness of his eyes just catching enough light to show her they were open. “Hey,” she said, as gently as she could, “we’re here. Time to wake up.”

  “Shit,” he said, and he brushed her hand aside. “Already?” He pushed himself up and slid out of the bunk all in one motion, and then he was running his fingers through his hair and tucking in the tail of his shirt. People were shuffling around like zombies, bumping into one another, cursing softly. The dogs began to whine. Somebody sneezed. “Where’s Ronnie?” he said, and there was an edge to his voice she didn’t recognize. “Where’s Pan? Is he here?”

  For the past two days all he could talk about was the border, the border this and the border that, and how he ought to sneak across in the trunk of the Studebaker or find someplace out in the middle of nowhere where he could just step from one country to the other as easily as moving from the front of the bus to the back. Star had tried to talk him out of it, because if they opened the trunk—and why wouldn’t they?—they’d nail him on the spot, but there were thirty people on the bus, not to mention two dogs and a cat, and the chances of their checking on everybody were slim. Especially in the middle of the night.

  “You don’t need Ronnie,” she said. “Just sit tight, that’s all. Everything’s going to be fine,” she said, and then she said it again, as if the words could make it so.

  “All right,” Norm was saying, and his voice was up to its usual volume now, somewhere between a shout and a roar, “all right, everybody just listen. The border’s two miles ahead, and we are just going to breeze right on through it, no hassles, no worries. You know what we are? All of us? We’re a rock band.”

  Weird George let out a groan.

  “No, we are. And we’ve got big dates in Fairbanks and Anchorage, and where else? I don’t know, Sitka. You people with guitars get ’em out, and a little strumming or even a group sing here would be nice, you know what I mean? Know what I’m saying?”

  It was two-thirty in the morning. They were at the Canadian border. Nobody felt like singing.

  “All right. Just let me do the talking. And you chicks—come on, you chicks, you Drop City Miracles—try to look sexy, right? You’re the backup singers.”

  That got a laugh, and you could feel the tension lift. People started chattering, the guy—cat—everybody called Deuce pulled out his harmonica and started a slow blues, and pretty soon Geoffrey joined him on guitar and two of the back-of-the-bus girls, Erika and Dunphy, let loose with a few random verses of “Love in Vain.” Norm took his hunched shoulders back up to the front of the bus, where Premstar was perched on the driver’s seat like a present he’d forgotten to unwrap. Marco gave Star a look, and then followed him. “Norm,” he was saying, “listen, Norm—I need to talk to you a second.” She slid down from the bunk, afraid suddenly, and went after him.

  Then the door of the bus wheezed open and the three of them—Norm, Marco and Star—were standing by the roadside with Ronnie and Mendocino Bill while the Studebaker idled behind its headlights in a pall of exhaust. A light rain spat down out of the sky and made the pavement glisten. Someone had broken a bottle here, and Star had to be careful where she put her feet. “So what do you want to do, then,” Norm said, “walk across? That wouldn’t draw any attention or anything, would it?”

  “If they catch me I go to jail.”

  “Relax, man, nobody’s going to catch you. It’s Canada, that’s all. Bunch of hicks, right, Pan? Am I right? Star?”

  The Studebaker’s headlights threw a cold lunar glare on Marco’s face. He ducked his head as if the Mounties were already on him, snapping whips.
“What about Pan’s car? The trunk, I mean?”

  Norm shook his head very slowly. His eyes jumped behind the lenses of his patched-up glasses. “We used to sneak into the drive-in like that. I think we got two cats and a chick in there one night, and then I couldn’t get the trunk open.” He laughed. “That was pretty wild. That was one wild night, let me tell you.”

  Ronnie said, “I don’t think so. If they like open the trunk, then I’m the one in deep shit, right? I’m a smuggler, right?”

  Nobody said anything. Star took hold of Marco’s arm. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get back on the bus. Let’s get it over with.”

  “Plus, I’ve got all my dope back there—our dope. Inside the spare tire. And that would be a major fuckup. I mean, if they found that.”

  Lester’s Lincoln pulled up then, and a moment later Dale Murray ratcheted in on his bike. Suddenly there was a whole lot of engine noise. And fumes. Lester rolled down the window. “So what now?” he said. “We go across, or what?”

  “Fuck, I’m freezing,” Dale Murray said. He was wet through, his hair painted to both sides of his face. “We got to stop and camp or something or I think I’m going to fucking die.”

  “We go across separately,” Norm said, “because we don’t want to give them a whole hippie freak show all at once. Ronnie, you’re first. Then you, Lester. And, Dale, you go through anytime you want, just make like you don’t know us—nobody knows anybody, dig?—and when we’re on the other side we’ll see if maybe we can’t get the bike aboard the bus somehow. How does that sound? Is it a plan?”

  Star was the only one who said anything, and she could barely hear herself over the ratcheting of the bike. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s a plan.”