Drop City

by T. C. Boyle

  Up ahead, the night bloomed with artificial light, trucks braking amidst the fading ghosts of cars, the Peace Arch aglow like an alien spaceship set down in a field of darkened wheat. There were gray metal booths bright with windows, figures in some kind of uniform moving like skaters across the shimmer of pavement. Ronnie’s car swung out ahead of the bus, out in the left lane, and everybody pressed their faces to the windows. They watched as the Studebaker’s taillights flashed red in a shroud of smoldering exhaust and a figure emerged from the near booth. The rain had quickened, beating with real authority now at the roof of the bus and driving pewter spikes into the roadway and the soft shrouded chassis of the cars. The figure leaned into Ronnie’s window—fifteen seconds, that was all it took—then straightened up and waved him on. Star watched the Studebaker ease forward and fold itself back into the night.

  Norm had pulled in behind a truck and the truck was taking its time. Nobody could see what the delay was because the back end of the truck was blocking their view, but the guitars kept strumming and half a dozen people were singing Beatles songs now—first “Rocky Raccoon,” and then “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” the choice of which would have struck Star as nothing short of hilarious if it weren’t for Marco. Poor Marco. He was huddled against the window in the seat beside her, sunk into the upturned collar of his denim jacket. His hair was like tarnished gold, like winter-killed weeds in a vacant lot. His eyes were drawn down to nothing. “I’m doing this for you,” he said. “I hope you know that.”

  Then it was Lester’s car, pulling up into the space vacated by Ronnie’s. The same figure emerged from the booth, only the figure was wearing a rain slicker now and it—he—produced a flashlight and shined it in Lester’s face. In the next moment, the truck was creeping forward, its blinkers flashing, and Norm was moving up to the booth even as the man with the flashlight waved Lester into the farthest lane over—the lane reserved for searches and seizures—and Lester, Franklin and Sky Dog all climbed out of the car and into the rain.

  But before anybody could even think to worry about that, the bus lurched to a stop, the door folded back with a wheeze and a man in a yellow rain slicker came up the steps. “Greetings,” Norm shouted. “It’s a bear out there, huh?”

  The man nodded and said something in a low voice to Norm and Premstar. From where she was sitting, Star could see him only as a dull yellow glow, like something growing in the dirt of a cellar. Behind her, all the way in the back, people were singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

  “American,” Norm said, and then Premstar, her voice floating back to Star like a fluff of dander on a sterile breeze, pulled her chin down and concurred: “American,” she said.

  The man in the slicker said something else, and Star couldn’t catch it.

  “Just passing through,” Norm said in a ringing voice. “We’re a rock band. Big dates in Alaska, they’re just dying for us up there—not that we wouldn’t want to perform for you Canadians too, but that’ll have to wait till next time. We’re booked, know what I mean?”

  One by one, the people in the back stopped singing, aware now that something was going on up front. Star leaned forward. Marco shrank into the seat.

  “What band?” Norm called out in disbelief. “You mean you don’t recognize us?”

  The man in the slicker shook his head from side to side. Star could see his face now—he was grinning. She saw the flash of his teeth in a face so red he might have been holding his breath all this time for all anyone knew.

  “Oh, man, you’re hurtin’ me,” Norm said, and he shot a look down the length of the aisle, mugging now, “you’re really hurtin’ me. Give you a hint,” he said. “ ‘Sugar Magnolia’? ‘Truckin”? ‘Friend of the Devil’? No? Oh, man, you’re killin’ me. All right, Premstar, you tell him—”

  The tiny wisp of her voice: “The Grateful Dead.”

  The man in the yellow slicker was grinning still, and so was Norm, as if it were some kind of contest. “You’ve heard of us, right?”

  “Oh, yeah,” the man said, his voice muffled by the floppy yellow rain hat, “sure, yeah, I’ve heard of you.”

  “I’ll be happy to give you an autograph if you want, no problem, man,” Norm said, and he held out his hand and the man took it.

  Then the man said something Star missed, and Norm swiveled around in the seat and looked down the length of the bus. “All right, people, just give this gentleman your attention a minute here now, because he just wants to ask everybody if they’re a citizen, okay? Okay, now?”

  Down the aisle the man in the slicker came, red-faced and grinning, and Star saw that he was older—gray hair in his sideburns—older even than Norm. He didn’t want any trouble. He didn’t want anything, except to be out of the bus and back in his booth. “American citizen?” he asked. “American citizen?” And everybody said yes, and then, just for variety, he asked, “Where were you born?” and people said Buffalo, San Diego, Charleston, Staten Island, Kansas City, Hornell. They watched his face as he came down the aisle, and they watched his shoulders as he made his way back up it. Che and Sunshine slept on. The dogs never even lifted their heads.

  There was a smattering of nervous laughter when he descended the steps, and the laughter boiled up into a wild irrepressible storm of hoots and catcalls and whinnying shrieks as the door pulled shut and Norm put the bus in gear and headed off toward the lights of Canada. Star alone looked back. The last thing she saw was Lester, up against the rain-washed Lincoln, and a man in a yellow slicker patting him down.

  20

  Though they hammered it twenty-four hours a day up through Canada and over the infinite roaring dirt incline that was the Alaska Highway, stopping only for gas and the bodily needs of thirty-one tight-lipped claustrophobes, the bus held up. By Marco’s count, it broke down three times, once just outside of Prince George, the second time at the crest of Muncho Pass, and then in a place that was no place at all, but Mendocino Bill and Tom Krishna were equal to the task and they were never stranded more than an hour or two. People played cards, read, slouched, strummed guitars. They made love under blankets, passed mugs of coffee, Coke and herbal tea from hand to hand and row to row, got stoned, dozed and woke and dozed again. Norm barely slept. And when he did sleep, crumpled across one of the seats as if he’d been deboned, Marco or Alfredo took over at the wheel, humping through country that made your eyes ache with the emptiness of it. Even Pan pitched in, turning the Studebaker over to Star and propelling the bus on through the dwindling hours of the night when nobody else could keep their eyes open. There were no Mounties, no speed traps, no cops of any kind anywhere. The scenery bared its claws. All anybody wanted was to get there, just that.

  Vanderhoof, Smithers, Cranberry Junction, Johnson’s Crossing, Whitehorse, Marsh Lake, Destruction Bay, Burwash Landing, so many ticks on a map, hello and goodbye. They saw a big rig folded up on itself in Wonowon, a dead moose stretched out in the dirt beside it and a calf the size of a quarter horse running wild with grief. There was a fire burning along the banks of the Donjek River, flames peeling off the tops of the trees and riding up into the night sky and not a human being in sight. They made a pit stop at Haines Junction and inadvertently left Jiminy behind, looping back nearly a hundred miles to find him standing in the rain by the gas pumps, his thumb outstretched and a look of cosmic incapacity bleeding out of his eyes. Out the window the rivers fled in gray streaks, the Takini, the Good-paster, the Tetsa, the Sikanni Chief, the Prophet, the Rabbit and the Blue.

  When they reached Alaska intact, as improbable as that might have seemed when they set out, the bus still rolling over its ten wheels and the Studebaker and Bug flagging on behind, everybody singing, sandwich-fed and hopeful, they pulled off to the side of the road and sat in a circle, hands clasped, while Reba and Tom Krishna led them in a chant. This was in a place called Northway Junction, forty-two miles from the border and the customs agents who wore flannel shirts, sipped coffee out of styrofoam cup
s and waved everybody on through, good morning and welcome to the U.S. of A. Reba’s kids strung up God’s eyes they’d made of yarn and strips of wood and Alfredo drew a big mandala in the dirt with a crooked stick, working back and forth over the pattern like a dowser looking for water until it showed dark against the pale duff of the forest floor. People lit candles and incense and circulated one of Harmony’s big ceramic bongs.

  The air was heavy with the smell of rain-soaked vegetation, of berries run riot and a sun that soaked up the moisture and gave it back again, day after day. It was a smell that brought Marco back to his childhood on the east coast, and he realized that this wasn’t the west anymore, this wasn’t California or Oregon—this was the same sort of environment he’d grown up in, the rolling boreal forest of the northeast extended all the way out here as the globe narrowed toward the pole. He remembered reading Thoreau’s The Maine Woods in college and marveling over the fact that there had been caribou in Maine no more than a century ago, right out there amongst the spruce and hardwoods—and now here he was in a place where there were caribou still, the chain yet unbroken. Staggered by the thought, he wandered up the road a hundred yards, half-expecting to see a herd of them just off the shoulder, but there was nothing to see but the dust of the road flung up into the trees and ladled a quarter inch thick over the weeds. He ambled back to the sound of a truck straining up the grade and took his place in the circle.

  He’d been there no more than a minute or two, accepting the bong from Maya, taking a dutiful hit and passing it on, when Star came out of the clearing behind them with an armful of wildflowers, flushed and smiling; he watched her dance round the group, dispensing flowers, and then she settled in beside him, a lavender spray of fireweed tucked behind each ear, and what was that song that made him grit his teeth every time he heard it—something about going to San Francisco with flowers in your hair? Whatever hack was responsible for that drivel should have seen Star in that moment and he might have learned something about flowers and hair.

  She was in a blue-and-white granny dress that brought out the color of her eyes, and the material strained against her knees and the long smooth slope of her thighs as she eased herself down. He put his arm around her to pull her in close, and as he did—in that exact moment—there was a flurry overhead and a quick-beating outsized bird that might have been an emperor goose or maybe an eagle, shot low through the trees and vanished so quickly nobody could be sure they’d seen it, and maybe none of them had, since just about everybody had their eyes closed. He let out a low exclamation. “Did you see that?” he said.

  She turned to him as if for a kiss, her hair soft against his face. “Yes!” she said. “Yes! Wasn’t it amazing? What was it—a hawk?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s a good omen, don’t you think?”

  Tom Krishna was leading a chant. Everybody clasped hands and she leaned away a moment to take hold of the person on her left—it was Weird George, with chicken bones knotted in his hair and a string of garlic cloves slung round his neck to ward off vampires—and then came back to him and intertwined her fingers with his. “I’m so happy,” she said. “I never knew I could be this happy, never even suspected it. Aren’t you happy too? Couldn’t you just die for it?”

  He told her he was. And he could.

  In Fairbanks, Norm pulled the bus up in front of a diner, and they all filed out, everybody, the whole family, including the dogs, while the goats bleated from their ramshackle pen and Che and Sunshine shot up and down the sidewalk like guided missiles. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. Cars stopped dead in the middle of the street. People came out of stores, the barbershop, town hall. And Drop City, arrayed in all its finery, went into the diner in shifts and ate them out of milk shakes, ice cream, grilled cheese, hamburgers, tuna salad, lettuce, lemon meringue pie and soup of the day, and all of it at triple the price they would have paid in California because every mouthful had to be shipped up from the lower forty-eight. Marco counted out his share and he paid for Star, too, but he sank into his denim jacket and pulled the collar up as if he could lose himself in it—he hadn’t seen a salmon yet. Or a caribou. A bear. Even a rabbit.

  “Don’t worry about the money,” Star told him, tucking the shining ropes of her hair behind her ears. She hadn’t washed it in a week. Nobody had washed, but for the odd splash under the faucet at a truck stop or gas station, and Norm refused to stop for a communal scrub-down or swim or anything else though they passed a thousand glittering streams and rivers and lakes so clear they weren’t even lakes but a kind of subset of the air. Keep it rolling, twenty-four hours a day, that was Norm’s motto.

  “I’m not worried,” Marco said, but he was.

  Star leaned across the table and took hold of his wrists. “This is America up here, that’s the beauty of it. We can get food stamps, unemployment, welfare, just like anyplace else.” Behind her, outside on the street where the sun raked at their sloping brows and kinked their hair and brought the angles of their cheekbones and noses into unblunted relief, three squared-up middle-aged women in flower-print dresses gaped through the window as if they were at the zoo. If he were in a lighter mood, Marco would have waved to them or maybe skewed his tongue in the corner of his mouth and scratched at his armpits, er-er-er. As it was, he just dropped his eyes. “Besides,” she said, lowering her voice, “I have a few bucks put away. For emergencies. And you’re definitely an emergency, you know that?”

  He didn’t know what to say to this, and he was irritated, impatient, tired of the whole dog and pony show. Where were the trees to cut and peel and notch, where was the river, where were the postcard vistas, the fish, the game, nature red in tooth and claw and just crying out to be manipulated and subdued—and enjoyed? What about enjoyment? Where was that on the schedule? He was wrung-out. Depressed. His throat was sore. In his pocket there were sixteen dollars and eighty-seven cents, and when that was gone, there’d be a long precious wait for food stamps and welfare and whatever else the all-giving and Great Society wanted to dole out—and how would the checks even get to them out in the bush? Was there mail delivery up the Yukon? Parcel post? Carrier pigeon? “I’m not worried,” he repeated.

  Across the room, too wrought up even to sit, Norm swayed over the Formica-topped tables, forking up the macaroni and cheese special with a side of Waldorf salad, his eyes sucked back into his head with fatigue, exhorting them to eat up, get with it, mobilize. “A hundred sixty more miles,” he rasped, too depleted to shout. “An inch and a half on the map. That’s all, people—we’re already home. Can you smell it? Smell that river?”

  Nobody could smell anything. Their jaws worked, their smiles glistened. It was a festive moment, presided over by a shell-shocked cook and a dazed waitress in a pleated skirt and a blouse with rodeo figures embroidered on the collar. And so what if Fairbanks was exactly like a half-mile strip torn out of any industrial city anywhere in America, like Detroit or Albany or Akron, like the very burgs they’d all escaped from in the first place? They were here. They were in Alaska. The end was in sight.

  Norm handed his plate to the waitress and people began to move reluctantly from the counter, the tables, the oversubscribed rest room in back. “Drop City North, man,” he said, spreading his arms to address the room at large, which included an Indian woman of indeterminate age frozen behind a paperback book in the far corner and two red-eared locals hunkered over coffee mugs and staring fixedly at the wall behind the counter as if the secrets of the universe were written there in infinitesimally small letters. “Land of the Midnight Sun!” From where he was sitting with Star, Marco felt detached from the whole scene. There was Norm, the reluctant guru, waving his arms in exhortation, pale and flaccid Norm who never wanted to lead anybody, at the end of his tether in a greasy spoon diner in a place that made nowhere sound like a legitimate destination. Marco felt embarrassed for him, embarrassed for them all, and the flare of optimism that had lit him up at Northway Junction was just a cinder now. This was crazy, he wa
s thinking, the whole quixotic business. If they lasted a month it would be a miracle.

  Outside on the street he shared a cigarette with Star, everybody milling around as if this was what they’d come for, to squat in the sun on the dirty sidewalks of a flat-topped frontier town that managed to look both pre- and postindustrial at the same time, sagging log cabins giving way to Quonset huts and abused brick and the rusted-out prefab warehouses that were elbowing their way across the flats like wounded soldiers. Pan and Lydia sat perched on the hood of the Studebaker, the same Top 40 hits you could have heard in Tuscaloosa or Sioux City whining out of the radio in thin threads of recognition, while Verbie and her sister fought over something in a hissing whisper. People kept trooping in and out of the bathroom at the rear of the diner, going back for toothpicks, breath mints, gum—anything to delay getting back on the bus—and then Norm just took Premstar by the hand and mounted the worn steel steps and everybody followed suit. He did a quick head count, the engine turned over with a grating blast of spent diesel, and the bus jerked away from the curb in a black pall of exhaust.

  They cranked through the bleak downtown streets, across the Chena River and out the Steese Highway, replete with overpriced diner food, with grease and sugar and phosphoric acid slithering through their veins like slow death. Cigarettes circulated from hand to hand, the odd joint, a bota bag of wine. Maya and Merry blew kisses and flashed the peace sign to the slumped Indians and stave-eyed drunks who seemed to be the only inhabitants of the place, pavement gave way to potholes and potholes to dirt, and then they were folded up in the country again, the world gone green on them and the final stretch of road lapping at the wheels like a gentle brown sea.