Drop City

by T. C. Boyle

  Sess gave him his grin back, then bent at the knee so Pamela could help him on with his pack. “Yeah, but Lynette—you’ve got to forgive her. She’s new here. She’s from Seattle. I guess she’s just got a hair up her ass.”

  “It was a gas,” the nephew said, rooting in his beard as if he’d lost something there. “What’d we play it—like fifty times? But listen, I was serious about the invitation—the chicks’ll have something cooked up inside the hour, I guarantee it, and well, you know, it’s been a long hard road and all that and we have just got to get down and raise some pure celebratory hell tonight. Nothing fancy—lentil soup, rice and vegetables. And wine. Sweet red wine.” He took another pull at his beer and looked out into the backlit trees.

  “You’re camping out tonight?”

  The nephew shrugged. His shoulders were bare under the straps of the coveralls, hairy, furred with mosquitoes. “Sure. Why not?”

  “But Roy’s place—” He faltered. How could he begin to convey the complexity of the arrangement, the untenanted cabin that might sleep five or six at most, the treachery of the Yukon with its load of silt that would pack your clothes and drag you down in a heartbeat should you give it a chance, the lack of basic comforts? What were all these people planning to eat? Where were they going to get their pink lipstick and face paint and their jugs of sweet wine and their uppers and their downers and their pot and all the rest of it? And did he really want neighbors, thirty and more of them set down on his river within shouting distance of his trapline?

  “It’s pretty far,” Pamela put in. “Three hours, at least, by canoe.”

  The nephew lifted his beard and let it drop. His hand was like a big soft fluttering moth as he brought the beer to his lips. “Oh, I’m apprised, I’m apprised,” he said. “I know the place, though it’s been something like—Jesus—twenty years? Oh, man, twenty years, can you believe it?” He began to laugh to himself, the pale shoulders bunching and heaving beneath a layer of fat, and the strap of the coveralls slipped down his right shoulder to reveal a tattoo in three colors—a cartoon character, and which one was it? Disney. A cross-legged fawn with outsized eyes. An image rushed up out of Sess’s childhood, his mother in a pink dress and his sister with her fist sunk deep in a box of extra-buttered popcorn: Bambi. The man had Bambi tattooed on his shoulder. Sess had never seen anything like it. He’d seen anchors, daggers, death’s heads, seen hearts transfixed with arrows and dripping blood, the cheap blue fading appellations of wives, sweethearts and ex-lovers, an eagle with a fish in its claws—but

  Bambi?

  “I’m no greenhorn,” the nephew was saying, “and I can tell you I know at least a modicum of what I’m talking about when it comes to this country, because I lived three summers and the better part of two winters up here with my uncle when I was a kid—which is not to say I haven’t got a lot to learn, man, you know? Because I do. But we got three canoes up on top of that bus”—Sess turned his head to contemplate the big yellow box on wheels and found himself staring into the boneheaded, slit-eyed faces of a pair of goats that could have been the templates for cartoon figures themselves—“and I made a deal with this bush pilot—Joe Bosky, you know him?—to ferry three loads of people and supplies upriver, including like tools and the basics because all these people, all my brothers and sisters, need to like get their heads together, you know what I mean? I mean, they think it’s all going to be milk and honey, but I know better—”

  The nephew went on for a while with his speech, and Sess and Pamela stood there as if they were in a lecture hall, except that they were swatting at mosquitoes and pulling at their beers while the shattered, tinkling music rained down on them and the skinny blonde with the pink lipstick came up and draped her arms over the nephew’s back and held on as if he were a buoy in a swirl of darkening waters. “So what I was thinking,” the nephew said, in what seemed a valedictory sort of way, “was we’d just pull up someplace by the river and camp for tonight and the next couple of days maybe—”

  Pull up where? Sess was going to ask, because there wasn’t a square foot of property anywhere along the riverfront that wasn’t already spoken for. You couldn’t buy, beg or steal a lot in Boynton since the Feds started in with the Native Claims Settlement business, and if you set foot outside the town line you were on government property—and Wetzel Setzler, the local shill for the Forest Service, could get pretty squirrelly about that. Plus, a bus full of longhairs in mufti wasn’t likely to provoke a warm response from whoever they chose to trespass on, and they were already tied up with Joe Bosky, the worst kind of river scum, and that was another strike against them—no matter how you sketched it, it wasn’t a pretty picture.

  The nephew sucked beer and grinned at him. He wore a halo of insects round the crown of thorns that was his greasy unbarbered hair and he looked so helpless he might have been newly hatched from the egg. “What do you say, brother?” he wanted to know. “You with us?”

  Sess looked to Pamela. She was giving him the let’s-go-home-and-pack-the-canoe look, and she was right: they had to get upriver, had to split and dry salmon if they were going to have fish come winter, had to tend the vegetables, haul wood, erect the new room and fit it out with a stove—and little tables, don’t forget the little tables. Still, Sess reminded himself, this was Roy Sender’s flesh and blood standing here in his sandals and beard like one of the lost prophets, and that had to mean something, if only for Roy’s sake. Before he could think, and with his voice lubricated with all that beer and the sweet hippie wine that rode its own currents and seemed to settle flush in his ringing ears, Sess heard himself say, “Why don’t you just camp at my place?”

  PART FIVE

  DROP CITY NORTH

  Hey, Bungalow Bill, What did you kill?

  —John Lennon–Paul McCartney,

  “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”

  22

  Jiminy was limping around with his arm in a dirty sling, looking as if a tree had fallen on him, but a tree hadn’t fallen on him and the sling consisted of two strips of frayed cotton that used to be the sleeves of somebody’s college sweatshirt, because who needed sleeves when the sun was shining twenty-four hours a day? Was it broken? No. You sure? Oh, yeah, man, yeah—I’d know if it was broken. So what’s the problem, then? A sprain, that’s all, man. Just a sprain.

  Not that Pan would accuse him of shirking, what with every able-bodied cat within shouting distance taking down six thousand trees a day and Alfredo all over the place barking out orders like the ass-faced little prick of an assistant principal they’d all had to sweat in junior high, and Norm, laid-back Norm, erupting like a volcano every thirty-seven seconds. If he’d sprained his arm or shoulder or elbow or whatever it was and sported a purple bruise that was like a birthmark creeping out from under the ragged hem of his cutoff jeans, that was understandable. Especially since Ronnie had been there when it happened.

  Everybody had just got done with the evening mush (brown rice with canned peas and the odd greasy chunk of Thirtymile salmon, and praise the lord for Spiracha hot sauce in the economy-sized bottle), and a bunch of people were fooling around with the aluminum boat Norm’s uncle had left behind when he decamped for Seattle. (And that was strange beyond comprehension: he’d left everything behind, from his boots and folded-up piss-stained old man’s underwear to his pornography collection to the .30-30 Winchester lever-action rifle and Smith & Wesson pistol with the worn black leather leg holster hanging from a hook on the wall, though Norm swore he was an old man with cancer of the prostate and had no intention of coming back. Ever. He’d even left the stove all primed to go, with paper, kindling and matches ready to hand. Why would he do that? Why would he leave all this good and valuable stuff behind, including the two bowie knives that made Marco’s Sears Roebuck version look like something the Boy Scouts handed out for whittling exercise? It was the way of the country, that was why—or so Norm claimed. “You leave the cabin stocked and ready to go for the next man through, not s
o much as a matter of courtesy, you understand, but as a matter of survival. Plus, what does he need with a bowie knife in a nursing home anyway?” Okay. Yeah. Sure. Point taken.)

  Jiminy wanted in the boat. So did Merry. Mendocino Bill, the whole big mush-warmed sack of him, sat in the stern, revving the outboard engine, Verbie, Angela and Maya were squeezed into the middle seat, and Weird George was in the bow. “Room for one more,” Bill announced, sucking back the thin blue exhaust of the engine. Everybody had humped it all day, taking down trees and whacking off the branches, kicking and stumbling through the brush in a blitzkrieg of mosquitoes and hard-earned sweat, and now they’d passed round the smokes and the pot and the last of the sticky red wine, the pale green half-gallon jugs already filled back up with Tom Krishna’s gaseous home-brewed beer that looked like motor oil drippings and didn’t taste a whole lot better. The dogs were yapping, the goats were bleating, people were perched on stumps with guitars and books and strings of electric blue beads that froze and shattered the light as they threaded them in a dance of sunlit fingers. Merry said, “Fuck you, Jiminy, I was here first,” and Jiminy said, “No, you go next—it’s my turn,” and things just escalated from there.

  For his part, Pan didn’t much care who went for a boat ride and who didn’t. He was feeling good, feeling beyond compare, with his head primed on a sliver of the chunk of blond Lebanese hash he’d sold to Alfredo for three times what he’d paid for it and the wine working its sweet slippery magic on the wad of mush in his gut. He was tanned like a macaroon. His muscles were hard from paddling, chopping, lifting, from hauling the net full of salmon out of the current and flinging the three-inch silver lure with the wire leader out into the deep cuts under the bank for pike—great northerns. He couldn’t believe it. Great northern pike. He’d caught something like twelve or thirteen of them in his spare time, no effort at all, just like in the Field and Stream and Outdoor Life articles he’d feasted on as a kid, and so what if they were ninety percent bone? The chicks made fish soup, fish stew, fish porridge and pike à la meunière. And for the meat eaters—and their party was growing by the day—he’d brought back ducks, geese, ptarmigans, even two lean black dripping muskrats, which nobody would eat but him and Norm, the meat dark and greasy, with a subtle aftertaste of dead insects and rotting twigs. As for the boat, he had priority there anytime he wanted it—Dibs, Pan has dibs on it, that’s what Alfredo said at one of the eternal meetings they seemed to have every other day now—because he was the designated fisher and hunter while Marco and Bill and Norm and the rest had become full-time architects and structural engineers, at least for the time being.

  “Just give me this,” Merry’s voice rose up, and she was ready to sob, the grief congesting her diction and dulling her consonants like a head cold, “that’s all I ask, and you are one selfish little prick, you know that? Huh, Jiminy? You are. You don’t care about me. You only care about yourself.”

  Ronnie was sitting on the bank in a spray of brittle wildflowers and coarse-grained sand that held the heat of the sun and gave it back to his flanks and the hard bare work-worn soles of his feet. He was feeling very calm, feeling the peace that comes of getting stoned after a hard day’s work outdoors and a double helping of salmon mush, and he watched Jiminy dance round Merry as if he were Zeus looking down from Olympus. The boat bobbed in the water. The current thrummed. The two of them jockeyed for position on the vagrant log the camp used as a kind of all-purpose pier and canoe-minder. Mendocino Bill’s voice rose up over the suck and sputter of the engine: “Come on, already, for Christ’s sake—you’d think you were six-year-olds, both of you.”

  Then Jiminy shoved her and she shoved him back and suddenly he was waving his arms and looking small-faced and embarrassed and in the next moment he lost his footing and landed awkwardly in the bottom of the boat, spilling everybody into the Thirtymile. The chicks shot up out of the current as if they’d been launched—because it was cold beyond anything anybody in California had ever even dreamed of—and Mendocino Bill choked and sputtered and came up cursing with his beard rinsed and his hair showing bald on top while Weird George churned up water like a human eggbeater and fought for purchase on the slick and whirling stones of the riverbed. Merry ducked away from the splash, her bare toes digging in like fingers as the log rose and fell, and then she turned her back, made a delicate little leap ashore and stalked away through the weeds. She didn’t offer any apologies.

  But Jiminy. He came out of the water dragging his arm, and after the initial shock he had to go find Reba and have her bind it up and tell him it probably wasn’t broken. And that was a trial, because Reba didn’t know her humerus from her femur, but she was Drop City’s resident medical authority by virtue of the fact that she’d dropped out of nursing school midway through her first year and could toss around terms like speculum and tongue depressor with the best of them. She always broke out her little black leather medical kit when anybody came down with anything, a kit Pan had taken it upon himself to look into one day when she was downriver, in the hope of turning up something interesting that she might not miss—morphine, maybe. Or Demerol. But it was just the basics: a needle and thread for suturing, Mercurochrome, gauze, the handy rectal thermometer. So Jiminy wasn’t shirking, not a bit. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise anybody if his arm was broken in about eighteen places after Reba had got done with it.

  Actually, Ronnie was more concerned with the outboard engine, whether it would start with saturated spark plugs and water in the fuel line and what to do about it if it wouldn’t. Jiminy would heal, but that Johnson outboard was the key to Drop City’s existence, the mechanical mule that carried every little thing upriver on its back. Still, he didn’t actually get up out of the sand till the boat was righted and everybody had cursed out the principals as thoroughly as they could under the circumstances, and when he did push himself up it wasn’t to fuss over a bundle of wet wiring and a starter cord that produced nothing but a nagging cough while Bill bored him into an upright grave with reminiscences of other outboard motors he’d known and loved and Tom Krishna quoted something apposite from The Bhagavad Gita. No, he found himself sauntering after Merry, with the idea of calming her down and maybe just insinuating himself a little because Star was off on her own trip with Marco, living in a dome tent out on the slope beyond the half-finished cabin that was going to be Drop City’s new meeting hall, and Lydia was back in Boynton with a couple of the others, sleeping in the bus and taking care of things on that end, and beyond that the pickings got pretty slim. Maya, no beauty to begin with, had bloated up on a steady diet of mush, and some sort of acne or scale was eating her face up (dishwater face, that was the clinical term for it, as if she’d been scrubbing the pots and pans with her cheekbones instead of her hands), Premstar was property of Norm, at least for the time being, and Verbie and her sister were strictly for emergencies only as far as Pan was concerned. And what was that song—“Make an Ugly Woman Your Wife”? Uh-uh. No way. Not in Pan’s scheme of things.

  (As for the other surviving Drop City chicks—Louise, Dunphy, Erika and Rain—they just weren’t his type in any way, shape or form, members of the long-faced chant-before-breakfast-lunch-and-dinner school, hairy-legged, sour-smelling, secret as thieves unless the subject of women’s lib came up, and then they were onto it like Verbie. Plus, they were all spoken for, and the only passable-looking one of the group—Erika—lived in a tent with two guys, Weird George and Geoffrey, and they all three balled one another in combinations Pan might have found fascinating in the abstract, but you could forget about getting up close with anything like that.)

  He found Merry out behind the original cabin, the one Norm’s uncle had built all on his own with an axe, a crosscut saw and two hard-knuckled hands. She was sitting in the dirt, her legs splayed, hair curtaining her face. The furor had died down, nothing lost, nobody hurt but Jiminy—and he had it coming anyway. The peeled yellow logs of the meeting hall shone in the sun, the goats bleated and strained at their t
ethers. He eased down beside her and put an arm round her shoulders. “Hey,” he murmured.

  Fine hairs glistened on her shins. She smelled of woodsmoke, of mush, of the river. “Jiminy can be such a prick sometimes,” she said.

  He wanted to agree—as in, Yeah, he is a prick, so why not get it on with me instead?—but held his peace. He pulled her in tighter, began to stroke her hair. “Come on,” he said, “it’s no big deal—everybody’s a little tense, that’s all. Once we get the buildings up, once we get things together, I mean, and have time to catch our breath—” He was talking horseshit and he knew it, but horseshit was what was called for under the circumstances—what was he going to use, logic?

  She swept the hair away from her face and gave him a sidelong look. “You don’t seem so tense. In fact, I’d say just the opposite.”

  And now the grin, aw shucks, and yep, you got me. “Blond Lebanese,” he said, “but I haven’t got enough for the whole crew and you know how they’re onto the smell of it like hounds—Jiminy, in particular, and Tom Krishna . . .” He paused to let that sink in, incontrovertible reasoning, and then tucked the most copacetic suggestion in the world under the lid of the moment: “You want to maybe just slip into my tent a minute?”

  The tent was Creamsicle orange, a one-man affair somebody had left in one of the overstuffed closets at Drop City. Pan had taken possession of it when they unloaded the bus because at the moment he didn’t need anything more by way of space since he wasn’t really sleeping with anybody—plus, it gave him a little privacy and a place to stash his own things. He’d pitched it two hundred yards away from the main cabin, on a sandbar upriver, and no, he wasn’t worried about bears, grizzly or otherwise, because he slept with the Springfield rifle he’d shot the deer with back in California and the Winchester Norm’s uncle had left behind, not to mention the .44 magnum pistol he kept strapped at his side at all times. Just let a bear poke his head in the tent. Just let him.