by T. C. Boyle
That was when Lynette turned away from the grill, one hand at her hip, and informed them if they wanted to roughhouse they were going to have to do it over at the Nougat because any more of this sort of thing and they were out the door, all of them. “And I don’t tolerate cussing in here either—you ought to know that, mister, and I’m talking to you, Ronnie. And you better inform your friends too.”
“Come on, man,” Sky Dog was saying, “come on, have a beer and forget it—you know Lester. He’s just fucking with your head is all. It’s a joke, man—can’t you take a joke?”
And then it was all right and somebody found the only two rock and roll sides on the jukebox and the beers went round for everybody, even Verbie, who wound up sitting in Iron Steve’s lap and drinking on his tab while he kneaded her breasts and licked the side of her face like a deer at a salt lick. Sky Dog produced another joint—“We brought a ton of the shit, man, and they almost nailed us at the border too if they were only smart enough to like look inside the spare tire”—and the sky darkened another degree till it was like twilight. Pan didn’t hold any grudges. He was glad to see them, glad to see them all, new faces, new stories—some life, for shitsake—and he drank first to Lester, to put that to rest, and then to Franklin, Sky Dog and Dale. And Harmony, don’t forget Harmony. And Alice too.
He had a wad of money in his pocket, and he hardly knew where it came from. It seemed to him he was a long way from home, any home, and as he contemplated his own sun-enlivened features in the mirror behind the bar he felt his life was only just beginning. Already it had taken him to strange destinations and there were stranger yet still to come. Tom Krishna was always talking about karma, and so was Norm, Verbie, Star—all of them were. What if it was true, what if he’d been a saint in some previous life and now he was set to reap the rewards? That was a thought. He smiled at his image in the mirror and tuned out what Sky Dog was saying to him about the Lincoln—they’d parked it around the corner, up in town, and hadn’t he seen it? Great car. Tended to overheat and it burned oil like a hog, but . . . he liked the way his beard was filling in, and his hair—it was long enough to eat up the collar of his shirt. He was looking hip, absolutely, indubitably, but who was going to know about it up here? Who even cared?
The rain started to pick up and the tapping at the windows became more insistent. He lit one cigarette off another and lost count of how many shots, let alone beers, he’d had. The day seemed to concentrate itself. Verbie went off on a laughing jag, Lester sniggered, somebody slapped him on the back. And when the door swung open and Lydia walked in with her hair hanging wet and full of chaff and twigs and flecks of seed because she’d been on her back in a field somewhere, her soaked-through top layered over her tits and her hand clenched like a sixth grader’s in Joe Bosky’s, he hardly glanced up. It was nothing to him, nothing at all. He was liquid to the bones, he was deep down and pressurized through and through, every square inch of him, a whole new medium to swim through here, and look at the colors of those fish. He fumbled in his pockets—“No, no, Joe, I do, I want to buy you a beer, I insist”—until he came up with a velvety worn five-dollar bill that looked as if it had been scooped out of the river and hung up to dry on a salmon rack. He held it a moment, working it in his fingers, and then laid it on the bar.
23
She was singing to herself, softly, tunelessly, a song she used to like by the Doors, the lyrics as elusive as the melody—Break on through, she kept repeating—break on through to the other side. That was it. That was all she could remember, and if she missed one thing, if there was one thing she could rub a magic lantern and wish for, it would be music. Alfredo and Geoffrey weren’t half bad on the guitar, and the communal sing-alongs were great—righteous, as Ronnie would say—but there was no comparison to flipping on the radio or putting a record on the turntable any time you felt like it and just letting yourself drift away into some other place altogether. She used to do that at her parents’ house, shut up alone in her room while the TV droned in the vacuum below and her father shouted himself hoarse over some seven-foot basketball player and a tiny little hoop, or in the car with her mother nattering on about drapes or the price of veal and a single guitar suddenly emerging from the buzz of static on the radio in a moment of shimmering triumph. Music was like food, like water, like air—that necessary, that essential—and here she was in a break-on-through mood and nothing for it but her own stumbling version caught like lint on her tongue.
You couldn’t have everything, she told herself. Nobody could.
Reba and Merry were working alongside her, in the garden they’d fertilized with goat pellets and fish heads, the garden Norm had told them to forget about because the growing season up here was maybe a hundred days max and thirty of those days were in June, already dead and gone. But what they thought—the women, all the women together—was why not give it a try? Maybe they’d get lucky. Maybe there’d be a late frost this year, maybe the round-the-clock sunlight would magically accelerate the whole process of sprouting, maturing, fruiting. They worked like lunatics to get a patch of ground cleared and planted by the tenth of July, concentrating on cool season vegetables—turnips, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts—but also laying in potatoes, sugar snap peas, zucchini and pumpkin. And pot, of course. The pot plants were already two feet high and rising up so fast you could almost see them growing, and even if they didn’t have a chance to bud there’d at least be the leaves and stems.
What they were doing at the moment was unrolling the big sheets of black plastic Lydia and Harmony had gone into Fairbanks for and Ronnie had brought upriver in the speedboat. The stuff came in rolls a foot in diameter and two and a half feet long, and it was perforated every couple of feet so you could rip off a sheet and use it to line your trash can out in the garage of your split-level home on your quarter-acre plot in a tree-lined suburb. But they didn’t have trash cans out here—or they did, but they were strictly for storing things like lentils, rice and oats out of reach of the mice that seemed to be everywhere—and they were using long carpets of the plastic to insulate the ground around their plants, a trick they’d picked up from Pamela Harder.
And that was something totally unexpected—Pamela. She and Star couldn’t have been more different—she was older, born and raised in Alaska, she didn’t do drugs, or not yet, anyway, and she’d never heard of The Band or Crosby, Stills and Nash, let alone Abbie Hoffman or Gloria Steinem, the Fillmore East, roach clips, mellow yellow, Keith Richards or Mick Jagger even—and yet when Star took a canoe downriver for a visit, she felt as if she were sitting with one of her own sisters, it was that relaxed. They settled in with a pot of tea at the picnic table out by the river while Sess split wood or fed the dogs or went off someplace with his gun, and they just talked, and that was nice, because Pamela was starved for the company, and for Star it was a break from the routine, from the same faces and the same little tics and grievances and the gossip and rumors she’d heard a hundred times already.
“I don’t want you to get the impression that I’m not happy here,” Pamela told her the first time she’d taken the canoe out just to get a little breathing space and then seen the smoke and heard the dogs and thought she might just stop in and say hello, because why not, they were both women, weren’t they? They’d already finished a cup of tea each, and Pamela, nudging a plate of homemade chocolate chip cookies across the table, paused to measure out two cups more. “Because I am. I’m the happiest woman in the world. It’s just that Sess—well, he’s used to being alone out here and sometimes he gets into a yes and no mode, and no matter what I say he just nods his head and gauges whether yes or no or sometimes maybe is what I want to hear. You know what I’m saying?”
The tea was like fuel, so sweet and strong it made your teeth ache. Star gazed off across the river to where the sun illuminated the trunks of the trees like slats in a fence, the dark shapes of birds swarming there like insects, everything placid but for the sharp intermittent rap of Sess’s hammer fr
om somewhere behind the cabin. “Sure,” Star said, coming back to her, to her tanned face and chipped nails and big work-hardened hands stroking the cup, to her eyes that were like rooms you could live in, “and that’s what I mean about Drop City, about having your own brothers and sisters around all the time—especially sisters.”
“Never a dull moment, huh?”
Star opened up her million-kilowatt smile. “Oh, no, never.”
“You don’t get on each other’s nerves?”
“We do, of course we do. That’s part of it. Norm says the biggest lesson is in just learning to think alike, to anticipate, to give, you know what I mean? And the flow. That’s important too. To feel the flow and know you’re not just a me anymore.”
“Is that it, then? Is that what you’re trying to accomplish—kill off your ego?”
The question had taken her by surprise. She’d never really thought in terms of a clear-cut goal you could reduce to a single phrase or really even explain to anybody—she was drifting, like anybody else, hoping to break on through if she was lucky. She set down the cup and spun a globe out of her hands. “It’s the earth, I guess,” she said. “Nature. You know, rejecting material things and living close to nature so you can feel the heartbeat of God—or whatever you want to call that force, Gaia, the oneness of being, nirvana. And my brothers and sisters are part of it—they’re my support group and I’m theirs. I mean, just look at me—I’m sitting here by this out-of-sight river in this amazing place having a cup of tea with you, and that’s something I never would have been able to do on my own.”
“But the hair,” Pamela said. “What about the hair and the weird clothes and all that? And the drugs? What does that have to do with getting back to nature?” She paused to light a cigarette, store-bought, out of the shiny cardboard box. Star watched her shake out the match and drop it to the dirt under the table. “You know what getting back to nature to me is? Just this, living day to day, working hard and taking what the land gives you, and that has nothing to do with face paint or LSD or bell-bottom pants . . .”
Star shrugged. “I don’t know, it’s hard to explain. It’s just hip, that’s all.”
Pamela worked the cup between her hands, and it was her turn to gaze out over the river. She sighed. “It takes all kinds, I guess.”
Star was going to agree, but she wasn’t sure if the comment was a not-so-subtle dig, as in It takes all kinds and you people are a bunch of greasy freaks and dopeheads who ought to pack up your beads and your sandals and head back to California before the going gets rough. And then she was going to say, And what kind are you? but in that moment it dawned on her that Pamela was just like them. She wasn’t buying into the plastic society, she wasn’t going to live the nine-to-five life in a little pink house in the suburbs and find her meat all wrapped up in plastic for her at the supermarket. She’d done that—worked in an office in downtown Anchorage—and she’d dropped out just as surely as anybody at Drop City had. She was pretty, she was smart, she knew what she wanted—she was confident, that’s what she was, confident in a way Star had never been, and that was something to aim for. The thought came to her: What if there were no Marco, no Norm, no Drop City? Would she be able to go out into the world and survive? Or was she just another chick newly hatched from the egg, all fluffy and warm and helpless?
But here she was out under the open sky nailing down strips of black plastic to feed the heat of the sun to the garden, working just as hard as any cat on the place, and you could hardly call that helpless. And when she was done with that she was going to haul buckets of water up from the river and dump them at the base of each plant, and when that was finished she was going to milk the goats, whip up a batch of fried rice and teriyaki salmon for lunch and pick a bucket of highbush cranberries and put them up in wax-sealed jars with a scoop of white cane sugar out of the ten-pound bag and two jiggers of brandy each, and when that was done, well, she’d see what the rest of the day would bring.
Merry was saying, “No way. Uh-uh.”
Reba drove a sliver of wood through the plastic to hold it in place. “Jiminy said you pushed him. Everybody said so—Bill, Verbie, even Weird George. And Pan. I hear Pan was involved too.”
“Well, if I did, I didn’t mean to. I really like him, you know that. But sometimes he gets so fucking, I don’t know, stubborn, like he’s six instead of nineteen, and as far as Ronnie’s concerned, yes, I did go up to his tent. And we got high. That’s all. Not that it’s anybody’s business.”
“What about Jiminy’s? Isn’t it his business? Didn’t I hear you say you were going to try to make that work, no more sleeping around and da-da-da?”
Merry looked up from the other end of the sheet, disrupting the flow of it, and Star could see the light pooling like oil in the dark folds of plastic. At the far end of the garden was the original cabin, the one Norm’s uncle had left behind, the logs gone gray with age, trees growing out of the sod of the roof. Beyond that was the new meeting hall, square all around and roofless still, the logs yellow as an animal’s teeth where the bark had been stripped away, and a dozen people clambering all over it with saws, axes, hammers. Star could hear the muffled thump of metal on wood, the shriek of the chainsaw, the occasional curse. “I don’t know,” Merry said, “I may be mistaken, but wasn’t that you I saw coming out of the bushes with Deuce two nights ago? Upriver? Late? With a smile on your face?”
“We were looking for blueberries, that’s all. Because if you think—”
Star could see she was lying, not that it made any difference. If Reba wanted to be a hypocrite, that was her business. And Alfredo’s. She smoothed plastic. Hammered in a stake. She had a view of the hacked-over field behind them, stumps bleeding all the way down to the river, and she saw Che coming before she heard him, and they all three heard him at once, his voice raised in an unholy shriek. “Uh, Reba, I think Che needs you,” she was saying, and there he was, livid protoplasm, upright and outraged, coming across the field from the river holding one limp hand out before him and wailing, Sunshine trailing behind.
Between gasps he shouted out her name—“Reba! Reba!”—because even in his extremity, whatever it was, he knew enough not to call her Mom like some mind-controlled zombie kid out of a suburban development. He was a brat, undernourished, unschooled, stoned before his time, but at least he knew that much. Reba got to her feet, her face gone stiff. She was wearing a beige-and-yellow western shirt with embroidered pockets, and she took a minute to dig her cigarettes out of one pocket and a lighter from the other, and even as Che came running to her to bury his screaming face in the V of her conjoined thighs she was exhaling the first blue puff of smoke. “What is it now?” she demanded.
He couldn’t tell her. He just stamped his feet till the plastic sagged and the stakes came up and she reached down and took him in her arms while Sunshine looked on with her hands on her hips and rehearsed her own version of events. Naked, browned, pocked with the angry red eruptions of a hundred bug bites, she was the original wild child, suckled by wolves, fed on honey-dew and the milk of paradise. Her hair was kinked, tangled, sun-bleached. Her eyes were watchful. “I did not,” she insisted as her brother whined his accusations into their mother’s crotch. “He did. He was the one.”
There was a shout in the distance. Star ignored it. They were busy here, couldn’t people see that? There was work to be done and she had no patience for screaming children or the catastrophe of the hour—and they were regular as clockwork, one per hour, on the hour—and couldn’t somebody find the time to sit down and read these kids a book? Was that too much to ask?
But the shouts were furious now, mounting—“Star!” they were calling, “Star!”—and she jerked her head round to see a knot of people running toward the goat pen with the two yellow dogs out front in a surge of kneading yellow muscle. Reba threw down her cigarette. Che’s sobs died in his throat, an ache, a quiver, then nothing. Star rose to her feet at the same time Merry did, the black plastic rippling like
a dark sea beneath them.
The goats were in a rudimentary pen made of eight-foot lengths of birch and cottonwood lashed to posts five feet high, a pen they planned to roof and convert to a barn for winter—and there’d been a whole storm of debate about that, because nobody really featured the goats stinking and bleating and dropping their pellets inside the cabins, yet they didn’t really want to put the work in when there were infinitely more important things to do, like erect cabins, install stoves and split a hundred cords of wood so they wouldn’t freeze their fucking asses off come winter. Star understood what the priorities were, but she didn’t care. She’d gone ahead and built the pen herself, with a hatchet and a coil of old clothesline, and the tent she and Marco shared was pitched up against it so she could keep track of her charges in the gray wash of night.
The dogs were barking now, panting breathless gasps of assertion and rage that rang out over the river and rebounded again, and one of them—it was Frodo—was trying to clamber up into the pen. She dropped the hammer at her feet and took off running.
Everybody was shouting, crowding in against the rail as if they were at a rodeo, Frodo’s hind end perched there statue-like for an instant and then disappearing even as Freak scrabbled at the crossbars and fell back. What it was, she couldn’t see, the goats bleating—screaming, screaming in a key she’d never before heard or imagined—and a blur of motion visible through the gaps, now here, now there, torn from one side of the pen to the other. And when she was there, everything in an uproar, Jiminy bolting for Pan’s tent to get a gun and Marco and Alfredo straddling the rail with clubs in their hands, she still couldn’t apprehend what she was seeing, as if there were some essential gap between her eyes and the part of her brain that processed visual information. “It’s a bear!” somebody shouted.