Drop City

by T. C. Boyle

  But Ronnie didn’t reply—he was off someplace else, suddenly transported back to last Halloween, to Peterskill, on the banks of the housebroken Hudson, a place where there were stores and bars and clubs and head shops and where you could get any variety of dope you wanted, day or night, clothes, records, steaks, Chinese, Italian, Dunkin’ Donuts, Kentucky Fried, the place where he’d wrecked his first car, the place where his parents lived. And his friends. His buddies. The people he’d grown up with. He felt so nostalgic suddenly, so lost and cored out, he had to pound his breastbone to keep from vomiting up the moose chile they’d been eating out of the pot the last three days. A ball of acid rose in his throat, burning like exile, and it brought the tears to his eyes. He and Star had really done it up that night. They were flaming, triumphant. Two majorly righteous parties, and then they went to a club with a live band, and she’d been dressed as a cat, in tights and a velvet shell that clung to her in all the right places, painted-on whiskers he’d licked off of her by the time the night was out, and she wasn’t the only one—all the chicks were dressed up like sex kittens or foxes or vampires, showing off their cleavage and their legs and everything else. He wondered if anybody had ever done a study of that, some sociologist, because the chicks invariably dressed up as everybody’s sexual fantasy, while the men, the cats, always went for the absurd. And what did that mean? The men could hang loose, get stoned, party, but the women—the females, the chicks—they wanted to be salivated over, they wanted worship.

  Ronnie had gone as Pan, with a pair of leftover devil’s horns painted forest brown, pipes he’d found under a pile of crap in the music room in their old high school and the hairy-hocked leggings his mother had made for him on the sewing machine, and she was handy that way, his mother. And it wasn’t that absurd, not at all. More cool, really. People had come up out of nowhere to compliment him, and if he hadn’t exactly won the prize for best costume—some asshole in a Spiro Agnew mask got first prize, a real authentic three-foot-tall hookah the club owner, Alex, had brought back from Marrakech—he didn’t care. That was the night he’d left Ronnie behind, the night he’d become Pan for good. The memory of it pushed him up off the bed and he began shoving the felt soles down into his boots, doubling his socks, lacing the boots, layering on clothes.

  “Where you going, man?” Sky Dog wanted to know. “Trick or treating?”

  It was eight miles to Boynton, walkable now on the highway of the river, and four to Drop City. Two times four equals eight, that was what he was thinking, and out in the dark, in the cold, his breath going like a steam engine, Pan turned to his right when he hit the river, heading north and east, thinking of Star. They’d be celebrating at Drop City tonight, no doubt about it—Halloween, the feast of the freaks, was in the air. Norm would do it up. If anybody would, Norm would. He heard the cold rush and snap of his footsteps as he compacted the thin layer of snow over the ice, one foot in front of the other, four miles no more than a stroll in the park and he didn’t feel cold at all, not in the least.

  Sess Harder had once unraveled the mystery of the distances for him, in the days when he could show his face around Sess’s cabin, that is—which he no longer could since he’d burned Pamela for the five bucks, but hey, tant pis, as the French say. His boots crunched snow. The wind fell away and the moon was there. What he couldn’t understand was why the river was called the Thirtymile—shouldn’t it have been thirty miles from Boynton then and not less than half of that? Sess had been busy, always busy, mending the gangline for his dogteam, and Pan had hung over him with a neighborly beer in one hand and a smoke in the other while the mathematics played out in Sess’s deep, unhurried tones. “The distance is measured from Dawson, in the Yukon Territory,” he told him. “Originally, what happened was people floated downriver from there, and so you’ve got your Fortymile River south and east of Eagle and your Seventymile just north of it, and what happened, I guess, is somebody didn’t want to call a river the Hundredmile—too daunting a number—so they just called this one the Thirtymile, because it’s thirty miles, give or take, down from the Seventymile. Does that make sense?”

  No, it didn’t. It hadn’t. They should have named it the Clothesline or the Dinosaur or the Punctured Pineapple, or maybe they should rename it after Jimi Hendrix’s mother—sure, and he’d have to get up a petition as soon as he got back to civilization. He went on that way, a string of increasingly ridiculous names running through his head, the silence and the vastness of the river and the hills spiked with shadow and the moon, the moon, gone down deep in him—Halloween, how about that?—and he’d never felt so connected in his life. He bore right again at the mouth of the Thirtymile, no more concerned than he would have been turning the corner from MacDougal onto Bleecker, and when he came to Sess’s cabin, to the glow of it floating against the backdrop of the trees and the smell of the woodsmoke drifting on the air like a promise, he kept on walking.

  By some miracle, Sess’s dogs didn’t sound the alarm. If he concentrated on distinguishing one shadow from another, he could make out the line of doghouses thrust back against the ankles of the trees, but there was no movement there, no faint rustle of steel-link chain or whisper of ruffled fur, no sound at all but for the rush of the wind in his ears. The dogs were asleep, curled up tail to nose, breathing easy in the fastness of the night. They dwelled here, they belonged, and so did he, so did Pan. He kept on walking, and maybe his toes were a bit numb—his boots weren’t the best—but it was nothing he hadn’t experienced before, back in New York. Colder, maybe, but not by much. He could remember five and ten below when he was a kid, ice forming in a grid of overlapping crystalline stars on the inside panes, his father kicking in the driver’s side door of the Studebaker because it wouldn’t start no matter how he goosed it and the sweet metallic smell of the ether he sprayed down the carburetor in the vain hope it would come to life. His father. The image of him held for just the fraction of a second, then slipped away, a fading reel in the projector of his mind. He was walking. He walked the immensity. Thought nothing. The moon—the harvest moon, the Halloween moon—lit the way.

  Drop City came to him first as the scent of smoke infusing the night air, then as a cluster of lights so pale and inadequate he couldn’t be sure he was seeing them, not until he mounted the bank and came up the rise to where the five cabins described a crescent above the river. Four of them were roofed and lit from within, sailing high on the sea of the night, but the fifth was just a collection of notched logs, waist-high at best, and he thought of Mendocino Bill and Alfredo and their big hyped-up plans, make way and look out, here comes the city on the hill, the metropolis, Chichén Itzá and Taj Mahal all rolled into one. Lift that plank, man, push that saw. Still, he had to admit they’d got farther than he’d expected, because those were stovepipes projecting out from under the roofs, and that was real, honest, actual smoke trailing away on the wind, and where there was smoke there was fire and where there was fire there was warmth. He was right there in the yard—Ronnie, Pan, come back to say hello on a night like no other—and he hesitated.

  He hadn’t been near the place since the end of August, and though he’d run into a couple of the brothers and sisters at the Three Pup and the Nougat and Setzler’s store, he really didn’t know how people felt about the whole thing, whether he’d be welcome or not, forgive and forget and let’s move on. Especially Norm. Norm he did not want to see, or Alfredo either. He was standing there in the cold of the moon, half-decided to slink away back to Woodchopper, and fuck Drop City, if they didn’t want him he didn’t want them, when something in the atmosphere shifted and he heard laughter, conviviality, somebody’s voice raised over somebody else’s and then a cascade of hoots and catcalls washing over both of them. He held his breath. Concentrated. And then he heard the music. There was music coming from the meeting hall, the thin attenuated whine of steel strings and the repetitive thump of drums. He crossed the yard, put his head down, and pushed through the door.

  It wasn’t
what he’d expected. People were gathered there, all right, eight, ten, eleven faces staring up at him from the gloom of candlelight, but nobody was dancing or even talking, and nobody was laughing now. It was Buffalo Springfield on the stereo, Neil Young’s stretched-wire voice working through “I Am a Child” in a way that made it seem like a dirge, the whole close stuffed-up pot-reeking room gone sad with it till Ronnie wanted to take hold of somebody by the arm and say, Who died? Star wasn’t there, Marco wasn’t there, Norm either. Or Merry. But Freak was there, and Freak at least had a greeting for him, whacking the stump of his tail and inserting a cold nose into the cup of Pan’s ungloved hand, and didn’t anybody recognize him, didn’t anybody give a shit one way or the other? “Hey, man,” he said, as faces picked themselves out of the shadows, “what’s happening?”

  Mendocino Bill broke the spell. He rose up off a crude bench by the stove, mountainous in a cableknit sweater his mother or his ex–old lady must have sent him, lifting his feet with the exaggerated care of a deep-sea diver wending his way between the killer octopus and the giant man-eating clam. “Holy shit,” he said, “look who it is. Hey, people,” rotating his head to take in the loft and the thermal-socked feet aggregated there like some sort of fungal excrescence, “it’s Pan.”

  Murmurs now. Neil Young went on killing the song, killing everything, people rising like zombies out of the murk, Geoffrey, Weird George, Dunphy, Erika, Deuce, all of them squinting at him as if he were six miles away. Was it Pan, was it really Pan? But where—? We thought—? Holy shit! It’s Pan. And there didn’t seem to be any hard feelings now, soul shakes all around, and here, man, have a hit of this, and he did, he did, but where was everybody else? This was Halloween, wasn’t it—or had he miscounted the days?

  Angela was there, Maya, Creamola, Foster. “We’re hip,” Bill was saying, and he backed up against the stove to warm the big palpitating lump of his backside, “it’s just that nobody really, I mean, we just didn’t get it together. Plus the pumpkins were like the size of grapefruits when that first frost hit—”

  “Snow, you mean,” Creamola said.

  “We carved a zucchini,” Angela put in, and there it was on the windowsill, a collapsed green loaf of a thing with a couple of holes poked in it and a pathetic flicker of candlelight emanating from somewhere in its pulpy depths. “And Reba had Che and Sunshine dressed up like devils—they made the rounds, trick or treating here, and then at Star’s cabin and the one I’m sharing with like Erika and George and Geoffrey.”

  He saw now that a few people—the chicks—had made up their eyes and spattered a little glitter on their cheeks and foreheads and Weird George had maybe freshened up his bones and garlic, but it was a far cry from any kind of celebration Pan could have conceived of. But what was happening with him? With Dale and Sky? Were they coming too?

  “No,” he said, “they’re playing cards,” and even as he said it he knew how lame it sounded. The fact was that Dale and Sky Dog were also personae non gratae here, ushered out by Marco and Alfredo after a couple of halcyon days of screwing, drinking and lying comatose in the sun, and they’d made it clear that Joe Bosky was unwelcome too—Pull Your Weight or Bail, PYWOB, that seemed to be the new motto of Drop City, and you could forget LATWIDNO. “But where’s everybody else?” he asked, at the center of a wheel of faces.

  Angela said: “Lydia’s back.”

  Lydia. He felt his groin stir. “Where is she?”

  “At Star and Merry’s. They’re the only ones that would take her in.”

  And he learned this: Lydia, flush with cash and laden down with scotch, chocolate bonbons and cigarettes, had blown in a week ago on the back end of some wild hair’s souped-up snow machine, replete with stories about the flesh trade in Fairbanks and the temperament of the Alaskan male, and she’d burned through Drop City like a wildfire. The party lasted two days—people just wanted distraction, anything, anybody, because you could only split so much wood, chow down so many bowls of mush and play Monopoly till you wore grooves in the board before you started wondering Is this all there is? It wasn’t even winter yet and already hard times had descended on Drop City. Factions were forming. People were terminally bored, suicidal. They had no snow machine, no way of getting out, unless they wanted to walk the twelve miles to Boynton in subzero temperatures, and Boynton itself was locked in. And what about the wild hair and his snow machine? Rain had slept with him—prostituted herself, fucked him up, down and sideways—and he’d taken her out with him in a trailing blast of exhaust and a flapping curtain of snow. She was probably back in San Francisco by now.

  Pan just stared at them. The joint came round and he took it. There was beer—Tom Krishna’s homebrew, and it wasn’t half bad. “Hey,” he said, sipping from the jar, “Tom’s improving. He gets out of here he ought to go directly to Budweiser, what do you think?” Nobody laughed. People fell back into the shadows. He settled in and just felt things for a while, and when he got comfortable behind it he pushed himself up and changed the record, a little rock and roll to shake things up, Excuse me while I kiss the sky. But Bill, the big overblown Freedom bus–riding sack of suet and hair, Mr. Downer, said they had to conserve the battery and switched the thing off, and then he was back out in the cold, thinking Star, thinking Merry, thinking Lydia.

  The thin crust of snow cracked under his boots like gunfire. It was colder now, the moon haunting the sky and the stars scattered in its wake like pustules on a broken-out face, and he had no illusions about Star, or Merry either—but Lydia, at least Lydia was mad for him, always had been, right from the first. She wasn’t his type, of course, but it had been a long dry stretch living like a combination lumberjack/monk at Bosky’s, humping wood, hunting, keeping the stove going when Joe was out cruising the empyrean in the Cessna. They’d brought two Indian chicks in one night and for a drunken day or two they’d gone through all the permutations, and that was all right, he wasn’t complaining—or maybe he was. This wasn’t what he’d signed on for, no way in the world, and if he had the bucks he’d be out of here in a heartbeat—for the winter, at least. Hawaii sounded nice. La Jolla. Ensenada.

  Star’s cabin was the one on the end. There was a dogtrot to break the wind, a pair of windows glowing, a curl of smoke from the stove. He stood there outside the door a minute, wondering if he should knock or what, and then he pushed on through the dark closet of the dogtrot and gave two raps at the cabin door. Nothing. He rapped again. Heard voices, the shuffle of feet. Then the door creaked open on its hinges and Marco was standing there in his bleached-out jeans and workshirt, looking noncommittal, looking stiff and unwelcoming, and there was no love lost between them, not since the pot incident, anyway, and the only thing he could think to say was “Trick or treat.”

  Star’s voice rose from the depths then. “Who is it? Ronnie? Is it Ronnie?” And then he heard a squeal from Merry, or maybe it was Lydia, and a long sustained jag of laughter from all three of them, as if the very fact of his existence was the funniest thing in the world. Marco gave him a nod and the three women, exuding the close, compacted odors of the sheet, the blanket, the nightie—the odors of the flesh—were there at the door in their sweatpants and sweatsocks, cooing their greetings. “Come on in,” Star insisted. “Jesus, don’t just stand there—”

  Inside, it was close as a prison cell. You could put your fingertips on one corrugated wall and practically reach across to the other. It was dark, hot, dry. The two built-in bunk beds dominated the place and you had to crouch to avoid the six hundred tons of crap hanging from hooks and lines strung across the room, wet socks and underwear, parkas, jeans, boots. Incense was burning. The stove glowed. There was a little table by the front window littered with cards and books and dirty plates and he fell into the chair Star pulled out for him and jerked off his gloves while the chicks hovered over him, three pairs of breasts at eye-level and their lit-up faces beaming down on him like alien probes searching for signs of life. “I can’t believe it,” Merry kept saying, and Jimi
ny was there too, he saw now, looking daggers from one of the top bunks.

  Pan shrugged. “Hey, it’s Halloween,” he said by way of explanation. “I thought I’d stop by. See what’s happening.”

  Nobody could argue with that, and pretty soon the three women were crowded in at the table with him, sharing a plate of sugar cookies with orange sprinkles baked specially for Halloween, firing up a joint, passing round the warmed-over jar of homebrew while Marco and Jiminy conversed in a low murmur from the upper bunks. Lydia was wearing a fur coat that fell all the way to the floor—“Cross fox, given to me by an admirer; you like it?”—and she was looking good, beyond good, and hadn’t she lost some weight, was that it? “You look dynamite,” he said, and he had an arm round her shoulder.

  “Whoa, listen to Pan,” Merry giggled. “Been without it too long, huh? Living like a what, like a goat, out there with Joe Bosky? What about me? Am I looking dynamite?”

  She was sitting knee to knee with Star and they were doing each other’s faces up for what was going to have to pass for Halloween, slashes of black down the bridge of the nose and across the cheekbones and everything else a pale putrescent green. This wasn’t the year for sexy costumes. Or the place. “Oh, yeah,” Ronnie heard himself say, “groovy. Super.”

  “What about me, Pan?” Star said. She pursed her lips and simpered and he couldn’t read her eyes, not at all. He wondered if there was something there still, or if she was cutting him loose, goodbye, so long, no regrets, and so what if they were in Mr. Boscovich’s class together and outdid Lewis and Clark and balled under the stars and shared every last nickel? So what?

  Lydia said, “I’m surprised you never made it in to see me dance—what’s the matter, baby, you lose interest? Or was I just not worth a four-hour drive?”