Drop City

by T. C. Boyle

  The three of them broke down then, poking, catcalling, gobbling, pounding the table with the shining heels of their hands. Ha-ha. Big laugh. And Ronnie—Pan—got sucked into it, trying to make excuses, and the excuses were real, they were true, because the car was, in fact, terminal and Joe flew only when he felt like it and he hadn’t felt like it lately. What was he supposed to do—walk?

  “So now I look dynamite, right? Now that I’m sitting two inches from you.” Lydia flashed her purple eyes at him. She was joking, fooling with him, her tone light and probing, but then her face clamped up on him, just like that. “And I suppose, Mr. Pan, Mr. Big Lover with your big dick, you want me to just roll over and make it with you as if I’m starved for it or something? Is that it?”

  Ronnie was at an impasse. He was stoned, he was tired, he wanted to get laid, but Socrates would have had a hard time with this one—yes was the honest answer, but yes closed the door, and no was just another kind of groveling, and he didn’t care how hard up he was, he wasn’t going to grovel, especially not for Lydia. She wasn’t even his type.

  Out of the suspension came Marco’s voice: “You took both of the rifles and the handgun too. They don’t belong to you, brother, and we want them back.”

  “Oh, come on, Marco,” Star said, her voice gone tight in her throat, “not now.”

  “You get your moose yet—you and who, Bosky, Dale and Bruce? They still living with you?”

  “Who? You mean Sky Dog?”

  “Yeah, Bruce. That’s his name, you know, just like you’re Ronnie and I’m Marco and Jiminy’s—what’s your name, anyway?”

  Jiminy’s voice, a whisper, a croak: “Paul Atkins.”

  “Right, Paul. Did you get your moose?”

  Another tough question. Yes and you’re damned; no and you’re an incompetent and you give the guns back anyway. “Yes,” he heard himself say. “A bull. Prime. Joe says he must have weighed eleven hundred pounds. We spotted him from the air—he was right out there in the open, this big blotch moving across the snow. I mean, we’ve got meat, plenty of it. I mean, if you want some—”

  But what Marco said, predictably, was: “We want the guns.”

  “Okay,” he said, “I hear you.” He squinted into the gloom of the upper bunk and picked up the focused glare of Marco’s eyes. There was no way he was giving up the handgun—and it was just pure luck he wasn’t wearing it now—or the thirty-ought-six either. The thirty-thirty, maybe. Maybe that. “Tomorrow. I swear.”

  Then it was Star going on about the garden and how they’d got practically nothing out of it—they started too late, and they’d learned a lesson there—but the pot came out okay, no buds to speak of but they’d dried out the leaves and got something out of it that wasn’t half bad. It got you there, anyway. And then there was a silence and Star, in her brightest voice, was saying, “Come on, Jiminy, Merry, Marco, let’s go trick or treat over at Norm’s and leave these two to have a little privacy for a while, what do think? Huh?”

  No sooner had the outer door slammed than Lydia got up to lay a couple of sticks on the fire, though compared to Bosky’s the cabin seemed as airtight as a Volkswagen and it must have been eighty-five already. She left the door of the stove open so they could watch the flames, and he appreciated the gesture, but he was sweating through his clothes and his throat was so dry he could have died for a glass of iced tea or a root beer—or a root beer float, A&W, just walk up to the window and give them your order on a muggy hot upstate New York day that scorched the skin off the back of your neck, the cicadas buzzing in the trees and the waxed cup perspiring in your hand. How about that for a fantasy? It was funny. Here he was in Alaska, in a log cabin in the middle of nowhere, snow on the ground and the temperature hovering at twenty below, and all he could think about was lemonade thick with ice in a tall cool glass, or a vodka and bitter lemon, gin and tonic, anything cold, the colder the better.

  Lydia took the lantern down from its hook and blew out the flame, a thin wisp of greenish smoke rising from the aperture and an evidentiary whiff of kerosene hanging on the air. She left the candles burning. He watched her move round the room, weaving through the clutter till she found her purse hanging from a nail beside Star’s navy blue High Sierra backpack, the one she’d kept in the trunk of the Studebaker all the way across country, and how about that, Pan was thinking, Star’s backpack. Lydia dug another stick of incense out of her purse and came to the table to light it off the candle guttering at Ronnie’s elbow. She set the incense in its holder—cloves, that was what it was, cloves and maybe peppermint—and then produced a joint from the pocket of the fox coat. She gave him a wide-lipped smile, lit it and handed it to him. Then she dropped the coat to the floor, pulled her sweater and brassiere up over her head in a single fluid motion and shook out her hair. “You want me to dance for you?” she said. “Seeing as how you missed me up onstage at the Wildcat?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “that would be nice.”

  She began a slow bump and grind, spinning an invisible hula hoop round her midsection while the big hips rotated and rotated again, and then she stepped out of her jeans and dropped them to the floor too. “What do you think, Pan, Pan the satyr, you want me now?”

  She watched him from the lower bunk as he fought off his clothes, so many layers, the two shirts, the sweater, the long johns—he felt like a six-year-old undressing for his mother after a day in the snow, but Lydia wasn’t his mother, uh-uh, no way in hell, and that was a good thing too, because there was nothing going to stop him now. The boots. He tore at the laces, kicked at the heels. “Come on, Ronnie,” she murmured, spread out for him there, waiting, “you don’t want me to get bored here, do you?”

  He came for her as if he’d been shot out of a bow, and there was the usual sucking and licking and wrestling for position on the narrow slat of the bed, all good and well, all part of the agenda, love, Free Love, but she seemed to be wearing her panties still and he was pushing into her and tugging at them all at the same time, and what was this, some kind of tease? “No,” she whispered, pulling away from him, “no, we can’t.”

  “What do you mean we can’t? What are you talking about?” He was right there, right on top of her, his hands making the circuit of her. “You didn’t take your pill? Is that it? Because I don’t care, I’ll be careful—”

  The purple eyes, the tease of a voice. “No,” she said, “that’s not it.”

  “Jesus,” he said, and he might have been praying—he was praying. “So what, then?”

  “Didn’t anybody tell you? Because they’ve been treating me like the dregs around here, Reba especially, the bitch—she’s the one that got found out. By Alfredo, I mean.”

  “What? What is it?”

  She shrugged and the bed quailed beneath her. “Crabs,” she said.

  “Crabs?”

  “I don’t know where I got them, I really don’t. And I don’t think it was Arnold.”

  “Arnold? Who’s Arnold?”

  “You don’t know him,” she said. “He like owns this sporting goods store? He drove me back here. On his Ski-Doo. All the way out from Fairbanks, with a three-hour pit stop at the Nougat. He was sweet. He really was.”

  Pan felt himself shrinking.

  “Nobody’s got any of that ointment,” she said. “That’s the problem. It’s not like there’s a drugstore around the corner, know what I mean?”

  “So big deal,” he said. “It’s not like VD or anything”—and it was all in the mind, wasn’t it, because he came back strong now, ready to burst with it—“I mean, we could still do it, couldn’t we?”

  She went right to sleep afterward, down and out for the count, and by the time he pulled out of her and rubbed himself as best he could with a dry bar of soap and a towel he found hanging by the door, she was snoring. Head back, breasts flattened across her chest, all that hair—she snatched in the air and blew it out again, hitting all the high notes as if she were playing a trumpet voluntary without the trumpet. That wa
s all right. He forgave her that. Lydia, his treat and his trick. He pulled on his long johns, but then peeled them down again and took a good long look at himself and ran the towel over his loins one more time, no problem, nothing there as far as he could see, and then he dressed in a hurry because there were four long cold miles to traverse before he could start snoring himself. He shrugged into his parka, hot, sweating, and he was about to push out into the night, relishing the idea of the cold, when Star’s backpack caught his eye.

  For a long time now—since he’d left Drop City, anyway—he’d been thinking about getting out, bailing, just turning his back on the whole thing and getting reacquainted with a little civilization for a change, and he’d written his parents three times begging for money, a one-way ticket, traveler’s checks, anything, but he might as well have been dead for all they cared. So Star’s backpack. There it was, hanging from the nail next to Lydia’s purse. And he knew something about that backpack that Star wasn’t aware of, and she should have been, because how could she ever have expected him to travel with her through all those nights on the road, in tents and motels and diners and fast-food outlets, at gas stations—Where’d you say the ladies’ rest room was?—without his knowing the contents of that backpack as well as he knew his own. And it wasn’t like he was stealing, not exactly, because that three hundred dollars wrapped up in a sock in the bottom of the innermost pouch was three hundred dollars she’d kept back from him, and how many times had he bought breakfast, cold drinks, cigarettes, how many times had he sprung for the motel or the campground fee? Momentarily, he felt bad about it—this was Star, after all, Star whom he loved and had always loved, at least for the past year, and these three bills were her fail-safe, her ticket out, and now she was going to be hung out to dry. But she’d hung him out to dry, hadn’t she? She’d gone for Marco. Big mistake. And she’d set this little thing up with Lydia tonight, right in front of everybody, and if that wasn’t a kiss-off, then what was?

  He found the door, found the night. The smoke rose against the moon, the lights in the windows of Drop City North cut their indentations out of the shadows. There was no one out in the yard, no sound but for the crunch of his boots against the plaintively yielding snow. Pan reached in under his parka to adjust the crotch of his pants—but not to itch, not yet—and then he started off across the frozen plain of the river.

  28

  The air was crisp, burned immaculate with the cold, and it did him good to be out in it, breathing deep and moving purposefully across the landscape as if he belonged here, as vital as the wolf, the hare, the moose, and it was good too to escape the numbing togetherness of Drop City for a few hours at least. Most of the others were content to sit around with a deck of cards, a sketchpad, a guitar, the hours falling away like so much sloughed skin, and what’s the hurry, man, be cool, but Marco was a different animal altogether. He couldn’t relax. He felt bored, stifled. He needed to get out, explore the country, open up his senses, learn something. The washed-out faces of Drop City looked up at him in surprise, the wind in the trees, the fire stoked, Rice Carolina simmering in the pot, even the dog too lazy to lift his head from the floor. You really going out there? In this?

  Six people were writing novels, or maybe it was seven, depending on whether the thin unspooled script crowding the pages of Alfredo’s notebooks turned out to be fiction or a tract on the joys of communal living—Alfredo wasn’t sure yet, but there was going to be plenty of time to work it out one way or the other once the curtain fell on the daylight, and that was coming soon, November twenty-first, according to Sess Harder. There was a lot of knitting going on. Scrabble, checkers, chess. And of course people found time to toboggan down the hill, organize skating parties on the river with the three pairs of skates in Drop City’s possession, build snowfreaks with willow roots for hair and somebody’s worn-out bandanna and maybe an iridescent green shirt or spangled vest thrown into the bargain. Fun and games. It was all fun and games.

  The sky hung low. Through the morning the temperature had risen into the single digits, creeping up the ladder of the thermometer in a grudging, slow, hand-over-hand ascent. There might have been snow in the air, if he knew enough to feel it, to smell it in the way Sess Harder could, or Iron Steve or old Tim Yule, who sat outside on the porch of his frame house in Boynton no matter what the weather. Marco could feel the tug of Drop City loosening as he made his way downriver, and he did look back, two or three times, just to admire the way the buildings defied the vacancy of the land, to watch the conjoined swirl of the smoke from four separate stoves twist up into the sky and listen to the fading shouts of Che and Sunshine, their figures drawn down to nothing as they hammered across the yard in their homemade snowsuits and red rubber boots.

  He’d given Ronnie a week, and a week was more than he had to spare. Joe Bosky and Pan the wood sprite might have gotten their meat, and Sess Harder certainly had his and probably everybody in Boynton had theirs too and half the weekend hunters from Fairbanks, Anchorage and points south, but Drop City had nothing. And that was a concern, a real concern, because pretty soon it would be too late, the moose gone stringy and tough from the rut, and despite the protests of the vegetarians, they were going to need meat to get them through till spring—either that or they’d be trapping mice under the floorboards and boiling up their shoes like Charlie Chaplin. It was frustrating too. At the end of October, just before Halloween, he and Star had been awakened by a sound that was like the rumble of fifty-five-gallon fuel drums rolling down the hill out of the trees, a deep thump and boom that resounded through the cabin and shook him out of bed and right on out the door in his stocking feet. Two moose—bulls—were going at each other on the gravel bar, great big quaking truckloads of meat suspended on the ridiculous poles of their delicate moose legs, no thought in the world but for each other and the cow just visible in the stripped yellow crown of willow behind them, and Marco standing there with empty hands like some Stone Age hunter’s apprentice, and what was he going to do, throw rocks at them? Jump on their backs and cut their throats severally while the tribe looked on wringing their hands? Ronnie had taken the rifles as if they were his alone, and Ronnie was going to give them back. It wasn’t a question of ownership or even of right and wrong. It was a matter of survival, just that.

  There was no sign of life at Sess’s place—smoke rising from the chimney, but nothing moving in the yard—and that was all right, because he didn’t intend to stop in till he was on the way back, with the rifles slung over his shoulder. Sess was his advisor, his mentor, the man who was going to instruct him in all the recondite ways of the country, and he’d already had to endure the humiliation of admitting to him that they had no rifle worth the name with which to go out and get their meat—Deuce had a .22 for potting rabbits and ground-hogs, and that was about it—and he was damned if he was going to appear weak in front of him again. So he walked on by the Harder cabin, and though the dogs raised a noise, no one came to the door and no face appeared at the window.

  There wasn’t much snow—just enough to whiten the ground—and Sess had told him not to expect Santa’s Workshop or whatever the people down below tried to make Alaska out to be. This wasn’t a postcard. It wasn’t the Cascades or the Sierra Nevada. The country around here, in the interior, was about the driest in Alaska, and if they got twelve or fourteen inches of precipitation a year, that was about it. The thing was, the precipitation stayed. There was no meltoff in winter, and in summer, the rains just pooled over the permafrost, which in turn created a vision of paradise for the mosquitoes—and the midges and no-see-ums and all the rest of the winged and fanged world. Marco kept on, studying the snow for sign, trying to read the country the way Sess would. It was warm now, up into the teens, at least, and he unzipped his parka and let the ends of his scarf dangle free. After a while he found himself whistling, a shrill, between-the-teeth rendition of “I Am a Child,” and where had that come from? He’d been fooling around with the guitar again lately—Geoffrey’s g
uitar—and this just might be a tune to pick up on, he was thinking, nothing too complex, a sweet lilting melody floating over the chords, but then the vocal—the vocal might be a stretch. He’d just have to take it down a key or two, that’s all.

  His mood changed abruptly as he rounded the bend onto Woodchopper Creek. He wasn’t whistling now, and he wasn’t thinking about guitars either. He’d never been to Bosky’s place and didn’t know what to expect—beyond trouble, recalcitrance and a shitstorm of lies, excuses and backpedaling from Pan, that is. He pictured him—Pan, Ronnie—with the little lost drawn-up bow of his lips and the tumbling chin and the eyes that always managed to look hurt and put-upon but never stopped assessing you, as if he were rating his own performance moment to moment, Ronnie the thief, Ronnie the backstabber. He steeled himself. Gulped air till his lungs were on fire. And he wasn’t walking anymore, but marching, marching like a soldier going into battle, right on up the creek, across the yard and onto the porch, and he was so wrought-up he didn’t even notice that Joe Bosky’s ski-equipped Cessna 180 with the stripped fuselage and the crudely stenciled N-number was nowhere to be seen.

  He knocked, and that was ridiculous in itself, because nobody came calling out here, no Mormons or newspaper boys or Avon ladies or neighbors borrowing a cup of sugar. Nobody had ever knocked on this door. Nobody would ever knock on it again, not if the cabin stood a hundred years. A wind settled in the branches overhead, cooled the sweat of his face. “Ronnie!” he called. “Ronnie, you in there?” Nothing. Or was that the sound of movement, of voices? “Ronnie, it’s me. It’s Marco.”

  He was about to push his way in—nobody home, and wouldn’t that be a miracle—when the door swung back and Pan, in bare feet and thermals, was standing there gaping at him like a fish on the end of a hook. Pan had been asleep, that was it, a yellow crust beading his eyelashes, hair flattened to one side of his head, advantage Marco. “Oh, hey, man,” he mumbled. “Hey, good to see you.”