Drop City

by T. C. Boyle

  From inside, sleep-wearied, the voice of Sky Dog, of Bruce: “Shut the fucking door, will you? What the fuck you doing, Pan?”

  Ronnie slouched back into the room, talking over his shoulder. “You want coffee? I was just going to make coffee.”

  Marco ducked under the lintel and entered the cabin, shutting the door behind him. It was dark, his pupils clenched round the glare of the snow and the reflective ice of the creek, and for a minute he couldn’t see a thing. He could smell, though, and what he smelled was a curious mélange of overcooked meat, bodily stinks, unwashed clothes and soap—the soap and lye Joe Bosky used for tanning his wolf pelts, and there was that smell too, the smell of the skin and the dead stripped-off fur of animals. Ronnie was a ghost at the stove, then the door of the stove swung open and there was the sudden incandescence of the coals and the silhouette of a thin-wristed hand framed there laying fuel on the fire.

  “No,” Marco said, “I don’t want any coffee. I don’t want anything from you except the guns you stole.”

  “Hey, Ronnie, man—who is that? Is somebody here? Joe? Joe, is that you?”

  “Fuck you, Sky!” Ronnie shouted suddenly, with real vehemence. “Go back to sleep, all right? Shit,” he cursed, slamming the coffeepot down in the direction of the stove, “there’s no peace around here, not for a fucking minute!”

  Marco stood just inside the door. He wasn’t moving. If this was going to get nasty, then let it. He was ready. He’d been ready for a long time now, since that day in the ditch back in California, since Bruce had trashed his things and Ronnie had laid his hands on Star. “The guns,” he repeated.

  Ronnie came into focus now, round-shouldered, big-headed, the dirty white thermal underwear clinging to him like a mummy’s wrap, the depth and clutter of the cabin stirring to life behind him in a storm of dust motes and dander and two beds materializing suddenly against the back wall, one of which contained a human form: Sky Dog, the mystery resolved. “What do you mean steal?” he said. “I didn’t steal anything. Norm gave me those guns because I was the only one that wasn’t too lame to use them, and you know it as well as I do, man,” and he snarled out the final locution as if it were a curse. “So screw you with your steal.” The pot rattled on the stove. The dust motes settled. And then, as if they’d been having a minor philological disagreement, a matter of semantics and not substance, all over now, open, shut and closed, he added, “You sure you don’t want a cup of coffee?”

  Marco saw the two rifles then, a simple scan of the room and there they were, suspended from nails driven into the wall above the unoccupied bed, but what he didn’t see was Ronnie reaching into the pocket of the parka hanging from the clothesline over the stove. Enough, he was thinking, angry, on fire with it, and he crossed the room in three strides and hooked down the top rifle, the .30-06 Springfield, and he was reaching for the Winchester when Sky Dog sat up in the bed opposite and muttered, “Hey, man, what do you think you’re doing?” and Ronnie pulled Norm’s uncle’s long-nosed slab of a pistol from the inside pocket of the coat and said, “Put it down, man. Put it down and get the fuck out of here before you get hurt, and I’m telling you, don’t push me, Marco, don’t push me, man.”

  But he was beyond all that, beyond threats, beyond Ronnie and Bruce and the minuscule and rapidly dwindling toehold they had in his life, and he strapped the Springfield over his shoulder as calmly as if he were getting dressed in the privacy of his own bedroom, then took down the Winchester and pulled that over his shoulder too. He gave Ronnie a long look, Ronnie at the stove in his underwear with the pistol he’d worn strapped to his thigh all summer extended now in the quaking grip of his light-shattering hand with its rings glinting and fingers curled. “Don’t push me,” Ronnie repeated, and without knowing what he was doing, he let his other hand descend to the crotch of his thermals and he began to scratch himself, his fingers working in deep, digging hard, moving unconsciously to another imperative altogether.

  And suddenly the whole thing was hilarious, a joke, as comical as any ten pratfalls, and could anyone have given a more inspired performance? Ronnie was holding a gun and Ronnie was scratching. Ronnie was in his underwear, with sleep in his eyes and his hair flattened to one side of his head, snarling Don’t push me, and Ronnie was scratching. Marco crossed the room, shifting his shoulders to accommodate the heft of the rifles, swung open the door on daylight and paused there a moment. “Take care, Pan,” he said, and it was all he could do to keep from laughing aloud. “And you too, Bruce,” he called, “goodbye, man. And thanks for everything.”

  Outside, the light was weakening. The sky had compressed and the clouds lay curdled and pale over the tops of the trees. His breath hung frozen on the air and he moved off and left it behind, one puff after another. He’d gone half a mile before he thought to stop and check the chambers of the rifles, because what good were they if there was no ammunition? There were two rounds in the Springfield, one in the Winchester. He felt foolish, but he could hardly retrace his steps, knock on the door all over again and ask Ronnie to cough up the bullets, which he might very well have purchased on his own at the general store in Boynton and which were readily available to Marco or anybody else the next time they felt like making the twenty-four-mile roundtrip stroll into town and back. Two rifles, three bullets. The night he’d gone with Norm to visit the uncle in Seattle (and it was just as he’d envisioned it, déjà vu, the old man in the bed and the snowshoes on the wall, and though he didn’t believe in karma or mysticism or any kind of predetermination at all, it was enough to chill him even now), the uncle had rattled on about using only two bullets a year, one for his moose and one for his bear. Well, all right. For the first time all fall, Marco had the means to lay in meat. And when he shouldered the rifles and came up out of his crouch, he listened to the breeze and studied the snow with the ears and eyes of a hunter.

  At some point—he couldn’t be sure later exactly when, whether it was half an hour up from Woodchopper or less—he saw moose sign along the south bank of the river, the neat parallel indentations of the hooves, the browsed willow, a dark scatter of pellets against the blank page of the snow, and he veered in off the ice to follow the trail. It led him inland, and there was more than one moose here—two, or possibly three, depending on how you read the tracks, and he was no expert, he’d be the first to admit it. Still, he’d hunted deer growing up in Connecticut, and a moose was just another kind of deer, six times as big, maybe, and dangerous, capable of turning on its adversary and goring him, battering him, crushing the life out of him, but for all that, a deer. He unslung the .30-06, with its two rounds, and eased through the unforgiving willow as stealthily as he could manage. There were their tracks, another pile of droppings, and up ahead, a V-shaped swath any fool could follow cut right through the center of the thicket. He went on, intent on the hunt, and hardly noticed when it began to snow.

  If he’d thought about what he was doing, he might have been concerned. He was on unfamiliar ground, the light was leaching out of the sky and the snow had begun to quicken. Worse, he had no shelter, no food, not even a day pack with paper, matches, a ground cloth—he’d been out for a stroll, an hour-and-twenty-minute walk on the open ice to Woodchopper Creek in clear weather, and he hadn’t felt the need to bring anything with him. He shouldn’t have been hunting, not dressed the way he was and without even the most rudimentary equipment, but he had the guns, a real novelty, and he saw the tracks, and he just didn’t think. In fact, as he worked his way deeper into the trees, he was thinking about Pan’s itch, how funny it was, how telling, how pathetic.

  Lydia had come back with crabs—lice, genital lice, hard little creeping things like ticks that were easy enough to get rid of if you went directly to the drugstore, slathered on the proper ointment and burned your underwear on the funeral pyre of intimate relations. But Drop City didn’t have a drugstore, and it was a long cold walk to Boynton, and there was no guarantee you’d find what you needed there either. The crabs spread t
hrough Drop City like dye in water, and then the camps formed and the accusations flew, and the crabs—clinging, persistent, enamored of blood and secret places—became the markers in the war between Free Love and commitment. Star didn’t have them, nor did Marco. But Jiminy had given them to Merry, and he wasn’t saying where he’d contracted them, and Reba had infected Alfredo, fooling no one, because she’d been making it with Deuce and Deuce had—speculation now—jumped on Lydia, as had half the other cats, because she was back and she was available and she was new all over again. And so Lydia was the pariah, though she hadn’t known what she was doing, because it took a week or so for the crabs to mate and lay their eggs and emerge to bite and suck and excrete their waste until the skin erupted and everybody itched.

  Marco thought it was funny, La Ronde staged in the hinterlands. Long-standing resentments flared up. Hypocrites assailed hypocrites. People wouldn’t speak to one another. They passed in the yard without looking up, dug into the communal pot for rice pilaf and meatless marinara and the person standing next to them might as well have been dead. As a result, the population of the three cabins and the meeting hall was in constant flux, Deuce at the foot of the bed one night, Angela, Erika or Geoffrey the next. Reba, as medical advisor, shrieked out over the clamor of one very contentious meeting and insisted that everybody, whether they were infected yet or not, had to shave their pudenda bald and soak their underwear in Clorox to kill the nearly invisible eggs of the things, and Mendocino Bill, himself itching, said people should forget coming to him for Dr. Scholl’s because it had about as much effect as cornstarch. Norm was itching. Premstar was itching. “I know it’s going to sting, people,” Norm boomed out over the tidal roar of the community in extremis, “but I say a little kerosene, maybe a shot glass full, rubbed in each night for a week.”

  Crabs. Crab lice. They were one form of life on this planet, evolved to fill a niche, as the evolutionists would say. And what was the ideal form of life, one that exists independently, preying on nothing, creating its own food source through photosynthesis? The plant, the tree. Yes, but given that life form, given the tree and the leaf, evolution presupposes the insect to feed on it and the fungus to break it down, and the bird to feed on the insect and the cat on the bird. And here he was, with a gun in his hand and the snow driving bristles in his face, doing his level best to prey on another and grander form of life. And why not? If the crabs could gnaw at his brothers’ and sisters’ groins, then why couldn’t he—why couldn’t they—gnaw at the leg of the moose?

  It was nearly full dark now. The trees were shadows, the tracks growing faint. Marco knelt to study them, all his senses alive, listening, watching, not daring even to breathe, and then he lifted his head and there it was, a moose, or the head of a moose, projecting in a dense clot of shadow from behind the nearest spruce in a forest of them. It was canny, this moose, its nostrils flared as it tried to pick up his scent, the bulk of its body secreted behind the trees, in no hurry to commit itself. He waited a long breathless moment for it to step out into the open, gauging where the shoulder would appear so he could aim for it, or just behind it, and do the fatal damage. But the animal barely moved, nothing more than a twitch now and again to lend it animacy, and finally, afraid of missing his chance, he took aim, the blood boiling in his veins—Do not miss, do not—and squeezed the trigger. The night tore open in thunder and flame, and yet, incredibly, the moose stood rooted to the spot. It wasn’t until he fired the second shot that it dropped in a dark swoon to the ground and he was coming after it, coming to retrieve it with hands that trembled and legs that had gone weak.

  The snow sifted through the needles with an admonitory hiss. Marco stumbled forward, one shot left, the slug in the Winchester, praying that the thing was dead, that he wouldn’t have to sacrifice it all over again, because this was enough for one day, more than enough. And then he was there, by the tree with its black skirts of tightly woven needles and the bark that smelled of pitch, of air freshener and Pine-Sol, and saw that there was no moose, wounded or otherwise, lying heaped in the snow. He heard a sudden sharp heartrending cry then, the cry of a human baby spitted by some fiend on the point of a bayonet, and looked down at his feet. There was something there, a black weakly thrashing living form, a thing he’d shot while it clung to the bark of the tree eight feet from the ground, impersonating the head of a moose. And what was it? Weak and bristling, the life sucking out of the hole he’d put in it—a porcupine, that’s what it was, the humped and hobbling old man of the woods, fit only to feed to the dogs.

  For a long moment he stood there, watching the thing thrash its spiked head against the ground, back and forth, back and forth, a metronome keeping time with its agony and its unbelief—or was that its tail? All the while, the dark thumping kept time to the beat of his own unavailing blood. He felt foolish, felt lost and hopeless and incompetent, felt ashamed, felt guilty. And then, as the night deepened and the snow struck down at the unprotected flesh of his face, he hammered the dark form at his feet with the heel of his boot until it stopped moving, then hurried off to find the way he had come.

  29

  She’d always been a night person, or that was how she liked to think of herself. A night person haunted the clubs, slept late, sucked all the glamour out of the dwindling dark hours when the straight world was asleep and dreaming of mortgage payments. Nobody wanted to be a morning person, or at least nobody wanted to admit to it. Morning people grinned and mugged and threw cheer in your face at seven-thirty A.M. when you barely knew what your name was and your blouse with the Peter Pan collar was on inside out and the kids, the students—morning people all—were already filing into the room to let their oversubscribed hormones go to war with their metabolic disorders. Her mother was a morning person. Reba—Reba was a morning person.

  Star was sitting at the table in the meeting hall preparing yet another community meal—dried salmon stew, with rice for consistency and tomatoes and peas out of the institutional-sized can for color—and she was smiling to herself as Merry chopped onions and Maya hammered at the stiff jerked slabs of fish with the butt of her knife. Night person. Morning person. The distinction didn’t mean much up here, since it was night pretty much all the time now, the kind of night they gave you in the casinos in Las Vegas so you’d never stop handing over your money, the night of the POWs with the black bags pulled down over their heads, black night, endless night. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, according to the only timepiece in Drop City’s possession, Alfredo’s Timex with the two-inch-wide tooled-leather band that never left his wrist, and it was dark, had been dark for some time now. Somebody said it was snowing outside. Somebody else said it had been snowing for the past hour. The dog looked up briefly and laid his head back down again, as if it were too heavy a burden to bear.

  People were scattered around the room in a funk of unwashed clothes and matted hair, down, dejected, disheveled, the energy level hovering around zero—they didn’t even look as if they’d be able to lift the forks to their mouths come dinner, and Star had a brief fantasy of feeding them all by hand, then changing their diapers and putting them to bed one after the other. It was depressing. When they spoke, it was in a whisper, as if nobody really wanted to express their thoughts aloud, and the cramped space of the meeting hall buzzed with an insectoid rasp of timbreless voices sawing away at the fabric of the afternoon. Faces were vapid, eyes drained. It was a day for getting stoned, and Drop City had been diligent about it. Star was floating right along herself, drifting like the cottonwood fluff on the river, back when there was a river—and cottonwood. She got up to fuel the fire and get some oil sizzling in the bottom of the pot. Three steps from the table to the stove, but she saw the pale slashes of the snow against the window like interference on a black-and-white TV. Marco was out there somewhere, that was what she was thinking. He should have been back by now.

  Merry was saying, “I’ll never speak to Jiminy again, I swear. Not unless he tells me who it was, and I alread
y know, I mean, I’d have to be blind not to—”

  Maya, chopping: “Dunphy.”

  “—I just want to hear it from him, like the truth, just once. Just once I’d like to hear the truth come out of his mouth.”

  Both of them looked across the room to where Lydia, wrapped in her fur coat, sat against the wall leafing through one of the magazines she’d brought back as a communal offering—Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone—along with pounds and pounds of chocolate, French milled soap and Canadian whiskey. And crabs. Crabs too.

  Star threw a handful of chopped garlic into the hot oil and everybody perked up visibly because there was no denying that scent, and then she went to Merry for the onions. People froze to death up here, that was what she was thinking—and what was that story she’d read in high school, the famous one where the guy, the cheechako, can’t get a fire going and tries to kill the dog to warm his hands? The dog was too smart for him, that much she remembered. But he was a cheechako, that was the telling point, a greenhorn who didn’t know the harshness of the country or the implacability of the night, a tenderfoot, a novice. Like Marco. There were animals out there in the woods, wolves, bears, that writhing dark buzzsaw of a thing that jerked across the ground as if it had been set on fire—the wolverine, the glutton, the intimidator—and if it could eviscerate a goat in ten seconds flat, then what could it do to a human being? People shot each other up here too, over guns, with guns, but then Ronnie would never—

  “Smells good.” It was Lydia, looking over her shoulder now. “What’s it going to be tonight, the salmon surprise?”

  Star smiled, pushed the hair away from her face with the back of her hand. “What else?” she said, stirring garlic and onions around the snapping of the oil. “It’s the specialty of the house.”