Drop City

by T. C. Boyle

  She looked up then, past Lydia, to the door. She’d heard a noise, a thump at the frame as if someone had fallen dead on the doorstep—Marco, she was thinking, Marco—and then suddenly the door flung open and slammed to again, and Jiminy was there in his Salvation Army greatcoat, stamping and blowing. He was wearing a knit hat that clung to his skull and came down tight over his ears and he’d wrapped his scarf round his head and face like a chador. Snow had crystallized in his eyebrows, it was caked atop his hat and batter-spread across the padded shoulders of the coat. “Jesus,” he muttered, unwrapping himself layer by layer, “it’s cold enough out there to piss and lean on it.”

  Star saw him exchange a glance with Merry—“Hi, Mer,” he said, but her eyes just bored right through him—and then it was his turn to say “Smells good” and he was crowding in at the stove, working up some friction between his palms and peering into the pot as if he were thinking about folding up his limbs and climbing into it.

  “Snowing hard?” Star had inverted the Spiracha bottle over the pot with one hand while she shook white pepper out of the big rust-topped can with the other, spice for the hordes, and it could never be spicy enough.

  “Snowing and blowing,” he said, and everybody in the room was listening. “I was like skating? Out on the river where we cleared that nice bumpless patch for a rink? But then the snow came up and pretty much ruined it.”

  “You didn’t see Marco, did you? Because he’s been gone all day.”

  “What, hunting?”

  “No,” she said, taking up the long wooden spoon and giving the contents of the pot a vigorous stir. “He went down to Woodchopper to get the guns Pan appropriated for himself.”

  “I’m sorry, but Pan’s a major league jerk,” Bill put in. He was hunched over a chessboard with Harmony, his oversized feet dangling from the edge of the loft in a pair of candy-striped socks with turned-up toes. “Worse, he’s just a scam artist, like the street people that came in and ruined the Haight for everybody. He’s out for nobody but himself. Period.”

  “He’s into me for ten dollars,” Harmony said.

  Tom Krishna was wrapped in a blanket atop one of the bunk beds set into the wall. He looked up from the book he’d been reading—the teachings of some guru whose name Star couldn’t pronounce; all she remembered was that he’d lived on air and had achieved moksha after dying of brain cancer in a Tibetan lamasery. “I gave him sixteen dollars that last time, for personal items, you know? And what’d I get? Nothing. Not even a taste of that grass he says he invested in for everybody.”

  “What a laugh,” Bill said.

  That went round a while—the subject of Pan, and if she’d been depressed before, now she felt bereaved, as if he’d crawled off somewhere and died, because nobody would defend him, not even Lydia—and then Jiminy turned his fleshless backside to the stove and asked Tom Krishna if the new batch of beer was ready yet and Tom said it was and the snow fell and the dog slept and she realized she’d never had an answer to her question. Maya relit the joint they’d been working on earlier and passed it to Merry, who passed it to Star. She took a hit and passed it on. That was what communal life was all about, passing things on. But what about Marco? What about the responsibility for him, for getting seriously worried here, for organizing a search party—were they all just going to pass that on too? “Alfredo,” she said suddenly, her voice too loud, “what time is it?”

  Alfredo was up in the loft with Bill and Harmony, ready to take on the winner of the chess match. They were playing a tournament, twelve players, twelve matches a day, twelve days running. When that was over and the victor had been crowned, they’d play another one. “Three forty-five,” he called down in a broad, matter-of-fact voice that could have belonged to an announcer in a TV studio, to Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley. Three forty-five. The real world, the mechanical world, intrudes.

  “Because, I don’t know, Marco’s been gone since noon or something—shouldn’t we, I mean, isn’t anybody going to go out and look for him?”

  It must have been two or three hours later when they all sat down to dinner—or when dinner was served, that is, because Drop City no longer ate as one. There wasn’t enough space, for one thing. When they dragged the table out from the wall and set places around it, only eight people could be seated comfortably, if you could call balancing on a wobbly two-foot-high round of black spruce comfortable. The rest just took a plate, heaped it up with rice or beans or pasta and hunkered down on the floor or the nearest bed or climbed the ladder to the loft, impressing on everybody just how cramped three hundred and sixty square feet of living space could be. The other limiting factor was the interpersonal feuds that were always flaring up out of nothing, but never more so than when everybody was confined to four cabins with no California sunshine to massage away the hard feelings—and people shuffled in and out of those cabins in a human shell game so bewildering even Star and Merry could barely keep track of who was on the outs with whom. Half the time they’d just come in, scoop something out of the pot and run for one of the cabins with it. And that prompted a new Drop City rule: everyone was responsible for his or her own plate. People scratched their initials into the bottom of the enameled plates and bowls, and some, like Weird George, had already reached their crockery limit and had to eat out of old peach and apricot cans.

  Norm blew in for dinner, trailing Premstar, Reba and the kids, and he wasn’t his usual self. He didn’t stamp or roar or call out greetings to the flock, just bowed his head, ducked out of his parka and got in line at the stove. There was fresh whole-grain bread laid out on the top shelf within easy reach of the stove, and butter out of the one-pound can. That and the salmon-rice dish, heavily laced with soy, and Kool-Aid and Tang to wash it all down, along with three big half-gallon jugs of Tom Krishna’s yeasty homebrew and two pans of fudge brownies. Humble fare, but there was plenty of it, and the vegetarians could be glad Marco didn’t have a gun, because when he did there’d have to be two meals prepared each night, the one incorporating moose or whatever, the other without it.

  It was still snowing. Star wasn’t given to senseless worry or the paranoia that certain grades and varieties of grass can generate—or maybe she was—but by the time dinner was on the table she was a wreck. There was no sign of Marco. It was an hour and a half to Woodchopper Creek, ten minutes to settle his business, and an hour and a half back. Three hours and ten minutes, and he’d been gone for six, six at least. Earlier, while the salmon was thickening in the pan, she’d got Merry and Maya to go out into the storm with her and shout his name into the wind. They’d taken Freak with them in the hope he’d catch Marco’s scent, and they’d gone as far downriver as Sess and Pamela’s place, but Marco wasn’t there and they hadn’t seen him. Pamela said it was probably nothing, he’d stayed on at Woodchopper when the storm settled in or he’d thrown up a temporary shelter and got a fire going, and really, Sess had camped a hundred times in much worse, hadn’t he? Sess had. He acknowledged that. But Pamela was only saying the expected things, to calm her, and Star, though she was three miles high and drifting like a cloud, didn’t miss the look she exchanged with Sess. They all had a cup of tea, then the three of them went out and shouted Marco’s name till their throats were raw and their lungs burning. When they got back, Star went to each of the cabins in succession, thinking he might have looped round them in the storm, but nobody had seen him, and when finally she returned to the meeting hall and the smell of the food and the shot of Everclear Bill gave her to calm her nerves, he wasn’t there either.

  If that wore her down, the worry that ate at her with every thump of her heart and made the storm a curse and the meal as bland as boiled cardboard so that she couldn’t take more than two bites of it and had to sneak her plate to the dog, what came next was even worse. It was an hour after they’d eaten. The dishes were soaking in the big washtub on the stove. People were passing cigarettes, the eternal joint. Alfredo had tried to get a sing-along going, but nobody seemed to hav
e the heart for it, and it wasn’t anxiety over Marco that had them down, it was just boredom, the sameness of the food, the faces, the night. Nothing was happening. Nothing was going to happen. This was the life they’d chosen. Voluntarily.

  Norm was sunk into one of the lower bunks with Premstar, their backs against the wall, feet splayed out on the floor. He was looking old. His skin was so pale it could have been the underbelly of a fish peeled off and sewed into place, and his hair, bucket-washed, hung limp and thin around his ears. There were hairs growing out of those ears, she saw now, out of his nostrils, climbing up out of the neck of his shirt. Never repaired, his glasses looked as if they’d been thrown at his face, dirty grayish lumps of Reba’s sticking plaster holding the frames together in a tentative accord with the forces of gravity. He was sniffling, victimized by the cold oozing its way through the collective mass of his brothers and sisters, his eyes red-rimmed and terminal. And he was itching, itching like everybody else. Pasha Norm. Norm the guru. Norm, the guiding light of Drop City.

  He pushed himself up with a grunt, and he was just like her father struggling up out of his chair after his team had gone down to defeat, shoulders slumped, eyes vacant, one hand going to the small of his back and whatever residual ache stabbed at him there, and then he crossed the room to the table and poured himself a cup of beer from the half-gallon jug. Why she was watching him, she didn’t know. She’d been playing a distracted game of cards—pitch—with Merry, Maya and Lydia, and as her gaze drifted round the room she’d somehow settled on Norm, as if she knew what was coming, as if she’d had a premonition, not only about Marco and Ronnie and the long downward slide of the night, but of the fate of Drop City itself.

  Norm tipped back his head, the hair spilling loose around his shoulders, and drank noisily from the cup. “That’s beer,” he said, fighting back a belch. “That’s the best thing about this place, our greatest achievement—Tom Krishna’s beer. We ought to bottle it and sell it. ‘Old Flatulence,’ we’ll call it. How does that sound?”

  Nobody laughed. But he’d accomplished what he wanted: he had the attention of the room now, people looking up from books, games, conversations—he was working up to something, they could all sense it.

  “You know,” he said, talking to the room now, “while we’ve got everybody gathered here, or mostly everybody, if you want to discount the people harboring grudges and ill will, and I guess that’s probably about half of us, people, half the Drop City Maniacs gone round the bend, and how about that as testimony to the power of brother- and sisterhood?” Still nobody laughed. “While we’ve got everybody here I just want to lay something on you, I mean, on behalf of me and Premstar—” They all looked to Premstar, who sat still as an icon, her lips parted in an expectant pout, her eyelids gleaming naked because she was out of glue for her false lashes and down to the last few dwindling traces of her pastel blue eyeshadow. Premstar glared back. She was out of her league here, Star was thinking, a prima donna in a community of equals, and there was no excuse for her, none, zero. She could pout all night long for all anybody cared.

  “Let me guess,” Bill said. “The Air Force is making an emergency drop of eighty-seven tubes of crab ointment right out on the river—”

  “And six color TVs, with rabbit ears the size of the Empire State Building,” Weird George cried out, thrusting up his mug of beer as if to propose a toast. “And all the back issues of Playboy in existence!”

  There were a few sniggers, a nervous laugh or two. The stove sighed. Snow ticked at the windows. Merry looked up from her cards and held Star’s eyes, as if to say, What next?

  Norm had no problem playing to the gallery. He was like an actor—he was an actor—and he swung round on the pivot of his heels and threw out his arms as if to embrace everybody leaning over the rough-hewn edge of the railingless loft, the cheap seats, everybody in the cheap seats. “I only wish,” he said.

  Reba, who’d been sitting in the corner staring at nothing while Che and Sunshine picked sodden lumps of fish off their untouched plates and flung them at one another in a silent, dragged-down war of attrition, spoke up suddenly. “We need a Ski-Doo is what we need. So we can get into town and get the damned ointment, because this is ridiculous, and the mail, and, and—”

  “And see some new faces for a change,” Bill finished the thought for her.

  Weird George said he’d like to hoist a few at the Three Pup.

  “Toothpaste,” Maya said. “Shampoo. An orange stick for my nails.”

  Jiminy’s opinion was that they were welcome to walk—“Walking is good for you, man, like the best exercise in the world”—but nobody rose to the bait. The idea was patently ridiculous. Sure, they could walk the twelve miles, and a few people had done it since the river had frozen up, but it was twelve miles back, and there was no place to stay in Boynton because the bus had no heat in it and Sess Harder had refused them the use of his shack cum toolshed, even for just an overnight stay. Everybody was out here now—no more furloughs—and they were going to stay here till the river broke up in May. Count the months—two weeks more of November, then December, January, February, March and April. It was a lifetime. A prison sentence. And already they were chafing, all of them—what would it be like in three months? In four?

  Everybody chased the issue around for a minute or two, any topic the subject of rancor and debate, and then there was a silence, a time-out while they each contemplated the future, both individual and communal, and then Bill coughed into his fist and looked up and asked Norm what he had on his mind.

  Norm put on a mask. His face was neutral but for his eyes, his red-rimmed eyes, sharpening suddenly from the depths of the two holes he’d poked in it. “It’s nothing really, no big deal, nothing to get uptight about, people.” He paused, and though everybody was busy with something, they were all listening, all of them. “Well, it’s Premstar,” he said. “Prem hasn’t been feeling too well—”

  Again, all eyes went to her. She was glaring out of the cave of herself, bristling with some kind of animus, sure, but she looked as healthy as anybody else. And pretty. Pretty as a beauty queen. Which in itself was unforgivable.

  “And I’ve had some news about the ranch—which I’ve been waiting for the right moment to share with you, good news and bad news too. The good news is we’ve got my attorney in there fighting the county’s right to foreclose on the property—I mean, we could sell it yet, clear the back taxes, and have the bread, I mean, the wherewithal, to really do something here. I mean, new buildings, sauna, snow machines, something for everybody—we can really make this place work, people, make it livable, comfortable, even. And self-sufficient, definitely self-sufficient. That’s my goal, that’s it right there—”

  What’s the bad news? Star wanted to say, and her heart was going—she didn’t need bad news, not with Marco out there somewhere in the night, maybe lost, maybe hurt—but Bill beat her to it. “So what’s the bad news?” he said.

  No hedging now, no going back: Norm thrust his face forward, challenging the room. “I’ve got to split,” he said. “Me and Prem. But just for like the tiniest little running jump of a hiatus—that’s what it is, a hiatus—because they want me in court down there, and—well, I fixed it up with Joe Bosky. He’s going to fly us to the airport in Fairbanks. I mean, when the weather allows.” He looked into each face around the cabin, ticking them off one by one. “Plus Prem,” he said. “Prem’s sick.”

  It took a minute. They were in shock, that was what it was. They were staggered. Punch-drunk. No one could have guessed, not in their wildest—Star watched their faces go up in flames, their eyes turn to ash. They couldn’t talk. Nobody could say a word. Norm had just held a glowing torch to the roof of the meeting hall, he’d napalmed the village and scattered the refugees. She felt herself lifting out of her seat as if she were in another dimension altogether, and wasn’t that the kind of thing that happened to you when you died, when you had an out-of-body experience, hovering above the scene in pure
sentience? She was high up, running with the clouds, and then she burst through them into the barren night of the stars and the planets and their cold, cold heat. And now there were angry voices, frightened voices, flaring out all around her as if they wanted to shoot her down. “But Marco,” she stammered, fighting to be heard, “you don’t understand, you can’t leave, nobody can—Marco’s out there!”

  She went out into the night, shouting for him, but the shouts died in her throat—he wasn’t coming back, nobody was coming back, Marco was dead, Drop City was dead, and she might as well have been dead herself. The wind spat snow at her, rammed at her shoulders, thrust a dry tongue up under her collar and down the back of her pants. She hunched herself in the parka and made a circuit of the place, up to the goat pen, down to the river and back, the tracks filling behind her even as she lifted her feet, the clouds stilled, the hills immovable and silent, transfixed on the spearheads of the trees. The snow was nearly to her knees and drifting now, picking up structure and definition. There was no feeling in her toes. Her feet were like blocks, her fingertips numb. She was freezing. She was helpless. There was nothing she could do. She went round a second time, fighting it, screaming, “Marco! Marco!” She paused, listened, called out again. No one answered.

  Then she was in her cabin, laying wood on the fire. She had the place to herself, at least for the moment, because everybody else was in the meeting hall, debating, shouting, glutting themselves on the bad vibes and negativity, and the people who hadn’t been there for dinner were there now—she’d seen the hurrying dark forms huddled against the snow, panic time, oh yes indeed. She tried to steady herself. Tried to talk herself down from the ledge she’d stepped out on here. What she needed most of all was to be calm, to think things through in a slow, orderly fashion. Marco was lost. Norm was bailing. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. She saw herself a Drop City widow, sidling up to Geoffrey or Weird George, peeling potatoes, hauling frozen buckets of human waste out to the refuse heap, living day by day through the slow deterioration of everything she cared about, everything she’d built and fought for, and maybe she’d pile up stones in memory of Marco, the way the Indians did, and cry over the stones and her battered hands and the whole impossible naive idealistic hippie trip she’d been on ever since she left home. What a fool, she thought. What a fool she’d been.