Drop City (16 page)

He turned round then, her husband, and in his hand the thing he was fumbling with, shiny foil, the skin-like droop of plastic. “I was just—” he said, and she watched his face, watched his eyes, as he warmed to this new vision of her standing there in nothing but the thinnest pearly evanescent flap of Oswalt's silk. “I couldn't—I mean, I tore the thing getting it out of the package . . .”

She wanted to laugh. “You don't need that thing,” she said, spreading her arms wide, “you'll never need it, ever again. Don't you realize? I'm your wife.”

They were up early, both of them, bags packed, the canoe loaded to the gunwales with wedding gifts, and they breakfasted on whatever came to hand (Sess had a ham, Swiss and caribou-tongue sandwich on half a loaf of the French bread her sister had brought with her from Anchorage; she had a plate of leftover three-bean salad, marinated artichoke hearts, a wedge of iceberg lettuce and a scoop of potato salad to round it off). She hadn't slept—or she had, off and on, but in a way that was more like a waking dream than any sleep she'd ever experienced, and she couldn't stop reaching out for him, running a hand down the slope of his arm or over the mysterious topography of the shoulder that lay pressed to hers. She was an explorer, that was what she was, learning the lay of the land, creating it anew all over again, and then again.

He'd made love to her twice under the influence of the tireless copper sun that refused to set on her wedding day, the sun that irradiated the squared-off edges of the shades and painted the foot of the bed as if it existed for them alone, and he was nothing like Fred Stines or Eric Kresten or the straining intent hot-faced college boys whose idea of love was a purely mechanical thing, a kind of exercise, like squat thrusts or push-ups. No. He was patient. Loving. Grateful. He made her feel more than just wanted—he made her feel as if she were the center of the universe. She watched him sleep as the sun dipped behind the hills and the shades went gray with the dusk that wanted to be night, and then she woke him when it came back up and he made love to her again.

But now it was seven
A
.
M
. and they straightened up the cabin, made the bed, stowed the leftovers in Richard's icebox and went out hand in hand to the canoe. The sun flooded the trees, the river was a cauldron of light. Birds nattered. A pair of geese shot up off the water and Sess pointed to the black burr of a porcupine caught in the crown of a birch up the shore. And then they were paddling, in concert, the easy rhythmic accommodation of man and wife, paddling as if they'd been a team forever.

Everything looked new to her, every leaf, every turning, the river
that resisted her paddle and re-created itself moment by moment. Her brain was flooded with endorphins. She was lighter than air. They talked in a hush, their soft, unhurried voices carrying out over the water, and they talked of practical things, of building a fish wheel, expanding the cabin, putting up a greenhouse for the tomatoes, of scattering seed for zinnias, marigolds, pansies and snapdragons. And the dogs. “The first thing I'm going to do is teach you to mush,” he told her, “so you can run the trapline with me, be my partner. You always wanted to be my partner, didn't you? Right from the start?”

Her answer was a smile, delivered over her right shoulder as the paddle slid back from the stroke. Sure she was his partner—she'd chosen him, hadn't she? Wasn't that what this was all about? She'd feed the dogs, she'd mush them, she'd stretch and tan hides, repair the rags of his clothes, feed him, keep him warm at night, and he'd hold her and take care of her in turn. That was her life, spinning out into the future, and it was as fixed and certain as anything on this earth ever can be.

After a time the churning milk of the Yukon gave way to the pellucid Thirtymile, and the cabin—their home—came into view like the last outpost of civilization in a world gone over to nature. The canoe cut across the current and the cabin loomed larger. Everything was still. Still and lush. She wanted to feel the silence, wanted to relax into it, but suddenly Sess was digging at the paddle in a kind of frenzy, out of sync with her for the first time, fighting it, ramming the canoe forward as if the river had caught fire. “The dogs,” he said.

And then it came to her: the dogs were silent. Two days at their stakes and no one home—they should have had their noses to the sky, expressing their impatience and their joy. But they were silent. Worse: they were lying still in the weeds, the chains like nooses at their throats. And when she and Sess got there, when they'd beached the canoe and sprinted up the bank with no breath left in them, the carcasses were already stiffening round the ragged dark openings where the bullets had gone to shelter.

PART THREE
DRUID DAY

One pill makes you larger, And one pill makes you small. And the ones that mother gives you Don't do anything at all.

—Grace Slick, “White Rabbit”

11

Star didn't have a mantra on this particular morning, no nonsense syllables or song lyrics ricocheting around her head while the sun sang in the windows over the sink and thirty-two fresh-cracked and beaten eggs fluffed in the pan. Or pans. Four of them, cast-iron, black as char—four pans, four burners, all balky. Posters climbed the walls, four Beatles, three Youngbloods, five Rolling Stones. Basil, rosemary, tarragon and lemongrass. Clay pots. A big spill of green. She was crumbling goat cheese over each of the pans, the fragrance rising, the spatula working, fold and stir, fold and stir. At her elbow, the chopping block, and this morning it had a wet sheen to it, the residue of the tomatoes, peppers and onions she and Merry had diced while Lydia squeezed oranges and Maya pulled biscuits from the oven. On the table, the tin plates were stacked high and the silverware awaited the rush in two big plastic tubs that had once held Blue Bonnet margarine. For napkins, there was a roll of paper towels, just like at Camp Minewa.

Numbers were important this morning, that's what it was—she was into numbers, two dogs stretched out on the floor, four women in the kitchen (and she wasn't going to call them
chicks,
because that was just stupid, that was demeaning and belittling, no matter what Ronnie said), two goats under the tree, forty-three people lined up for breakfast and one sun, fat and glowing, making a magical thing of the flat black grid of the screen door. She scrambled the eggs, one
pan, two pans, three pans, four, the scent of the onions competing with the biscuits until the whole room was dense with it and Jiminy stuck his head in the door. “Ready yet?” he wanted to know. “One more minute,” she said, and she loved this, this place and this moment, more than she'd loved anything in her life, “sixty short tiny little expiring seconds—you can start counting them off on your fingers.”

To Merry, at her shoulder, she said, “Cats and chicks, whoever invented that—I mean, those terms? Isn't it stupid? I mean cats are predatory, they're tough and—”

“Unreliable?” Merry said, leaning in with a smile and the crudely rolled, fat-in-the-middle joint they'd been sharing. She held it to Star's lips while Star plied the spatula and finessed the pans. “Always catting around? Spraying the furniture? Sharpening their claws?”

“Right, that's what I mean. They name sports teams after cats, the Tigers, the Nittany Lions, but what are chicks? Little fluffy helpless things that come out of eggs.”

“But cute, right?”

“I don't want to be cute.”

Merry was cutting bread into inch-thick slices. Her hair was involved with her hands, the cutting board, and she whipped it back with a flick of her neck. “What do you want to be, then—tough?”

The eggs tumbled out of the pans and into a matching pair of big fluted ceramic bowls lovingly fabricated by Harmony and Alice, Drop City's resident potters. Star shifted her face away from the swirl of steam and called out, “It's ready!” then tuned back in. “Yeah, sure—I'll settle for tough. It's a whole lot better than helpless. Or predatory, maybe. Predatory's even better.”

“Like a cat?”

But that was too much, and they were both giggling and rubbing at their eyes and the suddenly itching tips of their noses as they served up eggs, first to Jiminy, and then to all the rest of their brothers and sisters, as Drop City and special guests filed by, tin plates in hand. Jiminy was almost always first in line because he was the
hungriest, skinny as a concentration camp survivor but he could out-eat anybody Star had ever seen, including her brother Sam, who played left tackle on the high school football team and wore size fourteen shoes. Two total strangers were next in line, and then it was Reba and Alfredo and the kids, Reba looking hard and
old
in the morning light, her hair like dried weeds, her eyes blunted and lifeless. When she smiled—and she wasn't smiling now, because her lips were two dead things pressed one atop the other—a whole deep rutted floodplain of lines and gouges swallowed her eyes, as if she'd already used up her quotient of joy and from now on out every laugh was going to cost her. “Che doesn't like eggs,” she announced, “—I think he's allergic to albumin. Maybe just give me some toast and I'll smear it with honey or something.”

Che stood there beside her, looking numbed-out, dirty T-shirt, dirty feet, a frizz of wild sun-bleached hair and two eyes that were like blips on a radar screen. “That what you want, baby,” Reba said, bending to him, “—honey and toast?”

“
I
want honey,” Sunshine said in a voice that was like the scratching of a scab, rough and low, with no real expectation of relief. She was three years old. She stood just behind her brother, close enough so that the bulge of her bare abdomen brushed the hem of his shirt. Her eyes were soft, brimming, hopeless. Star tried to give her a smile, because that was what you were supposed to do when you came across a kid—
And isn't she cute, or is it a he? Or an it?
—but children made her feel awkward and uneasy, unnatural even. How could she, a woman, tell anybody she didn't want children, didn't relate to them, didn't even really like them? Children were nothing but dead weight as far as she was concerned, red-faced yowling little aliens that sucked the life right out of you, and if you ever had any dreams of living for yourself, you could forget them when you had kids, because from then and forever you were just somebody's mother. And what was wrong with birth control? The Pill? Ball all you want, but just don't forget to take your pill every morning. Star didn't get it. She really didn't.

At any rate, she tried for a smile, and Reba gave her an exasperated look before swinging round on her daughter and plucking at her arm with two fingers molded into pincers, just like Star's mother, just like everybody's mother, and that brought her back, way back, as if she were trapped in a home movie. “You eat your eggs and don't you dare start in because I'm in no mood this morning,” Reba hissed, “let me tell you—”

The girl, the kid, Sunshine—there she stood, not in the least moved by the unstated threat. Her brother fell into himself, utterly deranged by the hour, the place, life on this bewildering turned-on planet, and she looked at him as if she didn't recognize him. In her tiny hopeless scratch of a voice, she said: “I want juice.”

“Milk,” Reba responded automatically. People at the back of the line were drifting along in their own planetary orbits, bells, beards, beads, morning jokes, easy soothing rhythms, but even they began to look up to see what the delay was.

The tiny voice: “Juice.”

And now Star intervened, because the juice—well, this was Druid Day, a celebration for the summer solstice, and the juice, fresh-squeezed by Lydia and as pure and sweet and organically salutary as anything you could ever hope to find anywhere in the whole golden sun-struck state of California, was laced with acid, LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide, because everybody at Drop City was going to commune with their inner selves today, all of them, in a concerted effort to raise the consciousness of the planet by one tiny fraction of a degree. “But honey, the juice isn't good today, you won't like it—”

Naked, her legs slightly bowed and her features dwindling in the broad arena of her face, the kid held her ground. “Juice.”

“Oh, shit,” Reba said. “Shit. Fuck. I don't care. Give her juice.”

Lydia was there, Merry, Maya, all looking on with washed-out smiles. They were the chicks, and they were serving breakfast. Tomorrow it would be somebody else's turn, another group of chicks. But this morning it was this group—Star's group—and there was a
celebration going on, or about to go on. Star hesitated. “But it's, um—you know, the juice is
special
today, Reba. Did you forget?”

“Summer solstice.”

“Right.”

“Druid Day.”

She could feel the grass tugging at her body as if she were about to lift off, gravity suddenly nullified as in a dream, the gentlest subtlest most persuasive full-body tug in the world, and then it let go. “Yeah,” she said finally, “and so we, Lydia, I mean, already—”

“—laced the OJ with acid, as if Alfredo and I didn't like
invent
Druid Day year before last, and where were you then, back home with Mommy and Daddy? You really think I'm that far out that I don't know what I'm doing? You think my kids haven't been turned on?” Reba shot a withering look round the kitchen, then dropped her face to confront her daughter. “See the trouble you're causing? You want juice? Okay, have your juice—but don't you come crying to me if you get onto some kind of kid trip like you did last time—remember last time, when you curled up in that cabinet under the sink and wouldn't come out all day?”

Sunshine didn't nod, didn't say yes or no, didn't even blink.

“Okay,” Reba breathed, straightening up and smiling now, her face a cauldron of tics and wrinkles and wildly constellating moles, “give her the eggs, and
milk
, and if it'll keep her out of my hair because I need a day off sometimes too, believe it or not, just half a glass of the juice, okay?”

Alfredo was deep in conversation with Mendocino Bill—“Hobbits are three feet tall, just the size of kids, because it's a kids' book, so get over it, already”—and he had nothing to say. He turned a blank face to Star and the line shuffled forward. Sunshine took her plate of eggs and her juice over to the table, set them down, and came back for the milk. When Star looked up again, all the seats at the table were taken, and Jiminy was holding forth about something, waving his fork and jerking at the loose strands of his hair as if they'd come to life and
started attacking him. Sunshine was nowhere to be seen. Her plate, barely touched, had been pushed to one side. The glass of milk was there beside it, a yellow stripe of cream painted round the rim, but the juice was gone.

Star registered that fact, made a little snapshot of it in her head—crowded table, a surge of tie-dye, saffron eggs on a dull tin plate, forks gleaming, teeth flashing, and no kid present in any way, shape or form, and no juice—but the snapshot never got printed because Verbie was there in line with a girl who could have been her twin except she wore her hair long, and Verbie was introducing her as her sister Angela from Pasadena, and the plates moved, the biscuits retreated, the orange juice dwindled in the stoneware pitcher. Verbie helped herself to a double scoop of eggs, accepted biscuits and a full glass of juice. Star had already had
her
juice, and she could feel the first crackling charge of it leaping synapses up and down the length of her, and she momentarily tuned out Verbie, who was in the middle of a complicated story about her sister, something about the Whiskey, too many Harvey Wallbangers and a go-go dancer. The sister seethed with joy. This was a story about her, and Verbie was telling it, at breakfast, on Druid Day in Drop City.

“You know, I guess I'll take a full glass too,” the sister said. “It isn't that strong, is it?”

“Two hundred mics,” Verbie said. “Three, at most.”

And who was next? Ronnie, looking chewed-over and cranky. He had his head down and his eyes dodged and darted behind the oversized discs of his sunglasses,
fish,
but not in a net, little fish,
minnows,
trapped in a murky aquarium. He took a glass and held it out. “Eggs?” she said, and it was a peace offering. She'd cooked the eggs, and here she was to scoop them up and serve them, the hard-working, self-effacing and dutiful little
chick,
and what more could anybody ask for?

“Skip the eggs.”

“Toast? Biscuits?” She tried for a smile. “Fresh-baked. By Maya.”

“Just the juice.” He watched her fill the glass. The breakfast roar
surged round the room, spilled out the door and into the courtyard. “So where you been the last couple of days?” he said. “I've been looking all over for you.”

She shrugged to show how casual everything was, no big deal, but it wasn't easy to shrug and pour at the same time. Juice dripped down the sides of the glass, puddled on the table. “We were down backpacking round Mount Tam,” she said, “in the redwoods there? It was a trip. It really was.”

“You and Marco, right?”

She nodded.

“Like the night I got my deer—I looked all over for you that night too.” He took the glass from her hand and held it out away from him, the juice foaming like a witches' brew, neon orange and
drip, drip, drip.
“Just you and Marco, right?”