Drop City (44 page)

“Chicken,” Merry said.

“See, what'd I tell you?” Verbie said.

And then Premstar, propped up beside Norm like a painted mannequin, Premstar the beauty queen who was more worried about her nails and her lipstick and her eyeliner than about anything that could possibly go down at Drop City, past or present, entered the conversation for the first time all night. “What about our treats?” she demanded. “All the things we ordered from Pan, I mean. Did everybody forget, or what?”

That was the unfortunate moment Ronnie chose to come bobbing across the field from his tent, the sun firing the threads of his hair, his torso riding over his hips as if he were walking a treadmill, and the table fell momentarily silent to watch his progress. Everyone was thinking the same thing. Pan had been crashed in his tent all this time, out of sight, out of mind, but the boat had come in with Verbie and Sky Dog and Dale, strange cargo indeed, and the windows for the meeting house and the three prospective cabins were there, uncracked and true, and the cans of kerosene and the bar oil and blades
for the saws, but nothing else. No candy bars. No underarm deodorant. No books or magazines or tubes of suntan lotion. And if they weren't in the plane and they weren't in the boat, then where were they?

“Hey, Dale,” Sky Dog said, trying to get it going again, “remember that shit they tried to palm off on us in, where was it, Carmacks, in that roadhouse?
Moose
burger they called it?” But nobody was listening. All eyes were on Pan as he shuffled up to the table, tucking in his shirt and swatting absently at mosquitoes. Even Freak lifted his head from the dirt to give him a look of appraisal. The smoke drifted. The moment held.

“Hey, what's happening,” Ronnie said, leaning over Marco's shoulder to peer into the depths of the nearest pot. “Am I too late for dinner?”

At first, he tried to deny everything, squeezing himself in on the bench between Star and Joe Bosky and scraping what he could out of the bottom of the pot, all the while mounding it up on the first plate that came to hand, and never mind that it had already been used, he wasn't fussy. He was wearing his glad-to-be-here look, all smiles and dancing eyes, and he'd put a little effort into his clothes too, his denim shirt clean and maybe even pressed and what looked to be a new bandanna wrapped round his head. He found a fork, wiped it on his jeans, and began to feed the hardened dregs of rice into his mouth, too busy eating to address the issue of Drop City's trust and the two-column shopping list he'd wrapped round the wad of bills everybody had thrust on him five days ago. Marco studied the side of his head, the sparse thread of his sideburns tapering down into the sparser beard, the wad of muscle working in his jaw, but Ronnie was making eye contact with no one, least of all Premstar, who'd just looked directly at him and said, “So where's our stuff?”

Now she repeated herself, and Reba, the hunt in her eyes, said,
“Yeah,
Pan,
what's the deal? Are you going tell me you forgot, or what?”

If Ronnie was hoping it would blow by him, he was going to be disappointed, Marco could see that. He hadn't given him any money himself—he'd been too busy to think of needing or wanting anything—but Star had, and that was enough to involve him right there, more than enough. To this point, Pan had been fairly innocuous, shying away from the construction or anything that smacked of real work, maybe, but taking charge of the boat and the drift net Norm's uncle had left behind and assiduously drilling holes in anything that moved out along the river, and that was meat nobody else was going to go and get, at least not till the cabins were up anyway. He's doing his own thing, that's what Star said whenever his name came up in relation to the work details Alfredo was forever trying to organize—the latrine crew, the bark-stripping crew, the wood-splitters and sod-cutters—and the way she defended him was an irritant, certainly, but Marco wasn't jealous of him, or not that he would admit.
Of course I love him,
Star had insisted,
but like a brother, like my brother Sam, and no, we never really slept together, or not in any way that really meant anything—

“Is that booze I see here on the table? Distilled spirits?
Al
-co-holic beverage?” Ronnie lifted his head and darted a glance at the sun-drenched bottle of rum rising up out of the wooden slab at Bosky's elbow. “What are we mixing it with?”

“The stuff, Ronnie, the stuff,” Reba said. “We were talking about the stuff we all gave you money for—where is it? Huh?”

He reached for the bottle, found a cup, poured. Everybody at the table watched him as if they'd never before seen a man lift a cup to his lips, and they watched him sip and swallow and make a face. “I thought it was—didn't we bring it in the plane, Joe? I mean, this morning?”

But Joe Bosky was no help. He sat there frozen behind his glazed lenses, not even bothering to swat at the mosquitoes clustered on the
back of his neck. A dense spew of smoke raked across the table and then dissipated. No one said a word.

“Jesus,” Ronnie said, slapping at his forehead. “Don't tell me I left all that shit back at the bus—”

“Oh, cut the crap, already. You didn't leave anything anywhere, did you, man?” Mendocino Bill rose massively at the far end of the table. He'd put in an order for Dr. Scholl's medicated foot powder, because he had a semipermanent case of athlete's foot and the itching was driving him up a wall. “You fucked up, didn't you?”

Ronnie looked wildly round the table, his mouth set, eyes jumping from one face to another. He was calculating, Marco could see that, dipping deep in the well, way down in the deepest hole, fishing for a lie plausible enough to save his neck. Marco had no sympathy for him, none at all, and in that moment he realized how expendable he was, whether Star needed him as confessor or not—or no, especially because she needed him. Or thought she did. The shadows deepened. A hawk screeched from a tree at the edge of the woods. “What about it, Pan?” he heard himself say.

“Talk about the third degree,” Ronnie said, and he was looking down at the table now, toying with his fork. Suddenly he let out a laugh—a high sharp bark of a laugh that startled the dog out of his digestive trance—and he raised his head and gave Marco a sidelong look. “All right,” he said, “all right, you got me. I fucked up. Had one too many drinks, you know, and I just . . . I don't know, I just, I guess it slipped my mind—”

He must not have found much comfort in the look Marco was giving him, because he ducked his head again and murmured, to no one in particular, “So go ahead and hang me.”

A moment ticked by, everybody staring at the spool of his bowed head, the rings flashing on the fingers of his right hand—a ring on every finger, even the thumb—as he fed congealed rice pap into his mouth with the slow, trembling incertitude of a penitent. Freak got up from under the table, stretched, yawned and stared off at something across the field and into the line of the trees. Star sat there
rigid. Her face was white, bloodless, drawn down to nothing. She was giving Ronnie a look Marco couldn't fathom—was she afraid for him, was that it? Or was she ashamed? Ashamed and disgusted? He was almost surprised when her voice broke the silence: “So you'll be giving everybody their money back now, right?”

Ronnie took another pull at the mug, again made a face. He looked like a cat scratching around in a litter box. “Christ, has anybody got a Coke? Or a Pepsi? I'd settle for Royal Crown, even—this shit is
harsh.
” He shot a glance at Star, then looked down at his plate. “Well, not exactly,” he said, and an angry murmur burned from one end of the table to the other. “Because, you've got to understand, I saw this opportunity—pot, I mean, the pot Lester and Franklin smuggled in, because where else do you expect to find weed in Alaska? Beyond what we brought, I mean. So I figured what do we need most of all, the single biggest thing? And what are we going to need to get us through those long dark nights that are going to be coming before you know it? Right? Weed. So I made an investment for all of us.”

“You're a real altruist, Pan,” Reba said.

Bill hadn't sat down yet. He was still hovering there at the far end of the table, the fat firming to muscle in his shoulders and arms, the long slant of the sun crystallizing the strands of grease in his river-washed hair. He looked pained. Looked as if someone had just poked him with a sharp stick. “Yeah, right,” he said, and he growled it, his voice hoarse and raw with suppressed rage, “you mean the pot you tried to sell me this morning for thirty bucks a lid?”

“Fuck you,” Ronnie said, and he was on his feet now too, trying to untangle his legs from the table, trying to get serious, get angry. “I mean, fuck you, you fat sack of shit.”

And of course Bill rose to the bait, coming round the end of the table in the swelled-up shell of himself, coming at Ronnie like a moving mountain, and Marco thinking two or three punches and they're separated and Ronnie can go off in a huff to his tent, put-upon and abused, after which there would be an offering of pot, not all of it,
maybe, and certainly not anywhere near the value of it, and by the end of the night the blame would be meliorated and the sinner redeemed. But he was wrong. Because before any of it could play out, Joe Bosky entered the mix. Somehow he managed to lurch up and kick himself free of the bench in time to intercept Bill before he could get to Ronnie, who was only then bracing himself to meet the first rush. Everybody else sprang up simultaneously from the table, Reba cursing, Che and Sunshine looking lost and bewildered, Alfredo shouting, “No, no, no!”

Bosky never hesitated. He dropped his shoulder and slammed into Bill as if they were out on a football field, helmet to breastbone, and Bill's feet got tangled and he went down heavily in the dirt. Almost immediately he pushed himself up, his face transfigured with rage, but before anyone could intervene, Bosky hit him with two quick white fists—two uppercuts delivered as he was blundering to his feet—and Bill went down again. That was when Alfredo and Deuce made a move to wrap Bosky up in their arms, but Bosky swatted them away as if they were nothing and swung round to face off the whole camp. “Nobody fucks with Pan like that,” he snapped. “You understand? It's not right, because I want to tell you”—and here his voice got sluggish and he staggered back and caught himself—“I want tell you Pan is Joe Bosky's buddy and nobody fucks with Joe Bosky.”

Marco was just standing there with the rest of them, hands at his sides. It wasn't his fight. Then he saw Bill scrabbling in the dirt with a split lip and a film of blood enlivening his teeth and Bosky standing over him in his paramilitary getup, and began to grope toward the re-alization that maybe it was his fight after all. What was Bosky doing here, even? And what was this business with Star—he'd been coming on to her all day and Marco had let it pass. Maybe, he was thinking now, he shouldn't have.

But here was Jiminy, all hundred and thirty-five pounds of him, pushing his way through the crowd. “Who the hell are you?” he said, throwing it back at Bosky. “You're not part of this—you don't even belong here.”

“That's right,” somebody said, and then Reba was there, her face a mask of war, doing what nobody had yet thought to do—namely, help Bill up out of the dirt.

Bill was heaving. There was blood on his coveralls. Reba stood there beside him with her honed eyes, propping him up. She looked first to Ronnie, then to Bosky. “We don't need this kind of shit here,” she hissed. “You want to have your drunken brawls, take it someplace else. We've got kids here.”

And there they were, Che and Sunshine, backed up against the slashed crossbars of the cabin porch, hair in their faces, their eyes reduced to twin nubs of malleable black rubber, and anybody could mold those eyes, Marco thought, make them laugh, make them cry. He felt nothing but sad. “I'm with Reba,” he said.

“All right,” Joe Bosky spat, “I know when I'm not wanted, don't let the door hit you on the way out, right?” and he started off toward the plane, unsteady on his feet. He hadn't gone five yards before he turned round and focused the glare of his silver shades on Pan, on Ronnie. “You coming,” he said, “or what?”