Drop City (19 page)

On the way back, Marco didn't feel stoned at all, and then abruptly he did. There was no tingling in his extremities, no dislocation, no sudden infusion of light or loss of personality—it came over him as if he'd been draped in a blanket, swaddled and pinioned and laid out in a crib, as if it were night and he was dreaming somebody else's dreams for them. Norm, for once, was quiet. And Marco—he couldn't have spoken if he'd wanted to. He wasn't in the front seat of a VW van hurtling down a country road with the river trailing along behind him like a bright fluttering banner, but in a room, in a farmhouse or a rent-controlled apartment maybe, and the room was swollen with inherited and hoarded things, sideboards, stuffed chairs, a chest of drawers, quilts, antimacassars, bibelots, bric-a-brac. There was a bed in the room—a four-poster swamped with blankets—and in the bed, an old man, wasted and white, with a nose that climbed up out of his face as if it didn't belong to him. It was a conventional scene, a deathbed scene, somebody's future or past, utterly conventional, but for the single incongruity of a pair of snowshoes
fastened to the wall above the bed. The conscious remnant of his mind drew him back: Was this a photo he'd seen somewhere? A scene from childhood? TV? Or was he outside of himself and powerless to get back in? That was the thing with acid. He didn't like acid, had never liked acid, even when he liked drugs a whole lot more than he liked them now.

Norm murmured something—a snatch of nonsense, or no, he was singing, soft and low, lyrics like a private language—and here they were again, under the trees and then out in the open, moving through the sensory world as if they owned it. “You feel anything yet?” Norm wanted to know. “Because I don't feel a thing, or maybe just like the
beginning
of something, but what I'm wondering is did they forget to juice our juice or what?”

Marco was about to tell him he was feeling plenty himself, feeling possessed almost, feeling stacked up and wrung out, but he never got the chance—another vision sprang right up alongside the road and flung itself in front of the van, a huge dark blur of motion that wasn't a hallucination at all but the real and actual thing that was suddenly defeating Norm's white clenched hands and seriously dislocating his intentions. What was it? The horse. Charley Horse. The very animal, laying claim to the road and shivering its head stupidly as Norm ran his hands helplessly round the wheel and the van did a kind of stock-car trick on two thin wailing tires.

There were two lanes to that road, and the other one, the oncoming lane, instantly became a place of violent contraction, Norm's sidelong van and a pickup truck featuring a pair of startled faces, one male, one female, closing fast on the same space. Thunder and lightning: the van skewed violently to the left and Marco saw the horse loom up on his right before he felt the jolt of the first collision, the one that swatted the animal off its feet with the open palm of a big steel hand, and then the more substantial one, the one that screamed with contorted metal. The pickup truck—there was an old man in a feed cap at the wheel, his face fallen away into a deep pit of astonishment and outrage—caught the van just athwart the passenger's side
door and then shook itself loose and continued on into a tree, into several trees, and the horse lost all its legs and then found them again, even as Norm's van rebounded from the collision, described a long slow arc and came to rest in the center of the road.

“Okay,” Norm was saying, “okay, everything's okay,” as if he'd planned it, as if the whole thing were just another stunt he'd orchestrated to enliven the day. He was bleeding from a gash under one eyebrow, a bright reservoir of blood pooling in the orbit of his eye before draining off into his beard. His glasses had been snapped across the spine and the windshield featured a spidery mandala set in the glass like an ornament, and how clever of those German engineers, Marco was thinking, how clever—but shouldn't there be one on his side too?

Marco was all right, or that was his first impression, anyway. No blood, no broken bones. His right shoulder had a certain rigidity to it where he'd been flung against the dash three times in succession, and the acid seemed to be boiling up in his veins till he could hear the sizzle of it in his ears, but he was all right. All right, and out of the car—kicking open one very reluctant door and setting both his feet on the pavement, which hardly seemed to be moving at all. The horse—Charley Horse—was just standing there, trembling all over as if he'd been hosed down with ice water, Norm was a statue at the wheel of the van, and the old man—and his old wife—were camped out in the woods twenty feet from the road. Everything was still.

Until the next car—a monster of a thing, a Buick, or maybe it was a Pontiac, staggered in the rear by the weight of the blue-flecked fiberglass runabout it was hauling—came shearing round the curve and Charley Horse bucked twice, put his head down and tried to leap it. Marco heard himself shouting, but he was shouting over the adrenal surge and the successive rippling shore-battering waves of peaking acid, and no other living thing seemed to hear or heed him, least of all the horse. Which immediately laid its thousand pounds of horseflesh across the crumpling hood of the Buick—or no, it was a Pontiac, because there was the chrome
V
with the stoic chief welded
into it—and began a slow futile drumming of its hooves against the fenders on either side. The boat was part of the act now too—it rode up the back of the trailer, then relaxed an instant before gracefully spinning across the road till it came to rest against the bumper of the van.

Somebody was cursing. The sound of it arose from between the clenched teeth of the crash like an incantation, the same three monosyllables repeated over and over with increasing vehemence till the curses were screams and Marco was moving toward them through a scrim of what was real and what might have been. What did he see? A woman pinned behind the wheel of the Pontiac, her hair in curlers, her face distorted. Charley Horse had managed to tear himself open on the fulcrum of the hood ornament, and he'd collapsed the roof. Marco was fighting the drug, willing his mind to retake control of his body. He ducked away from the horse's hooves, from the horse's hundred buckets of blood and its looping gray intestines, and forced open the back door of the Pontiac. He had the woman—one long shriek of a woman—by the shoulders and dragged her into the backseat as if she were a piece of furniture, and then he had her out of the car and onto the shifting pavement. She wore her mouth like a badge, all that noise and violence, and he stood beside her, an arm round her shoulders, while Charley Horse thrashed himself off the car and slid across the shoulder of the road like a slick black sea lion leaving the shore for good. This time the horse didn't get up again.

“Marco!” Norm was shouting. “Marco, do something! Shit! What is this, blood?” He was standing in the road now too, and so were the old man and the old lady, squinting into the light as if they'd come in late to a movie and were trying to find their seats. Norm looked strange without his glasses—inhuman, or no: non-human. He'd found a rag in the car—a torn T-shirt that must have belonged to one of the children—and he pressed it to his face to stanch the bleeding. “Fucking horse,” he muttered, and there it was, on its side and heaving in the ditch.

“I just hope for your sake, mister,” the old man was saying—and
there
he
was, like a pop-up doll at Norm's elbow, with a white strained face and teeth that didn't seem to fit in his head (borrowed teeth, and that was a concept)—“I just hope you got insurance is all I got to say.”

Next thing Marco knew, he was running. Half a mile down the streaming blacktop to the Drop City turnoff, and then up the rutted dirt road to where the main house stood rippling against the trees. “Get help!” Norm had shouted in his face. “Get Alfredo! Get anybody!” And suddenly Marco was running, heaving himself down the road in a kind of pure white-hot acid-fueled panic, his boots flapping first at the pavement, then the dust. Somebody, anybody! He vaulted a rotting fence and pounded across an open field, thinking he'd better calm himself, better do whatever it was people were expected to do in a situation like this—shake it off, wake up, take responsibility—but the drug wouldn't let him. It was in his throat, in his head, it was strangling his heart, eating his lungs.

There was nobody on the front porch, nobody in the front room. The music was there, though, playing all on its own, loud, raucous, a clash of metal like a whole marching band falling down the stairs, and why didn't he recognize the tune? He saw plates of half-eaten food perched on the arms of chairs, the still-wet chopsticks like evil insects crouched over a splay of rice, beans, tofu; he saw record jackets come to ground like wind-swirled refuse, and in the back corner of the bookshelf, the black glistening puddle of a record working its way round the turntable. And that was strange, the music living a life of its own in a house with no human occupants. It was like a ghost story. A fairy tale. Nobody home and the porridge still warm on the table. The meeting room presented more of the same. Ditto the kitchen. He looked up and the square-headed orange tom looked down on him from its perch atop the refrigerator.

And then, beneath the music—or threaded through it—he heard the human noise in the backyard, a wailing, a hush, then a clamor of
voices, repeating now, slight return: wailing, a hush, clamor of voices. He took himself out the screen door and there they were, the whole tribe, gathered round the swimming pool and what appeared to be a very wet cloth doll stretched out on the flagstone coping. That was when the acid let go of him just long enough to record the scene: it was one of the kids, one of Reba's kids, and Jiminy was pumping at the kid's chest like a Marine Corps medic on the evening news and everybody else was wringing their hands and jumping in and out of the green murk that was the pool. He saw Ronnie inflate his cheeks and go down, and then Alfredo bobbing to the surface in a maelstrom of hair. “What's wrong?” he wanted to know, snatching at the first person his hand led him to, but he was so full of Norm and the accident he didn't recognize her, not at first.

“It's Che,” Merry told him. She was naked to the waist, shivering. She wore body paint, red and blue tendrils striating her limbs like extruded veins. Her eyes didn't seem to be in her head—they were just floating there, three inches to the left of her face. “He drowned, or he fell in or something, and we can't—I mean, nobody knows where
Sunshine
is.”

A shriek cut the air, every mother's nightmare. “Sunshine!” Reba wailed, drawing out the last syllable till it caught in the back of her throat. “Sunshine! Come out, baby, come out! It's not funny!” She flung herself across the yard, beat at the stiff brush of the chaparral with angry hands. She was puffed up, furious, just coming on to boil. “It's not a game. Come out, goddamnit! Come out, you hear me, you little bitch!”

“She's not in the pool,” somebody said, and in the confusion, Marco couldn't see who it was.

“The river, what about the river?” He glanced up to register Verbie—she was perched on the wet coping, her eyes dilated, hair glued to her head. “Did anybody search the river?”

A look of helplessness swept over them, lost eyes, mouths agape, the slumped shoulders and agitated hands, and how could anybody be expected to do anything at a time like this? It was Druid Day.
They were wiped, all of them. They didn't want to save children, they wanted to
be
children. “What do you mean, the river?” Merry wondered aloud.

“I mean the
river.
” Verbie flung out her hands as if she were taking a bullet on a dark stage. “She could've drowned. Down there, I mean.” Up to this point, she'd been going fine, but now she seemed to falter. She looked to her sister, then to Marco. “I mean, right?”