Drop City (20 page)

That was when Star appeared out of nowhere, parting the crowd like a prophet, her face ironed shut, quick bare feet on the flagstones, her naked limbs, wet T-shirt, wet shorts. And then she was bent over the limp form of Che, clearing his tongue with a sweep of two fingers, pinching his nostrils and breathing her life into him.
CPR. Junior Lifesavers. Mouth-to-Mouth.
It all came back to him in that moment, but all he could do was stand and watch, his arms dangling as if they'd been attached with pins, and what he felt was awe. He watched Star's knees grip the flagstones, watched her balance on the bridges of her feet. And her hair. It was a miracle, spread out over the child's head and torso like an oxygen tent, each curl like a finger, each finger willing him back.

People were pounding the bushes now, shouting out Sunshine's name as if it were the only word in the language, and Norm was down there bleeding like an animal somewhere on the road with the sheriff on his way and the citizenry up in arms, and still Marco didn't move. He watched Star's hair, watched her lips fasten to the boy's. Fasten and release, fasten and release. A year went by. A decade. And then Che's left foot began to dig at the flagstones, and Marco was released. In the next moment he was running again, generating a breeze all his own, the sweating cables of his own hair beating around his head, the cords of his legs fighting the descent that sent him hurtling down the bank of madrone, bay and knobcone pine to where the river took its light from the sky. He said it too, then, pronounced the name all the others were pronouncing, as if it were involuntary, called it out till his lungs burned and his throat went dry, “Sunshine! Sunshine!”

There was no answer. He took a path north along the bank, straining to see into the water, but the water was murky with its freight of sediment and deep here where the current sliced round a long garrulous bend. The water spoke to him, but it didn't calm him. Birds called out. The sky rose up and slapped down again. What had he expected to see—a pale arm waving amongst the river-run debris? The ghostly body pressed against a wedge of rocks six feet down? “Sunshine!” he called. “Sunshine!”

He was still calling when he found her. He was calling, but she wasn't answering. She was crouched at the foot of a deep arching bush hung with berries, a red stain of juice painted on her chin and exaggerating her mouth till it was like a clown's. Her red hands moiled in her lap. She was wearing a dirty white dress, no shoes, beads at her throat and wrist, and her hair was in two lax braids bristling with bits of twig and leaf. “Sunshine,” he said, just to hear himself say it again. She was staring past him, crouched there, just crouched. Maybe she was singing to herself, maybe that was it, because she was making some sort of noise in the back of her throat, and the noise made him uneasy. “Are you all right?” he asked her.

She didn't answer.

“Look,” he said, and the words were hard to extract, “everybody's been worried about you—your mother, she's been worried. And your father. And Norm and me and everybody.” He paused to let the breath go out of him, just for an instant, just to escape the tedium of breath-in and breath-out. “Been picking berries, huh?”

She didn't look at him, but she nodded her head, or at least he thought she did.

“Well, I'm going to take you back now, is that okay? I'm going to lift you up on my shoulders and take you back—you want a ride? You want to go piggyback?”

He came out of the woods to a hero's welcome, the whole clan gathered round him with their slow shy smiles and spooked eyes, yet
another tragedy averted, and let's stir up the pot of mush and get it on in a major way, sure, and crank the music too. It surprised him to see the sun fixed overhead—it was early afternoon still, though it felt much later, felt like midnight in his mind. Reba came across the yard, slid her daughter from his shoulders without a word and carried her into the house as if nothing had happened. Che was gone—presumably he was in the house too, in bed, fluttered over by half a dozen women, and that was an image Marco wanted to hold—but the blurred outline of him still clung to the wet flagstones as if it were a piece of some elaborate puzzle to which no one had the solution. Jiminy settled into one of the chaise longues with a pair of bongos and started a slow lugubrious slap-palmed beat. A beer—still cold from the tub—appeared in Marco's hand, and then Star was at his side. She didn't say a word, just leaned forward and kissed him and held her lips there until he came back to life.

13

When the black-and-white sheriff's cruiser came nosing up the drive like some sort of mechanical hound, sniffing out the curves and drawing a bead on the main house, Pan didn't feel much of anything. The day had careened right by him. There was all that hassle and hysteria, diving and diving again till he damned near wound up drowning
himself,
and then a lull that smoothed out all the wrinkles like a hot iron. Reba's brats had been saved and resurrected and either punished or rewarded or both—of that much he was sure, or at least he thought he was—and then at some point Norm had appeared with a bloody strip of cloth pressed to one eye and his glasses cobbled together with a white knuckle of masking tape. Norm was wearing his ask-no-questions look and went straight for his room at the top of the stairs, so that little drama was over before it began, and after a while the party or communal navel-gaze or whatever it was had recommenced in all earnestness.

But that was hours ago. What Pan was concerned about now was meat, and to that end he'd sequestered a package of Safeway hot dogs in the depths of the refrigerator and stashed an eight-pack of spongy supermarket buns under a pile of dirty clothes in the back bedroom, and as the cruiser worked its slow sure way up the road—moving so slowly, in fact, it barely even spun the dust off its tires—Pan was thinking he'd be building a little fire soon, after which he'd have a couple of hot dogs slathered with mustard and sweet pickle relish,
and anybody who happened to be around, weekend hippies and part-time heads included, would be welcome to join him.

He was sitting on the front porch, Merry, Maya and Mendocino Bill settled in beside him and some new cat in a serape and high-crowned straw hat sprawled on the steps (
his
trip was Krishna and there was no way to shut him up about it unless you took a claw hammer to the back of his head, and for the past half hour Pan had been giving it some real consideration). Merry wasn't going to eat any meat, or Maya either, that was for sure. Maybe Mendocino Bill, but Ronnie really didn't give a shit about Mendocino Bill one way or the other so it hardly mattered. “Krishna is love,” the new cat said, and the cruiser eased into the space in front of the railing like a foot slipping into a shoe. Two cops, each a replica of the other, got out.

They stood there in the dirt a moment, shifting their eyes around, two almost-young men, and what currents were
they
floating on? Lean, narrow-hipped, all but hairless, they looked as if they'd been specially bred in some police kennel somewhere, and Ronnie could picture it, the women staked out on chains and the bull-headed men going at them till they got the litter just right.
Woof-woof.
He studied their faces, but their faces gave away nothing. Their eyes, though—their eyes lit up every particle of dust, alive to every gesture, every nuance, eyes that could see through walls, through clothes, through flesh, and you'd have to be crazy not to feel the heat of them.

As the car doors slammed in unison, the two yellow dogs slunk out from beneath the porch to sniff at the cops' boots, and Freak, the one with the hacked-off tail, seized the opportunity to lift a leg and piss against the sidewall of the near tire. The cops never so much as shrugged. They took a minute to square their shoulders and adjust their belts, running their hands idly over the butts of their guns and truncheons and the rest of their head-cracking paraphernalia, then turned their attention to the porch. “You live here?” the one to the left asked, addressing Ronnie but letting his cold blue eyes jump to
Merry, Maya, Mendocino Bill and beyond, where the depths of the house stirred with a thick, lazy batter of activity.

Though half of Drop City had melted off into the woods at first sight of the cruiser, Ronnie played it cool. He had nothing to fear. He'd never been in trouble with the law—his luck had held through every transaction, every furtive hit and airless squeeze of the plunger—and his father's cousin the psychologist had gotten him a 4-F on the grounds of mental incapacity. Which is not to say he didn't recognize the pigs for what they were. “I live on the green planet earth,” he said, showing all his teeth.

“That's right, man,” the new cat put in, “and it was Brahma that put us here—and Lord Vishnu that preserves us.”

“Right on,” Maya said, and then Merry, flinging her hair back to expose her painted breasts, said, “You live here too. We all live here. On the planet, dig?” And everybody on the porch, even the new cat, flashed the peace sign.

The cop lifted one shining boot to the dried-out blasted paint-stripped plank of the porch's second riser, and rested it there, leaning into his knee and focusing tightly on Pan. “Who's in charge here?” he wanted to know, and his voice was reasonable yet, soft and reasonable, as if he were addressing a clutch of fourth graders or maybe the town drunk stewing in his own juices. “Who's the landlord? The owner?”

Dale Murray stepped through the screen door then, just in time to field the question. Dale was a head of the old school—No moment on this earth was rich enough to risk forgoing drugs for, that was his motto—and he'd blown into the ranch one night last week on a fig green Honda motorcycle that sounded as if he'd attached grenade launchers to the muffler pipes. He was wearing a pair of blue-and-white-striped bell-bottoms, he was shirtless, rigidly muscled and deeply tanned; bells and beads and the yellowed teeth of some unlucky carnivore dangled from his neck, and a guitar was fixed at his waist like a big wooden cummerbund. He gave each of the cops a hallowed look and said, “Listen, I'm not going to give you the
runaround and say God's the owner here and we're all mutual on this earth, you and me and your wife Loretta and Richard Milhous Nixon too—no, I'm not going to insult your intelligence and waste your time because I know how hard you guys work and the kind of shit people are always laying on you.” He paused. The cops' faces hardened, and the near one, the one who'd been asking the questions, drew his leg back and stood up square. “I won't lie,” Dale Murray said, “—I am. I'm in charge here.”

The talkative cop glanced at the top sheet in his summons book, then brought his eyes back up to drive them like staples into Dale Murray's. “You must be Norman L. Sender, then, is that right? Owner of an orange-and-white VW van with a peace sign painted on the driver's side panel and the California plate O-W-S-L-E-Y-1? Is that right?”

Dale Murray tugged at the loose ends of his hair. Ronnie could hear him breathing, a ragged intake and outflow that sounded like a machine in need of oil.

“Wanted for leaving the scene of an accident,” the cop went on, “in an obviously intoxicated state. That wouldn't be you, would it?”

“No, sir,” Dale Murray said, and there wasn't a flicker of recognition from anybody on the porch. “No, sir,” he repeated, and his accent—what was it, cowboy? Southern redneck?—seemed to thicken, “I didn't say that.”

The second cop had moved in to close the gap. “You got ID?” he wanted to know, and his voice wasn't reasonable at all—it was the standard-issue no-nonsense truncheon-swinging voice they must have handed out with the badges. “All of you,” he snarled, “I want to see some ID. Pronto.”

Nobody moved. Out on the periphery of the dried-up lawn, too far away for it to matter, Verbie was juggling three or four grapefruits in a shaft of sunlight while her sister danced round her like a mental case, strutting and writhing to some unheard melody. There was dogshit everywhere, piles of it like miniature termite mounds marching off into the distance. Two staved-in cars listed over their ruined
springs to the side of the house, amidst a midden of old lumber and shingles. From the back, the sounds of festivity, rock and roll, the odd splash and shout.

“Anybody here own a horse?” the first cop asked, posting the soft missive of his question in the slot left open for him by his partner.

That was when Mendocino Bill, all two hundred fifty pounds of him, shot up out of his chair as if he'd been launched, a question of his own on his lips: “You got a fucking warrant, man?”

Before it was over, everybody on the porch had to do penance, Ronnie included. As soon as Mendocino Bill opened his mouth, both cops went for him, even as Merry, Maya and the Krishna cat began chanting “Peace and Love, Peace and Love, Off the Pigs, Peace and Love.” Ronnie—
Pan
—gave the cops as wide a berth as he could, but he found himself crushed up against the railing as they dragged the big man from the porch, kicked his legs out from under him and forced his pale blubbery arms behind his back for the wedding of the cuffs. “He's not here,” Maya squeaked, “Norm's not here!” The cops ignored her. They weren't even breathing hard, and what they were scenting now was a kind of freedom they'd only dreamed of: hippies, a whole parade of them, resisting arrest.

Mendocino Bill—he was a loudmouthed know-it-all like Alfredo, up to his ears in
Popular Mechanics
in high school, no doubt a ham radio operator and an eagle scout on top of it, and here he was writhing in the dust on the fulcrum of his belly like a bowling pin set spinning by a strike right down the middle of the alley. So what if he'd been to Selma, so what if he could eat four plates of mush to anybody else's two, so what if he was one of the brothers and sisters of Drop City and the cops were the pigs? Despite himself, Pan felt something soar inside him to see the loudmouth brought low—until the second cop, the silent one, herded everybody off the porch and lined them up, hands against the wall and legs spread.

“What's the problem, Officer?” Dale Murray was saying as the
first cop patted him down. “I mean, what'd we do? A little kidding? Is that it? I mean, I was only joking. Can't you take a joke? You want to tell me jokes're against the law now?”

“Norm's not here,” Maya kept repeating in her thin strand of a voice. She had her head down, her hands framed on the wall and the dried-out ends of her hair dangling, and she was talking to the ground. She was no beauty, and if it weren't for the very loose scene at Drop City, and all those strung-out horny cats like Mendocino Bill and Jiminy, she'd never have gotten laid in a million years. “He's not. I mean,
really.
He went to Santa Rosa for like supplies and things and he never—”

“What was he driving?” the cop wanted to know, the first one, the talker. “VW van, right?”

“Don't tell him anything,” Merry said, and Ronnie saw that she'd clenched her face against the whole world, even as her eyes bled out of her head with the residue of the acid. He felt something for her then, something that took in her straining legs, her arched back and the painted breasts that stood up firm under the pressure of her out-thrust arms, and it wasn't just lust. She was all right, and more than all right—she was like Star, only better.

“You got ID?” the second cop repeated. “You? And you?”

Ronnie showed him his New York driver's license—
Ronald Daniel Sommers, 8 Crestview Avenue, Peterskill, New York, D.O.B. 12/2/48, eyes hazel, hair brown, 5'10", 162 lbs.—
and kept his mouth shut. They weren't interested in him. They were interested in Dale Murray, who had the better part of a lid of grass tucked down the front of his pants in a crotch-warmed plastic bag, and they were even more interested in Merry, who was wearing nothing but body paint from the waist up. If Norm had been in the house when the commotion started up, he was long gone by now—out the back door, across the yard and into the trees—and whatever he'd done with the van, the cops weren't going to find it here. They weren't going to find anything beyond Dale Murray's pot, Mendocino Bill's sweating carcass and Merry's tits—which was plenty, for one day—and as the people out back began to
drift round the house and surround them, the cops lightened up noticeably.