Drop City (21 page)

Ronnie was still flying high, way up there at thirty-five thousand feet, cruise control, the billowing clouds—
leavin' on a jet plane
—and none of it really affected him, though he resented the prodding and poking. Resentment, that was what he was made of, and the realization made him bristle inwardly, just a bit. He resented the cops, resented Mendocino Bill and Alfredo and Reba and her tripped-out filthy little suicidal brats, resented his parents and Star and Marco and maybe even the teepee cat out in the desert. Standing there in the late sun, with his hands spread flat against the outside wall of the house and his brothers and sisters gathered all around him and the cops starting to hedge their bets, he drifted back to that aching sorrowful high-crowned day when he went looking for Star, just to see her, to be with her, and his resentment took him across the yard and up the ladder and into the treehouse. How long had it taken him—five minutes? Ten? The space was empty, neat, rug on the floor, books on the shelves, guitar in the corner, backpack, clothes, Marco's hairbrush, his nail clippers, his toothpaste. The whole world was holding its breath. Pan didn't stint. He let the resentment come up in him till it was a kind of spew, and when he spewed, the violence of it surprised even him.

But now it was Druid Day and everybody was coming down in the fading afternoon and the cops were tucking Dale Murray's head into the black-and-white cruiser as if it were some precious object they were returning to its rightful owner. They let their eyes burn into the crowd for a long moment, Mendocino Bill rubbing at his liberated wrists and Merry jeering without opening her mouth, and then they ducked into the car, fired it up in a rapture of turbocharged power and made their slow sure way back down the dust-laden road.

The evening wore on. The light grew denser. Pan was roasting hot dogs on the slim green wand of a willow stick, woodsmoke tearing at
his lungs and Lydia propped up on a log beside him, already eating, when Norm came loping out of the woods.
Norm,
he thought,
here comes Norm,
and something tightened inside him. Ronnie always felt at a loss with Norm, because Norm was older—
an older cat
—a kind of guru whose approval he sought, though he was hardly aware of it himself. He always straightened up when Norm was around, though, and he found himself trying to exaggerate his own grasp of things, as if the only way he could relate to the man was through an intervening lens of cool. Was he trying to impress him? Sure he was. Trying to get him to take note, lean on him, single him out? Sure. So what did he say now but “Hey, Norm—man, hey, you want a hot dog?”

Norm didn't answer right away. He looked dazed, as if he'd been lost in the woods for a month. There was a crust of dried blood over his left eyebrow. His glasses clung awkwardly to his face. “The man,” he said, and he was gasping or wheezing or both. “The man was here, right? Looking for me?”

Lydia glanced up from her hot dog. Her bare feet were splayed out in the dust and you could see up the crotch of her cutoffs. She was sloppy, that was what Pan was thinking, sloppy and overweight. She said: “They took that new guy, what's his name—Dale?—and nobody's been down to bail him out or whatever. Alfredo said to wait for you.”

“Dope,” Ronnie said, and he sucked at his cheeks. Serious business. He was standing here by the open fire talking serious business with Norm Sender.

“Dope?” Norm's face dropped. “You mean they searched him? Right here, on private property? Right on my front lawn, for shitsake? Is that what you're telling me?”

The sky was lit with tracers of fire from the setting sun and bats had begun to hurl themselves through the air. The first mosquitoes were making their forays. A jay screeched from the line of trees behind them.

“They searched us all, everybody on the front porch.”

Norm gazed off toward the shadow of the house as if he could
detect them there still. Ronnie gripped a bun, squeezed a hot dog from the willow stick and handed it to him. “You want mustard?” he asked. “Relish? We got relish too.”

“Jesus,” Norm murmured, and he took the hot dog without comment, no mustard, no relish, just meat and bun, and lifted it to his mouth. “Jesus,” he repeated, and it sounded as if he was praying, “they're killing me here, that's what they're doing, they're killing me.”

The smoke shifted then and came back at them, twigs snapping in the flames, and both Ronnie and Norm had to step to one side.

“It was Bill,” Ronnie put in, and he couldn't help himself. “If he didn't go and open his big mouth, nothing would've happened. He pushed them. ‘You got a fucking warrant, man?' That's what he said.”

Norm was eating, his gaze vacant, the hot dog bun an extension of his face. Lydia scratched her inner thigh, slapped idly at a mosquito and contracted her shoulders in annoyance. “Fucking bugs,” she said. And then, musing: “I wasn't there. I missed the whole thing.”

“You didn't miss much,” Ronnie said, and he was wondering where she'd been—on her back someplace, no doubt, tripping her brains out and balling anybody who could manage to get his zipper down. “What do you think, Norm—think they'll be back?”

It was a stupid question, and Norm didn't respond—and if he had, it probably would have been with some put-down like
Where do you think they'll come looking for me, city hall?
He didn't respond because he hadn't come down all the way yet—he was just a little too jittery and bug-eyed—and in a rare moment of empathy, Ronnie saw how the day must have cut through him, what with the accident and watching the horse breathe its last and then having to hightail it into the woods.
Hightail it. And where had that expression come from? Some cowboy movie?
Pan had a brief glimmer of Hopalong Cassidy spurring a big white horse through the sagebrush, a round black-and-white screen the size of a fishbowl and his father screaming from the kitchen because some ingrate—that's what he used to say,
ingrate
—had used up all the ice in the tray without filling it again. Norm just stood there. He fed the rest of the bun into his mouth and chewed
mechanically, and when Ronnie handed him a second hot dog nestled in a fresh bun, he took it wordlessly.

It was a moment, and Ronnie was enjoying it. But then Reba came dragging her six-hundred-pound face across the back lot like some sort of bled-out zombie, already complaining from a hundred feet away, and the moment was gone. “Norm,” she was hollering, “did you hear? The cops. They were here. They're looking for you.”

Norm had heard. He'd been crouching in the woods in an acid coma for three hours with the blood crusting on his face and his glasses snapped in two, hadn't he? What did she think—he was hiding out there for the sheer thrill of it? They watched her, all three of them, as she made her way toward the flash and snap of the fire. “You heard about Che?” she called from twenty feet away.

Norm grunted something in response, something vaguely affirmative, and then she was right there, swaying over the balls of her feet, her pigtails unraveling round twin ligatures of pink rubber bands. “He's all right, he's going to be cool, but I tell you, he really freaked us out . . . I mean, for a while there he wasn't even breathing.” There was a pause, and nothing filled it. Her eyes were like grappling hooks, tearing at them, tugging and heaving and pulling. “But Charley Horse,” she said, “what a bummer.”

Lydia said, “Yeah, bummer,” and nodded her head.

Norm looked at his feet. “You know what you do with a dead horse?”

“Beat it,” Ronnie said.

“Render it. They use it for dog food, glue, whatever. I never liked the thing anyway. It was just this big, stupid, four-legged sack of shit my ex-wife just had to have.
You got a ranch, don't you? Well then you gotta have a horse.
Brilliant logic, huh?”

Reba stood there, hard-eyed and pugnacious, her feet splayed, braids coming undone, already hurtling into middle age. Ronnie saw the two vertical lines gouged into the flesh between her eyebrows, the parentheses at the corners of her mouth: married too young, knocked up too soon, that's what she was all about. And what did she
want? Answers. She wanted answers. “So what are we going to do, Norm? You know they're going to come back with a search warrant. You know they're going to close us down. What then? Where we going to go? I mean, Alfredo and me, we've given like two years of our
life
to this place—I mean, this is it. This was where we were going to stay for the rest of our lives—and Che's life, and Sunshine's.” She looked away, as if she couldn't bear the sight of him with his slumped shoulders and bloodied face and taped-up glasses, and then she lifted her head and came right back at him. “So what's it going to be, Norm? What are we going to do now?”

Pan skewered another hot dog on his willow stick and thrust it into the flames.
Close the place down?
He was just getting comfortable. Sure, some of his brothers and sisters might have been a pain in the ass, but they all knew him, and for the first time in his life he had a purpose, whether anybody wanted to admit it or not—he was the provider here, or one of them. One of the main ones. He'd got the deer, hadn't he? And quail—he'd shot quail too. And fish—that's all he did was fish, and even the vegetarians couldn't complain about that. They ate for free, and that was the whole point of going back to the land, wasn't it?

Reba's words hung on the air, accusatory, demanding, tragic, self-pitying:
What are we going to do now?

Norm wasn't staring at his feet anymore. He straightened his shoulders as if he'd just woken up, tucked the remains of the second hot dog in his mouth and slicked back his hair with the palms of his hands. He was thirty-seven years old. There was gray in his beard. His toes were so twisted they looked as if they'd been grafted on. “What are we going to do now?” he echoed. “We're going to have a meeting, that's what we're going to do.”

14

This meeting wasn't anything like the last one. All the air had gone out of the day, a slow insidious deflation that was so wearying it wasn't even worth thinking about, and by the time Norm put out the word, half the population of Drop City had already crashed and burned. People were stretched out on sofas, stained mattresses, sleeping bags, on mats of pine boughs and the backseats of cars, their faces drawn, hair bedraggled, sleeping off the effects of simultaneously opening all those doors in their minds. Star was asleep herself, her face pressed to the gently heaving swell of Marco's rib cage, when Verbie came up the ladder to the treehouse and told her to get up, it was an emergency, and everybody—everybody, no exceptions—was due in the meeting room in fifteen minutes.

Star didn't know what to think. She was in the treehouse, with Marco, and she'd been asleep—that much was clear. Beyond that, everything was a jumble. It felt like the middle of the night, but it was light out, and for the life of her she couldn't have said whether it was dawn or dusk. The light had no source, no direction—it just held, as gray and dense as water, and the limbs of the oak were suspended in it like the superstructure of a dream. But she hadn't had any dreams—she couldn't even remember going to bed. She looked up into the branches of the tree for clues, but it was just a tree, hanging over her with all its ribs showing. It gave off a smell of gall, astringent and sharp, and whether it was a morning smell or an evening smell, she couldn't say. Birds came to the branches like dark, flung stones.
Marco slept on. She couldn't find her panties—or her shorts—and something seemed to have bitten her in a series of leapfrogging welts that climbed up her naked abdomen and then vanished beneath her breasts. Where were her shoes? She sat up and looked around her.

Suddenly she was frightened. Emergency? What emergency? She summoned up a picture of the little boy then—Che—his hair kinked and wild, skin the color of olive oil thickened in the pan and his eyes sucked back into his head as if they were going to hide there forever, and she felt the impress of his cold lips on hers, lips like two copulating earthworms, like flesh without fire—but hadn't all that been settled? Hadn't she saved him? Saved the day?

It wasn't morning. That would be too much to hope for. It was dusk, and she knew it now. She could taste it on the air, hear it in the way the birds bickered and complained. It was Druid Day, the longest day of the year, and the worst, by far the worst—and it was still going on. Marco lay there beside her, his hair splayed across his face, his right fist balled up over his temple as if to ward off a blow. She listened to him breathe a moment, absorbed in the slow sure weave of it—ravel, unravel, ravel again—and then she shook him awake.

“What?” he said, propping himself up on his elbows so she could see the full spill of him.

“It's Norm. Some kind of emergency. Norm called a meeting—”

“Emergency? Now? What time is it?”

“Nine, maybe—I don't know. I thought it was morning.”

“What kind of emergency—did the pump burn out in the well or something? Or let me guess: Reba lost her kids again. Or Pan, what about him? Did he fall into his wienie fire and get all singed around the ears?”

“Verbie didn't say. But she sounded freaked out.”

“She always sounds freaked out.”

He was reaching for her, to pull her back down into the sleeping bag, but she pushed his hand away. “I'm scared,” she said. “After
today . . . the kids, the horse, I mean. The whole thing. We're out of control here, Marco—everybody's out of control.”

“Yeah,” he said, giving her a smile so faint it was barely there. “But isn't that the point?”

The main house was ablaze with the power company's light, the light Norm and Alfredo were always hassling them to conserve—
Candles, people, use candles!
—and when she and Marco came up the worn steps and onto the porch, the floorboards seemed to fall away beneath her feet, as if the whole place were on the verge of collapse. She saw the gouged wood of the doorframe, the tattered mesh of the screen door, the worn spot where the embrace of ten thousand hands had abraded the paint round the latch and replaced it with dirt, human dirt—saw everything with utter clarity, though she could feel a headache coming on, a pounding, relentless, newly awakened shriek of a headache that threatened to burst her skull from the inside out, and that was what acid did for you, that was the price you had to pay. Open up your mind, feed your head. Sure. And wind up feeling like something washed up on the beach and left for dead. She took hold of Marco's arm for support, and then the screen door was slapping behind them and they were standing uncertainly in the front room that was like a funeral parlor—no music, no candles, nobody playing chess or checkers or settling into one of the grease-slicked armchairs with a book. There was litter, though—newspapers, magazines, unwashed plates, cups and glasses, somebody's striped shirt, a pair of muddy boots—and where there was litter, there was life. As if to underscore the point, the dogs chose that moment to waggle into the room and nose at her hands even as the faintest hushed murmur of voices seeped in from the room beyond.

Nearly everybody was there already, most of them sitting cross-legged on the floor, their faces blanched, eyes vacant. People were rubbing their temples, circulating a pitcher of iced tea or Kool-Aid,
she couldn't tell which, picking idly at their ears or toes and sprawling in the sea of all that massed flesh as if they were learning to float—or maybe levitate. Alfredo and Reba were up front, and Reba had a cigarette going, lecturing her old man about something and painting the air with the glowing ember at the tip of it. Ronnie was all the way across the room with Merry and Lydia, melting into a heap of pillows, and Jiminy was slouched over the table with Verbie and her sister and Harmony and Alice.

Star wondered how she looked—she hadn't been near a mirror in days—and as she stepped into the room she tried to part her hair with her fingers, forcing it down like a cap over the crown of her head and looping the odd strands behind her ears. She was wearing a pair of ceramic earrings—blue dolphins with painted-on grins—that seemed to grow heavier by the minute till they felt like bricks tearing at her lobes, but she couldn't muster the energy to pull them out. She hadn't been able to find her sandals, but most of the tribe went barefoot most of the time anyway so that was all right, yet her T-shirt and cutoffs seemed damp, clammy almost, and when was the last time she'd washed them? Washed anything? Her head was pounding, and suddenly she was afraid again—for herself, for Marco and Drop City, for all the lost neurons and miswired synapses of a whole continent full of dopers and heads and teepee cats.
Boom,
the blood pounded in her temples,
boom, boom, boom.

She exchanged murmurs of greeting with a couple of people, thought of crossing the room to Merry and felt so weak suddenly it was as if her bones had dissolved. “Let's just sit here,” she said to Marco, and they sank to the floor just inside the doorway, because really, what difference did it make? Norm didn't call emergency meetings for nothing—this was going to be bad news, and it didn't matter if you took it standing up or sitting down, at the periphery or at the red-hot glowing center.

She watched Alfredo rise to his feet, turn and face the gathering. His eyes glowed with a dull sheen, as if they'd been painted on and hadn't quite dried yet. The overhead light stabbed at his face,
hollowing out his cheekbones and giving him the look of the crucified Christ in the big fresco over the altar in the church back at home. He was long-faced at the best of times, but now he appeared nothing less than tragic. “Listen, people, we've got a problem here,” he said, and his voice was a dirge. “It affects all of us, Norm especially, but all of us ultimately, and Norm asked me to get everybody together, because he wanted to say a few words—”

She could barely hear him for the throbbing in her head. It was as if a pair of pincers had come down from the ceiling and clamped onto her temples and was slowly and inexorably drawing her up into the air, and all she could think of was one of those arcade machines where you try to extract a prize from a heap of trinkets. She was the prize, the gold ring that was really brass, and the jaws had hold of her, squeezing and pinching, and what she needed was a Darvon, or better yet, a Seconal, something to kill the pain. She'd ask Ronnie once the meeting broke up—he was usually good for something, and he always had his own little stash hidden away somewhere. She stared at her folded hands and tried to concentrate on looking normal. Or human. Just that.

Alfredo was rattling on—“Brothers, sisters,
people,
we're all in this together, and now, of all times, we need to
stick
together . . .” She leaned into Marco, and a flare of irritation leapt up in her. “What's he talking about? The accident? Is that it? Can't Norm just pay a fine or something?”

Marco tucked a coil of hair behind his ear, smoothed his beard with a ringless hand (he didn't believe in jewelry, not for men, though she saw he was wearing the string of painted wooden beads she'd given him, and for a fraction of a moment that made everything balance out). He was sitting in the lotus position, legs folded, back arched, as perfect as an illustration in one of those pamphlets by Swami Kriyananda Norm was always handing out,
Yoga Made Easy, Eight Steps to Enlightenment, The Swami Speaks.
“No,” he said, shaking his head, “it's gone way beyond that. It's—I don't know. I didn't want to tell you this, at least not till tomorrow, anyway, but you want
to know the truth? It's over, is what it is. He was trying to tell me this morning, when we went for the cream soda and the rest of it—and the wire for the horse, which is still in the back of the van, by the way, wherever the van is. Not that it matters.”

“Over?” She sought out his eyes, but his eyes dodged away. “What are you talking about?”

That was when Norm's voice rang through the room and everybody looked up to see him standing there in the kitchen doorway, his arm around Premstar. “A horse!” he cried. “My kingdom for a horse!” That was all it took—two phrases—and the pall Alfredo had cast was dissolved, and they all, everybody—even Reba, even Alfredo and the Krishna cat—laughed aloud. “Or a match,” Norm said, pulling a number the size of a cigar from the inside pocket of his jacket. “Anybody got a match? Or did you forget about the bonfire? Longest day, man, longest
day
!”

The bonfire. Of course. A buzz went through the room. Norm could do that—he could wake people up, turn them on, change the vibe of a whole room just by striding through the door. And Star saw that he'd dressed for the occasion too, emergency or no, in a wide-brimmed suede hat with a chin strap and a fringed jacket cut from the same material. The suede was a deep amber, the color of honey at the bottom of the jar, and he'd cinched a blue bandanna round his throat to set it off. That wasn't all: his glasses were taped together and a slash of white sticking plaster bisected his right eyebrow, not in a way that made him look like a victim or an invalid or anything, but somehow—Star couldn't think of the word, and then she could—
jaunty.
And Premstar. She'd been here all of a week, and she'd done nothing but giggle and play up to Norm as if she was some kind of sex toy or something, and here she was dressed up in a sheer white nightgown like the ingenue in some vampire movie. And her hair—it was braided in two blond ropes that rose up off her brow like a layer cake.

Star turned to Marco, and for just an instant she felt the clamps let go of her. “That hair,” she whispered, feeling buoyant suddenly, feeling stoned all over again, “that's what
I
call an emergency.”