Drop City (31 page)

“Toxic shellfish poisoning,” Alfredo said. “Something like four hundred people died of it one year in San Francisco at the turn of the century, I think it was. There's this dinoflagellate that will concentrate in huge numbers, like a red tide, when the water temperature gets above a certain level—in summer, only in summer—and the
mussels, and clams and whatever, concentrate the toxin from them, and it doesn't bother the mussels at all, only us.”

“You know the CIA?” Jiminy put in. His face was a sunlit wedge of nose, cheekbone and bright burning eye chopped out of the frame of his hair. He was thrilled, overjoyed, never happier. “Their assassins use it on a needle and they just prick you in a crowd, a little stab you can barely feel, and then you're dead.”

“Paralyzed,” Reba said. “First your extremities go, then your limbs, until you're a vegetable and you can't move anything or feel anything—”

“Right,” Alfredo said, “—and then it shuts down the vital organs.”

There was an aroma on the air now, a sweet scintillating smell of mussels steamed in their own juices with butter and lemon, salt and pepper and maybe a hint of tarragon. Ronnie wasn't hovering over a picnic table at a two-dollar-a-night campground in Oregon, he was inside a cage at the zoo, and all these people—his friends, his compatriots, his brothers and sisters—were poking at him through the bars with sharpened sticks. “Bullshit,” he said for the third time. “I don't believe it.”

“Believe it,” Alfredo said, already turning to leave, and he was taking a whole raft of faces with him. Merry looked as if she'd been shoved over a cliff, and Jiminy was just waiting for the signal to get down on all fours and start barking like a dog.

Alfredo. Dinoflagellates. Quarantine. Ronnie was having none of it—it was nonsense was what it was, just another stab at him, as if it would kill Alfredo if he ever got any credit for anything. He stirred the pot, fished out a specimen and set it on the wooden plank of the table. It was perfect, tender—you can't cook them a heartbeat too long or you'll be chewing leather—the slick black shell peeking open to reveal the pink-orange meat within, and he was going to hold it up for Merry and run through his mussel routine, about how the lips and the flesh looked like a certain part of the female anatomy and how at medical schools the gynecology students had to study steamed mussels because the real thing was so hard to come by, but
Merry was gone, her arm slipped through Jiminy's, bare feet in the dust, off to consume her ration of stale bread and peanut butter.

Only Angela, Verbie's narrow-eyed, lantern-jawed sister, stayed behind to watch as Ronnie forced open the two leaves of the shell—
bivalves,
the term came hurtling back to him from Mr. Boscovich's Biology class, that's what they were,
bivalves,
and all the tastier for it—removed the glistening pink morsel and tentatively laid it on his tongue. “You're not really going to eat that, are you?” she said, and he might as well have been the geek in the circus with his incisors bared over the trembling neck of the squirming chicken while the crowd held its collective breath. Of course he was going to eat it, of course he was.

It took him a long moment, his tongue rolling the bit of flesh round his mouth, before he brought his teeth into play. And what was wrong with that? The juices were released, butter, tarragon, the sea, and the taste was fine, great even—this was the best and freshest mussel he'd ever had, wasn't it? He chewed thoughtfully, lingeringly. And then he spat the discolored lump into his hand and flung it into the bushes.

19

Star had never stolen a thing in her life, even when she was twelve or thirteen and pushing the limits and there was a compact or tube of eyeliner she could have died for and nobody was looking because her friends had distracted the old lady at the counter and they'd all got something in their turn—a comb, a package of gum, M&M's—as if it were a badge of honor. It wasn't that she didn't have the nerve—it was just that she'd been brought up to respect private property, to do right and think right and be a moral upstanding good little Catholic girl. But here she was in a supermarket just outside Seattle, smoking a cigarette in front of the cheese display in the dairy section, the pockets she'd sewn into the lining of her coat heavy with fancy imported cheeses, with Gouda and smoked cheddar and Jarlsberg, and never mind that it was eighty-two degrees outside and nobody else in the world was wearing a coat or even a sweater.

Reba and Verbie were pushing a cart down the aisle across from her, moving slowly, prepared to trade food stamps for fresh produce, whole wheat bread and family-sized sacks of rice and pinto beans, all the while secreting cans of tuna, crabmeat and artichoke hearts in the purses that dangled so insouciantly from their shoulders. “It's a family thing,” Reba explained as they were coming across the macadam lot, “—feed the family, that's all that matters. This place, this whole chain, is just part of the establishment, them against us, a bunch of millionaires in some corporate headquarters somewhere, devoting their lives to screwing people over the price of lettuce. Don't shed
any tears for them.” Ronnie, who'd driven the three of them over in the Studebaker, couldn't have agreed more. “Fucking fascists,” was his take on it.

Still, her heart was going as she drew on her cigarette and pretended to deliberate over the cardboard canister of Quaker Oats in her hand, her brow furrowed and her eyes drawn down to slits over the essential question of 100% Natural Rolled Oats versus one dollar and sixty-nine cents. She didn't see the man in the pressed white shirt and regulation bow tie until he was on top of her. “Finding everything all right?” he asked.

She met his eyes—a washed-out gray in a pink face surmounted by Brylcreemed hair with the dead-white precision part that was as perfect as the ones you saw in the pictures in the barbers' windows. He was twenty-five, he'd knocked up his girlfriend and dropped out of high school, and he'd been working in this place since he was sixteen. Or something like that. He was a member of the straight world, and that was all that counted. He was the enemy. Star never flinched, though her heart was going like a drum solo. “No,” she said, “not really,” and she could see Reba and Verbie draw in their antennae at the far end of the aisle—she was in this on her own now. “I was just looking for like a really nutritious cereal for my daughter? I don't want her eating all that junk we had as kids, Sugar Pops and Frosted Flakes and whatnot. So I was thinking oats, maybe. Just plain oats. With milk.”

“How old?” He was smiling like all the world, the assiduous employee coming to grips with the discerning shopper.

“What?”

“Your daughter—how old is she?”

“Oh, her . . .” And to cover herself, she made up a name on the spot. “Jasmine? I named her Jasmine, isn't that a pretty name?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Very pretty.” He paused. “It does get cold in here, doesn't it?”

For a moment, she was at a loss. Cold? What was he talking about? She looked down at her coat, and then back up again, and her
heart was in her mouth. “I'm very sensitive to it,” she said finally, trying to keep her voice under control. “I'm from down south, this little town in Arizona? Yuma? You ever hear of it?” He hadn't. “
Johnny
Yuma?” she tried. Nothing. She shrugged. “It's just that you've got all these refrigerators going in here, the meat, the dairy—”

He just nodded, and she realized he could see right through her, knew damned well what she was doing, saw it ten times a day. Especially from the likes of her, from heads, hippies, bikers, renegades of every stripe,
chicks.
“You know, I have three kids myself. The oldest one, Robert Jr.—Bobby—he's in the second grade already. And they all eat nothing but junk, the sugariest cereal, candy, pop—”

“Oh, well, Jasmine,” and it came to her that he wasn't going to say a thing, just so long as she played out the game with him, “she's only like one and a half or something, you know, and she's, uh, well, I don't want to get her into any bad habits, if you know what I mean.”

Oh, yes, he knew—she didn't have to tell him. And could he help with cereals? Cream of Wheat was good, if you cooked it with milk instead of water, and farina, of course. By the way, was she from around here, because he didn't remember—?

So that was it. He was hitting on her, just like any other
cat.
Just in case. Just on the off chance.

“We just moved in,” she said. “My husband's in Aerospace.” And then she thanked him and found herself stuck at the checkout across from Reba and Verbie with the Quaker Oats still in hand. Her heart was doing paradiddles, but she laid a wrinkled bill on the counter and prised the change out of her pocket, and then she was out in the parking lot and heading for the Studebaker, the very Queen of Cheese.

They got a late start out of Seattle that night, because Norm had taken Harmony's Bug and gone to see his uncle and stayed through the afternoon and on into the evening while everybody else sat on the bus and wondered if they'd been deserted. Norm had pulled the bus off at the first exit he came to and found a spot to park in a patch of
weed at the side of a two-lane blacktop road. It was an ugly spot, the trees nothing more than scrub, some sort of factory putting out smoke in the near distance and the ubiquitous ranch houses of suburban America clustered all round them. Some of the men gathered up twigs and refuse and got a fire going, and the best the women could do was throw together a kind of paella, thick with appropriated tuna and greens and whatever spices they could find that weren't already packed away.

Cars shot by like jet planes. The shouts of kids at play came to them as ambient noise. People ate hurriedly, guiltily even, because this wasn't what anybody expected. Even Che and Sunshine seemed lethargic, disoriented, and they barely touched their plates. Around eight, right in the middle of the meal, two men in sport shirts made their way across the street from a white ranch house with cream-colored trim and a new red car sitting in the driveway. “There's no camping here,” Star heard one of the men say to no one in particular, and heard the other one say, “And no fires.” After that, everybody climbed back on the bus and circled the block a couple of times, Lester and Ronnie in tow, till they wound up back where they'd started and just sat in the vehicles with nowhere to go and nothing to do, waiting for Norm as the darkness settled in. When he finally did appear and the caravan moved off again, they felt as if they'd all been rescued.

It was past midnight when Reba broke out the crabmeat and the smoked oysters and all the rest of it, and Star delivered up the cheeses. The bus was moving through the wall of the night. There was the green glow of the dash, a soft lateral rocking as if they were all inside a giant cradle. Norm was up front, his hands clenched round the wheel, Premstar squeezed into the cracked vinyl seat along with him. Ronnie was a pair of headlights somewhere behind them, Mendocino Bill and Verbie and her sister keeping him company, taking their turn, share and share alike. Marco, who'd gone along with Norm to visit the uncle—“To keep him company, and find out exactly where that mountain of gold is located, just in case we need
some spare change”—was in the back of the bus with Alfredo and some of the others, playing cards under a light Bill had rigged up. The kids were asleep. So was practically everybody else.

And so it was Reba, Merry, Maya, Lydia and Star, the women, spread out across three seats, gossiping and feasting as the bus jostled down the road and the vague lights of single homes, gas stations and farmhouses flashed at the windows in an unreadable code. “You get tired of just plain fare all the time, you know?” Reba said. “Tofu paste. Tahini. Brown rice. Even though it's healthy. Even though I'm committed to it. But this”—and she laid a sardine across a thin slice of wheat bread, licking the oil from her fingers—“this isn't just a luxury, this is a
necessity,
know what I mean?”

Appropriated crackers went round, more bread, a bottle of Liebfraumilch Reba had liberated from the liquor department. They all knew what she meant. And Star ate wedges of cheese and licked the oil from her own fingers—smoked oysters, that was her weakness—savoring the moment. In the inner fold of her backpack, the pouch between the frame and the main compartment, way down at the bottom and wrapped in a sock, were three one-hundred-dollar bills nobody knew about, not Marco, not Ronnie, not Merry or Maya. This was what she had left of her nest egg, the money she'd accumulated before she quit teaching, living dirt cheap at her parents' house when her only expenses were for records and clothes and maybe a Brandy Alexander or Black Russian at the Surf 'N' Turf, the nearest thing to a club Peterskill could offer; the rest had gone for gas and food coming across country, and everything since—food stamps, unemployment, whatever her mother managed to send c/o Drop City—had vanished into the communal pot. There was no way she was breaking those three bills, whether for luxury or necessity, and besides, Norm had guaranteed he'd float everybody through the first winter, at least as far as the basics were concerned.

Lydia, lounging in the seat across from Star, said “Paté,” as if she'd been thinking about it for weeks. “That's what turns me on. And those celery sticks with blue cheese inside. Swedish meatballs on a
toothpick. Canapés and champagne. They used to have these parties at the place I used to work, and I'd just camp in front of the hors d'oeuvres tray and pig out.”

“Will this do?” Reba said, and she leaned forward in the flicker of passing headlights and handed Lydia a box of Ritz crackers and two cans of deviled ham.

“Lobster,” Merry said. “With drawn butter.”

“You haven't lived till you've had the Crab Louis at this place called Metzger's on Tomales Bay,” Maya put in. “I went there once, just after high school, with—”

“I know,” Reba said, “—this guy named Jack. With hair down to his ass and a Fu Manchu mustache.”

Star laughed. They all laughed.

Maya's voice went soft. “Actually, it was with my parents. They took me and my brother out west on a vacation. For my graduation present.”

No one had anything to say to that, and they were all silent a moment as the bus lurched through a series of broad sweeping turns, heading for the Canadian border. The engine propelled them forward with a steady
whoosh,
as if there were a big vacuum cleaner under the hood. Wind beat at the windows, a spatter of rain. They could hear Norm's voice from up front, an unceasing buzz of fancy, opinion and incontestable fact fueled by Ronnie's speed and Premstar's lady-lotion skin, and who liked Premstar, who could even stand her? Nobody. On that, they were all in silent accord.

“Shrimp cocktail,” Reba said, feeding another sardine into her mouth. “For my money,” and she was chewing round her words, “a good shrimp cocktail, with big shrimp now, shrimp as long as your middle finger, with a spicy cocktail sauce and served on a little bed of ice, that's what I'd go for every time.”

Star said, “Pistachios. In the shell. And your fingers get all red. Has anybody in this world
ever
had enough of those?”