Drop City (39 page)

He wasn't looking anywhere. He really didn't give a rat's ass whether her portrait was plastered all over the bus inside and out or whether they'd raised a statue in honor of her or burned her in effigy—this was childish, that's what it was—and he crossed the yard to the bus and stuck his head in the open door.

It was deserted—you could see that at a glance. But he stepped up on the milk crate somebody had set there in the dirt to ease the transition to that first elevated step and gave a look down the aisle. Sun leaked through the curtains in thin regular bands and illuminated the dust motes hanging in the stagnant air. There was the usual clutter of clothes, books, record jackets and dirty plates, the odd smear of crushed flies and mosquitoes rubbed into the cracked vinyl seats, and a smell he couldn't quite place, something promiscuous, something
communal.
“Anybody here?” he called.

No answer. And that was odd: Where could they all be in the
middle of the day? In the shack? Up the bank of the river tossing daisies in the water? Tooling around in the Studebaker? But no, he could see the car out the window, sitting idle on the verge of the dirt road, and Harmony's Beetle humped there beside it under half a ton of dust. Verbie's voice came to him then, a little whoop of triumph from the far side of the bus: “Here I am! Look, I told you—I'm right here next to Angela and, and—this must be Jiminy!”

Pan backed out of the bus, his head as clear as it was ever going to be, since he hadn't had so much as a beer or a toke since he'd rolled out this morning, and no food either (breakfast, in its entirety, consisted of the honey-sweetened tea at Sess Harder's place and the handful of stale crackers Pamela had fanned out on the table like a deck of cards). Clear-headed? Light-headed was more like it. He was starving, that's what it was, wasting away like a mystic in the desert, and if he didn't get a burger and a couple beers in him pretty soon he was going to start speaking in tongues and spouting fire from his ears. For a long moment he stood there puzzling over the deserted bus, contemplating the pattern of footprints in the dust at his feet—the impress of bootheels, the elaborate punctuation of bare soles and the little necklaces of toeprints strung across the path that ran through the trampled weed to the road—and then he knew: they were at the bar, the saloon, the roadhouse, whatever they called it. The Three Pup. They were at the Three Pup, tipping back beers and maybe the odd shot of Everclear, getting a buzz on, salting fries, listening to the sizzle of burgers on the grill and the rattle of the jukebox as the record dropped and the stylus maneuvered into place. Pan was already making it up the road when Verbie came out from behind the bus. “Hey,” she said, her voice trailing away till it became no more noteworthy or troublesome than the routine buzz of the mosquitoes in his ears, “where is everybody?”

The clouds had closed out the sun by the time he turned the corner onto the Fairbanks Road. Somebody's dogs rose up from their chains and howled at him and somebody else's dogs took it up at the
other end of town. The breeze had shifted to the north all of a sudden, as chilly as the air leaching out of the mouth of a cave, and you didn't have to be a meteorologist to know it was going to be raining like holy hell in about three minutes. He could hear Verbie panting behind him, but he never looked back. If her legs were shorter than his, that was her problem—an accident of birth, that was all, an evolutionary dead end,
survival of the fittest, baby,
and get used to it. A faded blue pickup rolled by and he flashed the peace sign at the driver (nobody he recognized, unless maybe it was that scrawny chicken-necked old loser they called Herbert, or was it Howard?), and he ducked his head against the wind, thinking he really ought to go back to the boat for his denim jacket, but he dismissed the thought as soon as it crept into his head—going back would delay the cracking of the first beer and the sweet redolent slap of the first burger on the grill.

There was a handful of vehicles in the dirt lot out front of the Three Pup, including a tow truck with a Fairbanks logo painted on the driver's side door and what looked to be a Shelby Mustang jacked up behind it. Something was dripping from the back end of the Mustang and puddling in the dirt—water, it looked like, dirty water flecked with leaves and stripes of pond weed—and the wheels were packed like ball bearings in something that might have been grease, but wasn't. It was mud. Mud the color of shit, oozing out of the chassis and caking on the ground. Pan saw it, registered it, ignored it. In swung the screen door of the Three Pup and up rose the smell of the grill, of bourbon and scotch whiskey and beer spilled and wiped up and spilled again.

It was dark inside—why waste energy lighting up a sixty-watt bulb when you're running off a generator that runs off of gasoline hauled out the Fairbanks Road and it's light out day and night, anyway?—and at first he couldn't see whose shoulders and half-turned heads were crowded in at the bar. “Hey, Pan, what's happening?” somebody called out, and it was Harmony, Harmony there in the far corner with his rust-colored Fu Manchu and beaded headband and an arm
round Alice, and then somebody else called out his name and the jukebox started up with a maddening skreel of country fiddles and where was Lydia, anyway?

But wait a minute—and this was something that really challenged his newly resensitized powers of perception—who was this looming like an apparition out of the cigarette haze with his wide-brimmed outlaw's hat cocked down over one eye and his high-heeled Beatle boots rapping at the worn floorboards like a medium's knuckles? It was Lester, that was who, Lester standing there grinning at him as if he'd just stepped out on the porch of the back house with a jug of wine in his hand and Marvin Gaye going at it on the stereo through the flung-wide door. Lester was holding a tumbler of whiskey in one hand and a joint in the other, Franklin's big head and Sky Dog's mustache framed behind him against a backdrop of astonished faces and Lynette's furiously compressed lips and bugging eyes. Dale Murray was at the end of the bar, his rings flashing, yellow-tooth necklace dangling, working on a burger and a beer and running Skid Denton as solid a line of bullshit as Denton was running him, the big tall ramrod of a guy they called Iron Steve perched up on a stool between them like a referee. “Pan, my
man,
” Lester puffed in his softest imitation of a human voice, shifting the joint to his lips so he could take Ronnie's awakening hand in his own for the soul shake that reaffirmed the identity of the tribe and plumbed the deepest pockets of brotherhood. And then he was turning to crow over his shoulder: “Hey, look who's here, the bad cat himself, Pan the child-raper, the hippest baddest cat north of what?—Fairbanks. Fairbanks, yeah.”

The sequel involved a whole riotous tornado of soul-shaking and back-thumping, and Pan was dazed, he had to admit it, because he'd forgotten these people even existed and it was a real adjustment in context to create them anew in the lost world of the Three Pup—and what had it been, a month? But the joint helped and the beer and a shot that went down on an empty stomach like flaming gasoline and pretty soon he was in close conference with all four of them,
absorbing their tale of potholes, Nazis in the guise of the Canadian Mounted Police, blown tires and moose dancing down the highway like chorus girls.

“Shit, they busted Sky in some no-horse town in B.C.,” Dale Murray said, up from his stool now and waving his beer like a conductor's baton to a sudden crescendo of hilarity, Lester so far gone with it he had to set down his whiskey and brace himself against the bar.

“For what?” Ronnie wanted to know, even as the light went leaden and Verbie stumped through the door with a dumbstruck face and the first few random drops began to thump against the windows.

“He showed his big wicked thing—” Lester began, but he couldn't go on—it was too much.

“Scared them girls up there,” Franklin said, showing his teeth in a grin, and what did Pan feel? Left out. A pang of jealousy shot through him: they'd had the adventures and he'd been eating mush.

Sky Dog leaned back into the bar, lit a cigarette and managed to look rueful and put-upon at the same time. The country-inflected strains of one song faded away and another started up in its place. Everybody at the bar was looking at him, waiting for clarification. “Public indecency,” he said. “I was just—”

“He was pissing against a tree, that's what he was doing,” Lester said, panting between hoots of laughter. “Put a real fear into them girls, isn't that right, Franklin?”

“Whole town was terrified.”

A new round of laughter. Dale Murray joined in too, whinnying along with the rest of them. Sky Dog looked abashed. He ducked his head and shrugged. “It wasn't all that funny, man—it cost me a night in jail.”

“Right,” Lester said, “and this spade's twenty-five bucks, American. Which you still owe me, by the way.” Then he turned to Ronnie, took a long slow sip of the whiskey, and let his eyes drop to his boots and rise again. “And you, my friend,” he puffed, his voice so
soft it was barely audible, “what are you dressed up to be—Wild Bill Hickok? Or maybe it's Buffalo Bill? One of them honky
Bills
anyway, right?”

Lester was enjoying this. He had center stage now, as exotic in the Three Pup as a panther on a leash. They'd seen Indians up here, they'd seen Eskimos, Finns, Swedes and Frenchmen, but a
spade
was something else altogether, and Pan could appreciate that, appreciate the strain it must have been on Lester to delve ever deeper into the redneck fastness of the last outpost of the forty-ninth state, but there were limits to what he could take. He'd let the child-raper comment pass, but now the man was mounting the balls to stand here and mock him for the way he was dressed? Well, fuck that. “I don't know what the fuck you're talking about,” he said.

“The heat,” Lester said, pointing to the holster. “And this—what's this?” and he had the knife out of its sheath before Pan could react, twisting the blade in the dull wash of light for the amusement of everyone at the bar. “Don't tell me you're a mule skinner now—or do you just use this thing for cleaning your nails?”

“Mule skinners don't skin anything,” Dale Murray put in. “Least of all mules.”

Verbie was there at his elbow, the pale muffin of her face, looking for someone to buy her a beer. “Twenty-Mule Team Borax,” was her comment.

Pan couldn't have said where the anger came from or how it rose up so quickly and luminously, but he took hold of Lester's upraised wrist—the wrist attached to the hand with the knife in it—and in the same instant snatched off his hat and sailed it across the room. Lester's eyes went cold. The hair was flattened to his head, linty, dirty, twisted into something like cornrows with a couple of sky blue rubber bands, and nobody had ever seen anything like that, not since Farina anyway. “And what are you dressed up to be? You're the one in the cowboy hat.”

Soft, so soft: “That's my Hendrix hat, man.” And Lester let him take the knife and fit it back into the sheath while Franklin crossed
the room and bent to retrieve the hat. “Touchy, Pan, touchy,” Lester chided. “Don't you know I'm just goofin'? Don't you know that? Huh?”

That was when Lynette turned away from the grill, one hand at her hip, and informed them if they wanted to roughhouse they were going to have to do it over at the Nougat because any more of this sort of thing and they were out the door, all of them. “And I don't tolerate cussing in here either—you ought to know that, mister, and I'm talking to you, Ronnie. And you better inform your friends too.”

“Come on, man,” Sky Dog was saying, “come on, have a beer and forget it—you know Lester. He's just fucking with your head is all. It's a joke, man—can't you take a joke?”

And then it was all right and somebody found the only two rock and roll sides on the jukebox and the beers went round for everybody, even Verbie, who wound up sitting in Iron Steve's lap and drinking on his tab while he kneaded her breasts and licked the side of her face like a deer at a salt lick. Sky Dog produced another joint—“We brought a ton of the shit, man, and they almost nailed us at the border too if they were only smart enough to like look
inside
the spare tire”—and the sky darkened another degree till it was like twilight. Pan didn't hold any grudges. He was glad to see them, glad to see them all, new faces, new stories—some
life,
for shitsake—and he drank first to Lester, to put that to rest, and then to Franklin, Sky Dog and Dale. And Harmony, don't forget Harmony. And Alice too.

He had a wad of money in his pocket, and he hardly knew where it came from. It seemed to him he was a long way from home, any home, and as he contemplated his own sun-enlivened features in the mirror behind the bar he felt his life was only just beginning. Already it had taken him to strange destinations and there were stranger yet still to come. Tom Krishna was always talking about karma, and so was Norm, Verbie, Star—all of them were. What if it was true, what if he'd been a saint in some previous life and now he was set to reap the rewards? That was a thought. He smiled at his image in the mirror and tuned out what Sky Dog was saying to him about the
Lincoln—they'd parked it around the corner, up in town, and hadn't he seen it? Great car. Tended to overheat and it burned oil like a hog, but . . . he liked the way his beard was filling in, and his hair—it was long enough to eat up the collar of his shirt. He was looking hip, absolutely, indubitably, but who was going to know about it up here? Who even cared?