Drop City (41 page)

But the shouts were furious now, mounting—“Star!” they were calling, “Star!”—and she jerked her head round to see a knot of people running toward the goat pen with the two yellow dogs out front in a surge of kneading yellow muscle. Reba threw down her cigarette. Che's sobs died in his throat, an ache, a quiver, then nothing. Star rose to her feet at the same time Merry did, the black plastic rippling like a dark sea beneath them.

The goats were in a rudimentary pen made of eight-foot lengths of birch and cottonwood lashed to posts five feet high, a pen they planned to roof and convert to a barn for winter—and there'd been a whole storm of debate about that, because nobody really featured the goats stinking and bleating and dropping their pellets
inside
the cabins, yet they didn't really want to put the work in when there were infinitely more important things to do, like erect cabins, install stoves and split a hundred cords of wood so they wouldn't
freeze their fucking asses off
come winter. Star understood what the priorities were, but she didn't care. She'd gone ahead and built the pen herself, with a hatchet and a coil of old clothesline, and the tent she and Marco shared was pitched up against it so she could keep track of her charges in the gray wash of night.

The dogs were barking now, panting breathless gasps of assertion and rage that rang out over the river and rebounded again, and one
of them—it was Frodo—was trying to clamber up into the pen. She dropped the hammer at her feet and took off running.

Everybody was shouting, crowding in against the rail as if they were at a rodeo, Frodo's hind end perched there statue-like for an instant and then disappearing even as Freak scrabbled at the crossbars and fell back. What it was, she couldn't see, the goats bleating—screaming, screaming in a key she'd never before heard or imagined—and a blur of motion visible through the gaps, now here, now there, torn from one side of the pen to the other. And when she was there, everything in an uproar, Jiminy bolting for Pan's tent to get a gun and Marco and Alfredo straddling the rail with clubs in their hands, she still couldn't apprehend what she was seeing, as if there were some essential gap between her eyes and the part of her brain that processed visual information. “It's a bear!” somebody shouted.

The white of the goats, the yellow of the dog, the wild shifting raging
brownness
of this thing that didn't belong there in the pen, that didn't compute, that was no bear at all but something else entirely, claws, teeth and fur in a fury of grinding perpetual motion and a keening sharp-edged growl that never faltered, and by the time Marco and Alfredo waded in on it with their clubs the goats were dead and gutted and Frodo was lying there in the dirt with his throat torn out and this thing, this emanation of the deepest hole in the blackest part of the last and wildest stronghold of the hills that bristled round her like breastworks, faced them down and in one leap was gone, a dark rumor in the high weed out beyond the silent pen. And later, even when she knew what it was—
Gulo luscus,
the glutton, the wolverine, the big buffed-up weasel that was so blood-crazed it had been known to drive grizzlies off their kills, she still didn't understand. All she knew was that Ronnie had the guns downriver—all three of them—and that there would be no goats to tend, not anymore, and no milk, no yogurt, no cheese. There was a party, led by Weird George, Mendocino Bill and Norm himself, that wanted to butcher the goats and make use of the meat—the whole business regrettable, sure, a real bummer, but why let the meat go to waste, that
was their thinking—but she came at them like that thing itself, raging, absolutely raging, and “Why not skin Frodo, then,” she said. “Why not eat him?”

She dug the holes herself. Marco stood off at a distance with a solemn face and two empty dangling hands, but she wouldn't let him help. The ground was like rock. The mosquitoes drained her. Sweating till her eyes stung and the ends of her hair clung like tentacles at her throat, she dragged the carcasses of the goats—of Amanda and Dewlap, and yes, she could tell them apart now, even at this late hour when it no longer mattered and their eyes were closed on the world—dragged them across the yard and buried them.

In the morning, when she went out there in the tall weed amidst the stumps to lay a few flowers on the raw earth and gather her strength and maybe think some consoling thoughts and tell herself it was all for the best, all part of the plan, the
flow,
there was nothing to see but two empty holes and the naked long gashes that claws make in the dug-up dirt.

Ronnie and Verbie didn't come back on Thursday night as planned, and they didn't show up on Friday either. People began to wonder, and then they began to worry. This was a slippery place, wild, unbridled, full of surprises—and if they hadn't fully appreciated that because they were so wrapped up in themselves, so focused on their hands and feet and the planing of logs and scooping salmon from the river and berries from the hills, then that thing out of the woods had served them notice. This wasn't California. This wasn't Indiana or Texas or New Jersey. They were here in this country and they were going to stick it out, no question about it, and it was beautiful here, paradise almost, but it was a whole lot
dicier
than any of them could have dreamed in their infancy back in California when there was nothing more to fret over than is there gas in the car and do they have cassava and artichokes down at the supermarket yet? They'd been lulled by the sun, by the breath of the river and the scent of the
trees and the syrupy warm days that went on forever. But now there was an edge. Now they knew.

Star went out on Friday night and stared down the length of the river till her eyes felt the strain. She was worried for him, of course she was. Ronnie was the closest person in the world to her besides Marco, and she didn't know what she'd do if anything happened to him. He was her link—her only link—to all that past history, to Mr. Boscovich and the yearbook and her parents even, and though she'd never go back to that, though she'd hated it all then and hated it now, the farther she got from it the more important it became—it was as much a part of who she was as the atoms that composed her cells and the
blood material
that flowed through her veins and she needed that. Everybody did. She talked about it with Marco all the time, and with Merry and Maya. To come here, to be part of this, to do what they were trying to do at Drop City, you had to sever the ties no matter how painful that might be—but that didn't mean you had to give up the past, erase it as if it had never existed. She'd been Paulette once. She'd gone to Catholic school. She'd baked cookies with her mother, piloted her bike through the blazing blacktop streets of the development and listened to the tires peel back the tar anew with each whirring revolution, developed crushes on boys and wrote in her diary and stayed up all night talking on the phone to Nancy Trowbridge and Linda Sloniker about the most important things in the world. That mattered. It did. And Ronnie was part of it.

But Friday came and went and he was nowhere to be found. It rained all day Saturday and people hunkered down in their tents and crowded into the one workable cabin, the original one, which was really just a single tiny room no bigger than the paneled den where Star's father and her brother Sam used to sink into the couch and watch football on Saturday afternoons. There was a chill in the air—it couldn't have been more than fifty degrees out—but still it was too hot in the cabin, too hot by far, what with the stove going in order to cook in shifts all day and the press of bodies strewn all over like human baggage, people playing cards, grousing about the weather,
getting high and generally making a shithole of the place while Star and Merry tried to find room to conjure up a pot of beans and eight loaves of bread that were destined to be doughy and raw on the inside and burned black on the bottom, and what they wouldn't give for a couple of packages of La Estrella tortillas from the grocery back in Guerneville. Norm had taken possession of the only bunk in the place—the cabin
had
belonged to his uncle, after all, and the communal spirit only went so far in a pinch—and he was in it now, propped up on one elbow beside Premstar. They were playing hearts, the only game she knew, and when she slipped the black queen to him she squealed as if she'd been named Miss Watsonville all over again.

Outside in the rain, Marco and Alfredo and some of the others—it looked like Deuce, Tom Krishna, Creamola and Foster—were setting the big support beams in place for the roof of the meeting house, and wouldn't that be nice, to have some space when the weather turned really nasty? Or just space in general. Because she might have been smiling—always smiling, two sweet chick lips pressed together in beatific hippie chick bliss—but what she really felt was that she was a heartbeat and a half from going out of her mind, and if she had to step over one more stinking sockless foot or scrub one more caked-on plate because some idiot had just flung it down in the yard without rinsing it first, she was going to start screaming and only a gag and a straitjacket were going to stop her.

She glanced up and saw them there in the intermediate distance, huddled scurrying figures in drab-colored ponchos, struggling against the mud, the pelt of the rain and the shifting uncontainable weight of the timbers, and she wanted to go out and pin medals to their chests. Everybody else had given up for the day—the ones who'd even bothered to crawl out of their sleeping bags in the first place, that is. Reba had certainly made herself scarce, but maybe that was a blessing in itself because at least the kids weren't howling in and out the door every thirty seconds. Mendocino Bill had been working with Marco and the others all afternoon, but nobody had a poncho big enough to fit him and now he was huddled under the eaves of the cabin, paging
through a finger-worn copy of
Rolling Stone
and shivering so hard you could hear the glass rattle in the windowframe, his overalls soaked through, his bare splayed feet like two deep corings of hard clay mud pulled up out of a drill shaft. Of course, he was
blocking the light,
that was the important thing, but Star didn't have the heart to stick her head out the door and ask him to move. She swung round, two steps to the stove, and plunged a handful of dishes into the dishpan. Jiminy was right there underfoot, nursing his arm in a filthy sling and whittling little figurines out of alder—his voodoo dolls, he called them, and he had a whole collection already, one for each sister and brother in Drop City, though they were so crude only he could tell them apart. The hair curtained his face as he worked.

Star had a vision of the future then, of the winter, music-less, dull as paste, everybody crowded into a couple of half-finished cabins with no running water and no toilets and getting on each other's nerves while the snow fell and the ice thickened and the wind came in over the treetops like the end of everything. She held it a moment and then shook it out of her head.

“You know,” Norm said, raising his voice to be heard generally above the crackling of the stove and the steady drone of the rain, “somebody really ought to take a canoe on down to Boynton. I mean, to see what the deal is with Pan and Verbie, because I am hip to the fact that Verbs, at least, wouldn't want to cause anybody any hassles up here by
delaying
delivery of the window glass and the new blades for the saws and the two-stroke oil and the drag knife and timber chisels and all the rest of the wares and objects we are all crying out with need for here . . . unless maybe her mother's thing might have been, I don't know, maybe
heavier
than she thought”—and here he looked to Angela, who was wedged into the corner beside Jiminy, working a crossword puzzle in a book of crosswords that had already been deliberated over, filled in and erased by a dozen different hands. Angela never even lifted her head and you would have thought he was talking about somebody else's mother altogether. But then what
could she do short of hopping in a canoe herself? Or sprouting wings?

Jiminy said, “They'll be all right. It's the weather, that's what it is.”

“But what about yesterday,” Star said. “And the day before.” She was at the table now, trying to make salsa from canned tomatoes and a cluster of yellow onions that had lost their texture and given up their skin to a film of black mold, and even to think of chilies or cilantro was a joke. They could have drowned. Easily. In fact it was a miracle that everybody had made it upriver in one piece the first time, even with the help of Joe Bosky, who must have made five or six round-trips with gear and people and supplies while the canoes crept up against the current and Norm peeled off the hundred-dollar bills to keep the propellers whirring and the floats skidding across the water through one long frantic afternoon and a night that never came.