Drop City (51 page)

Star's voice rose from the depths then. “Who is it? Ronnie? Is it
Ronnie
?” And then he heard a squeal from Merry, or maybe it was Lydia, and a long sustained jag of laughter from all three of them, as if the very fact of his existence was the funniest thing in the world. Marco gave him a nod and the three women, exuding the close, compacted odors of the sheet, the blanket, the nightie—the odors of the flesh—were there at the door in their sweatpants and sweatsocks, cooing their greetings. “Come on in,” Star insisted. “Jesus, don't just stand there—”

Inside, it was close as a prison cell. You could put your fingertips on one corrugated wall and practically reach across to the other. It was dark, hot, dry. The two built-in bunk beds dominated the place and you had to crouch to avoid the six hundred tons of crap hanging from hooks and lines strung across the room, wet socks and underwear, parkas, jeans, boots. Incense was burning. The stove glowed. There was a little table by the front window littered with cards and books and dirty plates and he fell into the chair Star pulled out for him and jerked off his gloves while the chicks hovered over him, three pairs of breasts at eye-level and their lit-up faces beaming down on him like alien probes searching for signs of life. “I can't believe it,” Merry kept saying, and Jiminy was there too, he saw now, looking daggers from one of the top bunks.

Pan shrugged. “Hey, it's Halloween,” he said by way of explanation. “I thought I'd stop by. See what's happening.”

Nobody could argue with that, and pretty soon the three women were crowded in at the table with him, sharing a plate of sugar cookies with orange sprinkles baked specially for Halloween, firing up a joint, passing round the warmed-over jar of homebrew while Marco and Jiminy conversed in a low murmur from the upper bunks. Lydia was wearing a fur coat that fell all the way to the floor—“Cross fox, given to me by an admirer; you like it?”—and she was looking good, beyond good, and hadn't she lost some weight, was that it? “You look dynamite,” he said, and he had an arm round her shoulder.

“Whoa, listen to Pan,” Merry giggled. “Been without it too long, huh? Living like a what, like a goat, out there with Joe Bosky? What about me? Am I looking dynamite?”

She was sitting knee to knee with Star and they were doing each other's faces up for what was going to have to pass for Halloween, slashes of black down the bridge of the nose and across the cheekbones and everything else a pale putrescent green. This wasn't the year for sexy costumes. Or the place. “Oh, yeah,” Ronnie heard himself say, “groovy. Super.”

“What about
me,
Pan?” Star said. She pursed her lips and simpered and he couldn't read her eyes, not at all. He wondered if there was something there still, or if she was cutting him loose, goodbye, so long, no regrets, and so what if they were in Mr. Boscovich's class together and outdid Lewis and Clark and balled under the stars and shared every last nickel? So what?

Lydia said, “I'm surprised you never made it in to see me dance—what's the matter, baby, you lose interest? Or was I just not worth a four-hour drive?”

The three of them broke down then, poking, catcalling, gobbling, pounding the table with the shining heels of their hands. Ha-ha. Big laugh. And Ronnie—Pan—got sucked into it, trying to make excuses, and the excuses were real, they were true, because the car was, in fact, terminal and Joe flew only when he felt like it and he hadn't felt like it lately. What was he supposed to do—walk?

“So now I look dynamite, right? Now that I'm sitting two inches from you.” Lydia flashed her purple eyes at him. She was joking, fooling with him, her tone light and probing, but then her face clamped up on him, just like that. “And I suppose, Mr.
Pan,
Mr. Big Lover with your big dick, you want me to just roll over and make it with you as if I'm starved for it or something? Is that it?”

Ronnie was at an impasse. He was stoned, he was tired, he wanted to get laid, but Socrates would have had a hard time with this one—yes was the honest answer, but yes closed the door, and no was just another kind of groveling, and he didn't care how hard up he was, he wasn't going to grovel, especially not for Lydia. She wasn't even his type.

Out of the suspension came Marco's voice: “You took both of the rifles and the handgun too. They don't belong to you, brother, and we want them back.”

“Oh, come on, Marco,” Star said, her voice gone tight in her throat, “not now.”

“You get your moose yet—you and who, Bosky, Dale and Bruce? They still living with you?”

“Who? You mean Sky Dog?”

“Yeah,
Bruce.
That's his name, you know, just like you're Ronnie and I'm Marco and Jiminy's—what's your name, anyway?”

Jiminy's voice, a whisper, a croak: “Paul Atkins.”

“Right, Paul. Did you get your moose?”

Another tough question. Yes and you're damned; no and you're an incompetent and you give the guns back anyway. “Yes,” he heard himself say. “A bull. Prime. Joe says he must have weighed eleven hundred pounds. We spotted him from the air—he was right out there in the open, this big blotch moving across the snow. I mean, we've got meat, plenty of it. I mean, if you want some—”

But what Marco said, predictably, was: “We want the guns.”

“Okay,” he said, “I hear you.” He squinted into the gloom of the upper bunk and picked up the focused glare of Marco's eyes. There
was no way he was giving up the handgun—and it was just pure luck he wasn't wearing it now—or the thirty-ought-six either. The thirty-thirty, maybe. Maybe that. “Tomorrow. I swear.”

Then it was Star going on about the garden and how they'd got practically nothing out of it—they started too late, and they'd learned a lesson there—but the pot came out okay, no buds to speak of but they'd dried out the leaves and got something out of it that wasn't half bad. It got you there, anyway. And then there was a silence and Star, in her brightest voice, was saying, “Come on, Jiminy, Merry, Marco, let's go trick or treat over at Norm's and leave these two to have a little privacy for a while, what do think? Huh?”

No sooner had the outer door slammed than Lydia got up to lay a couple of sticks on the fire, though compared to Bosky's the cabin seemed as airtight as a Volkswagen and it must have been eighty-five already. She left the door of the stove open so they could watch the flames, and he appreciated the gesture, but he was sweating through his clothes and his throat was so dry he could have died for a glass of iced tea or a root beer—or a root beer float, A&W, just walk up to the window and give them your order on a muggy hot upstate New York day that scorched the skin off the back of your neck, the cicadas buzzing in the trees and the waxed cup perspiring in your hand. How about that for a fantasy? It was funny. Here he was in Alaska, in a log cabin in the middle of nowhere, snow on the ground and the temperature hovering at twenty below, and all he could think about was lemonade thick with ice in a tall cool glass, or a vodka and bitter lemon, gin and tonic, anything cold, the colder the better.

Lydia took the lantern down from its hook and blew out the flame, a thin wisp of greenish smoke rising from the aperture and an evidentiary whiff of kerosene hanging on the air. She left the candles burning. He watched her move round the room, weaving through the clutter till she found her purse hanging from a nail beside Star's
navy blue High Sierra backpack, the one she'd kept in the trunk of the Studebaker all the way across country, and how about that, Pan was thinking, Star's backpack. Lydia dug another stick of incense out of her purse and came to the table to light it off the candle guttering at Ronnie's elbow. She set the incense in its holder—cloves, that was what it was, cloves and maybe peppermint—and then produced a joint from the pocket of the fox coat. She gave him a wide-lipped smile, lit it and handed it to him. Then she dropped the coat to the floor, pulled her sweater and brassiere up over her head in a single fluid motion and shook out her hair. “You want me to dance for you?” she said. “Seeing as how you missed me up onstage at the Wildcat?”

“Yeah,” he said, “that would be nice.”

She began a slow bump and grind, spinning an invisible hula hoop round her midsection while the big hips rotated and rotated again, and then she stepped out of her jeans and dropped them to the floor too. “What do you think, Pan, Pan the satyr, you want me now?”

She watched him from the lower bunk as he fought off his clothes, so many layers, the two shirts, the sweater, the long johns—he felt like a six-year-old undressing for his mother after a day in the snow, but Lydia wasn't his mother, uh-uh, no way in hell, and that was a good thing too, because there was nothing going to stop him now. The boots. He tore at the laces, kicked at the heels. “Come on, Ronnie,” she murmured, spread out for him there, waiting, “you don't want me to get bored here, do you?”

He came for her as if he'd been shot out of a bow, and there was the usual sucking and licking and wrestling for position on the narrow slat of the bed, all good and well, all part of the agenda, love, Free Love, but she seemed to be wearing her panties still and he was pushing into her and tugging at them all at the same time, and what was this, some kind of tease? “No,” she whispered, pulling away from him, “no, we can't.”

“What do you mean
we can't
? What are you talking about?” He
was right there, right on top of her, his hands making the circuit of her. “You didn't take your pill? Is that it? Because I don't care, I'll be careful—”

The purple eyes, the tease of a voice. “No,” she said, “that's not it.”

“Jesus,” he said, and he might have been praying—he
was
praying. “So what, then?”

“Didn't anybody tell you? Because they've been treating me like the dregs around here, Reba especially, the bitch—she's the one that got found out. By Alfredo, I mean.”

“What? What is it?”

She shrugged and the bed quailed beneath her. “Crabs,” she said.

“Crabs?”

“I don't know where I got them, I really don't. And I don't think it was Arnold.”

“Arnold? Who's Arnold?”

“You don't know him,” she said. “He like owns this sporting goods store? He drove me back here. On his Ski-Doo. All the way out from Fairbanks, with a three-hour pit stop at the Nougat. He was sweet. He really was.”

Pan felt himself shrinking.

“Nobody's got any of that ointment,” she said. “That's the problem. It's not like there's a drugstore around the corner, know what I mean?”

“So big deal,” he said. “It's not like VD or anything”—and it was all in the mind, wasn't it, because he came back strong now, ready to burst with it—“I mean, we could still do it, couldn't we?”

She went right to sleep afterward, down and out for the count, and by the time he pulled out of her and rubbed himself as best he could with a dry bar of soap and a towel he found hanging by the door, she was snoring. Head back, breasts flattened across her chest, all that
hair
—she snatched in the air and blew it out again, hitting all the
high notes as if she were playing a trumpet voluntary without the trumpet. That was all right. He forgave her that. Lydia, his treat
and
his trick. He pulled on his long johns, but then peeled them down again and took a good long look at himself and ran the towel over his loins one more time, no problem, nothing there as far as he could see, and then he dressed in a hurry because there were four long cold miles to traverse before he could start snoring himself. He shrugged into his parka, hot, sweating, and he was about to push out into the night, relishing the idea of the cold, when Star's backpack caught his eye.