Drop City (54 page)

If that wore her down, the worry that ate at her with every thump of her heart and made the storm a curse and the meal as bland as boiled cardboard so that she couldn't take more than two bites of it and had to sneak her plate to the dog, what came next was even worse. It was an hour after they'd eaten. The dishes were soaking in the big washtub on the stove. People were passing cigarettes, the eternal joint. Alfredo had tried to get a sing-along going, but nobody seemed to have the heart for it, and it wasn't anxiety over Marco that had them down, it was just boredom, the sameness of the food, the faces, the night. Nothing was happening. Nothing was going to happen. This was the life they'd chosen. Voluntarily.

Norm was sunk into one of the lower bunks with Premstar, their backs against the wall, feet splayed out on the floor. He was looking old. His skin was so pale it could have been the underbelly of a fish
peeled off and sewed into place, and his hair, bucket-washed, hung limp and thin around his ears. There were hairs growing out of those ears, she saw now, out of his nostrils, climbing up out of the neck of his shirt. Never repaired, his glasses looked as if they'd been thrown at his face, dirty grayish lumps of Reba's sticking plaster holding the frames together in a tentative accord with the forces of gravity. He was sniffling, victimized by the cold oozing its way through the collective mass of his brothers and sisters, his eyes red-rimmed and terminal. And he was itching, itching like everybody else. Pasha Norm. Norm the guru. Norm, the guiding light of Drop City.

He pushed himself up with a grunt, and he was just like her father struggling up out of his chair after his team had gone down to defeat, shoulders slumped, eyes vacant, one hand going to the small of his back and whatever residual ache stabbed at him there, and then he crossed the room to the table and poured himself a cup of beer from the half-gallon jug. Why she was watching him, she didn't know. She'd been playing a distracted game of cards—pitch—with Merry, Maya and Lydia, and as her gaze drifted round the room she'd somehow settled on Norm, as if she knew what was coming, as if she'd had a premonition, not only about Marco and Ronnie and the long downward slide of the night, but of the fate of Drop City itself.

Norm tipped back his head, the hair spilling loose around his shoulders, and drank noisily from the cup. “That's beer,” he said, fighting back a belch. “That's the best thing about this place, our greatest achievement—Tom Krishna's beer. We ought to bottle it and sell it. ‘Old Flatulence,' we'll call it. How does that sound?”

Nobody laughed. But he'd accomplished what he wanted: he had the attention of the room now, people looking up from books, games, conversations—he was working up to something, they could all sense it.

“You know,” he said, talking to the room now, “while we've got everybody gathered here, or mostly everybody, if you want to discount the people harboring grudges and ill will, and I guess that's probably about
half
of us, people, half the Drop City Maniacs gone
round the
bend,
and how about that as testimony to the power of brother- and sisterhood?” Still nobody laughed. “While we've got everybody here I just want to lay something on you, I mean, on behalf of me and Premstar—” They all looked to Premstar, who sat still as an icon, her lips parted in an expectant pout, her eyelids gleaming naked because she was out of glue for her false lashes and down to the last few dwindling traces of her pastel blue eyeshadow. Premstar glared back. She was out of her league here, Star was thinking, a prima donna in a community of equals, and there was no excuse for her, none, zero. She could pout all night long for all anybody cared.

“Let me guess,” Bill said. “The Air Force is making an emergency drop of eighty-seven tubes of crab ointment right out on the river—”

“And six color TVs, with rabbit ears the size of the Empire State Building,” Weird George cried out, thrusting up his mug of beer as if to propose a toast. “And all the back issues of
Playboy
in existence!”

There were a few sniggers, a nervous laugh or two. The stove sighed. Snow ticked at the windows. Merry looked up from her cards and held Star's eyes, as if to say,
What next?

Norm had no problem playing to the gallery. He was like an actor—he
was
an actor—and he swung round on the pivot of his heels and threw out his arms as if to embrace everybody leaning over the rough-hewn edge of the railingless loft, the cheap seats, everybody in the cheap seats. “I only wish,” he said.

Reba, who'd been sitting in the corner staring at nothing while Che and Sunshine picked sodden lumps of fish off their untouched plates and flung them at one another in a silent, dragged-down war of attrition, spoke up suddenly. “We need a Ski-Doo is what we need. So we can get into town and get the damned ointment, because this is ridiculous, and the mail, and, and—”

“And see some new faces for a change,” Bill finished the thought for her.

Weird George said he'd like to hoist a few at the Three Pup.

“Toothpaste,” Maya said. “Shampoo. An orange stick for my nails.”

Jiminy's opinion was that they were welcome to walk—“Walking
is good for you, man, like the best exercise in the world”—but nobody rose to the bait. The idea was patently ridiculous. Sure, they could walk the twelve miles, and a few people had done it since the river had frozen up, but it was twelve miles
back,
and there was no place to stay in Boynton because the bus had no heat in it and Sess Harder had refused them the use of his shack cum toolshed, even for just an overnight stay. Everybody was out here now—no more furloughs—and they were going to stay here till the river broke up in May. Count the months—two weeks more of November, then December, January, February, March and April. It was a lifetime. A prison sentence. And already they were chafing, all of them—what would it be like in three months? In four?

Everybody chased the issue around for a minute or two, any topic the subject of rancor and debate, and then there was a silence, a time-out while they each contemplated the future, both individual and communal, and then Bill coughed into his fist and looked up and asked Norm what he had on his mind.

Norm put on a mask. His face was neutral but for his eyes, his red-rimmed eyes, sharpening suddenly from the depths of the two holes he'd poked in it. “It's nothing really, no big deal, nothing to get
uptight
about, people.” He paused, and though everybody was busy with something, they were all listening, all of them. “Well, it's Premstar,” he said. “Prem hasn't been feeling too well—”

Again, all eyes went to her. She was glaring out of the cave of herself, bristling with some kind of animus, sure, but she looked as healthy as anybody else. And pretty. Pretty as a beauty queen. Which in itself was unforgivable.

“And I've had some news about the ranch—which I've been waiting for the right moment to share with you, good news and bad news too. The good news is we've got my attorney in there fighting the county's right to foreclose on the property—I mean, we could sell it yet, clear the back taxes, and have the bread, I mean, the
wherewithal,
to really do something here. I mean, new buildings, sauna, snow machines, something for everybody—we can really make this place
work, people, make it livable,
comfortable,
even. And self-sufficient, definitely self-sufficient. That's my goal, that's it right there—”

What's the bad news? Star wanted to say, and her heart was going—she didn't need bad news, not with Marco out there somewhere in the night, maybe lost, maybe hurt—but Bill beat her to it. “So what's the bad news?” he said.

No hedging now, no going back: Norm thrust his face forward, challenging the room. “I've got to split,” he said. “Me and Prem. But just for like the tiniest little running jump of a hiatus—that's what it is, a
hiatus
—because they want me in court down there, and—well, I fixed it up with Joe Bosky. He's going to fly us to the airport in Fairbanks. I mean, when the weather allows.” He looked into each face around the cabin, ticking them off one by one. “Plus Prem,” he said. “Prem's sick.”

It took a minute. They were in shock, that was what it was. They were staggered. Punch-drunk. No one could have guessed, not in their wildest—Star watched their faces go up in flames, their eyes turn to ash. They couldn't talk. Nobody could say a word. Norm had just held a glowing torch to the roof of the meeting hall, he'd napalmed the village and scattered the refugees. She felt herself lifting out of her seat as if she were in another dimension altogether, and wasn't that the kind of thing that happened to you when you died, when you had an out-of-body experience, hovering above the scene in pure sentience? She was high up, running with the clouds, and then she burst through them into the barren night of the stars and the planets and their cold, cold heat. And now there were angry voices, frightened voices, flaring out all around her as if they wanted to shoot her down. “But Marco,” she stammered, fighting to be heard, “you don't understand, you can't leave, nobody can—Marco's out there!”

She went out into the night, shouting for him, but the shouts died in her throat—he wasn't coming back, nobody was coming back, Marco
was dead, Drop City was dead, and she might as well have been dead herself. The wind spat snow at her, rammed at her shoulders, thrust a dry tongue up under her collar and down the back of her pants. She hunched herself in the parka and made a circuit of the place, up to the goat pen, down to the river and back, the tracks filling behind her even as she lifted her feet, the clouds stilled, the hills immovable and silent, transfixed on the spearheads of the trees. The snow was nearly to her knees and drifting now, picking up structure and definition. There was no feeling in her toes. Her feet were like blocks, her fingertips numb. She was freezing. She was helpless. There was nothing she could do. She went round a second time, fighting it, screaming, “Marco! Marco!” She paused, listened, called out again. No one answered.

Then she was in her cabin, laying wood on the fire. She had the place to herself, at least for the moment, because everybody else was in the meeting hall, debating, shouting, glutting themselves on the bad vibes and negativity, and the people who hadn't been there for dinner were there now—she'd seen the hurrying dark forms huddled against the snow, panic time, oh yes indeed. She tried to steady herself. Tried to talk herself down from the ledge she'd stepped out on here. What she needed most of all was to be calm, to think things through in a slow, orderly fashion. Marco was lost. Norm was bailing.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
She saw herself a Drop City widow, sidling up to Geoffrey or Weird George, peeling potatoes, hauling frozen buckets of human waste out to the refuse heap, living day by day through the slow deterioration of everything she cared about, everything she'd built and fought for, and maybe she'd pile up stones in memory of Marco, the way the Indians did, and cry over the stones and her battered hands and the whole impossible naive idealistic hippie trip she'd been on ever since she left home. What a fool, she thought. What a fool she'd been.

She thought of the money then. The three pale stiff silvery green notes wrapped up in the sock in the inside flap of her backpack, her insurance policy, cab fare, bus fare, air fare, the means to get out.
Ronnie had got out, Sky Dog and Dale Murray, Rain, Lester and Franklin—and Norm was on his way. Verbie was living in town with Iron Steve in a rental with electricity and running water. Lydia was only parked here, the most temporary of arrangements, everybody knew that. And so why should she suffer? Why should she wear herself down in the thankless role of
chick
and scullery maid? She got up from the bed and went to her pack.

She dug through her summer tops, her cutoffs, sandals, a bundle of letters she'd meant to send, camping gear, books, suntan oil, three, four, five pairs of clean socks, her poncho, but when she reached into the inside pocket, deep down, at the bottom, there was nothing. It had to be a mistake. She upended the pack on the bed, went through every pouch, pocket and fold of clothing and laid everything out where she could see it, thinking she would hike the twelve miles to town all on her own, just follow the river like a highway, walk into the Three Pup and offer to pay one of the bush pilots to fly her out, Howard, maybe—he would do it, no problem. She'd offer fifty and keep the rest for a one-way ticket home—not to Florida, not to Hawaii, but home—and she saw herself sitting back in the reclining seat, eating a hot meal off the tray, prepackaged food, civilized food, and her mother standing there at the gate at Kennedy with Sam and the dog, and her father, if he could get off work. She started to cry then. She couldn't help herself.