Drop City (23 page)

Later, as the flames leapfrogged into the black vault of the sky and the hiss of Alaska sizzled up from the coals—
Alaska, Alaska,
the only word anybody needed to know tonight, the touchstone, the future—Star relaxed into the grip of whatever it was that was happening to her. She sipped at a fruit jar of Spañada and stood at the edge of the fire, watching the tracers rise up into the night. She felt calm, centered, as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders, the way she always felt when she came to a decision. Like with Ronnie. She remembered leaving home with him, books and records and brown bleeding bags of food piled up in the backseat, sleeping bags, kitchen things, the only home she'd known for three-quarters of her life receding in the rearview mirror, and then her mother raging barefoot down the street shouting out for the world to hear that she was throwing her life away. Her mother's face hung there in the window even after they'd reached the end of the block, and she could see it now, the wet sheen of her eyes and all the gouges and wrinkles of a long day and a long week mobilized in grief—
Paulette! You're throwing your life away, your life away!
—but she was calm that day too. She'd made up her mind to go, and that was it.

The sweet cold wine massaged her throat and condensed her headache till it was a hard black little India rubber ball come to rest somewhere in the backcourt of her mind. She was standing in a knot of people—Marco, Norm, Alfredo, Reba, Harmony, Deuce, all of them talking at once, talking logistics, talking
Alaska
—and she closed her eyes and rode the wave of exuberance that was washing over Drop City even now, even as Druid Day became something else—the day after Druid Day—and that was a holiday too. Sure it was. Didn't they have a bonfire? Didn't they have drugs, wine, beer? And weren't they going to dance till they dropped?

Just before the fire went up, when everybody was gathered in the field to watch Norm wave the ceremonial torch and make another of his rocket-propelled speeches—
Part of ourselves, people, let's all just step up and throw some part of ourselves on the funeral pyre of old Drop City
—Merry had retrieved the atlas from the high shelf in the kitchen where it was wedged between
The Whole Earth Catalogue
and
Joy of Cooking.
Star had come in to refill her glass, and Lydia and Maya were there too, mashing avocados for guacamole, and they all stood round the kitchen table as Merry traced her finger across the map of Alaska to the black dot on the swooping blue river that was Boynton. “There it is,” she said, “Drop City North,” and they all leaned forward to see that it was real, a place like any other, a destination. “And look,” she added, measuring out the distance with the width of a fingernail, “there's Fairbanks. And wow,
Nome.
”

No one said a word, but they all seemed to have caught the same fever. They'd all traveled to get here—that was part of the scene, seeing the country, the world, before you were shriveled up and dead like your parents. Lydia was from Sacramento originally, but she'd been to Puerto Vallarta, Key West and Nova Scotia, and Maya had hitchhiked all the way out here from Chicago. Merry was from Iowa, and Star had been across the Great Plains, through the Rockies and the high desert—all those rambling brown dusty miles—and that was nothing, nothing at all. Here was the chance to fall off the map, to see the last and best place and lay claim to bragging rights forever.
So you went to Bali, the French Riviera, the Ivory Coast? Yeah? Well, I was in
Alaska.

But where was the music? Weren't they going to dance? Wasn't that what Norm had said—
We are going to dance like nobody's ever danced?
Her eyes snapped open on the thought, and the first thing she saw was Ronnie, standing shirtless beside Dale Murray on the far side of the fire, a beer in one hand, a poker in the other. She was wondering what Ronnie thought about all this, because he was still her anchor to home no matter what happened, and the sight of him, of the neutral, too-cool-for-human-life look on his face, made her
doubt herself a moment—was he in for this, was he going to commit? Or would he put them all down with some sort of snide comment and slip out the back door? She leaned into Marco. “I'll be back,” she whispered, but Marco was already in Alaska, at least in his mind—
Mud and moss? You mean that's it for insulation?
—and he never even heard her.

She skirted the fire as people rushed up out of the dark to throw branches, scraps of lumber and trash into the flames. Jiminy and Merry came out of nowhere with a derelict armchair that had been quietly falling into itself under the front porch, and she could see the guy they called Weird George—all shadow and no substance—laboring across the yard with the crotch of a downed tree.

And here was Ronnie, lit like a flaming brand, his face a carnival mask of yellow and red, twin fires burning out of the reflective lenses of his eyes. She stood at his side a moment, watching as the glowing skeleton of the fire revealed itself like a shimmering X ray, and then she said, “Hey,” and Ronnie—in chorus with Dale Murray—returned the greeting.

“Wow, you're out,” Star said, looking to Dale Murray. “We were worried.”

“Right,” he said, and he leaned over to spit in the dirt. “But it's no thanks to you, is it? Any of you. If it wasn't for my buddy here”—he jerked his head and Sky Dog's profile emerged from the warring shades of the night, a beer pinned to his lips like a medallion—“I'd still be shitting bricks in the county jail. He's the one that went to the bail bondsman. I mean, what does that take? A genius?”

Star didn't have any response to that, because everything froze up inside her at the sight of Sky Dog. She'd thought all that was done with, thought he'd gone on to infest some other family with ego and selfishness and the kind of love that was no love at all, just words, empty words. He didn't acknowledge her, just drained his beer and flung the bottle into the fire.

There was a pop like a gunshot. The flames snapped and roared.

Ronnie said, “So what do you think?”

“You mean Norm?”

“Yeah. Norm. Like as if there's anything else to discuss tonight.”

“We looked it up on the map—Boynton. It's a real place. I mean, just like all the places on the map when we were coming across country.” And she couldn't help herself—she laughed. “A dot. A little black dot.”

“What's it near?”

She was the expert here, the old Alaska hand, but she'd already reached the limits of her knowledge: “Fairbanks. Like maybe a hundred fifty, two hundred miles?”

“The fishing up there,” Ronnie said, and he wasn't really talking to her now. “Grayling, char, king salmon as long as your leg. You could shoot a moose. A bear. In fact, you know they have to shoot a bear, everybody does, every year? You know why? The fat. I mean, it's not as if you can just stroll down to the grocery store and pick up a tub of margarine or Crisco or whatever—”

“What about the goats,” she said, and she had an image of them crammed into the back of the Studebaker, shitting all over everything, stinking, drooling, making a zoo of the place. “We're taking the goats, aren't we?” And there it was, a fait accompli:
we.

“Hey, man, you want another beer?” Dale Murray leaned into them, his face swollen in a stabbing flash of light. Ronnie held his bottle up experimentally, shook it twice and drained it. “How about you, Star?” Dale Murray wanted to know, and his voice had softened till it was reasonable, seductive even. Was this a peace offering—after all, she hadn't put him in jail; she hadn't even been there—or did he just want to ball her like all the rest of the
cats?

“I'm okay,” she said, and Dale Murray moved off into the shadows. She took a sip from the fruit jar and turned to Ronnie. “So what happened to your shirt?”

Ronnie pulled his eyes back and stared off into the distance. He shrugged. “I tossed it in the fire. Norm said to get rid of the bad shit, right? The shit with the negative vibes? Leave it all behind, isn't that what he said?”

It took her a minute. “The shirt I made for you?”

His eyes came back to her, dwindling and accusatory. He fingered the beads at his throat. “So what did you throw in the fire, like a little voodoo effigy of me or something? Or that turquoise bracelet I bought you in Sedona? I don't see that. I don't see you wearing that anymore—”

“Okay, look: I'm sorry. I love you, I do, but you have to understand—”

“Understand what?”

“Marco. I'm with Marco now, that's all.”

“And who the fuck is he? I've known you since
junior high.
Christ, we came out here together, we had all those adventures, remember? Doesn't that mean anything?” He bent forward to fling his empty bottle into the flames, and there was another pop as the heat took the glass down. “Shit, I don't even know if I want to go to Alaska if it's going to be like this—I mean, are we taking the Studebaker or what? And Marco, what about him—he doesn't even have a car, right? Not to mention all the rest of them. How are we going to get there, even?”

And what had she heard Lydia say in the kitchen just yesterday?
I don't watch pornography, I do it.
Right. Chicks and cats. Free Love. He was so full of shit it was coming out his ears. She took his hand and squeezed it. “Star and Pan,” she said.

“You know, I thought you were coming over here to ask do I have any more of those downs left, because I know you right through to the bone and I was figuring you were going to want to sleep tonight, isn't that right?”

She gave him a blossoming smile. “Mind reader.”

“You're going to have to come with me,” he said, reflexively patting the pockets of his jeans. “I got a little paranoid and went and stashed everything under this rock up in the woods. It's like three minutes from here.”

And then they were walking off into the deep pit of the night that pulled all the light down into it like a black hole, and she was feeling
her barefoot way, Ronnie's hand locked on hers like a magnet. Across the field and into the trees, and now her eyes began to adjust and she could see that there was a moon, a softness of light poured softly over every blade and leaf, pale stripes limning the dark trunks and a ghost-lit carpet spread uniformly over the ground from one corner of the night to the other. An owl hooted in the distance. The air had a taste to it, clean and cool, like a draught of water. “So where're you taking me, anyway?”

Ronnie worked his fingers between hers, gave her hand a squeeze. “Just up here, by that rock—see that rock?”

Up ahead was a big knuckle of extruded sandstone, glowing faintly in the moonlight, a landmark you could see from the kitchen window. In daylight, it was the haunt of lizards—and Jiminy, who liked to use it as a backrest when he was reading or meditating or whatever he did off by himself. The sight of the rock—the knowledge of it, its
familiarity
—saddened her. She was going to miss this place.

Ronnie let go of her hand and ducked into the shadows, and she heard him shifting things around in the dark, a rustle of twigs and then the sigh of plastic. “I got reds,” he said. “What do you want, two?”

She felt the touch of his hand, the faintest tactile apprehension of the two smooth weightless capsules. She chased them down with a gulp of sweet wine. In the distance, the glow of the fire painted the sky and she could hear the music starting up with a thump of tambourines and the rudimentary chord progressions of Sky Dog's guitar, or maybe it was Dale Murray's. They were dancing back there, dancing for joy, for wisdom, for peace. Star didn't feel like dancing anymore. She didn't feel like anything—she was numb, neutral, and all she wanted now was sleep. But then Ronnie ran a hand up her leg and rose from the shadows to press his mouth to hers, and she wanted to tell him no, wanted to tell him to go back to Lydia, wanted to tell him it was over between them except in the purest brotherly and sisterly sense and that being from home didn't mean anything anymore—that was what she wanted to tell him. But she didn't.

15

It never rained in June, not in California, because California had a monsoon climate and the climate dictated its own terms—rain in winter, drought in summer. That was the way it was. That was the way it had always been. “You can make book on it,” Norm would crow to the new arrivals from the east coast, “not a drop's going to fall between April and November. You want to live outdoors? You want to throw away your clothes? You want to party like the Chumash? Go right ahead, be my guest, because this isn't New Jersey or Buffalo or Pittsburgh, P.A.—this is
California.
” Marco had spent the driest summer and wettest winter of his life in San Francisco, trying to make a go of it in a big rambling old Victorian with a leaky roof and thirteen bickering communards, and he thought he'd got a grasp on the weather at least. Still, when he woke the morning after the solstice celebration, he woke to rain.

He hadn't slept well. Or much. Star had drifted away from him when the bonfire was at its height, and she hadn't come back. At the time, he'd hardly noticed. He'd had a couple of beers, and he was batting Alaska around like a shuttlecock with Norm and Alfredo, up over the net and back again, reach low for the implausible shot, leap high,
whack!
Everything was up in the air at that point, people gathering in stunned and angry groups
(The Nazi sons of bitches, this is still America, isn't it?),
trying to feed on this new dream, this dream of starting over, of building something from the ground up like the
pioneers they all secretly believed they were, and so what if they suffered? So what if it was cold? Did Roger Williams worry about physical comfort when he went off to found Rhode Island? Or Captain John Smith when he set sail for the swamps of Virginia? One by one they stripped off some garment or charm or totem and flung it into the fire, all the while pledging allegiance to the new ideal, to freedom absolute, to Alaska. It was an adolescent fantasy—the fantasy of owning your own island, your own country, making up the rules as you went along—but it was irresistible too. Marco could see it on every face, a look of transformation, of
mutation,
and he was caught up in it himself.

He was there, with Norm, sitting kneecap to kneecap over the embers of the fire, drinking Red Zinger tea out of a chipped ceramic mug and trying to read every nuance and foresee every impediment, when the sky began to lighten in the east. Everybody else had gone to bed, even Mendocino Bill, who'd spent the better part of a dimly lit hour rasping away over the need—no, the
duty
—to hire a lawyer and fight this thing, but Norm said he was done paying lawyers, done paying taxes, done with the straight world once and for all. “Look at that,” Norm said, waving his mug at the sky, “like God's big rheostat, huh?” And then he was on his feet, brushing at the seat of his overalls. “Time to file it away for tonight. We've got six days maybe, if we're lucky. Logistics, man, I'm talking logistics here. A lot to do.”

But now it was raining, a steady, gray, vertical assault of water in its natural state, unexpected, unheralded, wet. Marco woke to the sound and smell of it, and discovered that the roof was leaking. He'd never bothered to test it with a hose—it kept the dew off, and that was enough, and who would have thought it would be raining in June? He'd split the shakes himself, but he'd had no tar paper—or tar, for that matter—and the plywood he used had been left to the elements so long it was honeycombed with rot. Lying there in his sodden sleeping bag, he felt angry with himself at first, and then just foolish, until finally he realized how futile the whole business was: this was a treehouse, that was all, the sort of thing a twelve-year-old
might have thrown together as a lark. He'd just been playing around here. He could do better. Of course he could.

He breathed in and out, watched his expelled breath hang in the air like its own little meteorological event, listened to the incessant drip of the rain.

At least Star was dry. He tried to picture her curled up on one of the couches in the big house, listening to records and gossiping with Merry and Lydia and whoever else had come in out of the wet, or maybe in the kitchen, whipping up a little dish of veggie rice or pasta for forty. She was a good cook, good with spices. She could do Indian, and he loved Indian. And she must have been in the big house, because she wasn't here. Clearly. Nothing here but an abandoned longhair in a wet sleeping bag.

She'd complained of a headache the night before, and he assumed she'd gone back to the treehouse to crash, but when he climbed up the ladder in the stone soup of dawn, the sleeping bag was empty. And so he further assumed she'd spent the night in the big house, as she sometimes did, in the room Merry and Maya had partitioned with a pair of faded Navajo blankets strung across a length of clothesline. Marco had been in there once or twice—this was an open society, after all, and theoretically there was no private space—but it made him uncomfortable. The room smelled of women, tasted of them, of their perfumes and balms, their scented candles and incense and the things they wore close to their bodies, and it was orderly when the rest of the house was in disarray. And dark, dark and candlelit, even in the middle of the day, with sheets of cardboard and posters nailed up over the windows. Norm called it the seraglio. The big orange tom, no fool, liked to nest there among the bedclothes and have his ears rubbed.

Did he miss her after one night? Did he resent the fact that she hadn't slept beside him? Was he worried? Jealous? Possessive? He didn't know. But he peeled himself out of the clammy sleeping bag, stepped into his jeans and climbed barefoot down the ladder to cross the muddy yard to the big house and find out.

He went round back so as not to track mud through the house, and came up the rear steps thinking about boots—he was going to need a new pair, a pair of work boots from the Army and Navy store, if he expected to survive a winter up north—and he paused a moment to rinse his muddy feet in the fan of water shearing off the eaves. Inside, the teapot was going and the windows were steamed over. It wasn't cold, not really, but he found he was shivering as he pushed open the door on a wall of cooked air and a complex admixture of scents: fresh-baked bread, coffee, basil, vegetable stock simmering in a bright scoured pot on the stove.

Star was there, leaning over the pot, her child's hands cupped beneath a load of chopped celery. She gave him a smile, dropped the celery into the pot and crossed the room to hold him briefly and give him the briefest of kisses. “Where were you?” he breathed. “I missed you.” And she said, under her breath, “With the girls.”

Verbie was there too, with her sister, a long-faced girl with a bulge of jaw and eyes set too close together, and Merry, Maya and Lydia, all of them hovering around the stove with coffee mugs cradled in their hands. The two yellow dogs lay on the floor at their feet. “You eat yet?” Star wanted to know, and then she was back at the chopping board, scooping up vegetables for the pot.

“I feel like I'm in a Turkish bath or something,” he said, and found himself a seat at the table, smoothing his wet hair back with the palm of his right hand. He parted it in the middle, like everybody else, but the parting always seemed ragged, as if his head wasn't centered on his body, and unless he made a conscious effort with comb and brush there wasn't much hope for it. “No,” he said, in answer to Star's question, “not yet—but what time is it, anyway, you think?”

Merry answered for her. “I don't know—two? Two-thirty?” She poured a cup of coffee, two teaspoons of sugar, a float of goat's milk, and brought it to him. “What time did you turn in last night?”

He made a vague gesture. “Norm,” he began, “I was with Norm,” and they all—even Verbie's long-faced sister—burst out laughing. He liked that. Liked looking at them, at their small even teeth,
brilliant gums, eyes squeezed down to slits. The laughter trailed off into giggles. “Say no more,” Star said.

And then he was dipping warm bread into his coffee, wrapped up in the cocoon of the moment, not quite ready to start anything yet. The conversation flowed round him, soft voices, the rhythmic heel-and-toe dance of the knife on the chopping block.

“The goats are going, right?”

“I don't know. Yeah. I guess.”

“Do they need like a special, what do you call it—a wagon? Like horses, I mean?”

“Oh, you mean a goat wagon.” More giggles. “We can just go out to the goat wagon store and get one.”

“I'm serious.”

“Okay, so am I. What are we going to feed them?”

“The goats?”

“Yeah.”

“I don't know—grass?”

“In the winter.”

“Hay?”

“Where're we going to get hay in the middle of Alaska?”

“Buy it.”

“With what?”

“Barter for it, then. Like we do here. You know, dip candles, string beads, pottery, honey, that kind of thing.”

“Who's going to want beads up there?”

“The Eskimos.”

“There aren't any Eskimos where we're going. It's more like woods and rolling hills. Like Minnesota or something. That's what Norm said, anyway.”

“So Indians. They've got Indians up there, haven't they?”

“Indians make their own beads.”

“Teenagers, then. Teenagers dying to escape the grind. We'll start a revolution. Flower power on the tundra!”

“Yeah, right.”

Star was the one concerned with the goats. They were her domain now—nobody else seemed to bother with them. She even smelled of goat, and he didn't mind that, not at all, because it was a natural smell, and that was what they were getting here: nature. And if they could keep it together long enough to get to Alaska, they were going to get a whole lot more of it.

“I wouldn't be worried about goats, I'd be worried about long underwear—I mean, what are we supposed to wear up there? Mink coats? Mukluks?” Pause. “What
are
mukluks, anyway?”

“We'll just go to Goodwill or something. Get a bunch of sweaters and overcoats. And knit. We could knit, no problem—”

“Layers, that's how you do it.”

“I hear if you get overheated the sweat like freezes on your body and you wind up like dying of hypothermia or something.”

“I don't sweat.”

“You will, once we get you your mink panties and ermine bra.”

They were laughing. They were happy. They'd go to Siberia, Tierra del Fuego, Devil's Island—it was all the same to them. It was an adventure, that was all. A lark. They were the women. They were the soul and foundation of the enterprise. And sitting there in the kitchen with the rain tapping at the windows and the stock simmering on the stove and the women's voices casting a net in the air around him, Marco couldn't help but feel that everything was going to work out after all.

It was late afternoon and raining still when the dogs lifted their heads from the floor and cocked their ears—a vehicle was coming up the drive, something big, preceded by a rumble of wheels or maybe treads and the stuttering alien wheeze of a diesel engine. Marco was still in the kitchen, sitting at the window with a book, feeling confined and constrained, but in no mood to go back and crouch over a wet sleeping bag in a leaky treehouse for the rest of the day. He was
bored. Anxious to get started, to do something, see to details, arrange things, get this show on the road—Alaska, Alaska or Bust, and all he could see was a log cabin in a glade overlooking a broad flat river so full of salmon you could walk across their backs to the other side, and moose, moose standing in shallow pools with long strips of vegetation decorating their antlers. But it was raining, and he had a book, and he was going nowhere. As for the rest, the cast of characters had changed somewhat—Reba was at the stove now, making a casserole to go with the soup, and Alfredo was hunkered over a game of solitaire at the kitchen table while Che and Sunshine hurtled in and out of the room in a sustained frenzy that might have been called tag or hide-and-go-seek or gestalt therapy. Star and Merry were making piles of things in the corner—
Six teapots, do we really need six teapots?
—and Maya was sliding jars of preserves into a cardboard box with the grudging slow imponderability of a prisoner. The light was a gray slab. Things were slow.