Drop City (43 page)

The morning stretched and settled. Star brought a plate and a mug of coffee up to the tent and watched Marco eat in greedy gulps, the long spill of his naked torso plunging into the folds of the sleeping bag as if that was all that was left of him, and he cleaned the plate and lit a cigarette without shifting position. “That my shirt you're wearing?” he said, and she said, “Yeah,” and went down to get him seconds. Everybody was awake by now, pushing flapjacks around their
plates, tanking up on creamless coffee and sorting through the box of mail Tom Krishna had set out on the picnic table. There was nothing for her—she'd already checked—and nothing for Marco, because they'd fallen off the edge of the world here and nobody, least of all their parents, knew where they were. She loaded up the plate, drowned the flapjacks in syrup, and told herself she was going to have to find the time to write people—her mother, Sam, JoJo, Suzie—because it would be nice to get a letter once in a while, to correspond, to reaffirm that there was a world out there beyond the cool drift of the river. As she went back up the hill with the laden plate the polar sun reached out and pinned her shadow to the ground.

By ten o'clock it was eighty-seven degrees, according to the communal thermometer Norm had nailed up outside the door of the cabin, and the whole community, even Jiminy in his sling, even Premstar, was gathered in the yard out under the sun, focused on the task at hand: roofing and chinking the meeting house. “Finishing touches!” Norm sang out, slathering mud. “The first and most significant building of Drop City North rising here before your unbelieving eyes, and what do you think of that, people?”

He didn't really expect an answer—Norm was talking just to hear himself, and that was his job, as guru and cheerleader—but people were feeling good, playful, celebratory even. The mud—heavy clay dug out of the bog behind the goat pen and mixed with water to consistency in a trough fashioned of old boards—was all over everybody, and there'd been at least two breaks for mud fights, but still the trowels kept going and the dead black slits between the logs gave way to handsome long horizontal stripes of ochre mud, hardening in the sun, and yes, Virginia, this was going to keep the
wind
out all winter. The roof poles—a whole forest of them, white spruce stripped and glistening and as straight as nature and a little planing could make them—were handed up brigade-style to Marco and Tom Krishna and then set in place against the roof beams, no nails, no ligatures or sheet metal couplings needed, thank you very much, because the
weight of the sod—big peaty chunks of it two feet thick and with every sort of grass, flower and weed sprouting like hair from the surface of it—would hold them in place. Or that was the theory, anyway.

Star helped Dunphy and Erika make up sixty peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a fruit salad—two kinds of berries, Del Monte peaches fresh from the can and apple wedges with the bruised skin still intact—and five gallons of cherry Kool-Aid, mildly laced with acid, just to give the occasion the right sort of send-off, and Tom Krishna saw to the music situation, setting up a little portable Sears Roebuck stereo to run off a car battery that had to be used
sparingly,
people, because there was no way to charge it up again. The music—so unexpected, so disorienting, so immediate and all-absorbing—put them over the top. People broke free to link elbows and do-si-do a step or two and then went right back to slinging mud, and then they had a sandwich and a cup of Kool-Aid, and through it all the steady wet thump of the Grateful Dead slinging drumbeats and converting steel strings to a rain of broken glass,
A friend of the devil is a friend of mine.
Star found herself hugging everybody, and she'd forgotten all about the goats, about Ronnie, who'd crawled off to crash in his tent, and she would have forgotten about Joe Bosky too—creep extraordinaire—if he wasn't right there in her face every time she turned around, helping himself to the Kool-Aid and sandwiches, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet as if he were balancing on a pole, blowing her kisses, juggling a hatchet and a pair of kitchen knives in a dumb show that just went on and on.

But nothing could dampen her spirit. This was like a barn raising, was what it was, like something out of the history books, and here they were living it, doing it, making it happen in modern times because it was never so modern you couldn't take a step back. “This is like an old-fashioned barn raising,” Star said aloud, to no one in particular, and she liked the notion of it so much she said it again, and then again, but nobody really paid any attention to her because by then they were all into their own trips, the chinking trip, the roofing
trip, the take-two-steps-and-swing-your-partner trip, and the only one who responded was Joe Bosky, right there at her elbow, tossing his hatchet and his knives, and what he said was, “It sure is, sweetheart, and I'd raise a barn with you anytime.”

It was late in the afternoon, the meeting house chinked inside and out, the roof in place and buried in sod so that it looked as if a whole meadow had been transposed from the earth to the air, just floating there like a magic carpet strewn with flowers—and that was a trip, it was, everybody agreed—before anybody gave a thought to Verbie. Dinner was cooking—salmon fillets rubbed with dill and roasted over the open fire, with brown rice, stewed cranberries and a pot of communal mustard on the side—and all of Drop City was feeling relaxed and confident. They'd done it. They'd come all the way up here and built a place from scratch, with the materials at hand—free materials, provided by nature—and if they could do that they could build the cabins too, and why stop at three? Why not four or five or six of them? Why not make a whole camp of the place, like Camp Minewa, where there were four girls to a cabin, bunk beds up against the wall and plenty of space for everybody? Marco was talking about a smokehouse and Norm was pushing for a sauna and maybe even a hot tub, and at lunch he went into a long, acid-fueled oration on the Swedes and hot rocks and hotter water, on Chippewa sweathouses and purification rites, until he talked himself hoarse. Sure, people said. Yeah, sure, why not? Because there wasn't anything they couldn't do, and if anybody still doubted it, all they had to do was take a look at the meeting hall standing there tall and proud where before there'd been nothing but scrub and trees and a pile of dead gray rock. And so everybody was smiling, and it wasn't just the mellowing influence of the acid either. This was genuine. This was real. And Verbie? She was on her way upriver, wasn't she?

Star was outside, setting the big split-log picnic table for dinner, when the high sharp whine of an outboard engine broke free of the trees. Verbie, she thought. And Harmony and Alice and the shampoo, magazines and flashlight batteries she'd put in an order for, and
chocolate—she could die for chocolate. She dropped what she was doing and let her feet carry her down to the river.

Half a dozen people were already there, the water giving back sheets of light as it paged through its boils and riffles, the sky striped with cloud till it looked like one of the paint-by-numbers scenes she'd never had the patience to finish as a child. Weird George was perched barefooted atop a rock out in the middle of the current, wet hair trailing down his back like a tangle of dark weed, Erika waist-deep in the water beside him. The dog was there too, Freak, in up to his chest and wagging the hacked-off stump of his tail, and it was warm still, very warm, no different from high summer on the Jersey Shore. And that was what she was flashing on—the Jersey Shore, she and Ronnie and Mike and JoJo and some of the others from the stone cottages and the weekend they'd spent camped on the beach there, all sunlight and the tug of the salt drying on your skin, bonfires at night, clams steamed in their own juice—as the boat drew closer and she began to realize that this wasn't Harmony at the tiller-arm, or Verbie or Alice either. That was Verbie, there, in the bow, the pale mask of her face riding up and jolting down again, but who was that in the middle seat, and who in the rear?

The engine droned. The boat came on. Star turned her head and gave an anxious look over her shoulder to where Marco and Alfredo were kneeling atop the roof of the meeting house, inspecting their work, and she wanted to call out to them—“Look, look who's coming!”—but she checked herself. A few of the others glanced up now, curious, because two arrivals in a single day was unprecedented, and she could see their faces lighting up—Jiminy and Merry at the door of the cabin, Mendocino Bill and Creamola pausing dumbstruck over a game of horseshoes, Premstar with her hair piled up on her head and a magazine in her hand lurching out of the hammock Norm had strung for her. A breeze came down the riverbed, rattling the willows along the shore. Freak began to bark.

She turned back round just as the boat slid behind the rock where Weird George was waving his arms and shouting something
unintelligible over the noise of the engine, and for an instant he blocked her view. Then the boat shot forward and she saw who it was standing up now in the middle seat, and she couldn't have been more surprised if it was Richard M. Nixon himself. “Dale!” somebody shouted. “Hey, Dale!” And then, before she could think or even react, Sky Dog was gliding by, one hand on the tiller, the other flashing her the peace sign.

24

They were talking nonstop, really spinning it out, and if he didn't know better he would have thought they'd just been released from separate cages, one tap on the steel bars for yes, two for no. It was a kind of verbal diarrhea—a tag-team match—Sky Dog rushing in to fill the void when Dale Murray paused for breath, and vice versa. And the thing was, people wanted to hear it, every word of it, because this was the diversion, this was the entertainment for the evening. Nobody had left the table. A bottle of homebrew made the rounds, hand to hand and mouth to mouth. Norm produced a fresh pack of cigarettes, shook one out, and passed the pack on. Bones and salmon skin stuck fast to the plates, the leftover rice went hard in the pot, flies buzzed, mosquitoes hung like ornaments on the air. People's eyes were on fire. They laughed, chatted, laid communal hands on one another's shoulders, and it was just like Leonardo's reprise of the Last Supper, except the Christ figure was two Christs, Dale Murray and Sky Dog.

“And that was a trip, the whole bike thing, because in—where was it at, Dale?”

“Dawson.”

“In Dawson, they'd never even
seen
a Honda before, especially a beast like that, seven hundred fifty cc's, Windjammer fairing, I mean,
chrome
everything, and the first guy out the door of the saloon offered him twenty-two hundred for it—
Canadian
—and Dale, I'll tell you, Dale never looked back.”

“That's right, man. Bet your ass.”

Marco shifted his weight from one buttock to the other on the hard split plank of the seat, thinking he could do without the heroic exploits and the thick paste of smirks, nods and asides that seemed to have everybody glued to their seats, thinking the two of them should have stayed in Dawson or Whitehorse or wherever they'd blown in from, anywhere but here. They'd shown up like conquering heroes when the worst part of the work was already finished, that was what he was thinking, and what had Dale Murray—or Sky Dog, for that matter—ever done for Drop City? He exchanged a look with Alfredo, elbow-propped across the table and two places up, but Alfredo was keeping his own counsel. And hadn't they banished Sky Dog once already? Or was he dreaming?

Up at the head of the table, seated at the right hand of Norm, Premstar was giggling, and the pot—Sky Dog's pot, Dale Murray's pot, Lester's and Franklin's pot—kept circulating. When the communal joint came Marco's way he took it like anybody else, a pinch of the thumb and index fingers, Joe Bosky's compressed fingertips giving way to Star's and Star's to his own. The Kool-Aid was gone, and he thought he felt a mild residual buzz from it—it hadn't been intended as anything intense, but just something to focus behind, and he'd had maybe two cups of it hours ago—and now Reba and Merry were hovering over the table with a big blackened pot of hot chocolate and people were dipping their cups into it and the steam lifted off the pot in a transparent crown. Freak had stopped begging—glutted finally—and he lay at Star's feet, grunting softly as he plumbed his balls and nosed under his tail for fleas. Jiminy got up and held his lighter to the pile of brush and lopped-off pine branches he'd raked together for a fire, and before long the smoke was chasing round the table at the whim of the breeze, a nuisance surely, but at least it discouraged the mosquitoes.

Dale Murray said, “Kicked his ass for him, what do you think?”

Norm said, “Public
what
? Indecency? You got to be kidding.”

Marco exhaled and passed the joint on to Dunphy, her fingers
cold, spidery, bitten, thin, the briefest fleeting touch of skin to skin, and she gave him a blank-eyed look and half a smile and put the roach to her lips and sucked. He glanced down at his own fingers, at his hands laid out on the chewed plank of the table. The fingernails were chipped, the cuticles torn, dirt worked into every crack and abrasion in a tracery of dead black seams. These were the hands of a working man, a man putting in twelve- and thirteen-hour days, the hands of a man who was building something permanent. Pride came up in him in a sudden flush. And joy. That too.

“Tired?” Star murmured, leaning into him.

For answer, he pressed his palms together in prayer, then tilted them and made a pillow to lay his head on.

“And Lester,” Sky Dog was saying, “you should have seen Lester—man, they wanted to lock him up so bad, just on general principles, you know? But he gave them the old shuck and jive and smiled so hard at this one guy—I don't know what he was, a Mountie, a sheriff, something—I thought he was going to melt right down into his boots like a big stick of rancid butter. Oh, and, shit, the moose—did I tell you about the moose?”

Alfredo cut in. He wanted to know where Lester was—was he planning on coming upriver? Because if he was, it was going to be sticky, real sticky, after what went down in California, and he didn't want to sound prejudiced or anything, because prejudice had nothing to do with it—

“He stayed behind at the bus,” Verbie said, picking at a crescent of white bone. “With Franklin. They're panning for gold.”

Joe Bosky let out a hoot. “Fucking greenhorns,” he said. “Cheechakos.”

“All's I know,” Sky Dog put in, “is they got this vial half-filled with gold flakes already, and all they been doing is just catching what comes out of that creek up north of town—”

“Last Chance Creek,” Bosky said, folding his arms. The pale white ridge of a scar crept out of his aviator's mustache and curled into the flesh of his upper lip. You could see where every hair of his
head was rooted. “They should've called it No Chance Creek. Nothing in there but sewage leaching out of people's septic tanks.”

“Sorry, man, but I saw it, I'm telling you—that was
gold
in there.”

“Iron pyrites,” Verbie said, and then Norm weighed in. “Could be gold, who knows? You want to talk gold country, this is it, and I fully intend to get out there and rinse a couple pans myself, me and Premstar. Once the cabins are up. Because why not? It's
money
in the bank, people, and it's out there for the picking, just like the berries and the fat silver salmon coming up the river, and do I have to
remind
anybody what we're doing up here in the first place?”

Jiminy said he could feature some gold—maybe Harmony could figure out a way to melt it down and make ornaments and figurines and the like—or maybe they could just sell it and use the money for things like a new generator so they could have a little music more than once a week. And lights, what about lights. Wouldn't lights be nice?

People ran that around the table a while, the gold flecks that would invariably prove to be iron pyrites growing exponentially in each Drop City head till the creek across the river ran yellow and the trees on the hills gave up their roots and toppled because it wasn't earth they were growing in, but solid gold nuggets. Marco tuned them out. He'd never been so tired in his life. And if it wasn't for the elation he was riding on—the meeting house was up, the walls chinked and the roof in place, and who would have believed it a month ago?—he'd have crawled into his sleeping bag by now. But he held on, stroking Star's bare arm with the tip of one very relaxed finger and letting the marijuana turn the blood to syrup in his veins.

They'd made the meeting house two stories, with the beams laid inside for a loft where people could sleep if the need arose, and that was good thinking, a happy result of sitting down with a sheet of paper and a pencil and talking it all out beforehand with Tom, Alfredo and Norm. Norm knew what he was doing, for the most part, at least, and Sess Harder, fifteen minutes down the river, was like an encyclopedia—he was the one who told them to lay flattened cardboard
over the roof poles so none of the loose sod would leach through the cracks—and the uncle had left behind a pristine copy of
The Complete Log Home,
copyright 1910, which they could consult as needed, but really, Marco couldn't help marveling over how
basic
it all was. You cut and peeled the timber, notched the ends of the logs till they were no different, except in scale maybe, from the Lincoln Logs every ten-year-old in America constructed his forts and stockades with, dug down two feet to permafrost at the four corners and stacked up rock to lay the first square across and built on up from there. Then you laid the floor—with planks carved out of spruce with a chainsaw ripper—cut holes for the windows and a six-inch slot for the stovepipe, and you had it. Basically, that was it. And if they could all pitch in and build something like this—two stories high, twenty feet long and eighteen across—then the cabins would be nothing more than a reflex.

“What about Harmony and Alice?” This was Norm, leaning into the table and giving Sky Dog and Dale Murray a look over the top of his glasses. “And Lydia, what about her?”

“You know Harmony,” Sky Dog said. “He's got a kiln set up outside the bus and he says he's experimenting with some things and he's not ready to come upriver yet, at least that's what he told me and Dale. Plus the Bug is broken down.”

“He ordered a new fuel pump for it,” Verbie put in. “From this place in Anchorage.”

Norm dug his fingers into his beard, slid the glasses back up his nose. “And Lydia?”

To this point, Joe Bosky had been subdued, his dig at the gold situation the only thing out of his mouth all evening. He'd been locked behind the wrap of his silver shades since morning, stoned on a whole variety of things. When the hot chocolate went round he'd shuffled unsteadily to the plane and came back with a bottle of Hudson Bay rum and set it on the table, and a couple of people followed his example and spiked their chocolate with it. He cleared his throat in response to Norm's question and leaned over to spit in the dirt
before bringing the solidity of his face back to the table. “She's in Fairbanks,” he said.

“Fairbanks?”

A murmur went round the table. If it was true, this was disturbing news, evidence of their first defection, the first betrayal of the ideal. People eyed one another up and down the table—who was next? Where would it end? Was the whole thing going to come tumbling down now? Was that what this meant? Marco slouched over his plate. For the moment, at least, he was too tired to care.

“What do you mean, Fairbanks?”

Joe Bosky's voice was thick in his throat. “I got her a job at this place I know. A saloon. She's going to be a dancer.”

And now Verbie: “Only till winter, though, is what she told me. To get some money together, for all of us—she's doing it for all of us—and then she's going to come back to the fold. That's a promise, she said—tell them that's a promise.”

“And if any of you other girls are interested,” Bosky said, and here he turned to Star and fixed his null gaze on her, “I can arrange it, because Christ knows they are starved for women up here. And Lydia. I mean, she's a natural, with that body she's got on her—”

“You mean topless, right?” Maya said.

“Right down to her G-string, honey, because full frontal nudity is still against the law in this state, but I tell you she's going to take in more tips a night than you people'll get in a month out of welfare or food stamps or whatever it is you're on.”

Everyone looked to Norm, whether they were conscious of it or not. And Norm, at the head of the table, hair dangling from the cincture of his headband, the cowbell like a cheese grater hung round his neck, set down his cup of chocolate and licked his mustache till all the sweet residuum was gone. “All right,” he said finally. “Cool. I mean, we can live with that, right, people? Lydia's going to show off what she was born with and make a little cash for Drop City in the bargain, and where's the problem with that?”

Verbie's voice came back at him like a whipcrack. “It's exploitation.”

“Exploitation of what?”

“Of the female body. It's sexist. I mean, I don't see any of you men up there dancing in your jockstraps or whatever—”

“Only because they didn't ask,” Norm said, and people were laughing now, avowals going up and down the table, and then Sky Dog said he'd do it in a heartbeat.

“Oh, yeah,” Verbie shot back. “Then why don't you do it now? Why not get up on the table and give us something to look at, come on, let's see what you got, big boy, come on—”

Sky Dog rose unsteadily from his seat and began undoing the buttons of his shirt while the catcalls rang out, but once he got his shirt off, he seemed to lose track of what he was doing—gone into the wild blue yonder—and he sat back down again.