Drop City

1

The morning was a fish in a net, glistening and wriggling at the dead black border of her consciousness, but she'd never caught a fish in a net or on a hook either, so she couldn't really say if or how or why. The morning was a fish in a net. That was what she told herself over and over, making a little chant of it-a mantra-as she decapitated weeds with the guillotine of her hoe, milked the slit-eyed goats and sat down to somebody's idea of porridge in the big drafty meeting room, where sixty shimmering communicants sucked at spoons and worked their jaws.

Outside was the California sun, making a statement in the dust and saying something like ten o'clock or ten-thirty to the outbuildings and the trees. There were voices all around her, laughter, morning pleasantries and animadversions, but she was floating still and just opened up a million-kilowatt smile and took her ceramic bowl with the nuts and seeds and raisins and the dollop of pasty oatmeal afloat in goat's milk and drifted through the door and out into the yard to perch on a stump and feel the hot dust invade the spaces between her toes. Eating wasn't a private act-nothing was private at Drop City-but there were no dorm mothers here, no social directors or parents or bosses, and for once she felt like doing her own thing. Grooving, right? Wasn't that what this was all about? The California sun on your face, no games, no plastic society-just freedom and like minds, brothers and sisters all?

Star-Paulette Regina Starr, her name and being shrunk down to four essential letters now-had been at Drop City for something like three weeks. _Something like.__ In truth, she couldn't have said exactly how long she'd been sleeping on a particular mattress in a particular room with a careless warm slew of non-particular people, nor would she have cared to. She wasn't counting days or weeks or months-or even years. Or eons either. _Big Bang. Who created the universe? God created the universe. The morning is a fish in a net.__ Wasn't it a Tuesday when they got here? Tuesday was music night, and today-today was Friday. She knew that much from the buzz around the stewpot in the kitchen-the weekend hippies were on their way, and the gawkers and gapers too-but time wasn't really one of her hangups, as she'd demonstrated for all and sundry by giving her Tissot watch with the gold-link wristband to an Indian kid in Taos, and he wasn't even staring at her or looking for a handout, just standing there at the bus stop with his hand clenched in his mother's. “Here,” she said, “here,” twisting it off her wrist, “you want this?” She'd never been west before, never seen anything like it, and there he was, black bangs shielding his black eyes, a little deep-dwelling Indian kid, and she had to give him something. The hills screamed with cactus. The fumes of the bus rode up her nose and made her eyes water.

She'd come west with a guy from home, Ronnie Sommers, who called himself Pan, and they'd had some adventures along the way, Star and Pan-like Lewis and Clark, only brighter around the edges. Ronnie stopped for anybody with long hair, and that was universally good, opening up a whole world of places to crash, free food, drugs. They spent one night in Arizona in a teepee with a guy all tanned and lean, his hair tied back under a snakeskin headband, cooking brown rice and cauliflower over an open fire and swallowing peyote buds he'd gathered himself in the blinding white hills. “Hunters and gatherers,” he kept saying, “that's what we are,” and every time he said it they all broke up, and then Ronnie rolled a joint and she felt so good she made it with both of them.

She was still chanting to herself, the leaves on the trees frying right before her eyes and the dollop of oatmeal staring up at her from the yellowish goat's milk like something that had come out of her own body, blown out, vomited out, naked and alive and burnished with its own fluids, when a shadow fell over her and there he was, Ronnie, hovering in the frame of her picture like a ghost image. “Hey,” he said, squatting before her in his huaraches and cutoff jeans, “I missed you, where you been?” Then he was lifting her foot out of the dust, her right foot, the one with the fishhook-shaped scar sealed into the flesh as a memento of her childhood, and he kissed her there, the wet impress of his lips dully glistening in the featureless glare.

She stared at her own foot, at his hand and his long, gnawed fingers, at the silver and turquoise rings eating up the light. “Ringo-Pan,” she said.

He laughed. His hair was getting long at the back of his neck, spilling like string over the spool of his head, and his beard was starting to cohere. But his face-his face was small and distant, receding like a balloon swept up into the sky.

“I was milking the goats,” she said.

Two kids-little kids-blond, naked, dirty, appeared on the periphery, flopped down and started wrestling in the dirt. Somebody was banging a tambourine, and now a flute started up, skirling and stopping and lifting away like birdsong. “Good shit, huh?” he said.

Her smile came back, blissed-out, drenched with sun. Everything was alive everywhere. She could feel the earth spinning like a big ball beneath her feet. “Yeah,” she said. “Oh, yeah. Definitely.”

And then it was night. She'd come down gradually through the course of a long slow afternoon that stretched out and rolled over like a dog on a rug, and she'd worked in the kitchen with some of the others, chopping herbs, onions and tomatoes for the lentil soup and singing along to the Airplane and Country Joe and the Fish. Somebody was passing a pipe and she took a hit or two from that, and she'd kept a fruit jar topped up with Spañada right next to her throughout the cooking and the washing up and the meal that went on like the Last Supper while a guy named Sky Dog or maybe it was Junior Sky Dog played acoustic guitar and sang verses he made up on the spot. The blond kids from the morning were there, naked still, lentil soup streaking their torsos like war paint, and there was a baby in a wicker papoose strapped to the back of a gaunt tall woman with eyes that were like two craters sunk into her head. People were everywhere, people she'd never seen before-the weekend hippies up from the city-and her brothers and sisters too. Smoke rose from joss sticks, from grass and hash threaded meticulously from hand to hand as if they were all collectively stitching a quilt in the air. A pair of rangy yellow dogs sniffed at people's feet and thrust their snouts in the bowls that lay scattered across the floor.

Star was perched up on a throne of old couch pillows in the corner, along with Ronnie and a new girl whose name she'd forgotten. She wasn't feeling anything but tired, and though the whole thing-the whole scene-was fantastic, like summer camp without the counselors, a party that never ends, she was thinking she'd had enough, thinking she might just slip off and find a place to crash and let the sleep wash over her like a dark tide of nothing. Ronnie's leg lay across her own, and she could just barely feel the new girl's hair on her shoulder like a sprinkle of salt or sugar. She closed her eyes, let herself drift. The music began to fade, water sucked down a drain, water that was rushing over her, a creek, a river, one pool spilling into the next… but then one of the kids let out a sudden sharp wail and she came back to the moment. The kid, the little boy with his bare abdomen and dangling parts and his missing front teeth that gave him the look of a half-formed little ghoul, slapped something out of his mother's hand-Reba, that was her name, or maybe it was Rena? He let out another shriek, high and mechanical, but that was the beginning and the end of it, because Reba just held a joint to his lips and then sank back into the pillows as if nothing had happened.

Nothing had. No one seemed to notice or care. Sky Dog had been joined by a second guitarist now, and they were working their way through the steady creeping changes of a slow blues. A topless woman no one had ever seen before got up and began to hump her hips and flap her enormous breasts to the beat; before long, a couple of the commune's more or less permanent members rose up from the floor to join her, swaying in place and snaking their arms like Hindu mystics.

“A tourist,” Ronnie said, the syllables dry and hard on his tongue. “Weekend hippie.” He was wearing a Kmart T-shirt Star had tie-dyed for him on their first day here, orange supernovae bursting out of deep pink and purple galaxies, and when he turned to the new girl the light behind him made his beard translucent. “You're no tourist,” he said. “Right, Merry?”

Merry leaned back into the cradle of his arm. “I am not ever going back,” she said, “I promise you that.”

“Right,” Ronnie said, “right, don't even think about it.” Then he slipped his free arm around Star's shoulders and gave her a squeeze, and “Hey,” he was saying, caught up in the slow-churning engine of the moment, “you want to maybe go down by the river and spread a blanket under the stars and make it-just the three of us, I mean? You feel like it?” His eyes were on the dancing woman, up one slope and down the other. “Would that be righteous, or what?”

And here was the truth: Star _didn't__ feel like it. Nor, despite what she'd told herself, had she felt like it that night in the teepee either. It was Ronnie. Ronnie had talked her into undressing in front of the other guy-or no, he'd shamed her into it. “You don't want to be an uptight bourgeois cunt like your mother, do you?” he'd said, his voice a fierce rasp in her ear. “Or _my__ mother, for shitsake? Come on, it's all right, it's just the human body, it's natural-I mean, what is this?”

The other guy, the teepee guy-she never knew his name-just watched her as if she were a movie he'd never seen before. He was sitting there yoga style, the very avatar of peace and love, but you could see he was all wound up inside. He was intense. Freakish, even. She could feel it, some sort of bad vibe emanating from him, but then she told herself she was just being paranoid because of the peyote. So she lay back, crossed her legs at the ankles and stared into the fire. No one said anything for the longest time. And when she looked up finally the teepee guy's eyes were so pale there were no irises to them, or hardly any, and Ronnie rolled a joint and helped her off with her blue denim shirt with all the signs of the zodiac she'd embroidered up and down the sleeves and across the shoulders, and he was in his shorts and the teepee guy-_cat,__ teepee _cat,__ because Ronnie was always correcting her, you don't call men guys you call them cats-was in some sort of loincloth, and she was naked to the waist. The firelight rode up the walls and the smoke found the hole at the top.

“Just like the Sioux camped on the banks of the Little Bighorn, right, man?” Ronnie said, passing the joint. And then time seemed to ripple a bit, everything sparking red and blue-green and gold, and Ronnie was on top of her and the teepee guy was watching and she didn't care, or she did, but it didn't matter. They made it on an Indian rug in the dirt with this _cat__ watching, but it was Ronnie, and she fit the slope of his body, knew his shoulders and his tongue and the way he moved. Ronnie. Pan. From back home. But then he rolled off her and sat there a minute saying, “Man, wow, far out,” breathing hard, sweat on his forehead and a tiny infinitesimal drop of it fixed like a jewel to the tip of his nose, and he made a gesture to the teepee cat and said, “Go ahead, brother, it's cool-”

Outside, at the main gate to the Drop City ranch, there was a plywood sign nailed clumsily to the wooden crossbars: NO MEN__, NO WOMEN__-ONLY CHILDREN__. That was about it, she was thinking, nothing but children, Show and Tell, and show and show and show. Ronnie's arm was like a dead thing, like a two-ton weight, a felled tree crushing her from the neck down. The big topless woman danced. _Got to keep movin',__ Junior Sky Dog was singing, _movin' on down the line.__

“So what do you say?” Ronnie wanted to know. His face was right there, inches from hers, the pale fur of his beard, the dangle of his hair. His eyes were fractured, little ceramic plates hammered into the sheen there and then smashed to fragments. She said nothing, so he turned to Merry, and Star watched the new girl's face.

Merry had her own version of the million-kilowatt smile, wide-mouthed and pretty, and she was all legs in a pale yellow miniskirt that looked as if it hadn't been washed in a month. She looked first to Ronnie, then stared right into Star's eyes before letting her gaze drift out across the room as if she were too stoned to care, but she did care, she _did__-Star could see it in the self-conscious way she ducked her head and tugged at the hem of her dress and the dark indelible line of dirt there where she'd tugged at it a thousand times before. “I don't know,” she said, her voice nothing but air. And then she shrugged. “I guess.”

The two blond kids were dancing now, the vacant-eyed boy of four or five and his little sister, watching their feet, no sense of rhythm, none at all, the boy's little wadded-up tube of a penis flapping like a metronome to another beat altogether. “Cool,” Ronnie said. And then he turned to her, to Star, and said, “What about it, Star, what do you say?”

She said, “I don't think so. Not tonight. I'm feeling-I don't know, _weird.__”

“Weird? What the fuck you talking about?” Ronnie's brow was crawling and his mouth had dropped down into a little pit of nothing-she knew the look. Though he hadn't moved a muscle, though for all the world he was the hippest coolest least-uptight flower-child _cat__ in the universe, he was puffing himself up inside, full of rancor and Ronnie-bile. He got his own way. He always got his own way, whether it was a matter of who he was going to ball and when or what interstate they were going to take or where they were going to spend the night or even what sort of food they were going to eat. It didn't matter if they were passing through Buttwash, Texas, the Dexamil wearing off and eggs over easy the only thing she could think about to the point of obsession and maybe even hallucination, he wanted tacos, he wanted salsa and chiles and Tecate, and that's what they got.

“No, come on now, don't be a bummer, Paulette. You know what the Keristan Society says, right there in black and white in the _Speeler?__ Huh? Don't you?”

She did. Because he quoted it to her every time he felt horny. Whoever they were, the Keristanians or Keristanters or whatever they wanted to call themselves, they preached Free Love without prejudice-that is, making it with anybody who asked, no matter their race or creed or color or whether they were fat and old or retarded or smelled like the underside of somebody's shoe. It was considered an act of hostility to say no to anybody who wanted to ball, whether you felt like it or not-it's seven A.M. and you're hungover and your hair looks like it's been grafted to your head, and some guy wants to ball? You ball him. Either that, or you're not into the scene because you're infected with all your bourgeois hangups just like your fucked-up parents and the rest of the straight world. That was what the Keristan Society had to say, but what she was thinking, or beginning to think, in the most rudimentary way, was that Free Love was just an invention of some _cat__ with pimples and terminally bad hair and maybe crossed eyes who couldn't get laid any other way or under any other regime, and she wasn't having it, not tonight, not with Ronnie and what's her name.

“No, Ronnie,” she said, lifting his arm off her shoulder and letting it drop like the deadweight it was, “n-o.” She was on her feet now, looking down at him, at the tiny dollop of his face and the girl staring up at her with her smile fading like a brown-out. “I don't give a shit about the Keristan Society. I'm going to bed. And don't call me that.”

He was hurt, put-upon, devastated, clinging to the girl-Merry, that was her name, _Merry__-as if she were a crate on the high seas and his ship had just gone down. “Call you what?”

Breasts flapping, the little penis swaying, people hammering tambourines against their palms and the smoke of grass and incense roiling up off the floor like fog. “Don't call me Paulette,” she said, and then she was gone, bare feet picking their way through the sprawled hips and naked limbs of her brothers and her sisters.

It was another morning. This one came in over the treetops with a glow that was purely natural because she hadn't been high for three days now because Ronnie was busy with Merry and the big-tits woman, who was twenty-seven years old as it turned out and worked as a secretary for some shipping company. Her name was Lydia, and she'd found a welcoming mattress or two and decided to stay on and screw her job and the plastic world and her big straining flesh-cutting brassieres and the hair pins and makeup and all the rest. Star was indifferent. It wasn't as if she was in love with Ronnie or anything, she told herself. It was just that he was from back home and they'd been together on the road all that time, through the big bread pan of Iowa, yellow Nebraska, New Mexico in its shield of crumbling brown, brickred Arizona, singing along to the Stones, “Under My Thumb,”

“Goin' Home,” home, home, home. That was something. Sure it was. But as she maneuvered the bucket in under the first of the goats, she realized she was feeling good, clean and pure and good, without hangups or hassles, for the first time in as long as she could remember.

The moment was electric, and she could feel it through the soles of her bare feet, through her every pore: this was the life she'd envisioned when she left home, a life of peace and tranquillity, of love and meditation and faith in the ordinary, no pretense, no games, no plastic yearning after the almighty dollar. She'd got her first inkling of what it could be like back at home with Ronnie, with some people he knew who'd rented a collection of stone cottages in deep woods no more than a mile off the main highway. She and Ronnie would go there most nights, even nights when she had to get up and work in the morning, because she was living at her parents' still and this was a place where you could kick out your legs, drop all pretense and just be yourself. People from the surrounding cottages would gather in the last one down the row-two sisters from Florida had the place, JoJo and Suzie-because it was the biggest and it had a stone fireplace Suzie's boyfriend kept stoked all the time.

JoJo was older, twenty-four or twenty-five, and she'd been part of a commune in Vermont for a while-a place called Further-and on the good nights, when everybody wasn't so stoned they just sank wordlessly into the pillows on the floor and let the heartbeat of the stereo take over for them, JoJo used to reminisce about it. She'd gone there just after high school, alone, with six dollars in her pocket and a copy of _The Dharma Bums__ under one arm, hooked up with a cat, and stayed three years. Her eyes would draw into themselves as she talked, and the ash on her cigarette would go white. She'd sit at the kitchen table and tell Star about the way it was when you could live with a group of people who just lit you up day and night, your real appointed mystical brothers and sisters, selected out of all the world just for you, and about the simple joys of baking bread or collecting eggs or boiling down the thin, faintly sweet sap of the sugar maples till you had a syrup that was liquid gold, like nothing anybody ever bought in a store.

Ronnie would be out in the main room-he was into heroin then-nodding and scratching and talking in a graveyard voice about cars or stereos or bands, and JoJo would have a pot of something going on the stove just in case anybody got hungry, and they did, they would, practically every night. This wasn't a commune-it wasn't anything more than a bunch of young people, hip people, choosing to live next door to one another-but to Star it seemed absolute. You could show up there, in any one of those cottages, at any time of the day or night and there'd always be someone to talk to, share a new record with-or a poem or drugs or food. Star would settle into the old rug by the fireplace, shoulder-to-shoulder with Ronnie, and listen to music all night long while a pipe or a joint went round, and when she wanted to just gossip or show off a new pair of boots or jewelry, she had Suzie and JoJo and half a dozen other girls to relate to, and they were like sisters, like dormmates, only better.

That was a taste, only a taste. Because before long the police zeroed in on the place and made it a real hassle even to drive down the dark overgrown street to get there, the flashing lights and out of the car and where are you going this time of night and don't I know you? And it was too dependent on drugs, everybody zoned out after a while, and no real cooperation-they all still had their own jobs in the plastic world. Suzie got busted, and then her boyfriend, Mike, and the whole thing seemed to just fade away. But now Star was here, in California, the sunshine ladled over her shoulders and the goats bleating for her, really part of something for the first time, something important. And how about this? Until two weeks ago, she'd never even seen a goat-or if she had, it might have been at a petting zoo or pumpkin patch when she was ten and her jaws were clamped tight over her braces because she wouldn't dare smile with all that ugly metal flashing like a lightbulb in her mouth-and here she was milking the two of them like an expert, like a milkmaid in a Thomas Hardy novel, Star of the D'Urbervilles, and the whole community dependent on her.

All right. The yellow milk hissed into the bucket. But then the second goat-it was either Amanda or Dewlap, and she couldn't tell them apart for all the squeezing and teat-pulling she'd done for how many mornings in a row now? — stepped in it, and the milk, which they were planning to use for yogurt, not to mention cornflakes and coffee, washed out into the dirt.

“Wow,” said a voice behind her, “-an offering to the gods. I _am__ impressed.”

She was squatting in the shade of the oak tree they tethered the goats to overnight so as to prevent them from stripping every last green and burgeoning thing off the face of the earth, and she pulled up her smile and swung her head round. She was happy-exalted, ready to shout out and testify, spilled milk and all-because this was what she'd always wanted, living off the land with her brothers and sisters, and fuck Ronnie, really, just _fuck him.__ Okay. Fine. But she was smiling at nothing: there was no one there.

Was it that bad, then? Flashbacks were one thing, but aural hallucinations?

“Up here,” the voice said, and she looked up into the broad gray avenues of the tree and saw the soles of a pair of dirt-blackened feet, feet like the inside of a tomb, and the naked white slash of a man's thighs and hips and then his bare chest and his hair and his face. He was grinning down at her. Spraddling a branch as big around as the pipes that fed water to the kids-on-bicycles and mom-in-the-kitchen suburban development where she'd grown up amidst the roar of lawnmowers and the smoke of the cooking grills. _Barbecue. Lilac bushes. K through 12.__

What could she say? She automatically raised the rigid plane of her hand to shield her eyes against the glare, but there was no glare, only the deep shadows of the tree and the soft glowing nimbus of the sun.

Behind him-to his left and just above him, and how could she have failed to notice it? — was a treehouse, the very image of the one her father had built for her in the wild cherry tree in their backyard when she turned eight because that was what she'd wanted for her birthday and nothing else. His voice came floating down to her: “Goats being naughty or were you really trying to propitiate the gods?”

Propitiate? Who _was__ this guy?

“I was going to make yogurt-for everybody-but Dewlap here, or maybe it's Amanda-doesn't seem to want to cooperate.”

“You need a goat wrangler.”

“Right. You wouldn't be a goat wrangler, would you-by any chance, I mean?”

He was a naked man sitting in a tree. He laughed. “You got me pegged. But really that's only my avocation-my true vocation, what I was born here on this earth to do, is build treehouses. You like it, by the way?”

His name was Marco, and Norm Sender, the guy-cat-who'd inherited these forty-seven sun-washed acres above the Russian River and founded Drop City two years ago, had picked him up hitchhiking on the road out of Bolinas. Marco had built the treehouse from scrap lumber in a single afternoon-yesterday afternoon, in fact, while she was taking a siesta, meditating, pulling weeds and scrubbing communal pots-and when he reached down a bare arm to her she took hold of his hand and he pulled her up onto the branch alongside him as if she weighed no more than the circumambient air. She was in his lap, practically in his lap, and he was naked, but not hard, because this wasn't about that-this was about brother- and sisterhood, about being up in a tree at a certain hour of the morning and letting the world run itself without them. “This is Mount Olympus,” he said, “and we are the gods and givers of light, and can you see that stain in the dirt down there on the puny earth where the goat girl made sacrifice?”

She could, and that was funny, the funniest thing in the world, goat's milk spilled in the dirt and the unadorned tin pail on its side and the goats bleating and dropping their pellets and some early riser-it was Reba, blowsy, blown, ever-mothering Reba-coming out of the kitchen in the main house with a pan of dishwater to drip judiciously on the marguerites in the kitchen garden. She laughed till her chest hurt and the twin points of oxygen deprivation began to dig talons into the back of her head, and then he led her into the treehouse, six feet wide, eight long, with a carpet, a guitar, an unfurled sleeping bag and a roof of sweet-smelling cedar shake. And what was the first thing he did then? He rolled a joint, licked off the ends, and handed it to her.

2

The roadside was silken with ferns, wildflowers, slick wet grass that jutted up sharply to catch the belly of the fog, and he was standing there in his interrupted jeans with his thumb out. He was wearing a faded denim jacket, a T-shirt he hadn't washed in a week and a pair of hand-tooled red-and-black cowboy boots he'd got in Mexicali for probably a fifth of what he'd have paid in San Francisco, but they weren't holding up too well. The heels had worn unevenly for one thing, and to compound matters, the uppers had been wet through so many times the color was leached out of them. Up under his pant-legs, the boots were still new, but what you could see of them looked something like the rawhide twists they sold in a basket at the pet shop. His guitar was another story. It had never had a case, not that he could recall, anyway, so he'd wrapped it in a black plastic garbage bag for protection. Now, as he stood there, thumb extended, it was propped up against his leg like some lurid fungus that had sprung up out of the earth when nobody was looking.

It wasn't raining, not exactly, but the trees were catching the mist, and he'd tied his hair back with a red bandanna to keep the dripping ends of it out of his face. He had a knife in a six-inch sheath strapped to his belt, but it was for nonviolent purposes only, for stripping manzanita twigs of bark or gutting trout before wrapping them in tinfoil and roasting them over a bed of hot coals. There was water in his bota bag instead of wine (he'd learned that lesson the hard way, in the Sonoran Desert), and the Army surplus rucksack on his back contained a sleeping bag, a ground cloth, a few basic utensils and a damp copy of Steinbeck's _Of Mice and Men.__ Just that morning he'd reread the opening pages-George and Lennie sitting by a driftwood fire in a world that promised everything and gave up nothing-while he made coffee and heated up a can of stew over his own campfire, and the dawn came through the trees in a slow gray seep. Marco was thinking about that, about how Lennie kept up his refrain _An' live off the fatta the lan'__ despite all the sad dead weight of the evidence to the contrary, as the first of a procession of cars materialized out of the fog and shushed on past him as if he didn't exist.

He didn't mind. He was in no hurry. He wasn't so much running as drifting, anonymous as the morning, and yes, he'd had trouble with the law on a count of misdemeanor possession, dropped out of college, quit his job and then quit another one and another after that, and yes, he'd received the cold hard incontrovertible black-and-white draft notice in the gray sheet-metal mailbox out front of his parents' house in Connecticut, but that was two years ago now. In the interim-and here he thought of his favorite Steinbeck book of all, _Tortilla Flat__-he'd been trying to make things work on a different level, living simple, dropping down where the mood took him. Everybody talked about getting back to the earth, as if that were a virtue in itself. He knew what the earth was-he slept on it, hiked over its ridges and through the glare of the alkali flats, felt it like a monumental set of lungs breathing in and out when he woke beneath the trees in the still of the morning. That was something, and for now it was the best he could do. As for the cars: he hadn't been able to connect the night before either, and he'd found this place-this loop of the road hemmed in by white-bark eucalyptus that smelled of damp and menthol and every living possibility-and he bedded down by a creek so he could waken to the sound of water instead of traffic.

When the cars had passed it was preternaturally still, no sound but for birdcall and the whisper of the dripping trees. He waited a moment, listening for traffic, then slung the guitar over his shoulder and started walking up the road in the direction of Olema and Point Reyes. He got into the rhythm of his walking, feeling it in his calves and thighs like a kind of power, a man walking along the side of the road and he could walk forever, walk across the continent and back again and his face telling every passing car that he didn't give a damn whether they stopped for him or not. Twenty-five or thirty vehicles must have passed by and the sun had climbed up out of the fields to burn off the fog by the time a VW van finally stopped for him. It was practically new, the van, white above, burnt orange below, but as Marco came hustling up the shoulder he saw the peace sign crudely slashed on the side panel in a smear of white paint and knew he was home.

At the wheel was an older guy-thirties, maybe even late thirties-with an erratic beard that hung down over his coveralls and crawled up into his hair. He was wearing a pair of glasses in clunky black-plastic frames, and his smile had at least two gold teeth in it. “Hop in, brother,” he said. “Where you headed?”

The slamming of the door, a rattling blast of the tinny engine, kamikaze insects and dust, the rucksack and guitar flung into the backseat like contraband, every ride a ritual, every ritual a ride. “North,” Marco said. “And I really appreciate this, man,” he said automatically, “this is great,” and then they were off, the radio buzzing to life with an electric assault of rock and roll.

The visible world flew by for a full sixty seconds before the man turned to him and shouted over the radio, “North? That's a pretty general destination. What'd you have in mind-Sitka, maybe? Nome? How about Santa's Workshop? Santa we can do.”

Marco just grinned at him. “Actually, I was going up to Sonoma-the Drop City Ranch?”

“Drop City? You mean that hippie place? Isn't that where everybody's nude and they just ball and do dope all day long? Is that what you're into?” The man looked him full in the face, no expression, then turned back to the road.

Marco considered. He could be anybody, this guy-he could be a narc or a fascist or a stockbroker or maybe even General Hershey himself. But the beard-the beard gave him away. “Yeah,” Marco said, “that's exactly what I'm into.”

It couldn't have much been past noon when they rolled through the hinge-sprung cattle gates and lurched up the rutted dirt road to the main house. This was the ultimate ride, the ride that takes you right on up to the porch and in the front door, and Marco had sat there, alive to it all, while Norm Sender roared, “Good answer, brother,” and launched into a half-hour treatise on his favorite subject-his only subject-Drop City.

He was stoned on something-speed, from the look and sound of him-but that didn't factor into any of Marco's equations, because everybody he'd encountered for the past two years had either been high or coming down from a high, and he'd been there himself more times than he'd want to admit. At first, when he was nineteen, twenty, it was a matter of bragging rights-_Oh, yeah, so you did DMT and smoked paregoric at the concert? That's cool, but I'm into scag, man, that's all, I mean that's it for me. And acid. Acid, of course. And not to expand my mind or any of that mystical horseshit-just to get rocked, man, you know?__-but now it was just more of the same. How many of those conversations had he had? It felt like ten million, so much air in, so much out. Still, when Norm Sender lit up a roach and passed it to him, he took it and put it between his lips. That was what you did. That was the ritual.

They sat there, staring through the windshield, and smoked. When the roach was burned down to nothing, Norm lit a cigarette and passed that to Marco and Marco took a drag and passed it back. The road was like any road, burning silk in a sheen of fire, the trees like bombers coming in low. Marco settled back in his seat as the van rocked and swerved, even as the smoke climbed up the windows and Norm kept pushing at the frames of his glasses as if they'd been oiled. He was wearing a braided rope belt that couldn't contain the spill of his gut, there were spiky black hairs growing out of his ears and nostrils, and his arms were whiter than any farmer's ought to be. He talked and Marco listened, his voice a hoarse high yelp that plummeted into the noise soup of the radio and careened off the clacking whine of the engine.

“So like my parents?” (This by way of prelude, though Marco hadn't said a word about anybody's parents-they'd been talking nothing, talking good shit and groovy and the like, the radio hissing static as Norm manipulated the dial with his battered blunt fingers.) “Like my mother that gave me suck and my old dirt-blasted redneck cowboy of a father? They died. Bought the farm. Head-on collision with a truck full of Grade A fryers coming out of Petaluma on Route 116, and that might sound funny, the irony and all like that, but it isn't, because the old turd-dropper was blind drunk and my mother deserved better than that, but anyway, the son and heir gets the rancho in the hills-that's me, yours truly-and he's thinking he's feeling some kind of _discomfort__ over this whole trip of ownership of the land, because nobody owns the land and he's thinking like Timothy Leary, _Let's mutate, man,__ and so I come up with the concept of Voluntary Primitivism, and let me spell it out for you, man, LATWIDNO, Land Access to Which Is Denied No One, dig? You want to come to Drop City, you want to turn on, tune in, drop out and just live there on the land doing your own thing, whether that's milking the goats or working the kitchen or the garden or doing repairs or skewering mule deer or just staring at the sky in all your contentment-and I don't care who you are-you are welcome, hello, everybody-”

Two hours. So it went. Marco was in that phase where every high expectation gives way to something grimmer, darker, older, but when he saw the standing grass flecked with mustard and the oaks drinking up the earth, when he saw the milling dogs, goats, chickens, the longhaired men so attuned to what they were doing they barely glanced up, and the women-_the women!__-he felt something being born inside him all over again. He leaned forward and watched it all unscroll, huts, tents, truck gardens and citrus trees, a geodesic dome-or was that a yurt? Then the van came round a bend and the house leapt out at them from behind a screen of trees. It was there, and then it was gone. When it came into view again, Marco saw a two-story frame house with a sprawl of outbuildings, no different from what you'd see in Kansas or Missouri or any other place where farmers tilled the earth, except that somebody had painted the trim in Day-Glo orange and the rest a checkerboard pattern of green and pink so that the house wasn't a house anymore but a kind of billboard for the psychedelic revolution. The van lurched, dust rose up and killed the air, Norm grinning and flashing the peace sign all the while and a pair of yellow dogs loping along beside them, and then they were pulling into a rutted lot behind the house and Norm was shouting, “Home for the holidays, oh yes indeed!”

Holidays? What holidays? And Marco was wondering about that, about what holiday it might have been in the middle of May-he wasn't sure what the date was, but it couldn't have been later than maybe the fifteenth or sixteenth-when Norm turned to him with a grin. “Just an expression, man-and I want to be the very first to wish you a _Merry Christmas!__ But really, every day's a holiday at Drop City, because the _straight__ world is banned, absolutely and categorically, do not pass through these gates, Mr. Jones, dig?”

What could he do but smile and nod and lend a hand as his benefactor began to unload supplies from the back of the van, cans of ketchup, peanut butter, honey, sacks of bulgur wheat, sesame seeds, brown rice, raw almonds and rolled oats, tools, a rebuilt generator, a whole raft of bread-“Barter, man, barter, broccoli for bread, cukes for bread, eggplant, and can you say rutabaga?”-and two big brown-paper bags that must have had thirty record albums in them. And where was it all going? In the main house, four steps up onto the foot-worn back porch and into the kitchen, arms full, a homemade table, crude but honest, potted herbs in the window, shelves from ceiling to floor and institutional-sized cans of everything imaginable stacked up as if they were expecting a siege. And women, three of them: Merry, Maya and Verbie.

All three looked up when Marco followed Norm through the door and set his packages down on the table, smiling, yes, but he'd seen those smiles before-at Morning Star, Olompali, the Magic Farm, Gorda Mountain-and all but the last lingering residual flecks of brother- and sisterhood had been rinsed out of them. They were meant to be welcoming, these pale dry-lipped worried-over-the-porridge-blackened-into-the-bottom-of-the-pot brotherly-and-sisterly smiles, but how many had been welcomed already? He was new. A new cat. Another mouth to feed, and would he contribute, would he stay on and weed the garden, repair the roof and snake out the line from the plugged-up toilets to the half-dug septic field, would he be worth the investment of time and breath or would he just work his way through the women, smoke dope and drink cheap wine all day and then show up for meals with a plate in his hand? These were smiles with an edge, and they made him feel shy and unworthy.

He must have come up the steps six or seven times, arms laden with groceries, before anybody said anything to him. It was Merry, tall, dark-eyed, a sprig of baby's breath tucked behind one ear, who lifted her eyes and murmured, “Been on the road long?”

Norm wasn't there to answer for him-he'd wandered off shouting into the next room, tearing at the shrink-wrap on one of the new record jackets, and he left a vacuum behind him. Maya and Verbie were in the corner by the sink, leaning into the mounds of green onions, peppers, zucchini and carrots they were dicing for the pot and talking in flat low voices, and Merry had slipped across the room on bare feet to lift things out of the grocery bags and find places for them on the shelves. She was right there, two feet from him, smelling of garlic and cilantro, her eyes chasing vaguely after the question. Marco shrugged. The correct answer, more or less, was two years. But he didn't say that. He just said, “I don't know. A while.”

And that was the end of the conversation. Merry's back was to him, the spill and sweep of her hair that floated on its own currents, the white knuckles of her hands as she lifted cans to the shelves, sun pregnant in the windows, the potted herbs uncurling like fingers and a cat (a _feline,__ that is) Marco hadn't noticed till that moment lifting its head from its perch atop the refrigerator to fix him with a steely yellow-eyed gaze. The silence held half a beat more, till it was broken by the super-amplified hiss of a worn needle dropping on immaculate vinyl and a manic blast of drums and guitar filled the house. Two beats more. Then he ducked his head and edged back out the door.

Outside, beyond the dirt lot where Norm had parked the van, there was a more-or-less conventional backyard, with a pair of lemon trees, a flower garden and an in-ground pool that flashed light as a single swimmer-at this distance, Marco couldn't tell whether it was a man or woman-swam laps with the kind of loopy tenacity you see in caged animals. Dark head, tangled hair. Back and forth, back and forth. He had a sudden urge to strip down and plunge in, relieve himself of all the oils and stinks of the road and the lingering funk of the sleeping bag, but he didn't know anybody here and he was tentative yet-what he needed to do, before he got caught up in the rhythms of the place, was to decide where he was going to sleep for the night at least, and maybe beyond. Norm had pointed out a pile of scrap lumber behind one of the outbuildings as they came up the road-“Build,” he'd shouted over the radio, “go ahead, build to suit, and I'm not going to be a policeman, I'm not going to be mayor, you do what you want”-and Marco thought he might have a look at it, to see what he might do. He wasn't exactly a master carpenter, but he was good enough, and aside from a couple of days on a construction crew in San Jose, he hadn't done any real labor in weeks. Why not? he was thinking. Even if he didn't stay, it was a way to pass the time.

He left his rucksack and guitar under one of the big snaking oaks in the front yard, then strolled back up the road to inspect the lumber. It wasn't much. A nest of two-by-fours weathered white, a couple of sheets of warped plywood, some odds and ends, most of it charred, and you didn't have to be Sherlock Holmes to see that Drop City had lost at least one dwelling to fire. He was separating the good stuff from the bad when a man in his early twenties came rolling out of the high grass on lubricated hips, walking as if he was dancing, his head too big and his feet too small. “What's happening?” the man said, bobbing up to him, and Marco saw that he was balancing a spinning rod in one hand and a stringer of undersized smallmouth bass in the other. His eyes were glassy and fragile, as if he'd just shuffled out the doors at the very end of a very long concert. What else? Deep tan, choker beads, cutoffs, huaraches, the world's sparsest beard.

Marco nodded, and gave back the tribal greeting: “What's happening?”

The man stood there studying him a minute, the faintest look of amusement on his face. “I'm Pan,” he said, “or Ronnie, actually, but everybody calls me Pan… and you're-?”

“Marco.”

“Cool. Going to build?”

“I guess so.”

Ronnie frowned, rotating the toe of one sandal in the dirt. “With this shit?”

“From humble beginnings,” Marco said, and he said it with a smile. “Hey, Thoreau paid something like twenty-eight dollars for his place on Walden Pond, and that was good enough to get him through a New England winter-”

“Yeah,” Ronnie said, “but prices have gone crazy since then, right?”

“Right. This stuff is free. Talk about deflation, huh?”

But Ronnie didn't seem to get the joke. He stood there a long while, watching Marco bend to the pile of mismatched lumber, the fish already stiffening on the stringer. It was hot. A flock of crows sent up a jeer from somewhere off in the woods. “So what you building, anyway?” Ronnie asked finally.

It came to him then, and it took the question to elicit the response, because until that moment there was no shape before him. He saw the oak tree suddenly, the spread and penetrant shade of it, roots like claws, acorns, leaf litter, and beneath it, his guitar and rucksack propped casually against the trunk. He dropped a board at his feet.

“A treehouse,” he said.

3

Pan was taking the day off. Pan was just going to stroke his shaggy fetlocks and blow on his pipes and mellow out, no sex today-he was rubbed raw from it-and no hassles, not with Merry, not with Lydia, not with Star. Not today. The morning had already been a kind of nightmare, nine A__.M__. and crawling up off the mattress in the front bedroom with a taste like warmed-over shit in the back of his throat, everybody piling into the rusted-out '59 Studebaker he and Star had bombed across the country in and then on into Santa Rosa to the county welfare office to apply for food stamps. It must have been a hundred degrees, the streets on fire, the tie-and-jacket TGIF world closing in, big-armed _mothers__ going to the supermarket in their forty-foot-long station wagons and nobody with even so much as a roach to take the pain away.

It was late afternoon and Ronnie was stretched out by the pool, his hair greased to his head with the residue of a whole succession of dunkings in the vaguely greenish water-and shouldn't somebody dump some chlorine in it, isn't that the way it's done? — the sun holding up its end of the bargain, birds making a racket in the trees, the sound of somebody's harmonica drifting across the lawn along with the premonitory smells of dinner firming up in the big pots in the kitchen. Last night-or was it the night before? — it was veggie lasagna with tofu and carrots standing in for meat, and that was one of the better nights. Usually it was just some sort of rice mush flavored with stock and herbs and green onions and whatnot from the garden. He wasn't complaining. Or actually, he was. His food stamps were going into the communal pot along with everybody else's, and that he could live with, but Norm-Norm was insane, because Norm insisted on feeding anybody who showed up, even bums and winos and the spade cats from the Fillmore, who incidentally seemed to have taken over the back house in the past week, with no sign of leaving.

They'd come up over the weekend, seven of them crammed into an old Lincoln Continental with fins right off a spaceship that could have taken them to Mars and back, very cool, very peaceful, just checking out the scene. Ronnie had been on the front porch with Reba, Verbie, Sky Dog and a couple of others, watching the light play off the trees and doing their loyal best to cadge change off the tourists who always seemed so timid and _thankful__ to be able to do something to support the lifestyle, because they really believed in everything that was going down here, they really did, but their mother was sick and they were behind in their house payments and the orthodontist was threatening to rip the wires off their kids' teeth, and could they just sit here a minute on the porch, would that be cool? Some of them would bring cameras, and Sky Dog would charge a quarter for a picture with a real down and authentic hippie in full hippie regalia, and the braver ones would stay for supper and line up with a tin plate in their hands and maybe even take a toke or two of whatever was going round once the bonfire was lit and the guitars emerged from their cases. They'd even sing along to Buffalo Springfield tunes or Judy Collins or Dylan, if anybody could remember the words. Just like summer camp. Then they got in their Fords and Chevys and VW Bugs and Volvos and went home.

The spades were different. They didn't so much emerge from the car as uncoil from it, all that lubricious menacing supercool spade energy-and Ronnie wasn't a racist, not at all, he was just maybe a bit more _experienced__ than the rest of his brothers and sisters here at Drop City, who, after all, were maybe just a wee bit starry-eyed and _lame__-and they came across the dirt lot in formation, like a football team. Lester was the name of the one in charge. He was soft-looking, small, with a face made out of putty, and he was wearing a red silk scarf and high-heeled boots. “Peace, brother,” he said, spreading wide his middle and index fingers and looking Ronnie in the eye. Ronnie didn't say anything, but Sky Dog and the rest flashed the peace sign and made the usual noises of greeting in return. A heartbeat later Lester was sitting on the steps of the porch, taking a hit from the pipe that was going round, his black bells hiked up to show off red socks and the elastic tops of his Beatle boots, while the others milled around in the dirt, looking needful.

“So this is the famous Drop City,” Lester said, exhaling. His voice was so soft you had to strain to hear it, and that was a kind of trick, not so much an affectation as a _device__ to make you pay attention.

Verbie, who never shut up for long, said, “Yes it is.”

“We, uh-me and my amigos here-we heard all sorts of out of sight things about this place, like from the Diggers' soup kitchen? You know, in the Fillmore?” Lester gave a quick glance around the porch, then handed the pipe to one of his amigos, and then it went around to all of them and back again up onto the porch, and it was exactly like two tribes meeting on the high plains, peace, brother, and circulate the pipe. “Is it really as cool as they say it is? Like all brothers are welcome?”

The hippies on the porch fell all over themselves assuring him that that was the case, and everybody was thinking Hendrix, Buddy Miles, Free Huey, except Lester, because he just stretched out his legs and settled in.

Now, though-now Ronnie was crashed by the pool, just taking the day off from everything and everybody, never mellower, the smallest little hit of mescaline wearing down the sharp edges of things. Reba's kids-Che and Sunshine-were making a racket with one of those plastic trikes, humping it up and down the strip of concrete on the far side of the pool, and the communal horse-they called him Charley, Charley Horse, what else? — was stomping and snorting up a storm because some head from Daly City whose name escaped Ronnie at the moment was trying to get him to jump a shrunken sun-blasted strip of oleander at the base of the lawn, but that was all right, that was nothing. Ronnie drank it all in, feeling magnanimous. He was Pan. He was stoned. The sun was in the sky and the earth was a good place, a groovy place, a place designed by some higher power-_higher__ power-for the sensory awakening and spiritual uplift of every one of his brothers and sisters.

Until nightfall, that is. The night came seething and festering up out of the shadows that bunched themselves in circus shapes at the feet of the trees and in the clotted scrub that chased the hillside round and round. He was feeling a little-well, a little _jittery.__ There'd been an interlude there where he'd let things slide, a second hit of the mesc, a bottle of red wine and a couple of hits of something somebody had been smoking after dinner, and he hadn't even made dinner, had he? Dinner. Big pots full of mush, women with their tits hanging, health and simplicity and the good rural life. The pool glistened like oil, like blood, in the fading light. He wasn't hungry.

He had a sudden urge to see Star, to just sit with her someplace quiet and talk about home, the little routines and reminiscences that had kept them going all the way across the flat shag of the Midwest and into the Rockies and beyond-Mr. Boscovich and tenth grade biology and how he would call everything _material,__ as in _these cells are constructed of cellular material,__ the way the books in the school library smelled of soap and burning leaves, the afternoon Robert Stellner, the straightest kid in the school, stuck his head in a bag of model airplane glue and carved the mysterious message _Yahweh__ into his chest with a penknife while standing in front of the mirror in the boys' room, all of that-but Star was up in the tree with the new guy all the time, and that rankled, it did, all the shit about Free Love and the Keristan Society notwithstanding. He pushed himself up off the pavement, but that was a bit much, so he sat back down again. The pavement was warm still, and that made him think of the rattlesnake somebody had seen out here just two nights ago. “They come for the warmth,” that's how Norm had put it, “-and you can deal with that or you can kill 'em, skin 'em and eat 'em, but then you'll have bad snake karma your whole life and maybe into the next one, and do you really want that?”

From the main house, the sounds of laughter, conversation, music, all blended in a murmur that was like some sort of undercurrent, as if that was where the real life was, the only life, and this out here, this nature and this crepitating dark, was for losers-losers and snakes. Lydia was in there, and Merry, Verbie and the rest of them. Maybe he'd get up and go inside, just for the human warmth and companionship, because that's what Drop City was all about, companionship, a game of cards maybe, or Monopoly-but then the image of Alfredo clawed its way into the forefront of his brain, and he thought maybe he wouldn't.

Alfredo was one of the founding members of the commune, one of Norm Sender's inner circle, one of those sour-faced ascetic types, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, Reba's old man. He was always going on about natural childbirth and how Reba had cooked up the afterbirth and everybody shared a piece of it and how Che and Sunshine had been born outside under the moon and the stars, but he was an uptight, tight-assed jerk nonetheless, and two days ago Ronnie had gotten into it with him over some very pointed criticism about _volunteering__ to do wash-up or haul trash or dig a new septic field because all these _people__ were clogging up the commune's only two working toilets until they were rivers of _shit,__ and he wouldn't mind, would he? Hell, yeah. He minded. He didn't come all the way out here to California to dig _sewers.__ Jesus Fucking Christ.

That was what he was thinking, sitting there on the warm snake-loving pavement with the night festering around him, just a little shaky, but pissed off too, royally pissed off, when Lester and one of the other spade cats-Franklin, his name was Franklin-appeared out of nowhere with a jug of wine. “Hey, brother,” Lester breathed, easing himself down beside him, “-what you doing out here, swimming?”

“I don't know. Yeah. I guess. I was swimming before-earlier, you know?” The words seemed to be stuck in his mouth, like the crust at the bottom of a pan. “Kind of cold now, I guess. But what's happening with you?”

Franklin was just standing there, the jug of wine-Cribari red-dangling from his fingertips like a big glass bomb. Lester grinned. “Same old shit,” he said. “We're having a party in the back house, brother, and you're welcome to join us-we'd be real pleased about that, in fact; I would, at least-how about you, Franklin?”

Franklin said he'd be pleased too.

“By the way,” Lester said, and they were already gathering themselves up, “you wouldn't happen to have a couple of hits of that mescaline I heard you got left, would you?”

Well, he did. And two minutes later he was in the back house and there were six or seven cats sitting around listening to Marvin Gaye out of a battery-powered portable stereo with a blown bass, thump, thump, _blat,__ thump, thump, _blat.__ Sky Dog was there, cradling his guitar, somebody had lit a couple of scented candles because there was no electricity in the back house, and there was a new girl there-a chick-and she couldn't have been more than fourteen or fifteen. A runaway. What was her name? Sally. Where was she from? Santa Clara. And what was her father like? He was a son of a bitch. They probably got twenty a week just like her, and none of them stayed more than a night or two, as if this whole thing-Norm Sender, Alfredo, Reba, Drop City itself-was no more than a kind of extended slumber party.

Ronnie introduced himself as Pan, gave her a little brotherly and sisterly squeeze, and then settled in on the floor against the back wall and took it upon himself to make sure the jug kept circulating. All was peace. Silken voices murmuring, Marvin Gaye, Sly and the Family Stone, Hendrix, thump, thump, _blat,__ and Pan was in the middle of an elaborate story about a free concert in Central Park and the good and bad drugs he'd done that night and how somebody had vomited all over the windshield of his mother's car, which he'd borrowed with every warning and proscription attached, when Sally, the skinny-legged fourteen-year-old runaway in the patched jeans and stretch top, cried out. Or she screamed, actually. “Get off me, you freak!” she let out in a piping wild adolescent vibrato that shot up the scale like feedback, and Ronnie glanced away from his story to see Lester simultaneously pinning her down and going at her breasts with both hands and the pink slab of his tongue, and Sky Dog-_Sky Dog,__ Mr. Mellow Peace-and-Love himself-stripped to his tanned buttocks and working hard to peel her jeans down the flailing sticks of her legs.

Ronnie was right in the middle of a story, his voice droning on through the standard interludes and rich with the twenty nasal catchphrases of the day, and he was so _mellowed out__ he could barely keep his head up off the floor, but this-this scream, this scene going down in the corner-sent a shock wave through him. _“Get off, get off!”__ the girl kept screaming, and now her legs were bare and Sky Dog's buttocks were clenching and thrusting in a way that hurt to watch, a way that was wrong, dead wrong, and Ronnie tried to get up off the floor, tried to say, _Hey, man, what do you think you're doing,__ because this wasn't right, it wasn't-but by the time he got to his feet he realized everyone in the room was looking at him with eyes that had no brotherly or even human spark in them.

In the morning, which came hurtling out of the sky like a Russian missile aimed straight at his brain, Pan opened his eyes on the stiff tall grass and the golden seedheads drooping over him as if he were already dead and decomposed. He seemed to be lying supine in the weeds beyond the back house, and this was a nasty little surprise, speaking of snakes, rattle or otherwise. His hair was stiff with dirt and bits of twig and chaff, and when he rubbed the back of his skull he felt an unevenness there, as if some essential fluid-_blood,__ that is-had leaked out of him and coagulated in a bristling lump. He felt bad. Bad in every way. But most of all, he felt thirsty, and he saw himself rising up out of the sun-blasted weeds and staggering first to the hose on the back lawn and then to the pool, where the dried blood-and there seemed to be a rough granulated gash over his cheekbone too-would dissolve and boil up around him in a dull brown cloud of cellular material gone to waste.

It must have been noon or maybe even later, because people were gathered round the lawn and the pool coping with metal plates of lunchtime mush in their hands, eyes shining, hair flowing, all the colors of their sarongs and T-shirts and burnished flesh aglow as if everybody was a lightbulb and they just kept shining and shining. A couple of people made comments-“Rough night, huh?”-and laughed and joshed him in a brotherly and sisterly way when he bent to the hose and let the silver liquid flow in and out of his mouth in a long glowing arc. He couldn't figure out what was wrong with him, or what was most wrong-hangover, drug depletion or blood loss, and had he been in a fight, was that it? He tried to focus, tried to bring up the image of that girl on the floor in the back house, but the only thing that came into his mind was a phrase he'd used a thousand times, two truncated monosyllabic words that did nobody or no thing justice at all: _Free Love.__

Reba's kids were there, nice day, lunch outside, not enough seats in the meeting room — dining hall anyway, and they were chasing each other around the pool as if they'd never stopped, their cheeks distended with corn mush and cauliflower, their bodies naked and brown and stippled with cuts, contusions, poison oak, dirt. He dropped the hose and moved toward the water like a zombie. Then he was in, the green envelope, the cessation of sound, his limbs moving under command of the autonomous system, pump and release, pump and release, till he cracked his head on the far side of the pool and heaved himself streaming from the water.

Somebody else was in now, cannonballing and shouting, the two yellow dogs barking at their heels, Lydia-was that Lydia? — and the greenish water lapped at his knees and he was feeling he ought to shake the water out of his hair and get himself a plate of mush just for the ballast, when he locked eyes with Alfredo across the lawn. Alfredo gave him a look, niggardly little eyes, his mouth like a wad of gum stuck up under a desk at school, and Ronnie gave him a look back. He wasn't going to take any shit. He had as much right as anybody to be here-LATWIDNO, right? — and he wasn't about to apologize to Alfredo or Norm Sender or anybody else. Then he felt a hand on his knee and it was Lydia, her breasts bobbing, the hair pressed flat to her head. “Where you been?” she said. “We looked all over for you last night.” The water lapped, dragonflies hovered. And then: “Did you hear what happened?”

No, he hadn't heard.

She blinked the water out of her eyes, snaked a hand up his leg, and he felt himself go hard against the rough wet folds of his cutoffs. “A girl got raped.”

“Raped? What do you mean _raped?__”

“I mean she was some runaway-fourteen, she was only fourteen-and Norm's freaked about the whole thing, running around the kitchen jabbering about the man-the man's coming, the man's coming-and hide the dope and all, and clean this shit up, and do this and do that, and Alfredo's right there with him. They want Lester out. And Sky Dog and the rest of them.”

Ronnie considered this, the water lapping at his legs, Lydia's breasts bobbing at his ankles, her hand crawling up his thigh. His normal response would have been something like “Bummer” or “Heavy,” but the moment was huge and hovering and his head wasn't clear yet, not even close, so he just stared down at the white ghosts of her legs kicking rhythmically beneath the surface.

“What I hear is they got her stoned, and then they pinned her down, and it wasn't just Lester and Sky Dog either. It was all of them.” She paused, kicking, kicking, the slow fluid rhythm of her legs. Che threw something-a scarred Frisbee-at his sister and she let out a shriek, and then the dogs started barking and Reba, at the far end of the pool, went off on a laughing jag, ha-ha, ha-ha, ha-ha. Lydia's hand was cold. She clutched him tighter. “Somebody said you were there,” she breathed, and then trailed off.

He was there. Sure he was. And he'd gotten into it with a couple of them too, hadn't he? Sure, sure. He must have. Because he didn't care how stoned he was or how voluntarily primitive it got, he wasn't about to stand by and watch something like that… And the thought of it, the thought of that cheap little acidic moment in the back house with all those null and void faces and the thump, thump, _blat__ of the stereo and the girl with her stick legs flailing just made him feel so black inside he wished he'd never left home himself. What could he say? How could he explain it?

“Yeah,” he said, “yeah. I was there.”

Lydia seemed to consider this a moment, her eyes glittering like planets in the uncharted universe of her face. She was a big girl, big in the shoulders and the hips, big all over, black hair, everted lips, flecks of eye shadow caught in her lashes like drift washed up on a beach. Her legs kicked beneath the surface. Her hand tightened on his thigh. She blinked the water out of her eyes and gave him half a smile. “You want to rape me too?” she said.

4

Alfredo was the one who called the meeting, eight P.M., the supper dishes mostly washed, or soaking anyway, and everybody feeling lazy and contented, six pans of brownies cooling on the kitchen table and the promise of a movie afterward (Charlie Chaplin, one Star hadn't seen-something about Alaska, was that possible?). A few people had dressed for the occasion, Verbie in particular, because a meeting was really the template for a party, everybody already collected from their huts and yurts and the back bedrooms and all those acres of strung-out woods, and why not, Star was thinking, why not? Party on. If you thought about it, even peeling potatoes for the veggie stew or hacking the weeds out of the garden was a kind of party. It certainly wasn't work, not in any conventional sense, not when you were surrounded by your brothers and sisters and nobody was standing over you with a time clock.

By half past seven, Verbie was parading around in a lime green cape over a pink ruffled blouse, her face painted the color of the cracked saltillo tiles Norm had inexplicably dumped on the west side of the house one morning before anybody was awake. Jiminy was right there with her, wearing a high hat and tails with nothing underneath but a pair of Donald Duck briefs, some new guy was playing bongos, rat-a-tat-tat, the dogs and even the goats were in a high state of alert, and Maya swept in the door in a Goodwill wedding gown that looked as if the moths weren't done with it yet. And Ronnie? Ronnie was Ronnie, keep it simple. Star settled for a little face paint-a peace sign on each cheek and a third eye, replete with false lashes, centered in the middle of her forehead.

It must have been eight-thirty or so by the time Reba came in and lit some candles and set two pots of chamomile tea and a tray of thick ceramic mugs on the big table at the front of the room. That was the signal, or so Star thought, and she settled in on the floor beside Marco, Ronnie, Merry and Lydia, but it was another half hour before Norm Sender showed up and Alfredo lifted an old circus-prop megaphone to his lips and began saying, “All right, people, all right-can I have your attention up here for just a minute, and we're going to make this as painless as possible, I promise you-”

Star was feeling good, very good-blissful, even-as she sank into the pillows and Marco put his arm around her and one of the yellow dogs threaded its way across the room to settle at her side and prop a big yellow head on her knee. Everything seemed to converge in that moment, all the filaments of her life, the tugging from one pole to another, Ronnie, Marco, the teepee cat, her parents and the job and the car and the room she'd left behind, because this was her family now, this was where she belonged. She stretched her legs, gazed up at the drift of cobwebs stretched out across the ceiling like miniature cloudbanks and the craneflies straining against them. Until Drop City, she'd never belonged anywhere.

Who had she been in high school? Little Miss Nobody. She could have embroidered it on her sweaters, tattooed it across her forehead. And in smaller letters: I AM SHIT, I AM ANONYMOUS, STEP ON ME. PLEASE. She wasn't voted Most Humorous in her high school yearbook or Best Dancer or Most Likely to Succeed, and she wasn't in the band or the Spanish Club and when her ten-year reunion rolled around nobody would recognize her or have a single memory to share. The guys noticed her, though. In college they did, anyway. They noticed her big time, noticed her in the hallway and the cafeteria and downtown in the claustrophobic aisles of the record store, their eyes glazed with lust and a kind of animal ferocity they weren't even aware of. She dated a few of them, but she'd never had a serious boyfriend, and though she was pretty-she knew she was pretty-she couldn't figure out why that was, except that something was out of sync, as if she'd been born in the wrong era and the wrong place, especially the wrong place, where nothing ever happened and nobody ever got anywhere. That's what it was, she decided, that had to be it, and the notion comforted her through all her disappointments and the cardboard array of days and months and years, each as stiff and unyielding as the one that preceded it. She sat through the banal Education classes, Psych 101, faced down the six primary causes of World War I, algorithms and the internal anatomy of the earthworm, thinking there had to be something more.

She graduated, put on a face and started teaching third grade in the very elementary school she'd attended ten years earlier, living in her girlhood room in her parents' house like a case of arrested development, and she was just like her mother everybody said, because her mother taught kindergarten and wore cute petite-size pantsuits and mauve blouses with Peter Pan collars and so did she. But she didn't want to be just like her mother. When she got home at night she balled up her pantyhose in her own petite-size pantsuits, flung them on the floor in her room and lay stretched out on the floor with a speaker pressed to each ear, staring at the flecks and whorls of the thrice-painted ceiling while Janis Joplin flapped and soared over the thunderous changes of “Ball and Chain.” Her mother chattered through dinner, the lace curtains from Connemara hung rigid at the windows, her father guarded his plate as if someone were about to take it from him. She could barely lift the fork to her lips, peas, meat loaf, cod in cream sauce, Brussels sprouts. _And what about Tommy Nardone, is he behaving in class, because I had his brother Randy, and believe you me,__ her mother would say, and she'd nod and agree and go back up to her room and study the sneers of the Rolling Stones on the jacket of the _Out of Our Heads__ LP. And then she went to buy makeup at Caldor one rinsed-out dead bleak soul-destroying October afternoon and ran into Ronnie in the record section-Oh, yeah, he'd dropped out, all right, and he was hustling records just until he could save the _bread__ to get out to California, because that's where it was happening, there and no place else. Oh, yeah. _Miniskirt. Head shop. The Haight. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.__

“There's been some problems,” Alfredo was saying, “and I'm sure everybody's hip to them, but we all-I mean, me, Norm, Reba and like everybody that was working the communal garden this morning? — we all felt things had come to a head…”

“Which head?” Ronnie said, propping himself up on his elbows. “I think there's more than one here, man.”

“Uneasy lies the head-” Merry chimed in.

Ronnie swung round, playing to the crowd: “Heads of the world, unite!”

There was some foot-stomping, a spatter of applause and a whinny or two of laughter that might have had a bit too much fuel behind it. Alfredo merely sat there, slumped over the table, his eyes burning into every face in the room. When the noise died down, he continued: “Yes, but you all know that two toilets are inadequate for a commune this size, not to mention the fact that we're swamped with visitors every weekend, and with summer coming on it's just going to get worse-”

“Put up a sign,” Jiminy said. He was skinny, nineteen, with a beard that might have washed up out of the sea, and he'd been here no more than a week or so. Star liked his style. She'd been sitting outside on her stump, snapping the tops off of green beans and talking bands with Merry, when he came winding up the road on a unicycle, a black Scottie dog levitating over the bumps behind him. I have _arrived!__ he sang out, and _Scottie__ too! Somebody ran over the dog two days later, and Jiminy had sat there in the tall weeds crying like a child. “ 'Keep Out, No Trespassing, That Means You!' ” he shouted now, oblivious to the irony. “That's what they did at the original Drop City, in Colorado. And Thunder Mountain too.”

“Yeah, right, and who's going to decide who comes in and who doesn't? What, are we going to like hire pigs, is that it?” This was Verbie, swirling green-pink like a fruit drink in a blender. “Norm, what do you think? You going to be our policeman?”

Norm Sender was sitting cross-legged on the table, a cowbell suspended from a suede cord round his neck. He didn't even look up. “No way.”

“The problem,” Alfredo was saying, and his voice was strained now, as if he were trying to hold something back and it was choking him, “the problem is the shit in the woods. And everybody in this room is guilty-”

“Including the dogs,” a voice boomed.

“Right, including the dogs. But it's unsanitary, people, and I mean, people aren't even bothering to bury it, that's our own people, the Drop City people-the weekend hippies just fling their trash-and their excrement-anywhere they feel like it. And, speaking of which, there was that incident last night, in the back house, and you all know what I'm talking about.”

There was a murmur of agreement. Verbie said two words-“Sky Dog”-and then somebody called out: “It was the spades.”

“Really?” Alfredo let his eyes creep over the faces in the room. “Well, I don't know, maybe we better ask Pan over here-he was there, weren't you, Pan? Why don't you tell us about it? Come on, _Ronnie,__ enlighten us all-tell us about peace and love, huh?”

Ronnie had been lying there limp amongst the pillows, his feet skewed at the nether ends of his stretched-out legs, but now he came up off the floor so fast he startled her-and startled the dog too. Suddenly he was standing there trembling in his cutoffs and tie-dye, and she was wishing she had a hit of something, anything, because this was Ronnie when the finger was pointing at him, this was Ronnie the victim, Ronnie the crucified saint. “I told you once, man, and I'm telling all of you now, I had nothing to do with it-”

“Yeah, right. It was Sky Dog, wasn't it?” Alfredo hissed. “And the _spades.__”

Ronnie let his eyes bleed out of his head, cool Ronnie, poor Ronnie, and he spread his palms wide in extenuation. “I mean, it's me, Pan, you all know me. You really think I would do something like that, no matter how stoned I was-? Fourteen, she was only fourteen, jail bait no matter how you slice it. I'm not like that, I'm not that kind of person. You all know me, right? Right?”

Somebody up front, one of the founding members, stood up now too. Star couldn't see him at first, so she lifted her head up off the pillows and felt Marco adjust his position beside her. It was the guy-_cat__-everybody called Mendocino Bill, two hundred fifty pounds of hair wedged inside a pair of coveralls you could have used as a drop-cloth. “Listen, people, this isn't the issue, and I'm with Pan, he's my brother and I believe in him-I mean, what is this, a kangaroo court or something? No, look, the issue is our black brothers out there. They've been intimidating people, and all they want to do is drink cheap wine and score dope and have one big nonstop party-and it's at our expense. Because they sure don't miss a meal, do they?”

“Racist,” Verbie said. People began to hiss.

“It's not like that at all, man, and that's not fair”-Mendocino Bill's voice went up a notch-“because I of all people was in Selma and Birmingham and I wonder where the rest of you were cause I sure as hell don't remember seeing any of you down there, and I'm telling you I don't care who it is, we've got to police ourselves, people, or the Sonoma County sheriff'll come in here and do it for us-and I don't think there's anybody here wants that.”

That was when everybody started talking at once, accusations flying, people making bad jokes, somebody hitting a sour note on a harmonica over and over and Ronnie slipping out of the spotlight and settling back into the nest of pillows like a lizard disappearing into a crevice. Lydia took hold of his hand and Merry gave him a million-kilowatt smile, but he reached over to her, to Star, to make his plea. He was shaking his head, and this was for Marco too, because Marco was right there with his eyelids rolled back and his ears perked: “I swear,” Ronnie said. “I swear I didn't do a thing.”

“Bum's rush!” Jiminy shouted. “Kick 'em out!”

“Who?”

“The spades! Kick 'em the fuck out! Norm, come on, _Norm__-”

All eyes went to Norm Sender where he sat Buddha-like in the center of the table, and for a fraction of a moment, everyone exhaled. But Norm was having none of it-he ducked his head and shrank down to half his size. “Land Access to Which Is Denied _No__ One,” he said.

“Somebody's got to do something-it's like _Lord of the Flies__ out there, man.”

“Oh, yeah, sure it is-and what's it like in here, then?”

“Hey, fuck you.”

“No, fuck _you!__”

The whole thing was too much. Star lay there, propped up on her elbows, wishing they'd all just shut up, wondering where all the harmony and joy had gone to and why everybody had to hassle all the time, and then she looked at Ronnie, looked into his eyes, and saw a cold hard nugget of triumph there, sealed in, impervious to all things hip and the brotherly and the sisterly too. She was going to say something to him, she was going to call him out, when she felt the warmth leave her side as if it had evaporated and she was looking at Marco's frayed jeans and the dead bleached leather of his boots planted on the floor. “Hey,” he was saying, “hey, everybody,” and he put two fingers to his lips and produced one of those nails-on-the-blackboard sort of whistles you hear at ball games and rock concerts.

The room went quiet. Everybody was watching him. “Listen,” he said, “why doesn't somebody just go talk to them?”

“Talk to them?” Alfredo was incredulous. “If they wanted to talk they'd be here now, wouldn't they? But no, they're up there drunk as usual, looking to ball some other fourteen-year-old chick.” He glanced round the room. “Who's going to do it? You? Are you volunteering?”

“Yeah,” Marco said, nodding slowly. “I guess I am.”

That first day, the day when he lifted her up into his tree as if the breeze was blowing right through her, she'd felt like the heroine of some fairy tale, like Rapunzel-or no, that wasn't right. Like Leda maybe, Leda all wrapped in feathered glory. _Leda and the Swan.__ That had been her favorite poem in Lit class, and she'd read it over and over till it was part of her, all that turmoil and fatality spinning out of a single unguarded moment, and that was something, it was, but what made her face burn and her fingers tingle was the weirdness of the act itself. Picturing it. Dreaming it. The flapping of the wings, the smell, the violence. All the other poems in the anthology were about flowers or death or Grecian urns, but this, this was about fucking a swan. She remembered her amazement, wondering how that could be-did birds even _have__ penises? — and not just the mechanics of it, but the scene itself. Did he carry her off into the sky, or did it just feel that way? How big was he? And whose seed was he carrying-Zeus's, the professor said-but how did that work out, and wouldn't Helen be half-bird, then?

Marco had handed her a joint and she'd taken it reflexively. She'd had three days to clear her head, nothing stronger than Red Zinger running through her veins, Maya peeling onions and rattling on in her thin spidery voice about getting beyond drugs to a natural high, the oneness of the gurus, pure bliss in an overheated kitchen, but three days was enough. She needed something to kick-start her again, a quicker way to alter her consciousness than chanting _Om Mani Pema Hung__ a thousand times, because her consciousness was clogged like a drain with all the residue of Ronnie and the dregs of back home. Plus, she had to admit she felt awkward in the presence of this new _cat__ with his clothes off and his red-gold hair swinging like a curtain across his face and masking his eyes, because now that she was actually up there in his aerie, everything had changed. He didn't know what to say, and neither did she. The joint was an offering. It was the great equalizer, the holy communion, get wrecked and stare off into space and who actually needed to talk? They smoked it down to the last disintegrating nub of a roach, pressing it finger to finger, lip to lip, and neither of them said a word.

The air was sweet with the smell of it. Birds lighted on the split-wood railing and peered at them as if they were just another extension of the tree, some unlooked-for fruit or shell-less nut, or maybe some canker working its way out of the bark. She lay back, dissolving into herself while the sounds of the stirring commune-soft voices, the splash of the pool, music on the radio-drifted up to them from what seemed like miles away.

“Laundry day,” he said, appending a strained little chuckle that was meant to set them both at ease, and it might have if it hadn't turned to dust in his throat. Behind him, a limp array of jeans, T-shirts, ragged underwear and mismatched socks lay spread-eagled over the branches as if they'd dropped down out of the sky. She pictured a sudden cataclysm, a whirlwind that had ripped the clothes off people's backs and spared the flesh beneath. Or bombers, high overhead, on their way to Vietnam, dropping soggy underwear instead of death.

“Yeah,” was all she said, but it seemed as if the word stretched to eight syllables.

“It's been a week, at least. I was beginning to smell like roadkill.”

“Tell me about it,” she said, and suddenly all her burners were on high, “because when Ronnie and I drove across country it was exactly like that-you know Ronnie? _Pan,__ I mean? Every town, we were trying to get our quarters together for the laundromat, but we either got lost or they'd never heard of washing machines and dryers and those little one-scoop boxes of Tide and bleach-remember those? They just say _Bleach,__ that's it. No brand name or anything, just _Bleach.__ Don't you hate that?”

“Yeah,” he said, staring at a place just over her shoulder and nodding as if he'd been there with them through every turning in every soulless gloom-blasted dead-end town Oklatexahoma could offer. “I guess. But isn't that what's wrong with the whole consumer society-brand names? — as if my soap's better than yours? See the U. S. A. in your Chevrolet. Buy, buy, buy, kill, kill, kill, eat, eat, eat. That's what the war's all about-products, brand names, keep the economy going and who gives a shit if a couple hundred women and children get napalmed every day?”

She sat up and put a hand on his arm. “Whoa,” she said, “whoa. I'm just talking, that's all.”

“That's okay,” he said, and he was looking into her eyes now, no problem at all. “So am I.”

“All right,” she said, “all right, if we're just talking, then I was just wondering what you think about being nude in front of a girl you've never met before, and stoned on top of it at something like half past eight in the morning. Is it a statement or something, or are you just out of clothes?”

She'd expected him to laugh, but he looked away from her. He shrugged, eloquent shoulders, hard muscle, a cord flashing in his neck. “I don't know,” he said, and caught her eyes again. “Does it embarrass you? The human body, I mean?”

All the leaves held steady, then jumped, as if somebody had slipped a new slide into the projector that was the world. “Maybe,” she said. “Sometimes.”

They were silent a moment, the bleating of the goats rising up to them, a distant shout, the rumble of a car on the dirt road. Then he said, “Why don't you take your clothes off, see what it's like?”

“I know what it's like-I was naked in the shower at six o'clock this morning. Why don't you put yours back on?”

“They're wet.”

She laughed then-he had her there. His clothes _were__ wet, pasted to the branches like papier-mâché and dripping arrhythmically on the goat party below.

“Listen,” he said, “Star,” and he used her name for the first time since she'd given it to him, “you want to maybe just hang with me up here for a while, kick back-”

“And ball?”

He shrugged again, rubbed at an imaginary spot on his calf. “Sure. If you're into it.”

She gave it a minute, thinking of Ronnie and the new girl, Merry, and the big-tits woman and everything that was hers to taste at Drop City and in the redwood forests and anywhere else she wanted to go outside the rigid stultifying confines of the straight world, and she considered Marco, his smile, his manner, the way he put things, and then she said, “No, I don't think so.”

He dropped his head, let his voice go loose till it sounded like something that had pitched out of a basket and rolled across the floor: “I was just asking-”

“What am I trying to tell you?” she said, and she propped herself up on one elbow and took hold of his arm just above the wrist. “I'm involved with somebody right now, I guess, okay? That's all.”

She watched him gather up his legs, two balls of muscle flashing in his calves, and even as he stood he was careful to keep himself turned from her. “I don't know,” he said, and he was apologizing now, “you never know unless you ask, right?”

She gave a laugh, but it wasn't the kind of laugh she'd intended, because it had Ronnie and the teepee cat all tangled up in it. “No,” she said, “you never know.”

The night was darker than any night had a right to be, no moon, no stars, the sky locked up tight with the fog seeping in off the river. She couldn't see Marco or Ronnie, though they were three feet ahead of her, feeling their way around the trikes and tools and discarded saltillo tiles, but she could smell the dust beneath her feet and the fishy stagnant odor rising from the pool somewhere off to her right, and she could hear the goats softly rustling their chains as they changed position beneath the oaks. A lone cricket kept opening and shutting a tiny door in the deep grass. There was nothing else.

Verbie had decided to come along, as referee, and Jiminy, adamant Jiminy-he was ten feet behind them, cursing softly in the dark. “Shit. Fuck. I can't see a thing. Hey, Verbie, where are you? Verbie? Star?”

There was a hiss from just in front of her and Ronnie swung round on them, the pale ball of his face hanging there in the night like a broken streetlight. “Keep it down, will you?”

“Why?” Verbie's voice bloomed in the darkness. “What do you mean keep it down? Why should we? You think this is a raid or something? What are we, commandos? These are our brothers we're talking about here, and this is our place, all of it, free to everybody, power to the people-why should we have to keep it down, huh? _You tell me, huh?__”

Lydia and Merry were back in the main house, sitting round the scrapwood fire Norm had made to take the chill off the night, curled up, out of it, hunkering down with the rest of them to watch Charlie Chaplin eat his own shoe (“No, no, it's really a gas, like he boils it in a pot and serves up the laces like _spaghetti__”). People were helping themselves to brownies and tea, settling into little groups, stretching out on quilts, thumping the taut bellies of the dogs as if they were drumskins. Nobody made a move as the posse formed behind Marco (and Ronnie, who had no choice but to go if he was going to have any credibility with anybody), because it was too much trouble, let's plead laissez-faire and kick back and let the problem take care of itself. Star didn't want any hassles either-she hated confrontation, hated it-but this was something she had to do, not just for the family or because Marco had stood up and taken it all on himself, but for the girl, for _her.__ Because it had to stop someplace.

Star hadn't even seen her. She'd been baking, scrubbing, gardening, dreaming. People came, people went. Half the time she didn't recognize the faces round the dinner table, especially on weekends. It didn't matter. She might not have seen her, but she knew her from the inside out, somebody's little sister, skin the color of skim milk, the orthodontically assisted smile and the patched jeans and R. Crumb T-shirt, grubby now from the road and the leers and propositions and big moist hands of all the _cats__ who'd stopped for her out-thrust thumb and she didn't even need to turn and face the traffic because they would stop for her hair and the shape and living breath of her. Her boyfriend was an asshole. Her mother was a clone. There was verbal abuse, physical abuse maybe. She didn't fit in. She wanted something more than diagramming sentences and _Mi casa es su casa,__ and she'd come to them, to the hip people, the people she'd heard about till they were legends of redemption and hope, and found out that in the end she was just another _chick,__ so roll over and make it bald for me, honey.

Star stretched her hands out before her, red light, green light, moving forward one step at a time. It couldn't have been more than a couple hundred yards between the two houses, but it seemed like miles, their footsteps shuffling through the beaten dust and the clenched brown leaves of the oaks that were like little claws, everybody quiet for the first time since the door had shut behind them. “Man, it's dark,” Jiminy muttered after a moment, just to break the silence, but now there was the low thump of music up ahead, and they moved toward it until two faintly glowing windows floated up out of the shadows. Ronnie tripped over something and kicked it aside in a soft whispering rush of motion. Candlelight took hold of the gutted shades in the windows, let go, took hold, let go.

This was it, the back house, a place the size of a pair of trailers grafted together at the waist, with a roof of sun-bleached shingles and an add-on porch canted like a ship going down on a hard sea. Migrant workers had been housed here in the days when Norm's father ran the place, or so Alfredo claimed, pickers moving up and down the coast with the crops, apples in Washington, cherries in Oregon, grapes in California. Star could believe it-the place was a crash pad then and it was a crash pad now, the single funkiest building on the property. The windows were nearly opaque with dirt, there was no running water or electricity, and somebody had painted DROP CITY DROPOUTS over the door in a flowing swirl of Gothic lettering. She'd been inside maybe half a dozen times, attached to one movable feast or another-until Lester moved in, that is.

Marco didn't knock. He pushed the door open and they all just filed in, more like tourists than an invading army, and she tried to put on her smile, but it failed her. It took a minute for her eyes to adjust, a whole flurry of movement over the stale artificial greetings of the tribe, _what's happening, bro,__ candles fluttering, the soft autonomous pulse of Otis Redding, sitting on the dock of the bay. Who was there? Lester, Franklin, three cats, two black and one white, she'd never seen before, even at mealtimes when everybody tended to get together, and-this was a surprise-Sky Dog. It was a surprise because he hadn't shown up for the noon meal or dinner either and everybody assumed he'd gone back to the Haight, or Oregon-wasn't he from Oregon originally, and what _was__ his real name, anyway? She looked at him sitting there cross-legged on the floor, bent over his guitar and playing along with the record as if he didn't have a care in the world, as if nothing had happened, as if forcing yourself on fourteen-year-old runaways was no more sweat than brushing your teeth or taking a crap, and she felt something uncontainable coming up in her.

“Hey, man,” Verbie was saying, “how's it going? All right? Yeah? Because we just, you know, felt like dropping in and seeing what the scene was over here, you know?” She was five foot nothing, red hair clipped to the ears, with a tiny pinched oval of a face and a black gap where her left incisor should have been. The face paint clung like glitter at her hairline and she was twirling the cape and shuffling her feet as if she were about to tap dance across the room. “I mean, is it cool?”

No one offered any assurances, and it didn't feel cool, not at all. It felt as if they'd interrupted something. Star edged into the room behind Ronnie.

There was no furniture other than a plank set atop two cinder blocks, and everyone was sitting on the floor-or not on the floor exactly, but on the cracked and peeling vinyl cushions scavenged from the rusty chaise longue out by the pool and a khaki sleeping bag that looked as if it had been dragged behind a produce truck for a couple hundred miles. Someone had made a halfhearted attempt to sweep the place, and there was a mound of brown-paper bags, doughnut boxes, shredded newspapers and broken glass piled up like drift in the far corner. The only light came from a pair of candles guttering on either end of the plank-calderas of wax, unsteady shadows, a hash pipe balanced atop a box of kitchen matches-and as the jug of cheap red wine circulated from hand to hand it picked up the faintest glint, as if a dying sun were trapped in the belly of the glass.

“So what is it,” Lester said, looking up from the floor with a tight thin smile, “Halloween?” Beside him, Franklin ducked his head and gave out a quick truncated bark of a laugh. “It's trick or treat, right?” Lester said. “Is that what it is?”

“Yeah,” Franklin said, and he lifted the jug to his lips but had to set it down again because the joke was just too much, “but we ain't got no candy.”

Ronnie found a spot on the floor and eased himself down as if he belonged, and maybe he did, but the others just stood there, shifting from foot to foot. “It was a meeting,” Ronnie said, and then Verbie, who never knew when to shut up, started in on a blow-by-blow account of who had said what to whom, going on about the shit in the woods, the weekend hippies, the septic fields that needed to be dug, and she was just working her way around to the point of the whole thing, trying to soften the impact, when Marco spoke up for the first time.

He was leaning against the wall, arms folded against his chest. He was wearing a clean white T-shirt and a pair of striped suspenders that stretched taut over his chest. “We want you out,” he said, “all of you.” He gave Sky Dog a look. “And that includes you, my friend.”

Sky Dog never even lifted his head, but Lester made a face. “Ooo-ooo, listen to you,” he said, “and what's your sign, baby-Aries? Got to be-the ram, man, right? Ram it on in, huh? Ram it to 'em. Or is it that other _Ares__ I'm thinking of, god of war, right? Is that it? God of war?”

There was a snicker from Franklin, but the others just sat there. The record rotated. The jug wine went from one hand to another.

“But listen, you want to know about war, and I don't mean this SDS shit and setting the flag on fire on your mother's back lawn while us niggers go on over to Vietnam and smoke gooks for you, you talk to my man Dewey here”-and he indicated the man seated to his left-“because Dewey was dug in at Khe Sanh for something like eight fucking months and he can kick your white ass from here to Detroit and back.”

“That's not the point,” Verbie was saying.

“Nobody wants to get violent,” Jiminy put in, and he loomed over Verbie like the representative of another species, all bone and sinew, the white shanks of his legs flashing beneath the cutaway tails and Donald Duck grinning in endless replication from the hard little knot of his little boy's briefs, “it's just that we all, I mean, for the sake of the community-”

This was hard-going, very hard, and Star couldn't contain herself any longer. “You raped that girl,” she said, and it was as if she'd ripped the wiring out of the stereo or shot out the candles with a pair of smoking guns. The room fell silent. She looked at Lester, and Lester, hands dangling over the narrow peaks of his knees, looked back at her. This wasn't peace and love, this wasn't brothers and sisters. This was ugly, and she could have stayed home in Peterskill, New York, if she wanted ugliness.

“Come on, Star,” Ronnie said finally, but Lester cut him off. “I didn't _rape__ nobody,” he said, “because if anything happened here last night it was consensial, know what I mean? Shit, you were here, _Pan__-you know what went down.”

“Fuck it,” Marco said. “You're out of here, all of you.”

“Right,” Jiminy seconded the motion. “Look, I'm sorry, but we all-”

“All what?” Lester snarled. “Consulted the _I Ching__? Took a vote, let's get rid of the niggers? Is that it?” His voice was like the low rumble of a truck climbing a hill, very slow and deliberate. “Shit, you're just trying to tell me what I already know-peace and love, brother, do your own thing, baby, but only if your precious ass is white.”

5

The pick rose and fell, rose and fell. Marco was out in the heat of the day-a hundred-plus, easy-stripped down to his jeans and boots, sweating, working, feeling it in his upper arms and shoulders. Jiminy had been working beside him all morning, tearing away at the skin of the soil where the new leach lines for the septic tank were going in, but when the sun stood up straight overhead he'd set down his shovel as gingerly as if it were a ceramic sculpture and shambled across the yard in the direction of the swimming pool. He'd been good company, rattling on about books and records and all the places he wanted to visit-Benares, Rio, Nairobi, some town in Wisconsin that featured the world's biggest wheel of cheese, and if it had already gone moldy by the time he got there, well, he was sure they'd just make another one-but Marco didn't mind working alone. All the communities he'd been part of, or tried to be part of, had fallen to pieces under the pressure of the little things, the essentials, the cooking and the cleaning and the repairs, and while it was nice to think everybody would pitch in during a crisis, it didn't always work out that way.

And this _was__ a crisis, whether people seemed to realize it or not-the toilets in the main house were overflowing and there was a coil of human waste behind every rock, tree and knee-high scrap of weed on the property, and that was primitive, oh yes indeed. _In__voluntarily primitive. Nobody even had the sense to bury it, let alone dig a latrine. They didn't think, didn't want to get hung up on details. They'd dropped out. They were here. That was enough, and the less said about it the better. But before long, as Marco knew from experience, the county health inspector would have plenty to say, and it wouldn't reflect a higher consciousness either.

He was down in the trench, waist-deep, flinging dirt, when Alfredo came across the yard with a fruit jar of lemonade in one hand and a spade in the other. Marco saw him coming, but he kept digging, because for the moment at least digging was his affliction, his tic, the process that made his blood flow and his brain go numb. Simplest thing in the world: the pick rises, the pick falls; the shovel goes in, the dirt comes out.

“Hey,” Alfredo said, and he was showing his fine pointed teeth in a smile that cut a horizontal slash in the wiry black superstructure of his beard, “I thought you could use something to drink-and maybe some help too.”

Well, he could. And he appreciated the three precious ice cubes bobbing in the super-sweetened fresh-squeezed lemonade too, but there were probably twenty people at Drop City he'd rather spend the afternoon with. Nothing against Alfredo, except that he lacked a sense of humor-it was as if someone had run a hot wire through his brain, fusing all the appreciation cells in a dead smoking lump-and when he did manage to find something funny, he ran it into the ground, repeating the punch line over and over and snickering in a bottomless catarrhal wheeze that made you think he was choking on his own phlegm. He was older too-twenty-nine, thirty maybe-and that was a problem in itself, because he used his age advantage like a bludgeon any time there was a difference of opinion. His favorite phrases were: “Well, you were probably still in high school then” and “I don't want to tell you what to do, but-”

Alfredo got down into the trench, stripped off his shirt to reveal a pale flight of ribs, and started digging, and that was all right. They worked in silence for the first few minutes, the penetrable earth at their feet, the smell of it in their nostrils like the smell of fossilized bone, bloodless and neutral, the sun overhead, sweat pocking the dust of their shoes. At some point, there was a sudden high whinnying shout from the direction of the pool, a splash, two splashes, and then Alfredo, in the way of making idle conversation, was asking about his name. “Marco,” he said, “is that Italian?”

“Yeah, I suppose-originally, that is.” Marco straightened up and swiped a forearm across his brow, and what he should have done was dig a bandanna out of his pack, but it was too late now. He'd cool off in the pool, that's what he'd do-but later. Much later. “My father named me for Marco Polo.”

“Really? Far out.” There was the crunch of the shovel cutting into the earth. “What'd he name your brother-Christopher?”

Marco acknowledged the stab at humor with a foreshortened smile-he'd been responding to that joke since elementary school. “I don't have a brother.”

“My father's Italian,” Alfredo said, and he grunted as he heaved a load of dirt up over his shoulder. “My mother's Mexican. That's why I can take the heat-like this? This doesn't bother me at all.”

Right. But Marco was thinking of his own father, the man he'd known only as a voice over the long-distance wire these past two years and counting. _Where you now?__ his father would shout into the receiver. _Twentynine Palms? Hell, I was there during the war-desert training. For Rommel. Paradise on earth-in winter, anyway… Your mother wants to know when you're coming home-isn't that right, Rosemary? Rosemary?__

There were no hard feelings. It wasn't the usual thing at all, the sort of adolescent fury that goaded his high school buddies to ram their screaming V-8s down the throat of every street in the development and answer violence with violence across the kitchen table. In fact, he missed his father-missed both his parents. There were times, hefting his pack, sticking out his thumb, waking in a strange bed or in some nameless place that was exactly like every other place, when it infected him with a dull ache, like a tooth starting to go bad, but mostly now his parents were compacted in his thoughts till they were little more than strangers. He'd skipped bail. There was a warrant out for his arrest, the puerile little brick of a misdemeanor compounded by interstate flight and the fugitive months and years till it had become a towering jurisdictional wall-with a charge of draft evasion cemented to the top of it. Home? This was his home now.

_Sorry, Dad, but the answer is never.__

European history-that was what defined Marco's father, and he'd taught it, chapter and verse, out of the same increasingly irrelevant textbook to an endless succession of unimpressed faces for thirty years, thirty years at least. _This new class of tenth graders?__ he'd say at the dinner table, still in his brown corduroy jacket with the elbow patches that shone as if they'd been freshly greased, the only father in the whole development of two hundred and fifty-plus homes to wear a mustache. _They're more like the Visigoths than the Greeks. Not like in your day, Marco-and what a difference five years makes. You people were scholars!__ he'd roar, as if he meant it, and then he'd laugh. And laugh.

“We're Irish, mainly. My last name's Connell. Everybody thinks it's Mark O'Connell, but my father was a joker, I guess. And I guess he saw me going to distant lands.”

“Really? Ever been out of the country?”

Marco set down his shovel to work at an embedded stone with the business end of the pick. He glanced up and then away again. “Not really.”

And then Alfredo was onto travel, the names of places clotting on his tongue like lint spun out of a dryer, no two-thousand-pound Wisconsin cheeses for him-it was London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Venice, Florence-he was an art student at one time, did Marco know that? Yeah, and he'd sketched his way across Europe, from the Louvre to the Rijksmuseum to the Prado. That was the only way to do it, like a month in every city, just living there in some _pension__ or hostel, meeting people in cafes, scoring hash on the street and going straight to the bakery after the cafes close for your _pane__ and your baguette. He must have talked without drawing a breath for a solid fifteen minutes.

Somewhere there, in the space between Amsterdam and the Place de la Concorde, the crows started in, a bawling screech that came out of the trees and circled overhead as the big glistening birds dive-bombed an owl they'd flushed from its roost. “The owls get them at night when they're helpless, did you know that?” Marco said, glad for a chance to change the subject. “That's what that's all about. Survival. And imagine us-imagine if there was another ape species here to challenge _us,__ and I don't mean like gorillas and chimps, but another humanoid.”

Alfredo didn't seem to have anything to say to that-he believed in universal harmony, brotherhood, vegetarianism, peace, love and understanding. He didn't want to know about the war between crows and owls, let alone apes, or the way the crows mobbed the nests of lesser birds-sparrows, finches, juncos-to crush and devour the young. That had nothing to do with the world he lived in. “Heavy,” that's what he said finally. _Heavy.__

They bent to their work, the silence broken only by the persistent slice of the shovels, the tumult of the birds running off the edge of the sky until the pedestrian murmur of Drop City began to filter back in: the goats bleating to be milked or fed, the single sharp ringing note of a dog surprised by its own hunger, the regular slap of the screen door at the back of the house-and underneath it all, like the soundtrack to a movie, the dull hum of rock and roll leaking out the kitchen windows. “Listen, I really appreciate your doing this,” Alfredo said, pausing to straighten up and arch his back, the fine grains of dirt clinging to the flesh in a dense fur of sweat. “Taking the initiative, I mean. I know you've only been here like two weeks or whatever, but this is a trip, it really is-it's what we need more of around here.”

“Sure,” Marco said, “no problem,” and the shovel never stopped working. It felt good to be doing something, making something, putting his back to it till there was nothing left to clutter up his head. Drifting was fine. To a point. Lying up in a treehouse with a book, that was fine too. And dope. And women. And music. But right now, in this ditch, under this sun, it was the tug of the physical that mattered, only that.

“You know, I was at Thunder Mountain before this-me and Reba, that was before we had the kids. Or no, Che was like one or maybe a year and a half, I don't know. But mainly what happened was everybody just wanted to ball and do dope, which is okay, don't get me wrong, but it got to the point where nobody wanted to tend the garden or make the food. The chicks, I mean. Because they're the key to the whole thing. If the chicks don't have any energy and don't want to, you know, wash the dishes, sweep up, cook the meals, then you're in trouble, big time. There's nothing worse than having all the dishes piled up and the pots and pans all crusted and dirty, and then everybody milling around like what are we going to do about dinner, man, and that's where it all breaks down, believe me.”

Marco had no chance to respond, even if he'd wanted to, because when he looked up he saw Sky Dog sauntering across the lot with Lester and Franklin in tow. Or no, it wasn't Franklin-it was the other one, what was his name, Dewey, the war hero. They didn't say anything, didn't wave, didn't smile, just kept coming across the weed-strewn lot in a slow, sure amble, miniature explosions of dust riding up the heels of their boots. Alfredo looked up too, just as the three of them reached the far end of the ditch and stood there staring down like executioners. The phrase _Digging your own grave__ popped in and out of Marco's head. This wasn't going to be a happy occasion.

“Hey, Alfredo,” Sky Dog said, “I wanted to talk to you.”

Alfredo spread one palm flat at the top of the ditch and came up out of it then, wiping both hands on the bleached-out fabric of his jeans, trying for a grin. “Hey,” he said, as if he were happy to see him, “what's happening, man?” and he snaked out a hand for the soul shake that never came.

And what was Sky Dog? Five-ten, five-eleven maybe, a hundred seventy pounds, tanned till his skin was a sheath of gold, a single blue vein painted down the biceps of each arm, his eyes lighter than his face. He wore a Fu Manchu mustache that trailed a good three inches below the line of his jawbone. Usually he was in jeans and an embroidered blue jeans jacket with the sleeves removed at the shoulders, the humble hippie farmer adorned in humble hippie chic, but today he was a dude, dressed up in a paisley shirt and a silver scarf fed through a little gold hoop at his throat and a pair of elephant bells that swallowed up his feet. “I want to tell you I'm pissed off,” he said, and his face went the color of liver before it hits the pan, “because if you think you can just vote me out of here or whatever, you're crazy. And to send this fucker”-a gesture for Marco-“to be your errand boy because you don't got the balls-”

“Come on, Bruce, come on, you know I wouldn't do anything against you, me of all people”-Alfredo had his arms spread wide in renunciation-“but you've got to know we can't run the risk of the law coming in here, and whether you had anything to do with that girl or not, she could still go straight to the Sonoma County sheriff and say anything she wants, and we don't even know who she is or where she is-”

“Aw, fuck it, man, listen to you-you're nothing but a hypocrite. I mean, listen to yourself-_if you had anything to do with that girl.__ Yeah, I did. And so did Lester and Dewey and a couple of other guys-including that little shit, Pan, or whatever his name is. She was asking for it-no, she was begging for it, like let's get stoned and ball and get stoned and ball some more, and do you guys have any weed? — and I'm not apologizing to anybody. There isn't a cat on this property that wouldn't have done the same thing, am I right?”

Lester said he was right. Dewey said nothing, but his eyes were lying in wait.

Sky Dog-or Bruce, that was his name, _Bruce,__ and to know it was to know the shibboleth that would cut him down to size-let his voice ascend the scale into the upper register of complaint. “I've been here, what, eight, nine months? And you send this fucker here”-again a finger stabbed at Marco, down in his hole-“who's been here like a week to tell _me__ I got to go? Well, I'll tell you, I'm not going anywhere, not even if Norm himself comes knocking on the door, and you want to know why, I'll tell you why-”

That was when Marco stopped listening. He was thinking about a dog his uncle once had, a husky, one brown eye, one blue, the single wildest canine ever domesticated, like no other dog Marco had ever seen. It didn't want to chase a ball or do tricks or go for a ride in the car, it never fawned or licked your hand or begged at the table, and when it was thrust into the company of other dogs at the park or on the broad humped lawn out back of the school, it wouldn't budge, barely deigning to lift its leg or take the exculpatory sniff. But when it was pushed, when another dog crowded in too close with a ratcheting growl and a thrust of its shoulders, the thing erupted-no warning, just a pure fluid rush of violence so sudden and absolute you couldn't be sure you'd seen it. The other dog, no matter how big, wound up on its back, and his uncle's husky-_Lobo,__ that was his name-was locked at its throat.

Twice now, in the space of sixty seconds, Marco had been called a fucker to his face, and twice was two times too many. Before _Bruce__ could air the remainder of his grievance in his high nasal wallop of a voice that was absolutely pitched to the key and tenor of the blues-_and no doubt about it, the boy could sing__-Marco reached up and took hold of his left foot, right at the heel of his boot, and jerked it out from under him. In the next instant, Sky Dog came down hard on the edge of the ditch, and in the instant after that he was sputtering and thrashing at the bottom of it, and Marco, with all the calm deliberation in the world, watched his own right fist rise and fall like a piston as he bent to retool this particular _cat's__ features in the most unbrotherly way he could imagine.

If he'd thought he was ending something, he was wrong, and he should have known better, should have calculated and looked to his best chance, but none of that mattered now. What mattered was Dewey, who clapped an arm around his throat and snatched his head back as if he were rebounding the ball after an errant layup; what mattered was Lester, puff-faced Lester, in his platform boots and wide-brimmed pimp's hat with the silver chain flashing at the crown, who gathered himself atop the mounded dirt and shot two clean balletic kicks to Marco's midsection as Marco fought the hammerlock at his throat and Sky Dog-_Bruce!__-came up out of the trench with both fists flailing. Ten seconds passed, twenty, all three of them going at Marco where he stood immobilized, caught up in Dewey's grip like a man of straw, Alfredo shouting “Break it up! Break it up! Come on, man, _break it up!__”

Marco had no illusions. It was power against power, what they wanted against what he wanted, and what he wanted was Drop City, nothing less. He twisted, churned his legs, kicked out at Sky Dog and fought the arm clamped round his throat. It was a dance, that's what it was. A jerking, twisting, futile dance punctuated by the wet dull thump of one blow after another. Sky Dog was sloppy, near tears, half his punches glancing off muscle or bone, but Dewey was made out of hammered steel and Lester kept stepping up and aiming his kicks, one after another, as if he were climbing a ladder. “Motherfucker,” he kept repeating, softly, almost tenderly, as if he'd confused the act and the epithet, “you motherfucker.”

It might have gone on even longer than it did, no usual end to this, blood on top of blood, the knife in its sheath, the sheath on the belt, the wet slap of flesh on flesh, if it hadn't been for the tourists. Two of them-a couple, denim and leather, bronze peace signs dangling from their throats, just in the night before to see how the counterculture lives, maybe write an essay or a book about it, promiscuity and peace, granola, goat's milk, marijuana under the stars. Marco had met them that morning-they were from Berkeley, he was a professor and she was a poet, and they'd donated two dollars each for runny oatmeal and scones that were like loofahs, and it was worth every penny because they were making the scene. The professor was bald on top, but he'd wrapped a bandanna round his head and greased up the long stiff hairs at the back of his neck so they trailed down over his collar in what must have been a royally hip display for his colleagues in the Sociology department. The poet was forty maybe, nobody he'd ever heard of, with a pair of big collapsing breasts in a sleeveless T-shirt, bird feathers for hair, a parsimonious mouth and mean little inquisitive eyes that dug and probed everywhere, because everything was a poem in the making. Well here was another one unfolding right before her eyes, and what would she call it-“The Fight for the Leach Field Ditch”? Or maybe just “The Ditch”? Marco wasn't thinking. He dodged and writhed and absorbed the blows as best he could. But yeah, “The Ditch” sounded just about right. “The Ditch” said it all.

What happened was this: they were out for a stroll, professor and poet, grooving on the heat, the dust, the fence lizards puffing up their tiny reptilian chests in the blissed-out aura of peace and love and communal synergy, when suddenly she-the poet-let out a scream. And this was no ordinary scream-it wasn't the kind of semi-titillated pro forma shriek you might expect from a female poet announcing a fistfight among hippies in a half-dug ditch in a blistering field above the Russian River; no, this was meant to convey shock, real shock, a savage tug at the cord strung taut between the two poles of existence. The poet's scream rose above the heat, airless and impacted, and everything stopped right there. Dewey let go, Lester snatched back his foot, Sky Dog and Alfredo swung their heads first to her, then to the dense stand of woods at the edge of the lot. And Marco, unsteady on his feet, riding the adrenal rush till it was a hot cautery run through his veins, Marco was the last to turn and look.

What he saw was Ronnie-Pan-staggering out of the shadows in a suit of blood, wet blood set afire by the hard harsh light of the sun, and something slung across his shoulders, swallowing him up in the fresh red wetness. It was-it was a living thing, or no, a dead thing, clearly dead. And bleeding. _The girl,__ Marco thought, _the girl,__ and it wasn't enough that they'd raped and humiliated her, now they'd-but this wasn't a human form at all. What did he see? Fur, dun fur. Had he killed one of the dogs, was that it?

“Hey, man,” Ronnie's voice came stunting across the field, weak with excitement, “we got _meat!__”

“Meat?” Alfredo said, already moving toward him-they were all, all of them, moving toward him. “What are you talking about? What is that?”

Marco climbed up out of the ditch. Ronnie was closing now, a hundred feet, maybe less, staggering under his burden of blood, meat, hair, bone. “The fuck you mean, man? I got me a deer!”

6

You would have thought he'd shot Bambi or something the way some of the chicks carried on, and Merry was the worst-or no, Verbie, Verbie was even worse than that, as if she hadn't spent the first eighteen years of her life cruising the meat department at the supermarket and gorging on fifteen-cent burgers and pepperoni pizza like every other teenager in America. And _Alfredo,__ with his meat-is-murder rap and how could you just slaughter one of your fellow creatures and live with that kind of karma, and _blah, blah, blah.__ It was a joke, it really was. All they talked about was going back to the land, living simple, dropping out, and yet if there wasn't a supermarket within ten miles they'd have starved to death by now, every one of them. There were fish in the river, there was game in the woods, and so what if it was out of season, so what if he'd wound up with a doe that couldn't have weighed more than ninety pounds dressed out? It was meat, free meat, and it could feed everybody on the place for a week at least. Did they really expect to go through life choking down soy patties and eggplant on rye? Falafel? _Tofu kabobs,__ for Christ's sake? Shit, they should have given him a medal.

As it was, he spent the whole afternoon skinning and quartering the thing, slippery, ugly work, no doubt about it, and the only one who'd give him a hand was Marco, because Marco understood what going back to nature was all about-he'd been hunting and fishing since he was eight years old, grouse, rabbit, squirrel, duck blinds on a morning made out of ice, standing waist-deep in water that shot by like a freight train and nothing but two stunted half-developed swaybacked hatchery trout to show for it, and you'd better hope your mother made meat loaf. He'd been there-there and back. Just like Ronnie. Like _Pan.__ And while Che and Sunshine stuck their fingers up their noses and stood there gaping and half the commune seemed to just drop what they were doing and drift by to scold and kibitz and feature the way a few nice venison steaks might look sizzling on a grill over a bed of hot coals, Ronnie tugged at the hide in a blizzard of flies-he was thinking he might make a doeskin jacket maybe, with a fringe-and Marco bent to sever the thin tegument that held it all together with the slick glassy edge of his hunting knife.

“What happened to your face?” Ronnie asked in the course of things, his hands dipped in gore, the sun quavering in the trees like some novelty item from Japan. The butt end of a joint clung to his lower lip; a quart of beer, slick with bloody palm prints, tilted out of the stiff yellow grass beside him. It was late in the afternoon, and the smells from the kitchen were strictly vegetarian.

Marco looked up, grinning, but it was a lopsided Floyd Patterson sort of grin. His left eye was swollen up like a sausage in a pan and a crusted-over gash dropped down into the facial hair below it. “A difference of opinion,” he said, and that was all right, because Ronnie wasn't prepared for any heavy trip about the spades and Sky Dog and who did what to whom in the back house night before last, so he just nodded and let it go.

The two of them kept sawing away, first one side, then the other, and before long the hide pulled back from the flesh like a wet rug, but didn't you have to salt it or rub it with lye or something? And for leather, you had to get the fur off too, and that was a drag, a lifetime sentence, no less… That was what Ronnie was thinking as the fat bluebottle flies scorched the air and the voice of Tracy Nelson, strong and true, rose up high over the currents of the main house. They were out behind the pool on a dead bleached strip of grass, and they'd hung the carcass from a branch, to bleed it, but just for an hour-they were both afraid of the heat, because who'd ever shot a deer this time of year? Nobody. Nobody but Pan. Yes, and here it was, in the flesh. This morning it had been down by the river, pawing around in the mud, pulling up tender shoots of this and that, off on some trip of its own no one could ever have imagined or predicted, and now it was dead, now it was his.

Pan was feeling it-the grass, the beer, the pure streaming uncontainable _rush__ of accomplishment, his _deer,__ his _first deer__-and he began to sing along with the music, _When it all comes down, you got to go back to Mother Earth.__ Oh, yes. And he let it rip too, no reason to be shy about it because everybody told him he had a nice voice and you couldn't hold back when you were trying to sing any more than you could when you were trying to talk French or bring a ten-speed bicycle down Potrero Hill with a full pack and a load of groceries on your back. _I don't care how rich you are, I don't care what you're worth__-he threw his head back, really getting into it, on a roll, unbeatable, when the record choked off with a screech and almost instantaneously somebody put on some frantic self-congratulatory raga that was like _compulsive masturbation__ or something. “Fuck,” he said, “I hate that. I really hate that.”

Marco took the joint from his lips with two bloody fingers. “Hate what? Ravi Shankar?”

“No-I mean, yes. Shit, yes. It's utter crap. But what I mean is when you're really like into a song, you know, and somebody just”-he waved a hand, his own bloody knife, as if to say _You know what I mean,__ and Marco did, because he nodded in sympathy, say no more.

They listened in silence to the blooming sitar and the tablas that seethed under it like rain on a tin roof, Marco squatting beside him, inhaling, holding it in, then taking a good churning hit from the bottle. The beer sizzled yellow, so warm at this point it was like carbonated piss, but when Marco passed him the bottle Ronnie put his lips to the aperture and tilted his head back. The knives slashed, the flies rose. They were cutting out crude steaks now, and this was a learning process for both of them. “You've got a good voice,” Marco said.

“Oh, that? You like it? I mean, that was just singing along with a record. You should of heard me with this band I almost got into back in New York-I mean, I sang with them a couple times at rehearsals, the guitar player and I were like really tight, and the drummer was this cat I went to high school with…” He went on in that mode for a while, enjoying himself, thinking of Baracca and Herlihy and the other guys in the band and the sense of flying without wings he got every time he stood at the microphone with all that electric surge of the band behind him and Eddie Herlihy's voice twisting round his own like two _veins__ out of the same body. How could he ever explain that to anybody? Yeah, sure, and the scag that went with it, in the three- and five-dollar bags you got from the spades out back of the burned-out, boarded-up storefronts downtown, taste it, cook it, shoot it, just to come _down__ from the rush of the music, and that was brotherhood, the brotherhood of the syringe copped from somebody's old lady the nurse that was so dull you had to hammer it into your arm- “So what do you think,” Marco was saying, “should we try smoking the rest of the meat-have you ever done that? Or salt it. I hear you can salt it.”

“What about the freezer?”

“Are you kidding? It's full of Tofutti and six kinds of ice cream and cookie dough and what, fifty trays of ice? If we can squeeze three roasts in there it'll be a miracle, and I don't know how many people are going to want steaks tonight-but I say we grill up as much as we can.”

“Right on,” Ronnie said, and he was already picturing it, the smoke rising like a forest ablaze, the sweet meat scent permeating everything, another joint maybe to mellow out and goose the appetite, and all of them-even Alfredo-lined up at the grill with their tin plates and a shriveled-up pathetic little scoop of rice and veggies, and Pan, magnanimous Pan, hunter and gatherer, essential cog, man of the hour, dishing it up.

As it turned out, it was nearly dark by the time the coals had died down enough to do the steaks without igniting a firestorm on the grill, and Ronnie, who was feeling pretty loose by then, really heaped them up. A little salt, a little pepper, a smear of _Pan's__ famous barbecue sauce (two parts ketchup, one part mustard, garlic powder to taste and upend the bottle of apple cider vinegar over the whole mess for ten seconds, _glug, glug, glug__), and that was that. Before he'd got the job in the record department at Caldor, he'd worked at a steakhouse called the Surf 'N' Turf, two days a week on the grill, three behind the bar, and he had a pretty good idea of what to do with meat, once it looked like meat, that is, and he kept the steaks moving with all the flair of a pro.

He was feeling expansive, flipping steaks with both hands and talking everybody up, accepting the odd hit from this pipe or that, and then he was telling Jiminy about this hitchhiker who'd invited Star and him to a party one night in Iowa, he thought it was-yeah, Iowa-and there were maybe ten or twelve improbably hip people gathered round a big picnic table in the middle of a field, crickets going at it, the moon rising fat over the horizon, very calm and soulful. All the plates-tin plates, just like these, exactly, _and isn't that a trip?__-were nailed to the table, just crucified there with a single nail dead center all the way down both sides of the table. When the party was over, when they were all done gnawing on their pork bones and corn cobs and the rest, the hitchhiker's brother-he was the host-just stood up and hosed off the table.

“Really? And how was that?”

“Utterly fucking cool.”

“No problem with like grease and germs and all that?”

“The ants would be at it next day, the birds and the flies and whatnot. The sun. Rain.”

“Let nature take care of it, right?”

“Yeah, that's right: let nature take care of it.”

Most of the brothers and sisters had already eaten-dinner was at six-but they lined up nonetheless, all except for Merry and Alfredo and a couple of the hard-core vegetarians like Verbie. (That hurt him-_Merry__-but she was adamant, every creature is sacred, wouldn't slap a malarial mosquito if it was perched on her wrist, and did he know about the Jains in India who went around with gauze over their faces so they wouldn't inadvertently inhale so much as a gnat?) Norm was there, though, glad-handing and effusing, ripped on something and shouting “Loaves and fishes! It's a miracle!” every two minutes. Somebody dragged the big speakers out onto the back porch and dropped the needle on _Electric Ladyland,__ and pretty soon people were dancing out across the lawn in a kind of meat frenzy, and by the time it was over the steaks were gone, and a good time had by all.

At one point, stretched out on the grass with his plate, a transient joint and the dregs of a jug of wine he kept swishing round the bottom of his fruit jar in the hope a little _circulation__ would make it taste less like recycled lamp oil, Ronnie found himself hemmed in by the professor and his old lady, the one who'd let out that stone-cold shriek when he'd come staggering out of the woods with the deer wrapped round his shoulders, and if anybody thought _that__ was fun they were out of their minds. Star was there too, and Marco, Lydia, Jiminy, a whole little circle of people off the main circle, and they'd been discussing weighty matters like is Hendrix an alien and how many heads fit on the pin of an angel. And suddenly here was this _professor__ sitting right there at his elbow with a plate full of gnawed gristle, and the professor was saying things like “So, when did you drop out?”

Ronnie wanted to tell him to fuck off and go back to Berkeley with the rest of the tourists-_Can't you see we're having a party here, man?__-but there was something about the guy-the gray in his beard, the fruity rich mellow tenor that brought back all those somnolent afternoons in English class-that just made him duck his head and mumble “A year and a half.” And it wasn't just that he was mumbling, he was exaggerating too-six months was nearer the truth. But the professor didn't want any six-month hippies, he wanted the genuine down-in-the-trenches peripatetic lifetime dirtbags he could awe and thrill the _reading public__ with. He had a notepad. He had a-no, yes-tape recorder.

“You mind if I tape this?” the professor was asking.

Hendrix rode the night, supreme, astral, totally mind-blowing, and Ronnie mumbled _Sure__ and the professor's old lady moved in, thick legs in a long skirt and the joint pinched in her fingers like a deadly writhing South American bushmaster with its fangs drawn. Did she take a hit? Yes. And then she passed it on.

“You're how old? Here, talk into this.”

“Into this?”

“That's right, yeah.”

“I'm twenty-two.”

“Family problems?”

“No more than usual.”

“Ever run away from home?”

“Not that I can remember. Or maybe once. Or twice.”

“You were how old then?”

“I don't know-nine. I went to the bowling alley and hid behind the pinball machine.”

“Both parents alive?”

His parents were alive, all right, but so was Lon Chaney Jr. in _The Mummy's Ghost.__ They were just like that, staggering from one foot to the other and grunting out hostile messages to the world and the trashed wind-sucking son they saw only at dinner because he needed that dinner to stay alive. Might as well wrap them up in mummy's bandages too, because they were both walking disasters, his father's nose like a skinned animal pinned to his face with the shiny metallic tackheads of his eyes, his mother a shapeless sack of organs with a howling withered skull stuck atop it. Come to think of it, she could have starred in _Screaming Skull__ herself. And they nagged. Nagged and grunted. Pan looked into the professor's eyes and then away again. “Yeah,” was all he said.

“Any abuse? You use marijuana? Hard drugs? Booze? What about Free Love? Any social diseases? You vote in the last election?”

Pan fell into it. He warmed, grew effusive. He told the professor about scoring dope on South Street and cooking it up in whatever semi-clean receptacle that happened to be handy and wouldn't catch on fire, a spoon usually or one of those little cups they poach eggs in, an example of which he'd had and prized for about a week until it got lost, and he laid out both his arms like exhibits at the morgue to show the professor his tracks that were six months gone because the truth of the matter was heroin scared the shit out of him and he was never going to do anything other than maybe snort it ever again. Drew was dead. And Dead Mike, he was dead too. “But Free Love-oh, man, don't get me started. That's what this is all about-the _chicks,__ you know what I mean?” That was when he realized Star was watching him, her knees pulled up to her chin and locked tight in the clasp of her arms, the firelight like hot grease on her face and that smirk she had, that smirk that was more of a put-down than anything she could ever say.

“What about VD?” the professor was saying, leaning in close with the microphone, his face hanging there at the end of his veiny blistered old man's throat like a piñata, the gift-shop peace medallion dangling like a rip cord below that and his eyes like two wriggling leg-kicking toads, and Pan-Ronnie-felt so _embarrassed,__ so fucking mortified and put-upon, he actually jerked the microphone out of the professor's hand and then, not knowing what to do with it, flung it into the fire in one smooth uncontested motion.

“What the hell you think you're doing?” the professor wanted to know, and his old lady-the poet-said, “American Primitive,” and laughed a long-gone laugh.

Ronnie was on his feet now, not much kicking power in a pair of huaraches, but enough to send the rest of the apparatus-the big silver-and-gray box with the knobs and dials and slow-turning _spools__-into the fire too, and the professor shouting and grabbing for the machine amidst the coals and the black and quiescent remains of the deer.

“You crazy son of a bitch!” That was what the professor said, but it was nothing to Ronnie, he wasn't even listening. He heard Star laugh though, a hard harsh dart of a laugh that stuck right in him as he went off into the night, looking for something else altogether.

Later, much later, after sitting around a campfire with some people he didn't recognize-or maybe he did recognize them-he thought about going up to the back house and seeing what Sky Dog and the spades were up to, but then he thought he wouldn't. Better not press his luck. There were people who wanted him gone-and here Alfredo's face loomed up out of a shallow grave in the back corner of his mind, followed in quick succession by Reba's and Verbie's-and what happened the other night had split the place down the middle. Lester and Sky Dog and the rest had been voted out, and that meant they didn't show for meals and kept strictly to themselves, running the Lincoln down to the store for wine, cigarettes and processed cheese sandwiches every couple hours, but they might as well have been in another county for all they had to do with Drop City. They'd smelled the meat-Ronnie had seen them out on the porch of the back house as the light faded, and he almost wished they would have come down and joined the party so he could show them what he'd done with a.30–06 rifle and two shining copper-jacketed bullets, but they weren't interested, because it was war now, and you had to choose sides. And that was no contest as far as Pan was concerned. He was for the side in control, the side that had all the chicks and the food and the big house with the KLH speakers and all of those five hundred or eight hundred or however many records that were lined up on the shellacked pine bookcases in random order and was there a radio station in the _country__ with a better collection?

The night deepened. Shouts and laughter ran at him across the lawn and the music pulsed steadily from the back of the main house. He was standing there in the bushes, where he'd just zipped up after responding to the call of nature, and he could feel a headache coming on. It had been a _day,__ all right, and he felt pretty glorious, all things considered, but what he needed was maybe a little of that sticky Spañada Star was always drinking-or Mateus, if anybody had any. Sure. That's what he needed, to knock down the headache and put a mellow cap on the evening, and he headed back across the lawn, toward where the shadows danced round the cookfire.

Star wasn't there. She wasn't up in the treehouse either, because he hoisted himself up the ladder to see, and she wasn't in the main house where half a dozen people shushed him because they were watching some silent movie Norm had got out of the library for the sheer appreciation and _uplift__ of it. Ronnie stood there a minute in the darkened room, watching the light play over a frozen landscape until an Eskimo appeared, two slits for eyes, the wind tearing at the ruff of his parka, and began building an igloo out of blocks he cut from the snow. He had a knife the size of a machete, and he wasted no time, because you could see the way the wind was blowing and his breath froze into the wisps of his beard, each block perfect, one atop the other, and when he fitted the final block into a gap in the roof of the thing, everybody burst into applause. “Fuckin' Nanook,” Norm said, and there he was stretched out on the floor with a comforter drawn up to his chin, “you want to talk about living off the land, man…”

In the morning-or no, it was the afternoon, definitely the afternoon-Ronnie woke with a lurch that set the whole room rocking like a boat, and the dream, whatever it was, was gone before he could resuscitate it. Just as well, because he could feel the veins inflating in his neck with the frantic scramble of his heart-he'd been trying to escape something or somebody, dark twisting corridors and howling faces-and now, suddenly, he was awake in the apparent world, a fine sheen of sweat greasing his body and leaching into the sleeping bag that each day stank ever more powerfully of mold and ammonia and creeping decay. Beside him, breathing through her open mouth with a faint rattling snore, was Lydia, her arms stretched out as if she'd been crucified. The dark nipples were like knitted caps pulled over the white crowns of her breasts, and her breasts were like people, two slouching fat white people in caps having a conversation across the four-lane highway of her rib cage. A fine line of glistening dead black hair measured the distance from her navel to her bush. There was hair under her arms, hair on her legs, a faint stripe of it painted over her upper lip. She was sweating. Her eyelids trembled. He lay there contemplating her a minute, letting his heart climb back down from the ledge he'd left it on, feeling as if he'd been assembled from odd scraps during the night. His head throbbed. His stomach made a fist and relaxed it. He needed to find some toilet paper, _fast.__

Pan rose from the sleeping bag that was stretched over a double mattress on the floor in the far corner of the back room of the main house. He rose slowly, warily, his bones as heavy as spars, and began silently shuffling through his backpack and the cardboard box that between them held everything he owned. He didn't want to wake Lydia. He definitely did not want to wake Lydia. Because Lydia would want one thing, and that thing, in his present condition, he was unwilling to give her. In fact, as he studied her out of the corner of his eye while rummaging for any last overlooked and forgotten quarter or eighth or even sixteenth of a roll of toilet paper his brothers and sisters might not already have got to, she struck him as being fat, too fat, not at all his type. His type was Merry. His type was Star-and where was she?

He hadn't been able to find her the night before, though he'd looked everyplace he could think of except the back house, where the spades and Sky Dog were nursing their grudges and washing down their Velveeta cheese sandwiches with sour red wine and snuffing the last fading vestiges of grilled venison on the thin night air, but she wouldn't be there, he knew that and the spades knew that and everybody in Drop City knew it too. He'd run into Merry-she and Jiminy were reading poems out loud to each other in Norm's bedroom upstairs-but Merry said she didn't feel in much of a festive mood because the whole _idea__ of a barbecue went against everything she believed in, and then she'd called him a carnivore, or maybe it was a cannibal, but she said it with a smile, as in all is forgiven but don't bother me now I'm reading poetry. Out loud. To Jiminy. So Ronnie found some other people and continued to abuse various controlled and illicit substances until the whole day went into extra innings and he wound up in the shadowy deeps of this room with a stick of incense and a single phallic candle burning and Lydia naked and hairy and wet and taking hold of his prick as if she owned it.

And now he needed toilet paper. Desperately. He found his cutoffs and stepped into them, and forget the shirt, forget the huaraches, he was in the grip of something urgent here. He was thinking _Leaves, I'll just use leaves,__ when Lydia's purple Elizabeth Taylor eyes flashed open. “Oh,” she said. “What? Oh, it's you.” And then she was on her hands and knees, stretching, her great pumped-up tits suspended beneath her like airships, like zeppelins, and she was saying “Come on over here, Ronnie, _Pan,__ come on, just hold me, just for a minute, huh? You got a minute, don't you?”

He didn't have a minute. He didn't have fifteen seconds. The deer, all that gamy protein and wild hard gristle and backwoods fat, was having its revenge. His stomach clenched again, the image of gas rising in a beaker in Chemistry class set up camp in his brain, and he was out the door, through the house-startled faces, oh, it's Pan and what's the hurry? — and out across the blistered lawn and into the nearest clump of bushes he could find. And then, finally, he was squatting, no thought of septic fields or clogged toilets or luxury accommodations in mind, and it was all coming out of him in a savage uncontainable rush.

What he thought was that he'd feel better as the day wore on, but he thought wrong. His head throbbed, his insides kept churning. And though he made his slow careful way through a plate of rice mush, grain by grain, _that__ went right through him too. He wound up lying beside the swollen green carpet of the pool through the late afternoon and into the evening, refusing all attempts at conversation and invitations to eat (Merry), ball (Lydia) or inhale drugs (half a dozen people, cats and chicks alike). Every once in a while, hammered by the sun, he'd wallow lethargically in the pool, but even that made his brain pound and his gut clench, and he didn't really rouse himself till somebody pulled the shades down over the day and dusk came to sit in the trees like a vulture and everything went gray. Then he had a few shaky hits from a bottle of Don Ricardo special re-posado tequila he kept under the seat of the car and went out across the lawn to inspect the remains of the deer. There was no one around, and the fire he and Marco had made-the smoking fire, not the barbecue, because the meat had to be preserved somehow-wasn't even warm. It was a circle of white ash flecked with cinders, and you could lay your palm on it and feel absolutely nothing. The deer-the unchoice cuts, the parts they hadn't bothered with in the rush to get the blood off their hands and the party under way-dangled from a thin strand of wire like the leavings of some twisted vigilante squad, its head skewed at an impossible angle, backbone gnawed to a blue-black ripple of bone. While he'd been asleep, while he'd been lying up beside the pool as if he'd been gutshot himself, the flies had been busy making a playground of the thing, and he saw that now, but it didn't affect him one way or the other. He didn't even bother to raise a hand and flick them away. It was getting dark. And the meat-the deer, his triumph-had already begun to stink.