Drop City

11

Star didn't have a mantra on this particular morning, no nonsense syllables or song lyrics ricocheting around her head while the sun sang in the windows over the sink and thirty-two fresh-cracked and beaten eggs fluffed in the pan. Or pans. Four of them, cast-iron, black as char-four pans, four burners, all balky. Posters climbed the walls, four Beatles, three Youngbloods, five Rolling Stones. Basil, rosemary, tarragon and lemongrass. Clay pots. A big spill of green. She was crumbling goat cheese over each of the pans, the fragrance rising, the spatula working, fold and stir, fold and stir. At her elbow, the chopping block, and this morning it had a wet sheen to it, the residue of the tomatoes, peppers and onions she and Merry had diced while Lydia squeezed oranges and Maya pulled biscuits from the oven. On the table, the tin plates were stacked high and the silverware awaited the rush in two big plastic tubs that had once held Blue Bonnet margarine. For napkins, there was a roll of paper towels, just like at Camp Minewa.

Numbers were important this morning, that's what it was-she was into numbers, two dogs stretched out on the floor, four women in the kitchen (and she wasn't going to call them _chicks,__ because that was just stupid, that was demeaning and belittling, no matter what Ronnie said), two goats under the tree, forty-three people lined up for breakfast and one sun, fat and glowing, making a magical thing of the flat black grid of the screen door. She scrambled the eggs, one pan, two pans, three pans, four, the scent of the onions competing with the biscuits until the whole room was dense with it and Jiminy stuck his head in the door. “Ready yet?” he wanted to know. “One more minute,” she said, and she loved this, this place and this moment, more than she'd loved anything in her life, “sixty short tiny little expiring seconds-you can start counting them off on your fingers.”

To Merry, at her shoulder, she said, “Cats and chicks, whoever invented that-I mean, those terms? Isn't it stupid? I mean cats are predatory, they're tough and-”

“Unreliable?” Merry said, leaning in with a smile and the crudely rolled, fat-in-the-middle joint they'd been sharing. She held it to Star's lips while Star plied the spatula and finessed the pans. “Always catting around? Spraying the furniture? Sharpening their claws?”

“Right, that's what I mean. They name sports teams after cats, the Tigers, the Nittany Lions, but what are chicks? Little fluffy helpless things that come out of eggs.”

“But cute, right?”

“I don't want to be cute.”

Merry was cutting bread into inch-thick slices. Her hair was involved with her hands, the cutting board, and she whipped it back with a flick of her neck. “What do you want to be, then-tough?”

The eggs tumbled out of the pans and into a matching pair of big fluted ceramic bowls lovingly fabricated by Harmony and Alice, Drop City's resident potters. Star shifted her face away from the swirl of steam and called out, “It's ready!” then tuned back in. “Yeah, sure-I'll settle for tough. It's a whole lot better than helpless. Or predatory, maybe. Predatory's even better.”

“Like a cat?”

But that was too much, and they were both giggling and rubbing at their eyes and the suddenly itching tips of their noses as they served up eggs, first to Jiminy, and then to all the rest of their brothers and sisters, as Drop City and special guests filed by, tin plates in hand. Jiminy was almost always first in line because he was the hungriest, skinny as a concentration camp survivor but he could out-eat anybody Star had ever seen, including her brother Sam, who played left tackle on the high school football team and wore size fourteen shoes. Two total strangers were next in line, and then it was Reba and Alfredo and the kids, Reba looking hard and _old__ in the morning light, her hair like dried weeds, her eyes blunted and lifeless. When she smiled-and she wasn't smiling now, because her lips were two dead things pressed one atop the other-a whole deep rutted floodplain of lines and gouges swallowed her eyes, as if she'd already used up her quotient of joy and from now on out every laugh was going to cost her. “Che doesn't like eggs,” she announced, “-I think he's allergic to albumin. Maybe just give me some toast and I'll smear it with honey or something.”

Che stood there beside her, looking numbed-out, dirty T-shirt, dirty feet, a frizz of wild sun-bleached hair and two eyes that were like blips on a radar screen. “That what you want, baby,” Reba said, bending to him, “-honey and toast?”

“_I__ want honey,” Sunshine said in a voice that was like the scratching of a scab, rough and low, with no real expectation of relief. She was three years old. She stood just behind her brother, close enough so that the bulge of her bare abdomen brushed the hem of his shirt. Her eyes were soft, brimming, hopeless. Star tried to give her a smile, because that was what you were supposed to do when you came across a kid-_And isn't she cute, or is it a he? Or an it?__-but children made her feel awkward and uneasy, unnatural even. How could she, a woman, tell anybody she didn't want children, didn't relate to them, didn't even really like them? Children were nothing but dead weight as far as she was concerned, red-faced yowling little aliens that sucked the life right out of you, and if you ever had any dreams of living for yourself, you could forget them when you had kids, because from then and forever you were just somebody's mother. And what was wrong with birth control? The Pill? Ball all you want, but just don't forget to take your pill every morning. Star didn't get it. She really didn't.

At any rate, she tried for a smile, and Reba gave her an exasperated look before swinging round on her daughter and plucking at her arm with two fingers molded into pincers, just like Star's mother, just like everybody's mother, and that brought her back, way back, as if she were trapped in a home movie. “You eat your eggs and don't you dare start in because I'm in no mood this morning,” Reba hissed, “let me tell you-”

The girl, the kid, Sunshine-there she stood, not in the least moved by the unstated threat. Her brother fell into himself, utterly deranged by the hour, the place, life on this bewildering turned-on planet, and she looked at him as if she didn't recognize him. In her tiny hopeless scratch of a voice, she said: “I want juice.”

“Milk,” Reba responded automatically. People at the back of the line were drifting along in their own planetary orbits, bells, beards, beads, morning jokes, easy soothing rhythms, but even they began to look up to see what the delay was.

The tiny voice: “Juice.”

And now Star intervened, because the juice-well, this was Druid Day, a celebration for the summer solstice, and the juice, fresh-squeezed by Lydia and as pure and sweet and organically salutary as anything you could ever hope to find anywhere in the whole golden sun-struck state of California, was laced with acid, LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide, because everybody at Drop City was going to commune with their inner selves today, all of them, in a concerted effort to raise the consciousness of the planet by one tiny fraction of a degree. “But honey, the juice isn't good today, you won't like it-”

Naked, her legs slightly bowed and her features dwindling in the broad arena of her face, the kid held her ground. “Juice.”

“Oh, shit,” Reba said. “Shit. Fuck. I don't care. Give her juice.”

Lydia was there, Merry, Maya, all looking on with washed-out smiles. They were the chicks, and they were serving breakfast. Tomorrow it would be somebody else's turn, another group of chicks. But this morning it was this group-Star's group-and there was a celebration going on, or about to go on. Star hesitated. “But it's, um-you know, the juice is _special__ today, Reba. Did you forget?”

“Summer solstice.”

“Right.”

“Druid Day.”

She could feel the grass tugging at her body as if she were about to lift off, gravity suddenly nullified as in a dream, the gentlest subtlest most persuasive full-body tug in the world, and then it let go. “Yeah,” she said finally, “and so we, Lydia, I mean, already-”

“-laced the OJ with acid, as if Alfredo and I didn't like _invent__ Druid Day year before last, and where were you then, back home with Mommy and Daddy? You really think I'm that far out that I don't know what I'm doing? You think my kids haven't been turned on?” Reba shot a withering look round the kitchen, then dropped her face to confront her daughter. “See the trouble you're causing? You want juice? Okay, have your juice-but don't you come crying to me if you get onto some kind of kid trip like you did last time-remember last time, when you curled up in that cabinet under the sink and wouldn't come out all day?”

Sunshine didn't nod, didn't say yes or no, didn't even blink.

“Okay,” Reba breathed, straightening up and smiling now, her face a cauldron of tics and wrinkles and wildly constellating moles, “give her the eggs, and _milk__, and if it'll keep her out of my hair because I need a day off sometimes too, believe it or not, just half a glass of the juice, okay?”

Alfredo was deep in conversation with Mendocino Bill-“Hobbits are three feet tall, just the size of kids, because it's a kids' book, so get over it, already”-and he had nothing to say. He turned a blank face to Star and the line shuffled forward. Sunshine took her plate of eggs and her juice over to the table, set them down, and came back for the milk. When Star looked up again, all the seats at the table were taken, and Jiminy was holding forth about something, waving his fork and jerking at the loose strands of his hair as if they'd come to life and started attacking him. Sunshine was nowhere to be seen. Her plate, barely touched, had been pushed to one side. The glass of milk was there beside it, a yellow stripe of cream painted round the rim, but the juice was gone.

Star registered that fact, made a little snapshot of it in her head-crowded table, a surge of tie-dye, saffron eggs on a dull tin plate, forks gleaming, teeth flashing, and no kid present in any way, shape or form, and no juice-but the snapshot never got printed because Verbie was there in line with a girl who could have been her twin except she wore her hair long, and Verbie was introducing her as her sister Angela from Pasadena, and the plates moved, the biscuits retreated, the orange juice dwindled in the stoneware pitcher. Verbie helped herself to a double scoop of eggs, accepted biscuits and a full glass of juice. Star had already had _her__ juice, and she could feel the first crackling charge of it leaping synapses up and down the length of her, and she momentarily tuned out Verbie, who was in the middle of a complicated story about her sister, something about the Whiskey, too many Harvey Wallbangers and a go-go dancer. The sister seethed with joy. This was a story about her, and Verbie was telling it, at breakfast, on Druid Day in Drop City.

“You know, I guess I'll take a full glass too,” the sister said. “It isn't that strong, is it?”

“Two hundred mics,” Verbie said. “Three, at most.”

And who was next? Ronnie, looking chewed-over and cranky. He had his head down and his eyes dodged and darted behind the oversized discs of his sunglasses, _fish,__ but not in a net, little fish, _minnows,__ trapped in a murky aquarium. He took a glass and held it out. “Eggs?” she said, and it was a peace offering. She'd cooked the eggs, and here she was to scoop them up and serve them, the hard-working, self-effacing and dutiful little _chick,__ and what more could anybody ask for?

“Skip the eggs.”

“Toast? Biscuits?” She tried for a smile. “Fresh-baked. By Maya.”

“Just the juice.” He watched her fill the glass. The breakfast roar surged round the room, spilled out the door and into the courtyard. “So where you been the last couple of days?” he said. “I've been looking all over for you.”

She shrugged to show how casual everything was, no big deal, but it wasn't easy to shrug and pour at the same time. Juice dripped down the sides of the glass, puddled on the table. “We were down backpacking round Mount Tam,” she said, “in the redwoods there? It was a trip. It really was.”

“You and Marco, right?”

She nodded.

“Like the night I got my deer-I looked all over for you that night too.” He took the glass from her hand and held it out away from him, the juice foaming like a witches' brew, neon orange and _drip, drip, drip.__ “Just you and Marco, right?”

“Yeah, well I'm sure you had Lydia to comfort you, and what about Merry and that new girl I saw you being all friendly with the other day, what's her name, Premstar-the one that's so tripped-out she can barely talk? I'm sure they must've kept you from feeling too sorry for yourself.”

“Just you and Marco, right?” he repeated.

She just stared at him.

“Okay, fine.” He drank off the juice in a single gulp, snatched the pitcher from the counter and filled the glass back up to the rim. “Don't even talk to me,” he said, and he was saying it over his shoulder, because he was already out the door and into the coruscating light that exploded all around him like colliding stars.

Lydia was sitting on the counter by the sink, gazing off across the room as if she were oblivious to the whole thing-off on her own trip, and don't you confuse your trip with mine-but Merry came round the table and stood there till Star acknowledged her. “What was that all about?”

Star was feeling it, right down to her toes, the first fluttering euphoric rush of the drug. She didn't want hassles, she didn't want possessiveness, jealousy, anger, bad sex and bad feelings-she wanted to let loose and watch the day play itself out, one swollen luminous minute after another. She looked at Merry, and it was as if Merry were underwater, her hair floating in gentle undulations, her face, her eyes, seaweed riding the currents and seahorses too. “I don't know,” she heard herself say, “I guess Pan's having a bad day.”

That was when Lester's face hove into view, big smile, gold in his teeth, his skin as slick and worn as the leather on the speed bag Sam had hanging in the garage back at home. His eyes were huge, as if he'd been groping in the dark his whole life-and what were they, a lemur's eyes, an owl's-and his hair was teased out till it stood straight up off his head like Jimi Hendrix's. Franklin was with him, and they both had their shoulders hunched, as if they were stalking through a rainstorm. “Hey, Star, Merry, what's happening?” Lester said. “Just wondering if, uh, you might have some of that _juice__ left for a couple of hermits? Maybe some eggs too-wouldn't some eggs be nice, Franklin?”

“Sure would,” Franklin said.

Star couldn't seem to summon a response-try though she might, no response was forthcoming, not right then, not a yes or a no or a see you in hell first, nothing. Zero. She was drawing blanks. Sky Dog had moved on, as had Dewey and most of the others, but Lester and Franklin had persisted, though everybody treated them like lepers. They hadn't showed up for a meal in weeks, and hardly anyone ever saw them. But they were there, and everyone was aware of it, whether they pretended differently or not. Go out to the parking lot, and there was the Lincoln, dusted over till it could have been some spontaneous excrescence of the earth itself. Take a stroll at night, and the music came at you from the back house, deep-bottomed and mysterious. And every once in a while you'd look up from what you were doing, and there they'd be out on their tumbledown porch, stripped to the waist and passing a joint or a cigarette or a jug of wine from one adhesive hand to another.

Merry spoke up first. “I don't think so,” she said.

Lester turned to Franklin, as if to interpret for him. “You hear that, Franklin? The girl doesn't think so. What do you say to that?”

Franklin stood a head taller than Lester. He was wearing a wide-collared polka-dot shirt, yellow on black. He had bags under his eyes, as if he'd been up for a hundred nights straight, and he was letting his processed hair grow out in reddish wisps. He looked at Lester when he spoke. “I don't say nothin'.”

“Well, I say it's a bunch of racist hippie-dippy shit,” Lester said, swinging round on them. “What's a matter, us niggers ain't good enough for you?”

“Fuck you, Lester,” Merry said, and there were faces at the door now, people jerked up short as if they had leashes fastened round their throats. And where was Marco? In Santa Rosa, with Norm, getting supplies.

Lester thought this was funny. “Fuck me, huh? There's peace and love for you.”

_Irate,__ that was a word, wasn't it? Star was irate-first Ronnie, and now this. “Look,” she said, stepping into the breach, “you know perfectly well this has nothing to do with whether you're black or white or, or-”

“Red or yellow?”

Somehow, she had the spatula in her hand. Or no, it was the serving spoon, a stick of dried-out tessellated overcooked pine, and she was waving it like a conductor's baton. “Norm said-”

He threw it back at her, but softly, softly, his voice a whisper: “ 'Norm said.' Listen to her. Norm didn't say shit. Norm said everybody's welcome here, and if you're so hot on niggers, you tell me how many more brothers you got hiding out there in the woods just in case we do decide to move on out of here one of these days? Huh? How many? Ten? Fifteen?”

She could feel her heart going into overdrive. She dropped the spoon on the table and backed away from it. “I'm not going to argue with you, I'm not going to get involved in your trip at all, because you can just do what you want and I don't care, I really don't.”

“What about _Marco__-he care?”

And now she said it too: “Fuck you, Lester. Just go fuck yourself.”

But Lester was pouring juice, Lester was scooping up eggs and biscuits. He took enough for three people, mounded it up on a plate till it was spilling over and handed it to Franklin, then served himself, and no one said a word. One scoop of eggs, two, three. He took his time, and he wore a tight little smile on his face that made her feel nothing but sad and ashamed. Had it really come to this? Were they fighting over _food?__ Or was it something else, something ugly and dirty, something that made Drop City the biggest joke in the world?

So go ahead and define your bad trip, because here it was. She just turned and walked out of the kitchen, through the meeting room and out the front door, no eggs for her, no washing up with her sisters, no dancing and joy and flowers in her hair, no bonding with the clan and letting the acid strip her clean, inside and out. She crossed the pale dirt drive to the treehouse, climbed the ladder and pulled it up after her, and she lay there on Marco's sleeping bag, staring up into the leaves till she could identify each and every one of them individually and her heart slowed through all the gears from overdrive on down to neutral.

Later-it might have been five minutes or five hours, she had no idea-she pushed herself up and looked around her. There was a dragonfly perched on the rail, a single bolt of electric color like a driven blue nail, and beneath it, a built-in shelf aflame with the spines of the books Marco had been collecting-_Soul on Ice, Ficciones, Cat's Cradle, Trout Fishing in America, Steppenwolf__-and a Coleman lantern in a shade of green so deep it cut a hole through the wall. The books were incandescent, burning from the inside out. She picked one up almost at random, for the color and the feel of it, and she opened it on words that tacked across the page like ships on a poisoned sea. She couldn't make sense of them, didn't want to, hated in that instant the whole idea of books, literature, _stories__-because stories weren't true, were they? — but the books reminded her of Marco, and so they were good and honest and valuable, and she stroked the familiar object in her hand as if it were a cat or a pet rabbit, stroked it until the paper became fur and the living warmth of it penetrated her fingertips.

Small sounds came to her, intimate sounds, as if she'd lifted out of herself and become an omnipresence-a cough, a giggle, a sigh, the faint soughing of Jiminy's breath catching in the back of his throat as he rocked against Merry's sweat-slick skin in the downstairs bedroom of the main house a hundred yards away. She could hear the leaves respiring and the sap creeping through the branches in the way of blood, slow blood, blood like paste. Termites whispered in the duff, the hooves of the goats grew and expanded with a sharpedged sound that teemed and popped in her ears. And then the book, the one in her hand, rematerialized in a ripple of color, pink and yellow and a single human eye staring out of the page, and she knew it at once, Julio Cortázar's _Blow-up and Other Stories.__ It was a book Ronnie had turned her onto, back in New York, and she in turn had bought it for Marco-there was the imprint of the secondhand book shop in Sebastopol, FREEWHEELIN__' BOOKS__, 25¢, right there in a faded pink blur on the inside page. All right. At least she had that, and though the words still wouldn't cooperate, though they grouped and regrouped and pitched and bucked across the page and every mouth in the forest buzzed in her ears with tiny voices that kept burning and screaming out their testimony till it was all just a blur of white noise, she could dream the stories, dream of the axolotl and the man who kept vomiting up bunnies, and she did, until she had to pull out all the books, one after another, and let the stories infest her.

And then she was down out of the tree, barefoot in the biting leaves, scattering an armload of books like glossy seeds, because that's where they'd found them, she and Marco, on a dense hot sweating afternoon that went off like a time bomb, and where was he now when she needed him? He was with Norm, she reminded herself, that's where he was. In Santa Rosa. Getting supplies. He'd promised to drop his acid at the same time she dropped hers, so they could ride the wave together, and she saw him doing that as the van lurched down the road and Norm bellowed along with the radio in a voice that was like a long sustained shriek from the house of pain, but Santa Rosa wasn't Timbuktu, and they should have been back by now, shouldn't they?

With a sweep of her instep, she interred the books beneath the clawlike leaves. They'd smashed his guitar, torn his clothes, eviscerated the books, and now she'd laid them to rest again, but carefully, carefully, with proper obsequies and all due respect. New books, with fiercer colors and truer stories, would sprout up to replace the tattered ones, a whole living library growing out of the duff beneath the tree, free books, books for the taking, books you could pluck like berries. Or something like that. She lingered there a moment, struggling for focus, then found herself drifting toward the main house, a knot of people sunk into the front porch, music rising up out of unseen depths, joy and sisterhood, but it didn't feel right, not yet, and she struck off into the woods instead. Here she was on her own-on her own trip-the earth gripping her feet like custom-made shoes, _hello and goodbye, hello and goodbye,__ and the trees giving way like a parting crowd all along the path down to the river.

The air was thick, the sun tortured the water. Birds dropped like meteors out of the sky. She sat on the bank, listened to what the current said, dipped her fingers and her feet, and still she didn't feel right. She couldn't seem to catch her breath, that's what it was, as if she'd overdosed on espresso or taken one too many white crosses in a long streaming night behind the wheel and the Rockies rising up out of the wastelands like a big gray impenetrable wall that could have stopped whole armies. Was she afraid? She was. Afraid of nothing and everything, of things that weren't there and things that shifted and mutated just beyond the range of her vision. She closed her eyes and watched the images play across the dark stage of her eyelids in a careening spastic dance she couldn't slow or stop.

She'd been with Marco the day they trashed his things-out in the field behind the main house, where he was laying the pipe for the leach lines. She'd come out with a pitcher of Kool-Aid, barefoot, in shorts and a peasant blouse with blue quetzal birds stitched into the bodice she'd picked up at a secondhand store in New Mexico-a blouse that made her smile even now to think of it-and she'd sat watching the way the muscles gathered in his back every time he bent to fling a shovel of gravel into the ditch. He said she was beautiful. She said he was beautiful himself. “So we're a mutual admiration society,” he said, flinging gravel. There was another shovel standing there all by itself, thrust right up out of a mound of loose stones as if it were a gift of nature. “Want me to help?” she asked, pulling the shovel from the gravel with a sound like grinding teeth, then striking a pose for him, one bare foot poised on the edge of the blade, both arms digging at the haft.

“Barefooted?” he said, straightening up to wipe the sweat from his face with a wadded-up paisley scarf that doubled as a headband. “You must be one tough woman.”

And she was. For the better part of an hour she worked beside him, pitching and thrusting, her movements matched to his, the gravel rising in the ditch like a gray tributary cutting across the dun chop of the field, and she could feel it in her hamstrings, her arms and lower back, and her feet-her feet especially, which couldn't have ached more if they'd been pounded with bricks the whole time-but she never let up. She wanted his praise, and more: she wanted to outdo him.

“All right,” he said finally, “all right-Christ, you're like a demon here. Alfredo was right.”

“About what?”

He looked off across the field to where the trees staggered down to the river. “I don't know. You want to take a swim?”

The water was a living thing, animated in every rill and ripple, and she entered it in a smooth knifing motion that started with her prayer-bound palms elevated over the arch of her neck and ended with a fillip of her ankles and feet. Marco's splash was muffled by the sound of her own, the cold immediate shock, and then they were racing to the far bank, her crawl against his butterfly. He came on strong at the end, pounding the surface to a froth with the spread wings of his arms and the dull hammering explosions of his kick, but in her mind she was back home at the lake, thirteen years old all over again and the strongest swimmer in her age group, out to the raft and back, and she never lost once, not all that summer. She touched the rocks on the far side and turned to face him. Two beats, three, and he was there, naked against her in the flutter of the current, and he took hold of her as if he'd been chasing her all his life.

Later, when the sun wore a groove down the middle of the river and fell off into the trees, they swam back in tandem, pulled on their clothes and started back up the hill. Her feet glided over the dirt of the path. She felt clean and new, the way she always did after a swim, her muscles stretched taut and then stroked and massaged till they were like the veal her mother used to pound for cordon bleu, first one side, then the other, _whack, whack, whack.__ They'd made love in a cool dimple of grass on a sandbar, Marco taking his time, using his tongue and his fingers to pry each soft gasp from her, and she arching her back, taking him in, making love to him every bit as much as he was making love to her. Then they lay there in the grass a long while, watching the cobalt sky and a single hawk on fire with the sun, and then Marco nuzzled her, and she rolled herself on top of him, every square millimeter of her skin lit from within, and she thought of a film she'd seen on TV one late night when she was in high school and her parents were asleep and dead to the world-_Hiroshima, Mon Amour,__ that was it, a French movie-and the thrill it gave her to see the two lovers just like that, skin to skin, her breasts to his chest, their loins pressed tight, their legs, their feet. She didn't feel dirty. She felt clean. Pure. Felt as if she'd never lived in her parents' house, never gone to religious instruction or holy communion or listened in red-faced horror as Mrs. Montgomery took the seventh grade girls aside and told them about the penis and how the blood flowed to it to make it erect and what that would mean to them if they couldn't keep their knees together till they were married. She didn't think of Ronnie. Didn't think of the teepee cat. Didn't think of anything at all.

Nobody saw anything. Nobody knew anything. But she came up from the river with Marco, her hair trailing wet all the way to the small of her back, her hand swinging in the grip of his and nothing but pleasure and peace in the world, and there was the guitar, the strings crawling loose in the leaf litter and the fretboard splintered into glittering shards that were no better than souvenirs now. They crossed the road and saw what looked like the remains of a rummage sale laid out beneath the tree, his books, his clothes, even his toothbrush. Marco never said a word. He didn't stoop to examine the books or try to reassemble the pages or tape the covers back together-all that would come later. He just turned and started for the back house, his shoulders set, arms rigid at his sides, and she didn't say anything either-or maybe she did, maybe she gasped out some crumpled little wad of nonsense like _Who?__ or _Why?__-but she followed along behind him.

Sky Dog was out on the porch, and Sky Dog saw them coming. What he did was get up out of the swaybacked kitchen chair he'd been sitting in and call out to somebody inside the house-to Lester, Franklin, Dewey-but no one answered the call, and now Marco was coming up the steps in a furious headlong rush and Sky Dog, all hands and extruded eyes, was backing away from him. “I got no problem with you,” he said, narrowing himself in the corner, ready to flinch and duck and throw out a warding arm. Marco went straight at him.

She didn't know how long it went on, but there was never any doubt as to the outcome. It took Alfredo, Jiminy and Mendocino Bill combined to pull Marco off Sky Dog, who went down in the first rush and never got up again. Standing there in the dirt with a cored-out shaft of sunlight hammering at her head, she could hear the impact of each blow, relentless, bone on flesh, bone on bone, and it was almost as if Marco was giving him a massage too, very thorough, very diligent, with special attention to the head and throat. But this was no massage, this was murder. Or the closest thing to it. There was blood where there wasn't supposed to be blood, on the dried-out floorboards, on the bleached walls, imbued in the fabric of Sky Dog's denim vest and smeared like finger paint across the cavity of his breastbone. Her own blood was racing. She hated this, hated it, but she couldn't take her eyes away and she never once called out for help.

But that was then, and then didn't count for much.

Now was what counted, and she flashed open her eyes on the nodding trees, the festival of the river, a pair of kingfishers swooping low. It was just a day, a kind of garment you could crawl inside of and use for your own purposes, and it was brightening now, brightening till all the colors stood out in relief against the shadows gathered along the far bank. Numbers, she told herself, numbers, not stories. Two birds, one river, three hundred and sixteen trees, seven thousand wildflowers, one earth, one sky: there was nothing to be afraid of here, nothing to get hung about. _Strawberry fields forever.__ She pushed herself up and started back.

12

Norm had a pocket watch that had been in the family for three generations, a tarnished silver disc on a tarnished silver chain he kept tucked away in the front flap of his overalls. By Marco's count, he must have consulted it at least once every thirty seconds since they left the ranch, his free hand draped casually over the wheel, the radio giving back static and the van skating through the curves on River Road as if the usual forces in operation-gravity, velocity, wind resistance-had been suspended in honor of the day. “What I want,” he was shouting, “is to coordinate this so we're in tune with everybody else, I mean, right on the stroke-and don't call me crazy because it's a karmic thing, is all. And for the rush. I mean, what's the sense of tripping if you're not having a blast? Am I right?”

He didn't need Marco to tell him he was, but Marco told him anyway.

“All right. So ten o'clock is what we're shooting for, one cup of OJ for me, one for you, then we pick up the stuff for the feast-cream soda, that's what I'm into, man, I really _crave__ cream soda, especially when I'm tripping-and then we're back like by eleven-thirty, twelve, you know, and let the party commence, longest day, man, longest day. Whew! Can you believe it?”

They'd just pulled into the parking lot at the supermarket, life beating around them, kids on bikes, old men crawling out of pickup trucks like squashed bugs, planes overhead, dogs scratching, mothers pushing shopping carts as if they were going off to war, when Norm's watch gave out. It froze at five of ten, the hands immobilized as if they'd been soldered in place. “I can't believe it,” he muttered, tapping at the crystal. He put the watch to his ear, tapped it again. “I just wound it this morning.”

“Well, there you go,” Marco told him, “too much attention to detail. Go with the flow.”

Norm looked puzzled. He squinted at Marco out of the depths of his walled-in eyes as if he couldn't quite place him. He murmured something unintelligible, some sort of prayer or chant, and then, out of nowhere, he said, “You know, not that it's any of my business, but just out of curiosity-you've been getting it on with Star, haven't you?”

The question took Marco by surprise-_Star? Who was talking about Star?__-and right away, it filled him with suspicion. He looked at Norm, at the feverish brown eyes dodging behind the distorting lenses, and wondered, What does he care? Was he even paying attention? And if he was, what was he really asking? As chief guru and presiding genius of the ranch, he recycled women pretty efficiently-at one time or another practically all the Drop City chicks had slept with him. Lydia had gone around for a week talking about his lingam and what a perfect fit it was, Verbie called him “Pasha Norm” behind his back and Star-well, Marco couldn't speak for Star, but from what he knew about her and what he felt for her, he doubted she and Norm had got it on, but anything was possible. Of course, either way it was all right, because everybody was enlightened and the flesh existed to be celebrated, didn't it? If anybody was jealous, if any of the usual bourgeois hangups festered beneath the surface of the long irenic dream that was Drop City, Marco never saw it. But then he wasn't all that observant, as he'd be the first to admit. “I think we're really attuned to one another,” he said, and his voice seemed to be caught in his throat. “Star and me.”

Norm, leaning in close: “You mean like in a spiritual way? Agape instead of eros?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you balling her?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“A practical one.” Norm's breath was stale, or worse than stale-rotten. The teeth were rotting in his head and his head was rotting on his body. He didn't believe in dentists-only shamans-because it wasn't caries that caused your teeth to fall out, but the evil spirits of dentists gone down, and he had the gold in his mouth to prove it.

“What,” Marco said, and he felt his face flush, “-you interested?”

Norm shifted his weight in the seat, gave a shrug. “She's a groovy chick.”

Sure she was. Everybody was groovy, every_thing__ was groovy. This was the world they were making, this was the new age, free and enlightened and without hangups, climb every mountain, milk every goat. “Yeah,” Marco heard himself say, “yeah, she is.”

There was a moment's silence, the van's engine ticking off to sleep somewhere beneath and behind them. Norm made no move to get out. He pushed the glasses up his nose and they slid back down. He sighed. Lifted his hand as if in extenuation, then dropped it. “You know, there's something I never told you,” he said. “Or anybody, really, except for Alfredo. And it's not good, not good at all.” He tapped the watch again, then gave it a rueful glance, as if it were the source of all the world's sorrow and misery.

“What do you mean?”

“They don't like heads in this town, is what I mean-in this whole fucking fascist county, for that matter, and you better pay up now and worship the rules and regulations or you are _fucked,__ believe me. They don't want to see people living in harmony with the earth and each other-they just want Daddy, Mommy, Junior and Sis, all shoved into a tract house with a new blacktop driveway and a lawn that looks like it's been painted right on the dirt.”

“You having trouble with the county?”

“Bet your ass I am.”

“Board of Health? Fire and Safety?”

Bent over the watch, his head lolling weakly on his shoulders as if it were floating on the upended mass of his hair, Norm just nodded. “Bunch of shit,” he said finally, but all the animation was gone from his voice. “I didn't sign on for this, no way in hell.”

They sat there staring bleakly out the bug-spattered windshield on the fruits of life in the land of plenty, _Wonder Bread, Skippy Peanut Butter, Oleo Margarine,__ and while Marco sucked in his breath and idly traced a finger up and down the face of the glove box, Norm heaved a sigh and filled him in. The situation was worse than he'd suspected. Far worse. The county health and sanitation people had been looking to close up Drop City for over a year now, and the fire and building inspectors were close on their heels. Norm had been in and out of court all through the past fall and into the winter; lately, he'd been using the summonses to light the fire in the incinerator out back, because he was through with all that, fed up to his ears, so pissed off and rubbed raw he just wanted to give it all up and let the bureaucratic pencil-pushing bastards take the ranch and pave it over if that's what they wanted. And it got worse still: the county had ordered him to clear the property of all persons and all substandard dwellings or face a fine of five hundred dollars a day. “Like as if I was a slumlord or something,” he said, staring out the window of the van on a row of piggybacked shopping carts and the bold bright ads for detergent, meat and liquor that crowded the windows of the supermarket.

“What's so bad that we can't fix it?” Marco said. “The leach lines are in, aren't they? Shouldn't that make them happy?” He was talking just to hear himself, just to say something. He knew the way it worked. Nobody wanted a free-form community in their midst, because free-form meant anarchy, it meant a cordillera of trash a mile high and human shit in the woods, it meant Sky Dog and Lester and a guitar smashed like an eggshell-even if Drop City were on a mountaintop in Tibet the people in charge would steer their overworked yaks right up the face of the cliffs to shut them down. And maybe that wasn't all bad, maybe somebody somewhere had to put the brakes on.

“They've been garnishing my account at the B. of A.” Norm was watching a miniskirted blonde lift brown-paper bags from a cart and set them with soft precision in the trunk of the low-slung Cutlass in the next row over. She had two kids with her-a baby with its bare fat legs dangling from the slots cut in the cart, and an older kid of five or six who gave them an even stare and then flashed the peace sign. “Jesus, look at that kid, the baby, I mean,” Norm said. “He looks like Alfred Hitchcock, doesn't he? But I guess all babies look like Alfred Hitchcock. Or Mao. Maybe Mao. Maybe that's who he looks like.”

Marco didn't have anything to say. He was calculating, pluses on one side, minuses on the other. He'd gotten too comfortable, and he should have known better. He'd settled in, built himself a treehouse, dug the leach lines, found a girl-and here the image of Star, smiling as if in some faded yearbook photo, rose up to take hold of him-but it was all so ephemeral, and nothing lasted, whether you fought for it or not. Sky Dog was gone, that was a plus, and it was just a matter of time before Lester followed him. Alfredo he could take or leave, and Pan could be an irritant, but at least he could be controlled. Not that it mattered. Not with the authorities involved. It was over, and if he had any sense at all he'd dump what he'd accumulated in the past five weeks and hit the road.

Norm shifted around in the seat to face him. “People would say to me, 'Norm, you can't just let everybody in because that's going to ruin it for the rest of us,' but what are you going to do? Everybody wants out of this fucking consumer-freak society and I'm not going to stand in their way, I mean, nobody elected me God.” Norm pushed the glasses up the bridge of his nose, and they slid back down. It was getting hot in the cab. “Besides, and I don't have to tell you this, man, if you start to like _limit__ the community, then it becomes static, like the Shakers or the Amish or whatever. They die out. Just like that. You've got to have an open community, and in the purest Gurdjieffian sense you let God be the selector, you know what I mean?”

“What about Sky Dog? Or Lester?”

“What about them?”

“Oh, come on, Norm, are you kidding me? — they bring the whole thing down. And there's a million more just like them, and they keep coming till the county drives a stake through your heart or the whole scene collapses. Or even Jiminy. Or Star, or me, or any of us. It just doesn't work unless you have some kind of standards-”

“You want rules, go work in the bank. Which brings me to my point here-motherfuckers are into me for something like three thousand dollars already because of these ridiculous-do I want to say contemptible? Yeah, _contemptible__-fines, and all that money is from the insurance settlement. Get to the end of it and there's nothing left, see what I mean, man? It's over. All she wrote. Good night and goodbye.”

The moment drifted past them. On the radio it was nothing but bright little bubbles of pop trash, “I Got You Babe” filtered through a thunderstorm of static and speakers that were already rattling though the van couldn't have been more than six months old.

“That's why I bought this vehicle,” Norm said, as if Marco had been thinking aloud. “Spend some of my own money on something _I__ want-or we all want, not to mention we all can use-instead of just giving it up to the dickheads with the slide rules and the building codes they must've fucking committed to memory. But fuck it. This is the day, isn't it? Aren't we on a serious mission here to score cream soda?”

They were. And Marco hadn't just come along for the ride-he was building a corral for the horse, a pin-headed, wild-eyed, fat-flanked monster of a thing that didn't seem to appreciate concepts like two-lane blacktop and cement trucks with bad brakes, and he'd been planning on picking up a roll of barbed wire at the hardware store-on Norm's dollar-but that all seemed pretty useless now. He ducked his head, depressed suddenly, and scratched at his beard, wondering vaguely if he'd caught ringworm from the big orange cat that lived atop the refrigerator. He'd wanted to build something-he was twenty-four years old and past the age of butting his head up against the establishment-but it wasn't going to happen at Drop City. He felt heavy all of a sudden, immensely heavy, as if he could crush the car beneath him and plunge down through the blacktop and into the ancient rivers that ran under the earth. He wanted to kick something, wanted to get out and clear his lungs or maybe his tear ducts, and he had his fingers on the door handle when Norm grabbed him by the wrist.

Hot in that van. And Norm: the black clunky plastic-frame glasses, gold teeth flashing in his grin like a prospector's dream. He was holding up the thermos as if it were the solution to every problem they'd ever known, the key, the prize, the grail brought back home on a silver salver. Marco relaxed, accepted the smudged white cup with the screw tread worked into the rim. “One for you,” Norm said, pouring till the cup would hold no more. “And one,” he said, tipping the thermos back so that the white plastic aperture was swallowed up in the dark accumulation of his beard, “for me.”

On the way back, Marco didn't feel stoned at all, and then abruptly he did. There was no tingling in his extremities, no dislocation, no sudden infusion of light or loss of personality-it came over him as if he'd been draped in a blanket, swaddled and pinioned and laid out in a crib, as if it were night and he was dreaming somebody else's dreams for them. Norm, for once, was quiet. And Marco-he couldn't have spoken if he'd wanted to. He wasn't in the front seat of a VW van hurtling down a country road with the river trailing along behind him like a bright fluttering banner, but in a room, in a farmhouse or a rent-controlled apartment maybe, and the room was swollen with inherited and hoarded things, sideboards, stuffed chairs, a chest of drawers, quilts, antimacassars, bibelots, bric-a-brac. There was a bed in the room-a four-poster swamped with blankets-and in the bed, an old man, wasted and white, with a nose that climbed up out of his face as if it didn't belong to him. It was a conventional scene, a deathbed scene, somebody's future or past, utterly conventional, but for the single incongruity of a pair of snowshoes fastened to the wall above the bed. The conscious remnant of his mind drew him back: Was this a photo he'd seen somewhere? A scene from childhood? TV? Or was he outside of himself and powerless to get back in? That was the thing with acid. He didn't like acid, had never liked acid, even when he liked drugs a whole lot more than he liked them now.

Norm murmured something-a snatch of nonsense, or no, he was singing, soft and low, lyrics like a private language-and here they were again, under the trees and then out in the open, moving through the sensory world as if they owned it. “You feel anything yet?” Norm wanted to know. “Because I don't feel a thing, or maybe just like the _beginning__ of something, but what I'm wondering is did they forget to juice our juice or what?”

Marco was about to tell him he was feeling plenty himself, feeling possessed almost, feeling stacked up and wrung out, but he never got the chance-another vision sprang right up alongside the road and flung itself in front of the van, a huge dark blur of motion that wasn't a hallucination at all but the real and actual thing that was suddenly defeating Norm's white clenched hands and seriously dislocating his intentions. What was it? The horse. Charley Horse. The very animal, laying claim to the road and shivering its head stupidly as Norm ran his hands helplessly round the wheel and the van did a kind of stock-car trick on two thin wailing tires.

There were two lanes to that road, and the other one, the oncoming lane, instantly became a place of violent contraction, Norm's sidelong van and a pickup truck featuring a pair of startled faces, one male, one female, closing fast on the same space. Thunder and lightning: the van skewed violently to the left and Marco saw the horse loom up on his right before he felt the jolt of the first collision, the one that swatted the animal off its feet with the open palm of a big steel hand, and then the more substantial one, the one that screamed with contorted metal. The pickup truck-there was an old man in a feed cap at the wheel, his face fallen away into a deep pit of astonishment and outrage-caught the van just athwart the passenger's side door and then shook itself loose and continued on into a tree, into several trees, and the horse lost all its legs and then found them again, even as Norm's van rebounded from the collision, described a long slow arc and came to rest in the center of the road.

“Okay,” Norm was saying, “okay, everything's okay,” as if he'd planned it, as if the whole thing were just another stunt he'd orchestrated to enliven the day. He was bleeding from a gash under one eyebrow, a bright reservoir of blood pooling in the orbit of his eye before draining off into his beard. His glasses had been snapped across the spine and the windshield featured a spidery mandala set in the glass like an ornament, and how clever of those German engineers, Marco was thinking, how clever-but shouldn't there be one on his side too?

Marco was all right, or that was his first impression, anyway. No blood, no broken bones. His right shoulder had a certain rigidity to it where he'd been flung against the dash three times in succession, and the acid seemed to be boiling up in his veins till he could hear the sizzle of it in his ears, but he was all right. All right, and out of the car-kicking open one very reluctant door and setting both his feet on the pavement, which hardly seemed to be moving at all. The horse-Charley Horse-was just standing there, trembling all over as if he'd been hosed down with ice water, Norm was a statue at the wheel of the van, and the old man-and his old wife-were camped out in the woods twenty feet from the road. Everything was still.

Until the next car-a monster of a thing, a Buick, or maybe it was a Pontiac, staggered in the rear by the weight of the blue-flecked fiberglass runabout it was hauling-came shearing round the curve and Charley Horse bucked twice, put his head down and tried to leap it. Marco heard himself shouting, but he was shouting over the adrenal surge and the successive rippling shore-battering waves of peaking acid, and no other living thing seemed to hear or heed him, least of all the horse. Which immediately laid its thousand pounds of horseflesh across the crumpling hood of the Buick-or no, it was a Pontiac, because there was the chrome _V__ with the stoic chief welded into it-and began a slow futile drumming of its hooves against the fenders on either side. The boat was part of the act now too-it rode up the back of the trailer, then relaxed an instant before gracefully spinning across the road till it came to rest against the bumper of the van.

Somebody was cursing. The sound of it arose from between the clenched teeth of the crash like an incantation, the same three monosyllables repeated over and over with increasing vehemence till the curses were screams and Marco was moving toward them through a scrim of what was real and what might have been. What did he see? A woman pinned behind the wheel of the Pontiac, her hair in curlers, her face distorted. Charley Horse had managed to tear himself open on the fulcrum of the hood ornament, and he'd collapsed the roof. Marco was fighting the drug, willing his mind to retake control of his body. He ducked away from the horse's hooves, from the horse's hundred buckets of blood and its looping gray intestines, and forced open the back door of the Pontiac. He had the woman-one long shriek of a woman-by the shoulders and dragged her into the backseat as if she were a piece of furniture, and then he had her out of the car and onto the shifting pavement. She wore her mouth like a badge, all that noise and violence, and he stood beside her, an arm round her shoulders, while Charley Horse thrashed himself off the car and slid across the shoulder of the road like a slick black sea lion leaving the shore for good. This time the horse didn't get up again.

“Marco!” Norm was shouting. “Marco, do something! Shit! What is this, blood?” He was standing in the road now too, and so were the old man and the old lady, squinting into the light as if they'd come in late to a movie and were trying to find their seats. Norm looked strange without his glasses-inhuman, or no: non-human. He'd found a rag in the car-a torn T-shirt that must have belonged to one of the children-and he pressed it to his face to stanch the bleeding. “Fucking horse,” he muttered, and there it was, on its side and heaving in the ditch.

“I just hope for your sake, mister,” the old man was saying-and there _he__ was, like a pop-up doll at Norm's elbow, with a white strained face and teeth that didn't seem to fit in his head (borrowed teeth, and that was a concept)-“I just hope you got insurance is all I got to say.”

Next thing Marco knew, he was running. Half a mile down the streaming blacktop to the Drop City turnoff, and then up the rutted dirt road to where the main house stood rippling against the trees. “Get help!” Norm had shouted in his face. “Get Alfredo! Get anybody!” And suddenly Marco was running, heaving himself down the road in a kind of pure white-hot acid-fueled panic, his boots flapping first at the pavement, then the dust. Somebody, anybody! He vaulted a rotting fence and pounded across an open field, thinking he'd better calm himself, better do whatever it was people were expected to do in a situation like this-shake it off, wake up, take responsibility-but the drug wouldn't let him. It was in his throat, in his head, it was strangling his heart, eating his lungs.

There was nobody on the front porch, nobody in the front room. The music was there, though, playing all on its own, loud, raucous, a clash of metal like a whole marching band falling down the stairs, and why didn't he recognize the tune? He saw plates of half-eaten food perched on the arms of chairs, the still-wet chopsticks like evil insects crouched over a splay of rice, beans, tofu; he saw record jackets come to ground like wind-swirled refuse, and in the back corner of the bookshelf, the black glistening puddle of a record working its way round the turntable. And that was strange, the music living a life of its own in a house with no human occupants. It was like a ghost story. A fairy tale. Nobody home and the porridge still warm on the table. The meeting room presented more of the same. Ditto the kitchen. He looked up and the square-headed orange tom looked down on him from its perch atop the refrigerator.

And then, beneath the music-or threaded through it-he heard the human noise in the backyard, a wailing, a hush, then a clamor of voices, repeating now, slight return: wailing, a hush, clamor of voices. He took himself out the screen door and there they were, the whole tribe, gathered round the swimming pool and what appeared to be a very wet cloth doll stretched out on the flagstone coping. That was when the acid let go of him just long enough to record the scene: it was one of the kids, one of Reba's kids, and Jiminy was pumping at the kid's chest like a Marine Corps medic on the evening news and everybody else was wringing their hands and jumping in and out of the green murk that was the pool. He saw Ronnie inflate his cheeks and go down, and then Alfredo bobbing to the surface in a maelstrom of hair. “What's wrong?” he wanted to know, snatching at the first person his hand led him to, but he was so full of Norm and the accident he didn't recognize her, not at first.

“It's Che,” Merry told him. She was naked to the waist, shivering. She wore body paint, red and blue tendrils striating her limbs like extruded veins. Her eyes didn't seem to be in her head-they were just floating there, three inches to the left of her face. “He drowned, or he fell in or something, and we can't-I mean, nobody knows where _Sunshine__ is.”

A shriek cut the air, every mother's nightmare. “Sunshine!” Reba wailed, drawing out the last syllable till it caught in the back of her throat. “Sunshine! Come out, baby, come out! It's not funny!” She flung herself across the yard, beat at the stiff brush of the chaparral with angry hands. She was puffed up, furious, just coming on to boil. “It's not a game. Come out, goddamnit! Come out, you hear me, you little bitch!”

“She's not in the pool,” somebody said, and in the confusion, Marco couldn't see who it was.

“The river, what about the river?” He glanced up to register Verbie-she was perched on the wet coping, her eyes dilated, hair glued to her head. “Did anybody search the river?”

A look of helplessness swept over them, lost eyes, mouths agape, the slumped shoulders and agitated hands, and how could anybody be expected to do anything at a time like this? It was Druid Day. They were wiped, all of them. They didn't want to save children, they wanted to _be__ children. “What do you mean, the river?” Merry wondered aloud.

“I mean the _river.__” Verbie flung out her hands as if she were taking a bullet on a dark stage. “She could've drowned. Down there, I mean.” Up to this point, she'd been going fine, but now she seemed to falter. She looked to her sister, then to Marco. “I mean, right?”

That was when Star appeared out of nowhere, parting the crowd like a prophet, her face ironed shut, quick bare feet on the flagstones, her naked limbs, wet T-shirt, wet shorts. And then she was bent over the limp form of Che, clearing his tongue with a sweep of two fingers, pinching his nostrils and breathing her life into him. _CPR. Junior Lifesavers. Mouth-to-Mouth.__ It all came back to him in that moment, but all he could do was stand and watch, his arms dangling as if they'd been attached with pins, and what he felt was awe. He watched Star's knees grip the flagstones, watched her balance on the bridges of her feet. And her hair. It was a miracle, spread out over the child's head and torso like an oxygen tent, each curl like a finger, each finger willing him back.

People were pounding the bushes now, shouting out Sunshine's name as if it were the only word in the language, and Norm was down there bleeding like an animal somewhere on the road with the sheriff on his way and the citizenry up in arms, and still Marco didn't move. He watched Star's hair, watched her lips fasten to the boy's. Fasten and release, fasten and release. A year went by. A decade. And then Che's left foot began to dig at the flagstones, and Marco was released. In the next moment he was running again, generating a breeze all his own, the sweating cables of his own hair beating around his head, the cords of his legs fighting the descent that sent him hurtling down the bank of madrone, bay and knobcone pine to where the river took its light from the sky. He said it too, then, pronounced the name all the others were pronouncing, as if it were involuntary, called it out till his lungs burned and his throat went dry, “Sunshine! Sunshine!”

There was no answer. He took a path north along the bank, straining to see into the water, but the water was murky with its freight of sediment and deep here where the current sliced round a long garrulous bend. The water spoke to him, but it didn't calm him. Birds called out. The sky rose up and slapped down again. What had he expected to see-a pale arm waving amongst the river-run debris? The ghostly body pressed against a wedge of rocks six feet down? “Sunshine!” he called. “Sunshine!”

He was still calling when he found her. He was calling, but she wasn't answering. She was crouched at the foot of a deep arching bush hung with berries, a red stain of juice painted on her chin and exaggerating her mouth till it was like a clown's. Her red hands moiled in her lap. She was wearing a dirty white dress, no shoes, beads at her throat and wrist, and her hair was in two lax braids bristling with bits of twig and leaf. “Sunshine,” he said, just to hear himself say it again. She was staring past him, crouched there, just crouched. Maybe she was singing to herself, maybe that was it, because she was making some sort of noise in the back of her throat, and the noise made him uneasy. “Are you all right?” he asked her.

She didn't answer.

“Look,” he said, and the words were hard to extract, “everybody's been worried about you-your mother, she's been worried. And your father. And Norm and me and everybody.” He paused to let the breath go out of him, just for an instant, just to escape the tedium of breath-in and breath-out. “Been picking berries, huh?”

She didn't look at him, but she nodded her head, or at least he thought she did.

“Well, I'm going to take you back now, is that okay? I'm going to lift you up on my shoulders and take you back-you want a ride? You want to go piggyback?”

He came out of the woods to a hero's welcome, the whole clan gathered round him with their slow shy smiles and spooked eyes, yet another tragedy averted, and let's stir up the pot of mush and get it on in a major way, sure, and crank the music too. It surprised him to see the sun fixed overhead-it was early afternoon still, though it felt much later, felt like midnight in his mind. Reba came across the yard, slid her daughter from his shoulders without a word and carried her into the house as if nothing had happened. Che was gone-presumably he was in the house too, in bed, fluttered over by half a dozen women, and that was an image Marco wanted to hold-but the blurred outline of him still clung to the wet flagstones as if it were a piece of some elaborate puzzle to which no one had the solution. Jiminy settled into one of the chaise longues with a pair of bongos and started a slow lugubrious slap-palmed beat. A beer-still cold from the tub-appeared in Marco's hand, and then Star was at his side. She didn't say a word, just leaned forward and kissed him and held her lips there until he came back to life.

13

When the black-and-white sheriff's cruiser came nosing up the drive like some sort of mechanical hound, sniffing out the curves and drawing a bead on the main house, Pan didn't feel much of anything. The day had careened right by him. There was all that hassle and hysteria, diving and diving again till he damned near wound up drowning _himself,__ and then a lull that smoothed out all the wrinkles like a hot iron. Reba's brats had been saved and resurrected and either punished or rewarded or both-of that much he was sure, or at least he thought he was-and then at some point Norm had appeared with a bloody strip of cloth pressed to one eye and his glasses cobbled together with a white knuckle of masking tape. Norm was wearing his ask-no-questions look and went straight for his room at the top of the stairs, so that little drama was over before it began, and after a while the party or communal navel-gaze or whatever it was had recommenced in all earnestness.

But that was hours ago. What Pan was concerned about now was meat, and to that end he'd sequestered a package of Safeway hot dogs in the depths of the refrigerator and stashed an eight-pack of spongy supermarket buns under a pile of dirty clothes in the back bedroom, and as the cruiser worked its slow sure way up the road-moving so slowly, in fact, it barely even spun the dust off its tires-Pan was thinking he'd be building a little fire soon, after which he'd have a couple of hot dogs slathered with mustard and sweet pickle relish, and anybody who happened to be around, weekend hippies and part-time heads included, would be welcome to join him.

He was sitting on the front porch, Merry, Maya and Mendocino Bill settled in beside him and some new cat in a serape and high-crowned straw hat sprawled on the steps (_his__ trip was Krishna and there was no way to shut him up about it unless you took a claw hammer to the back of his head, and for the past half hour Pan had been giving it some real consideration). Merry wasn't going to eat any meat, or Maya either, that was for sure. Maybe Mendocino Bill, but Ronnie really didn't give a shit about Mendocino Bill one way or the other so it hardly mattered. “Krishna is love,” the new cat said, and the cruiser eased into the space in front of the railing like a foot slipping into a shoe. Two cops, each a replica of the other, got out.

They stood there in the dirt a moment, shifting their eyes around, two almost-young men, and what currents were _they__ floating on? Lean, narrow-hipped, all but hairless, they looked as if they'd been specially bred in some police kennel somewhere, and Ronnie could picture it, the women staked out on chains and the bull-headed men going at them till they got the litter just right. _Woof-woof.__ He studied their faces, but their faces gave away nothing. Their eyes, though-their eyes lit up every particle of dust, alive to every gesture, every nuance, eyes that could see through walls, through clothes, through flesh, and you'd have to be crazy not to feel the heat of them.

As the car doors slammed in unison, the two yellow dogs slunk out from beneath the porch to sniff at the cops' boots, and Freak, the one with the hacked-off tail, seized the opportunity to lift a leg and piss against the sidewall of the near tire. The cops never so much as shrugged. They took a minute to square their shoulders and adjust their belts, running their hands idly over the butts of their guns and truncheons and the rest of their head-cracking paraphernalia, then turned their attention to the porch. “You live here?” the one to the left asked, addressing Ronnie but letting his cold blue eyes jump to Merry, Maya, Mendocino Bill and beyond, where the depths of the house stirred with a thick, lazy batter of activity.

Though half of Drop City had melted off into the woods at first sight of the cruiser, Ronnie played it cool. He had nothing to fear. He'd never been in trouble with the law-his luck had held through every transaction, every furtive hit and airless squeeze of the plunger-and his father's cousin the psychologist had gotten him a 4-F on the grounds of mental incapacity. Which is not to say he didn't recognize the pigs for what they were. “I live on the green planet earth,” he said, showing all his teeth.

“That's right, man,” the new cat put in, “and it was Brahma that put us here-and Lord Vishnu that preserves us.”

“Right on,” Maya said, and then Merry, flinging her hair back to expose her painted breasts, said, “You live here too. We all live here. On the planet, dig?” And everybody on the porch, even the new cat, flashed the peace sign.

The cop lifted one shining boot to the dried-out blasted paint-stripped plank of the porch's second riser, and rested it there, leaning into his knee and focusing tightly on Pan. “Who's in charge here?” he wanted to know, and his voice was reasonable yet, soft and reasonable, as if he were addressing a clutch of fourth graders or maybe the town drunk stewing in his own juices. “Who's the landlord? The owner?”

Dale Murray stepped through the screen door then, just in time to field the question. Dale was a head of the old school-No moment on this earth was rich enough to risk forgoing drugs for, that was his motto-and he'd blown into the ranch one night last week on a fig green Honda motorcycle that sounded as if he'd attached grenade launchers to the muffler pipes. He was wearing a pair of blue-and-white-striped bell-bottoms, he was shirtless, rigidly muscled and deeply tanned; bells and beads and the yellowed teeth of some unlucky carnivore dangled from his neck, and a guitar was fixed at his waist like a big wooden cummerbund. He gave each of the cops a hallowed look and said, “Listen, I'm not going to give you the runaround and say God's the owner here and we're all mutual on this earth, you and me and your wife Loretta and Richard Milhous Nixon too-no, I'm not going to insult your intelligence and waste your time because I know how hard you guys work and the kind of shit people are always laying on you.” He paused. The cops' faces hardened, and the near one, the one who'd been asking the questions, drew his leg back and stood up square. “I won't lie,” Dale Murray said, “-I am. I'm in charge here.”

The talkative cop glanced at the top sheet in his summons book, then brought his eyes back up to drive them like staples into Dale Murray's. “You must be Norman L. Sender, then, is that right? Owner of an orange-and-white VW van with a peace sign painted on the driver's side panel and the California plate O-W-S-L-E-Y-1? Is that right?”

Dale Murray tugged at the loose ends of his hair. Ronnie could hear him breathing, a ragged intake and outflow that sounded like a machine in need of oil.

“Wanted for leaving the scene of an accident,” the cop went on, “in an obviously intoxicated state. That wouldn't be you, would it?”

“No, sir,” Dale Murray said, and there wasn't a flicker of recognition from anybody on the porch. “No, sir,” he repeated, and his accent-what was it, cowboy? Southern redneck? — seemed to thicken, “I didn't say that.”

The second cop had moved in to close the gap. “You got ID?” he wanted to know, and his voice wasn't reasonable at all-it was the standard-issue no-nonsense truncheon-swinging voice they must have handed out with the badges. “All of you,” he snarled, “I want to see some ID. Pronto.”

Nobody moved. Out on the periphery of the dried-up lawn, too far away for it to matter, Verbie was juggling three or four grapefruits in a shaft of sunlight while her sister danced round her like a mental case, strutting and writhing to some unheard melody. There was dogshit everywhere, piles of it like miniature termite mounds marching off into the distance. Two staved-in cars listed over their ruined springs to the side of the house, amidst a midden of old lumber and shingles. From the back, the sounds of festivity, rock and roll, the odd splash and shout.

“Anybody here own a horse?” the first cop asked, posting the soft missive of his question in the slot left open for him by his partner.

That was when Mendocino Bill, all two hundred fifty pounds of him, shot up out of his chair as if he'd been launched, a question of his own on his lips: “You got a fucking warrant, man?”

Before it was over, everybody on the porch had to do penance, Ronnie included. As soon as Mendocino Bill opened his mouth, both cops went for him, even as Merry, Maya and the Krishna cat began chanting “Peace and Love, Peace and Love, Off the Pigs, Peace and Love.” Ronnie-_Pan__-gave the cops as wide a berth as he could, but he found himself crushed up against the railing as they dragged the big man from the porch, kicked his legs out from under him and forced his pale blubbery arms behind his back for the wedding of the cuffs. “He's not here,” Maya squeaked, “Norm's not here!” The cops ignored her. They weren't even breathing hard, and what they were scenting now was a kind of freedom they'd only dreamed of: hippies, a whole parade of them, resisting arrest.

Mendocino Bill-he was a loudmouthed know-it-all like Alfredo, up to his ears in _Popular Mechanics__ in high school, no doubt a ham radio operator and an eagle scout on top of it, and here he was writhing in the dust on the fulcrum of his belly like a bowling pin set spinning by a strike right down the middle of the alley. So what if he'd been to Selma, so what if he could eat four plates of mush to anybody else's two, so what if he was one of the brothers and sisters of Drop City and the cops were the pigs? Despite himself, Pan felt something soar inside him to see the loudmouth brought low-until the second cop, the silent one, herded everybody off the porch and lined them up, hands against the wall and legs spread.

“What's the problem, Officer?” Dale Murray was saying as the first cop patted him down. “I mean, what'd we do? A little kidding? Is that it? I mean, I was only joking. Can't you take a joke? You want to tell me jokes're against the law now?”

“Norm's not here,” Maya kept repeating in her thin strand of a voice. She had her head down, her hands framed on the wall and the dried-out ends of her hair dangling, and she was talking to the ground. She was no beauty, and if it weren't for the very loose scene at Drop City, and all those strung-out horny cats like Mendocino Bill and Jiminy, she'd never have gotten laid in a million years. “He's not. I mean, _really.__ He went to Santa Rosa for like supplies and things and he never-”

“What was he driving?” the cop wanted to know, the first one, the talker. “VW van, right?”

“Don't tell him anything,” Merry said, and Ronnie saw that she'd clenched her face against the whole world, even as her eyes bled out of her head with the residue of the acid. He felt something for her then, something that took in her straining legs, her arched back and the painted breasts that stood up firm under the pressure of her out-thrust arms, and it wasn't just lust. She was all right, and more than all right-she was like Star, only better.

“You got ID?” the second cop repeated. “You? And you?”

Ronnie showed him his New York driver's license-_Ronald Daniel Sommers, 8 Crestview Avenue, Peterskill, New York, D.O.B.12/2/48, eyes hazel, hair brown, 5'10", 162 lbs.-__and kept his mouth shut. They weren't interested in him. They were interested in Dale Murray, who had the better part of a lid of grass tucked down the front of his pants in a crotch-warmed plastic bag, and they were even more interested in Merry, who was wearing nothing but body paint from the waist up. If Norm had been in the house when the commotion started up, he was long gone by now-out the back door, across the yard and into the trees-and whatever he'd done with the van, the cops weren't going to find it here. They weren't going to find anything beyond Dale Murray's pot, Mendocino Bill's sweating carcass and Merry's tits-which was plenty, for one day-and as the people out back began to drift round the house and surround them, the cops lightened up noticeably.

Ronnie was still flying high, way up there at thirty-five thousand feet, cruise control, the billowing clouds-_leavin' on a jet plane__-and none of it really affected him, though he resented the prodding and poking. Resentment, that was what he was made of, and the realization made him bristle inwardly, just a bit. He resented the cops, resented Mendocino Bill and Alfredo and Reba and her tripped-out filthy little suicidal brats, resented his parents and Star and Marco and maybe even the teepee cat out in the desert. Standing there in the late sun, with his hands spread flat against the outside wall of the house and his brothers and sisters gathered all around him and the cops starting to hedge their bets, he drifted back to that aching sorrowful high-crowned day when he went looking for Star, just to see her, to be with her, and his resentment took him across the yard and up the ladder and into the treehouse. How long had it taken him-five minutes? Ten? The space was empty, neat, rug on the floor, books on the shelves, guitar in the corner, backpack, clothes, Marco's hairbrush, his nail clippers, his toothpaste. The whole world was holding its breath. Pan didn't stint. He let the resentment come up in him till it was a kind of spew, and when he spewed, the violence of it surprised even him.

But now it was Druid Day and everybody was coming down in the fading afternoon and the cops were tucking Dale Murray's head into the black-and-white cruiser as if it were some precious object they were returning to its rightful owner. They let their eyes burn into the crowd for a long moment, Mendocino Bill rubbing at his liberated wrists and Merry jeering without opening her mouth, and then they ducked into the car, fired it up in a rapture of turbocharged power and made their slow sure way back down the dust-laden road.

The evening wore on. The light grew denser. Pan was roasting hot dogs on the slim green wand of a willow stick, woodsmoke tearing at his lungs and Lydia propped up on a log beside him, already eating, when Norm came loping out of the woods. _Norm,__ he thought, _here comes Norm,__ and something tightened inside him. Ronnie always felt at a loss with Norm, because Norm was older-_an older cat__-a kind of guru whose approval he sought, though he was hardly aware of it himself. He always straightened up when Norm was around, though, and he found himself trying to exaggerate his own grasp of things, as if the only way he could relate to the man was through an intervening lens of cool. Was he trying to impress him? Sure he was. Trying to get him to take note, lean on him, single him out? Sure. So what did he say now but “Hey, Norm-man, hey, you want a hot dog?”

Norm didn't answer right away. He looked dazed, as if he'd been lost in the woods for a month. There was a crust of dried blood over his left eyebrow. His glasses clung awkwardly to his face. “The man,” he said, and he was gasping or wheezing or both. “The man was here, right? Looking for me?”

Lydia glanced up from her hot dog. Her bare feet were splayed out in the dust and you could see up the crotch of her cutoffs. She was sloppy, that was what Pan was thinking, sloppy and overweight. She said: “They took that new guy, what's his name-Dale? — and nobody's been down to bail him out or whatever. Alfredo said to wait for you.”

“Dope,” Ronnie said, and he sucked at his cheeks. Serious business. He was standing here by the open fire talking serious business with Norm Sender.

“Dope?” Norm's face dropped. “You mean they searched him? Right here, on private property? Right on my front lawn, for shitsake? Is that what you're telling me?”

The sky was lit with tracers of fire from the setting sun and bats had begun to hurl themselves through the air. The first mosquitoes were making their forays. A jay screeched from the line of trees behind them.

“They searched us all, everybody on the front porch.”

Norm gazed off toward the shadow of the house as if he could detect them there still. Ronnie gripped a bun, squeezed a hot dog from the willow stick and handed it to him. “You want mustard?” he asked. “Relish? We got relish too.”

“Jesus,” Norm murmured, and he took the hot dog without comment, no mustard, no relish, just meat and bun, and lifted it to his mouth. “Jesus,” he repeated, and it sounded as if he was praying, “they're killing me here, that's what they're doing, they're killing me.”

The smoke shifted then and came back at them, twigs snapping in the flames, and both Ronnie and Norm had to step to one side.

“It was Bill,” Ronnie put in, and he couldn't help himself. “If he didn't go and open his big mouth, nothing would've happened. He pushed them. 'You got a fucking warrant, man?' That's what he said.”

Norm was eating, his gaze vacant, the hot dog bun an extension of his face. Lydia scratched her inner thigh, slapped idly at a mosquito and contracted her shoulders in annoyance. “Fucking bugs,” she said. And then, musing: “I wasn't there. I missed the whole thing.”

“You didn't miss much,” Ronnie said, and he was wondering where she'd been-on her back someplace, no doubt, tripping her brains out and balling anybody who could manage to get his zipper down. “What do you think, Norm-think they'll be back?”

It was a stupid question, and Norm didn't respond-and if he had, it probably would have been with some put-down like _Where do you think they'll come looking for me, city hall?__ He didn't respond because he hadn't come down all the way yet-he was just a little too jittery and bug-eyed-and in a rare moment of empathy, Ronnie saw how the day must have cut through him, what with the accident and watching the horse breathe its last and then having to hightail it into the woods. _Hightail it. And where had that expression come from? Some cowboy movie?__ Pan had a brief glimmer of Hopalong Cassidy spurring a big white horse through the sagebrush, a round black-and-white screen the size of a fishbowl and his father screaming from the kitchen because some ingrate-that's what he used to say, _ingrate__-had used up all the ice in the tray without filling it again. Norm just stood there. He fed the rest of the bun into his mouth and chewed mechanically, and when Ronnie handed him a second hot dog nestled in a fresh bun, he took it wordlessly.

It was a moment, and Ronnie was enjoying it. But then Reba came dragging her six-hundred-pound face across the back lot like some sort of bled-out zombie, already complaining from a hundred feet away, and the moment was gone. “Norm,” she was hollering, “did you hear? The cops. They were here. They're looking for you.”

Norm had heard. He'd been crouching in the woods in an acid coma for three hours with the blood crusting on his face and his glasses snapped in two, hadn't he? What did she think-he was hiding out there for the sheer thrill of it? They watched her, all three of them, as she made her way toward the flash and snap of the fire. “You heard about Che?” she called from twenty feet away.

Norm grunted something in response, something vaguely affirmative, and then she was right there, swaying over the balls of her feet, her pigtails unraveling round twin ligatures of pink rubber bands. “He's all right, he's going to be cool, but I tell you, he really freaked us out… I mean, for a while there he wasn't even breathing.” There was a pause, and nothing filled it. Her eyes were like grappling hooks, tearing at them, tugging and heaving and pulling. “But Charley Horse,” she said, “what a bummer.”

Lydia said, “Yeah, bummer,” and nodded her head.

Norm looked at his feet. “You know what you do with a dead horse?”

“Beat it,” Ronnie said.

“Render it. They use it for dog food, glue, whatever. I never liked the thing anyway. It was just this big, stupid, four-legged sack of shit my ex-wife just had to have. _You got a ranch, don't you? Well then you gotta have a horse.__ Brilliant logic, huh?”

Reba stood there, hard-eyed and pugnacious, her feet splayed, braids coming undone, already hurtling into middle age. Ronnie saw the two vertical lines gouged into the flesh between her eyebrows, the parentheses at the corners of her mouth: married too young, knocked up too soon, that's what she was all about. And what did she want? Answers. She wanted answers. “So what are we going to do, Norm? You know they're going to come back with a search warrant. You know they're going to close us down. What then? Where we going to go? I mean, Alfredo and me, we've given like two years of our _life__ to this place-I mean, this is it. This was where we were going to stay for the rest of our lives-and Che's life, and Sunshine's.” She looked away, as if she couldn't bear the sight of him with his slumped shoulders and bloodied face and taped-up glasses, and then she lifted her head and came right back at him. “So what's it going to be, Norm? What are we going to do now?”

Pan skewered another hot dog on his willow stick and thrust it into the flames. _Close the place down?__ He was just getting comfortable. Sure, some of his brothers and sisters might have been a pain in the ass, but they all knew him, and for the first time in his life he had a purpose, whether anybody wanted to admit it or not-he was the provider here, or one of them. One of the main ones. He'd got the deer, hadn't he? And quail-he'd shot quail too. And fish-that's all he did was fish, and even the vegetarians couldn't complain about that. They ate for free, and that was the whole point of going back to the land, wasn't it?

Reba's words hung on the air, accusatory, demanding, tragic, self-pitying: _What are we going to do now?__

Norm wasn't staring at his feet anymore. He straightened his shoulders as if he'd just woken up, tucked the remains of the second hot dog in his mouth and slicked back his hair with the palms of his hands. He was thirty-seven years old. There was gray in his beard. His toes were so twisted they looked as if they'd been grafted on. “What are we going to do now?” he echoed. “We're going to have a meeting, that's what we're going to do.”

14

This meeting wasn't anything like the last one. All the air had gone out of the day, a slow insidious deflation that was so wearying it wasn't even worth thinking about, and by the time Norm put out the word, half the population of Drop City had already crashed and burned. People were stretched out on sofas, stained mattresses, sleeping bags, on mats of pine boughs and the backseats of cars, their faces drawn, hair bedraggled, sleeping off the effects of simultaneously opening all those doors in their minds. Star was asleep herself, her face pressed to the gently heaving swell of Marco's rib cage, when Verbie came up the ladder to the treehouse and told her to get up, it was an emergency, and everybody-everybody, no exceptions-was due in the meeting room in fifteen minutes.

Star didn't know what to think. She was in the treehouse, with Marco, and she'd been asleep-that much was clear. Beyond that, everything was a jumble. It felt like the middle of the night, but it was light out, and for the life of her she couldn't have said whether it was dawn or dusk. The light had no source, no direction-it just held, as gray and dense as water, and the limbs of the oak were suspended in it like the superstructure of a dream. But she hadn't had any dreams-she couldn't even remember going to bed. She looked up into the branches of the tree for clues, but it was just a tree, hanging over her with all its ribs showing. It gave off a smell of gall, astringent and sharp, and whether it was a morning smell or an evening smell, she couldn't say. Birds came to the branches like dark, flung stones. Marco slept on. She couldn't find her panties-or her shorts-and something seemed to have bitten her in a series of leapfrogging welts that climbed up her naked abdomen and then vanished beneath her breasts. Where were her shoes? She sat up and looked around her.

Suddenly she was frightened. Emergency? What emergency? She summoned up a picture of the little boy then-Che-his hair kinked and wild, skin the color of olive oil thickened in the pan and his eyes sucked back into his head as if they were going to hide there forever, and she felt the impress of his cold lips on hers, lips like two copulating earthworms, like flesh without fire-but hadn't all that been settled? Hadn't she saved him? Saved the day?

It wasn't morning. That would be too much to hope for. It was dusk, and she knew it now. She could taste it on the air, hear it in the way the birds bickered and complained. It was Druid Day, the longest day of the year, and the worst, by far the worst-and it was still going on. Marco lay there beside her, his hair splayed across his face, his right fist balled up over his temple as if to ward off a blow. She listened to him breathe a moment, absorbed in the slow sure weave of it-ravel, unravel, ravel again-and then she shook him awake.

“What?” he said, propping himself up on his elbows so she could see the full spill of him.

“It's Norm. Some kind of emergency. Norm called a meeting-”

“Emergency? Now? What time is it?”

“Nine, maybe-I don't know. I thought it was morning.”

“What kind of emergency-did the pump burn out in the well or something? Or let me guess: Reba lost her kids again. Or Pan, what about him? Did he fall into his wienie fire and get all singed around the ears?”

“Verbie didn't say. But she sounded freaked out.”

“She always sounds freaked out.”

He was reaching for her, to pull her back down into the sleeping bag, but she pushed his hand away. “I'm scared,” she said. “After today… the kids, the horse, I mean. The whole thing. We're out of control here, Marco-everybody's out of control.”

“Yeah,” he said, giving her a smile so faint it was barely there. “But isn't that the point?”

The main house was ablaze with the power company's light, the light Norm and Alfredo were always hassling them to conserve-_Candles, people, use candles!__-and when she and Marco came up the worn steps and onto the porch, the floorboards seemed to fall away beneath her feet, as if the whole place were on the verge of collapse. She saw the gouged wood of the doorframe, the tattered mesh of the screen door, the worn spot where the embrace of ten thousand hands had abraded the paint round the latch and replaced it with dirt, human dirt-saw everything with utter clarity, though she could feel a headache coming on, a pounding, relentless, newly awakened shriek of a headache that threatened to burst her skull from the inside out, and that was what acid did for you, that was the price you had to pay. Open up your mind, feed your head. Sure. And wind up feeling like something washed up on the beach and left for dead. She took hold of Marco's arm for support, and then the screen door was slapping behind them and they were standing uncertainly in the front room that was like a funeral parlor-no music, no candles, nobody playing chess or checkers or settling into one of the grease-slicked armchairs with a book. There was litter, though-newspapers, magazines, unwashed plates, cups and glasses, somebody's striped shirt, a pair of muddy boots-and where there was litter, there was life. As if to underscore the point, the dogs chose that moment to waggle into the room and nose at her hands even as the faintest hushed murmur of voices seeped in from the room beyond.

Nearly everybody was there already, most of them sitting cross-legged on the floor, their faces blanched, eyes vacant. People were rubbing their temples, circulating a pitcher of iced tea or Kool-Aid, she couldn't tell which, picking idly at their ears or toes and sprawling in the sea of all that massed flesh as if they were learning to float-or maybe levitate. Alfredo and Reba were up front, and Reba had a cigarette going, lecturing her old man about something and painting the air with the glowing ember at the tip of it. Ronnie was all the way across the room with Merry and Lydia, melting into a heap of pillows, and Jiminy was slouched over the table with Verbie and her sister and Harmony and Alice.

Star wondered how she looked-she hadn't been near a mirror in days-and as she stepped into the room she tried to part her hair with her fingers, forcing it down like a cap over the crown of her head and looping the odd strands behind her ears. She was wearing a pair of ceramic earrings-blue dolphins with painted-on grins-that seemed to grow heavier by the minute till they felt like bricks tearing at her lobes, but she couldn't muster the energy to pull them out. She hadn't been able to find her sandals, but most of the tribe went barefoot most of the time anyway so that was all right, yet her T-shirt and cutoffs seemed damp, clammy almost, and when was the last time she'd washed them? Washed anything? Her head was pounding, and suddenly she was afraid again-for herself, for Marco and Drop City, for all the lost neurons and miswired synapses of a whole continent full of dopers and heads and teepee cats. _Boom,__ the blood pounded in her temples, _boom, boom, boom.__

She exchanged murmurs of greeting with a couple of people, thought of crossing the room to Merry and felt so weak suddenly it was as if her bones had dissolved. “Let's just sit here,” she said to Marco, and they sank to the floor just inside the doorway, because really, what difference did it make? Norm didn't call emergency meetings for nothing-this was going to be bad news, and it didn't matter if you took it standing up or sitting down, at the periphery or at the red-hot glowing center.

She watched Alfredo rise to his feet, turn and face the gathering. His eyes glowed with a dull sheen, as if they'd been painted on and hadn't quite dried yet. The overhead light stabbed at his face, hollowing out his cheekbones and giving him the look of the crucified Christ in the big fresco over the altar in the church back at home. He was long-faced at the best of times, but now he appeared nothing less than tragic. “Listen, people, we've got a problem here,” he said, and his voice was a dirge. “It affects all of us, Norm especially, but all of us ultimately, and Norm asked me to get everybody together, because he wanted to say a few words-”

She could barely hear him for the throbbing in her head. It was as if a pair of pincers had come down from the ceiling and clamped onto her temples and was slowly and inexorably drawing her up into the air, and all she could think of was one of those arcade machines where you try to extract a prize from a heap of trinkets. She was the prize, the gold ring that was really brass, and the jaws had hold of her, squeezing and pinching, and what she needed was a Darvon, or better yet, a Seconal, something to kill the pain. She'd ask Ronnie once the meeting broke up-he was usually good for something, and he always had his own little stash hidden away somewhere. She stared at her folded hands and tried to concentrate on looking normal. Or human. Just that.

Alfredo was rattling on-“Brothers, sisters, _people,__ we're all in this together, and now, of all times, we need to _stick__ together…” She leaned into Marco, and a flare of irritation leapt up in her. “What's he talking about? The accident? Is that it? Can't Norm just pay a fine or something?”

Marco tucked a coil of hair behind his ear, smoothed his beard with a ringless hand (he didn't believe in jewelry, not for men, though she saw he was wearing the string of painted wooden beads she'd given him, and for a fraction of a moment that made everything balance out). He was sitting in the lotus position, legs folded, back arched, as perfect as an illustration in one of those pamphlets by Swami Kriyananda Norm was always handing out, _Yoga Made Easy, Eight Steps to Enlightenment, The Swami Speaks.__ “No,” he said, shaking his head, “it's gone way beyond that. It's-I don't know. I didn't want to tell you this, at least not till tomorrow, anyway, but you want to know the truth? It's over, is what it is. He was trying to tell me this morning, when we went for the cream soda and the rest of it-and the wire for the horse, which is still in the back of the van, by the way, wherever the van is. Not that it matters.”

“Over?” She sought out his eyes, but his eyes dodged away. “What are you talking about?”

That was when Norm's voice rang through the room and everybody looked up to see him standing there in the kitchen doorway, his arm around Premstar. “A horse!” he cried. “My kingdom for a horse!” That was all it took-two phrases-and the pall Alfredo had cast was dissolved, and they all, everybody-even Reba, even Alfredo and the Krishna cat-laughed aloud. “Or a match,” Norm said, pulling a number the size of a cigar from the inside pocket of his jacket. “Anybody got a match? Or did you forget about the bonfire? Longest day, man, longest _day__!”

The bonfire. Of course. A buzz went through the room. Norm could do that-he could wake people up, turn them on, change the vibe of a whole room just by striding through the door. And Star saw that he'd dressed for the occasion too, emergency or no, in a wide-brimmed suede hat with a chin strap and a fringed jacket cut from the same material. The suede was a deep amber, the color of honey at the bottom of the jar, and he'd cinched a blue bandanna round his throat to set it off. That wasn't all: his glasses were taped together and a slash of white sticking plaster bisected his right eyebrow, not in a way that made him look like a victim or an invalid or anything, but somehow-Star couldn't think of the word, and then she could-_jaunty.__ And Premstar. She'd been here all of a week, and she'd done nothing but giggle and play up to Norm as if she was some kind of sex toy or something, and here she was dressed up in a sheer white nightgown like the ingenue in some vampire movie. And her hair-it was braided in two blond ropes that rose up off her brow like a layer cake.

Star turned to Marco, and for just an instant she felt the clamps let go of her. “That hair,” she whispered, feeling buoyant suddenly, feeling stoned all over again, “that's what _I__ call an emergency.”

The whole room watched as Norm led Premstar to the table, where he pulled out a chair for her with the kind of exaggerated gallantry that announced to everybody they'd been balling ten minutes ago, handed her the joint and leapt up onto the worn oak planks. “People,” he shouted, “brothers and sisters, this is my rap and I'm like more than grievously sorry to have to lay it on you tonight of all nights and even before we light the bonfire and dance, and I mean we _are__ going to shake it out, believe me, we are going to _dance__ like nobody has ever danced, I mean we are going to _reinvent__ the whole trip of dancing for now and forever, but this has been coming down a long time now and there's no denying it, no postponing it anymore, and I've just _got__ to get it out, so bear with me…” He stopped right there, and nobody said a word, nobody so much as breathed.

Star found Marco's arm and pulled it up over her shoulder like a cloak. Her heart was pounding now too, along with her head, a little hammer there striking over and over like in the TV commercials-she wasn't going back to Peterskill no matter what happened, not if Drop City closed down tonight. She was going to stay here, right here, and she didn't care what Norm said or how bad it was.

Norm bent low to light the joint for Premstar, and Premstar took a hit and Norm watched in a proprietary way as she passed it on to Reba before he straightened up again and looked out over the room. “I'm telling you the bad news first, but remember what the _I Ching__ says-'Perseverance Furthers'-and you are all, every one of you brothers and sisters, going to _know__ that the good vibes outweigh the bad and that we _will__ persevere in our mission and our philosophy and all the love and truth and the beautiful vibes of Drop City and everything we've accomplished here in spite of the fascists beating at the door.” Another pause. His voice dropped. “Only we won't be here. Not on this property.”

If there was any air left in the room, it was gone now, sucked right out the window. Not here? What was he talking about?

“The fuck we won't!” Jiminy jumped up out of his chair, his hair windmilling round his shoulders. His fist was balled, and he brought it down on the table at Norm's feet, and then rocked back into himself, trembling all over. The day hadn't been kind to him either, Star could see that.

“It's over, people,” Norm sighed, and he never even glanced at Jiminy, just let his gaze seek out each face in the crowd, one after another, like beads on a string. “The bureaucrats've won the war. The pencil-pushers, the accountants, the _man.__ We're history here, and you better get used to it, because the straight world is moving in.”

Everybody was aroused now. Or no: they were incensed. “Bullshit!” a voice shouted from the far side of the room. “We won't let them!”

“No!” Maya joined in, nothing to her voice but textured air, her glasses flashing in the glare of the overhead lights like a shield, and what was with the lights, Star was wondering, why feed PG&E? Was Norm staging this? Was that it?

And then a voice she recognized, knew so intimately it was as if she were speaking herself: “Come on, Norm, come on, man, don't let us down.” It was Ronnie, across the room, his face pinched and his eyes swollen in his head. He looked terrible. Looked as if he'd been buried a week and dug up again. But that voice, that tone-there was something raw and desperate in it, a quaver she recognized from all those late-night disquisitions on God, the futility of life and how impossible it was to find a good FM station in the flatlands, and she understood in that moment how much all this meant to him. Ronnie. Pan. He needed Drop City as much as she did. “Come on, Norm,” he nagged. “Come _on.__”

Norm bowed his head a minute, as if all the fuss were too much for him. He dug at his beard, pushed the hat brim up off his brow so that the bandage flared out like an accusation. “The bulldozers'll be here inside of a week. And that's whether the pigs come back and lock me up or not, because let me give it to you straight, people-by order of the _judge,__ and you can look it up, Judge Vincent T. Everard, the Right and Honorable, they're going to take down every substandard dwelling on the place, and that's their words, not mine, because I say _substandard,__ my ass.”

“Right on!” Mendocino Bill shouted, and then they were all shouting, a dizzy reeling tightly wound gabble of voices-no, they wouldn't budge, they'd fight, they'd chain themselves to the gates-but all Star could think of was the naked hills and the rubble of the yurts and huts and plastic sheeting all rolled up like a frayed blanket, and would they spare the treehouse? Would they see it, even?

She drifted in and out of it then, because that was when the joint worked its way to her and she touched her lips to it and tasted her brothers' and sisters' communion in the wetness of it and filled her lungs with the dense sweet smoke that was going to knock her headache down and out for the count and fill her every cell and fiber with bliss, the bliss she needed and deserved and wanted because that was what this life was all about, wasn't it? Norm went on and on, ranting about the county, about Mr. Jones and the plastic society that spawned him, about conformity and hate and love and the _I Ching.__ He must have talked nonstop for half an hour, his voice dipping and raging and looping back on itself until it was a kind of white noise and the words couldn't touch her-she'd had enough bad vibes and negativity for one day. Enough. Enough, already. And she was about to get to her feet and say just that-_Enough, and let's sleep on it and see what the morning brings__-when the room fell silent.

She looked round her, and it was as if she'd just awakened.

Norm was still up there on the table, the artificial light bleeding from his face. He'd just delivered the good news, the promise that was going to redeem them all and resurrect Drop City, and it came in three interconnected syllables that didn't sound like a promise at all-it was more like a joke, or maybe a dream. She couldn't even be sure she'd heard him right, and before she knew what she was doing, she was raising her hand, raising her hand and flapping it at the end of her wrist as if she were wedged behind a tiny shellacked desk back in elementary school. “Norm, Norm!” she cried amidst a tumult of voices, everybody talking at once, everybody shouting, but she was on her feet now and he was looking right at her through the clear hard lenses of his taped-up glasses as if she were the only one in the room. “Norm, did you say _Alaska?__”

Yes. That was what he'd said: Alaska. He repeated it for her, the whole long strung-together Normed-out sentence that ended with the noun that hit her like a body blow, the name of that alien, icebound afterthought of a place that had no deeper association for anyone in the room than _Sergeant Preston of the Yukon,__ and the Yukon wasn't even in Alaska, was it? No matter. Norm had the stage, Norm was their leader and guru and though he'd never led them before, he was leading them now, his feet dancing and his arms beating time to the silken swoosh of the suede fringe, and he was selling Alaska as if he owned it. “No rules,” he shouted, “no zoning laws, no taxes, no county dicks and ordinances. You want to build, you build. You want to take down some trees and put up a cabin by the most righteous far-out turned-on little lake in the world, you go right ahead and do it and you don't have to go groveling for anybody's permission because there's no-fucking-body there-do you hear me, people? Nobody. You can live like Daniel Boone, live like the original hippies, like our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers-off the land, man, doing your own thing, no apologies. Do you dig what I'm telling you?”

Silence, stunned silence. Everybody was seeing sled dogs and tracts of rippled snow. They were seeing-what? — king crab, bears, Eskimos, Mount McKinley rising up out of a wall calendar like a white planet tearing loose from its moorings. He was joking. He had to be.

“Are you fucking crazy?” Star turned her head and Mendocino Bill was right there beside her, tottering on his swollen white feet, his beard draining the color from his face. “Are you out of your fucking mind? Alaska? It's like sixty below up there. What are we going to do, make igloos like Nanook? Eat snow and icicles and what, seal blubber?”

“Longest day, man,” Norm said. “The sun won't set up there tonight. I've seen it. For three years I saw it. And you know what that means? That means strawberries the size of apples, that means tomatoes like watermelons and zucchini you could hollow out and _live__ in. And this”-he reached into his jacket pocket and produced another communal joint, gaudily rolled in red-white-and-blue-striped papers-"this shit grows like giant redwoods up there, like sequoias, I mean, get me to the _lumber__ mill, man.

“My uncle Roy-and I don't know how many of you know this, I mean, you do, Alfredo, and probably you, Verbie-he's got a place up there, just outside of Boynton, on the Yukon River, farthest place you can drive to in the continental U. S., the last place, I'm telling you, the last frontier, and what's the whole town built out of? Logs. You know what I'm saying? _Logs!__ I lived there three years after I dropped out of high school in my junior year because I couldn't take the plastic bourgeois capitalist fucking bullshit _brainwashing__ anymore, and I know what I'm talking about.” He flipped off his glasses, wiped them on his sleeve and clapped them back on again, and then he was shaking out a folded piece of lined yellow paper and holding it up to the light.

“You see this, people? See it? This is a letter from my uncle. From Uncle Roy himself, dated two months ago, and I've been carrying it around ever since. You know what it says?” He paused to look out over the room. “It says he's in Seattle, living with my other uncle, Uncle Norm-my namesake-because he's seventy-two fucking years old and he's got arthritis so bad he can hardly wrap his fingers around the pen. He's not going back, not ever, and you know what that means? That means the cabin is ours, people, fully stocked and ready to go, traps, guns, snowshoes, six cords of wood stacked up outside the door, pots and pans and homemade furniture and all the rest, and it's going to be an adventure, it is. We're going to take down some _trees,__ because that's the way you do it-lumber is free up there, can you dig that, _free__-and we're going to build four more cabins and a meeting house and we're going to build right on down to the river because the salmon are running up that river even as we speak and they're running in the _millions.__ You dig smoked salmon? Anybody here dig smoked salmon? And the blueberries. The cranberries. You never saw anything like it. You want to know what we're going to eat? We're going to _eat the land__ because it's one big smorgasbord. And there's nobody-I mean _nobody__-to stop us.”

Everyone in the room was on their feet now, and it was like a rally, like a concert, and Star was thinking about the time she'd seen the Velvet Underground live in a downtown loft that was wall-to-wall people-there was that kind of excitement, that kind of energy. A current was burning through the room, and it was burning through her too, and never mind the headache, never mind the bulldozers, this was something new, outrageous, beyond anybody's capacity to imagine or envision, and when Norm scrambled down from the table they buried him in an avalanche of hands and shoulders and hair, and the questions never stopped. When? Where? How? That was what they wanted to know, and so many people were talking at once they might as well have been speaking different languages entirely. Verbie was right there at his shoulder, and Jiminy wedged in beside her, his eyes shining. Even Reba looked upbeat.

“Details!” Norm cried over the tumult. “Petty details, people.” He was already in motion, dismissing every rational fear and practical concern with a casual swipe of his hand. He had Premstar by the arm and he was leading her through the crush and into the kitchen, and through the kitchen and out into the darkened yard, shouting over his shoulder like an agitator leaving the arena: “The bonfire! On to the bonfire!”

“Man, has he lost it or what?” somebody said, and Star felt herself jostled from behind. “I mean, do you believe this shit?”

She looked to Marco, only to him, and he was watching her out of hooded eyes as they moved toward the door and the scent of the damp night air. He met her gaze and then he grinned and shrugged his shoulders. “You know,” he said, and he put his arm round her shoulders and locked his hip to hers, “I've always wanted to see the northern lights.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ronnie said, “So what do you think?”

“You mean Norm?”

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

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

“What's it near?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Understand what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The goats are going, right?”

“I don't know. Yeah. I guess.”

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

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

“I'm serious.”

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

“The goats?”

“Yeah.”

“I don't know-grass?”

“In the winter.”

“Hay?”

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

“Buy it.”

“With what?”

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

“Who's going to want beads up there?”

“The Eskimos.”

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

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

“Indians make their own beads.”

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

“Yeah, right.”

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

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

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

“Layers, that's how you do it.”

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

“I don't sweat.”

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

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

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

But the dogs were on their feet now, clicking across the floor on stiff black nails. Freak began to bark suddenly, and then Frodo joined in, and everybody was thinking the same thing-the bulldozers. “Oh, shit,” Alfredo said, his head jerking up as if it were on a string. Reba gave him a stricken look. “It couldn't be,” she said, “not yet. Norm said Friday, didn't he?” Marco flung down the book without marking his place-_Trout Fishing in America,__ one of the titles Star had mysteriously interred beneath the leaves yesterday, and he still couldn't fathom what she'd been thinking-and then he was out the door, down the steps and into the battleground of the yard.

At first there was only the noise, a grinding mechanical assault tearing at his heart and his brain till he didn't know whether to stand his ground or run-and what would he tell them, what would he do when they started battering it all to pieces? He clenched his toes in the mud, heard the others gathering on the porch. “They can't just come in here like this”-Reba's voice, wound tight, spinning out behind him-“can they?” There was a flash of yellow-bright as Heinz mustard-and the shape of something moving through the trees along the road, and it was no bulldozer, it was too big for that, too _yellow…__

It was a bus. A school bus. And Norm, sleepless Norm, fueled on amphetamine and black coffee, was at the wheel, the suede cowboy hat pulled down to the level of the black broken frames of his glasses and Premstar perched in his lap like a ventriloquist's dummy. The gears ground with a shriek, the massive face of the thing swung into the yard and beat the mud into submission and the rain sculpted the two long streaming banks of windows in a smooth wrap. There was the wheeze of the air brakes, a heavy dependable sloshing, and then the bus was idling there before them, as if all they had to do was pick up their schoolbags and lunchboxes and climb aboard.

The door folded in on itself with a sigh, and Premstar, the former Miss Watsonville, with her high tight breasts and perfect legs, was stepping down from the platform, an uncertain smile puckering her lips. She was wearing white lipstick, blue eyeshadow and a pair of big blunt high-heeled boots that crept up over her knees. Marco watched, riveted, as she stepped daintily into the mud, brushed the hair out of her face, and glanced up at him. “We got a school bus,” she said in a breathy little puff of a voice, and she might have been describing a trip to the grocery for toilet paper, “-me and Norm.”

Norm pulled the hand brake and came down the steps behind her, the bus idling with a stuttering grab and release, the smell of diesel infesting the air. The rain spattered his hat and his fringed jacket, the drops dark as blood against the honey-colored suede. His eyes were tired. The rain made him wince. “Go ahead,” he said, waving an arm, “take a look. It's a ninety-one-passenger 1963 Crown, is what it is, the kind of thing you could get if you were real lucky and real smart on a straight-up trade for a slightly dented, almost-like-new 1970 VW van, if you know what I mean.”

Alfredo was standing there in the rain now too, and Reba beside him; Star came up and slipped an arm round Marco's waist. They were all grinning, even as Premstar ascended the back steps and Norm slouched on by them, his shoulders slumped and his head dropped down between them like a bowling ball. “But I don't want to shut it off, that's the thing,” he said, “because it was a real hassle getting it started-the cat that sold it to me said it was a little quirky, especially on cold mornings.”

“Cold mornings?” Alfredo said. “This is the _afternoon,__ and if it's anything less than maybe sixty-five out right now, then we need a new weatherman.”

“Yeah, well, this is a good machine, heavy duty, no more than like a hundred twenty thousand miles on it and it could go three times that, easy, so what I'm saying is I haven't slept in two days and I've done my part, more than done my part, and I think somebody-like Bill, for instance-should be looking to the tune-up or whatever, and the rest of you people should be loading your shit aboard, because time and the river and the county board of supervisors wait for no man.” He mounted the back steps and put an arm round Premstar. “Or chick, for that matter. But I've had it, I'm wiped, and somebody's going to have to build a rack or something all around the roof, for storage, and we're going to need rope and bungee cords and like that. And food, I mean, bins of just the basic stuff, dried beans and flour and whatnot, from the coop down in Guerneville.”

He paused, patted down his overalls and dug a money clip from the inside pocket. “Here,” he said, peeling off a hundred-dollar bill and holding it out over the steps so that the rain darkened it till it was like a piece of wet cardboard, like play money, “you take it, Reba, okay? For food?” And then he pulled open the screen door and edged his way in, Premstar tucked neatly under one arm.

The next five days were gypsy days, that's what Marco and Star were calling them, their little joke, no time for sweet wine or beer or dope or meditating with your back up against the big yellow knuckle of rock in the middle of the field, no time for sleep even-the caravan was moving on, fold up your tents, untether the goats and snatch the legs right out from under the chickens. If anyone had entertained any doubts about Norm Sender's seriousness of purpose, the bus erased them. There it was, massive and incontrovertible, dominating the mud-slick yard like some dream of mechanical ascendancy, and all day, every day, from dawn till the last declining stretched-out hours, people were swarming all over it with tools, bedding, food, records, supplies.

The previous owner-one of Norm's old high school buddies who'd evolved into a ponytailed psychologist in Mill Valley-had installed a potbellied stove, an unfinished counter and sink, and eight fold-down slabs of plywood that served as bunks. He'd had a dream, the psychologist, of outfitting the thing as a camper so he could take some of his patients from the state mental hospital on overnight outings, but the dream had never been realized for the reason that so many dreams have to die: lack of funds. He'd left the first half dozen rows of seats intact, and they'd each seat three adults abreast and sleep at least one, and all the way in the back, across from the stove, there was a crude plywood compartment with a stainless steel toilet in it. According to Premstar, who gave up the information in a sidelong whisper when Norm was out of earshot, the psychologist had got the bus cheap after a collision with a heating oil truck in which three kindergartners had been burned to death. The accident had left the frame knocked out of alignment, though the psychologist had tried to set it right with the help of another old high school buddy who owned a welding shop, and that was something they were just going to have to live with-the thing always felt as if it were veering sideways when it was bearing straight down the middle of the road. And no matter what anybody did by way of sprays and lacquers and air fresheners, a smell of incinerated vinyl-and maybe worse-haunted the interior.

When Jiminy saw the bus that first night, even as the rain was folding itself back into the mist and a derelict moon crept up over the trees, he drifted barefoot through the mud and embraced the cold metal of the hood as if it were living tissue. “Magic bus,” he murmured, and then he began chanting it under his breath, “Magic bus, magic bus, hey, hey, magic bus.” Marco was holding a flashlight for Mendocino Bill, who was peering into the engine compartment with a wrench in one hand and a screwdriver in the other, and Alfredo, for lack of anything better to do, was supervising. Reba had hung a Coleman lantern from one of the hooks inside, and the women were in there, five or six of them-Star included-adjusting things, running a sponge over the seats and a mop over the floor, already seeing to the division of space.

“You know what we can do?” Jiminy said, his cheek pressed to the front fender. “We can paint it. Like Kesey, like the Pranksters. Mandalas, peace signs, weird faces, and fish-fish all over it, like Peter Max fish, blowing bubbles. And porpoises. That kind of thing. We'll freak them out from here to fucking Nome.”

Mendocino Bill made an affirmative noise in the back of his throat, but it wasn't particularly enthusiastic-here was another adolescent fantasy, and what was wrong with WASHO UNIFIED skirting both sides of the bus in black bold adamantine letters?

“I don't want to tell you what to do,” Alfredo put in, “but we have to cross the Canadian border here-like twice-and the last thing you want is a freak parade, you know what I mean?” He jumped down from the bench Bill had propped himself up on and gave Jiminy a look. “Like you, for instance, _Jiminy__-that's how we know you, but what's your real name? I mean, like on your draft card?”

Jiminy looked down at his feet. “Paul Atkins.”

“Paul Atkins? Yeah, well, that's what they're going to want to know at the border, and you better have a draft card to show them too. And maybe a birth certificate on top of it. What are you, 4-F?”

Jiminy looked hurt, put-upon, and Marco wanted to say something, but he didn't. “They don't ask that shit at the border,” Jiminy said. “Just are you a citizen, right? And how long'll you be in Canada?”

“Look, man,” Alfredo was saying, “you were probably still in junior high the first time I went up to Canada-in Ontario, this was-and maybe they might have been cool about it back in those days, but believe me, with the war on and all these draft dodgers-who I support, by the way, so don't get me wrong-it's going to be a trip and we are really going to have to play it right. Get it through your head, man-this is no game, no three-day rock festival where you can just go on home when it's over. This is survival we're talking about here-they're driving us off the _ranch,__ for Christ's sake. What do you think that says?”

Marco wasn't listening anymore, because he was seeing that border, a vague scrim of trees, a checkpoint dropped down on the highway in a pool of darkness, and what was he going to do if they questioned him? Work up a fake ID? Get out three miles down the road and sneak across through the scrub? Was there a wire? Was it electrified?

“Keep the light steady, will you?” Bill said. “I can barely see what I'm doing here.”

“So what are we supposed to be then,” Jiminy wanted to know. “The Washo Unified Lacrosse Team? With our cheerleaders and band along for our triumphant tour of British Columbia?” He pushed himself away from the bus and hovered over the twin craters his feet made in the mud. “Easy for you to say, but you don't have to worry-you're too old for the draft.”

The rain was nothing more now than the faintest drizzle, and the flanks of the bus shone with it as if they'd been polished. The moon glistened in the mud. From inside the bus, the sound of giggling.

Alfredo didn't answer right away. “That's right,” he said finally, “I'm too old by four years and three months. But that doesn't mean I'm not looking out for you and Marco and Mendocino Bill and all the other cats here. This is a war, man, and we are going to win it. Drop City North, right? Am I right?”

“It's still America,” Marco said. “The forty-ninth state. They've got the selective service up there too.”

“Yeah, but we're going to be so far out there nobody's even going to know we exist.”

In the morning, while Marco was up atop the bus with Star, trying to fashion scavenged two-by-fours into the world's biggest luggage rack, he reached over the side for another stick and found himself peering into the upturned faces of Lester and Franklin. “So what's this I hear?” Lester wanted to know, his voice padded with cotton wool as if he were afraid he might bruise it. He tugged at the brim of his oversized porkpie hat to shield his eyes from the sun. “You all are really going to up and desert Franklin and me? To go where-to fucking Alaska?” And then he began to chuckle, a low soft breathless push of air that might have been the first two bars of a song. “You people,” he said, and he was still chuckling, “you are seriously deranged.”

Marco had a hammer in his hand, so he didn't have to say anything in reply. He just banged a couple of nails into the corner at the front of the box, and yes, the humped steel roof of the bus was going to be a problem, but he was thinking if he built the rack up high enough and they strapped everything down as tightly as possible, it ought to get them where they were going-as long as the roof didn't crumple under all that weight. Star said, “Maybe so,” and she was smiling so wide you would have thought her cheeks would split. “But in case you haven't heard, Alaska's the real thing, the last truly free place on this whole continent.”

“Shit,” Lester said, grinning now himself, “that's what I thought about California-till my ass wound up in Oakland. And the Fillmore's worse than Oakland, even, and the Haight's worse than that.”

“What about us?” Franklin asked, and he was staring up at them out of a pair of yellow-tinted shades that looked like the top half of a gas mask. “They going to take down the back house too?”

“That's what I want to know,” Lester put in. “And Sky Dog. And Dale. Because it's going to be kind of unfriendly around here when they come in with those bulldozers, you know what I mean?” He dropped his head, kicked a stone in the trammeled mud that was already baked to texture. Then he looked up again, one hand shielding his eyes from the sun. “But what I really want to know is are we invited? Because we got the Lincoln and there's no way you're going to fit everybody in that bus, and Pan's car, and whatever-that beat-to-shit Bug Harmony's got.”

Marco looked down from on high. He didn't like Lester and he liked Sky Dog even less, and he hadn't forgotten that day in the ditch either, or what they'd done to the treehouse, but this, this really strained credulity. Lester was serious. He really thought he was part of all this, really believed in the credo of the tribe, in peace and love and brotherhood. Or he wanted to. Desperately wanted to. It was a hard moment, and Marco felt like Noah perched atop the ark and looking down his nose on all the bad seed toiling across the sodden dark plains below. He looked at Star and she looked away.

“Or maybe I'm talking to the wrong person, maybe I ought to talk to Alfredo. Or Norm.”

“I hear they got gold up there,” Franklin said, and he was straining to look up too. “Is that what you're going to do, pan for gold?”

“Hey, come on, man,” Lester said, “let bygones be bygones, right? Brothers, right?”

A long moment ticked by. No one said a word. Marco could feel the bus shift beneath him as Reba and Merry climbed aboard with two more boxes of dishes, pots and pans, tools, cutlery, preserves. They were going to mount the big KLH speakers from two racks in the back of the bus and run the record player off a car battery, so they could have music at night when they pulled the bus off by the side of the road or into a public campground. Maya was fixing up curtains for the windows and Verbie and her sister were cutting up a roll of discarded carpet and fitting it to the floor. Even Pan was contributing, doing up a fish fry with chips and coleslaw so the women could be free of the kitchen and concentrate on the business at hand. Marco could hear the soft thrum of the voices below him, the sound of something growing, taking shape in a unity of effort that made all the pimples and warts of Drop City fade away to nothing. He felt good. Felt omnipotent. Felt like one of the elect.

“So what do you say?” Lester's voice floated up to him, soft as a feather. “We invited or not?”

Marco plucked a nail from his shirt pocket, set it in place and drove it home with two strokes of the hammer. The sound exploded out of the morning like two gunshots, one after the other, true-aimed and fatal. He shrugged. “Hey,” he said, and he could hear the finality in his own voice, “it's a free country.”