Drop City

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “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 doe
s 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, everything 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 Y
ou 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.