Drop City

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  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?”