Drop City

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  The sequel was mostly a blur, because he was dazed, that was it, though the speed was churning through him like a thousand little engines whizzing round the tracks of his veins, and he was in the car still, Star cradling his head. But Marco came round the hood of the Studebaker and slashed into the knot of them, that much he was sure of, and then Dale Murray and Sky Dog were there, and it was a scrimmage, everybody everywhere, down in the dirt and out across the lot, cursing and thumping at one another. Franklin stepped into it next, in one silent gliding motion, and put one of the frat boys down with a single blow, and now the whole bus was emptying out in a spangle of white-faced hippies and the old stick-people were sucking at their bourbon and all the flying kids gathering round and shouting in their piping attenuated half-grown voices.

  Norm was the one who put an end to it. Two of the frat boys were on the ground and a whole flotilla of blunt-toed hippie boots was going at them at ramming speed, even while the third one—the driver—was engaged with Dale Murray, slam, bam-bam, as if this were a heavyweight bout, when Norm stepped between them and it stopped right there, just like that. “Enough!” he said. “Peace!” and he barked it out as if he were shouting “Maim!” or “Kill!”

  They were bleeding in mosaic, all three of them, shuffling their feet in the dirt and huffing like fat men going up an endless flight of stairs. They were outnumbered. They had nothing to say. But Pan did, oh, yes, his head hanging out the window of the Studebaker now, and his life in this moment as sweet as anything on this planet. “Next time you want to beat up on a bunch of hippies, you better think twice, you sorry-ass motherfuckers—”

  They’d already edged back to their pickup, jeans, boots, T-shirts, muscles, and one of them, heaving still—the one with the blond crewcut and the scalp that shone through it like boiled ham—said, “Yeah, and fuck you too, all of you.” That was what he said, but it was just bravado, and everybody knew it. The three of them slammed back into the pickup, wiping grit and blood out of their eyes, licking at split lips and wondering what that ringing in their ears was, and as they put it in gear Ronnie just sauntered up to them with a shit-eating grin and flashed the peace sign. They didn’t even bother to spin the tires.

  Later, when the jug of wine was going round and the chicks were spreading out loaves of bread and jars of peanut butter and jelly and mixing up pitchers of Kool-Aid and everybody was congratulating themselves on the way they’d handled things there in the naked dirt of the lot, Pan sprang his surprise. On the morning before they’d left, he’d taken the Studebaker down through Guerneville and the cutover hills of the Russian River valley to Marshall, where the Pacific beat against the rocks and gave up a mist that hung in the sunlight like the smoke of a fire that never went out. The air was cold, the water colder. He waded right in in his cutoffs with Marco’s hunting knife in one hand and two burlap sacks in the other.

  There were gulls overhead, cormorants and pelicans scissoring the rolling green flats beyond the breakers. It was low tide, and the rocks were fortresses half-buried in the sand, every one of them glistening black with a breastwork of mussels. Pan worked under a pale sun, shivering in the wind that blew up out of nowhere and dodging the spray as best he could, and in the course of an hour he cut a hundred mussels from the rocks, two hundred, three, four, maybe even five, but who was counting? Back at the ranch, he rinsed and debearded them himself, and everybody was so preoccupied with the bus, with moving and packing and getting clear of the bulldozers, nobody even so much as glanced at him. He’d sneaked the two big sacks of mussels into the trunk of the Studebaker and set aside a pound of salted butter and half a dozen lemons from the tree out back of the pool. Now it was time to steam them. Now especially, because who wanted peanut butter and jelly on tasteless crumbling two-day-old home-baked bread, when they could glut themselves on the bounty of the sea?

  Nobody said a word as he built a fire in one of the blackened cast-iron barbecue grills that grew up out of the dirt in the lee of each picnic table, but Merry—looking like two scoops of ice cream in a macramé top—drifted over when he set the five-gallon pot atop it. She handed him the nub of a joint she’d just removed from her lips, and nobody worried about that, about where the sacramental dope was going to come from through a long hard winter before they could have a chance to get a crop in the ground—nobody worried about anything, because this was the adventure, right here and now. He drew on the roach and she smiled. “What you got cooking?”

  He shrugged, gave her back the smile. “Nothing. A little surprise. Something even a vegetarian could get behind.”

  She poked one of the sacks with a bare toe. “What?” She smiled wider. “Clams? Lobster?”

  “You’ll see. In about five minutes. But you wouldn’t eat anything with a face on it, would you? You wouldn’t even slap a mosquito or breathe in a gnat, right?” The roach had gone out. He handed it back to her for form’s sake.

  “I don’t know. Depends, I suppose.”

  “On what?”

  “On how hungry I am, and what’s going in that pot. It’s not meat, right?”

  People had begun to set up tents in a cluster round the bus. Sky Dog, Dale Murray, Lester and Franklin were off by themselves, sitting on a picnic table in the near distance, their legs propped up on the buckled slats of the seats, and Sky Dog and Dale were strumming their guitars. A bunch of people were on the far side of the bus, visible only as lower legs and feet, and Che and Sunshine were at the center of a flying wedge of straight people’s children, pale limbs, shouts, a kickball chasing itself from one end of the lot to the other.

  “Would I do that to you?” Pan took a step back from the fire and glanced at the bus. The windows were down all along the near side and an invisible presence had just dropped the needle on “God Bless the Child,” a tune he loved, and for a moment he just looked out across the lot and listened to the horns feed off the vocals. Then he turned back to Merry. “Where you sleeping tonight? The bus?”

  “I guess.”

  “Want to sleep with me? Big seat in the back of that Studebaker. Or I might just do a sleeping bag on one of the picnic tables, like if there’s no dew or rain or anything—”

  “What about Lydia?”

  “What about her?”

  She settled into the corner of the picnic table with a shrug, one haunch balanced there, the dead roach pinched between her fingers. “I don’t know,” she said. “Where’s she sleeping?”

  He didn’t answer her, just upended the first of the burlap sacks into the big gleaming pot. It was like shifting rocks. There was a clatter and a hiss, and then he dumped the other bag in. “That’s a Billie Holiday song,” he said, “you know that?”

  “No,” she said, “I didn’t know. I thought it was like Blood, Sweat and Tears?”

  “Originally, I mean. Like in the thirties or whenever.”

  “Oh, really? So it’s like really old, huh?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and he looked off into the trees that weren’t all that different from the trees at Drop City, or not that he could tell, anyway.

  “What are those, mussels?”

  “Yep. Pure protein, bounty of the sea. And wait’ll you taste them with Pan’s special lemon and butter sauce. You ever have mussels just steamed like clams or maybe dropped in a marinara sauce at the very last minute?”

  She didn’t know. And she was a vegetarian. But he watched her as the steam rose and butter melted in a pan and he sliced and squeezed the lemons, and she looked interested, definitely interested. “What about Jiminy,” he said, “where’s he sleeping?”

  When she shrugged, her breasts lifted and fell. “In the bus, I guess.”

  He was thinking about Lydia, thinking about Star, about Marco and the way he’d put his arm around her and drawn her to him in the Studebaker. He’d gone to high school with her. They’d come all the way across the country together. “Sleep with me,” he said. “What’s it been, like weeks?”

  That was when Reba came out of the trees
with an armload of firewood and a hermetically sealed face, Alfredo trailing in her wake. He had a hatchet in one hand, a half-rotted length of pine in the other. Reba’s eyes locked on the pot. “What’s that?” she said. “You cooking something, Ronnie?” Oh, and now she smiled, oh yes indeed. “For everybody?”

  She was wearing moccasins she’d stitched and sewed herself and she’d stuck an iridescent blue-black raven’s feather in her beaded headband—give her a couple of slashes of war paint and she could have been a squaw in a John Ford movie, and that was funny because Star kept saying that all the way across country, that the whole hip style was just like playing cowboys and Indians, from the boots and bell-bottoms that were like chaps right on up to the serapes and headbands and wide-brimmed hats. He’d denied it at the time, simply because he hadn’t thought about it and the notion scuffed at his idea of himself, but she was right, and he saw it in that moment. Reba was playing at cowboys and Indians, and so was he, and everybody else.

  “It’s mussels,” he said. “Enough to feed the whole campground, heads and straights alike.”

  Alfredo was standing there in his boots and denim shirt with a wondering look on his face, as if he’d just been cut down from the gibbet by his amigos in that very same western. “Mussels?” he echoed. “Where’d you get them?”

  Pan was feeling good. Pan was feeling expansive and generous, feeling brotherly and sisterly. He gave them an elaborated version of his struggle against the sea two mornings ago.

  And what was Alfredo’s reaction? The reaction of the least-together, most tight-assed member of this whole peripatetic circus? How did he respond to Pan’s selfless gesture and all the pride he took in it? He said, “You must be fucking crazy, man. Don’t you realize they’re quarantined this time of year?”

  “Quarantined? What are you talking about?” If he was onto fishing licenses and seasons and all the rest of it, he might as well be talking to his shoes. “June doesn’t have an R in it—”

  Alfredo set down the hatchet and lifted the top from the pot. The mussels roiled blackly in the churning water. “Jesus,” he said. “You could have poisoned all of us.”

  Ronnie peered into the pot, then looked to Merry and Reba before settling on Alfredo. “Bullshit,” he said.

  By now, some of the others had begun to gather round—Maya, Angela, Jiminy—and Ronnie had no choice but to hold his ground. “Bullshit,” he repeated. “So what if they’re quarantined?”

  “Toxic shellfish poisoning,” Alfredo said. “Something like four hundred people died of it one year in San Francisco at the turn of the century, I think it was. There’s this dinoflagellate that will concentrate in huge numbers, like a red tide, when the water temperature gets above a certain level—in summer, only in summer—and the mussels, and clams and whatever, concentrate the toxin from them, and it doesn’t bother the mussels at all, only us.”

  “You know the CIA?” Jiminy put in. His face was a sunlit wedge of nose, cheekbone and bright burning eye chopped out of the frame of his hair. He was thrilled, overjoyed, never happier. “Their assassins use it on a needle and they just prick you in a crowd, a little stab you can barely feel, and then you’re dead.”

  “Paralyzed,” Reba said. “First your extremities go, then your limbs, until you’re a vegetable and you can’t move anything or feel anything—”

  “Right,” Alfredo said, “—and then it shuts down the vital organs.”

  There was an aroma on the air now, a sweet scintillating smell of mussels steamed in their own juices with butter and lemon, salt and pepper and maybe a hint of tarragon. Ronnie wasn’t hovering over a picnic table at a two-dollar-a-night campground in Oregon, he was inside a cage at the zoo, and all these people—his friends, his compatriots, his brothers and sisters—were poking at him through the bars with sharpened sticks. “Bullshit,” he said for the third time. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Believe it,” Alfredo said, already turning to leave, and he was taking a whole raft of faces with him. Merry looked as if she’d been shoved over a cliff, and Jiminy was just waiting for the signal to get down on all fours and start barking like a dog.

  Alfredo. Dinoflagellates. Quarantine. Ronnie was having none of it—it was nonsense was what it was, just another stab at him, as if it would kill Alfredo if he ever got any credit for anything. He stirred the pot, fished out a specimen and set it on the wooden plank of the table. It was perfect, tender—you can’t cook them a heartbeat too long or you’ll be chewing leather—the slick black shell peeking open to reveal the pink-orange meat within, and he was going to hold it up for Merry and run through his mussel routine, about how the lips and the flesh looked like a certain part of the female anatomy and how at medical schools the gynecology students had to study steamed mussels because the real thing was so hard to come by, but Merry was gone, her arm slipped through Jiminy’s, bare feet in the dust, off to consume her ration of stale bread and peanut butter.

  Only Angela, Verbie’s narrow-eyed, lantern-jawed sister, stayed behind to watch as Ronnie forced open the two leaves of the shell—bivalves, the term came hurtling back to him from Mr. Boscovich’s Biology class, that’s what they were, bivalves, and all the tastier for it—removed the glistening pink morsel and tentatively laid it on his tongue. “You’re not really going to eat that, are you?” she said, and he might as well have been the geek in the circus with his incisors bared over the trembling neck of the squirming chicken while the crowd held its collective breath. Of course he was going to eat it, of course he was.

  It took him a long moment, his tongue rolling the bit of flesh round his mouth, before he brought his teeth into play. And what was wrong with that? The juices were released, butter, tarragon, the sea, and the taste was fine, great even—this was the best and freshest mussel he’d ever had, wasn’t it? He chewed thoughtfully, lingeringly. And then he spat the discolored lump into his hand and flung it into the bushes.

  19

  Star had never stolen a thing in her life, even when she was twelve or thirteen and pushing the limits and there was a compact or tube of eyeliner she could have died for and nobody was looking because her friends had distracted the old lady at the counter and they’d all got something in their turn—a comb, a package of gum, M&M’s—as if it were a badge of honor. It wasn’t that she didn’t have the nerve—it was just that she’d been brought up to respect private property, to do right and think right and be a moral upstanding good little Catholic girl. But here she was in a supermarket just outside Seattle, smoking a cigarette in front of the cheese display in the dairy section, the pockets she’d sewn into the lining of her coat heavy with fancy imported cheeses, with Gouda and smoked cheddar and Jarlsberg, and never mind that it was eighty-two degrees outside and nobody else in the world was wearing a coat or even a sweater.

  Reba and Verbie were pushing a cart down the aisle across from her, moving slowly, prepared to trade food stamps for fresh produce, whole wheat bread and family-sized sacks of rice and pinto beans, all the while secreting cans of tuna, crabmeat and artichoke hearts in the purses that dangled so insouciantly from their shoulders. “It’s a family thing,” Reba explained as they were coming across the macadam lot, “—feed the family, that’s all that matters. This place, this whole chain, is just part of the establishment, them against us, a bunch of millionaires in some corporate headquarters somewhere, devoting their lives to screwing people over the price of lettuce. Don’t shed any tears for them.” Ronnie, who’d driven the three of them over in the Studebaker, couldn’t have agreed more. “Fucking fascists,” was his take on it.

  Still, her heart was going as she drew on her cigarette and pretended to deliberate over the cardboard canister of Quaker Oats in her hand, her brow furrowed and her eyes drawn down to slits over the essential question of 100% Natural Rolled Oats versus one dollar and sixty-nine cents. She didn’t see the man in the pressed white shirt and regulation bow tie until he was on top of her. “Finding everything all right?” he asked.
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br />   She met his eyes—a washed-out gray in a pink face surmounted by Brylcreemed hair with the dead-white precision part that was as perfect as the ones you saw in the pictures in the barbers’ windows. He was twenty-five, he’d knocked up his girlfriend and dropped out of high school, and he’d been working in this place since he was sixteen. Or something like that. He was a member of the straight world, and that was all that counted. He was the enemy. Star never flinched, though her heart was going like a drum solo. “No,” she said, “not really,” and she could see Reba and Verbie draw in their antennae at the far end of the aisle—she was in this on her own now. “I was just looking for like a really nutritious cereal for my daughter? I don’t want her eating all that junk we had as kids, Sugar Pops and Frosted Flakes and whatnot. So I was thinking oats, maybe. Just plain oats. With milk.”

  “How old?” He was smiling like all the world, the assiduous employee coming to grips with the discerning shopper.

  “What?”

  “Your daughter—how old is she?”

  “Oh, her . . .” And to cover herself, she made up a name on the spot. “Jasmine? I named her Jasmine, isn’t that a pretty name?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Very pretty.” He paused. “It does get cold in here, doesn’t it?”

  For a moment, she was at a loss. Cold? What was he talking about? She looked down at her coat, and then back up again, and her heart was in her mouth. “I’m very sensitive to it,” she said finally, trying to keep her voice under control. “I’m from down south, this little town in Arizona? Yuma? You ever hear of it?” He hadn’t. “Johnny Yuma?” she tried. Nothing. She shrugged. “It’s just that you’ve got all these refrigerators going in here, the meat, the dairy—”

  He just nodded, and she realized he could see right through her, knew damned well what she was doing, saw it ten times a day. Especially from the likes of her, from heads, hippies, bikers, renegades of every stripe, chicks. “You know, I have three kids myself. The oldest one, Robert Jr.—Bobby—he’s in the second grade already. And they all eat nothing but junk, the sugariest cereal, candy, pop—”