Drop City

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “Tired?” Star murmured, leaning into him.

  For answer, he pressed his palms together in prayer, then tilted them and made a pillow to lay his head on.

  “And Lester,” Sky Dog was saying, “you should have seen Lester—man, they wanted to lock him up so bad, just on general principles, you know? But he gave them the old shuck and jive and smiled so hard at this one guy—I don’t know what he was, a Mountie, a sheriff, something—I thought he was going to melt right down into his boots like a big stick of rancid butter. Oh, and, shit, the moose—did I tell you about the moose?”

  Alfredo cut in. He wanted to know where Lester was—was he planning on coming upriver? Because if he was, it was going to be sticky, real sticky, after what went down in California, and he didn’t want to sound prejudiced or anything, because prejudice had nothing to do with it—

  “He stayed behind at the bus,” Verbie said, picking at a crescent of white bone. “With Franklin. They’re panning for gold.”

  Joe Bosky let out a hoot. “Fucking greenhorns,” he said. “Cheechakos.”

  “All’s I know,” Sky Dog put in, “is they got this vial half-filled with gold flakes already, and all they been doing is just catching what comes out of that creek up north of town—”

  “Last Chance Creek,” Bosky said, folding his arms. The pale white ridge of a scar crept out of his aviator’s mustache and curled into the flesh of his upper lip. You could see where every hair of his head was rooted. “They should’ve called it No Chance Creek. Nothing in there but sewage leaching out of people’s septic tanks.”

  “Sorry, man, but I saw it, I’m telling you—that was gold in there.”

  “Iron pyrites,” Verbie said, and then Norm weighed in. “Could be gold, who knows? You want to talk gold country, this is it, and I fully intend to get out there and rinse a couple pans myself, me and Premstar. Once the cabins are up. Because why not? It’s money in the bank, people, and it’s out there for the picking, just like the berries and the fat silver salmon coming up the river, and do I have to remind anybody what we’re doing up here in the first place?”

  Jiminy said he could feature some gold—maybe Harmony could figure out a way to melt it down and make ornaments and figurines and the like—or maybe they could just sell it and use the money for things like a new generator so they could have a little music more than once a week. And lights, what about lights. Wouldn’t lights be nice?

  People ran that around the table a while, the gold flecks that would invariably prove to be iron pyrites growing exponentially in each Drop City head till the creek across the river ran yellow and the trees on the hills gave up their roots and toppled because it wasn’t earth they were growing in, but solid gold nuggets. Marco tuned them out. He’d never been so tired in his life. And if it wasn’t for the elation he was riding on—the meeting house was up, the walls chinked and the roof in place, and who would have believed it a month ago?—he’d have crawled into his sleeping bag by now. But he held on, stroking Star’s bare arm with the tip of one very relaxed finger and letting the marijuana turn the blood to syrup in his veins.

  They’d made the meeting house two stories, with the beams laid inside for a loft where people could sleep if the need arose, and that was good thinking, a happy result of sitting down with a sheet of paper and a pencil and talking it all out beforehand with Tom, Alfredo and Norm. Norm knew what he was doing, for the most part, at least, and Sess Harder, fifteen minutes down the river, was like an encyclopedia—he was the one who told them to lay flattened cardboard over the roof poles so none of the loose sod would leach through the cracks—and the uncle had left behind a pristine copy of The Complete Log Home, copyright 1910, which they could consult as needed, but really, Marco couldn’t help marveling over how basic it all was. You cut and peeled the timber, notched the ends of the logs till they were no different, except in scale maybe, from the Lincoln Logs every ten-year-old in America constructed his forts and stockades with, dug down two feet to permafrost at the four corners and stacked up rock to lay the first square across and built on up from there. Then you laid the floor—with planks carved out of spruce with a chainsaw ripper—cut holes for the windows and a six-inch slot for the stovepipe, and you had it. Basically, that was it. And if they could all pitch in and build something like this—two stories high, twenty feet long and eighteen across—then the cabins would be nothing more than a reflex.

  “What about Harmony and Alice?” This was Norm, leaning into the table and giving Sky Dog and Dale Murray a look over the top of his glasses. “And Lydia, what about her?”

  “You know Harmony,” Sky Dog said. “He’s got a kiln set up outside the bus and he says he’s experimenting with some things and he’s not ready to come upriver yet, at least that’s what he told me and Dale. Plus the Bug is broken down.”

  “He ordered a new fuel pump for it,” Verbie put in. “From this place in Anchorage.”

  Norm dug his fingers into his beard, slid the glasses back up his nose. “And Lydia?”

  To this point, Joe Bosky had been subdued, his dig at the gold situation the only thing out of his mouth all evening. He’d been locked behind the wrap of his silver shades since morning, stoned on a whole variety of things. When the hot chocolate went round he’d shuffled unsteadily to the plane and came back with a bottle of Hudson Bay rum and set it on the table, and a couple of people followed his example and spiked their chocolate with it. He cleared his throat in response to Norm’s question and leaned over to spit in the dirt before bringing the solidity of his face back to the table. “She’s in Fairbanks,” he said.

  “Fairbanks?”

  A murmur went round the table. If it was true, this was disturbing news, evidence of their first defection, the first betrayal of the ideal. People eyed one another up and down the table—who was next? Where would it end? Was the whole thing going to come tumbling down now? Was that what this meant? Marco slouched over his plate. For the moment, at least, he was too tired to care.

  “What do you mean, Fairbanks?”

  Joe Bosky’s voice was thick in his throat. “I got her a job at this place I know. A saloon. She’s going to be a dancer.”

  And now Verbie: “Only till winter, though, is what she told me. To get some money together, for all of us—she’s doing it for all of us—and then she’s going to come back to the fold. That’s a promise, she said—tell them that’s a promise.”

  “And if any of you other girls are interested,” Bosky said, and here he turned to Star and fixed his null gaze on her, “I can arrange it, because Christ knows they are starved for women up here. And Lydia. I mean, she’s a natural, with that body she’s got on her—”

  “You mean topless, right?” Maya said.

  “Right down to her G-string, honey, because full frontal nudity is still against the law in this state, but I tell you she’s going to take in more tips a night than you people’ll get in a month out of welfare or food stamps or whatever it is you’re on.”

  Everyone looked to Norm, whether they were conscious of it or not. And Norm, at the head of the table, hair dangling from the cincture of his headband, the cowbell like a cheese grater hung round his neck, set down his cup of chocolate and licked his mustache till all the sweet residuum was gone. “All right,” he said finally. “Cool. I mean, we can live with that, right, people? Lydia’s going to show off what she was born with and make a little cash for Drop City in the bargain, and where’s the problem with that?”

  Verbie’s voice came back at him like a whipcrack. “It’s exploitation.”

  “Exploitation of what?”

  “Of the female body. It’s sexist. I mean, I don’t see any of you men up there dancing in your jockstraps or whatever—”

  “Only because they didn’t ask,” Norm said, and people were laughing now, avowals going up and down the table, and then Sky Dog said he’d do it in a heartbeat.

  “Oh, yeah,” Verbie shot back. “Then why don’t you do it now? Why not get u
p on the table and give us something to look at, come on, let’s see what you got, big boy, come on—”

  Sky Dog rose unsteadily from his seat and began undoing the buttons of his shirt while the catcalls rang out, but once he got his shirt off, he seemed to lose track of what he was doing—gone into the wild blue yonder—and he sat back down again.

  “Chicken,” Merry said.

  “See, what’d I tell you?” Verbie said.

  And then Premstar, propped up beside Norm like a painted mannequin, Premstar the beauty queen who was more worried about her nails and her lipstick and her eyeliner than about anything that could possibly go down at Drop City, past or present, entered the conversation for the first time all night. “What about our treats?” she demanded. “All the things we ordered from Pan, I mean. Did everybody forget, or what?”

  That was the unfortunate moment Ronnie chose to come bobbing across the field from his tent, the sun firing the threads of his hair, his torso riding over his hips as if he were walking a treadmill, and the table fell momentarily silent to watch his progress. Everyone was thinking the same thing. Pan had been crashed in his tent all this time, out of sight, out of mind, but the boat had come in with Verbie and Sky Dog and Dale, strange cargo indeed, and the windows for the meeting house and the three prospective cabins were there, uncracked and true, and the cans of kerosene and the bar oil and blades for the saws, but nothing else. No candy bars. No underarm deodorant. No books or magazines or tubes of suntan lotion. And if they weren’t in the plane and they weren’t in the boat, then where were they?

  “Hey, Dale,” Sky Dog said, trying to get it going again, “remember that shit they tried to palm off on us in, where was it, Carmacks, in that roadhouse? Mooseburger they called it?” But nobody was listening. All eyes were on Pan as he shuffled up to the table, tucking in his shirt and swatting absently at mosquitoes. Even Freak lifted his head from the dirt to give him a look of appraisal. The smoke drifted. The moment held.

  “Hey, what’s happening,” Ronnie said, leaning over Marco’s shoulder to peer into the depths of the nearest pot. “Am I too late for dinner?”

  At first, he tried to deny everything, squeezing himself in on the bench between Star and Joe Bosky and scraping what he could out of the bottom of the pot, all the while mounding it up on the first plate that came to hand, and never mind that it had already been used, he wasn’t fussy. He was wearing his glad-to-be-here look, all smiles and dancing eyes, and he’d put a little effort into his clothes too, his denim shirt clean and maybe even pressed and what looked to be a new bandanna wrapped round his head. He found a fork, wiped it on his jeans, and began to feed the hardened dregs of rice into his mouth, too busy eating to address the issue of Drop City’s trust and the two-column shopping list he’d wrapped round the wad of bills everybody had thrust on him five days ago. Marco studied the side of his head, the sparse thread of his sideburns tapering down into the sparser beard, the wad of muscle working in his jaw, but Ronnie was making eye contact with no one, least of all Premstar, who’d just looked directly at him and said, “So where’s our stuff?”

  Now she repeated herself, and Reba, the hunt in her eyes, said, “Yeah, Pan, what’s the deal? Are you going tell me you forgot, or what?”

  If Ronnie was hoping it would blow by him, he was going to be disappointed, Marco could see that. He hadn’t given him any money himself—he’d been too busy to think of needing or wanting anything—but Star had, and that was enough to involve him right there, more than enough. To this point, Pan had been fairly innocuous, shying away from the construction or anything that smacked of real work, maybe, but taking charge of the boat and the drift net Norm’s uncle had left behind and assiduously drilling holes in anything that moved out along the river, and that was meat nobody else was going to go and get, at least not till the cabins were up anyway. He’s doing his own thing, that’s what Star said whenever his name came up in relation to the work details Alfredo was forever trying to organize—the latrine crew, the bark-stripping crew, the wood-splitters and sod-cutters—and the way she defended him was an irritant, certainly, but Marco wasn’t jealous of him, or not that he would admit. Of course I love him, Star had insisted, but like a brother, like my brother Sam, and no, we never really slept together, or not in any way that really meant anything—

  “Is that booze I see here on the table? Distilled spirits? Al-co-holic beverage?” Ronnie lifted his head and darted a glance at the sun-drenched bottle of rum rising up out of the wooden slab at Bosky’s elbow. “What are we mixing it with?”

  “The stuff, Ronnie, the stuff,” Reba said. “We were talking about the stuff we all gave you money for—where is it? Huh?”

  He reached for the bottle, found a cup, poured. Everybody at the table watched him as if they’d never before seen a man lift a cup to his lips, and they watched him sip and swallow and make a face. “I thought it was—didn’t we bring it in the plane, Joe? I mean, this morning?”

  But Joe Bosky was no help. He sat there frozen behind his glazed lenses, not even bothering to swat at the mosquitoes clustered on the back of his neck. A dense spew of smoke raked across the table and then dissipated. No one said a word.

  “Jesus,” Ronnie said, slapping at his forehead. “Don’t tell me I left all that shit back at the bus—”

  “Oh, cut the crap, already. You didn’t leave anything anywhere, did you, man?” Mendocino Bill rose massively at the far end of the table. He’d put in an order for Dr. Scholl’s medicated foot powder, because he had a semipermanent case of athlete’s foot and the itching was driving him up a wall. “You fucked up, didn’t you?”

  Ronnie looked wildly round the table, his mouth set, eyes jumping from one face to another. He was calculating, Marco could see that, dipping deep in the well, way down in the deepest hole, fishing for a lie plausible enough to save his neck. Marco had no sympathy for him, none at all, and in that moment he realized how expendable he was, whether Star needed him as confessor or not—or no, especially because she needed him. Or thought she did. The shadows deepened. A hawk screeched from a tree at the edge of the woods. “What about it, Pan?” he heard himself say.

  “Talk about the third degree,” Ronnie said, and he was looking down at the table now, toying with his fork. Suddenly he let out a laugh—a high sharp bark of a laugh that startled the dog out of his digestive trance—and he raised his head and gave Marco a sidelong look. “All right,” he said, “all right, you got me. I fucked up. Had one too many drinks, you know, and I just . . . I don’t know, I just, I guess it slipped my mind—”

  He must not have found much comfort in the look Marco was giving him, because he ducked his head again and murmured, to no one in particular, “So go ahead and hang me.”

  A moment ticked by, everybody staring at the spool of his bowed head, the rings flashing on the fingers of his right hand—a ring on every finger, even the thumb—as he fed congealed rice pap into his mouth with the slow, trembling incertitude of a penitent. Freak got up from under the table, stretched, yawned and stared off at something across the field and into the line of the trees. Star sat there rigid. Her face was white, bloodless, drawn down to nothing. She was giving Ronnie a look Marco couldn’t fathom—was she afraid for him, was that it? Or was she ashamed? Ashamed and disgusted? He was almost surprised when her voice broke the silence: “So you’ll be giving everybody their money back now, right?”

  Ronnie took another pull at the mug, again made a face. He looked like a cat scratching around in a litter box. “Christ, has anybody got a Coke? Or a Pepsi? I’d settle for Royal Crown, even—this shit is harsh.” He shot a glance at Star, then looked down at his plate. “Well, not exactly,” he said, and an angry murmur burned from one end of the table to the other. “Because, you’ve got to understand, I saw this opportunity—pot, I mean, the pot Lester and Franklin smuggled in, because where else do you expect to find weed in Alaska? Beyond what we brought, I mean. So I figured what do we need most of all, the single big
gest thing? And what are we going to need to get us through those long dark nights that are going to be coming before you know it? Right? Weed. So I made an investment for all of us.”

  “You’re a real altruist, Pan,” Reba said.

  Bill hadn’t sat down yet. He was still hovering there at the far end of the table, the fat firming to muscle in his shoulders and arms, the long slant of the sun crystallizing the strands of grease in his river-washed hair. He looked pained. Looked as if someone had just poked him with a sharp stick. “Yeah, right,” he said, and he growled it, his voice hoarse and raw with suppressed rage, “you mean the pot you tried to sell me this morning for thirty bucks a lid?”

  “Fuck you,” Ronnie said, and he was on his feet now too, trying to untangle his legs from the table, trying to get serious, get angry. “I mean, fuck you, you fat sack of shit.”

  And of course Bill rose to the bait, coming round the end of the table in the swelled-up shell of himself, coming at Ronnie like a moving mountain, and Marco thinking two or three punches and they’re separated and Ronnie can go off in a huff to his tent, put-upon and abused, after which there would be an offering of pot, not all of it, maybe, and certainly not anywhere near the value of it, and by the end of the night the blame would be meliorated and the sinner redeemed. But he was wrong. Because before any of it could play out, Joe Bosky entered the mix. Somehow he managed to lurch up and kick himself free of the bench in time to intercept Bill before he could get to Ronnie, who was only then bracing himself to meet the first rush. Everybody else sprang up simultaneously from the table, Reba cursing, Che and Sunshine looking lost and bewildered, Alfredo shouting, “No, no, no!”

  Bosky never hesitated. He dropped his shoulder and slammed into Bill as if they were out on a football field, helmet to breastbone, and Bill’s feet got tangled and he went down heavily in the dirt. Almost immediately he pushed himself up, his face transfigured with rage, but before anyone could intervene, Bosky hit him with two quick white fists—two uppercuts delivered as he was blundering to his feet—and Bill went down again. That was when Alfredo and Deuce made a move to wrap Bosky up in their arms, but Bosky swatted them away as if they were nothing and swung round to face off the whole camp. “Nobody fucks with Pan like that,” he snapped. “You understand? It’s not right, because I want to tell you”—and here his voice got sluggish and he staggered back and caught himself—“I want tell you Pan is Joe Bosky’s buddy and nobody fucks with Joe Bosky.”