Drop City

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

They were on their way to Boynton and thence to Fairbanks in Richard Schrader’s truck, if Richard Schrader’s truck was available, and he had no doubt it would be, unless maybe the rear end had fallen out of it, which, come to think of it, it was threatening to do last time he’d driven the thing. Pamela had wanted a break for a few days, and so had he, bright lights, big city, one more dose before winter set in. They were both of them hankering to spend a little of the money that had come their way in the form of much-handled bills wrinkled up in plain envelopes or stuffed inside wedding cards, and there were things they needed, obviously, to fill up the new room of the cabin and top off their store of dried beans, rice, tea, coffee, cigarettes, pasta and the like. And toothpaste, never forget toothpaste. He’d spent one whole winter brushing his teeth with his forefinger and another using a mixture of baking soda and salt that ate the bristles out of the brush. Soon the river would be impassable, and then they’d have to wait till freeze-up to come downriver with the dogs, and their destination would have to be Boynton, unless they wanted to mortgage the farm and fly to a place where the sun was more than just a rumor.

  So here they were, out on the river. With cold hands. But there would be warmth in spades at the Nougat and the Three Pup, and by the time they hit the Fairbanks Road the sun would be well up and the temperature peaking in the forties or maybe even fifties. A wedge of noisy scoters shot past overhead, moving south, intelligent birds, get out while the going is good. His paddle shifted ice. “How you doing up there, Pamela?” he asked. “Hands cold?”

  She looked over her shoulder, smiling wide, the dimple bored into her near cheek and those neat white teeth and little girl’s gums on display. “Super,” she said, in answer to the first question. And, “A little, I guess,” in answer to the second.

  He loved her. Loved her more than anything he could ever conceive of. “Hang in there,” he said, proud of her toughness, glowing with it. “When we get to the Three Pup,” he said, digging at the paddle, “the first shot’s on me.”

  “Big spender,” she said, and her laugh trailed out over the river, hit the bank and came rebounding back again.

  They’d both removed their sweaters and their hands were fully recharged by the time the big sweeping bend that gave onto Boynton came into view. It had warmed more than he’d expected—into the sixties, he guessed—and with both shores lit with fall color the last few miles were nothing but pleasure. His eyes were roving ahead—always roving, a hunter’s eyes—when something moving in the shallows at the head of Last Chance Creek caught his attention. He held the paddle down on the last stroke and angled them in on a line for the creek, puzzled, because this was no moose or bear or congress of beaver, no half-submerged sweeper bobbing in the current and no boat either—it was something unexpected, out of place, one of those aberrations of nature that made life so damned interesting out here in the wastelands, because just when you thought you’d seen it all—

  “Who is that out there wading in the creek?” Pamela said, and her eyes were keener than his, how about that? And then it—they—came into focus for him. He saw the two figures grow together and then separate like shards of glass in a kaleidoscope, the canoe slicing closer now, the two of them bending to the water and coming back up again, standard-issue hip waders, glossy shirts, the flash of light from the linked silver band that looped the crown of a flat-brimmed hat. He was dumbfounded, absolutely dumbfounded. There were two black men—two Negroes, hippie Negroes—out in the sun-spangled wash of Last Chance Creek, panning for gold.

  “Hello,” he called as the canoe drifted up on them, “how you doing?”

  Neither man said a word. They gave him looks, though, fixed dark eyes bristling with distrust and hostility. The current surged at their thighs, at the sagging skin of their waders. They regarded the canoe for a long solemn moment, as if it had appeared there spontaneously as some sort of compound of the water and air, and they looked first to Pamela, and then Sess, before turning back to their work, rinsing scoop after scoop of sand in the dull gleam of their pans till all the false clinging grains of silica were washed free.

  “Showing any color?” Sess asked, because he had to say something.

  The smaller one looked up out of a face like a tobacco pouch worn smooth with secret indulgence. His voice was soft, a whisper. “Naw, ain’t nothin’ here, isn’t that right, Franklin?”

  The other one glanced up now, one wild eye and a look that invited nothing. “Naw,” he seconded, “nothin’.”

  Then the first one: “Place isn’t worth shit. Right, Franklin?”

  “Right.”

  Sess said he guessed he’d be seeing them later, then, and Pamela said good luck, and they both dug at their paddles, eager to work their way out of earshot and run this episode through the grinder. They’d gone three or four hundred yards, when Pamela lifted her paddle on the glide and turned her head to him. “What was that all about?”

  “Beats me,” he said. “But they wouldn’t find half an ounce of gold in that creek if they panned it for a hundred years.”

  “They sure don’t act that way. They act like those wild hairs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, like Humphrey Bogart and I don’t who—”

  “Walter Huston,” he said.

  “Right, Walter Huston.”

  The canoe drifted. The sun cut diamonds out of the water. “They were black men, Pamela. Negroes. Where in god’s name do you find Negroes up here?”

  Boynton had come into view now and she arched her back and dipped her paddle. “Jesus, Sess,” she said, throwing the words over her shoulder, “black men, red men, Chinese, what difference does it make? You sound like you’ve never seen a black man before.”

  He was going to say, “I haven’t,” but just then a new feature, as strange in its way as the two figures in the creek, leapt out of the shoreline at him in an explosion of color. It wasn’t a house exactly, more like a Quonset hut, wedged in between Richard Schrader’s weathered gray clapboard box and the shack, and the presence of it there stymied him a minute, but then he knew what it was and knew the answer to his question all in a single flash of intuition: Where do you find Negroes up here? In a hippie bus, that’s where.

  If he expected warmth and conviviality at the Three Pup, he was mistaken. Lynette was laying for him, and so was Skid Denton. The minute he ushered Pamela in the door, Lynette backed away from the bar and said, “Whoa, here he is, the hippie king himself. Or should I say, hippie landlord?”

  Skid Denton was welded to his seat at the end of the bar, as usual, a plate of home fries at his elbow and a glass of beer sizzling in his hand. He leaned forward from the waist to put in his two cents: “It’s a bonfire every night and that hippie music never stops. I hear they’re screwing themselves raw upriver, screwing everything but the dog, and smoking drugs all day long. They really get a cabin built?”

  “That one with the bones in his hair,” Lynette said.

  “And the niggers.” Richie Oliver looked up red-eyed from his scotch and water as if he’d been dog-paddling in a sea of it for the past three days. “Don’t forget the niggers.”

  Eight people were gathered at the bar and there wasn’t a single genuine smile for him—or for Pamela either. And that hurt, because what did she have to do with it? No more than he did. Or less, a whole lot less. He tried his best to ignore Lynette and Skid Denton, who was a first-class jerk, anyway, greeted everybody by name and pulled out a chair for Pamela at the table by the window, thinking ham and eggs, or bacon, or maybe a burger, and a beer and a bump to go with it, because he’d be goddamned if they were going to chase him out of his own chosen roadhouse and bar. Pamela gave him a thin smile and took his hand across the table. “Lynette,” he called, and maybe he did raise his voice just a hair more than was called for, “can we have a little goddamn service over here?”

  They drank. They ate. And they took their sweet time about it. People pulled up chairs and plopped down to butt in, one after another, two at time, three, and all th
e news and all the burning gossip started with the hippies and ended with them too. Lynette sat right at the table with him and Pamela and watched them cut their meat and lift the forks to their mouths as if they might need instruction, and she never stopped talking, not even to draw breath. “The one with the bones in his hair and the garlic strung round his neck? Mr. Vampire, that’s what I call him. He come in here and ordered a pitcher of beer and wanted to know if he could get it on credit and when I said nobody gets credit here he went around the bar and asked if anybody had any change to spare.”

  But Richard Schrader—the best friend Sess had on the river, the best man at his wedding—Richard Schrader took the cake. He hadn’t been home when they came up from the canoe, and they’d skirted the tarted-up bus and the hippie out there hovering over his kiln and the shining glazed line of bowls and plates and ashtrays he’d arranged on a split log as if he was going into business in Sess’s weedpatch, and now he—Richard—pulled the truck into the lot and came through the mosquitoless door and the first thing out of his mouth was “Sess, these people have got to go, they’re making a three-ring circus out of my yard and I don’t think I’ve had more than two hours sleep a night since they got here with their whooping and screaming and that unholy racket of guitars and tambourines and whatnot and did you know they took the speakers out of the bus and mounted them up on the roof so they could blast that shit out over the river and everyplace else? And I’ve tried to reason with them, I have, but it’s Peace, brother, and fuck you—”

  Sess had another beer. He took his time. Wiped his plate with a slice of spongy store-bought bread. Asked about dessert. Forwent a second shot. On the exterior, he might have appeared calm, but he was boiling up inside, and he laid some money on the table, took the keys from Richard and told Pamela he wouldn’t be a minute. He hadn’t gone two feet out the door before Lynette was right there after him, grabbing at his arm. “And, Sess,” she said, the striations of age puckered up around her lips and digging disapproving trenches at the flanges of her nose and the corners of her shrunk-down eyes till she looked like one of those dried and frozen corpses they found in the Andes, “whatever did you go and do to Joe Bosky?” She looked down at the flap of her sidearm and back up again. “I tell you, watch out for that one—”

  So he drove the truck the half mile to town and eased it high up over the ruts and half-buried rocks and into the yard out front of the shack. The dust followed him in. He slammed the transmission up into park, let the engine keen a minute, then cut the ignition. What he heard then was the music, a bull-roaring voice over the guitars, drums and electrified piano, driven at such a volume the speakers couldn’t contain it. The vocal settled, went slack with distortion, then settled again. Off to the right were the two cars, the VW and the Studebaker, looking as if they hadn’t been moved in a month. The kiln was set in the lee of the bus, the heat of it radiating out of the seams and corrugating his view of the shack, which was in need of paint. The bus, though, that didn’t need any paint. They’d been busy with that, and if there was a color they’d neglected to lay on he couldn’t name it.

  The air was clean, the sun going about its business. It was warmer than it had a right to be. He stepped out of the truck to the assault of the music and went up to the door of the bus and knocked at the panel of painted-over glass there. He knocked again. After a while he started to hammer at it with his fist, and it was a good thing—a good thing for them—he hadn’t had that second shot. “Open up!” he shouted. “Whoever’s in there, open up!”

  He felt the bus give ever so slightly on its springs, and then the door cranked open and the one they called Weird George was standing there on the top step, wrapped in a dirty green blanket. He was barefoot. His hair was like a second blanket, or no, it was like the stuff Jill used to make plant holders with in her apartment, some kind of jute, rough-edged and matted, and he had half a dozen bleached-out animal bones dangling from the ragged ends of it. “Oh,” Weird George said, trying to place him. “Oh, hey.”

  “Listen,” and Sess could feel it coming up in him now, an anger pulled up out of nowhere, out of a sunny day, and heavily disproportionate to the crime, “you people are going to have to get out of here. All of you. And take all of your fucking crap with you.”

  Weird George made a vague gesture. He didn’t look as if his legs would hold him upright another thirty seconds. “Oh, man,” he said after a moment, and Sess could barely hear him for the bawling of the speakers, “you want Harmony, Harmony’s the cat to talk to—”

  Everybody’s luck held, because at that moment Harmony came round the front of the bus, his hands dripping clay. As best Sess could figure, the man was about his age, and though he wore his dense blond hair layered like a woman’s he had a fierce reddish Fu Manchu mustache to counteract the effect, and in Sess’s limited dealings with the tribe he seemed the most reasonable of any of them—and a whole lot easier to communicate with than the nephew, who tended to talk in paragraphs, as if he were getting paid by the word. Harmony looked surprised. He wiped his hands on his jeans, cocked his head and gave Sess a look out of the corner of his wire-frame glasses. He was about to say “What’s happening?”—Sess would have bet the farm on it—but before he could open his mouth Sess launched into a lecture of his own, enumerating the hippie infractions and the way the town felt about them and telling him in no uncertain terms that he was going to have to pack everybody up and find another place to throw his pots and blast his music and smoke his marijuana and LSD.

  Sess didn’t know how long he went on, but after a while Harmony was joined by his wife or girlfriend or whoever she was, a thin raggedy little woman with a serene smile and the usual hair and a pair of breasts that should have been matched to somebody twice her size, and the two of them just stood there and listened to him as if they were SRO in a lecture hall. When he was done, when he’d talked himself out and begun to think of getting back in the truck, picking up Pamela and heading into Fairbanks to celebrate life and the season and the cache that was full to bursting with dressed-out meat, the record he’d been subconsciously screaming over came to a superamplified halt, and Harmony said, “I hear you, man.” He put an arm round the woman’s shoulders and drew her to him. “You’ve been like supercool, and we all appreciate that, even Weird George. And listen, we’ve been maybe a little remiss in this, but Alice and I have been wanting to like show our appreciation. Here,” he said, gesturing toward the long tottering line of misshapen ashtrays and bongs and fluted drinking cups set out on the naked board and gracing the tree stumps of the field, “you just take your pick—”

  Three days later, when they got back from Fairbanks, the bus was still there. Of course it was—what did he expect them to do, paint it over with vanishing ink? The thing probably wouldn’t even start. Why fool himself?—it was there for the duration. Maybe when the next glacial age hit in another ten thousand years the big mile-high wall of ice would creep across the tundra and grind it to dust, but for now, Sess figured, he might as well get used to it because it wasn’t going anywhere. And at this point—three days on—he couldn’t really get himself worked up about it. He and Pamela had had a matchless time, their second honeymoon—or first, actually—lazing in bed at the Williwaw Motor Inn, smoking cigarettes and drinking rum and Coke out of plastic disposable cups and watching the mystical flicker of the world caught and sealed in the little box everybody called by the diminutive just to express their sodality with it. They bought things. Made the rounds of the bars. And though he was disappointed to find that the dog pound had nothing with four legs and a tail that weighed more than maybe fifteen pounds—the Chihuahua meets the toy poodle meets the bichon frise in the dumped-down hills of Fairbanks—he was satisfied. He was going upriver with his wife and all the necessities and luxuries they could carry and hippie pottery too, and he didn’t give a blue damn for how things sorted out in Boynton.

  They got in from Fairbanks in the late afternoon, and it was blowing up cold. Sess went ri
ght on by the Three Pup, pulled the pickup into Richard’s drive and backed it down to the river. “Is there anything we need out of the shack?” he wondered aloud as Pamela handed him boxes of groceries, cans of Blazo gas and two-stroke oil, a bag of brand-new socks and underwear and felt linings for his mukluks. He was leaning forward, distributing the weight in the bottom of the canoe. The wind took his hair and gave it a yank.

  “Nothing I can think of,” she said, straightening up and looking out over the anvil of the river. The sky was dark. Whole armadas of ice had come down to do war with the open water.

  “All right, then,” he said, “because I don’t like the looks of that sky, not one bit.”

  Pamela was wearing her parka and she’d put the hood up the minute she got out of the truck. Her hands were thin gray flaps of skin working out of her sleeves, her shoulders were hunched against the wind and the tip of her nose and her cheeks were already drawing color. When she took the paddle up out of the thwarts, he saw that her knuckles showed white against the dark oiled grain of the wood. She gave him a tired smile and settled herself in the bow and he couldn’t help thinking of the contrast between this and the first time they’d gone upriver together, all the way back in the fullness of June, but then a little discomfort was what the country offered everybody without prejudice, and soon enough he’d have her back in the cabin, the fire stoked and a cup of something hot in her hands. As they shoved off, the canoe shattered the spider ice that clung to the shore. No one had to tell him this would be the last canoe trip of the year.

  They hadn’t gone more than half a mile, the wind in their faces, when Pamela turned to him. “The keys,” she said. “What about the keys?”

  “I left them in the truck. Didn’t I?”

  “Check your pockets, Sess—you remember what happened last time.”

  His hand was so numb he could barely work it into his pocket, and what did he feel there taking shape under his fingers? A pack of matches, his pocketknife, the money clip—and the keys to Richard Schrader’s truck. So they turned around and went back and he climbed up the bank past the battened and silent hippie bus—they must have all gone upriver, that’s what he figured—slipped the keys into the truck’s ignition and came back down the bank at a jog and shoved off again.