Drop City (30 page)

“Forget it?” Marco's face was like a bad dream, and Ronnie saw that and registered it, because there was a violent divide here, and he wouldn't want to find himself on the wrong side of it. Ever. “I'm going to fucking kill them, all three of them! You with me, Ronnie—Pan? You with me?”

Ronnie's hands were frozen on the wheel, his eyes pasted to the rearview mirror. “Peace,” Star kept saying, “peace and love, remember?” Ronnie looked at the three faces ranged across the hood of the car behind him, looked at Lydia's shoulders, the mad flying tangle of her hair, and his heart was looping back on itself. “I hear you, man,” he said.

But then the whole procession was slowing, chain reaction—bus, Bug, Lincoln, motorcycle, Studebaker, pickup—and Norm had the big amber blinker going on the bus and the yellow wall was sliding into a turn, a side road, and there was the sign that spelled relief in foot-high letters:
PUBLIC CAMPGROUND
,
ALL CARS WELCOME
, 2
$ PER NITE
. Now, surely now, Ronnie was thinking, the pickup would peel away from them and vanish on down the highway, but no, it came on still, the faces behind the windshield taut and pale and vengeful.

The pavement gave out beneath him, and the Studebaker was thumping into a big rutted dirt lot interspersed with trees, barbecue smoke snatching at the air, cars and Winnebagos pulled up around tents and picnic tables, kids chasing each other in a flash of motion while white-legged old stick-people sucked bourbon out of paper cups and dogs yapped in a territorial frenzy, and this was it, America
the beautiful, home of the brave, all cars welcome. Lydia had to pee. She was hungry. They were all hungry. But before Ronnie could twist the key off and set the brake, the three frat boys were at the driver's side window, and a hand, a meaty red outraged hand, was snatching at his hair, even as he flung his head back and away and Star let out with a screech that just about stopped his heart.

“Fucking longhair!”

“Get out of the car, asshole!”

All in a flash, it came to him that his antagonists weren't simply the frat boy rednecks he'd taken them to be, but frat boy redneck football players, or maybe weight lifters, all puffed up like toads in their Oregon Ducks T-shirts. One of them, the guy who'd been driving, was like a monument ripped from its pedestal with two livid eyes and a blond crewcut drilled into his skull.
Son of a bitch.
A bitter taste of impotence and rage clotted in Pan's throat, because he'd been here before and he knew what was coming. He was afraid, and then he wasn't, because all at once he was beyond fear, beyond anything, and he leaned back into the door and snatched at the handle at the very moment the meaty red hand converted itself into a fist that exploded in his left ear with a sound of wind rushing down a tunnel.

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?”