Drop City Read online

  Naked, her legs slightly bowed and her features dwindling in the broad arena of her face, the kid held her ground. “Juice.”

  “Oh, shit,” Reba said. “Shit. Fuck. I don’t care. Give her juice.”

  Lydia was there, Merry, Maya, all looking on with washed-out smiles. They were the chicks, and they were serving breakfast. Tomorrow it would be somebody else’s turn, another group of chicks. But this morning it was this group—Star’s group—and there was a celebration going on, or about to go on. Star hesitated. “But it’s, um—you know, the juice is special today, Reba. Did you forget?”

  “Summer solstice.”

  “Right.”

  “Druid Day.”

  She could feel the grass tugging at her body as if she were about to lift off, gravity suddenly nullified as in a dream, the gentlest subtlest most persuasive full-body tug in the world, and then it let go. “Yeah,” she said finally, “and so we, Lydia, I mean, already—”

  “—laced the OJ with acid, as if Alfredo and I didn’t like invent Druid Day year before last, and where were you then, back home with Mommy and Daddy? You really think I’m that far out that I don’t know what I’m doing? You think my kids haven’t been turned on?” Reba shot a withering look round the kitchen, then dropped her face to confront her daughter. “See the trouble you’re causing? You want juice? Okay, have your juice—but don’t you come crying to me if you get onto some kind of kid trip like you did last time—remember last time, when you curled up in that cabinet under the sink and wouldn’t come out all day?”

  Sunshine didn’t nod, didn’t say yes or no, didn’t even blink.

  “Okay,” Reba breathed, straightening up and smiling now, her face a cauldron of tics and wrinkles and wildly constellating moles, “give her the eggs, and milk, and if it’ll keep her out of my hair because I need a day off sometimes too, believe it or not, just half a glass of the juice, okay?”

  Alfredo was deep in conversation with Mendocino Bill—“Hobbits are three feet tall, just the size of kids, because it’s a kids’ book, so get over it, already”—and he had nothing to say. He turned a blank face to Star and the line shuffled forward. Sunshine took her plate of eggs and her juice over to the table, set them down, and came back for the milk. When Star looked up again, all the seats at the table were taken, and Jiminy was holding forth about something, waving his fork and jerking at the loose strands of his hair as if they’d come to life and started attacking him. Sunshine was nowhere to be seen. Her plate, barely touched, had been pushed to one side. The glass of milk was there beside it, a yellow stripe of cream painted round the rim, but the juice was gone.

  Star registered that fact, made a little snapshot of it in her head—crowded table, a surge of tie-dye, saffron eggs on a dull tin plate, forks gleaming, teeth flashing, and no kid present in any way, shape or form, and no juice—but the snapshot never got printed because Verbie was there in line with a girl who could have been her twin except she wore her hair long, and Verbie was introducing her as her sister Angela from Pasadena, and the plates moved, the biscuits retreated, the orange juice dwindled in the stoneware pitcher. Verbie helped herself to a double scoop of eggs, accepted biscuits and a full glass of juice. Star had already had her juice, and she could feel the first crackling charge of it leaping synapses up and down the length of her, and she momentarily tuned out Verbie, who was in the middle of a complicated story about her sister, something about the Whiskey, too many Harvey Wallbangers and a go-go dancer. The sister seethed with joy. This was a story about her, and Verbie was telling it, at breakfast, on Druid Day in Drop City.

  “You know, I guess I’ll take a full glass too,” the sister said. “It isn’t that strong, is it?”

  “Two hundred mics,” Verbie said. “Three, at most.”

  And who was next? Ronnie, looking chewed-over and cranky. He had his head down and his eyes dodged and darted behind the oversized discs of his sunglasses, fish, but not in a net, little fish, minnows, trapped in a murky aquarium. He took a glass and held it out. “Eggs?” she said, and it was a peace offering. She’d cooked the eggs, and here she was to scoop them up and serve them, the hard-working, self-effacing and dutiful little chick, and what more could anybody ask for?

  “Skip the eggs.”

  “Toast? Biscuits?” She tried for a smile. “Fresh-baked. By Maya.”

  “Just the juice.” He watched her fill the glass. The breakfast roar surged round the room, spilled out the door and into the courtyard. “So where you been the last couple of days?” he said. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  She shrugged to show how casual everything was, no big deal, but it wasn’t easy to shrug and pour at the same time. Juice dripped down the sides of the glass, puddled on the table. “We were down backpacking round Mount Tam,” she said, “in the redwoods there? It was a trip. It really was.”

  “You and Marco, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Like the night I got my deer—I looked all over for you that night too.” He took the glass from her hand and held it out away from him, the juice foaming like a witches’ brew, neon orange and drip, drip, drip. “Just you and Marco, right?”

  “Yeah, well I’m sure you had Lydia to comfort you, and what about Merry and that new girl I saw you being all friendly with the other day, what’s her name, Premstar—the one that’s so tripped-out she can barely talk? I’m sure they must’ve kept you from feeling too sorry for yourself.”

  “Just you and Marco, right?” he repeated.

  She just stared at him.

  “Okay, fine.” He drank off the juice in a single gulp, snatched the pitcher from the counter and filled the glass back up to the rim. “Don’t even talk to me,” he said, and he was saying it over his shoulder, because he was already out the door and into the coruscating light that exploded all around him like colliding stars.

  Lydia was sitting on the counter by the sink, gazing off across the room as if she were oblivious to the whole thing—off on her own trip, and don’t you confuse your trip with mine—but Merry came round the table and stood there till Star acknowledged her. “What was that all about?”

  Star was feeling it, right down to her toes, the first fluttering euphoric rush of the drug. She didn’t want hassles, she didn’t want possessiveness, jealousy, anger, bad sex and bad feelings—she wanted to let loose and watch the day play itself out, one swollen luminous minute after another. She looked at Merry, and it was as if Merry were underwater, her hair floating in gentle undulations, her face, her eyes, seaweed riding the currents and seahorses too. “I don’t know,” she heard herself say, “I guess Pan’s having a bad day.”

  That was when Lester’s face hove into view, big smile, gold in his teeth, his skin as slick and worn as the leather on the speed bag Sam had hanging in the garage back at home. His eyes were huge, as if he’d been groping in the dark his whole life—and what were they, a lemur’s eyes, an owl’s—and his hair was teased out till it stood straight up off his head like Jimi Hendrix’s. Franklin was with him, and they both had their shoulders hunched, as if they were stalking through a rainstorm. “Hey, Star, Merry, what’s happening?” Lester said. “Just wondering if, uh, you might have some of that juice left for a couple of hermits? Maybe some eggs too—wouldn’t some eggs be nice, Franklin?”

  “Sure would,” Franklin said.

  Star couldn’t seem to summon a response—try though she might, no response was forthcoming, not right then, not a yes or a no or a see you in hell first, nothing. Zero. She was drawing blanks. Sky Dog had moved on, as had Dewey and most of the others, but Lester and Franklin had persisted, though everybody treated them like lepers. They hadn’t showed up for a meal in weeks, and hardly anyone ever saw them. But they were there, and everyone was aware of it, whether they pretended differently or not. Go out to the parking lot, and there was the Lincoln, dusted over till it could have been some spontaneous excrescence of the earth itself. Take a stroll at night, and the music came at you
from the back house, deep-bottomed and mysterious. And every once in a while you’d look up from what you were doing, and there they’d be out on their tumbledown porch, stripped to the waist and passing a joint or a cigarette or a jug of wine from one adhesive hand to another.

  Merry spoke up first. “I don’t think so,” she said.

  Lester turned to Franklin, as if to interpret for him. “You hear that, Franklin? The girl doesn’t think so. What do you say to that?”

  Franklin stood a head taller than Lester. He was wearing a wide-collared polka-dot shirt, yellow on black. He had bags under his eyes, as if he’d been up for a hundred nights straight, and he was letting his processed hair grow out in reddish wisps. He looked at Lester when he spoke. “I don’t say nothin’.”

  “Well, I say it’s a bunch of racist hippie-dippy shit,” Lester said, swinging round on them. “What’s a matter, us niggers ain’t good enough for you?”

  “Fuck you, Lester,” Merry said, and there were faces at the door now, people jerked up short as if they had leashes fastened round their throats. And where was Marco? In Santa Rosa, with Norm, getting supplies.

  Lester thought this was funny. “Fuck me, huh? There’s peace and love for you.”

  Irate, that was a word, wasn’t it? Star was irate—first Ronnie, and now this. “Look,” she said, stepping into the breach, “you know perfectly well this has nothing to do with whether you’re black or white or, or—”

  “Red or yellow?”

  Somehow, she had the spatula in her hand. Or no, it was the serving spoon, a stick of dried-out tessellated overcooked pine, and she was waving it like a conductor’s baton. “Norm said—”

  He threw it back at her, but softly, softly, his voice a whisper: “ ‘Norm said.’ Listen to her. Norm didn’t say shit. Norm said everybody’s welcome here, and if you’re so hot on niggers, you tell me how many more brothers you got hiding out there in the woods just in case we do decide to move on out of here one of these days? Huh? How many? Ten? Fifteen?”

  She could feel her heart going into overdrive. She dropped the spoon on the table and backed away from it. “I’m not going to argue with you, I’m not going to get involved in your trip at all, because you can just do what you want and I don’t care, I really don’t.”

  “What about Marco—he care?”

  And now she said it too: “Fuck you, Lester. Just go fuck yourself.”

  But Lester was pouring juice, Lester was scooping up eggs and biscuits. He took enough for three people, mounded it up on a plate till it was spilling over and handed it to Franklin, then served himself, and no one said a word. One scoop of eggs, two, three. He took his time, and he wore a tight little smile on his face that made her feel nothing but sad and ashamed. Had it really come to this? Were they fighting over food? Or was it something else, something ugly and dirty, something that made Drop City the biggest joke in the world?

  So go ahead and define your bad trip, because here it was. She just turned and walked out of the kitchen, through the meeting room and out the front door, no eggs for her, no washing up with her sisters, no dancing and joy and flowers in her hair, no bonding with the clan and letting the acid strip her clean, inside and out. She crossed the pale dirt drive to the treehouse, climbed the ladder and pulled it up after her, and she lay there on Marco’s sleeping bag, staring up into the leaves till she could identify each and every one of them individually and her heart slowed through all the gears from overdrive on down to neutral.

  Later—it might have been five minutes or five hours, she had no idea—she pushed herself up and looked around her. There was a dragonfly perched on the rail, a single bolt of electric color like a driven blue nail, and beneath it, a built-in shelf aflame with the spines of the books Marco had been collecting—Soul on Ice, Ficciones, Cat’s Cradle, Trout Fishing in America, Steppenwolf—and a Coleman lantern in a shade of green so deep it cut a hole through the wall. The books were incandescent, burning from the inside out. She picked one up almost at random, for the color and the feel of it, and she opened it on words that tacked across the page like ships on a poisoned sea. She couldn’t make sense of them, didn’t want to, hated in that instant the whole idea of books, literature, stories—because stories weren’t true, were they?—but the books reminded her of Marco, and so they were good and honest and valuable, and she stroked the familiar object in her hand as if it were a cat or a pet rabbit, stroked it until the paper became fur and the living warmth of it penetrated her fingertips.

  Small sounds came to her, intimate sounds, as if she’d lifted out of herself and become an omnipresence—a cough, a giggle, a sigh, the faint soughing of Jiminy’s breath catching in the back of his throat as he rocked against Merry’s sweat-slick skin in the downstairs bedroom of the main house a hundred yards away. She could hear the leaves respiring and the sap creeping through the branches in the way of blood, slow blood, blood like paste. Termites whispered in the duff, the hooves of the goats grew and expanded with a sharp-edged sound that teemed and popped in her ears. And then the book, the one in her hand, rematerialized in a ripple of color, pink and yellow and a single human eye staring out of the page, and she knew it at once, Julio Cortázar’s Blow-up and Other Stories. It was a book Ronnie had turned her onto, back in New York, and she in turn had bought it for Marco—there was the imprint of the secondhand book shop in Sebastopol, FREEWHEELIN’ BOOKS, 25¢, right there in a faded pink blur on the inside page. All right. At least she had that, and though the words still wouldn’t cooperate, though they grouped and regrouped and pitched and bucked across the page and every mouth in the forest buzzed in her ears with tiny voices that kept burning and screaming out their testimony till it was all just a blur of white noise, she could dream the stories, dream of the axolotl and the man who kept vomiting up bunnies, and she did, until she had to pull out all the books, one after another, and let the stories infest her.

  And then she was down out of the tree, barefoot in the biting leaves, scattering an armload of books like glossy seeds, because that’s where they’d found them, she and Marco, on a dense hot sweating afternoon that went off like a time bomb, and where was he now when she needed him? He was with Norm, she reminded herself, that’s where he was. In Santa Rosa. Getting supplies. He’d promised to drop his acid at the same time she dropped hers, so they could ride the wave together, and she saw him doing that as the van lurched down the road and Norm bellowed along with the radio in a voice that was like a long sustained shriek from the house of pain, but Santa Rosa wasn’t Timbuktu, and they should have been back by now, shouldn’t they?

  With a sweep of her instep, she interred the books beneath the clawlike leaves. They’d smashed his guitar, torn his clothes, eviscerated the books, and now she’d laid them to rest again, but carefully, carefully, with proper obsequies and all due respect. New books, with fiercer colors and truer stories, would sprout up to replace the tattered ones, a whole living library growing out of the duff beneath the tree, free books, books for the taking, books you could pluck like berries. Or something like that. She lingered there a moment, struggling for focus, then found herself drifting toward the main house, a knot of people sunk into the front porch, music rising up out of unseen depths, joy and sisterhood, but it didn’t feel right, not yet, and she struck off into the woods instead. Here she was on her own—on her own trip—the earth gripping her feet like custom-made shoes, hello and goodbye, hello and goodbye, and the trees giving way like a parting crowd all along the path down to the river.

  The air was thick, the sun tortured the water. Birds dropped like meteors out of the sky. She sat on the bank, listened to what the current said, dipped her fingers and her feet, and still she didn’t feel right. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath, that’s what it was, as if she’d overdosed on espresso or taken one too many white crosses in a long streaming night behind the wheel and the Rockies rising up out of the wastelands like a big gray impenetrable wall that could have stopped whole armies. Was she afraid?
She was. Afraid of nothing and everything, of things that weren’t there and things that shifted and mutated just beyond the range of her vision. She closed her eyes and watched the images play across the dark stage of her eyelids in a careening spastic dance she couldn’t slow or stop.

  She’d been with Marco the day they trashed his things—out in the field behind the main house, where he was laying the pipe for the leach lines. She’d come out with a pitcher of Kool-Aid, barefoot, in shorts and a peasant blouse with blue quetzal birds stitched into the bodice she’d picked up at a secondhand store in New Mexico—a blouse that made her smile even now to think of it—and she’d sat watching the way the muscles gathered in his back every time he bent to fling a shovel of gravel into the ditch. He said she was beautiful. She said he was beautiful himself. “So we’re a mutual admiration society,” he said, flinging gravel. There was another shovel standing there all by itself, thrust right up out of a mound of loose stones as if it were a gift of nature. “Want me to help?” she asked, pulling the shovel from the gravel with a sound like grinding teeth, then striking a pose for him, one bare foot poised on the edge of the blade, both arms digging at the haft.

  “Barefooted?” he said, straightening up to wipe the sweat from his face with a wadded-up paisley scarf that doubled as a headband. “You must be one tough woman.”

  And she was. For the better part of an hour she worked beside him, pitching and thrusting, her movements matched to his, the gravel rising in the ditch like a gray tributary cutting across the dun chop of the field, and she could feel it in her hamstrings, her arms and lower back, and her feet—her feet especially, which couldn’t have ached more if they’d been pounded with bricks the whole time—but she never let up. She wanted his praise, and more: she wanted to outdo him.