Drop City by T. C. Boyle Page B

they might as well have been in another county for all they had to do with Drop City. They’d smelled the meat—Ronnie had seen them out on the porch of the back house as the light faded, and he almost wished they would have come down and joined the party so he could show them what he’d done with a .30-06 rifle and two shining copper-jacketed bullets, but they weren’t interested, because it was war now, and you had to choose sides. And that was no contest as far as Pan was concerned. He was for the side in control, the side that had all the chicks and the food and the big house with the KLH speakers and all of those five hundred or eight hundred or however many records that were lined up on the shellacked pine bookcases in random order and was there a radio station in the country with a better collection?
    The night deepened. Shouts and laughter ran at him across the lawn and the music pulsed steadily from the back of the main house. He was standing there in the bushes, where he’d just zipped up after responding to the call of nature, and he could feel a headachecoming on. It had been a day, all right, and he felt pretty glorious, all things considered, but what he needed was maybe a little of that sticky Spañada Star was always drinking—or Mateus, if anybody had any. Sure. That’s what he needed, to knock down the headache and put a mellow cap on the evening, and he headed back across the lawn, toward where the shadows danced round the cookfire.
    Star wasn’t there. She wasn’t up in the treehouse either, because he hoisted himself up the ladder to see, and she wasn’t in the main house where half a dozen people shushed him because they were watching some silent movie Norm had got out of the library for the sheer appreciation and uplift of it. Ronnie stood there a minute in the darkened room, watching the light play over a frozen landscape until an Eskimo appeared, two slits for eyes, the wind tearing at the ruff of his parka, and began building an igloo out of blocks he cut from the snow. He had a knife the size of a machete, and he wasted no time, because you could see the way the wind was blowing and his breath froze into the wisps of his beard, each block perfect, one atop the other, and when he fitted the final block into a gap in the roof of the thing, everybody burst into applause. “Fuckin’ Nanook,” Norm said, and there he was stretched out on the floor with a comforter drawn up to his chin, “you want to talk about living off the land, man . . .”

    In the morning—or no, it was the afternoon, definitely the afternoon—Ronnie woke with a lurch that set the whole room rocking like a boat, and the dream, whatever it was, was gone before he could resuscitate it. Just as well, because he could feel the veins inflating in his neck with the frantic scramble of his heart—he’d been trying to escape something or somebody, dark twisting corridors and howling faces—and now, suddenly, he was awake in the apparent world, a fine sheen of sweat greasing his body and leaching into the sleeping bag that each day stank ever more powerfully of mold and ammonia and creeping decay. Beside him, breathing through her open mouth with a faint rattling snore, was Lydia, her arms stretched out as if she’dbeen crucified. The dark nipples were like knitted caps pulled over the white crowns of her breasts, and her breasts were like people, two slouching fat white people in caps having a conversation across the four-lane highway of her rib cage. A fine line of glistening dead black hair measured the distance from her navel to her bush. There was hair under her arms, hair on her legs, a faint stripe of it painted over her upper lip. She was sweating. Her eyelids trembled. He lay there contemplating her a minute, letting his heart climb back down from the ledge he’d left it on, feeling as if he’d been assembled from odd scraps