Murmurs now. Neil Young went on killing the song, killing everything, people rising like zombies out of the murk, Geoffrey, Weird George, Dunphy, Erika, Deuce, all of them squinting at him as if he were six miles away. Was it Pan, was it really Pan? But where-? We thought-? Holy shit! It's Pan. And there didn't seem to be any hard feelings now, soul shakes all around, and here, man, have a hit of this, and he did, he did, but where was everybody else? This was Halloween, wasn't it-or had he miscounted the days?
Angela was there, Maya, Creamola, Foster. “We're hip,” Bill was saying, and he backed up against the stove to warm the big palpitating lump of his backside, “it's just that nobody really, I mean, we just didn't get it together. Plus the pumpkins were like the size of grapefruits when that first frost hit-”
“Snow, you mean,” Creamola said.
“We carved a zucchini,” Angela put in, and there it was on the windowsill, a collapsed green loaf of a thing with a couple of holes poked in it and a pathetic flicker of candlelight emanating from somewhere in its pulpy depths. “And Reba had Che and Sunshine dressed up like devils-they made the rounds, trick or treating here, and then at Star's cabin and the one I'm sharing with like Erika and George and Geoffrey.”
He saw now that a few people-the chicks-had made up their eyes and spattered a little glitter on their cheeks and foreheads and Weird George had maybe freshened up his bones and garlic, but it was a far cry from any kind of celebration Pan could have conceived of. But what was happening with _him__? With Dale and Sky? Were they coming too?
“No,” he said, “they're playing cards,” and even as he said it he knew how lame it sounded. The fact was that Dale and Sky Dog were also personae non gratae here, ushered out by Marco and Alfredo after a couple of halcyon days of screwing, drinking and lying comatose in the sun, and they'd made it clear that Joe Bosky was unwelcome too-Pull Your Weight or Bail, PYWOB, that seemed to be the new motto of Drop City, and you could forget LATWIDNO. “But where's everybody else?” he asked, at the center of a wheel of faces.
Angela said: “Lydia's back.”
_Lydia.__ He felt his groin stir. “Where is she?”
“At Star and Merry's. They're the only ones that would take her in.”
And he learned this: Lydia, flush with cash and laden down with scotch, chocolate bonbons and cigarettes, had blown in a week ago on the back end of some wild hair's souped-up snow machine, replete with stories about the flesh trade in Fairbanks and the temperament of the Alaskan male, and she'd burned through Drop City like a wildfire. The party lasted two days-people just wanted distraction, anything, anybody, because you could only split so much wood, chow down so many bowls of mush and play Monopoly till you wore grooves in the board before you started wondering _Is this all there is?__ It wasn't even winter yet and already hard times had descended on Drop City. Factions were forming. People were terminally bored, suicidal. They had no snow machine, no way of getting out, unless they wanted to walk the twelve miles to Boynton in subzero temperatures, and Boynton itself was locked in. And what about the wild hair and his snow machine? Rain had slept with him-prostituted herself, fucked him up, down and sideways-and he'd taken her out with him in a trailing blast of exhaust and a flapping curtain of snow. She was probably back in San Francisco by now.
Pan just stared at them. The joint came round and he took it. There was beer-Tom Krishna's homebrew, and it wasn't half bad. “Hey,” he said, sipping from the jar, “Tom's improving. He gets out of here he ought to go directly to Budweiser, what do you think?” Nobody laughed. People fell back into the shadows. He settled in and just _felt__ things for a while, and when he got comfortable behind it he pushed himself up and changed the record, a little rock and roll to shake things up, _Excuse me while I kiss the sky.__ But Bill, the big overblown Freedom bus — riding sack of suet and hair, Mr. Downer, said they had to conserve the battery and switched the thing off, and then he was back out in the cold, thinking Star, thinking Merry, thinking Lydia.
The thin crust of snow cracked under his boots like gunfire. It was colder now, the moon haunting the sky and the stars scattered in its wake like pustules on a broken-out face, and he had no illusions about Star, or Merry either-but Lydia, at least Lydia was mad for him, always had been, right from the first. She wasn't his type, of course, but it had been a long dry stretch living like a combination lumberjack/monk at Bosky's, humping wood, hunting, keeping the stove going when Joe was out cruising the empyrean in the Cessna. They'd brought two Indian chicks in one night and for a drunken day or two they'd gone through all the permutations, and that was all right, he wasn't complaining-or maybe he was. This wasn't what he'd signed on for, no way in the world, and if he had the bucks he'd be out of here in a heartbeat-for the winter, at least. Hawaii sounded nice. La Jolla. Ensenada.
Star's cabin was the one on the end. There was a dogtrot to break the wind, a pair of windows glowing, a curl of smoke from the stove. He stood there outside the door a minute, wondering if he should knock or what, and then he pushed on through the dark closet of the dogtrot and gave two raps at the cabin door. Nothing. He rapped again. Heard voices, the shuffle of feet. Then the door creaked open on its hinges and Marco was standing there in his bleached-out jeans and workshirt, looking noncommittal, looking stiff and unwelcoming, and there was no love lost between them, not since the pot incident, anyway, and the only thing he could think to say was “Trick or treat.”
Star's voice rose from the depths then. “Who is it? Ronnie? Is it _Ronnie__?” And then he heard a squeal from Merry, or maybe it was Lydia, and a long sustained jag of laughter from all three of them, as if the very fact of his existence was the funniest thing in the world. Marco gave him a nod and the three women, exuding the close, compacted odors of the sheet, the blanket, the nightie-the odors of the flesh-were there at the door in their sweatpants and sweatsocks, cooing their greetings. “Come on in,” Star insisted. “Jesus, don't just stand there-”
Inside, it was close as a prison cell. You could put your fingertips on one corrugated wall and practically reach across to the other. It was dark, hot, dry. The two built-in bunk beds dominated the place and you had to crouch to avoid the six hundred tons of crap hanging from hooks and lines strung across the room, wet socks and underwear, parkas, jeans, boots. Incense was burning. The stove glowed. There was a little table by the front window littered with cards and books and dirty plates and he fell into the chair Star pulled out for him and jerked off his gloves while the chicks hovered over him, three pairs of breasts at eye-level and their lit-up faces beaming down on him like alien probes searching for signs of life. “I can't believe it,” Merry kept saying, and Jiminy was there too, he saw now, looking daggers from one of the top bunks.
Pan shrugged. “Hey, it's Halloween,” he said by way of explanation. “I thought I'd stop by. See what's happening.”
Nobody could argue with that, and pretty soon the three women were crowded in at the table with him, sharing a plate of sugar cookies with orange sprinkles baked specially for Halloween, firing up a joint, passing round the warmed-over jar of homebrew while Marco and Jiminy conversed in a low murmur from the upper bunks. Lydia was wearing a fur coat that fell all the way to the floor-“Cross fox, given to me by an admirer; you like it?”-and she was looking good, beyond good, and hadn't she lost some weight, was that it? “You look dynamite,” he said, and he had an arm round her shoulder.
“Whoa, listen to Pan,” Merry giggled. “Been without it too long, huh? Living like a what, like a goat, out there with Joe Bosky? What about me? Am I looking dynamite?”