“You didn't see Marco, did you? Because he's been gone all day.”
“What, hunting?”
“No,” she said, taking up the long wooden spoon and giving the contents of the pot a vigorous stir. “He went down to Woodchopper to get the guns Pan appropriated for himself.”
“I'm sorry, but Pan's a major league jerk,” Bill put in. He was hunched over a chessboard with Harmony, his oversized feet dangling from the edge of the loft in a pair of candy-striped socks with turned-up toes. “Worse, he's just a scam artist, like the street people that came in and ruined the Haight for everybody. He's out for nobody but himself. Period.”
“He's into me for ten dollars,” Harmony said.
Tom Krishna was wrapped in a blanket atop one of the bunk beds set into the wall. He looked up from the book he'd been reading-the teachings of some guru whose name Star couldn't pronounce; all she remembered was that he'd lived on air and had achieved _moksha__ after dying of brain cancer in a Tibetan lamasery. “I gave him sixteen dollars that last time, for personal items, you know? And what'd I get? Nothing. Not even a taste of that grass he says he invested in for everybody.”
“What a laugh,” Bill said.
That went round a while-the subject of Pan, and if she'd been depressed before, now she felt bereaved, as if he'd crawled off somewhere and died, because nobody would defend him, not even Lydia-and then Jiminy turned his fleshless backside to the stove and asked Tom Krishna if the new batch of beer was ready yet and Tom said it was and the snow fell and the dog slept and she realized she'd never had an answer to her question. Maya relit the joint they'd been working on earlier and passed it to Merry, who passed it to Star. She took a hit and passed it on. That was what communal life was all about, passing things on. But what about Marco? What about the responsibility for him, for getting seriously worried here, for organizing a search party-were they all just going to pass that on too? “Alfredo,” she said suddenly, her voice too loud, “what time is it?”
Alfredo was up in the loft with Bill and Harmony, ready to take on the winner of the chess match. They were playing a tournament, twelve players, twelve matches a day, twelve days running. When that was over and the victor had been crowned, they'd play another one. “Three forty-five,” he called down in a broad, matter-of-fact voice that could have belonged to an announcer in a TV studio, to Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley. Three forty-five. The real world, the mechanical world, intrudes.
“Because, I don't know, Marco's been gone since noon or something-shouldn't we, I mean, isn't anybody going to go out and look for him?”
It must have been two or three hours later when they all sat down to dinner-or when dinner was served, that is, because Drop City no longer ate as one. There wasn't enough space, for one thing. When they dragged the table out from the wall and set places around it, only eight people could be seated comfortably, if you could call balancing on a wobbly two-foot-high round of black spruce comfortable. The rest just took a plate, heaped it up with rice or beans or pasta and hunkered down on the floor or the nearest bed or climbed the ladder to the loft, impressing on everybody just how cramped three hundred and sixty square feet of living space could be. The other limiting factor was the interpersonal feuds that were always flaring up out of nothing, but never more so than when everybody was confined to four cabins with no California sunshine to massage away the hard feelings-and people shuffled in and out of those cabins in a human shell game so bewildering even Star and Merry could barely keep track of who was on the outs with whom. Half the time they'd just come in, scoop something out of the pot and run for one of the cabins with it. And that prompted a new Drop City rule: everyone was responsible for his or her own plate. People scratched their initials into the bottom of the enameled plates and bowls, and some, like Weird George, had already reached their crockery limit and had to eat out of old peach and apricot cans.
Norm blew in for dinner, trailing Premstar, Reba and the kids, and he wasn't his usual self. He didn't stamp or roar or call out greetings to the flock, just bowed his head, ducked out of his parka and got in line at the stove. There was fresh whole-grain bread laid out on the top shelf within easy reach of the stove, and butter out of the one-pound can. That and the salmon-rice dish, heavily laced with soy, and Kool-Aid and Tang to wash it all down, along with three big half-gallon jugs of Tom Krishna's yeasty homebrew and two pans of fudge brownies. Humble fare, but there was plenty of it, and the vegetarians could be glad Marco didn't have a gun, because when he did there'd have to be two meals prepared each night, the one incorporating moose or whatever, the other without it.
It was still snowing. Star wasn't given to senseless worry or the paranoia that certain grades and varieties of grass can generate-or maybe she was-but by the time dinner was on the table she was a wreck. There was no sign of Marco. It was an hour and a half to Woodchopper Creek, ten minutes to settle his business, and an hour and a half back. Three hours and ten minutes, and he'd been gone for six, six at least. Earlier, while the salmon was thickening in the pan, she'd got Merry and Maya to go out into the storm with her and shout his name into the wind. They'd taken Freak with them in the hope he'd catch Marco's scent, and they'd gone as far downriver as Sess and Pamela's place, but Marco wasn't there and they hadn't seen him. Pamela said it was probably nothing, he'd stayed on at Woodchopper when the storm settled in or he'd thrown up a temporary shelter and got a fire going, and really, Sess had camped a hundred times in much worse, hadn't he? Sess had. He acknowledged that. But Pamela was only saying the expected things, to calm her, and Star, though she was three miles high and drifting like a cloud, didn't miss the look she exchanged with Sess. They all had a cup of tea, then the three of them went out and shouted Marco's name till their throats were raw and their lungs burning. When they got back, Star went to each of the cabins in succession, thinking he might have looped round them in the storm, but nobody had seen him, and when finally she returned to the meeting hall and the smell of the food and the shot of Everclear Bill gave her to calm her nerves, he wasn't there either.
If that wore her down, the worry that ate at her with every thump of her heart and made the storm a curse and the meal as bland as boiled cardboard so that she couldn't take more than two bites of it and had to sneak her plate to the dog, what came next was even worse. It was an hour after they'd eaten. The dishes were soaking in the big washtub on the stove. People were passing cigarettes, the eternal joint. Alfredo had tried to get a sing-along going, but nobody seemed to have the heart for it, and it wasn't anxiety over Marco that had them down, it was just boredom, the sameness of the food, the faces, the night. Nothing was happening. Nothing was going to happen. This was the life they'd chosen. Voluntarily.
Norm was sunk into one of the lower bunks with Premstar, their backs against the wall, feet splayed out on the floor. He was looking old. His skin was so pale it could have been the underbelly of a fish peeled off and sewed into place, and his hair, bucket-washed, hung limp and thin around his ears. There were hairs growing out of those ears, she saw now, out of his nostrils, climbing up out of the neck of his shirt. Never repaired, his glasses looked as if they'd been thrown at his face, dirty grayish lumps of Reba's sticking plaster holding the frames together in a tentative accord with the forces of gravity. He was sniffling, victimized by the cold oozing its way through the collective mass of his brothers and sisters, his eyes red-rimmed and terminal. And he was itching, itching like everybody else. Pasha Norm. Norm the guru. Norm, the guiding light of Drop City.
He pushed himself up with a grunt, and he was just like her father struggling up out of his chair after his team had gone down to defeat, shoulders slumped, eyes vacant, one hand going to the small of his back and whatever residual ache stabbed at him there, and then he crossed the room to the table and poured himself a cup of beer from the half-gallon jug. Why she was watching him, she didn't know. She'd been playing a distracted game of cards-pitch-with Merry, Maya and Lydia, and as her gaze drifted round the room she'd somehow settled on Norm, as if she knew what was coming, as if she'd had a premonition, not only about Marco and Ronnie and the long downward slide of the night, but of the fate of Drop City itself.