She was about to say something when Marco loomed up out of the blue glitter of the snow, took her by the arm and led her through the dogtrot and into the cabin. His beard was ice. His eyes were cracked and broken. The tip of his nose was the wrong color. “Something happened,” he said.
There were sounds from outside, Sess's voice, Pamela's, the dogs yapping and clamoring for their food. “What?” she wanted to know, straining to read his face even as he turned away from her and held his hands out to the stove. She felt sick suddenly. There was a shadow sweeping over the ground, over the cabin, over Drop City. “What? What is it?”
“Ronnie,” he said.
“Ronnie?” She didn't understand him. What could Ronnie possibly have to do with a hurt dog and three days out on the ridges and down in the ravines in forty-below-zero weather? Ronnie the thief? Ronnie the irrelevance? Who cared about him? Who cared about him, really? He'd gone to high school with her. He'd been her lover. He'd stolen her money.
Marco wouldn't look her in the face, and that scared her.
“What?” she demanded. “What happened?”
“He-they tried to, him and Bosky, in the plane. He died. He's dead.”
Still she didn't understand. “Who? You mean Joe Bosky?”
“Both of them. It was a plane crash.”
She had to sit down then, and Pamela was in the room now and Sess right behind her, the door slamming to, the last breath of the cold trapped and dissipating inside the furnace of the four walls, the shrinking space of the cabin crowded suddenly, shoulders, faces, limbs, three people in parkas stalking around and recoiling from one another as if they were trying to make their way through Grand Central at rush hour: _Ronnie? Dead?__
Eventually-it must have been an hour, an hour or more-she went out into the yard, her hand clasped in Marco's, to look at him there in the sled, because she still didn't believe it, didn't believe really that anybody could die-the old maybe, maybe them-but nobody she knew, nobody like Ronnie. Like _Pan.__ They'd come across country together. He'd made her laugh. He'd pressed himself to her in the hush of her room, on the seat of the car, in the starched sterile drum-tight beds of motels in anonymous towns, he'd read to her, sung to her, praised her and loved her. And now he was lying there frozen in the sled, a shadow, a dead lump of nothing pressed in death to the dead lump of Joe Bosky-and those were his boots, Bosky's, sticking out of the bottom of the sled on his dead frozen feet. For a long moment she stood there looking down at the dark hummock of the sled, Sess and Pamela immured in the cabin, Marco beside her. She was trying to cry, but there was nothing there. “I want to see him,” she said, and her voice betrayed her.
Marco's breath trailed away from his lips, silvered and alive. “You don't want to see him. Really, you don't. Come on, let's go inside. We'll spend the night and decide what to do in the morning. Okay?”
It wasn't okay. She stepped forward, the dogs rustling at their chains, the stars riding up and away from her till the whole night seemed to plead for intercession, and then she pulled back the blanket and the moon showed her what was there.
“That's not Pan,” she said.
And it wasn't. It was something twisted to impossibility, nothing natural, nothing she could identify, no face even, because it was turned from her in its frozen cowl, just the slant of a face, that was all, and it could have been anybody. “Come on, Star,” Marco whispered. She saw the hair then, spilling off the spool of his head, grown out finally to its maximum length, hip, very hip, as hip as anybody could ever have wished or dreamed, and she slipped the glove from her hand for just an instant to feel it move beneath the pressure of her five bare fingers.
On Christmas Eve, just after the light faded from the sky, it began to snow. Marco and Jiminy had cut a tree and set it up in the back corner of the meeting hall, and everybody gathered over eggnog (rum and evaporated milk, whipped with nutmeg, sugar and powdered egg) to decorate it with God's eyes made of yarn, scraps of silver foil, strings of glass beads and paper chains. The twelve-volt battery, newly charged in Boynton and retrieved on the back of Iron Steve's snowmobile, was hooked up to the stereo in the loft, and so there was music, people shuffling through the albums to find their favorite cuts, nothing religious, really, no hymns or carols, but mystical stuff, Ravi Shankar, Mahavishnu John McLaughlin, Coltrane, Rollins, Dylan.
There were four stoves at Drop City, one in each of three finished cabins, and the ancient Great Majestic range they'd brought upriver in the boat to do the communal cooking in the meeting hall, and all four were in use. They were roasting two turkeys and a goose delivered frozen from the general store in Boynton by Sess Harder, and a pair of spruce hens Marco had managed to shoot under a tree somewhere, with potatoes, stuffing and gravy, and for the vegetarians there was a broccoli and cheese casserole, meatless lasagna and mashed turnips. And cookies. A thousand cookies.
Star was in the midst of it all, juggling pots on the range, slicing, chopping, whipping, the music getting up inside her till it was like a whole new circulatory system working in symbiosis with the original one, the one she was born with, and when somebody handed her a joint, she took it and held it to her lips a moment and passed it back again. She sang to herself, hummed, made up lyrics for the tunes that didn't have any. The gravy thickened, the snow faltered. Lydia was dancing with Tom Krishna and Deuce, and Jiminy was dancing by himself, Harmony and Alice handed out personalized ceramic mugs to every one of Drop City's eighteen remaining residents-each one with a reasonably faithful representation of the recipient's face molded into it-and Marco came up and surprised her with a pair of earrings-peace symbols-he'd carved out of a scrap of caribou antler. And just when she thought it couldn't get any better, Pamela appeared at the door with two bricks of fruit cake and a bottle of brandy tucked under her arm.
There was a jabber of greeting, dishes already set out on the sheet of plywood they'd extended the table with, steam rising, the dog-Freak-looking hopeful, and then Star took Pamela's coat and flung it up to Mendocino Bill in the loft, because that's where the coats were going, no room anywhere else. Pamela stood there, giving off energy, and then she was hugging people, one after the other. She was looking good-healthy, pretty-her face colored by the wind, her hair parted in the middle and trailing down over her sweater till the reindeer dancing across her chest were hidden in a spill of honey-blond hair, and she was wearing the beaded headband Star had given her. “You know what you look like?” Star said, handing her the joint that had just appeared magically in her hand.
“No, what?”
“Like a hippie.”
“You mean a hippie _chick__?”
It took her a minute. “Are you playing with my head?”
“Who me? Never.”
She watched Pamela make a pretense of inhaling, then took the joint back from her. “So where's Sess?” she asked.
A shrug. “Out on the trail. But he'll be here. He'd better be.” She shook out her hair with an abrupt flip of her neck. “It's our first Christmas together. I'll kill him if he doesn't make it.”
The notion struck her as funny, because why wouldn't he make it? Was it that compelling out there? As far as Star could see there was nothing beyond the windows but the night and the cold and the hills that folded back into another set of hills and another set beyond that. This was where the life was, the only life within miles. There was food, music, beer, wine. There was eggnog, there were cookies. Laughter and conviviality. There were people here. Brothers and sisters. “Oh, he'll make it,” she said. “I'm sure he will.”
Later, after they'd eaten, Verbie and Iron Steve showed up, extending the party all the way out from Boynton, and they danced, everybody, all of Drop City, even Che and Sunshine, and there was nothing lame about it and nobody to sulk and lie and exaggerate and cheat and steal and pronounce it lame, nobody. At midnight, Bill dropped down out of the loft, got up as Santa Claus with a cotton-puff beard and every strip of red clothing Drop City owned draped round the bulk of him, and announced he had a present for everybody, right outside the door. People stirred, exchanged glances. Outside? There were groans, catcalls. “Is he for real?” Merry said.