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 headache coming 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'd been 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 during the night. His head throbbed. His stomach made a fist and relaxed it. He needed to find some toilet paper, _fast.__
Pan rose from the sleeping bag that was stretched over a double mattress on the floor in the far corner of the back room of the main house. He rose slowly, warily, his bones as heavy as spars, and began silently shuffling through his backpack and the cardboard box that between them held everything he owned. He didn't want to wake Lydia. He definitely did not want to wake Lydia. Because Lydia would want one thing, and that thing, in his present condition, he was unwilling to give her. In fact, as he studied her out of the corner of his eye while rummaging for any last overlooked and forgotten quarter or eighth or even sixteenth of a roll of toilet paper his brothers and sisters might not already have got to, she struck him as being fat, too fat, not at all his type. His type was Merry. His type was Star-and where was she?
He hadn't been able to find her the night before, though he'd looked everyplace he could think of except the back house, where the spades and Sky Dog were nursing their grudges and washing down their Velveeta cheese sandwiches with sour red wine and snuffing the last fading vestiges of grilled venison on the thin night air, but she wouldn't be there, he knew that and the spades knew that and everybody in Drop City knew it too. He'd run into Merry-she and Jiminy were reading poems out loud to each other in Norm's bedroom upstairs-but Merry said she didn't feel in much of a festive mood because the whole _idea__ of a barbecue went against everything she believed in, and then she'd called him a carnivore, or maybe it was a cannibal, but she said it with a smile, as in all is forgiven but don't bother me now I'm reading poetry. Out loud. To Jiminy. So Ronnie found some other people and continued to abuse various controlled and illicit substances until the whole day went into extra innings and he wound up in the shadowy deeps of this room with a stick of incense and a single phallic candle burning and Lydia naked and hairy and wet and taking hold of his prick as if she owned it.
And now he needed toilet paper. Desperately. He found his cutoffs and stepped into them, and forget the shirt, forget the huaraches, he was in the grip of something urgent here. He was thinking _Leaves, I'll just use leaves,__ when Lydia's purple Elizabeth Taylor eyes flashed open. “Oh,” she said. “What? Oh, it's you.” And then she was on her hands and knees, stretching, her great pumped-up tits suspended beneath her like airships, like zeppelins, and she was saying “Come on over here, Ronnie, _Pan,__ come on, just hold me, just for a minute, huh? You got a minute, don't you?”
He didn't have a minute. He didn't have fifteen seconds. The deer, all that gamy protein and wild hard gristle and backwoods fat, was having its revenge. His stomach clenched again, the image of gas rising in a beaker in Chemistry class set up camp in his brain, and he was out the door, through the house-startled faces, oh, it's Pan and what's the hurry? — and out across the blistered lawn and into the nearest clump of bushes he could find. And then, finally, he was squatting, no thought of septic fields or clogged toilets or luxury accommodations in mind, and it was all coming out of him in a savage uncontainable rush.
What he thought was that he'd feel better as the day wore on, but he thought wrong. His head throbbed, his insides kept churning. And though he made his slow careful way through a plate of rice mush, grain by grain, _that__ went right through him too. He wound up lying beside the swollen green carpet of the pool through the late afternoon and into the evening, refusing all attempts at conversation and invitations to eat (Merry), ball (Lydia) or inhale drugs (half a dozen people, cats and chicks alike). Every once in a while, hammered by the sun, he'd wallow lethargically in the pool, but even that made his brain pound and his gut clench, and he didn't really rouse himself till somebody pulled the shades down over the day and dusk came to sit in the trees like a vulture and everything went gray. Then he had a few shaky hits from a bottle of Don Ricardo special re-posado tequila he kept under the seat of the car and went out across the lawn to inspect the remains of the deer. There was no one around, and the fire he and Marco had made-the smoking fire, not the barbecue, because the meat had to be preserved somehow-wasn't even warm. It was a circle of white ash flecked with cinders, and you could lay your palm on it and feel absolutely nothing. The deer-the unchoice cuts, the parts they hadn't bothered with in the rush to get the blood off their hands and the party under way-dangled from a thin strand of wire like the leavings of some twisted vigilante squad, its head skewed at an impossible angle, backbone gnawed to a blue-black ripple of bone. While he'd been asleep, while he'd been lying up beside the pool as if he'd been gutshot himself, the flies had been busy making a playground of the thing, and he saw that now, but it didn't affect him one way or the other. He didn't even bother to raise a hand and flick them away. It was getting dark. And the meat-the deer, his triumph-had already begun to stink.