Nothing had. No one seemed to notice or care. Sky Dog had been joined by a second guitarist now, and they were working their way through the steady creeping changes of a slow blues. A topless woman no one had ever seen before got up and began to hump her hips and flap her enormous breasts to the beat; before long, a couple of the commune's more or less permanent members rose up from the floor to join her, swaying in place and snaking their arms like Hindu mystics.
“A tourist,” Ronnie said, the syllables dry and hard on his tongue. “Weekend hippie.” He was wearing a Kmart T-shirt Star had tie-dyed for him on their first day here, orange supernovae bursting out of deep pink and purple galaxies, and when he turned to the new girl the light behind him made his beard translucent. “You're no tourist,” he said. “Right, Merry?”
Merry leaned back into the cradle of his arm. “I am not ever going back,” she said, “I promise you that.”
“Right,” Ronnie said, “right, don't even think about it.” Then he slipped his free arm around Star's shoulders and gave her a squeeze, and “Hey,” he was saying, caught up in the slow-churning engine of the moment, “you want to maybe go down by the river and spread a blanket under the stars and make it-just the three of us, I mean? You feel like it?” His eyes were on the dancing woman, up one slope and down the other. “Would that be righteous, or what?”
And here was the truth: Star _didn't__ feel like it. Nor, despite what she'd told herself, had she felt like it that night in the teepee either. It was Ronnie. Ronnie had talked her into undressing in front of the other guy-or no, he'd shamed her into it. “You don't want to be an uptight bourgeois cunt like your mother, do you?” he'd said, his voice a fierce rasp in her ear. “Or _my__ mother, for shitsake? Come on, it's all right, it's just the human body, it's natural-I mean, what is this?”
The other guy, the teepee guy-she never knew his name-just watched her as if she were a movie he'd never seen before. He was sitting there yoga style, the very avatar of peace and love, but you could see he was all wound up inside. He was intense. Freakish, even. She could feel it, some sort of bad vibe emanating from him, but then she told herself she was just being paranoid because of the peyote. So she lay back, crossed her legs at the ankles and stared into the fire. No one said anything for the longest time. And when she looked up finally the teepee guy's eyes were so pale there were no irises to them, or hardly any, and Ronnie rolled a joint and helped her off with her blue denim shirt with all the signs of the zodiac she'd embroidered up and down the sleeves and across the shoulders, and he was in his shorts and the teepee guy-_cat,__ teepee _cat,__ because Ronnie was always correcting her, you don't call men guys you call them cats-was in some sort of loincloth, and she was naked to the waist. The firelight rode up the walls and the smoke found the hole at the top.
“Just like the Sioux camped on the banks of the Little Bighorn, right, man?” Ronnie said, passing the joint. And then time seemed to ripple a bit, everything sparking red and blue-green and gold, and Ronnie was on top of her and the teepee guy was watching and she didn't care, or she did, but it didn't matter. They made it on an Indian rug in the dirt with this _cat__ watching, but it was Ronnie, and she fit the slope of his body, knew his shoulders and his tongue and the way he moved. Ronnie. Pan. From back home. But then he rolled off her and sat there a minute saying, “Man, wow, far out,” breathing hard, sweat on his forehead and a tiny infinitesimal drop of it fixed like a jewel to the tip of his nose, and he made a gesture to the teepee cat and said, “Go ahead, brother, it's cool-”
Outside, at the main gate to the Drop City ranch, there was a plywood sign nailed clumsily to the wooden crossbars: NO MEN__, NO WOMEN__-ONLY CHILDREN__. That was about it, she was thinking, nothing but children, Show and Tell, and show and show and show. Ronnie's arm was like a dead thing, like a two-ton weight, a felled tree crushing her from the neck down. The big topless woman danced. _Got to keep movin',__ Junior Sky Dog was singing, _movin' on down the line.__
“So what do you say?” Ronnie wanted to know. His face was right there, inches from hers, the pale fur of his beard, the dangle of his hair. His eyes were fractured, little ceramic plates hammered into the sheen there and then smashed to fragments. She said nothing, so he turned to Merry, and Star watched the new girl's face.
Merry had her own version of the million-kilowatt smile, wide-mouthed and pretty, and she was all legs in a pale yellow miniskirt that looked as if it hadn't been washed in a month. She looked first to Ronnie, then stared right into Star's eyes before letting her gaze drift out across the room as if she were too stoned to care, but she did care, she _did__-Star could see it in the self-conscious way she ducked her head and tugged at the hem of her dress and the dark indelible line of dirt there where she'd tugged at it a thousand times before. “I don't know,” she said, her voice nothing but air. And then she shrugged. “I guess.”
The two blond kids were dancing now, the vacant-eyed boy of four or five and his little sister, watching their feet, no sense of rhythm, none at all, the boy's little wadded-up tube of a penis flapping like a metronome to another beat altogether. “Cool,” Ronnie said. And then he turned to her, to Star, and said, “What about it, Star, what do you say?”
She said, “I don't think so. Not tonight. I'm feeling-I don't know, _weird.__”
“Weird? What the fuck you talking about?” Ronnie's brow was crawling and his mouth had dropped down into a little pit of nothing-she knew the look. Though he hadn't moved a muscle, though for all the world he was the hippest coolest least-uptight flower-child _cat__ in the universe, he was puffing himself up inside, full of rancor and Ronnie-bile. He got his own way. He always got his own way, whether it was a matter of who he was going to ball and when or what interstate they were going to take or where they were going to spend the night or even what sort of food they were going to eat. It didn't matter if they were passing through Buttwash, Texas, the Dexamil wearing off and eggs over easy the only thing she could think about to the point of obsession and maybe even hallucination, he wanted tacos, he wanted salsa and chiles and Tecate, and that's what they got.
“No, come on now, don't be a bummer, Paulette. You know what the Keristan Society says, right there in black and white in the _Speeler?__ Huh? Don't you?”
She did. Because he quoted it to her every time he felt horny. Whoever they were, the Keristanians or Keristanters or whatever they wanted to call themselves, they preached Free Love without prejudice-that is, making it with anybody who asked, no matter their race or creed or color or whether they were fat and old or retarded or smelled like the underside of somebody's shoe. It was considered an act of hostility to say no to anybody who wanted to ball, whether you felt like it or not-it's seven A.M. and you're hungover and your hair looks like it's been grafted to your head, and some guy wants to ball? You ball him. Either that, or you're not into the scene because you're infected with all your bourgeois hangups just like your fucked-up parents and the rest of the straight world. That was what the Keristan Society had to say, but what she was thinking, or beginning to think, in the most rudimentary way, was that Free Love was just an invention of some _cat__ with pimples and terminally bad hair and maybe crossed eyes who couldn't get laid any other way or under any other regime, and she wasn't having it, not tonight, not with Ronnie and what's her name.