“What,” Marco said, and he felt his face flush, “-you interested?”
Norm shifted his weight in the seat, gave a shrug. “She's a groovy chick.”
Sure she was. Everybody was groovy, every_thing__ was groovy. This was the world they were making, this was the new age, free and enlightened and without hangups, climb every mountain, milk every goat. “Yeah,” Marco heard himself say, “yeah, she is.”
There was a moment's silence, the van's engine ticking off to sleep somewhere beneath and behind them. Norm made no move to get out. He pushed the glasses up his nose and they slid back down. He sighed. Lifted his hand as if in extenuation, then dropped it. “You know, there's something I never told you,” he said. “Or anybody, really, except for Alfredo. And it's not good, not good at all.” He tapped the watch again, then gave it a rueful glance, as if it were the source of all the world's sorrow and misery.
“What do you mean?”
“They don't like heads in this town, is what I mean-in this whole fucking fascist county, for that matter, and you better pay up now and worship the rules and regulations or you are _fucked,__ believe me. They don't want to see people living in harmony with the earth and each other-they just want Daddy, Mommy, Junior and Sis, all shoved into a tract house with a new blacktop driveway and a lawn that looks like it's been painted right on the dirt.”
“You having trouble with the county?”
“Bet your ass I am.”
“Board of Health? Fire and Safety?”
Bent over the watch, his head lolling weakly on his shoulders as if it were floating on the upended mass of his hair, Norm just nodded. “Bunch of shit,” he said finally, but all the animation was gone from his voice. “I didn't sign on for this, no way in hell.”
They sat there staring bleakly out the bug-spattered windshield on the fruits of life in the land of plenty, _Wonder Bread, Skippy Peanut Butter, Oleo Margarine,__ and while Marco sucked in his breath and idly traced a finger up and down the face of the glove box, Norm heaved a sigh and filled him in. The situation was worse than he'd suspected. Far worse. The county health and sanitation people had been looking to close up Drop City for over a year now, and the fire and building inspectors were close on their heels. Norm had been in and out of court all through the past fall and into the winter; lately, he'd been using the summonses to light the fire in the incinerator out back, because he was through with all that, fed up to his ears, so pissed off and rubbed raw he just wanted to give it all up and let the bureaucratic pencil-pushing bastards take the ranch and pave it over if that's what they wanted. And it got worse stilclass="underline" the county had ordered him to clear the property of all persons and all substandard dwellings or face a fine of five hundred dollars a day. “Like as if I was a slumlord or something,” he said, staring out the window of the van on a row of piggybacked shopping carts and the bold bright ads for detergent, meat and liquor that crowded the windows of the supermarket.
“What's so bad that we can't fix it?” Marco said. “The leach lines are in, aren't they? Shouldn't that make them happy?” He was talking just to hear himself, just to say something. He knew the way it worked. Nobody wanted a free-form community in their midst, because free-form meant anarchy, it meant a cordillera of trash a mile high and human shit in the woods, it meant Sky Dog and Lester and a guitar smashed like an eggshell-even if Drop City were on a mountaintop in Tibet the people in charge would steer their overworked yaks right up the face of the cliffs to shut them down. And maybe that wasn't all bad, maybe somebody somewhere had to put the brakes on.
“They've been garnishing my account at the B. of A.” Norm was watching a miniskirted blonde lift brown-paper bags from a cart and set them with soft precision in the trunk of the low-slung Cutlass in the next row over. She had two kids with her-a baby with its bare fat legs dangling from the slots cut in the cart, and an older kid of five or six who gave them an even stare and then flashed the peace sign. “Jesus, look at that kid, the baby, I mean,” Norm said. “He looks like Alfred Hitchcock, doesn't he? But I guess all babies look like Alfred Hitchcock. Or Mao. Maybe Mao. Maybe that's who he looks like.”
Marco didn't have anything to say. He was calculating, pluses on one side, minuses on the other. He'd gotten too comfortable, and he should have known better. He'd settled in, built himself a treehouse, dug the leach lines, found a girl-and here the image of Star, smiling as if in some faded yearbook photo, rose up to take hold of him-but it was all so ephemeral, and nothing lasted, whether you fought for it or not. Sky Dog was gone, that was a plus, and it was just a matter of time before Lester followed him. Alfredo he could take or leave, and Pan could be an irritant, but at least he could be controlled. Not that it mattered. Not with the authorities involved. It was over, and if he had any sense at all he'd dump what he'd accumulated in the past five weeks and hit the road.
Norm shifted around in the seat to face him. “People would say to me, 'Norm, you can't just let everybody in because that's going to ruin it for the rest of us,' but what are you going to do? Everybody wants out of this fucking consumer-freak society and I'm not going to stand in their way, I mean, nobody elected me God.” Norm pushed the glasses up the bridge of his nose, and they slid back down. It was getting hot in the cab. “Besides, and I don't have to tell you this, man, if you start to like _limit__ the community, then it becomes static, like the Shakers or the Amish or whatever. They die out. Just like that. You've got to have an open community, and in the purest Gurdjieffian sense you let God be the selector, you know what I mean?”
“What about Sky Dog? Or Lester?”
“What about them?”
“Oh, come on, Norm, are you kidding me? — they bring the whole thing down. And there's a million more just like them, and they keep coming till the county drives a stake through your heart or the whole scene collapses. Or even Jiminy. Or Star, or me, or any of us. It just doesn't work unless you have some kind of standards-”
“You want rules, go work in the bank. Which brings me to my point here-motherfuckers are into me for something like three thousand dollars already because of these ridiculous-do I want to say contemptible? Yeah, _contemptible__-fines, and all that money is from the insurance settlement. Get to the end of it and there's nothing left, see what I mean, man? It's over. All she wrote. Good night and goodbye.”
The moment drifted past them. On the radio it was nothing but bright little bubbles of pop trash, “I Got You Babe” filtered through a thunderstorm of static and speakers that were already rattling though the van couldn't have been more than six months old.
“That's why I bought this vehicle,” Norm said, as if Marco had been thinking aloud. “Spend some of my own money on something _I__ want-or we all want, not to mention we all can use-instead of just giving it up to the dickheads with the slide rules and the building codes they must've fucking committed to memory. But fuck it. This is the day, isn't it? Aren't we on a serious mission here to score cream soda?”
They were. And Marco hadn't just come along for the ride-he was building a corral for the horse, a pin-headed, wild-eyed, fat-flanked monster of a thing that didn't seem to appreciate concepts like two-lane blacktop and cement trucks with bad brakes, and he'd been planning on picking up a roll of barbed wire at the hardware store-on Norm's dollar-but that all seemed pretty useless now. He ducked his head, depressed suddenly, and scratched at his beard, wondering vaguely if he'd caught ringworm from the big orange cat that lived atop the refrigerator. He'd wanted to build something-he was twenty-four years old and past the age of butting his head up against the establishment-but it wasn't going to happen at Drop City. He felt heavy all of a sudden, immensely heavy, as if he could crush the car beneath him and plunge down through the blacktop and into the ancient rivers that ran under the earth. He wanted to kick something, wanted to get out and clear his lungs or maybe his tear ducts, and he had his fingers on the door handle when Norm grabbed him by the wrist.