Later, as the flames leapfrogged into the black vault of the sky and the hiss of Alaska sizzled up from the coals-_Alaska, Alaska,__ the only word anybody needed to know tonight, the touchstone, the future-Star relaxed into the grip of whatever it was that was happening to her. She sipped at a fruit jar of Spañada and stood at the edge of the fire, watching the tracers rise up into the night. She felt calm, centered, as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders, the way she always felt when she came to a decision. Like with Ronnie. She remembered leaving home with him, books and records and brown bleeding bags of food piled up in the backseat, sleeping bags, kitchen things, the only home she'd known for three-quarters of her life receding in the rearview mirror, and then her mother raging barefoot down the street shouting out for the world to hear that she was throwing her life away. Her mother's face hung there in the window even after they'd reached the end of the block, and she could see it now, the wet sheen of her eyes and all the gouges and wrinkles of a long day and a long week mobilized in grief-_Paulette! You're throwing your life away, your life away!__-but she was calm that day too. She'd made up her mind to go, and that was it.
The sweet cold wine massaged her throat and condensed her headache till it was a hard black little India rubber ball come to rest somewhere in the backcourt of her mind. She was standing in a knot of people-Marco, Norm, Alfredo, Reba, Harmony, Deuce, all of them talking at once, talking logistics, talking _Alaska__-and she closed her eyes and rode the wave of exuberance that was washing over Drop City even now, even as Druid Day became something else-the day after Druid Day-and that was a holiday too. Sure it was. Didn't they have a bonfire? Didn't they have drugs, wine, beer? And weren't they going to dance till they dropped?
Just before the fire went up, when everybody was gathered in the field to watch Norm wave the ceremonial torch and make another of his rocket-propelled speeches-_Part of ourselves, people, let's all just step up and throw some part of ourselves on the funeral pyre of old Drop City__-Merry had retrieved the atlas from the high shelf in the kitchen where it was wedged between _The Whole Earth Catalogue__ and _Joy of Cooking.__ Star had come in to refill her glass, and Lydia and Maya were there too, mashing avocados for guacamole, and they all stood round the kitchen table as Merry traced her finger across the map of Alaska to the black dot on the swooping blue river that was Boynton. “There it is,” she said, “Drop City North,” and they all leaned forward to see that it was real, a place like any other, a destination. “And look,” she added, measuring out the distance with the width of a fingernail, “there's Fairbanks. And wow, _Nome.__”
No one said a word, but they all seemed to have caught the same fever. They'd all traveled to get here-that was part of the scene, seeing the country, the world, before you were shriveled up and dead like your parents. Lydia was from Sacramento originally, but she'd been to Puerto Vallarta, Key West and Nova Scotia, and Maya had hitchhiked all the way out here from Chicago. Merry was from Iowa, and Star had been across the Great Plains, through the Rockies and the high desert-all those rambling brown dusty miles-and that was nothing, nothing at all. Here was the chance to fall off the map, to see the last and best place and lay claim to bragging rights forever. _So you went to Bali, the French Riviera, the Ivory Coast? Yeah? Well, I was in__ Alaska.
But where was the music? Weren't they going to dance? Wasn't that what Norm had said-_We are going to dance like nobody's ever danced?__ Her eyes snapped open on the thought, and the first thing she saw was Ronnie, standing shirtless beside Dale Murray on the far side of the fire, a beer in one hand, a poker in the other. She was wondering what Ronnie thought about all this, because he was still her anchor to home no matter what happened, and the sight of him, of the neutral, too-cool-for-human-life look on his face, made her doubt herself a moment-was he in for this, was he going to commit? Or would he put them all down with some sort of snide comment and slip out the back door? She leaned into Marco. “I'll be back,” she whispered, but Marco was already in Alaska, at least in his mind-_Mud and moss? You mean that's it for insulation?__-and he never even heard her.
She skirted the fire as people rushed up out of the dark to throw branches, scraps of lumber and trash into the flames. Jiminy and Merry came out of nowhere with a derelict armchair that had been quietly falling into itself under the front porch, and she could see the guy they called Weird George-all shadow and no substance-laboring across the yard with the crotch of a downed tree.
And here was Ronnie, lit like a flaming brand, his face a carnival mask of yellow and red, twin fires burning out of the reflective lenses of his eyes. She stood at his side a moment, watching as the glowing skeleton of the fire revealed itself like a shimmering X ray, and then she said, “Hey,” and Ronnie-in chorus with Dale Murray-returned the greeting.
“Wow, you're out,” Star said, looking to Dale Murray. “We were worried.”
“Right,” he said, and he leaned over to spit in the dirt. “But it's no thanks to you, is it? Any of you. If it wasn't for my buddy here”-he jerked his head and Sky Dog's profile emerged from the warring shades of the night, a beer pinned to his lips like a medallion-“I'd still be shitting bricks in the county jail. He's the one that went to the bail bondsman. I mean, what does that take? A genius?”
Star didn't have any response to that, because everything froze up inside her at the sight of Sky Dog. She'd thought all that was done with, thought he'd gone on to infest some other family with ego and selfishness and the kind of love that was no love at all, just words, empty words. He didn't acknowledge her, just drained his beer and flung the bottle into the fire.
There was a pop like a gunshot. The flames snapped and roared.
Ronnie said, “So what do you think?”
“You mean Norm?”
“Yeah. Norm. Like as if there's anything else to discuss tonight.”
“We looked it up on the map-Boynton. It's a real place. I mean, just like all the places on the map when we were coming across country.” And she couldn't help herself-she laughed. “A dot. A little black dot.”
“What's it near?”
She was the expert here, the old Alaska hand, but she'd already reached the limits of her knowledge: “Fairbanks. Like maybe a hundred fifty, two hundred miles?”
“The fishing up there,” Ronnie said, and he wasn't really talking to her now. “Grayling, char, king salmon as long as your leg. You could shoot a moose. A bear. In fact, you know they have to shoot a bear, everybody does, every year? You know why? The fat. I mean, it's not as if you can just stroll down to the grocery store and pick up a tub of margarine or Crisco or whatever-”
“What about the goats,” she said, and she had an image of them crammed into the back of the Studebaker, shitting all over everything, stinking, drooling, making a zoo of the place. “We're taking the goats, aren't we?” And there it was, a fait accompli: _we.__
“Hey, man, you want another beer?” Dale Murray leaned into them, his face swollen in a stabbing flash of light. Ronnie held his bottle up experimentally, shook it twice and drained it. “How about you, Star?” Dale Murray wanted to know, and his voice had softened till it was reasonable, seductive even. Was this a peace offering-after all, she hadn't put him in jail; she hadn't even been there-or did he just want to ball her like all the rest of the _cats?__
“I'm okay,” she said, and Dale Murray moved off into the shadows. She took a sip from the fruit jar and turned to Ronnie. “So what happened to your shirt?”