Then they were silent and the dog hung his head out the window and the sun defeated the clouds to light the road ahead of them like an expressway and Joe Bosky's Mustang lurched into the ruts and sought out the puddles. Traffic wasn't a problem. They overtook two cars going their way-probably heading for Boynton Hot Springs, where there was an old tumbledown resort for summer people-and six or seven vehicles came at them headed for Fairbanks, all of which Sess recognized. He whistled his way through four quavering versions of “My Favorite Things,” something from Dvor?ák, she wasn't sure what, and, maddeningly, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus (Underneath the Mistletoe Last Night),” and then it was evening and they were three miles outside of Boynton and he was pulling over on the side of the road in a place where Birch Creek meandered along the shoulder and the odd fisherman had worn a blistered dirt hump in the bank. “Time to get out, Pamela,” he said, and before she could find the door handle he was around her side of the car and pulling open the door for her. “Time to stretch your legs. Come on, Lucius, that's a good dog. You want to stretch too?”
The creek was a river actually, slow and deep here, with water the color of steeped tea. The dog lifted his leg, sniffed. Sess took her in his arms and gave her a kiss full of passion and hunger, and then he let her go and started fitting the groceries into the two backpacks they'd brought along. The mosquitoes were overjoyed. “What are you up to, Sess?” she asked, standing over him. “You're going to leave the car here, is that it?”
He didn't answer. The tendons stood out in his neck as he stuffed cans, jars and plastic bags of pasta and marshmallows into the packs with an eye to balancing out the load.
“I don't see that it matters, Sess,” she heard herself say, and she didn't mean to nag-tried to catch herself, in fact, but couldn't. “Because you were right out there on the main street of town this morning where everybody could see you, beeping the horn even, and if anybody wanted to know our fingerprints are all over the thing. Dog hair too.” She tried to inject something light into it, though she was fuming all over again: “What would Perry Mason make of that?”
He looked up from the squat of his knees, genuinely puzzled. “Who's Perry Mason?” Then he rose to his feet, lifted both backpacks by their straps and set them to one side in the tall weed. “Pamela,” he said, “I need you to do me a favor here for just a minute, would you?” He didn't wait for a reply. “Just take hold of Lucius so he doesn't get spooked, okay?”
“Spooked? What are you talking about?”
“Just do it, will you?”
And then the grand finale that made her heart dwindle down to nothing, because he was out of control, this husband of hers, out of his mind, and there was no going back from this, this was final and irrevocable and you might just as well hope for peace between the Brits and the Irish, the Israelis and the Palestinians. He slid back into the car, fired up the engine with a roar and left the driver's side door swinging wide on its hinges. “You know, there's probably not five hundred of these Shelby Mustangs in all of the United States of America,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the engine, and then he gunned it up over the dirt hump and on into the creek, jumping wide as the water took hold of it and the tail end bobbed up for just an instant and then settled back down again, the slow steady seep of the current washing it clean.
18
Ronnie was loving this, absolutely and truly loving it. He was on the road again, his wrist draped casually over the wheel of the Studebaker, Star and Marco wedged in beside him, the roof piled high with roped-down boxes and Lydia stretched out across the backseat in a see-through blouse. He was dogging the bus, Merry and Maya making faces out the back window and the goats bleating away at sixty miles an hour from their ramshackle pen atop the thing, and that was a trip too-the bus was such a top-heavy, loaded-down piece of swaying and reeling spring-sprung shit even the Joads would have run screaming from it. Washo Unified, yes indeed. It gave him pleasure just to look at it, because it was a kind of in-joke, and he was in on it. And behind him-all he had to do was glance in the rearview mirror for the comfort of it-was Harmony's liver-spotted Bug, rattling along just beyond the nose of Lester's Lincoln.
And that was a whole other trip: Lester and Franklin. They showed up at the last minute, shuffling around in the dirt, hands going in and out of their pockets and their eyes locking on every face as if they were equipped with built-in lasers, and announced they were coming along for the ride even if they didn't think they'd make it all the way up to the frozen hinterlands, because it was a free country, wasn't it? Pan didn't really care one way or the other-they were all right, he'd hang with anybody, though he had his doubts about how much good they'd be trapping a lynx or shooting a moose or peeling logs for a cabin. And Sky Dog. He was in the backseat of the Lincoln amidst a heap of sleeping bags, cooking gear and a bleached-out tent that looked as if Eisenhower had used it in the Normandy Invasion, and his buddy Dale Murray was bringing up the rear on his bike. What was it Alfredo kept saying all week-the last thing we need is a freak parade? Well, here it was, and the sun was steady on the horizon, the gas tank topped up and the radio spewing rock and roll, and Pan, for his part, was proud and pleased to be part of it.
Not that it was all fun and games. Some real residual _nastiness__ had come out when everybody was deciding whether they were going to sign up or drift on back to San Francisco or try to hook up with one of the other communes, and a whole raft of people just packed up and left. And then there was the question of space-who was going to ride where and when and with whom? For a few days there, brotherliness and sisterliness just broke down like an old junker with a thrown rod and refused to budge. It was a mess. Totally disorganized. Reba tried to crack the whip, and of course Alfredo had his nose in everything, and the Krishna cat (Tom Krishna, everybody was calling him now) came out of his Krishna funk long enough to show some real skill with a hammer and saw, and the chicks, all of them, kept putting things in boxes like a disaster-relief crew-but still, it looked as if Drop City was going nowhere right up until the minute the county dicks came up the drive in their county dick cars with the little gumball machines whirring on top and the bulldozers swung in off the highway.
At least they brought the bulldozers in the night before and left them out on the main road so everybody could get a good long look at them in case they needed their memories jogged-two Cats the size of houses, one on either side of the dirt drive. Mendocino Bill wanted to pour sand down the gas tanks, and to Pan's mind that wasn't a half-bad idea at all-he'd done plenty of that sort of thing out back of the development when he was a kid just for the pure uncomplicated destructive _rush__ of it-but Norm said no, let them be. And that was no joy either, strung out across the hill in back holding hands and singing some lame Joan Baez song as the first of the Cats came clanking up the drive and took down the back house as if it were made of pasteboard and toothpicks, Jiminy shaking his fist and cursing, Star with tears burning down her cheeks and Norm all the while looking over his shoulder for the county sheriff with his arrest warrant. Dust rocketed up into the air. Walls fell. Harmony's yurt went down without so much as a whimper, and all Ronnie could think of was those World War II documentaries his father was always so obsessed with, the Battle of Britain, the Siege of Stalingrad, one wall down and a whole cozy little tea parlor exposed. And then _whump, whump,__ the bombs hit again and the dust just rose and rose.