She poked one of the sacks with a bare toe. “What?” She smiled wider. “Clams? Lobster?”
“You'll see. In about five minutes. But you wouldn't eat anything with a face on it, would you? You wouldn't even slap a mosquito or breathe in a gnat, right?” The roach had gone out. He handed it back to her for form's sake.
“I don't know. Depends, I suppose.”
“On what?”
“On how hungry I am, and what's going in that pot. It's not meat, right?”
People had begun to set up tents in a cluster round the bus. Sky Dog, Dale Murray, Lester and Franklin were off by themselves, sitting on a picnic table in the near distance, their legs propped up on the buckled slats of the seats, and Sky Dog and Dale were strumming their guitars. A bunch of people were on the far side of the bus, visible only as lower legs and feet, and Che and Sunshine were at the center of a flying wedge of straight people's children, pale limbs, shouts, a kickball chasing itself from one end of the lot to the other.
“Would I do that to you?” Pan took a step back from the fire and glanced at the bus. The windows were down all along the near side and an invisible presence had just dropped the needle on “God Bless the Child,” a tune he loved, and for a moment he just looked out across the lot and listened to the horns feed off the vocals. Then he turned back to Merry. “Where you sleeping tonight? The bus?”
“I guess.”
“Want to sleep with me? Big seat in the back of that Studebaker. Or I might just do a sleeping bag on one of the picnic tables, like if there's no dew or rain or anything-”
“What about Lydia?”
“What about her?”
She settled into the corner of the picnic table with a shrug, one haunch balanced there, the dead roach pinched between her fingers. “I don't know,” she said. “Where's she sleeping?”
He didn't answer her, just upended the first of the burlap sacks into the big gleaming pot. It was like shifting rocks. There was a clatter and a hiss, and then he dumped the other bag in. “That's a Billie Holiday song,” he said, “you know that?”
“No,” she said, “I didn't know. I thought it was like Blood, Sweat and Tears?”
“Originally, I mean. Like in the thirties or whenever.”
“Oh, really? So it's like really old, huh?”
“Yeah,” he said, and he looked off into the trees that weren't all that different from the trees at Drop City, or not that he could tell, anyway.
“What are those, mussels?”
“Yep. Pure protein, bounty of the sea. And wait'll you taste them with Pan's special lemon and butter sauce. You ever have mussels just steamed like clams or maybe dropped in a marinara sauce at the very last minute?”
She didn't know. And she was a vegetarian. But he watched her as the steam rose and butter melted in a pan and he sliced and squeezed the lemons, and she looked interested, definitely interested. “What about Jiminy,” he said, “where's he sleeping?”
When she shrugged, her breasts lifted and fell. “In the bus, I guess.”
He was thinking about Lydia, thinking about Star, about Marco and the way he'd put his arm around her and drawn her to him in the Studebaker. He'd gone to high school with her. They'd come all the way across the country together. “Sleep with me,” he said. “What's it been, like weeks?”
That was when Reba came out of the trees with an armload of firewood and a hermetically sealed face, Alfredo trailing in her wake. He had a hatchet in one hand, a half-rotted length of pine in the other. Reba's eyes locked on the pot. “What's that?” she said. “You cooking something, Ronnie?” Oh, and now she smiled, oh yes indeed. “For everybody?”
She was wearing moccasins she'd stitched and sewed herself and she'd stuck an iridescent blue-black raven's feather in her beaded headband-give her a couple of slashes of war paint and she could have been a squaw in a John Ford movie, and that was funny because Star kept saying that all the way across country, that the whole hip style was just like playing cowboys and Indians, from the boots and bell-bottoms that were like chaps right on up to the serapes and headbands and wide-brimmed hats. He'd denied it at the time, simply because he hadn't thought about it and the notion scuffed at his idea of himself, but she was right, and he saw it in that moment. Reba was playing at cowboys and Indians, and so was he, and everybody else.
“It's mussels,” he said. “Enough to feed the whole campground, heads and straights alike.”
Alfredo was standing there in his boots and denim shirt with a wondering look on his face, as if he'd just been cut down from the gibbet by his amigos in that very same western. “Mussels?” he echoed. “Where'd you get them?”
Pan was feeling good. Pan was feeling expansive and generous, feeling brotherly and sisterly. He gave them an elaborated version of his struggle against the sea two mornings ago.
And what was Alfredo's reaction? The reaction of the least-together, most tight-assed member of this whole peripatetic circus? How did he respond to Pan's selfless gesture and all the pride he took in it? He said, “You must be fucking crazy, man. Don't you realize they're quarantined this time of year?”
“Quarantined? What are you talking about?” If he was onto fishing licenses and seasons and all the rest of it, he might as well be talking to his shoes. “June doesn't have an _R__ in it-”
Alfredo set down the hatchet and lifted the top from the pot. The mussels roiled blackly in the churning water. “Jesus,” he said. “You could have poisoned all of us.”
Ronnie peered into the pot, then looked to Merry and Reba before settling on Alfredo. “Bullshit,” he said.
By now, some of the others had begun to gather round-Maya, Angela, Jiminy-and Ronnie had no choice but to hold his ground. “Bullshit,” he repeated. “So what if they're quarantined?”
“Toxic shellfish poisoning,” Alfredo said. “Something like four hundred people died of it one year in San Francisco at the turn of the century, I think it was. There's this dinoflagellate that will concentrate in huge numbers, like a red tide, when the water temperature gets above a certain level-in summer, only in summer-and the mussels, and clams and whatever, concentrate the toxin from them, and it doesn't bother the mussels at all, only us.”
“You know the CIA?” Jiminy put in. His face was a sunlit wedge of nose, cheekbone and bright burning eye chopped out of the frame of his hair. He was thrilled, overjoyed, never happier. “Their assassins use it on a needle and they just prick you in a crowd, a little stab you can barely feel, and then you're dead.”
“Paralyzed,” Reba said. “First your extremities go, then your limbs, until you're a vegetable and you can't move anything or feel anything-”
“Right,” Alfredo said, “-and then it shuts down the vital organs.”
There was an aroma on the air now, a sweet scintillating smell of mussels steamed in their own juices with butter and lemon, salt and pepper and maybe a hint of tarragon. Ronnie wasn't hovering over a picnic table at a two-dollar-a-night campground in Oregon, he was inside a cage at the zoo, and all these people-his friends, his compatriots, his brothers and sisters-were poking at him through the bars with sharpened sticks. “Bullshit,” he said for the third time. “I don't believe it.”
“Believe it,” Alfredo said, already turning to leave, and he was taking a whole raft of faces with him. Merry looked as if she'd been shoved over a cliff, and Jiminy was just waiting for the signal to get down on all fours and start barking like a dog.
Alfredo. Dinoflagellates. Quarantine. Ronnie was having none of it-it was nonsense was what it was, just another stab at him, as if it would kill Alfredo if he ever got any credit for anything. He stirred the pot, fished out a specimen and set it on the wooden plank of the table. It was perfect, tender-you can't cook them a heartbeat too long or you'll be chewing leather-the slick black shell peeking open to reveal the pink-orange meat within, and he was going to hold it up for Merry and run through his mussel routine, about how the lips and the flesh looked like a certain part of the female anatomy and how at medical schools the gynecology students had to study steamed mussels because the real thing was so hard to come by, but Merry was gone, her arm slipped through Jiminy's, bare feet in the dust, off to consume her ration of stale bread and peanut butter.