The spades were different. They didn't so much emerge from the car as uncoil from it, all that lubricious menacing supercool spade energy-and Ronnie wasn't a racist, not at all, he was just maybe a bit more _experienced__ than the rest of his brothers and sisters here at Drop City, who, after all, were maybe just a wee bit starry-eyed and _lame__-and they came across the dirt lot in formation, like a football team. Lester was the name of the one in charge. He was soft-looking, small, with a face made out of putty, and he was wearing a red silk scarf and high-heeled boots. “Peace, brother,” he said, spreading wide his middle and index fingers and looking Ronnie in the eye. Ronnie didn't say anything, but Sky Dog and the rest flashed the peace sign and made the usual noises of greeting in return. A heartbeat later Lester was sitting on the steps of the porch, taking a hit from the pipe that was going round, his black bells hiked up to show off red socks and the elastic tops of his Beatle boots, while the others milled around in the dirt, looking needful.
“So this is the famous Drop City,” Lester said, exhaling. His voice was so soft you had to strain to hear it, and that was a kind of trick, not so much an affectation as a _device__ to make you pay attention.
Verbie, who never shut up for long, said, “Yes it is.”
“We, uh-me and my amigos here-we heard all sorts of out of sight things about this place, like from the Diggers' soup kitchen? You know, in the Fillmore?” Lester gave a quick glance around the porch, then handed the pipe to one of his amigos, and then it went around to all of them and back again up onto the porch, and it was exactly like two tribes meeting on the high plains, peace, brother, and circulate the pipe. “Is it really as cool as they say it is? Like all brothers are welcome?”
The hippies on the porch fell all over themselves assuring him that that was the case, and everybody was thinking Hendrix, Buddy Miles, Free Huey, except Lester, because he just stretched out his legs and settled in.
Now, though-now Ronnie was crashed by the pool, just taking the day off from everything and everybody, never mellower, the smallest little hit of mescaline wearing down the sharp edges of things. Reba's kids-Che and Sunshine-were making a racket with one of those plastic trikes, humping it up and down the strip of concrete on the far side of the pool, and the communal horse-they called him Charley, Charley Horse, what else? — was stomping and snorting up a storm because some head from Daly City whose name escaped Ronnie at the moment was trying to get him to jump a shrunken sun-blasted strip of oleander at the base of the lawn, but that was all right, that was nothing. Ronnie drank it all in, feeling magnanimous. He was Pan. He was stoned. The sun was in the sky and the earth was a good place, a groovy place, a place designed by some higher power-_higher__ power-for the sensory awakening and spiritual uplift of every one of his brothers and sisters.
Until nightfall, that is. The night came seething and festering up out of the shadows that bunched themselves in circus shapes at the feet of the trees and in the clotted scrub that chased the hillside round and round. He was feeling a little-well, a little _jittery.__ There'd been an interlude there where he'd let things slide, a second hit of the mesc, a bottle of red wine and a couple of hits of something somebody had been smoking after dinner, and he hadn't even made dinner, had he? Dinner. Big pots full of mush, women with their tits hanging, health and simplicity and the good rural life. The pool glistened like oil, like blood, in the fading light. He wasn't hungry.
He had a sudden urge to see Star, to just sit with her someplace quiet and talk about home, the little routines and reminiscences that had kept them going all the way across the flat shag of the Midwest and into the Rockies and beyond-Mr. Boscovich and tenth grade biology and how he would call everything _material,__ as in _these cells are constructed of cellular material,__ the way the books in the school library smelled of soap and burning leaves, the afternoon Robert Stellner, the straightest kid in the school, stuck his head in a bag of model airplane glue and carved the mysterious message _Yahweh__ into his chest with a penknife while standing in front of the mirror in the boys' room, all of that-but Star was up in the tree with the new guy all the time, and that rankled, it did, all the shit about Free Love and the Keristan Society notwithstanding. He pushed himself up off the pavement, but that was a bit much, so he sat back down again. The pavement was warm still, and that made him think of the rattlesnake somebody had seen out here just two nights ago. “They come for the warmth,” that's how Norm had put it, “-and you can deal with that or you can kill 'em, skin 'em and eat 'em, but then you'll have bad snake karma your whole life and maybe into the next one, and do you really want that?”
From the main house, the sounds of laughter, conversation, music, all blended in a murmur that was like some sort of undercurrent, as if that was where the real life was, the only life, and this out here, this nature and this crepitating dark, was for losers-losers and snakes. Lydia was in there, and Merry, Verbie and the rest of them. Maybe he'd get up and go inside, just for the human warmth and companionship, because that's what Drop City was all about, companionship, a game of cards maybe, or Monopoly-but then the image of Alfredo clawed its way into the forefront of his brain, and he thought maybe he wouldn't.
Alfredo was one of the founding members of the commune, one of Norm Sender's inner circle, one of those sour-faced ascetic types, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, Reba's old man. He was always going on about natural childbirth and how Reba had cooked up the afterbirth and everybody shared a piece of it and how Che and Sunshine had been born outside under the moon and the stars, but he was an uptight, tight-assed jerk nonetheless, and two days ago Ronnie had gotten into it with him over some very pointed criticism about _volunteering__ to do wash-up or haul trash or dig a new septic field because all these _people__ were clogging up the commune's only two working toilets until they were rivers of _shit,__ and he wouldn't mind, would he? Hell, yeah. He minded. He didn't come all the way out here to California to dig _sewers.__ Jesus Fucking Christ.
That was what he was thinking, sitting there on the warm snake-loving pavement with the night festering around him, just a little shaky, but pissed off too, royally pissed off, when Lester and one of the other spade cats-Franklin, his name was Franklin-appeared out of nowhere with a jug of wine. “Hey, brother,” Lester breathed, easing himself down beside him, “-what you doing out here, swimming?”
“I don't know. Yeah. I guess. I was swimming before-earlier, you know?” The words seemed to be stuck in his mouth, like the crust at the bottom of a pan. “Kind of cold now, I guess. But what's happening with you?”