(As for the other surviving Drop City chicks-Louise, Dunphy, Erika and Rain-they just weren't his type in any way, shape or form, members of the long-faced chant-before-breakfast-lunch-and-dinner school, hairy-legged, sour-smelling, secret as thieves unless the subject of women's lib came up, and then they were onto it like Verbie. Plus, they were all spoken for, and the only passable-looking one of the group-Erika-lived in a tent with two guys, Weird George and Geoffrey, and they all three balled one another in combinations Pan might have found fascinating in the abstract, but you could forget about getting up close with anything like that.)
He found Merry out behind the original cabin, the one Norm's uncle had built all on his own with an axe, a crosscut saw and two hard-knuckled hands. She was sitting in the dirt, her legs splayed, hair curtaining her face. The furor had died down, nothing lost, nobody hurt but Jiminy-and he had it coming anyway. The peeled yellow logs of the meeting hall shone in the sun, the goats bleated and strained at their tethers. He eased down beside her and put an arm round her shoulders. “Hey,” he murmured.
Fine hairs glistened on her shins. She smelled of woodsmoke, of mush, of the river. “Jiminy can be such a prick sometimes,” she said.
He wanted to agree-as in, _Yeah, he is a prick, so why not get it on with me instead?__-but held his peace. He pulled her in tighter, began to stroke her hair. “Come on,” he said, “it's no big deal-everybody's a little tense, that's all. Once we get the buildings up, once we get things together, I mean, and have time to catch our breath-” He was talking horseshit and he knew it, but horseshit was what was called for under the circumstances-what was he going to use, logic?
She swept the hair away from her face and gave him a sidelong look. “You don't seem so tense. In fact, I'd say just the opposite.”
And now the grin, aw shucks, and yep, you got me. “Blond Lebanese,” he said, “but I haven't got enough for the whole crew and you know how they're onto the _smell__ of it like hounds-Jiminy, in particular, and Tom Krishna…” He paused to let that sink in, incontrovertible reasoning, and then tucked the most copacetic suggestion in the world under the lid of the moment: “You want to maybe just slip into my tent a minute?”
The tent was Creamsicle orange, a one-man affair somebody had left in one of the overstuffed closets at Drop City. Pan had taken possession of it when they unloaded the bus because at the moment he didn't need anything more by way of space since he wasn't really sleeping with anybody-plus, it gave him a little privacy and a place to stash his own things. He'd pitched it two hundred yards away from the main cabin, on a sandbar upriver, and no, he wasn't worried about bears, grizzly or otherwise, because he slept with the Springfield rifle he'd shot the deer with back in California and the Winchester Norm's uncle had left behind, not to mention the.44 magnum pistol he kept strapped at his side at all times. Just let a bear poke his head in the tent. Just let him.
It was warm. Merry's hand was clamped in his. Half the tribe was mewed up in the cabin now, sitting around and picking their toes as people read chapters of _Slaughterhouse Five__ aloud, smoke drifting up and away from the stovepipe and the big pan heating water for the dishes. He and Merry caught a view of them as they drifted by the open door-heads and shoulders, slumped backs, cradled arms, splayed feet-and he saw that Marco was in there. And Star. Of course, that was nothing to him, and he'd already read the book twice-and he'd rather be fishing anyway. Or fucking. Ideally, that is.
He stole a glance at Merry. Her face was neutral, chin set, eyes squinted against the sun. Her hair swayed with each step, billowing and settling and billowing again. She kept her fingers entwined in his. He saw the dogs, two streaks of liquid fire wrestling over a bone in a spray of sun on the porch, and heard Reba's kids shrieking somewhere downriver while Mendocino Bill and Tom Krishna tried to make sense of the engine that whirred and shuddered but refused to come back to life. Nobody even glanced up as he led Merry along the bank to where the tent stood slack against the ragged line of the trees.
Inside, it was so close they had to sit yoga-style, their knees touching and their hands gone idle in their laps. But Pan, Pan got right to it, turning from the waist to dig out the pipe, the matches, the tinfoil, the hash and the razor blade, all of it kept close in a plastic baggie in the front pouch of his backpack. Merry said, “I love the sound of the river,” just to make conversation because conversation filled the void when people were preparing drugs for you, and Ronnie said something expected like, “Yeah, it's cool,” and he held the pipe out for her and lit a match. He watched her lips purse as she took in the smoke, watched the light settle in the rings on her fingers. They were in a cocoon, hidden away from the world, the skin of the tent lit up like the lens of a flashlight. Or a sausage. That's what it was. “I feel like we're inside a big orange Italian sausage, the hot kind,” he said, taking a hit and immediately feeding the pipe back to her because she was the one who needed to catch up- Her eyes watered. They swelled and fractured, and her cheeks distended with the effort to hold in the smoke that was always precious but never more so than out here under the bleached white sky of nowhere. Then she was coughing, hacking till her lungs were blistered and her lips flecked with spittle, and he was coughing too. “It never fails,” she gasped in a faltering little squeak of a voice that could have belonged to Maya, “because I think-it's my theory, anyway-that you get just as high from coughing as from the dope itself.”
Pan smiled. He agreed. Couldn't have agreed more. He hacked into his fist. After a moment he laid his hands on her thighs and began to work them back and forth with a soft tentative friction. “Music would be cool right now,” he said, just to say something, just to keep it going, and he thought of Lydia, back in the bus, cranking any record she felt like, and then he shook that thought right out of his head. “But you know, in some ways it's just as well that we don't have it, because we've got to _resensitize__ our ears to the environment, like the moose, the caribou, the wolves-you hear the _wolves__ last night?”
Her eyes were closed. She murmured something-yes, no, maybe-and then her eyes flashed open and she laid her hands atop his and guided them up her thighs. For a long moment they both looked down at their two pairs of hands working there against the hard lateral stitching of her jeans, pushing and kneading in concert, and then she leaned into him and kissed him. He heard the hiss of the river with his resensitized ears, felt the blood beating in his temples. And then he was pulling the T-shirt up over his head and fumbling with his belt and the black heavy load of the gun he kept strapped to his thigh like some TV gunslinger, like Matt Dillon or Johnny Yuma-he was a cowboy, how about that? — and she eased out her legs with an awkward rustle of the Creamsicle orange fabric of the tent and jerked her jeans and underpants down to her knees in a single motion. His hand went right to her and their mouths met again, and then- And then Jiminy was calling her name-“Merry! Merry?”-and his sodden Dingo boots were crunching in the gravel along the bank. “You out here? Merry?”
Pan froze. So did she. Jiminy couldn't see them, nobody could. The tent wasn't made of ultralightweight semitransparent Creamsicle-colored nylon-it was made of steel, steel lined with lead and with six inches of concrete on top of that. Pan was exploding. The buckle wouldn't give. He didn't dare move.