Soft, so soft: “That's my Hendrix hat, man.” And Lester let him take the knife and fit it back into the sheath while Franklin crossed the room and bent to retrieve the hat. “Touchy, Pan, touchy,” Lester chided. “Don't you know I'm just goofin'? Don't you know that? Huh?”
That was when Lynette turned away from the grill, one hand at her hip, and informed them if they wanted to roughhouse they were going to have to do it over at the Nougat because any more of this sort of thing and they were out the door, all of them. “And I don't tolerate cussing in here either-you ought to know that, mister, and I'm talking to you, Ronnie. And you better inform your friends too.”
“Come on, man,” Sky Dog was saying, “come on, have a beer and forget it-you know Lester. He's just fucking with your head is all. It's a joke, man-can't you take a joke?”
And then it was all right and somebody found the only two rock and roll sides on the jukebox and the beers went round for everybody, even Verbie, who wound up sitting in Iron Steve's lap and drinking on his tab while he kneaded her breasts and licked the side of her face like a deer at a salt lick. Sky Dog produced another joint-“We brought a ton of the shit, man, and they almost nailed us at the border too if they were only smart enough to like look _inside__ the spare tire”-and the sky darkened another degree till it was like twilight. Pan didn't hold any grudges. He was glad to see them, glad to see them all, new faces, new stories-some _life,__ for shitsake-and he drank first to Lester, to put that to rest, and then to Franklin, Sky Dog and Dale. And Harmony, don't forget Harmony. And Alice too.
He had a wad of money in his pocket, and he hardly knew where it came from. It seemed to him he was a long way from home, any home, and as he contemplated his own sun-enlivened features in the mirror behind the bar he felt his life was only just beginning. Already it had taken him to strange destinations and there were stranger yet still to come. Tom Krishna was always talking about karma, and so was Norm, Verbie, Star-all of them were. What if it was true, what if he'd been a saint in some previous life and now he was set to reap the rewards? That was a thought. He smiled at his image in the mirror and tuned out what Sky Dog was saying to him about the Lincoln-they'd parked it around the corner, up in town, and hadn't he seen it? Great car. Tended to overheat and it burned oil like a hog, but… he liked the way his beard was filling in, and his hair-it was long enough to eat up the collar of his shirt. He was looking hip, absolutely, indubitably, but who was going to know about it up here? Who even cared?
The rain started to pick up and the tapping at the windows became more insistent. He lit one cigarette off another and lost count of how many shots, let alone beers, he'd had. The day seemed to concentrate itself. Verbie went off on a laughing jag, Lester sniggered, somebody slapped him on the back. And when the door swung open and Lydia walked in with her hair hanging wet and full of chaff and twigs and flecks of seed because she'd been on her back in a field somewhere, her soaked-through top layered over her tits and her hand clenched like a sixth grader's in Joe Bosky's, he hardly glanced up. It was nothing to him, nothing at all. He was liquid to the bones, he was deep down and pressurized through and through, every square inch of him, a whole new medium to swim through here, and look at the _colors__ of those fish. He fumbled in his pockets-“No, no, Joe, I do, I want to buy you a beer, I insist”-until he came up with a velvety worn five-dollar bill that looked as if it had been scooped out of the river and hung up to dry on a salmon rack. He held it a moment, working it in his fingers, and then laid it on the bar.
23
She was singing to herself, softly, tunelessly, a song she used to like by the Doors, the lyrics as elusive as the melody-_Break on through,__ she kept repeating-_break on through to the other side.__ That was it. That was all she could remember, and if she missed one thing, if there was one thing she could rub a magic lantern and wish for, it would be music. Alfredo and Geoffrey weren't half bad on the guitar, and the communal sing-alongs were great-_righteous,__ as Ronnie would say-but there was no comparison to flipping on the radio or putting a record on the turntable any time you felt like it and just letting yourself drift away into some other place altogether. She used to do that at her parents' house, shut up alone in her room while the TV droned in the vacuum below and her father shouted himself hoarse over some seven-foot basketball player and a tiny little hoop, or in the car with her mother nattering on about drapes or the price of veal and a single guitar suddenly emerging from the buzz of static on the radio in a moment of shimmering triumph. Music was like food, like water, like air-that necessary, that essential-and here she was in a break-on-through mood and nothing for it but her own stumbling version caught like lint on her tongue.
You couldn't have everything, she told herself. Nobody could.
Reba and Merry were working alongside her, in the garden they'd fertilized with goat pellets and fish heads, the garden Norm had told them to forget about because the growing season up here was maybe a hundred days max and thirty of those days were in June, already dead and gone. But what they thought-the women, all the women together-was why not give it a try? Maybe they'd get lucky. Maybe there'd be a late frost this year, maybe the round-the-clock sunlight would magically accelerate the whole process of sprouting, maturing, fruiting. They worked like lunatics to get a patch of ground cleared and planted by the tenth of July, concentrating on cool season vegetables-turnips, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts-but also laying in potatoes, sugar snap peas, zucchini and pumpkin. And pot, of course. The pot plants were already two feet high and rising up so fast you could almost see them growing, and even if they didn't have a chance to bud there'd at least be the leaves and stems.
What they were doing at the moment was unrolling the big sheets of black plastic Lydia and Harmony had gone into Fairbanks for and Ronnie had brought upriver in the speedboat. The stuff came in rolls a foot in diameter and two and a half feet long, and it was perforated every couple of feet so you could rip off a sheet and use it to line your trash can out in the garage of your split-level home on your quarter-acre plot in a tree-lined suburb. But they didn't have trash cans out here-or they did, but they were strictly for storing things like lentils, rice and oats out of reach of the mice that seemed to be everywhere-and they were using long carpets of the plastic to insulate the ground around their plants, a trick they'd picked up from Pamela Harder.
And that was something totally unexpected-Pamela. She and Star couldn't have been more different-she was older, born and raised in Alaska, she didn't do drugs, or not yet, anyway, and she'd never heard of The Band or Crosby, Stills and Nash, let alone Abbie Hoffman or Gloria Steinem, the Fillmore East, roach clips, mellow yellow, Keith Richards or Mick Jagger even-and yet when Star took a canoe downriver for a visit, she felt as if she were sitting with one of her own sisters, it was that relaxed. They settled in with a pot of tea at the picnic table out by the river while Sess split wood or fed the dogs or went off someplace with his gun, and they just talked, and that was nice, because Pamela was starved for the company, and for Star it was a break from the routine, from the same faces and the same little tics and grievances and the gossip and rumors she'd heard a hundred times already.