But Friday came and went and he was nowhere to be found. It rained all day Saturday and people hunkered down in their tents and crowded into the one workable cabin, the original one, which was really just a single tiny room no bigger than the paneled den where Star's father and her brother Sam used to sink into the couch and watch football on Saturday afternoons. There was a chill in the air-it couldn't have been more than fifty degrees out-but still it was too hot in the cabin, too hot by far, what with the stove going in order to cook in shifts all day and the press of bodies strewn all over like human baggage, people playing cards, grousing about the weather, getting high and generally making a shithole of the place while Star and Merry tried to find room to conjure up a pot of beans and eight loaves of bread that were destined to be doughy and raw on the inside and burned black on the bottom, and what they wouldn't give for a couple of packages of La Estrella tortillas from the grocery back in Guerneville. Norm had taken possession of the only bunk in the place-the cabin _had__ belonged to his uncle, after all, and the communal spirit only went so far in a pinch-and he was in it now, propped up on one elbow beside Premstar. They were playing hearts, the only game she knew, and when she slipped the black queen to him she squealed as if she'd been named Miss Watsonville all over again.
Outside in the rain, Marco and Alfredo and some of the others-it looked like Deuce, Tom Krishna, Creamola and Foster-were setting the big support beams in place for the roof of the meeting house, and wouldn't that be nice, to have some space when the weather turned really nasty? Or just space in general. Because she might have been smiling-always smiling, two sweet chick lips pressed together in beatific hippie chick bliss-but what she really felt was that she was a heartbeat and a half from going out of her mind, and if she had to step over one more stinking sockless foot or scrub one more caked-on plate because some idiot had just flung it down in the yard without rinsing it first, she was going to start screaming and only a gag and a straitjacket were going to stop her.
She glanced up and saw them there in the intermediate distance, huddled scurrying figures in drab-colored ponchos, struggling against the mud, the pelt of the rain and the shifting uncontainable weight of the timbers, and she wanted to go out and pin medals to their chests. Everybody else had given up for the day-the ones who'd even bothered to crawl out of their sleeping bags in the first place, that is. Reba had certainly made herself scarce, but maybe that was a blessing in itself because at least the kids weren't howling in and out the door every thirty seconds. Mendocino Bill had been working with Marco and the others all afternoon, but nobody had a poncho big enough to fit him and now he was huddled under the eaves of the cabin, paging through a finger-worn copy of _Rolling Stone__ and shivering so hard you could hear the glass rattle in the windowframe, his overalls soaked through, his bare splayed feet like two deep corings of hard clay mud pulled up out of a drill shaft. Of course, he was _blocking the light,__ that was the important thing, but Star didn't have the heart to stick her head out the door and ask him to move. She swung round, two steps to the stove, and plunged a handful of dishes into the dishpan. Jiminy was right there underfoot, nursing his arm in a filthy sling and whittling little figurines out of alder-his voodoo dolls, he called them, and he had a whole collection already, one for each sister and brother in Drop City, though they were so crude only he could tell them apart. The hair curtained his face as he worked.
Star had a vision of the future then, of the winter, music-less, dull as paste, everybody crowded into a couple of half-finished cabins with no running water and no toilets and getting on each other's nerves while the snow fell and the ice thickened and the wind came in over the treetops like the end of everything. She held it a moment and then shook it out of her head.
“You know,” Norm said, raising his voice to be heard generally above the crackling of the stove and the steady drone of the rain, “somebody really ought to take a canoe on down to Boynton. I mean, to see what the deal is with Pan and Verbie, because I am hip to the fact that Verbs, at least, wouldn't want to cause anybody any hassles up here by _delaying__ delivery of the window glass and the new blades for the saws and the two-stroke oil and the drag knife and timber chisels and all the rest of the wares and objects we are all crying out with need for here… unless maybe her mother's thing might have been, I don't know, maybe _heavier__ than she thought”-and here he looked to Angela, who was wedged into the corner beside Jiminy, working a crossword puzzle in a book of crosswords that had already been deliberated over, filled in and erased by a dozen different hands. Angela never even lifted her head and you would have thought he was talking about somebody else's mother altogether. But then what could she do short of hopping in a canoe herself? Or sprouting wings?
Jiminy said, “They'll be all right. It's the weather, that's what it is.”
“But what about yesterday,” Star said. “And the day before.” She was at the table now, trying to make salsa from canned tomatoes and a cluster of yellow onions that had lost their texture and given up their skin to a film of black mold, and even to think of chilies or cilantro was a joke. They could have drowned. Easily. In fact it was a miracle that everybody had made it upriver in one piece the first time, even with the help of Joe Bosky, who must have made five or six round-trips with gear and people and supplies while the canoes crept up against the current and Norm peeled off the hundred-dollar bills to keep the propellers whirring and the floats skidding across the water through one long frantic afternoon and a night that never came.
Premstar was concentrating on her cards and the others were just staring out the open door, mesmerized by the rain. Norm folded his hand, then looked up at Star and gave his beard a meditative scratch. “I guess I better call a meeting,” he said finally, and Star followed his gaze out the door and into the dwindling perspective offered by the rain.
The next morning was clear, the sun already high and irradiating the thin blue nylon of the tent when she woke beside Marco, her mouth dry and sour and her shoulder stiff where the bedding-spruce cuttings, no longer fresh-had poked at her through the unpadded hide of the sleeping bag. Everything was damp and rank. She was glutinous with sweat because the sleeping bag was good for twenty below zero and she'd zipped it all the way up the night before, shivering so hard she could barely stand to shake her clothes off. It had been raining still when she went to bed nearly an hour after Marco had turned in, and it couldn't have been any colder than maybe forty-five degrees, but the tent felt like a meat locker, and that, more than anything, made her appreciate the concerted seven-days-a-week effort they were all putting in to get those cabins up. Teamwork. Brothers and sisters. Everybody pulling together, one for all and all for one.
Marco had told her there were old-timers up here who'd overwintered in a canvas tent with nothing more than a sheet-metal stove and some flattened cardboard boxes to keep the wind out, but she couldn't even begin to imagine it. A tent? In the snow? At fifty and sixty below? That was when you crossed the boundary from self-sufficiency to asceticism-to martyrdom-and she had no intention of suffering just for the sake of it. There was nothing wrong with comfort, with twelve-inch-thick walls and an extravagant fire and a pile of sleeping bags to wrap yourself up in and dream away the hours while the snow accumulated and the wind sang in the treetops. And why not sketch a cup of hot chocolate into the picture-and a good book too?