They'd already sited the cabins, walked them off in the dirt and sat there to admire the prospect of the river each of them would have, a little semicircle of neat foursquare peeled-log cabins like something out of a picture book, and as soon as the meeting hall was finished, they were going to start in on them. And the big question was how would they divide up the space? Who was going to live with who and would they switch midwinter if somebody really freaked out? She was thinking she and Marco would go in with Merry and Jiminy, for sure, and maybe Maya and one of the unattached guys-_cats__-but four would be nice and two even nicer.
She stretched, careful not to wake Marco. He was hunched away from her, wrapped up like a corpse in his battered Army surplus bag, exhausted from working nonstop all day in the rain. He'd been so burned out the previous night he'd skipped the meeting altogether, and at dinner he could barely lift a fork to his mouth, all the jokes and debates and crack-brained theories that made dinner so lively and communitarian every evening just flying right by him. She was thinking she'd slip down to the cabin and see what Dunphy and Erika were cooking up for breakfast (today it was their drill, and nine'd get you ten it was going to be flapjacks, with hand-carved slices of bacon on the side for the carnivores) and bring a plate of it to him here in the tent, breakfast in bed and hello and good morning and how are you this fine day, my love?
Sometime in the night she must have flung off the T-shirt she normally slept in, though she had no recollection of it, nor of having unzipped the bag either, and her thoughts were moving slowly, as if her brain were an unfilled kettle and each thought the thinnest reluctant drip of a leaky faucet. She'd smoked the night before-pot and a couple hits of the hash Alfredo was circulating after the meeting-and as she lay there now staring at the intense unearthly blue dome of the tent's roof, she felt dragged out and sluggish, as if one of Weird George's vampires had slipped in in the middle of the night, drained her blood and pumped sand into her veins in its place.
It seemed to take her forever just to sit up-was that coffee she smelled, drifting up the slope from the cabin? — and then it hit her that there would be no milk in the coffee today, unless it was powdered, unless it was canned and tasted of tin and some Elsie Borden factory tucked away somewhere in the very rusted-out epicenter of the military-industrial complex they'd all come up here to escape. The goats were dead, that was the fact of the matter. One minute they'd been pulling up brush and tender sprouts of this and that with those dainty little jerks of their heads and staring off into the slit-eyed distance in some sort of deep-dwelling goat trance, and the next they were lying there torn inside out like a pair of bloody socks. And Frodo. Everybody loved that dog. You could throw a Frisbee a hundred feet, two hundred, and he'd be there to catch it every time, magically, as if he rode on air-he'd even learned to smile, as some dogs do, the really special ones, wagging his head and lifting his upper lip to show his front teeth in a weird canine parody of the master species' favorite greeting. He was dead too. And Ronnie-what about Ronnie? And Verbie?
They'd all decided that if the two of them weren't back by noon today somebody would have to go downriver in a canoe and see what the deal was, whether it was just a delay in getting the windows and the building supplies because maybe the Studebaker had broken down or they were having a problem with the outboard engine, a leak in the bottom of the boat, choppy conditions on the river, whatever-or whether it was something darker, something nobody really wanted to think about. And who was going to go? They couldn't spare anybody, actually, because they were racing against time here and everybody, even one-armed Jiminy, was vital to the cause, but finally Angela had volunteered-it was her sister, her mother-and Bill said he'd go with her to make sure she didn't get lost, because after all she was just recently released from the penitentiary of a whole life lived in Pasadena and her notion of wilderness to this point hadn't extended much beyond the bounds of Griffith Park.
It _was__ coffee. No smell on earth like it. Star kicked her feet free of the sleeping bag and pulled on her underwear and a pair of shorts, both so damp you could have used them to wipe up the linoleum floor back at home, then she slipped a very grungy tie-dyed T-shirt that might have been Marco's-two sniffs; it _was__-over her head and bent forward to lace up her hiking boots. It was then that the nothing sounds-wind in the alders, the willows, the cottonwoods and spruce, the erratic complaints of the birds, the rustle of the river-began to feature something else, something _un__natural, man-made, the drilling, straight-ahead monotone of an internal combustion engine.
She stepped out of the tent in time to see the shot-silver streak of Joe Bosky's floatplane dip behind the curtain of trees along the river and then emerge to skate out across the water on two flashing parabolas of light. The engine revved and then died as the plane faced around and its forward motion carried it up on the gravel beach in front of the cabin. By the time she got there Ronnie was already out on shore, securing the plane with a line looped around the big minder log. There was a dead moment, and then the sun grabbed the door of the plane and let it go again, and Joe Bosky was there beside him, in camouflage fatigues and a black beret, the two of them bent close, laughing over something.
It was early yet-no later than seven or so-but other people had heard the engine too and were poking their heads out of their tents or just standing there looking dazed in their bare feet and underwear. Star was the first one down to the water, and she was still half asleep herself, the tall grass tickling at her calves, insects springing away from the tread of her feet in revolving cartwheels of color. From somewhere in the depths of the cabin, Freak let out a sharp introductory bark. “Ronnie,” she called, coming across the strip of gravel and reaching out her arms for him, and all at once she was lit up with joy, just beaming, she couldn't help herself, “we were worried about you.”
Ronnie didn't smile, didn't say anything. He just took hold of her-_Pan__-and he wasn't settling for any brotherly and sisterly squeeze either, not this time, wrapping her in his arms and pulling her tight to his body as if he wanted to break her down right there. And then, before she could react, he threw her head back and kissed her hard on the mouth, too hard, and held it too long, so that she wound up having to push away from him while Joe Bosky stood there grinning as if he were at a peep show or something. “Don't I rate a kiss too?” he said, and the taste of Ronnie was the taste of alcohol and cigarettes and how many nights without sleep? “Jesus,” Ronnie said, “you look like shit.”
She let a hand go to her temple and she shook her hair back and away from her face, vulnerable, always vulnerable. “What do you think? — I just got up. I haven't even brushed my hair yet or washed my face or anything-”
“She looks good to me,” Joe Bosky said. “Like something I could spread with butter and just eat all day long.” His grin was even, loopily steady, his eyes poked back in his head as if an internal whip were lashing out at them. He wore a pistol at his waist, strapped down like Ronnie's, and he'd rolled up the sleeves of his shirt to show off the cut meat of his biceps. He leered at her a moment, then clapped on a pair of silver reflective glasses that gave back nothing. He was stoned, that's what he was, up there in the air stoned out of his mind, and Ronnie was stoned too. She saw it all in a flash, the money on the bar, the dirty jokes and backslapping and the cigars and joints and one more round and hey, man, let's fly upriver and drop in on Drop City.
“So where's the boat?” she asked. “Where's Verbie?”
Ronnie gave her a look she knew from Kansas, from Denver, from Tucumcari, New Mexico, poor Ronnie, put-upon Ronnie, Ronnie the crucified and ever-suffering. “She's such a _cunt,__” he said. “And I'm sorry, but I just couldn't take it anymore.”