Dale Murray said, “Kicked his ass for him, what do you think?”
Norm said, “Public _what__? Indecency? You got to be kidding.”
Marco exhaled and passed the joint on to Dunphy, her fingers cold, spidery, bitten, thin, the briefest fleeting touch of skin to skin, and she gave him a blank-eyed look and half a smile and put the roach to her lips and sucked. He glanced down at his own fingers, at his hands laid out on the chewed plank of the table. The fingernails were chipped, the cuticles torn, dirt worked into every crack and abrasion in a tracery of dead black seams. These were the hands of a working man, a man putting in twelve- and thirteen-hour days, the hands of a man who was building something permanent. Pride came up in him in a sudden flush. And joy. That too.
“Tired?” Star murmured, leaning into him.
For answer, he pressed his palms together in prayer, then tilted them and made a pillow to lay his head on.
“And Lester,” Sky Dog was saying, “you should have seen Lester-man, they wanted to lock him up so bad, just on general principles, you know? But he gave them the old shuck and jive and smiled so hard at this one guy-I don't know what he was, a Mountie, a sheriff, something-I thought he was going to melt right down into his boots like a big stick of rancid butter. Oh, and, shit, the moose-did I tell you about the moose?”
Alfredo cut in. He wanted to know where Lester was-was he planning on coming upriver? Because if he was, it was going to be sticky, real sticky, after what went down in California, and he didn't want to sound prejudiced or anything, because prejudice had nothing to do with it- “He stayed behind at the bus,” Verbie said, picking at a crescent of white bone. “With Franklin. They're panning for gold.”
Joe Bosky let out a hoot. “Fucking greenhorns,” he said. “Cheechakos.”
“All's I know,” Sky Dog put in, “is they got this vial half-filled with gold flakes already, and all they been doing is just catching what comes out of that creek up north of town-”
“Last Chance Creek,” Bosky said, folding his arms. The pale white ridge of a scar crept out of his aviator's mustache and curled into the flesh of his upper lip. You could see where every hair of his head was rooted. “They should've called it No Chance Creek. Nothing in there but sewage leaching out of people's septic tanks.”
“Sorry, man, but I saw it, I'm telling you-that was _gold__ in there.”
“Iron pyrites,” Verbie said, and then Norm weighed in. “Could be gold, who knows? You want to talk gold country, this is it, and I fully intend to get out there and rinse a couple pans myself, me and Premstar. Once the cabins are up. Because why not? It's _money__ in the bank, people, and it's out there for the picking, just like the berries and the fat silver salmon coming up the river, and do I have to _remind__ anybody what we're doing up here in the first place?”
Jiminy said he could feature some gold-maybe Harmony could figure out a way to melt it down and make ornaments and figurines and the like-or maybe they could just sell it and use the money for things like a new generator so they could have a little music more than once a week. And lights, what about lights. Wouldn't lights be nice?
People ran that around the table a while, the gold flecks that would invariably prove to be iron pyrites growing exponentially in each Drop City head till the creek across the river ran yellow and the trees on the hills gave up their roots and toppled because it wasn't earth they were growing in, but solid gold nuggets. Marco tuned them out. He'd never been so tired in his life. And if it wasn't for the elation he was riding on-the meeting house was up, the walls chinked and the roof in place, and who would have believed it a month ago? — he'd have crawled into his sleeping bag by now. But he held on, stroking Star's bare arm with the tip of one very relaxed finger and letting the marijuana turn the blood to syrup in his veins.
They'd made the meeting house two stories, with the beams laid inside for a loft where people could sleep if the need arose, and that was good thinking, a happy result of sitting down with a sheet of paper and a pencil and talking it all out beforehand with Tom, Alfredo and Norm. Norm knew what he was doing, for the most part, at least, and Sess Harder, fifteen minutes down the river, was like an encyclopedia-he was the one who told them to lay flattened cardboard over the roof poles so none of the loose sod would leach through the cracks-and the uncle had left behind a pristine copy of _The Complete Log Home,__ copyright 1910, which they could consult as needed, but really, Marco couldn't help marveling over how _basic__ it all was. You cut and peeled the timber, notched the ends of the logs till they were no different, except in scale maybe, from the Lincoln Logs every ten-year-old in America constructed his forts and stockades with, dug down two feet to permafrost at the four corners and stacked up rock to lay the first square across and built on up from there. Then you laid the floor-with planks carved out of spruce with a chainsaw ripper-cut holes for the windows and a six-inch slot for the stovepipe, and you had it. Basically, that was it. And if they could all pitch in and build something like this-two stories high, twenty feet long and eighteen across-then the cabins would be nothing more than a reflex.
“What about Harmony and Alice?” This was Norm, leaning into the table and giving Sky Dog and Dale Murray a look over the top of his glasses. “And Lydia, what about her?”
“You know Harmony,” Sky Dog said. “He's got a kiln set up outside the bus and he says he's experimenting with some things and he's not ready to come upriver yet, at least that's what he told me and Dale. Plus the Bug is broken down.”
“He ordered a new fuel pump for it,” Verbie put in. “From this place in Anchorage.”
Norm dug his fingers into his beard, slid the glasses back up his nose. “And Lydia?”
To this point, Joe Bosky had been subdued, his dig at the gold situation the only thing out of his mouth all evening. He'd been locked behind the wrap of his silver shades since morning, stoned on a whole variety of things. When the hot chocolate went round he'd shuffled unsteadily to the plane and came back with a bottle of Hudson Bay rum and set it on the table, and a couple of people followed his example and spiked their chocolate with it. He cleared his throat in response to Norm's question and leaned over to spit in the dirt before bringing the solidity of his face back to the table. “She's in Fairbanks,” he said.
“Fairbanks?”
A murmur went round the table. If it was true, this was disturbing news, evidence of their first defection, the first betrayal of the ideal. People eyed one another up and down the table-who was next? Where would it end? Was the whole thing going to come tumbling down now? Was that what this meant? Marco slouched over his plate. For the moment, at least, he was too tired to care.
“What do you mean, Fairbanks?”
Joe Bosky's voice was thick in his throat. “I got her a job at this place I know. A saloon. She's going to be a dancer.”
And now Verbie: “Only till winter, though, is what she told me. To get some money together, for all of us-she's doing it for all of us-and then she's going to come back to the fold. That's a promise, she said-tell them that's a promise.”
“And if any of you other girls are interested,” Bosky said, and here he turned to Star and fixed his null gaze on her, “I can arrange it, because Christ knows they are starved for women up here. And Lydia. I mean, she's a natural, with that body she's got on her-”
“You mean topless, right?” Maya said.
“Right down to her G-string, honey, because full frontal nudity is still against the law in this state, but I tell you she's going to take in more tips a night than you people'll get in a month out of welfare or food stamps or whatever it is you're on.”