Everyone looked to Norm, whether they were conscious of it or not. And Norm, at the head of the table, hair dangling from the cincture of his headband, the cowbell like a cheese grater hung round his neck, set down his cup of chocolate and licked his mustache till all the sweet residuum was gone. “All right,” he said finally. “Cool. I mean, we can live with that, right, people? Lydia's going to show off what she was born with and make a little cash for Drop City in the bargain, and where's the problem with that?”
Verbie's voice came back at him like a whipcrack. “It's exploitation.”
“Exploitation of what?”
“Of the female body. It's sexist. I mean, I don't see any of you men up there dancing in your jockstraps or whatever-”
“Only because they didn't ask,” Norm said, and people were laughing now, avowals going up and down the table, and then Sky Dog said he'd do it in a heartbeat.
“Oh, yeah,” Verbie shot back. “Then why don't you do it now? Why not get up on the table and give us something to look at, come on, let's see what you got, big boy, come on-”
Sky Dog rose unsteadily from his seat and began undoing the buttons of his shirt while the catcalls rang out, but once he got his shirt off, he seemed to lose track of what he was doing-gone into the wild blue yonder-and he sat back down again.
“Chicken,” Merry said.
“See, what'd I tell you?” Verbie said.
And then Premstar, propped up beside Norm like a painted mannequin, Premstar the beauty queen who was more worried about her nails and her lipstick and her eyeliner than about anything that could possibly go down at Drop City, past or present, entered the conversation for the first time all night. “What about our treats?” she demanded. “All the things we ordered from Pan, I mean. Did everybody forget, or what?”
That was the unfortunate moment Ronnie chose to come bobbing across the field from his tent, the sun firing the threads of his hair, his torso riding over his hips as if he were walking a treadmill, and the table fell momentarily silent to watch his progress. Everyone was thinking the same thing. Pan had been crashed in his tent all this time, out of sight, out of mind, but the boat had come in with Verbie and Sky Dog and Dale, strange cargo indeed, and the windows for the meeting house and the three prospective cabins were there, uncracked and true, and the cans of kerosene and the bar oil and blades for the saws, but nothing else. No candy bars. No underarm deodorant. No books or magazines or tubes of suntan lotion. And if they weren't in the plane and they weren't in the boat, then where were they?
“Hey, Dale,” Sky Dog said, trying to get it going again, “remember that shit they tried to palm off on us in, where was it, Carmacks, in that roadhouse? _Moose__burger they called it?” But nobody was listening. All eyes were on Pan as he shuffled up to the table, tucking in his shirt and swatting absently at mosquitoes. Even Freak lifted his head from the dirt to give him a look of appraisal. The smoke drifted. The moment held.
“Hey, what's happening,” Ronnie said, leaning over Marco's shoulder to peer into the depths of the nearest pot. “Am I too late for dinner?”
At first, he tried to deny everything, squeezing himself in on the bench between Star and Joe Bosky and scraping what he could out of the bottom of the pot, all the while mounding it up on the first plate that came to hand, and never mind that it had already been used, he wasn't fussy. He was wearing his glad-to-be-here look, all smiles and dancing eyes, and he'd put a little effort into his clothes too, his denim shirt clean and maybe even pressed and what looked to be a new bandanna wrapped round his head. He found a fork, wiped it on his jeans, and began to feed the hardened dregs of rice into his mouth, too busy eating to address the issue of Drop City's trust and the two-column shopping list he'd wrapped round the wad of bills everybody had thrust on him five days ago. Marco studied the side of his head, the sparse thread of his sideburns tapering down into the sparser beard, the wad of muscle working in his jaw, but Ronnie was making eye contact with no one, least of all Premstar, who'd just looked directly at him and said, “So where's our stuff?”
Now she repeated herself, and Reba, the hunt in her eyes, said, “Yeah, _Pan,__ what's the deal? Are you going tell me you forgot, or what?”
If Ronnie was hoping it would blow by him, he was going to be disappointed, Marco could see that. He hadn't given him any money himself-he'd been too busy to think of needing or wanting anything-but Star had, and that was enough to involve him right there, more than enough. To this point, Pan had been fairly innocuous, shying away from the construction or anything that smacked of real work, maybe, but taking charge of the boat and the drift net Norm's uncle had left behind and assiduously drilling holes in anything that moved out along the river, and that was meat nobody else was going to go and get, at least not till the cabins were up anyway. He's doing his own thing, that's what Star said whenever his name came up in relation to the work details Alfredo was forever trying to organize-the latrine crew, the bark-stripping crew, the wood-splitters and sod-cutters-and the way she defended him was an irritant, certainly, but Marco wasn't jealous of him, or not that he would admit. _Of course I love him,__ Star had insisted, _but like a brother, like my brother Sam, and no, we never really slept together, or not in any way that really meant anything-__
“Is that booze I see here on the table? Distilled spirits? _Al__-co-holic beverage?” Ronnie lifted his head and darted a glance at the sun-drenched bottle of rum rising up out of the wooden slab at Bosky's elbow. “What are we mixing it with?”
“The stuff, Ronnie, the stuff,” Reba said. “We were talking about the stuff we all gave you money for-where is it? Huh?”
He reached for the bottle, found a cup, poured. Everybody at the table watched him as if they'd never before seen a man lift a cup to his lips, and they watched him sip and swallow and make a face. “I thought it was-didn't we bring it in the plane, Joe? I mean, this morning?”
But Joe Bosky was no help. He sat there frozen behind his glazed lenses, not even bothering to swat at the mosquitoes clustered on the back of his neck. A dense spew of smoke raked across the table and then dissipated. No one said a word.
“Jesus,” Ronnie said, slapping at his forehead. “Don't tell me I left all that shit back at the bus-”
“Oh, cut the crap, already. You didn't leave anything anywhere, did you, man?” Mendocino Bill rose massively at the far end of the table. He'd put in an order for Dr. Scholl's medicated foot powder, because he had a semipermanent case of athlete's foot and the itching was driving him up a wall. “You fucked up, didn't you?”
Ronnie looked wildly round the table, his mouth set, eyes jumping from one face to another. He was calculating, Marco could see that, dipping deep in the well, way down in the deepest hole, fishing for a lie plausible enough to save his neck. Marco had no sympathy for him, none at all, and in that moment he realized how expendable he was, whether Star needed him as confessor or not-or no, especially because she needed him. Or thought she did. The shadows deepened. A hawk screeched from a tree at the edge of the woods. “What about it, Pan?” he heard himself say.
“Talk about the third degree,” Ronnie said, and he was looking down at the table now, toying with his fork. Suddenly he let out a laugh-a high sharp bark of a laugh that startled the dog out of his digestive trance-and he raised his head and gave Marco a sidelong look. “All right,” he said, “all right, you got me. I fucked up. Had one too many drinks, you know, and I just… I don't know, I just, I guess it slipped my mind-”
He must not have found much comfort in the look Marco was giving him, because he ducked his head again and murmured, to no one in particular, “So go ahead and hang me.”