Drop City

was no joy either, strung out across the hill in back holding hands and singing some lame Joan Baez song as the first of the Cats came clanking up the drive and took down the back house as if it were made of pasteboard and toothpicks, Jiminy shaking his fist and cursing, Star with tears burning down her cheeks and Norm all the while looking over his shoulder for the county sheriff with his arrest warrant. Dust rocketed up into the air. Walls fell. Harmony's yurt went down without so much as a whimper, and all Ronnie could think of was those World War II documentaries his father was always so obsessed with, the Battle of Britain, the Siege of Stalingrad, one wall down and a whole cozy little tea parlor exposed. And then _whump, whump,__ the bombs hit again and the dust just rose and rose.
    “So where do you think Norm's planning to stop tonight?” Star said over the decelerating thump of Canned Heat--a miracle of a little college station out of Portland, and Pan was the one with the nimble fingers to find it. “I mean, _if__ he's going to stop, and with him there're no guarantees, right?”
    “Right,” Marco said, “but the more miles we make, the better.”
    “That's the theory,” Ronnie said, and before the caravan left Drop City he'd hunted and gathered one hundred pharmaceutical-grade Dexedrine tablets from a cat he knew in the River Run bar in Guerneville and handed them out like candy--_at cost__--to anybody who was even thinking about getting behind the wheel.
    Star's legs were bare, and her feet--perched up on the dashboard like two fluttering white birds--were bare too. She was wearing a white midriff blouse and a pair of cutoffs and probably nothing else beyond her own natural essence, though she sometimes dabbed a little extract of vanilla behind each ear and in the crease between her breasts. Ronnie leaned into her and took a furtive sniff. She smelled of sweat, of the natural oils and artificial emollients she used on her hair, and there it was--just the faintest hint of vanilla, like the residue at the bottom of the glass after you've finished your shake and let it sit on the counter half an hour. She'd wanted to ride in the bus. But what had he done? He'd begged and pleaded and made her feed on her own guilt through all its thousands of layers and permutations because they'd come all the way across the country in this very same car, with this very same radio and her very same feet perched up on the very same dash, and didn't that count for anything? All right, she'd said finally, all right, sure, yeah, of course. Of course I'll ride with you. But only if Marco comes too.
    Now she said: “It takes all the fun out of it that way. I want to see the country-especially like when we get into Canada. I want to feel it between my toes and stretch out in the sun if only for like ten minutes, smell the air, you know, and I wonder if that's too much to ask?”
    No one said anything. The scenery streamed by in a wash of gray, green, brown.
    “And all these creeks and rivers--it's like they don't even exist, as if I'm imagining them--like there, right there, see that?--and I just want to get out and swim, swim all the way to Alaska, like in that Burt Lancaster movie where he swims home from one pool to another. Don't you want to do that? Don't you want to get out and swim? Or just splash around even?”
    “Burt Lancaster?” Ronnie said. “What planet are you coming from?”
    Marco snaked his arm up over the back of the seat and put it around her and pulled her close, a little act of intimacy Pan didn't pay even a lick of attention to. “Yeah, but don't you want to get there? Don't you want to see the place, all of those millions of acres for the taking, the lakes there, the rivers? See the cabin? Walk off the site where we're going to build? Plus,” and he was smiling now, “I'll bet that water's just a wee bit chilly, wouldn't you think?”
    Lydia's voice rose up out of the void of the backseat. “I'm hungry. And I have to pee.”
    Ronnie glanced over his shoulder to where Lydia lay sprawled beneath her breasts, then exchanged a look with Star. “Lydia's got a point,” he said.
    From the backseat: “What point? That I have to pee?”
    Lydia was sitting up now, and he studied her a moment in the rearview mirror before he responded. She was looking good--if the light hit her just right, she could look very good, sultry, like one of those big-shouldered women in the Italian movies, her black hair