Drop City

windswept, her makeup smeared, and that randy, let's-lick-the-sauce-off-the-spoon-together look on her face.
    “What I mean is, maybe it's time to pull over for the night. We've got to find a place to crash, right? And cook something up?”
    “I don't know,” Star said, “yeah, sure, I could stop.”
    So Ronnie calculated and took his chance and swung out into the fast lane till he came up abreast of the bus, the air roaring at the windows, insects giving themselves up to the superior force in a quickening series of thumps and splats--and why, he wondered, were they all uniformly yellow inside, was that their blood, was that it? And there was Norm, sitting up high in the driver's seat with his arms wrapped round the wheel as if it were the head of some seabeast he was wrestling, a fixed, no-nonsense, I-am-driving-the-bus look in his Dexedrine-tranced eyes, and Ronnie was flapping his left arm up over the roof of the car and laying on the horn. Marco rolled down the window and shouted to Norm to pull over at the next stop because Lydia had to pee and everybody was tired and hungry and wrung-out from driving straight through the first night and day and on into the evening that was even now spreading its wings out over the hills ahead of them like a big celestial bat.
    Norm jerked his head back and gave them a faraway look, as if they were just anybody burning down the highway in a rusted-out Studebaker with New York plates, but then the shining white-hot gleam of recognition came into his eyes and he started fumbling with the little window at his elbow, all the while cupping a hand to his ear and pantomiming his bewilderment. What could they possibly want? Had he dropped a wheel? Run down a passel of Vietnamese orphans? Did the road ahead end in the sheer drop-off of a Roadrunner cartoon?
    And this was fun, this was hilarious--anything for a little diversion. Side by side, hurtling down the road, Marco shouting and laughing, and Star and Lydia getting into the act now too, people in the bus--Premstar, Reba--making faces and sticking out their tongues like six-year-olds, _Casey Jones, you better watch your speed!__ But then, gradually, Ronnie became aware of another sound altogether--a horn, sharp and insistent--and people on the bus were pointing behind him, like _look out,__ and he brought his eyes up to the rearview mirror. It was only a heartbeat between awareness and recognition, but his first thought had been _the man,__ what else? But it wasn't the man, it was three crewcut young Oregonian shit-flingers in a Ford pickup the color of arterial blood. They wouldn't have liked hippies, anyway, and Ronnie had seen _Easy Rider__--three times now and counting--but that didn't figure into the calculus of the moment. They were giving him the finger, riding his bumper, laying on the horn. Assholes. Redneck assholes. Red-faced redneck assholes.
    Ronnie feathered the brakes, then feathered them again--and again, till the rednecks had to ride their own brakes and the bus slid ahead of them like a big yellow wall, Harmony's Bug, Lester's Lincoln and Dale Murray's ratcheting bike pulled along in its wake like the twisted little things it had given birth to. When Dale Murray cleared the Studebaker, Ronnie was going about twenty-five and the middle finger of his right hand was fixed just over the reflection of his eyes in the rearview mirror. He expected the rednecks to pass on his right in a flurry of hoots and catcalls, but they just held there in the passing lane, right on his tail, and so he eased in behind Dale Murray and hit the accelerator.
    But the occupants of the pickup surprised him. They swung in behind the Studebaker and put on a sudden burst of speed, looming up on his rear bumper as if they meant to hook on to it. “Son of a bitch,” Ronnie said, and it came out of him in a stunned and wounded gasp, as if he'd been punched in the stomach--he wasn't even driving anymore, just floating. And now Lydia made herself known, kneeling on the backseat so they could get a good look at her and alternately flashing the peace sign and blowing them kisses. Which enraged them even more. Twice they tapped the bumper--at something like fifty or fifty-five miles an hour, and what were they, not simple rednecks but redneck frat boys, because there were all the frat boy decals, DELTA UPSILON, U. OF OREGON, GO DUCKS, plastered across the windshield as if they meant something. Ronnie braced himself for the next thump.
    “Are they