Drop City

crazy or what?” Marco said. He leaned out the window and showed them his fist.
    The wind was wild, everybody's hair whipping, and it seemed to snatch the breath right out of Ronnie's lungs. “Stop the car,” Marco shouted, whirling on him. “Just fucking pull over!”
    Star said no. “Just forget it,” she said. “Ignore them.”
    “Forget it?” Marco's face was like a bad dream, and Ronnie saw that and registered it, because there was a violent divide here, and he wouldn't want to find himself on the wrong side of it. Ever. “I'm going to fucking kill them, all three of them! You with me, Ronnie--Pan? You with me?”
    Ronnie's hands were frozen on the wheel, his eyes pasted to the rearview mirror. “Peace,” Star kept saying, “peace and love, remember?” Ronnie looked at the three faces ranged across the hood of the car behind him, looked at Lydia's shoulders, the mad flying tangle of her hair, and his heart was looping back on itself. “I hear you, man,” he said.
    But then the whole procession was slowing, chain reaction--bus, Bug, Lincoln, motorcycle, Studebaker, pickup--and Norm had the big amber blinker going on the bus and the yellow wall was sliding into a turn, a side road, and there was the sign that spelled relief in foot-high letters: PUBLIC CAMPGROUND__, ALL CARS WELCOME__, 2$ PER NITE__. Now, surely now, Ronnie was thinking, the pickup would peel away from them and vanish on down the highway, but no, it came on still, the faces behind the windshield taut and pale and vengeful.
    The pavement gave out beneath him, and the Studebaker was thumping into a big rutted dirt lot interspersed with trees, barbecue smoke snatching at the air, cars and Winnebagos pulled up around tents and picnic tables, kids chasing each other in a flash of motion while white-legged old stick-people sucked bourbon out of paper cups and dogs yapped in a territorial frenzy, and this was it, America the beautiful, home of the brave, all cars welcome. Lydia had to pee. She was hungry. They were all hungry. But before Ronnie could twist the key off and set the brake, the three frat boys were at the driver's side window, and a hand, a meaty red outraged hand, was snatching at his hair, even as he flung his head back and away and Star let out with a screech that just about stopped his heart.
    “Fucking longhair!”
    “Get out of the car, asshole!”
    All in a flash, it came to him that his antagonists weren't simply the frat boy rednecks he'd taken them to be, but frat boy redneck football players, or maybe weight lifters, all puffed up like toads in their Oregon Ducks T-shirts. One of them, the guy who'd been driving, was like a monument ripped from its pedestal with two livid eyes and a blond crewcut drilled into his skull. _Son of a bitch.__ A bitter taste of impotence and rage clotted in Pan's throat, because he'd been here before and he knew what was coming. He was afraid, and then he wasn't, because all at once he was beyond fear, beyond anything, and he leaned back into the door and snatched at the handle at the very moment the meaty red hand converted itself into a fist that exploded in his left ear with a sound of wind rushing down a tunnel.
    The sequel was mostly a blur, because he was dazed, that was it, though the speed was churning through him like a thousand little engines whizzing round the tracks of his veins, and he was in the car still, Star cradling his head. But Marco came round the hood of the Studebaker and slashed into the knot of them, that much he was sure of, and then Dale Murray and Sky Dog were there, and it was a scrimmage, everybody everywhere, down in the dirt and out across the lot, cursing and thumping at one another. Franklin stepped into it next, in one silent gliding motion, and put one of the frat boys down with a single blow, and now the whole bus was emptying out in a spangle of white-faced hippies and the old stick-people were sucking at their bourbon and all the flying kids gathering round and shouting in their piping attenuated half-grown voices.
    Norm was the one who put an end to it. Two of the frat boys were on the ground and a whole flotilla of blunt-toed hippie boots was going at them at ramming speed, even while the third one--the driver--was engaged with Dale Murray, _slam, bam-bam,__ as if this were a heavyweight bout, when Norm stepped between them and it stopped right there, just like that. “Enough!” he said. “Peace!” and he barked it out as if he were