Drop City

visible only as lower legs and feet, and Che and Sunshine were at the center of a flying wedge of straight people's children, pale limbs, shouts, a kickball chasing itself from one end of the lot to the other.
    “Would I do that to you?” Pan took a step back from the fire and glanced at the bus. The windows were down all along the near side and an invisible presence had just dropped the needle on “God Bless the Child,” a tune he loved, and for a moment he just looked out across the lot and listened to the horns feed off the vocals. Then he turned back to Merry. “Where you sleeping tonight? The bus?”
    “I guess.”
    “Want to sleep with me? Big seat in the back of that Studebaker. Or I might just do a sleeping bag on one of the picnic tables, like if there's no dew or rain or anything--”
    “What about Lydia?”
    “What about her?”
    She settled into the corner of the picnic table with a shrug, one haunch balanced there, the dead roach pinched between her fingers. “I don't know,” she said. “Where's she sleeping?”
    He didn't answer her, just upended the first of the burlap sacks into the big gleaming pot. It was like shifting rocks. There was a clatter and a hiss, and then he dumped the other bag in. “That's a Billie Holiday song,” he said, “you know that?”
    “No,” she said, “I didn't know. I thought it was like Blood, Sweat and Tears?”
    “Originally, I mean. Like in the thirties or whenever.”
    “Oh, really? So it's like really old, huh?”
    “Yeah,” he said, and he looked off into the trees that weren't all that different from the trees at Drop City, or not that he could tell, anyway.
    “What are those, mussels?”
    “Yep. Pure protein, bounty of the sea. And wait'll you taste them with Pan's special lemon and butter sauce. You ever have mussels just steamed like clams or maybe dropped in a marinara sauce at the very last minute?”
    She didn't know. And she was a vegetarian. But he watched her as the steam rose and butter melted in a pan and he sliced and squeezed the lemons, and she looked interested, definitely interested. “What about Jiminy,” he said, “where's he sleeping?”
    When she shrugged, her breasts lifted and fell. “In the bus, I guess.”
    He was thinking about Lydia, thinking about Star, about Marco and the way he'd put his arm around her and drawn her to him in the Studebaker. He'd gone to high school with her. They'd come all the way across the country together. “Sleep with me,” he said. “What's it been, like weeks?”
    That was when Reba came out of the trees with an armload of firewood and a hermetically sealed face, Alfredo trailing in her wake. He had a hatchet in one hand, a half-rotted length of pine in the other. Reba's eyes locked on the pot. “What's that?” she said. “You cooking something, Ronnie?” Oh, and now she smiled, oh yes indeed. “For everybody?”
    She was wearing moccasins she'd stitched and sewed herself and she'd stuck an iridescent blue-black raven's feather in her beaded headband--give her a couple of slashes of war paint and she could have been a squaw in a John Ford movie, and that was funny because Star kept saying that all the way across country, that the whole hip style was just like playing cowboys and Indians, from the boots and bell-bottoms that were like chaps right on up to the serapes and headbands and wide-brimmed hats. He'd denied it at the time, simply because he hadn't thought about it and the notion scuffed at his idea of himself, but she was right, and he saw it in that moment. Reba was playing at cowboys and Indians, and so was he, and everybody else.
    “It's mussels,” he said. “Enough to feed the whole campground, heads and straights alike.”
    Alfredo was standing there in his boots and denim shirt with a wondering look on his face, as if he'd just been cut down from the gibbet by his amigos in that very same western. “Mussels?” he echoed. “Where'd you get them?”
    Pan was feeling good. Pan was feeling expansive and generous, feeling brotherly and sisterly. He gave them an elaborated version of his struggle against the sea two mornings ago.
    And what was Alfredo's reaction? The reaction of the least-together, most tight-assed member of this whole peripatetic circus? How did he respond to Pan's selfless gesture and all the pride he took in it? He said, “You must be fucking crazy, man. Don't you realize they're quarantined this time of year?”
    “Quarantined? What are you