Drop City

talking about?” If he was onto fishing licenses and seasons and all the rest of it, he might as well be talking to his shoes. “June doesn't have an _R__ in it--”
    Alfredo set down the hatchet and lifted the top from the pot. The mussels roiled blackly in the churning water. “Jesus,” he said. “You could have poisoned all of us.”
    Ronnie peered into the pot, then looked to Merry and Reba before settling on Alfredo. “Bullshit,” he said.
    By now, some of the others had begun to gather round--Maya, Angela, Jiminy--and Ronnie had no choice but to hold his ground. “Bullshit,” he repeated. “So what if they're quarantined?”
    “Toxic shellfish poisoning,” Alfredo said. “Something like four hundred people died of it one year in San Francisco at the turn of the century, I think it was. There's this dinoflagellate that will concentrate in huge numbers, like a red tide, when the water temperature gets above a certain level--in summer, only in summer--and the mussels, and clams and whatever, concentrate the toxin from them, and it doesn't bother the mussels at all, only us.”
    “You know the CIA?” Jiminy put in. His face was a sunlit wedge of nose, cheekbone and bright burning eye chopped out of the frame of his hair. He was thrilled, overjoyed, never happier. “Their assassins use it on a needle and they just prick you in a crowd, a little stab you can barely feel, and then you're dead.”
    “Paralyzed,” Reba said. “First your extremities go, then your limbs, until you're a vegetable and you can't move anything or feel anything--”
    “Right,” Alfredo said, “--and then it shuts down the vital organs.”
    There was an aroma on the air now, a sweet scintillating smell of mussels steamed in their own juices with butter and lemon, salt and pepper and maybe a hint of tarragon. Ronnie wasn't hovering over a picnic table at a two-dollar-a-night campground in Oregon, he was inside a cage at the zoo, and all these people--his friends, his compatriots, his brothers and sisters--were poking at him through the bars with sharpened sticks. “Bullshit,” he said for the third time. “I don't believe it.”
    “Believe it,” Alfredo said, already turning to leave, and he was taking a whole raft of faces with him. Merry looked as if she'd been shoved over a cliff, and Jiminy was just waiting for the signal to get down on all fours and start barking like a dog.
    Alfredo. Dinoflagellates. Quarantine. Ronnie was having none of it--it was nonsense was what it was, just another stab at him, as if it would kill Alfredo if he ever got any credit for anything. He stirred the pot, fished out a specimen and set it on the wooden plank of the table. It was perfect, tender--you can't cook them a heartbeat too long or you'll be chewing leather--the slick black shell peeking open to reveal the pink-orange meat within, and he was going to hold it up for Merry and run through his mussel routine, about how the lips and the flesh looked like a certain part of the female anatomy and how at medical schools the gynecology students had to study steamed mussels because the real thing was so hard to come by, but Merry was gone, her arm slipped through Jiminy's, bare feet in the dust, off to consume her ration of stale bread and peanut butter.
    Only Angela, Verbie's narrow-eyed, lantern-jawed sister, stayed behind to watch as Ronnie forced open the two leaves of the shell--_bivalves,__ the term came hurtling back to him from Mr. Boscovich's Biology class, that's what they were, _bivalves,__ and all the tastier for it--removed the glistening pink morsel and tentatively laid it on his tongue. “You're not really going to eat that, are you?” she said, and he might as well have been the geek in the circus with his incisors bared over the trembling neck of the squirming chicken while the crowd held its collective breath. Of course he was going to eat it, of course he was.
    It took him a long moment, his tongue rolling the bit of flesh round his mouth, before he brought his teeth into play. And what was wrong with that? The juices were released, butter, tarragon, the sea, and the taste was fine, great even--this was the best and freshest mussel he'd ever had, wasn't it? He chewed thoughtfully, lingeringly. And then he spat the discolored lump into his hand and flung it into the bushes.

Drop City
    19
    Star had never stolen a thing in her life, even when she was twelve or thirteen and pushing the limits and there was a compact