Drop City

she's, uh, well, I don't want to get her into any bad habits, if you know what I mean.”
    Oh, yes, he knew--she didn't have to tell him. And could he help with cereals? Cream of Wheat was good, if you cooked it with milk instead of water, and farina, of course. By the way, was she from around here, because he didn't remember--?
    So that was it. He was hitting on her, just like any other _cat.__ Just in case. Just on the off chance.
    “We just moved in,” she said. “My husband's in Aerospace.” And then she thanked him and found herself stuck at the checkout across from Reba and Verbie with the Quaker Oats still in hand. Her heart was doing paradiddles, but she laid a wrinkled bill on the counter and prised the change out of her pocket, and then she was out in the parking lot and heading for the Studebaker, the very Queen of Cheese.
    They got a late start out of Seattle that night, because Norm had taken Harmony's Bug and gone to see his uncle and stayed through the afternoon and on into the evening while everybody else sat on the bus and wondered if they'd been deserted. Norm had pulled the bus off at the first exit he came to and found a spot to park in a patch of weed at the side of a two-lane blacktop road. It was an ugly spot, the trees nothing more than scrub, some sort of factory putting out smoke in the near distance and the ubiquitous ranch houses of suburban America clustered all round them. Some of the men gathered up twigs and refuse and got a fire going, and the best the women could do was throw together a kind of paella, thick with appropriated tuna and greens and whatever spices they could find that weren't already packed away.
    Cars shot by like jet planes. The shouts of kids at play came to them as ambient noise. People ate hurriedly, guiltily even, because this wasn't what anybody expected. Even Che and Sunshine seemed lethargic, disoriented, and they barely touched their plates. Around eight, right in the middle of the meal, two men in sport shirts made their way across the street from a white ranch house with cream-colored trim and a new red car sitting in the driveway. “There's no camping here,” Star heard one of the men say to no one in particular, and heard the other one say, “And no fires.” After that, everybody climbed back on the bus and circled the block a couple of times, Lester and Ronnie in tow, till they wound up back where they'd started and just sat in the vehicles with nowhere to go and nothing to do, waiting for Norm as the darkness settled in. When he finally did appear and the caravan moved off again, they felt as if they'd all been rescued.
    It was past midnight when Reba broke out the crabmeat and the smoked oysters and all the rest of it, and Star delivered up the cheeses. The bus was moving through the wall of the night. There was the green glow of the dash, a soft lateral rocking as if they were all inside a giant cradle. Norm was up front, his hands clenched round the wheel, Premstar squeezed into the cracked vinyl seat along with him. Ronnie was a pair of headlights somewhere behind them, Mendocino Bill and Verbie and her sister keeping him company, taking their turn, share and share alike. Marco, who'd gone along with Norm to visit the uncle--“To keep him company, and find out exactly where that mountain of gold is located, just in case we need some spare change”--was in the back of the bus with Alfredo and some of the others, playing cards under a light Bill had rigged up. The kids were asleep. So was practically everybody else.
    And so it was Reba, Merry, Maya, Lydia and Star, the women, spread out across three seats, gossiping and feasting as the bus jostled down the road and the vague lights of single homes, gas stations and farmhouses flashed at the windows in an unreadable code. “You get tired of just plain fare all the time, you know?” Reba said. “Tofu paste. Tahini. Brown rice. Even though it's healthy. Even though I'm committed to it. But this”--and she laid a sardine across a thin slice of wheat bread, licking the oil from her fingers--“this isn't just a luxury, this is a _necessity,__ know what I mean?”
    Appropriated crackers went round, more bread, a bottle of Liebfraumilch Reba had liberated from the liquor department. They all knew what she meant. And Star ate wedges of cheese and licked the oil from her own fingers--smoked oysters, that was her weakness--savoring the moment. In the inner fold of her backpack, the pouch between