Drop City

grinning still, and so was Norm, as if it were some kind of contest. “You've heard of us, right?”
    “Oh, yeah,” the man said, his voice muffled by the floppy yellow rain hat, “sure, yeah, I've heard of you.”
    “I'll be happy to give you an autograph if you want, no problem, man,” Norm said, and he held out his hand and the man took it.
    Then the man said something Star missed, and Norm swiveled around in the seat and looked down the length of the bus. “All right, people, just give this gentleman your attention a minute here now, because he just wants to ask everybody if they're a citizen, okay? Okay, now?”
    Down the aisle the man in the slicker came, red-faced and grinning, and Star saw that he was older--gray hair in his sideburns--older even than Norm. He didn't want any trouble. He didn't want anything, except to be out of the bus and back in his booth. “American citizen?” he asked. “American citizen?” And everybody said yes, and then, just for variety, he asked, “Where were you born?” and people said Buffalo, San Diego, Charleston, Staten Island, Kansas City, Hornell. They watched his face as he came down the aisle, and they watched his shoulders as he made his way back up it. Che and Sunshine slept on. The dogs never even lifted their heads.
    There was a smattering of nervous laughter when he descended the steps, and the laughter boiled up into a wild irrepressible storm of hoots and catcalls and whinnying shrieks as the door pulled shut and Norm put the bus in gear and headed off toward the lights of Canada. Star alone looked back. The last thing she saw was Lester, up against the rain-washed Lincoln, and a man in a yellow slicker patting him down.

Drop City
    20
    Though they hammered it twenty-four hours a day up through Canada and over the infinite roaring dirt incline that was the Alaska Highway, stopping only for gas and the bodily needs of thirty-one tight-lipped claustrophobes, the bus held up. By Marco's count, it broke down three times, once just outside of Prince George, the second time at the crest of Muncho Pass, and then in a place that was no place at all, but Mendocino Bill and Tom Krishna were equal to the task and they were never stranded more than an hour or two. People played cards, read, slouched, strummed guitars. They made love under blankets, passed mugs of coffee, Coke and herbal tea from hand to hand and row to row, got stoned, dozed and woke and dozed again. Norm barely slept. And when he did sleep, crumpled across one of the seats as if he'd been deboned, Marco or Alfredo took over at the wheel, humping through country that made your eyes ache with the emptiness of it. Even Pan pitched in, turning the Studebaker over to Star and propelling the bus on through the dwindling hours of the night when nobody else could keep their eyes open. There were no Mounties, no speed traps, no cops of any kind anywhere. The scenery bared its claws. All anybody wanted was to get there, just that.
    Vanderhoof, Smithers, Cranberry Junction, Johnson's Crossing, Whitehorse, Marsh Lake, Destruction Bay, Burwash Landing, so many ticks on a map, hello and goodbye. They saw a big rig folded up on itself in Wonowon, a dead moose stretched out in the dirt beside it and a calf the size of a quarter horse running wild with grief. There was a fire burning along the banks of the Donjek River, flames peeling off the tops of the trees and riding up into the night sky and not a human being in sight. They made a pit stop at Haines Junction and inadvertently left Jiminy behind, looping back nearly a hundred miles to find him standing in the rain by the gas pumps, his thumb outstretched and a look of cosmic incapacity bleeding out of his eyes. Out the window the rivers fled in gray streaks, the Takini, the Good-paster, the Tetsa, the Sikanni Chief, the Prophet, the Rabbit and the Blue.
    When they reached Alaska intact, as improbable as that might have seemed when they set out, the bus still rolling over its ten wheels and the Studebaker and Bug flagging on behind, everybody singing, sandwich-fed and hopeful, they pulled off to the side of the road and sat in a circle, hands clasped, while Reba and Tom Krishna led them in a chant. This was in a place called Northway Junction, forty-two miles from the border and the customs agents who wore flannel shirts, sipped coffee out of styrofoam cups and waved everybody on through, good morning and welcome to the U. S. of A. Reba's kids strung up God's