Drop City

Alaska, appearances to the contrary. He'd begun to have his doubts. Where were the glaciers, the waterfalls, the snow-capped mountains and untrammeled forests? Not here, not in the interior, anyway. This looked more like Ohio, like Michigan or Wisconsin or a hundred other places. He strained his eyes looking for eagles, looking for wolves, but there was nothing out there but scrub and more scrub.
    Norm was onto something else now, his mind peeling back memories layer by layer--he'd expected a wolf behind every bush the first time he'd come up here, salmon hanging from the trees, gold dust in his coffee grains--but Marco wasn't listening. He wasn't feeling all that steady. Everybody on the bus had been trading round the same cold for a week, one of the hazards of communal living, especially when you were cooped up like this, and now he had it too. His head ached. He was sniffling. And the wine scoured the back of his throat and sat hard on his stomach, a mistake, and he knew it was a mistake even before he'd passed the bag to Star and she'd passed it to Premstar and Premstar took a delicate white-throated sip and passed it to Mendocino Bill. The bus lurched, righted itself, lurched again, and he looked down at Star's hand entwined in his own as if he didn't know what it was. The next moment he was making his way down the aisle to the bathroom.
    Though the sun was high and it couldn't have been past seven or so, most people were asleep, Reba with her head back and snoring, Jiminy and Merry camped under one of the faded Navajo blankets that had hung in the back room at Drop City in a time that seemed so distant now he could barely remember it. Mendocino Bill and Deuce were playing chess on a magnetic board, the dogs were curled up beneath the seats and Che and Sunshine, snot glistening on their upper lips, stared numbly up the aisle as if they were watching a home movie, of which Marco, suddenly sick to his stomach, was the star. The bus lurched again and he staggered against one of the seats, then he was through the kitchen and into the rear of the bus, rattling at the door of the makeshift bathroom. The smell didn't help. The whole bus reeked of unwashed bodies and festering feet, of the tribe that dabbed powdered hand soap under their arms and rinsed their hair in grimy truck stop rest rooms, but the chemical toilet was something else altogether--this was where the thin gruel of the road poured out of them, brothers and sisters alike. Marco forced himself inside and flipped the latch.
    He was sweating, the hair pasted to his forehead under the red bandanna he hadn't unknotted since they'd left California. It was dark and close, the only light a peep-show flicker through the grate in the door. He needed to vomit, because if he vomited he'd feel better--or that was the theory, anyway--and so he crouched over the stainless steel seat and thrust two pinched fingers down his throat. He gagged, but nothing came up. The contents of the bowl sloshed and rotated and gave off an evil smell. He braced himself against the ringing metal wall and was about to try again, two wet fingers poised at his lips, when the floor suddenly skewed away from him and then came bucking back up to pitch him face-first into the door. Then they weren't moving anymore and everybody seemed to be shouting at once.
    His nose wasn't broken, or at least he didn't think it was, but the blood had darkened his T-shirt and pretty well ruined the gold-and-black brocade vest Star had picked out for him at a thrift shop in Ukiah, and that was a shame--a drag, a real drag--because it had become part of his identity, his signature article of clothing, the essential garment that announced to the world who he was and what he intended to do about it. It was hip, quintessentially hip, and now it was ruined. But that was all right, he told himself. In six months he'd be wearing caribou hide, wearing wolf, bear, ermine--and what was an ermine, anyway? A kind of weasel, wasn't it?
    The excess blood had dried in his mustache and at the corners of his mouth, and he sat by the side of the road alternately rubbing the flecks of it loose and swatting at mosquitoes while the rest of the tribe milled around watching Mendocino Bill and Tom Krishna trying to work the wheel with the shredded tire off the axle, and of course it had to be an inner wheel--what else would you expect? Truly, at this point he didn't care whether his nose was broken or not, didn't care about the blood