Drop City
or the throbbing dull pain in his sinuses and couldn't remember what he'd been doing in the steel cage of the bathroom in the first place, but like everyone else he was so frustrated he could cry. By Norm's calculation, they weren't more than three or four miles from Boynton, _walking__ distance, no less--and here was one more delay, one last impediment to keep the tents from going up and the trees from coming down. Just to sleep on the ground for a change, that was all anybody was asking. To get there. To arrive. To sit around an open fire and be a family again instead of a traveling circus.
Star had been sitting with him, the mosquitoes coming fast and furious, but she'd climbed back into the bus to change into a pair of long pants and a jacket, and he'd asked her to dig a bottle of bug repellant out of his backpack so he could get some relief himself. It was a wet country, boggy, the top two feet of the ground defrosting in summer but holding the water like a sink because it couldn't permeate the frozen layer beneath, and that was ideal for _Culex pipiens__ and their wriggling waterborne larvae. They'd swarmed through the summer nights in Connecticut when he was growing up, and he'd been south too, to Florida and Louisiana, but the mosquitoes here--his first introduction to Alaskan wildlife, how about that?--were something else altogether. He slapped at his arms and clapped a hand to the back of his neck, and when he sneezed a wad of disjointed insects blew out of his nostrils in bits and pieces. His nose pulsated like a freshly rung bell, and he was drinking Spañada out of the bota bag to compensate--Alfredo had gotten a deal on a case of half-gallon bottles in some outpost somewhere along the way--and with each sip he told himself to stay calm, be patient, go with the flow. At least he wasn't queasy anymore, at least he had that.
He watched Star climb down out of the bus with Merry, Maya and Jiminy in tow, all four of them looking conspiratorial. She'd changed into a pair of red corduroy bells and her denim shirt with the signs of the zodiac embroidered up and down the arms and across the plane of her shoulders--the archer, Sagittarius, flexing his bow back there as if to ward off any harm that might come to her. The four of them trooped across the road to him, their faces shining and triumphant under the high slant of the sun, and he could see from the way she cupped her right hand and held it close to her body that it was more than just insect repellent she was carrying. He watched her hips slice back and forth, watched her sandals compact the dust of the road. Her features were regular, her eyes luminous. She gave him a smile so serene she could have been a Renaissance Madonna--or maybe she was just stoned. Maybe that was it.
“Let me guess,” he said, “nobody could wait, right?”
They eased down in the weeds beside him, the homey familiar scent of marijuana clinging to their hair and clothing. There was a rustle of vegetation, wildflowers crushed and displaced--lupine, fireweed, what looked to be some sort of poppy--and Jiminy's knees cracking as he dropped down and inserted half a dozen joss sticks into the friable dirt at their feet. “That's right,” he said, leaning forward to touch a lighter to the tapering ends one by one, “and we're mosquito-proofing this holy shrine that surrounds you too, my good man. Be gone, bothersome insects. And for the rest, be merry and of good cheer.”
“Some of us were thinking of walking it,” Maya said, “just to see what the town's like--I mean, we're so close. But Norm didn't think so. He didn't think it would be cool.”
People were out in the road throwing Frisbees and shouting while the dogs irrigated the bushes and Norm rasped and gesticulated and tugged at his beard, and Pan--the back of his head with its thin wisps of hair visible just below the line of vegetation clinging to the far shoulder--flung a lure at the dark surface of the river that slid along the road here like the lining of a jacket. There was no traffic. There'd never been any traffic. They might as well have had a flat out on the Serengeti or the Kirghiz steppe.
“I'd walk it in a heartbeat,” Marco said.
“Me too,” Jiminy said without conviction. Smoke had begun to rise from the joss sticks, and the clear cool unalloyed air carried a freight of burnt punk.
“Just to see it, you know what I'm saying?” Marco persisted--he couldn't help himself. “I've seen it in my
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