Drop City

head to the point where I know I'm going to be disappointed. Or maybe not. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised. That happens, doesn't it? Don't you get pleasantly surprised once out of a hundred times?”
    “Nothing's the way you picture it,” Star said. “The mind creates its own reality, and how could the real and actual thing ever match that? It's like a movie compared to a cartoon.” She was right there beside him, and in her palm the veined and speckled pill that looked like one of the color tablets you'd use to dye Easter eggs.
    “Or a book,” Maya said. “A book compared to a movie.”
    “I don't know, I think I'd listen to Norm,” Merry said, leaning back on the twin props of her elbows and stretching her legs out into the roadway as if she were sinking into an easy chair. Her pupils were dilated to the size of a cat's. She was wearing a serape over her jeans and a flop-brimmed vaquero's hat and her feet were bare and dirty and fringed with mosquitoes. Marco saw that she'd painted each of her toenails a different color, and though he wasn't stoned--not yet, anyway--he thought he'd never seen anything so beautiful, and why didn't all women paint their toenails like that? All men, for that matter? “I mean, what's the hurry?” she said. “Can't we just groove on this sky, the wildflowers, the river? I mean, look at it. Just look.”
    Marco took it as an injunction and looked off down the sunstruck tunnel of the road, and there was the Studebaker and there the Bug, pulled up on the shoulder, but there was no Dale Murray on his motorcycle, and where was he when you needed him? It would be nothing to horse the thing into Boynton and back, see the river, ride right into it, snuff the breeze, all hail and hallelujah, Boynton or Bust. But Dale Murray had turned back the day after they'd crossed into Canada to see what had become of Lester and Franklin and Sky Dog, and he'd never reappeared. Marco didn't feel one way or the other about it, because when you came right down to it he hardly knew the guy and he certainly couldn't write any recommendations for the people he associated with. But Dale Murray had two legs and two arms and a pair of hands and they were going to need every pair of hands they could muster to put this thing together--it would be a long dark age before any runaways or weekend hippies found their way up here to swell their ranks, that was for sure.
    There was some noise from the direction of the bus, a lively debate between Mendocino Bill and Norm as to the viability of the spare--“There's no doubt in my mind,” Norm was saying, “no doubt whatsoever, so go ahead, put it on”--and then Star was pressing the pill into his hand. He accepted it, accepted it in the way he'd been conditioned to--if somebody gave you drugs, you took them, no questions asked--and he even went so far as to bring his hand to his mouth and make the motions of swallowing. Burnt punk rose to his nostrils. The sun cupped a hand at the back of his neck. No one was watching him--their gazes were fixed across the road, on the bus, on Norm, on the black wheel laid out like a corpse in the dirt. They weren't there yet, that was what he was thinking, and he wasn't going to celebrate until they were. He slipped the pill into the bloodstained pocket of his ruined vest.
    Star let out a laugh in response to something Jiminy had said, and then they were all laughing--even him, even Marco, though he had no idea what he was laughing about or for or whether laughing was the appropriate response to the situation. No matter. The smoke rose from the joss sticks, the Frisbee hung in the air like a brick in a wall and they were stretched out on the side of the road and laughing, just laughing, and you would have thought the cabins had already been built, the wood split for the stove, the gold panned, the furs stretched and the larder stocked, because nobody here had a care in the world. Merry handed a roach to Star and she held it to her lips till the stub of it glowed red and then she handed it to Marco, who pinched it from her fingers and held it to his own lips a moment, sucking in the sweet seep of smoke as he'd done a thousand times before. Everything seemed to slow down, as if the earth were transfixed on its axis and the fragment of sky overhead was all they would ever need. And then, out of the corner of his eye, the laziest, slowest movement in the world: the dogs were emerging from the strip of blue shadow beneath the