Drop City

bus and stirring themselves with a dainty flex and release of their rear paws. They both gazed intently up the road, and Freak, his hackles rising, let out a low woof of inquiry.
    A dog had appeared round the far bend--or no, it was a wolf, with the rawboned legs that seemed to veer away from its body as if they'd been put on backward, a wolf trotting down a road in Alaska. Marco was on his feet. “Look,” he said, “look, it's a--” He caught himself. There were two figures coming round the bend now, a man and a woman striding along easily under the weight of their backpacks, and this was no wolf, or no wild wolf anyway. The Frisbee slid back down its arc, people eased to their feet. “Norm,” somebody said, “hey, Norm.”
    The man was tall, hard-muscled, lean. He was wearing a weather-bleached flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of jeans so knee-sprung and tattered they made Marco's look new. His hair was short, thick, and it stood up straight from his head. He was walking as if walking were a competitive event, the steady pump of his legs and the clip of his boots reeling in the road before him, a man moving in silhouette against the bright splash of the day, and Marco couldn't tell what he was, a bum, a gas station attendant, the Scholar Gypsy himself. The woman--she was in her twenties, her blond hair tied back in a ponytail like a cheerleader's, her shorts showing off the muscles of her calves and the clean working lines of her buttocks and thighs--raised a hand to shade her eyes as if she couldn't quite decide whether the bus was a mirage or not. Up the road shot a yellow blur, paws gathering, muscles straining, and Freak and Frodo were on them, but the man never broke stride and his dog never wavered either--it just ducked its head and followed at his heels. For a moment the yellow dogs bobbed round them, dust rose, and then the gap closed to nothing and the man and woman were standing right there amongst them on the deserted road.
    Tom Krishna had been busy with the axle, with the big ridged tire and the stubborn wheel that just that moment slid forward to kiss the spare. He looked up into the silence and saw the hikers standing there with their swollen backpacks and the dogs moiling around and the road dust rising. “Hey,” he said, coming up out of his crouch, “what's happening, brother,” and he reached out a greasy hand for the soul shake that never came.
    The man just looked at them with an amused grin, looked at them all, while the sun glanced off Norm's glasses and Marco stood suspended at the side of the road and Merry and Maya exchanged a giggle. “You people aren't--” the man began, and then caught himself. There was flat incredulity in his tone. “You aren't _hippies,__ are you?”
    Norm came forward, boxy in his overalls, rings glittering on his fingers. The bell tinkled at his neck. From the goats atop the bus, a forlorn bleat of disenchantment: they wanted down, they wanted out, they wanted to graze their way to Boynton. Norm bellowed out his name--“Norm Sender!”--and pumped the man's hand in a conventional handshake before turning to the woman and showing the gold in his rotting teeth. “We're Drop City, is what we are, avatars of peace, love and the _higher__ consciousness, come all the way up from California to reclaim my uncle Roy's place--Roy Sender's?--on the sweet, giving and ever-clear Thirtymile. And we're all of us pleased to meet you.”
    The man scratched the back of his head and tossed his gaze like a beanbag from face to face. “I'll be damned,” he said. “You _are__ hippies.”
    The girls giggled. The dogs danced. Mendocino Bill said, “That's right. And we're proud of it.”
    And then the man in the worn flannel shirt seemed to think of something else altogether, some new concern that disarmed him totally, and Marco watched him shift his feet in the pale tan dirt of the road. Watched the brow furrow and the grin vanish. The man's gaze flitted around again and finally came back to Norm. “Did you say _Roy Sender__?”

Drop City
    21
    That was what he'd said, _Roy Sender--Roy Sender's place__--and Sess tried to control his facial muscles, but his body betrayed him. He took a step back to disengage himself, ran a hand through his hair. This was crazy, purely crazy, a page torn out of one of the newsmagazines--“The Woodstock Nation,”
    “Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll” or some such--torn out and given three dimensions and flesh, acres