Drop City

the second run-through a couple of the hippies had begun to sway their shoulders and shuffle their feet; by the third time around they were dancing, throwing out their elbows and letting their arms writhe over their heads. The nephew had got hold of a thin blond girl in stacked-up shoes who looked like Twiggy's American twin, and a little five-foot girl with a missing tooth and a tie-dyed shirt grabbed Iron Steve by the hand and started pogoing around the room with him. Sess put another quarter in, hit the tune three more times. Skid Denton let out a groan, Richie Oliver put a finger to his temple and pulled an imaginary trigger, and still more hippies poured through the door and spilled back out into the parking lot where somebody cranked up the big speakers in the bus and a whole shimmering spangle of weird hippie guitar music drifted out into the muskeg. There'd been nothing like this here since the last alien visitation, and Sess was too young to remember that.
    “Sess!” Skid Denton was shouting over the uproar, waving a full shot glass as if he were proposing a toast. “Where'd you find these freaks, anyway--the Ringling Brothers' circus?”
    “And Barnum and Bailey,” Sess shouted back. He snaked his arm between a chinless character with a beard so sparse it was barely there and a big-shouldered girl--woman, Pamela's age at least--whose breasts were on full display in some sort of leotard thing, and said, “Excuse me,” as he reached for his second beer. But the woman reached for it simultaneously and got there first. She let the neck of the bottle sprout between her thumb and forefinger before bringing it to her lips for a long calculated swallow and then handing it to him. “Hi,” she said, and he could see the mascara caked on her eyelashes, definitely a downtown sort of girl and what was she doing in the Three Pup? “I'm Lydia,” she said. “And you're Norm's friend, right?”
    Norm? Who the hell was Norm? He just smiled, and the guy with the nonexistent beard smiled, and she smiled too. “Yeah,” he heard himself say, “that's right.”
    And now her face really lit up. “Well, I just wanted to thank you, that's all, on behalf of all of us, I mean, because we really didn't know how our whole trip was going to go down up here--I mean, we didn't know if it was going to be like _Easy Rider__ or _Joe__ or what.”
    “Trepidatious, that's what we were,” the guy said, but he was a kid, really, twenty, twenty-one maybe, with a head that was too big and shoulders that were too narrow and a pair of eyes that were a vast delta of broken veins. He slipped his wrist inside Sess's and attempted some sort of secret hippie handshake, but the beer bottle got in his way, so he leaned back and made the victory sign with two fingers. “Peace, man,” he said, and then he started off on a monologue about how he'd always wanted to shoot a moose and skin it and a bear too and have a bear rug on the floor and maybe catch a king salmon and have it stuffed at the taxidermist's--for over the fireplace, you know what I mean?--and did he, Sess, have any idea where the moose were this time of year, like up in the hills or down by the river or what?
    The thump of the bass was like friction: the floor was moving one way and Sess was going the other, even though he was standing stock still. He looked across the room to where Pamela sat at a table with the pigtailed woman, waving a beer and declaiming about something, and then the woman chimed in--it was all in pantomime over the intervening roar--and Pamela chattered right back at her. The hippies had caught on and kept feeding the jukebox quarters and the only song they played--the song of the night, the anthem--was “Mystic Eyes.” It was a joke. Hilarious. Fifteen times, twenty, twenty-five. They danced and pounded and threw back beers and shots of peppermint schnapps and whatever else they could lay their hands on. All was movement and noise and the swirling interleaved colors of the dancers' shirts and jackets and the flapping wind-propelled cuffs of their pants. _We went walkin' / Down by / The old graveyard / I looked at you--__
    Sess was going to answer the kid--he was going to tell him that the season was fish, not meat, and that the average moose stood taller than any of the cabins along the river and just might be a tiny bit too much for a chinless, slack-armed, eye-bleeding, California hippie to take on before he got his feet wet and pulled his head up