Drop City

out of his ass--but he never got the chance, and Lynette was the deciding factor. She came out from behind the bar like the shadow of something swift-moving and vast and jerked the electric cord out of the socket beside the jukebox. The music died. Everybody froze.
    “I want you out!” Lynette cried in a wild strained falsetto that made it sound as if she were trying to take the song to the next level and beyond. “All of you--out! Now! If you think I'm going to listen to that shitty rock and roll crap one more time you're out of your mind. Now get out! Everybody! This place is _closed.__”
    From outside, in the mosquito-hung lot, there came the sound of the hippie guitars, more noticeable now in the absence of the jukebox. It was a mournful, contemplative music, each note plied out of a crevice to be held up and viewed from all angles before the next one allowed itself to be dug out and the next one after that. Sess stood immobilized amidst the throng, and then he felt himself moving toward the door and the sad sparkling wrung-out promise of the music. He drained his beer. He felt Pamela at his side. Then they were outside in the air that had a sweet riparian smell to it, the smell of the river recharging itself with meltwater, and the hippies were dancing like moonwalkers to the drugged-down testudineous beat. Lucius was there, nosing at his cupped hand, and he realized he hadn't fed him since he'd claimed him from the pound, and that was remiss, it was. “Come on, Sess,” Pamela was saying, tugging him toward the corner of the porch where they'd dropped their packs full of marshmallows and dill pickles and cheese graters and all the rest of the claptrap they just couldn't seem to live without. “Time to go. We've got a big day tomorrow. The garden, remember? All those logs that need to be peeled? The salmon?”
    That was when he locked eyes with the woman who'd put her lips to his beer--Lydia--and she gave him a long slow re-evaluative look out of eyes the color of the lupines sprouting along the road, one thin slant of sun catching her face, and whoever made her, whoever pulled the genes up out of the parental hat, sure didn't stint, that was what he was thinking. But then the brunette in the cowgirl getup looped her arm through Lydia's and she turned her back and began a weaving in-and-out snakedance that was like dripping hot oil right down the front of his pants.
    “Hello, Sess. Remember me, your wife?”
    He blinked twice, grinned.
    “Enjoying the scenery?”
    “They sure don't waste a lot of money on underwear, do they?”
    She slipped an arm round his waist. The notes fractured and burst like bubbles, bubbles of aluminum, of pewter, hard metallic bubbles made by a machine somewhere in hippie land and bursting through the hippie speakers secreted in the back of the hippie bus. What was it? What would they say? Mind-blowing. It was mind-blowing. Skid Denton came through the door then with a soft-faced girl on either side of him, talking French a mile a minute. “No,” Pamela said, leaning into him, and she was feeling pretty good herself, no offense taken and the night was young, still young, “no, I don't guess they do.”
    And then it was Iron Steve, his shoulders hunched and head bowed low so as to better breathe in what the little gap-toothed girl was all about--“Oh, yeah,” he was saying, “yeah, it gets cold, _shit, yeah__”--and Sess discovered another beer in his hand even as he was helping Pamela duck into the straps of her pack.
    The nephew was the agent of the beer, standing there with his crack-frame glasses and the color showing in his teeth, two more beers bunched between his knuckles, one of which he handed to Pamela; the other he kept to himself, giving it a good long suck till the foam flecked his beard. “You know something?” he said, pulling away from the bottle and grinning wide. “I like your taste in music.”
    Sess gave him his grin back, then bent at the knee so Pamela could help him on with his pack. “Yeah, but Lynette--you've got to forgive her. She's new here. She's from Seattle. I guess she's just got a hair up her ass.”
    “It was a gas,” the nephew said, rooting in his beard as if he'd lost something there. “What'd we play it--like fifty times? But listen, I was serious about the invitation--the chicks'll have something cooked up inside the hour, I guarantee it, and well, you know, it's been a long hard road and all that and we have just _got__ to