Drop City

get down and raise some pure celebratory hell tonight. Nothing fancy--lentil soup, rice and vegetables. And wine. Sweet red wine.” He took another pull at his beer and looked out into the backlit trees.
    “You're camping out tonight?”
    The nephew shrugged. His shoulders were bare under the straps of the coveralls, hairy, furred with mosquitoes. “Sure. Why not?”
    “But Roy's place--” He faltered. How could he begin to convey the complexity of the arrangement, the untenanted cabin that might sleep five or six at most, the treachery of the Yukon with its load of silt that would pack your clothes and drag you down in a heartbeat should you give it a chance, the lack of basic comforts? What were all these people planning to eat? Where were they going to get their pink lipstick and face paint and their jugs of sweet wine and their uppers and their downers and their pot and all the rest of it? And did he really want neighbors, thirty and more of them set down on his river within shouting distance of his trapline?
    “It's pretty far,” Pamela put in. “Three hours, at least, by canoe.”
    The nephew lifted his beard and let it drop. His hand was like a big soft fluttering moth as he brought the beer to his lips. “Oh, I'm apprised, I'm apprised,” he said. “I know the place, though it's been something like--_Jesus__--twenty years? Oh, man, _twenty__ years, can you believe it?” He began to laugh to himself, the pale shoulders bunching and heaving beneath a layer of fat, and the strap of the coveralls slipped down his right shoulder to reveal a tattoo in three colors--a cartoon character, and which one was it? Disney. A cross-legged fawn with outsized eyes. An image rushed up out of Sess's childhood, his mother in a pink dress and his sister with her fist sunk deep in a box of extra-buttered popcorn: Bambi. The man had _Bambi__ tattooed on his shoulder. Sess had never seen anything like it. He'd seen anchors, daggers, death's heads, seen hearts transfixed with arrows and dripping blood, the cheap blue fading appellations of wives, sweethearts and ex-lovers, an eagle with a fish in its claws--but _Bambi?__
    “I'm no greenhorn,” the nephew was saying, “and I can tell you I know at least a modicum of what I'm talking about when it comes to this country, because I lived three summers and the better part of two winters up here with my uncle when I was a kid--which is not to say I haven't got a lot to learn, man, you know? Because I do. But we got three canoes up on top of that bus”--Sess turned his head to contemplate the big yellow box on wheels and found himself staring into the boneheaded, slit-eyed faces of a pair of goats that could have been the templates for cartoon figures themselves--“and I made a deal with this bush pilot--Joe Bosky, you know him?--to ferry three loads of people and supplies upriver, including like tools and the _basics__ because all these people, all my brothers and sisters, need to like get their _heads__ together, you know what I mean? I mean, they think it's all going to be milk and honey, but I know better--”
    The nephew went on for a while with his speech, and Sess and Pamela stood there as if they were in a lecture hall, except that they were swatting at mosquitoes and pulling at their beers while the shattered, tinkling music rained down on them and the skinny blonde with the pink lipstick came up and draped her arms over the nephew's back and held on as if he were a buoy in a swirl of darkening waters. “So what I was thinking,” the nephew said, in what seemed a valedictory sort of way, “was we'd just pull up someplace by the river and camp for tonight and the next couple of days maybe--”
    Pull up where? Sess was going to ask, because there wasn't a square foot of property anywhere along the riverfront that wasn't already spoken for. You couldn't buy, beg or steal a lot in Boynton since the Feds started in with the Native Claims Settlement business, and if you set foot outside the town line you were on government property--and Wetzel Setzler, the local shill for the Forest Service, could get pretty squirrelly about that. Plus, a bus full of longhairs in mufti wasn't likely to provoke a warm response from whoever they chose to trespass on, and they were already tied up with Joe Bosky, the worst kind of river scum, and that was another strike against them--no matter how you sketched it, it wasn't a pretty picture.
    The nephew sucked beer and grinned at him. He