Drop City

stumps with guitars and books and strings of electric blue beads that froze and shattered the light as they threaded them in a dance of sunlit fingers. Merry said, “Fuck you, Jiminy, I was here first,” and Jiminy said, “No, you go next--it's my turn,” and things just escalated from there.
    For his part, Pan didn't much care who went for a boat ride and who didn't. He was feeling good, feeling beyond compare, with his head primed on a sliver of the chunk of blond Lebanese hash he'd sold to Alfredo for three times what he'd paid for it and the wine working its sweet slippery magic on the wad of mush in his gut. He was tanned like a macaroon. His muscles were hard from paddling, chopping, lifting, from hauling the net full of salmon out of the current and flinging the three-inch silver lure with the wire leader out into the deep cuts under the bank for pike--_great northerns.__ He couldn't believe it. Great northern pike. He'd caught something like twelve or thirteen of them in his spare time, no effort at all, just like in the _Field and Stream__ and _Outdoor Life__ articles he'd feasted on as a kid, and so what if they were ninety percent bone? The chicks made fish soup, fish stew, fish porridge and pike à la meunière. And for the meat eaters--and their party was growing by the day--he'd brought back ducks, geese, ptarmigans, even two lean black dripping muskrats, which nobody would eat but him and Norm, the meat dark and greasy, with a subtle aftertaste of dead insects and rotting twigs. As for the boat, he had priority there anytime he wanted it--_Dibs, Pan has dibs on it,__ that's what Alfredo said at one of the eternal meetings they seemed to have every other day now--because he was the designated fisher and hunter while Marco and Bill and Norm and the rest had become full-time architects and structural engineers, at least for the time being.
    “Just give me this,” Merry's voice rose up, and she was ready to sob, the grief congesting her diction and dulling her consonants like a head cold, “that's all I ask, and you are one selfish little prick, you know that? Huh, Jiminy? You are. You don't care about me. You only care about yourself.”
    Ronnie was sitting on the bank in a spray of brittle wildflowers and coarse-grained sand that held the heat of the sun and gave it back to his flanks and the hard bare work-worn soles of his feet. He was feeling very calm, feeling the peace that comes of getting stoned after a hard day's work outdoors and a double helping of salmon mush, and he watched Jiminy dance round Merry as if he were Zeus looking down from Olympus. The boat bobbed in the water. The current thrummed. The two of them jockeyed for position on the vagrant log the camp used as a kind of all-purpose pier and canoe-minder. Mendocino Bill's voice rose up over the suck and sputter of the engine: “Come on, already, for Christ's sake--you'd think you were six-year-olds, both of you.”
    Then Jiminy shoved her and she shoved him back and suddenly he was waving his arms and looking small-faced and embarrassed and in the next moment he lost his footing and landed awkwardly in the bottom of the boat, spilling everybody into the Thirtymile. The chicks shot up out of the current as if they'd been launched--because it was _cold__ beyond anything anybody in California had ever even dreamed of--and Mendocino Bill choked and sputtered and came up cursing with his beard rinsed and his hair showing bald on top while Weird George churned up water like a human eggbeater and fought for purchase on the slick and whirling stones of the riverbed. Merry ducked away from the splash, her bare toes digging in like fingers as the log rose and fell, and then she turned her back, made a delicate little leap ashore and stalked away through the weeds. She didn't offer any apologies.
    But Jiminy. He came out of the water dragging his arm, and after the initial shock he had to go find Reba and have her bind it up and tell him it probably wasn't broken. And that was a trial, because Reba didn't know her humerus from her femur, but she was Drop City's resident medical authority by virtue of the fact that she'd dropped out of nursing school midway through her first year and could toss around terms like _speculum__ and _tongue depressor__ with the best of them. She always broke out her little black leather medical kit when anybody came down with anything, a kit Pan had taken it upon himself to look into one day when she was