Drop City

downriver, in the hope of turning up something interesting that she might not miss--morphine, maybe. Or Demerol. But it was just the basics: a needle and thread for suturing, Mercurochrome, gauze, the handy rectal thermometer. So Jiminy wasn't shirking, not a bit. In fact, it wouldn't surprise anybody if his arm _was__ broken in about eighteen places after Reba had got done with it.
    Actually, Ronnie was more concerned with the outboard engine, whether it would start with saturated spark plugs and water in the fuel line and what to do about it if it wouldn't. Jiminy would heal, but that Johnson outboard was the key to Drop City's existence, the mechanical mule that carried every little thing upriver on its back. Still, he didn't actually get up out of the sand till the boat was righted and everybody had cursed out the principals as thoroughly as they could under the circumstances, and when he did push himself up it wasn't to fuss over a bundle of wet wiring and a starter cord that produced nothing but a nagging cough while Bill bored him into an upright grave with reminiscences of other outboard motors he'd known and loved and Tom Krishna quoted something apposite from _The Bhagavad Gita.__ No, he found himself sauntering after Merry, with the idea of calming her down and maybe just _insinuating__ himself a little because Star was off on her own trip with Marco, living in a dome tent out on the slope beyond the half-finished cabin that was going to be Drop City's new meeting hall, and Lydia was back in Boynton with a couple of the others, sleeping in the bus and taking care of things on that end, and beyond that the pickings got pretty slim. Maya, no beauty to begin with, had bloated up on a steady diet of mush, and some sort of acne or scale was eating her face up (dishwater face, that was the clinical term for it, as if she'd been scrubbing the pots and pans with her cheekbones instead of her hands), Premstar was property of Norm, at least for the time being, and Verbie and her sister were strictly for emergencies only as far as Pan was concerned. And what was that song--“Make an Ugly Woman Your Wife”? Uh-uh. No way. Not in Pan's scheme of things.
    (As for the other surviving Drop City chicks--Louise, Dunphy, Erika and Rain--they just weren't his type in any way, shape or form, members of the long-faced chant-before-breakfast-lunch-and-dinner school, hairy-legged, sour-smelling, secret as thieves unless the subject of women's lib came up, and then they were onto it like Verbie. Plus, they were all spoken for, and the only passable-looking one of the group--Erika--lived in a tent with two guys, Weird George and Geoffrey, and they all three balled one another in combinations Pan might have found fascinating in the abstract, but you could forget about getting up close with anything like that.)
    He found Merry out behind the original cabin, the one Norm's uncle had built all on his own with an axe, a crosscut saw and two hard-knuckled hands. She was sitting in the dirt, her legs splayed, hair curtaining her face. The furor had died down, nothing lost, nobody hurt but Jiminy--and he had it coming anyway. The peeled yellow logs of the meeting hall shone in the sun, the goats bleated and strained at their tethers. He eased down beside her and put an arm round her shoulders. “Hey,” he murmured.
    Fine hairs glistened on her shins. She smelled of woodsmoke, of mush, of the river. “Jiminy can be such a prick sometimes,” she said.
    He wanted to agree--as in, _Yeah, he is a prick, so why not get it on with me instead?__--but held his peace. He pulled her in tighter, began to stroke her hair. “Come on,” he said, “it's no big deal--everybody's a little tense, that's all. Once we get the buildings up, once we get things together, I mean, and have time to catch our breath--” He was talking horseshit and he knew it, but horseshit was what was called for under the circumstances--what was he going to use, logic?
    She swept the hair away from her face and gave him a sidelong look. “You don't seem so tense. In fact, I'd say just the opposite.”
    And now the grin, aw shucks, and yep, you got me. “Blond Lebanese,” he said, “but I haven't got enough for the whole crew and you know how they're onto the _smell__ of it like hounds--Jiminy, in particular, and Tom Krishna . . .” He paused to let that sink in, incontrovertible reasoning, and then tucked the most copacetic suggestion in the world under the lid of