Drop City

against the hard lateral stitching of her jeans, pushing and kneading in concert, and then she leaned into him and kissed him. He heard the hiss of the river with his resensitized ears, felt the blood beating in his temples. And then he was pulling the T-shirt up over his head and fumbling with his belt and the black heavy load of the gun he kept strapped to his thigh like some TV gunslinger, like Matt Dillon or Johnny Yuma--he was a cowboy, how about that?--and she eased out her legs with an awkward rustle of the Creamsicle orange fabric of the tent and jerked her jeans and underpants down to her knees in a single motion. His hand went right to her and their mouths met again, and then-- And then Jiminy was calling her name--“Merry! Merry?”--and his sodden Dingo boots were crunching in the gravel along the bank. “You out here? Merry?”
    Pan froze. So did she. Jiminy couldn't see them, nobody could. The tent wasn't made of ultralightweight semitransparent Creamsicle-colored nylon--it was made of steel, steel lined with lead and with six inches of concrete on top of that. Pan was exploding. The buckle wouldn't give. He didn't dare move.
    “Merry?”
    The front flaps parted suddenly and the odd mosquito drifted in on the unfiltered glare of the night just as Jiminy's face hove into view, suspended there like a second sun. That was a moment, Pan caught with his fingers in the cookie jar, Merry's eyes anything but merry and Jiminy's face working itself through a whole catalogue of conflicting emotions, beginning with slap-faced shock and progressing through enlightenment to lust, grief and hate. The river coiled and uncoiled itself. The birds said nothing. And then, with the sound of a pebble dropped from on high into the deepest pool in the broad running length of the Yukon, Jiminy gave it one more try: “Merry?”
    In the morning, Ronnie volunteered to take the boat downriver to pick up two of the bus people (they were working on the furlough system) and the eight hundred sixty-seven absolutely indispensable items of manufacture and trade without which Drop City North would cease to exist in short order--and that included building supplies, tools, candy, cigarettes, shampoo, sun lotion, potato chips and cheap paperbacks of any quality and on any subject, so long as they were in English. And the mail, don't forget the mail. Everybody gave him a list--Marco, Star, Reba, Bill and Premstar, even Jiminy (and that took some balls after what had come down last night). But that was all right. They were all brothers and sisters, no hard feelings, no grudges, Free Love in a free society. Pan collected money and wadded-up slips of paper and gave back assurances and disclaimers--“Sure, sure, if I can find it, sure, yeah.” He was the man of the hour and they all came to him, even Norm. (“Hard candy!” Norm roared, wading out into the river as he was about to shove off, and there wasn't a thing wrong with the engine a couple of dry spark plugs couldn't rectify, putt-putt-putt, _varoom.__ “The old-fashioned kind, with like butterscotch and cinnamon and whatnot. Get a big tin of it, ten pounds of it. Twenty. A hundred!”)
    The only problem was Verbie. She was going with him, and no, he didn't need the company, didn't need anybody except maybe Lydia on the other end of the line with her legs spread wide, but Verbie's mother was in the hospital with some harrowing nightmare of a female cancer that was turning her insides to soup and Verbie had to phone home and lighten the load though she'd walked out the door three years ago and hadn't spoken to her mother since. There was no arguing with that. _Angela__ was staying. _Angela__ was going to give herself over to the needs of Drop City and stay behind to scrub pans, peel logs and whip up big cauldrons full of rice pap and mush three times a day, and she shared the same mother as Verbie--wasn't that sacrifice enough?
    So at nine A.M., with the sound of sifting sand in his ears and the sun like a hot poker stabbed first in one eye and then the other--too much hash, too much of Tom Krishna's poisonous homebrew--Pan swung the bow of the skiff out into the current of the Thirtymile and headed downriver, Verbie perched in the middle of the seat in front of him for ballast. Unfortunately, she was _talking__ ballast, and before they even made Sess Harder's place she'd managed to change the subject six or eight times, moving without transition from the health benefits of ginseng