Drop City

to carpet bombing along the Ho Chi Minh Trail to mercury in tuna and the plight of the farm workers because the lettuce boycott just didn't go _far enough.__ Ronnie stared off past the sidewall of her face, the too-small eye, the sickle nose, the dark gap where the tooth was missing in front. She was talking over her shoulder like some sort of cockatoo, like a trained parrot that could twist its head round twice and never miss a beat. He wasn't listening. He was trying to focus on the country, on the joy of being here, the sun warm on his back and the breeze cool on his face, his eyes scanning the near shore for something to put a bullet through. Because that was his job, that was what he was doing here, no different from Sess Harder or Joe Bosky or any of the rest of them. And who was he? He was Pan, Pan of the North, and you could forget about Nanook.
    Riding with the current, it was no more than fifteen minutes to Harder's place at the junction of the Thirtymile and the Yukon, and Ronnie spotted Sess and his old lady working a log into place where they were extending the cabin out along the flank of the river. He pulled the tiller-arm hard right and swung the boat in along the bank with the intention of asking Sess if he needed anything from town, common courtesy out here, the sort of thing anybody would do, but the fact was Ronnie used every excuse he could just to _talk__ to the man, to sit at his feet and pump him for information about pike holes and drift nets and the best way to smoke and press a duck.
    “What do you think you're _doing?__” Verbie leaned into the turn, the breeze kicking up tufts of her chopped red hair. She tried to swing round to confront him, but the centrifugal force was too much for her.
    Pan snuffed the breeze, exulting in the river smell and the speed that drove it to him. The skiff planed over the surface. He didn't bother to answer.
    “We've got no time for this, Pan. _Ronnie.__ Come on. You know we've got to grub everything out of that little shitbird of a store owner, who like threw a fit over the food stamps last time, and get the mail and all that and be back by tomorrow night--and that's _if__ Lydia and Harmony ever went into Fairbanks for the window glass and the batteries and I don't know what else.”
    “Hey, this is _Alaska,__ Verbs,” he said, and he cut the throttle and let the skiff coast into shore on its own steam. “These people are our neighbors. I mean, I just want to ask them if they need anything--don't you think they'd do the same for us?”
    “No,” she said, “no they wouldn't. Not if their mother was dying and they had twenty-four people depending on them and three cabins and a meeting hall to put up before winter--”
    So she was a pain in the ass. She was born a pain in the ass. Like Alfredo. Like Reba. Such were the joys of communal living. “Five minutes,” Pan said. “I swear.”
    Sess hardly glanced up as the boat swung into shore. He and Pamela had just set the log in place, chest-high, and he was smoothing the upper surface of it with a drag knife, slivers of wood leaping away from his hands like insects in a field. He was wearing an old thermal shirt with the sleeves ripped out and his patched jeans and work boots and he'd sweated through the shirt so many times it looked as if it had been tie-dyed in eight progressively paler--and _ranker__--shades of yellow. The hair hung in his eyes, trailed down his neck and over his ears, almost long enough to qualify as hip. And from the look of him he wasn't exactly wearing out his razor either.
    Ronnie tied up the boat and leapt ashore, Verbie clambering over the gunwale behind him and getting her feet wet in the process, and now the wife looked up and waved, and she was wearing dirty jeans and a plaid shirt three sizes too big for her, her hair tied back in a ponytail and her arms bare and smudged with what might have been grease or maybe mud. If Sess was the original dropout--_Sess Harder, mountain man__--then she was already halfway there, the prom queen shading to pioneer, to helpmeet, to fish skinner and plucker of goose and duck. And wasn't life beautiful?
    The dogs were racketing, jerking at their chains and nosing at the sky, elevating dust. Behind them was the garden, probably a quarter acre of squash and peas and whatnot, tomatoes in a greenhouse made out of Visquine thrown over a willow frame, and to the right of that was the cache, a miniature cabin set up on timbers eight feet off the