Drop City

his head against the wind, thinking he really ought to go back to the boat for his denim jacket, but he dismissed the thought as soon as it crept into his head--going back would delay the cracking of the first beer and the sweet redolent slap of the first burger on the grill.
    There was a handful of vehicles in the dirt lot out front of the Three Pup, including a tow truck with a Fairbanks logo painted on the driver's side door and what looked to be a Shelby Mustang jacked up behind it. Something was dripping from the back end of the Mustang and puddling in the dirt--water, it looked like, dirty water flecked with leaves and stripes of pond weed--and the wheels were packed like ball bearings in something that might have been grease, but wasn't. It was mud. Mud the color of shit, oozing out of the chassis and caking on the ground. Pan saw it, registered it, ignored it. In swung the screen door of the Three Pup and up rose the smell of the grill, of bourbon and scotch whiskey and beer spilled and wiped up and spilled again.
    It was dark inside--why waste energy lighting up a sixty-watt bulb when you're running off a generator that runs off of gasoline hauled out the Fairbanks Road and it's light out day and night, anyway?--and at first he couldn't see whose shoulders and half-turned heads were crowded in at the bar. “Hey, Pan, what's happening?” somebody called out, and it was Harmony, Harmony there in the far corner with his rust-colored Fu Manchu and beaded headband and an arm round Alice, and then somebody else called out his name and the jukebox started up with a maddening skreel of country fiddles and where was Lydia, anyway?
    But wait a minute--and this was something that really challenged his newly resensitized powers of perception--who was this looming like an apparition out of the cigarette haze with his wide-brimmed outlaw's hat cocked down over one eye and his high-heeled Beatle boots rapping at the worn floorboards like a medium's knuckles? It was Lester, that was who, Lester standing there grinning at him as if he'd just stepped out on the porch of the back house with a jug of wine in his hand and Marvin Gaye going at it on the stereo through the flung-wide door. Lester was holding a tumbler of whiskey in one hand and a joint in the other, Franklin's big head and Sky Dog's mustache framed behind him against a backdrop of astonished faces and Lynette's furiously compressed lips and bugging eyes. Dale Murray was at the end of the bar, his rings flashing, yellow-tooth necklace dangling, working on a burger and a beer and running Skid Denton as solid a line of bullshit as Denton was running him, the big tall ramrod of a guy they called Iron Steve perched up on a stool between them like a referee. “Pan, my _man,__” Lester puffed in his softest imitation of a human voice, shifting the joint to his lips so he could take Ronnie's awakening hand in his own for the soul shake that reaffirmed the identity of the tribe and plumbed the deepest pockets of brotherhood. And then he was turning to crow over his shoulder: “Hey, look who's here, the bad cat himself, Pan the child-raper, the hippest baddest cat north of what?--Fairbanks. Fairbanks, yeah.”
    The sequel involved a whole riotous tornado of soul-shaking and back-thumping, and Pan was dazed, he had to admit it, because he'd forgotten these people even existed and it was a real adjustment in context to create them anew in the lost world of the Three Pup--and what had it been, a month? But the joint helped and the beer and a shot that went down on an empty stomach like flaming gasoline and pretty soon he was in close conference with all four of them, absorbing their tale of potholes, Nazis in the guise of the Canadian Mounted Police, blown tires and moose dancing down the highway like chorus girls.
    “Shit, they busted Sky in some no-horse town in B. C.,” Dale Murray said, up from his stool now and waving his beer like a conductor's baton to a sudden crescendo of hilarity, Lester so far gone with it he had to set down his whiskey and brace himself against the bar.
    “For what?” Ronnie wanted to know, even as the light went leaden and Verbie stumped through the door with a dumbstruck face and the first few random drops began to thump against the windows.
    “He showed his big wicked thing--” Lester began, but he couldn't go on--it was too much.
    “Scared them girls up there,” Franklin said, showing his teeth in a grin, and what did Pan feel?