Drop City

Alfredo's. She smoothed plastic. Hammered in a stake. She had a view of the hacked-over field behind them, stumps bleeding all the way down to the river, and she saw Che coming before she heard him, and they all three heard him at once, his voice raised in an unholy shriek. “Uh, Reba, I think Che needs you,” she was saying, and there he was, livid protoplasm, upright and outraged, coming across the field from the river holding one limp hand out before him and wailing, Sunshine trailing behind.
    Between gasps he shouted out her name--“Reba! Reba!”--because even in his extremity, whatever it was, he knew enough not to call her _Mom__ like some mind-controlled zombie kid out of a suburban development. He was a brat, undernourished, unschooled, stoned before his time, but at least he knew that much. Reba got to her feet, her face gone stiff. She was wearing a beige-and-yellow western shirt with embroidered pockets, and she took a minute to dig her cigarettes out of one pocket and a lighter from the other, and even as Che came running to her to bury his screaming face in the _V__ of her conjoined thighs she was exhaling the first blue puff of smoke. “What is it now?” she demanded.
    He couldn't tell her. He just stamped his feet till the plastic sagged and the stakes came up and she reached down and took him in her arms while Sunshine looked on with her hands on her hips and rehearsed her own version of events. Naked, browned, pocked with the angry red eruptions of a hundred bug bites, she was the original wild child, suckled by wolves, fed on honey-dew and the milk of paradise. Her hair was kinked, tangled, sun-bleached. Her eyes were watchful. “I did not,” she insisted as her brother whined his accusations into their mother's crotch. “He did. He was the one.”
    There was a shout in the distance. Star ignored it. They were busy here, couldn't people see that? There was work to be done and she had no patience for screaming children or the catastrophe of the hour--and they were regular as clockwork, one per hour, on the hour--and couldn't somebody find the time to sit down and read these kids a _book?__ Was that too much to ask?
    But the shouts were furious now, mounting--“Star!” they were calling, “Star!”--and she jerked her head round to see a knot of people running toward the goat pen with the two yellow dogs out front in a surge of kneading yellow muscle. Reba threw down her cigarette. Che's sobs died in his throat, an ache, a quiver, then nothing. Star rose to her feet at the same time Merry did, the black plastic rippling like a dark sea beneath them.
    The goats were in a rudimentary pen made of eight-foot lengths of birch and cottonwood lashed to posts five feet high, a pen they planned to roof and convert to a barn for winter--and there'd been a whole storm of debate about that, because nobody really featured the goats stinking and bleating and dropping their pellets _inside__ the cabins, yet they didn't really want to put the work in when there were infinitely more important things to do, like erect cabins, install stoves and split a hundred cords of wood so they wouldn't _freeze their fucking asses off__ come winter. Star understood what the priorities were, but she didn't care. She'd gone ahead and built the pen herself, with a hatchet and a coil of old clothesline, and the tent she and Marco shared was pitched up against it so she could keep track of her charges in the gray wash of night.
    The dogs were barking now, panting breathless gasps of assertion and rage that rang out over the river and rebounded again, and one of them--it was Frodo--was trying to clamber up into the pen. She dropped the hammer at her feet and took off running.
    Everybody was shouting, crowding in against the rail as if they were at a rodeo, Frodo's hind end perched there statue-like for an instant and then disappearing even as Freak scrabbled at the crossbars and fell back. What it was, she couldn't see, the goats bleating--screaming, screaming in a key she'd never before heard or imagined--and a blur of motion visible through the gaps, now here, now there, torn from one side of the pen to the other. And when she was there, everything in an uproar, Jiminy bolting for Pan's tent to get a gun and Marco and Alfredo straddling the rail with clubs in their hands, she still couldn't apprehend what she was seeing, as if there were some essential gap between her eyes and the part of her brain that processed visual