Drop City

twenty-two hundred for it--_Canadian__--and Dale, I'll tell you, Dale never looked back.”
    “That's right, man. Bet your ass.”
    Marco shifted his weight from one buttock to the other on the hard split plank of the seat, thinking he could do without the heroic exploits and the thick paste of smirks, nods and asides that seemed to have everybody glued to their seats, thinking the two of them should have stayed in Dawson or Whitehorse or wherever they'd blown in from, anywhere but here. They'd shown up like conquering heroes when the worst part of the work was already finished, that was what he was thinking, and what had Dale Murray--or Sky Dog, for that matter--ever done for Drop City? He exchanged a look with Alfredo, elbow-propped across the table and two places up, but Alfredo was keeping his own counsel. And hadn't they banished Sky Dog once already? Or was he dreaming?
    Up at the head of the table, seated at the right hand of Norm, Premstar was giggling, and the pot--Sky Dog's pot, Dale Murray's pot, Lester's and Franklin's pot--kept circulating. When the communal joint came Marco's way he took it like anybody else, a pinch of the thumb and index fingers, Joe Bosky's compressed fingertips giving way to Star's and Star's to his own. The Kool-Aid was gone, and he thought he felt a mild residual buzz from it--it hadn't been intended as anything intense, but just something to focus behind, and he'd had maybe two cups of it hours ago--and now Reba and Merry were hovering over the table with a big blackened pot of hot chocolate and people were dipping their cups into it and the steam lifted off the pot in a transparent crown. Freak had stopped begging--glutted finally--and he lay at Star's feet, grunting softly as he plumbed his balls and nosed under his tail for fleas. Jiminy got up and held his lighter to the pile of brush and lopped-off pine branches he'd raked together for a fire, and before long the smoke was chasing round the table at the whim of the breeze, a nuisance surely, but at least it discouraged the mosquitoes.
    Dale Murray said, “Kicked his ass for him, what do you think?”
    Norm said, “Public _what__? Indecency? You got to be kidding.”
    Marco exhaled and passed the joint on to Dunphy, her fingers cold, spidery, bitten, thin, the briefest fleeting touch of skin to skin, and she gave him a blank-eyed look and half a smile and put the roach to her lips and sucked. He glanced down at his own fingers, at his hands laid out on the chewed plank of the table. The fingernails were chipped, the cuticles torn, dirt worked into every crack and abrasion in a tracery of dead black seams. These were the hands of a working man, a man putting in twelve- and thirteen-hour days, the hands of a man who was building something permanent. Pride came up in him in a sudden flush. And joy. That too.
    “Tired?” Star murmured, leaning into him.
    For answer, he pressed his palms together in prayer, then tilted them and made a pillow to lay his head on.
    “And Lester,” Sky Dog was saying, “you should have seen Lester--man, they wanted to lock him up so bad, just on general principles, you know? But he gave them the old shuck and jive and smiled so hard at this one guy--I don't know what he was, a Mountie, a sheriff, something--I thought he was going to melt right down into his boots like a big stick of rancid butter. Oh, and, shit, the moose--did I tell you about the moose?”
    Alfredo cut in. He wanted to know where Lester was--was he planning on coming upriver? Because if he was, it was going to be sticky, real sticky, after what went down in California, and he didn't want to sound prejudiced or anything, because prejudice had nothing to do with it-- “He stayed behind at the bus,” Verbie said, picking at a crescent of white bone. “With Franklin. They're panning for gold.”
    Joe Bosky let out a hoot. “Fucking greenhorns,” he said. “Cheechakos.”
    “All's I know,” Sky Dog put in, “is they got this vial half-filled with gold flakes already, and all they been doing is just catching what comes out of that creek up north of town--”
    “Last Chance Creek,” Bosky said, folding his arms. The pale white ridge of a scar crept out of his aviator's mustache and curled into the flesh of his upper lip. You could see where every hair of his head was rooted. “They should've called it No Chance Creek. Nothing in there but sewage leaching out of people's septic tanks.”
    “Sorry, man, but I saw it, I'm