Drop City

telling you--that was _gold__ in there.”
    “Iron pyrites,” Verbie said, and then Norm weighed in. “Could be gold, who knows? You want to talk gold country, this is it, and I fully intend to get out there and rinse a couple pans myself, me and Premstar. Once the cabins are up. Because why not? It's _money__ in the bank, people, and it's out there for the picking, just like the berries and the fat silver salmon coming up the river, and do I have to _remind__ anybody what we're doing up here in the first place?”
    Jiminy said he could feature some gold--maybe Harmony could figure out a way to melt it down and make ornaments and figurines and the like--or maybe they could just sell it and use the money for things like a new generator so they could have a little music more than once a week. And lights, what about lights. Wouldn't lights be nice?
    People ran that around the table a while, the gold flecks that would invariably prove to be iron pyrites growing exponentially in each Drop City head till the creek across the river ran yellow and the trees on the hills gave up their roots and toppled because it wasn't earth they were growing in, but solid gold nuggets. Marco tuned them out. He'd never been so tired in his life. And if it wasn't for the elation he was riding on--the meeting house was up, the walls chinked and the roof in place, and who would have believed it a month ago?--he'd have crawled into his sleeping bag by now. But he held on, stroking Star's bare arm with the tip of one very relaxed finger and letting the marijuana turn the blood to syrup in his veins.
    They'd made the meeting house two stories, with the beams laid inside for a loft where people could sleep if the need arose, and that was good thinking, a happy result of sitting down with a sheet of paper and a pencil and talking it all out beforehand with Tom, Alfredo and Norm. Norm knew what he was doing, for the most part, at least, and Sess Harder, fifteen minutes down the river, was like an encyclopedia--he was the one who told them to lay flattened cardboard over the roof poles so none of the loose sod would leach through the cracks--and the uncle had left behind a pristine copy of _The Complete Log Home,__ copyright 1910, which they could consult as needed, but really, Marco couldn't help marveling over how _basic__ it all was. You cut and peeled the timber, notched the ends of the logs till they were no different, except in scale maybe, from the Lincoln Logs every ten-year-old in America constructed his forts and stockades with, dug down two feet to permafrost at the four corners and stacked up rock to lay the first square across and built on up from there. Then you laid the floor--with planks carved out of spruce with a chainsaw ripper--cut holes for the windows and a six-inch slot for the stovepipe, and you had it. Basically, that was it. And if they could all pitch in and build something like this--two stories high, twenty feet long and eighteen across--then the cabins would be nothing more than a reflex.
    “What about Harmony and Alice?” This was Norm, leaning into the table and giving Sky Dog and Dale Murray a look over the top of his glasses. “And Lydia, what about her?”
    “You know Harmony,” Sky Dog said. “He's got a kiln set up outside the bus and he says he's experimenting with some things and he's not ready to come upriver yet, at least that's what he told me and Dale. Plus the Bug is broken down.”
    “He ordered a new fuel pump for it,” Verbie put in. “From this place in Anchorage.”
    Norm dug his fingers into his beard, slid the glasses back up his nose. “And Lydia?”
    To this point, Joe Bosky had been subdued, his dig at the gold situation the only thing out of his mouth all evening. He'd been locked behind the wrap of his silver shades since morning, stoned on a whole variety of things. When the hot chocolate went round he'd shuffled unsteadily to the plane and came back with a bottle of Hudson Bay rum and set it on the table, and a couple of people followed his example and spiked their chocolate with it. He cleared his throat in response to Norm's question and leaned over to spit in the dirt before bringing the solidity of his face back to the table. “She's in Fairbanks,” he said.
    “Fairbanks?”
    A murmur went round the table. If it was true, this was disturbing news, evidence of their first defection, the first betrayal of the ideal. People eyed one another up and down the table--who was next?