Drop City

between Star and Joe Bosky and scraping what he could out of the bottom of the pot, all the while mounding it up on the first plate that came to hand, and never mind that it had already been used, he wasn't fussy. He was wearing his glad-to-be-here look, all smiles and dancing eyes, and he'd put a little effort into his clothes too, his denim shirt clean and maybe even pressed and what looked to be a new bandanna wrapped round his head. He found a fork, wiped it on his jeans, and began to feed the hardened dregs of rice into his mouth, too busy eating to address the issue of Drop City's trust and the two-column shopping list he'd wrapped round the wad of bills everybody had thrust on him five days ago. Marco studied the side of his head, the sparse thread of his sideburns tapering down into the sparser beard, the wad of muscle working in his jaw, but Ronnie was making eye contact with no one, least of all Premstar, who'd just looked directly at him and said, “So where's our stuff?”
    Now she repeated herself, and Reba, the hunt in her eyes, said, “Yeah, _Pan,__ what's the deal? Are you going tell me you forgot, or what?”
    If Ronnie was hoping it would blow by him, he was going to be disappointed, Marco could see that. He hadn't given him any money himself--he'd been too busy to think of needing or wanting anything--but Star had, and that was enough to involve him right there, more than enough. To this point, Pan had been fairly innocuous, shying away from the construction or anything that smacked of real work, maybe, but taking charge of the boat and the drift net Norm's uncle had left behind and assiduously drilling holes in anything that moved out along the river, and that was meat nobody else was going to go and get, at least not till the cabins were up anyway. He's doing his own thing, that's what Star said whenever his name came up in relation to the work details Alfredo was forever trying to organize--the latrine crew, the bark-stripping crew, the wood-splitters and sod-cutters--and the way she defended him was an irritant, certainly, but Marco wasn't jealous of him, or not that he would admit. _Of course I love him,__ Star had insisted, _but like a brother, like my brother Sam, and no, we never really slept together, or not in any way that really meant anything--__
    “Is that booze I see here on the table? Distilled spirits? _Al__-co-holic beverage?” Ronnie lifted his head and darted a glance at the sun-drenched bottle of rum rising up out of the wooden slab at Bosky's elbow. “What are we mixing it with?”
    “The stuff, Ronnie, the stuff,” Reba said. “We were talking about the stuff we all gave you money for--where is it? Huh?”
    He reached for the bottle, found a cup, poured. Everybody at the table watched him as if they'd never before seen a man lift a cup to his lips, and they watched him sip and swallow and make a face. “I thought it was--didn't we bring it in the plane, Joe? I mean, this morning?”
    But Joe Bosky was no help. He sat there frozen behind his glazed lenses, not even bothering to swat at the mosquitoes clustered on the back of his neck. A dense spew of smoke raked across the table and then dissipated. No one said a word.
    “Jesus,” Ronnie said, slapping at his forehead. “Don't tell me I left all that shit back at the bus--”
    “Oh, cut the crap, already. You didn't leave anything anywhere, did you, man?” Mendocino Bill rose massively at the far end of the table. He'd put in an order for Dr. Scholl's medicated foot powder, because he had a semipermanent case of athlete's foot and the itching was driving him up a wall. “You fucked up, didn't you?”
    Ronnie looked wildly round the table, his mouth set, eyes jumping from one face to another. He was calculating, Marco could see that, dipping deep in the well, way down in the deepest hole, fishing for a lie plausible enough to save his neck. Marco had no sympathy for him, none at all, and in that moment he realized how expendable he was, whether Star needed him as confessor or not--or no, especially because she needed him. Or thought she did. The shadows deepened. A hawk screeched from a tree at the edge of the woods. “What about it, Pan?” he heard himself say.
    “Talk about the third degree,” Ronnie said, and he was looking down at the table now, toying with his fork. Suddenly he let out a laugh--a high sharp bark of a laugh that startled the dog out of his digestive trance--and he raised his head and gave