Drop City

Marco a sidelong look. “All right,” he said, “all right, you got me. I fucked up. Had one too many drinks, you know, and I just . . . I don't know, I just, I guess it slipped my mind--”
    He must not have found much comfort in the look Marco was giving him, because he ducked his head again and murmured, to no one in particular, “So go ahead and hang me.”
    A moment ticked by, everybody staring at the spool of his bowed head, the rings flashing on the fingers of his right hand--a ring on every finger, even the thumb--as he fed congealed rice pap into his mouth with the slow, trembling incertitude of a penitent. Freak got up from under the table, stretched, yawned and stared off at something across the field and into the line of the trees. Star sat there rigid. Her face was white, bloodless, drawn down to nothing. She was giving Ronnie a look Marco couldn't fathom--was she afraid for him, was that it? Or was she ashamed? Ashamed and disgusted? He was almost surprised when her voice broke the silence: “So you'll be giving everybody their money back now, right?”
    Ronnie took another pull at the mug, again made a face. He looked like a cat scratching around in a litter box. “Christ, has anybody got a Coke? Or a Pepsi? I'd settle for Royal Crown, even--this shit is _harsh.__” He shot a glance at Star, then looked down at his plate. “Well, not exactly,” he said, and an angry murmur burned from one end of the table to the other. “Because, you've got to understand, I saw this opportunity--pot, I mean, the pot Lester and Franklin smuggled in, because where else do you expect to find weed in Alaska? Beyond what we brought, I mean. So I figured what do we need most of all, the single biggest thing? And what are we going to need to get us through those long dark nights that are going to be coming before you know it? Right? Weed. So I made an investment for all of us.”
    “You're a real altruist, Pan,” Reba said.
    Bill hadn't sat down yet. He was still hovering there at the far end of the table, the fat firming to muscle in his shoulders and arms, the long slant of the sun crystallizing the strands of grease in his river-washed hair. He looked pained. Looked as if someone had just poked him with a sharp stick. “Yeah, right,” he said, and he growled it, his voice hoarse and raw with suppressed rage, “you mean the pot you tried to sell me this morning for thirty bucks a lid?”
    “Fuck you,” Ronnie said, and he was on his feet now too, trying to untangle his legs from the table, trying to get serious, get angry. “I mean, fuck you, you fat sack of shit.”
    And of course Bill rose to the bait, coming round the end of the table in the swelled-up shell of himself, coming at Ronnie like a moving mountain, and Marco thinking two or three punches and they're separated and Ronnie can go off in a huff to his tent, put-upon and abused, after which there would be an offering of pot, not all of it, maybe, and certainly not anywhere near the value of it, and by the end of the night the blame would be meliorated and the sinner redeemed. But he was wrong. Because before any of it could play out, Joe Bosky entered the mix. Somehow he managed to lurch up and kick himself free of the bench in time to intercept Bill before he could get to Ronnie, who was only then bracing himself to meet the first rush. Everybody else sprang up simultaneously from the table, Reba cursing, Che and Sunshine looking lost and bewildered, Alfredo shouting, “No, no, no!”
    Bosky never hesitated. He dropped his shoulder and slammed into Bill as if they were out on a football field, helmet to breastbone, and Bill's feet got tangled and he went down heavily in the dirt. Almost immediately he pushed himself up, his face transfigured with rage, but before anyone could intervene, Bosky hit him with two quick white fists--two uppercuts delivered as he was blundering to his feet--and Bill went down again. That was when Alfredo and Deuce made a move to wrap Bosky up in their arms, but Bosky swatted them away as if they were nothing and swung round to face off the whole camp. “Nobody fucks with Pan like that,” he snapped. “You understand? It's not right, because I want to tell you”--and here his voice got sluggish and he staggered back and caught himself--“I want tell you Pan is Joe Bosky's buddy and nobody fucks with Joe Bosky.”
    Marco was just standing there with the rest of them, hands at his sides. It wasn't his fight.