Drop City

Then he saw Bill scrabbling in the dirt with a split lip and a film of blood enlivening his teeth and Bosky standing over him in his paramilitary getup, and began to grope toward the re-alization that maybe it was his fight after all. What was Bosky doing here, even? And what was this business with Star--he'd been coming on to her all day and Marco had let it pass. Maybe, he was thinking now, he shouldn't have.
    But here was Jiminy, all hundred and thirty-five pounds of him, pushing his way through the crowd. “Who the hell are you?” he said, throwing it back at Bosky. “You're not part of this--you don't even belong here.”
    “That's right,” somebody said, and then Reba was there, her face a mask of war, doing what nobody had yet thought to do--namely, help Bill up out of the dirt.
    Bill was heaving. There was blood on his coveralls. Reba stood there beside him with her honed eyes, propping him up. She looked first to Ronnie, then to Bosky. “We don't need this kind of shit here,” she hissed. “You want to have your drunken brawls, take it someplace else. We've got kids here.”
    And there they were, Che and Sunshine, backed up against the slashed crossbars of the cabin porch, hair in their faces, their eyes reduced to twin nubs of malleable black rubber, and anybody could mold those eyes, Marco thought, make them laugh, make them cry. He felt nothing but sad. “I'm with Reba,” he said.
    “All right,” Joe Bosky spat, “I know when I'm not wanted, don't let the door hit you on the way out, right?” and he started off toward the plane, unsteady on his feet. He hadn't gone five yards before he turned round and focused the glare of his silver shades on Pan, on Ronnie. “You coming,” he said, “or what?”
    Ten minutes later, while people milled and debated and groused and Bill pressed a cold wet towel to his face, they heard the plane's engine start up with a sucking roar, as if someone were out there vacuuming off the surface of the river. Then the accelerating whine of the propeller came to them and they looked up to see Joe Bosky's floatplane glide out from shore, catch the current and taxi into the mouth of the trees only to rise a moment later and flare off into the night sky with a single reflective flash of the declining sun. Marco stood there watching it a moment, then took Star by the hand and walked her down through the field of foot-worn flowers and trampled weed to a place where they could look out over the ripples and braids of the current. He eased himself down, and she sat in the gravel beside him. “There goes Ronnie,” he said.
    Star drew her knees up and knotted her arms round them. For a moment she said nothing, just seesawed back and forth, her white compact feet beating time to the motion of her body. “He'll be back,” she said.
    “You really think so?”
    She looked off across the river. It was late, midnight or thereabout. The colors went up in layers, from the scoured tin of the river to the dense black-green of the trees to the pink band of the sun-brushed hills. A sickle moon, pale as ice, sketched itself in over the trees. She cursed and slapped a mosquito on her ankle, then another on the back of her arm. “Really?” she said finally, turning to hold his eyes. “Truly?”
    He shrugged, as if it didn't matter one way or the other.
    “No,” she said. “I don't think so. I think he's--” There was a catch in her voice and he wanted to rock her in his arms but that catch made him hesitate, made him angry and hateful and jealous. “I think he's gone,” she said. “For good.”
    That was when they heard the motor out on the river and they looked up unbelieving, because this had been a day of arrivals and departures, an unprecedented day, nothing like it yet in the brief history of Drop City North--first Bosky and Ronnie, then Verbie, Sky Dog and Dale Murray--and now who was this slashing up against the dark run of the current? They watched as the boat--it was a skiff, flat-bottomed, snub-nosed, like any dozen of them up and down the river--took on color and shape and finally emerged from the dark screen of the littoral and swung into shore fifty feet from them. A stooping, raw-boned figure clambered over the seat from stern to bow, flinging something ashore, a sleek bundle that fell formless to the gravel, and then a pair of scissoring legs splashed ashore and there he was. “Hey, hello there,” he said, stooping to the bundle and pulling himself up out of