Drop City

Diamonds.__
    “There's been some problems,” Alfredo was saying, “and I'm sure everybody's hip to them, but we all--I mean, me, Norm, Reba and like everybody that was working the communal garden this morning?--we all felt things had come to a head . . .”
    “Which head?” Ronnie said, propping himself up on his elbows. “I think there's more than one here, man.”
    “Uneasy lies the head--” Merry chimed in.
    Ronnie swung round, playing to the crowd: “Heads of the world, unite!”
    There was some foot-stomping, a spatter of applause and a whinny or two of laughter that might have had a bit too much fuel behind it. Alfredo merely sat there, slumped over the table, his eyes burning into every face in the room. When the noise died down, he continued: “Yes, but you all know that two toilets are inadequate for a commune this size, not to mention the fact that we're swamped with visitors every weekend, and with summer coming on it's just going to get worse--”
    “Put up a sign,” Jiminy said. He was skinny, nineteen, with a beard that might have washed up out of the sea, and he'd been here no more than a week or so. Star liked his style. She'd been sitting outside on her stump, snapping the tops off of green beans and talking bands with Merry, when he came winding up the road on a unicycle, a black Scottie dog levitating over the bumps behind him. I have _arrived!__ he sang out, and _Scottie__ too! Somebody ran over the dog two days later, and Jiminy had sat there in the tall weeds crying like a child. “ 'Keep Out, No Trespassing, That Means You!' ” he shouted now, oblivious to the irony. “That's what they did at the original Drop City, in Colorado. And Thunder Mountain too.”
    “Yeah, right, and who's going to decide who comes in and who doesn't? What, are we going to like hire pigs, is that it?” This was Verbie, swirling green-pink like a fruit drink in a blender. “Norm, what do you think? You going to be our policeman?”
    Norm Sender was sitting cross-legged on the table, a cowbell suspended from a suede cord round his neck. He didn't even look up. “No way.”
    “The problem,” Alfredo was saying, and his voice was strained now, as if he were trying to hold something back and it was choking him, “the problem is the shit in the woods. And everybody in this room is guilty--”
    “Including the dogs,” a voice boomed.
    “Right, including the dogs. But it's unsanitary, people, and I mean, people aren't even bothering to bury it, that's our own people, the Drop City people--the weekend hippies just fling their trash--and their excrement--anywhere they feel like it. And, speaking of which, there was that incident last night, in the back house, and you all know what I'm talking about.”
    There was a murmur of agreement. Verbie said two words--“Sky Dog”--and then somebody called out: “It was the spades.”
    “Really?” Alfredo let his eyes creep over the faces in the room. “Well, I don't know, maybe we better ask Pan over here--he was there, weren't you, Pan? Why don't you tell us about it? Come on, _Ronnie,__ enlighten us all--tell us about peace and love, huh?”
    Ronnie had been lying there limp amongst the pillows, his feet skewed at the nether ends of his stretched-out legs, but now he came up off the floor so fast he startled her--and startled the dog too. Suddenly he was standing there trembling in his cutoffs and tie-dye, and she was wishing she had a hit of something, anything, because this was Ronnie when the finger was pointing at him, this was Ronnie the victim, Ronnie the crucified saint. “I told you once, man, and I'm telling all of you now, I had nothing to do with it--”
    “Yeah, right. It was Sky Dog, wasn't it?” Alfredo hissed. “And the _spades.__”
    Ronnie let his eyes bleed out of his head, cool Ronnie, poor Ronnie, and he spread his palms wide in extenuation. “I mean, it's me, Pan, you all know me. You really think I would do something like that, no matter how stoned I was--? Fourteen, she was only fourteen, jail bait no matter how you slice it. I'm not like that, I'm not that kind of person. You all know me, right? Right?”
    Somebody up front, one of the founding members, stood up now too. Star couldn't see him at first, so she lifted her head up off the pillows and felt Marco adjust his position beside her. It was the guy--_cat__--everybody called Mendocino Bill, two hundred fifty pounds of hair wedged inside a pair of coveralls you could