Drop City

were gathered at the bar and there wasn't a single genuine smile for him--or for Pamela either. And that hurt, because what did she have to do with it? No more than he did. Or less, a whole lot less. He tried his best to ignore Lynette and Skid Denton, who was a first-class jerk, anyway, greeted everybody by name and pulled out a chair for Pamela at the table by the window, thinking ham and eggs, or bacon, or maybe a burger, and a beer and a bump to go with it, because he'd be goddamned if they were going to chase him out of his own chosen roadhouse and bar. Pamela gave him a thin smile and took his hand across the table. “Lynette,” he called, and maybe he did raise his voice just a hair more than was called for, “can we have a little goddamn service over here?”
    They drank. They ate. And they took their sweet time about it. People pulled up chairs and plopped down to butt in, one after another, two at time, three, and all the news and all the burning gossip started with the hippies and ended with them too. Lynette sat right at the table with him and Pamela and watched them cut their meat and lift the forks to their mouths as if they might need instruction, and she never stopped talking, not even to draw breath. “The one with the bones in his hair and the garlic strung round his neck? Mr. Vampire, that's what I call him. He come in here and ordered a pitcher of beer and wanted to know if he could get it on credit and when I said nobody gets credit here he went around the bar and asked if anybody had any change to spare.”
    But Richard Schrader--the best friend Sess had on the river, the _best man__ at his wedding--Richard Schrader took the cake. He hadn't been home when they came up from the canoe, and they'd skirted the tarted-up bus and the hippie out there hovering over his kiln and the shining glazed line of bowls and plates and ashtrays he'd arranged on a split log as if he was going into business in Sess's weedpatch, and now he--Richard--pulled the truck into the lot and came through the mosquitoless door and the first thing out of his mouth was “Sess, these people have got to go, they're making a three-ring circus out of my yard and I don't think I've had more than two hours sleep a night since they got here with their whooping and screaming and that unholy racket of guitars and tambourines and whatnot and did you know they took the speakers out of the bus and mounted them up on the roof so they could blast that shit out over the river and everyplace else? And I've tried to reason with them, I have, but it's Peace, brother, and fuck you--”
    Sess had another beer. He took his time. Wiped his plate with a slice of spongy store-bought bread. Asked about dessert. Forwent a second shot. On the exterior, he might have appeared calm, but he was boiling up inside, and he laid some money on the table, took the keys from Richard and told Pamela he wouldn't be a minute. He hadn't gone two feet out the door before Lynette was right there after him, grabbing at his arm. “And, Sess,” she said, the striations of age puckered up around her lips and digging disapproving trenches at the flanges of her nose and the corners of her shrunk-down eyes till she looked like one of those dried and frozen corpses they found in the Andes, “whatever did you go and do to Joe Bosky?” She looked down at the flap of her sidearm and back up again. “I tell you, watch out for that one--”
    So he drove the truck the half mile to town and eased it high up over the ruts and half-buried rocks and into the yard out front of the shack. The dust followed him in. He slammed the transmission up into park, let the engine keen a minute, then cut the ignition. What he heard then was the music, a bull-roaring voice over the guitars, drums and electrified piano, driven at such a volume the speakers couldn't contain it. The vocal settled, went slack with distortion, then settled again. Off to the right were the two cars, the VW and the Studebaker, looking as if they hadn't been moved in a month. The kiln was set in the lee of the bus, the heat of it radiating out of the seams and corrugating his view of the shack, which was in need of paint. The bus, though, that didn't need any paint. They'd been busy with that, and if there was a color they'd neglected to lay on he couldn't name it.
    The air was clean, the sun going about its business. It was warmer than it had a right to be. He stepped out of the truck to the assault of the music