Drop City

and went up to the door of the bus and knocked at the panel of painted-over glass there. He knocked again. After a while he started to hammer at it with his fist, and it was a good thing--a good thing for them--he hadn't had that second shot. “Open up!” he shouted. “Whoever's in there, open up!”
    He felt the bus give ever so slightly on its springs, and then the door cranked open and the one they called Weird George was standing there on the top step, wrapped in a dirty green blanket. He was barefoot. His hair was like a second blanket, or no, it was like the stuff Jill used to make plant holders with in her apartment, some kind of jute, roughedged and matted, and he had half a dozen bleached-out animal bones dangling from the ragged ends of it. “Oh,” Weird George said, trying to place him. “Oh, hey.”
    “Listen,” and Sess could feel it coming up in him now, an anger pulled up out of nowhere, out of a sunny day, and heavily disproportionate to the crime, “you people are going to have to get out of here. All of you. And take all of your fucking crap with you.”
    Weird George made a vague gesture. He didn't look as if his legs would hold him upright another thirty seconds. “Oh, man,” he said after a moment, and Sess could barely hear him for the bawling of the speakers, “you want Harmony, Harmony's the cat to talk to--”
    Everybody's luck held, because at that moment Harmony came round the front of the bus, his hands dripping clay. As best Sess could figure, the man was about his age, and though he wore his dense blond hair layered like a woman's he had a fierce reddish Fu Manchu mustache to counteract the effect, and in Sess's limited dealings with the tribe he seemed the most reasonable of any of them--and a whole lot easier to communicate with than the nephew, who tended to talk in paragraphs, as if he were getting paid by the word. Harmony looked surprised. He wiped his hands on his jeans, cocked his head and gave Sess a look out of the corner of his wire-frame glasses. He was about to say “What's happening?”--Sess would have bet the farm on it--but before he could open his mouth Sess launched into a lecture of his own, enumerating the hippie infractions and the way the town felt about them and telling him in no uncertain terms that he was going to have to pack everybody up and find another place to throw his pots and blast his music and smoke his marijuana and LSD.
    Sess didn't know how long he went on, but after a while Harmony was joined by his wife or girlfriend or whoever she was, a thin raggedy little woman with a serene smile and the usual hair and a pair of breasts that should have been matched to somebody twice her size, and the two of them just stood there and listened to him as if they were SRO in a lecture hall. When he was done, when he'd talked himself out and begun to think of getting back in the truck, picking up Pamela and heading into Fairbanks to celebrate life and the season and the cache that was full to bursting with dressed-out meat, the record he'd been subconsciously screaming over came to a superamplified halt, and Harmony said, “I hear you, man.” He put an arm round the woman's shoulders and drew her to him. “You've been like supercool, and we all appreciate that, even Weird George. And listen, we've been maybe a little remiss in this, but Alice and I have been wanting to like show our appreciation. Here,” he said, gesturing toward the long tottering line of misshapen ashtrays and bongs and fluted drinking cups set out on the naked board and gracing the tree stumps of the field, “you just take your pick--”
    Three days later, when they got back from Fairbanks, the bus was still there. Of course it was--what did he expect them to do, paint it over with vanishing ink? The thing probably wouldn't even start. Why fool himself?--it was there for the duration. Maybe when the next glacial age hit in another ten thousand years the big mile-high wall of ice would creep across the tundra and grind it to dust, but for now, Sess figured, he might as well get used to it because it wasn't going anywhere. And at this point--three days on--he couldn't really get himself worked up about it. He and Pamela had had a matchless time, their second honeymoon--or first, actually--lazing in bed at the Williwaw Motor Inn, smoking cigarettes and drinking rum and Coke out of plastic disposable cups and watching the mystical flicker of the world caught and sealed in the