Drop City

nostalgic suddenly, so lost and cored out, he had to pound his breastbone to keep from vomiting up the moose chile they'd been eating out of the pot the last three days. A ball of acid rose in his throat, burning like exile, and it brought the tears to his eyes. He and Star had really done it up that night. They were flaming, triumphant. Two majorly righteous parties, and then they went to a club with a live band, and she'd been dressed as a cat, in tights and a velvet shell that clung to her in all the right places, painted-on whiskers he'd licked off of her by the time the night was out, and she wasn't the only one--all the chicks were dressed up like sex kittens or foxes or vampires, showing off their cleavage and their legs and everything else. He wondered if anybody had ever done a study of that, some sociologist, because the chicks invariably dressed up as everybody's sexual fantasy, while the men, the cats, always went for the absurd. And what did that mean? The men could hang loose, get stoned, party, but the women--the females, the chicks--they wanted to be salivated over, they wanted _worship.__
    Ronnie had gone as Pan, with a pair of leftover devil's horns painted forest brown, pipes he'd found under a pile of crap in the music room in their old high school and the hairy-hocked leggings his mother had made for him on the sewing machine, and she was handy that way, his mother. And it wasn't _that__ absurd, not at all. More cool, really. People had come up out of nowhere to compliment him, and if he hadn't exactly won the prize for best costume--some asshole in a Spiro Agnew mask got first prize, a real authentic three-foot-tall hookah the club owner, Alex, had brought back from Marrakech--he didn't care. That was the night he'd left Ronnie behind, the night he'd _become__ Pan for good. The memory of it pushed him up off the bed and he began shoving the felt soles down into his boots, doubling his socks, lacing the boots, layering on clothes.
    “Where you going, man?” Sky Dog wanted to know. “Trick or treating?”
    It was eight miles to Boynton, walkable now on the highway of the river, and four to Drop City. Two times four equals eight, that was what he was thinking, and out in the dark, in the cold, his breath going like a steam engine, Pan turned to his right when he hit the river, heading north and east, thinking of Star. They'd be celebrating at Drop City tonight, no doubt about it--Halloween, the feast of the freaks, was in the air. Norm would do it up. If anybody would, Norm would. He heard the cold rush and snap of his footsteps as he compacted the thin layer of snow over the ice, one foot in front of the other, four miles no more than a stroll in the park and he didn't feel cold at all, not in the least.
    Sess Harder had once unraveled the mystery of the distances for him, in the days when he could show his face around Sess's cabin, that is--which he no longer could since he'd burned Pamela for the five bucks, but hey, _tant pis,__ as the French say. His boots crunched snow. The wind fell away and the moon was there. What he couldn't understand was why the river was called the Thirtymile--shouldn't it have been thirty miles from Boynton then and not less than half of that? Sess had been busy, always busy, mending the gangline for his dogteam, and Pan had hung over him with a neighborly beer in one hand and a smoke in the other while the mathematics played out in Sess's deep, unhurried tones. “The distance is measured from Dawson, in the Yukon Territory,” he told him. “Originally, what happened was people floated downriver from there, and so you've got your Fortymile River south and east of Eagle and your Seventymile just north of it, and what happened, I guess, is somebody didn't want to call a river the Hundredmile--too daunting a number--so they just called this one the Thirtymile, because it's thirty miles, give or take, down from the Seventymile. Does that make sense?”
    No, it didn't. It hadn't. They should have named it the Clothesline or the Dinosaur or the Punctured Pineapple, or maybe they should rename it after Jimi Hendrix's mother--sure, and he'd have to get up a petition as soon as he got back to civilization. He went on that way, a string of increasingly ridiculous names running through his head, the silence and the vastness of the river and the hills spiked with shadow and the moon, the _moon,__ gone down deep in him--Halloween, how about that?--and he'd never felt so