Drop City

down again, as if it were too heavy a burden to bear.
    People were scattered around the room in a funk of unwashed clothes and matted hair, down, dejected, disheveled, the energy level hovering around zero--they didn't even look as if they'd be able to lift the forks to their mouths come dinner, and Star had a brief fantasy of feeding them all by hand, then changing their diapers and putting them to bed one after the other. It was depressing. When they spoke, it was in a whisper, as if nobody really wanted to express their thoughts aloud, and the cramped space of the meeting hall buzzed with an insectoid rasp of timbreless voices sawing away at the fabric of the afternoon. Faces were vapid, eyes drained. It was a day for getting stoned, and Drop City had been diligent about it. Star was floating right along herself, drifting like the cottonwood fluff on the river, back when there was a river--and cottonwood. She got up to fuel the fire and get some oil sizzling in the bottom of the pot. Three steps from the table to the stove, but she saw the pale slashes of the snow against the window like interference on a black-and-white TV. Marco was out there somewhere, that was what she was thinking. He should have been back by now.
    Merry was saying, “I'll never speak to Jiminy again, I swear. Not unless he tells me who it was, and I already know, I mean, I'd have to be blind not to--”
    Maya, chopping: “Dunphy.”
    “--I just want to hear it from him, like the truth, just once. Just once I'd like to hear the truth come out of his mouth.”
    Both of them looked across the room to where Lydia, wrapped in her fur coat, sat against the wall leafing through one of the magazines she'd brought back as a communal offering--_Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone__--along with pounds and pounds of chocolate, French milled soap and Canadian whiskey. And crabs. Crabs too.
    Star threw a handful of chopped garlic into the hot oil and everybody perked up visibly because there was no denying that scent, and then she went to Merry for the onions. People froze to death up here, that was what she was thinking--and what was that story she'd read in high school, the famous one where the guy, the cheechako, can't get a fire going and tries to kill the dog to warm his hands? The dog was too smart for him, that much she remembered. But he was a cheechako, that was the telling point, a greenhorn who didn't know the harshness of the country or the implacability of the night, a tenderfoot, a novice. Like Marco. There were animals out there in the woods, wolves, bears, that writhing dark buzzsaw of a thing that jerked across the ground as if it had been set on fire--the wolverine, the glutton, the intimidator--and if it could eviscerate a goat in ten seconds flat, then what could it do to a human being? People shot each other up here too, over guns, with guns, but then Ronnie would never-- “Smells good.” It was Lydia, looking over her shoulder now. “What's it going to be tonight, the salmon surprise?”
    Star smiled, pushed the hair away from her face with the back of her hand. “What else?” she said, stirring garlic and onions around the snapping of the oil. “It's the specialty of the house.”
    She looked up then, past Lydia, to the door. She'd heard a noise, a thump at the frame as if someone had fallen dead on the doorstep--_Marco,__ she was thinking, _Marco__--and then suddenly the door flung open and slammed to again, and Jiminy was there in his Salvation Army greatcoat, stamping and blowing. He was wearing a knit hat that clung to his skull and came down tight over his ears and he'd wrapped his scarf round his head and face like a chador. Snow had crystallized in his eyebrows, it was caked atop his hat and batter-spread across the padded shoulders of the coat. “Jesus,” he muttered, unwrapping himself layer by layer, “it's cold enough out there to piss and lean on it.”
    Star saw him exchange a glance with Merry--“Hi, Mer,” he said, but her eyes just bored right through him--and then it was his turn to say “Smells good” and he was crowding in at the stove, working up some friction between his palms and peering into the pot as if he were thinking about folding up his limbs and climbing into it.
    “Snowing hard?” Star had inverted the Spiracha bottle over the pot with one hand while she shook white pepper out of the big rust-topped can with the other, spice for the hordes, and it could never