Drop City

be spicy enough.
    “Snowing and blowing,” he said, and everybody in the room was listening. “I was like skating? Out on the river where we cleared that nice bumpless patch for a rink? But then the snow came up and pretty much ruined it.”
    “You didn't see Marco, did you? Because he's been gone all day.”
    “What, hunting?”
    “No,” she said, taking up the long wooden spoon and giving the contents of the pot a vigorous stir. “He went down to Woodchopper to get the guns Pan appropriated for himself.”
    “I'm sorry, but Pan's a major league jerk,” Bill put in. He was hunched over a chessboard with Harmony, his oversized feet dangling from the edge of the loft in a pair of candy-striped socks with turned-up toes. “Worse, he's just a scam artist, like the street people that came in and ruined the Haight for everybody. He's out for nobody but himself. Period.”
    “He's into me for ten dollars,” Harmony said.
    Tom Krishna was wrapped in a blanket atop one of the bunk beds set into the wall. He looked up from the book he'd been reading--the teachings of some guru whose name Star couldn't pronounce; all she remembered was that he'd lived on air and had achieved _moksha__ after dying of brain cancer in a Tibetan lamasery. “I gave him sixteen dollars that last time, for personal items, you know? And what'd I get? Nothing. Not even a taste of that grass he says he invested in for everybody.”
    “What a laugh,” Bill said.
    That went round a while--the subject of Pan, and if she'd been depressed before, now she felt bereaved, as if he'd crawled off somewhere and died, because nobody would defend him, not even Lydia--and then Jiminy turned his fleshless backside to the stove and asked Tom Krishna if the new batch of beer was ready yet and Tom said it was and the snow fell and the dog slept and she realized she'd never had an answer to her question. Maya relit the joint they'd been working on earlier and passed it to Merry, who passed it to Star. She took a hit and passed it on. That was what communal life was all about, passing things on. But what about Marco? What about the responsibility for him, for getting seriously worried here, for organizing a search party--were they all just going to pass that on too? “Alfredo,” she said suddenly, her voice too loud, “what time is it?”
    Alfredo was up in the loft with Bill and Harmony, ready to take on the winner of the chess match. They were playing a tournament, twelve players, twelve matches a day, twelve days running. When that was over and the victor had been crowned, they'd play another one. “Three forty-five,” he called down in a broad, matter-of-fact voice that could have belonged to an announcer in a TV studio, to Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley. Three forty-five. The real world, the mechanical world, intrudes.
    “Because, I don't know, Marco's been gone since noon or something--shouldn't we, I mean, isn't anybody going to go out and look for him?”
    It must have been two or three hours later when they all sat down to dinner--or when dinner was served, that is, because Drop City no longer ate as one. There wasn't enough space, for one thing. When they dragged the table out from the wall and set places around it, only eight people could be seated comfortably, if you could call balancing on a wobbly two-foot-high round of black spruce comfortable. The rest just took a plate, heaped it up with rice or beans or pasta and hunkered down on the floor or the nearest bed or climbed the ladder to the loft, impressing on everybody just how cramped three hundred and sixty square feet of living space could be. The other limiting factor was the interpersonal feuds that were always flaring up out of nothing, but never more so than when everybody was confined to four cabins with no California sunshine to massage away the hard feelings--and people shuffled in and out of those cabins in a human shell game so bewildering even Star and Merry could barely keep track of who was on the outs with whom. Half the time they'd just come in, scoop something out of the pot and run for one of the cabins with it. And that prompted a new Drop City rule: everyone was responsible for his or her own plate. People scratched their initials into the bottom of the enameled plates and bowls, and some, like Weird George, had already reached their crockery limit and had to eat out of old peach and apricot cans.
    Norm blew in for dinner, trailing Premstar, Reba and the