Drop City

kids, and he wasn't his usual self. He didn't stamp or roar or call out greetings to the flock, just bowed his head, ducked out of his parka and got in line at the stove. There was fresh whole-grain bread laid out on the top shelf within easy reach of the stove, and butter out of the one-pound can. That and the salmon-rice dish, heavily laced with soy, and Kool-Aid and Tang to wash it all down, along with three big half-gallon jugs of Tom Krishna's yeasty homebrew and two pans of fudge brownies. Humble fare, but there was plenty of it, and the vegetarians could be glad Marco didn't have a gun, because when he did there'd have to be two meals prepared each night, the one incorporating moose or whatever, the other without it.
    It was still snowing. Star wasn't given to senseless worry or the paranoia that certain grades and varieties of grass can generate--or maybe she was--but by the time dinner was on the table she was a wreck. There was no sign of Marco. It was an hour and a half to Woodchopper Creek, ten minutes to settle his business, and an hour and a half back. Three hours and ten minutes, and he'd been gone for six, six at least. Earlier, while the salmon was thickening in the pan, she'd got Merry and Maya to go out into the storm with her and shout his name into the wind. They'd taken Freak with them in the hope he'd catch Marco's scent, and they'd gone as far downriver as Sess and Pamela's place, but Marco wasn't there and they hadn't seen him. Pamela said it was probably nothing, he'd stayed on at Woodchopper when the storm settled in or he'd thrown up a temporary shelter and got a fire going, and really, Sess had camped a hundred times in much worse, hadn't he? Sess had. He acknowledged that. But Pamela was only saying the expected things, to calm her, and Star, though she was three miles high and drifting like a cloud, didn't miss the look she exchanged with Sess. They all had a cup of tea, then the three of them went out and shouted Marco's name till their throats were raw and their lungs burning. When they got back, Star went to each of the cabins in succession, thinking he might have looped round them in the storm, but nobody had seen him, and when finally she returned to the meeting hall and the smell of the food and the shot of Everclear Bill gave her to calm her nerves, he wasn't there either.
    If that wore her down, the worry that ate at her with every thump of her heart and made the storm a curse and the meal as bland as boiled cardboard so that she couldn't take more than two bites of it and had to sneak her plate to the dog, what came next was even worse. It was an hour after they'd eaten. The dishes were soaking in the big washtub on the stove. People were passing cigarettes, the eternal joint. Alfredo had tried to get a sing-along going, but nobody seemed to have the heart for it, and it wasn't anxiety over Marco that had them down, it was just boredom, the sameness of the food, the faces, the night. Nothing was happening. Nothing was going to happen. This was the life they'd chosen. Voluntarily.
    Norm was sunk into one of the lower bunks with Premstar, their backs against the wall, feet splayed out on the floor. He was looking old. His skin was so pale it could have been the underbelly of a fish peeled off and sewed into place, and his hair, bucket-washed, hung limp and thin around his ears. There were hairs growing out of those ears, she saw now, out of his nostrils, climbing up out of the neck of his shirt. Never repaired, his glasses looked as if they'd been thrown at his face, dirty grayish lumps of Reba's sticking plaster holding the frames together in a tentative accord with the forces of gravity. He was sniffling, victimized by the cold oozing its way through the collective mass of his brothers and sisters, his eyes red-rimmed and terminal. And he was itching, itching like everybody else. Pasha Norm. Norm the guru. Norm, the guiding light of Drop City.
    He pushed himself up with a grunt, and he was just like her father struggling up out of his chair after his team had gone down to defeat, shoulders slumped, eyes vacant, one hand going to the small of his back and whatever residual ache stabbed at him there, and then he crossed the room to the table and poured himself a cup of beer from the half-gallon jug. Why she was watching him, she didn't know. She'd been playing a distracted game of cards--pitch--with Merry, Maya and Lydia, and as her gaze drifted round the room she'd somehow