Drop City

shout, the rumble of a car on the dirt road. Then he said, “Why don't you take your clothes off, see what it's like?”
    “I know what it's like--I was naked in the shower at six o'clock this morning. Why don't you put yours back on?”
    “They're wet.”
    She laughed then--he had her there. His clothes _were__ wet, pasted to the branches like papier-mâché and dripping arrhythmically on the goat party below.
    “Listen,” he said, “Star,” and he used her name for the first time since she'd given it to him, “you want to maybe just hang with me up here for a while, kick back--”
    “And ball?”
    He shrugged again, rubbed at an imaginary spot on his calf. “Sure. If you're into it.”
    She gave it a minute, thinking of Ronnie and the new girl, Merry, and the big-tits woman and everything that was hers to taste at Drop City and in the redwood forests and anywhere else she wanted to go outside the rigid stultifying confines of the straight world, and she considered Marco, his smile, his manner, the way he put things, and then she said, “No, I don't think so.”
    He dropped his head, let his voice go loose till it sounded like something that had pitched out of a basket and rolled across the floor: “I was just asking--”
    “What am I trying to tell you?” she said, and she propped herself up on one elbow and took hold of his arm just above the wrist. “I'm involved with somebody right now, I guess, okay? That's all.”
    She watched him gather up his legs, two balls of muscle flashing in his calves, and even as he stood he was careful to keep himself turned from her. “I don't know,” he said, and he was apologizing now, “you never know unless you ask, right?”
    She gave a laugh, but it wasn't the kind of laugh she'd intended, because it had Ronnie and the teepee cat all tangled up in it. “No,” she said, “you never know.”
    The night was darker than any night had a right to be, no moon, no stars, the sky locked up tight with the fog seeping in off the river. She couldn't see Marco or Ronnie, though they were three feet ahead of her, feeling their way around the trikes and tools and discarded saltillo tiles, but she could smell the dust beneath her feet and the fishy stagnant odor rising from the pool somewhere off to her right, and she could hear the goats softly rustling their chains as they changed position beneath the oaks. A lone cricket kept opening and shutting a tiny door in the deep grass. There was nothing else.
    Verbie had decided to come along, as referee, and Jiminy, adamant Jiminy--he was ten feet behind them, cursing softly in the dark. “Shit. Fuck. I can't see a thing. Hey, Verbie, where are you? Verbie? Star?”
    There was a hiss from just in front of her and Ronnie swung round on them, the pale ball of his face hanging there in the night like a broken streetlight. “Keep it down, will you?”
    “Why?” Verbie's voice bloomed in the darkness. “What do you mean keep it down? Why should we? You think this is a raid or something? What are we, commandos? These are our brothers we're talking about here, and this is our place, all of it, free to everybody, power to the people--why should we have to keep it down, huh? _You tell me, huh?__”
    Lydia and Merry were back in the main house, sitting round the scrapwood fire Norm had made to take the chill off the night, curled up, out of it, hunkering down with the rest of them to watch Charlie Chaplin eat his own shoe (“No, no, it's really a gas, like he boils it in a pot and serves up the laces like _spaghetti__”). People were helping themselves to brownies and tea, settling into little groups, stretching out on quilts, thumping the taut bellies of the dogs as if they were drumskins. Nobody made a move as the posse formed behind Marco (and Ronnie, who had no choice but to go if he was going to have any credibility with anybody), because it was too much trouble, let's plead laissez-faire and kick back and let the problem take care of itself. Star didn't want any hassles either--she hated confrontation, hated it--but this was something she had to do, not just for the family or because Marco had stood up and taken it all on himself, but for the girl, for _her.__ Because it had to stop someplace.
    Star hadn't even seen her. She'd been baking, scrubbing, gardening, dreaming. People came, people went. Half the time she didn't recognize the faces round the dinner table, especially on weekends. It didn't matter. She might not have