Drop City

and peeling vinyl cushions scavenged from the rusty chaise longue out by the pool and a khaki sleeping bag that looked as if it had been dragged behind a produce truck for a couple hundred miles. Someone had made a halfhearted attempt to sweep the place, and there was a mound of brown-paper bags, doughnut boxes, shredded newspapers and broken glass piled up like drift in the far corner. The only light came from a pair of candles guttering on either end of the plank--calderas of wax, unsteady shadows, a hash pipe balanced atop a box of kitchen matches--and as the jug of cheap red wine circulated from hand to hand it picked up the faintest glint, as if a dying sun were trapped in the belly of the glass.
    “So what is it,” Lester said, looking up from the floor with a tight thin smile, “Halloween?” Beside him, Franklin ducked his head and gave out a quick truncated bark of a laugh. “It's trick or treat, right?” Lester said. “Is that what it is?”
    “Yeah,” Franklin said, and he lifted the jug to his lips but had to set it down again because the joke was just too much, “but we ain't got no candy.”
    Ronnie found a spot on the floor and eased himself down as if he belonged, and maybe he did, but the others just stood there, shifting from foot to foot. “It was a meeting,” Ronnie said, and then Verbie, who never knew when to shut up, started in on a blow-by-blow account of who had said what to whom, going on about the shit in the woods, the weekend hippies, the septic fields that needed to be dug, and she was just working her way around to the point of the whole thing, trying to soften the impact, when Marco spoke up for the first time.
    He was leaning against the wall, arms folded against his chest. He was wearing a clean white T-shirt and a pair of striped suspenders that stretched taut over his chest. “We want you out,” he said, “all of you.” He gave Sky Dog a look. “And that includes you, my friend.”
    Sky Dog never even lifted his head, but Lester made a face. “Ooo-ooo, listen to you,” he said, “and what's your sign, baby--Aries? Got to be--the ram, man, right? Ram it on in, huh? Ram it to 'em. Or is it that other _Ares__ I'm thinking of, god of war, right? Is that it? God of war?”
    There was a snicker from Franklin, but the others just sat there. The record rotated. The jug wine went from one hand to another.
    “But listen, you want to know about war, and I don't mean this SDS shit and setting the flag on fire on your mother's back lawn while us niggers go on over to Vietnam and smoke gooks for you, you talk to my man Dewey here”--and he indicated the man seated to his left--“because Dewey was dug in at Khe Sanh for something like eight fucking months and he can kick your white ass from here to Detroit and back.”
    “That's not the point,” Verbie was saying.
    “Nobody wants to get violent,” Jiminy put in, and he loomed over Verbie like the representative of another species, all bone and sinew, the white shanks of his legs flashing beneath the cutaway tails and Donald Duck grinning in endless replication from the hard little knot of his little boy's briefs, “it's just that we all, I mean, for the sake of the community--”
    This was hard-going, very hard, and Star couldn't contain herself any longer. “You raped that girl,” she said, and it was as if she'd ripped the wiring out of the stereo or shot out the candles with a pair of smoking guns. The room fell silent. She looked at Lester, and Lester, hands dangling over the narrow peaks of his knees, looked back at her. This wasn't peace and love, this wasn't brothers and sisters. This was ugly, and she could have stayed home in Peterskill, New York, if she wanted ugliness.
    “Come on, Star,” Ronnie said finally, but Lester cut him off. “I didn't _rape__ nobody,” he said, “because if anything happened here last night it was consensial, know what I mean? Shit, you were here, _Pan__--you know what went down.”
    “Fuck it,” Marco said. “You're out of here, all of you.”
    “Right,” Jiminy seconded the motion. “Look, I'm sorry, but we all--”
    “All what?” Lester snarled. “Consulted the _I Ching__? Took a vote, let's get rid of the niggers? Is that it?” His voice was like the low rumble of a truck climbing a hill, very slow and deliberate. “Shit, you're just trying to tell me what I already know--peace and love, brother, do your own thing, baby, but only if your precious ass is