Drop City

the stab at humor with a foreshortened smile--he'd been responding to that joke since elementary school. “I don't have a brother.”
    “My father's Italian,” Alfredo said, and he grunted as he heaved a load of dirt up over his shoulder. “My mother's Mexican. That's why I can take the heat--like this? This doesn't bother me at all.”
    Right. But Marco was thinking of his own father, the man he'd known only as a voice over the long-distance wire these past two years and counting. _Where you now?__ his father would shout into the receiver. _Twentynine Palms? Hell, I was there during the war--desert training. For Rommel. Paradise on earth--in winter, anyway . . . Your mother wants to know when you're coming home--isn't that right, Rosemary? Rosemary?__
    There were no hard feelings. It wasn't the usual thing at all, the sort of adolescent fury that goaded his high school buddies to ram their screaming V-8s down the throat of every street in the development and answer violence with violence across the kitchen table. In fact, he missed his father--missed both his parents. There were times, hefting his pack, sticking out his thumb, waking in a strange bed or in some nameless place that was exactly like every other place, when it infected him with a dull ache, like a tooth starting to go bad, but mostly now his parents were compacted in his thoughts till they were little more than strangers. He'd skipped bail. There was a warrant out for his arrest, the puerile little brick of a misdemeanor compounded by interstate flight and the fugitive months and years till it had become a towering jurisdictional wall--with a charge of draft evasion cemented to the top of it. Home? This was his home now.
    _Sorry, Dad, but the answer is never.__
    European history--that was what defined Marco's father, and he'd taught it, chapter and verse, out of the same increasingly irrelevant textbook to an endless succession of unimpressed faces for thirty years, thirty years at least. _This new class of tenth graders?__ he'd say at the dinner table, still in his brown corduroy jacket with the elbow patches that shone as if they'd been freshly greased, the only father in the whole development of two hundred and fifty-plus homes to wear a mustache. _They're more like the Visigoths than the Greeks. Not like in your day, Marco--and what a difference five years makes. You people were scholars!__ he'd roar, as if he meant it, and then he'd laugh. And laugh.
    “We're Irish, mainly. My last name's Connell. Everybody thinks it's Mark O'Connell, but my father was a joker, I guess. And I guess he saw me going to distant lands.”
    “Really? Ever been out of the country?”
    Marco set down his shovel to work at an embedded stone with the business end of the pick. He glanced up and then away again. “Not really.”
    And then Alfredo was onto travel, the names of places clotting on his tongue like lint spun out of a dryer, no two-thousand-pound Wisconsin cheeses for him--it was London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Venice, Florence--he was an art student at one time, did Marco know that? Yeah, and he'd sketched his way across Europe, from the Louvre to the Rijksmuseum to the Prado. That was the only way to do it, like a month in every city, just living there in some _pension__ or hostel, meeting people in cafes, scoring hash on the street and going straight to the bakery after the cafes close for your _pane__ and your baguette. He must have talked without drawing a breath for a solid fifteen minutes.
    Somewhere there, in the space between Amsterdam and the Place de la Concorde, the crows started in, a bawling screech that came out of the trees and circled overhead as the big glistening birds dive-bombed an owl they'd flushed from its roost. “The owls get them at night when they're helpless, did you know that?” Marco said, glad for a chance to change the subject. “That's what that's all about. Survival. And imagine us--imagine if there was another ape species here to challenge _us,__ and I don't mean like gorillas and chimps, but another humanoid.”
    Alfredo didn't seem to have anything to say to that--he believed in universal harmony, brotherhood, vegetarianism, peace, love and understanding. He didn't want to know about the war between crows and owls, let alone apes, or the way the crows mobbed the nests of lesser birds--sparrows, finches, juncos--to crush and devour the young. That had nothing to do with the world he lived in. “Heavy,” that's what