Drop City

is--”
    “Aw, fuck it, man, listen to you--you're nothing but a hypocrite. I mean, listen to yourself--_if you had anything to do with that girl.__ Yeah, I did. And so did Lester and Dewey and a couple of other guys--including that little shit, Pan, or whatever his name is. She was asking for it--no, she was begging for it, like let's get stoned and ball and get stoned and ball some more, and do you guys have any weed?--and I'm not apologizing to anybody. There isn't a cat on this property that wouldn't have done the same thing, am I right?”
    Lester said he was right. Dewey said nothing, but his eyes were lying in wait.
    Sky Dog--or Bruce, that was his name, _Bruce,__ and to know it was to know the shibboleth that would cut him down to size--let his voice ascend the scale into the upper register of complaint. “I've been here, what, eight, nine months? And you send this fucker here”--again a finger stabbed at Marco, down in his hole--“who's been here like a week to tell _me__ I got to go? Well, I'll tell you, I'm not going anywhere, not even if Norm himself comes knocking on the door, and you want to know why, I'll tell you why--”
    That was when Marco stopped listening. He was thinking about a dog his uncle once had, a husky, one brown eye, one blue, the single wildest canine ever domesticated, like no other dog Marco had ever seen. It didn't want to chase a ball or do tricks or go for a ride in the car, it never fawned or licked your hand or begged at the table, and when it was thrust into the company of other dogs at the park or on the broad humped lawn out back of the school, it wouldn't budge, barely deigning to lift its leg or take the exculpatory sniff. But when it was pushed, when another dog crowded in too close with a ratcheting growl and a thrust of its shoulders, the thing erupted--no warning, just a pure fluid rush of violence so sudden and absolute you couldn't be sure you'd seen it. The other dog, no matter how big, wound up on its back, and his uncle's husky--_Lobo,__ that was his name--was locked at its throat.
    Twice now, in the space of sixty seconds, Marco had been called a fucker to his face, and twice was two times too many. Before _Bruce__ could air the remainder of his grievance in his high nasal wallop of a voice that was absolutely pitched to the key and tenor of the blues--_and no doubt about it, the boy could sing__--Marco reached up and took hold of his left foot, right at the heel of his boot, and jerked it out from under him. In the next instant, Sky Dog came down hard on the edge of the ditch, and in the instant after that he was sputtering and thrashing at the bottom of it, and Marco, with all the calm deliberation in the world, watched his own right fist rise and fall like a piston as he bent to retool this particular _cat's__ features in the most unbrotherly way he could imagine.
    If he'd thought he was ending something, he was wrong, and he should have known better, should have calculated and looked to his best chance, but none of that mattered now. What mattered was Dewey, who clapped an arm around his throat and snatched his head back as if he were rebounding the ball after an errant layup; what mattered was Lester, puff-faced Lester, in his platform boots and wide-brimmed pimp's hat with the silver chain flashing at the crown, who gathered himself atop the mounded dirt and shot two clean balletic kicks to Marco's midsection as Marco fought the hammerlock at his throat and Sky Dog--_Bruce!__--came up out of the trench with both fists flailing. Ten seconds passed, twenty, all three of them going at Marco where he stood immobilized, caught up in Dewey's grip like a man of straw, Alfredo shouting “Break it up! Break it up! Come on, man, _break it up!__”
    Marco had no illusions. It was power against power, what they wanted against what he wanted, and what he wanted was Drop City, nothing less. He twisted, churned his legs, kicked out at Sky Dog and fought the arm clamped round his throat. It was a dance, that's what it was. A jerking, twisting, futile dance punctuated by the wet dull thump of one blow after another. Sky Dog was sloppy, near tears, half his punches glancing off muscle or bone, but Dewey was made out of hammered steel and Lester kept stepping up and aiming his kicks, one after another, as if he were climbing a ladder. “Motherfucker,” he kept repeating, softly, almost tenderly, as if he'd confused the act and the epithet, “you motherfucker.”
    It