Drop City

more than ninety pounds dressed out? It was meat, free meat, and it could feed everybody on the place for a week at least. Did they really expect to go through life choking down soy patties and eggplant on rye? Falafel? _Tofu kabobs,__ for Christ's sake? Shit, they should have given him a medal.
    As it was, he spent the whole afternoon skinning and quartering the thing, slippery, ugly work, no doubt about it, and the only one who'd give him a hand was Marco, because Marco understood what going back to nature was all about--he'd been hunting and fishing since he was eight years old, grouse, rabbit, squirrel, duck blinds on a morning made out of ice, standing waist-deep in water that shot by like a freight train and nothing but two stunted half-developed swaybacked hatchery trout to show for it, and you'd better hope your mother made meat loaf. He'd been there--there and back. Just like Ronnie. Like _Pan.__ And while Che and Sunshine stuck their fingers up their noses and stood there gaping and half the commune seemed to just drop what they were doing and drift by to scold and kibitz and feature the way a few nice venison steaks might look sizzling on a grill over a bed of hot coals, Ronnie tugged at the hide in a blizzard of flies--he was thinking he might make a doeskin jacket maybe, with a fringe--and Marco bent to sever the thin tegument that held it all together with the slick glassy edge of his hunting knife.
    “What happened to your face?” Ronnie asked in the course of things, his hands dipped in gore, the sun quavering in the trees like some novelty item from Japan. The butt end of a joint clung to his lower lip; a quart of beer, slick with bloody palm prints, tilted out of the stiff yellow grass beside him. It was late in the afternoon, and the smells from the kitchen were strictly vegetarian.
    Marco looked up, grinning, but it was a lopsided Floyd Patterson sort of grin. His left eye was swollen up like a sausage in a pan and a crusted-over gash dropped down into the facial hair below it. “A difference of opinion,” he said, and that was all right, because Ronnie wasn't prepared for any heavy trip about the spades and Sky Dog and who did what to whom in the back house night before last, so he just nodded and let it go.
    The two of them kept sawing away, first one side, then the other, and before long the hide pulled back from the flesh like a wet rug, but didn't you have to salt it or rub it with lye or something? And for leather, you had to get the fur off too, and that was a drag, a lifetime sentence, no less . . . That was what Ronnie was thinking as the fat bluebottle flies scorched the air and the voice of Tracy Nelson, strong and true, rose up high over the currents of the main house. They were out behind the pool on a dead bleached strip of grass, and they'd hung the carcass from a branch, to bleed it, but just for an hour--they were both afraid of the heat, because who'd ever shot a deer this time of year? Nobody. Nobody but Pan. Yes, and here it was, in the flesh. This morning it had been down by the river, pawing around in the mud, pulling up tender shoots of this and that, off on some trip of its own no one could ever have imagined or predicted, and now it was dead, now it was his.
    Pan was feeling it--the grass, the beer, the pure streaming uncontainable _rush__ of accomplishment, his _deer,__ his _first deer__--and he began to sing along with the music, _When it all comes down, you got to go back to Mother Earth.__ Oh, yes. And he let it rip too, no reason to be shy about it because everybody told him he had a nice voice and you couldn't hold back when you were trying to sing any more than you could when you were trying to talk French or bring a ten-speed bicycle down Potrero Hill with a full pack and a load of groceries on your back. _I don't care how rich you are, I don't care what you're worth__--he threw his head back, really getting into it, on a roll, unbeatable, when the record choked off with a screech and almost instantaneously somebody put on some frantic self-congratulatory raga that was like _compulsive masturbation__ or something. “Fuck,” he said, “I hate that. I really hate that.”
    Marco took the joint from his lips with two bloody fingers. “Hate what? Ravi Shankar?”
    “No--I mean, yes. Shit, yes. It's utter crap. But what I mean is when you're really like into a song, you know, and somebody just”--he waved a hand, his own bloody knife, as if to say _You know