Drop City

usually or one of those little cups they poach eggs in, an example of which he'd had and prized for about a week until it got lost, and he laid out both his arms like exhibits at the morgue to show the professor his tracks that were six months gone because the truth of the matter was heroin scared the shit out of him and he was never going to do anything other than maybe snort it ever again. Drew was dead. And Dead Mike, he was dead too. “But Free Love--oh, man, don't get me started. That's what this is all about--the _chicks,__ you know what I mean?” That was when he realized Star was watching him, her knees pulled up to her chin and locked tight in the clasp of her arms, the firelight like hot grease on her face and that smirk she had, that smirk that was more of a put-down than anything she could ever say.
    “What about VD?” the professor was saying, leaning in close with the microphone, his face hanging there at the end of his veiny blistered old man's throat like a piñata, the gift-shop peace medallion dangling like a rip cord below that and his eyes like two wriggling leg-kicking toads, and Pan--Ronnie--felt so _embarrassed,__ so fucking mortified and put-upon, he actually jerked the microphone out of the professor's hand and then, not knowing what to do with it, flung it into the fire in one smooth uncontested motion.
    “What the hell you think you're doing?” the professor wanted to know, and his old lady--the poet--said, “American Primitive,” and laughed a long-gone laugh.
    Ronnie was on his feet now, not much kicking power in a pair of huaraches, but enough to send the rest of the apparatus--the big silver-and-gray box with the knobs and dials and slow-turning _spools__--into the fire too, and the professor shouting and grabbing for the machine amidst the coals and the black and quiescent remains of the deer.
    “You crazy son of a bitch!” That was what the professor said, but it was nothing to Ronnie, he wasn't even listening. He heard Star laugh though, a hard harsh dart of a laugh that stuck right in him as he went off into the night, looking for something else altogether.
    Later, much later, after sitting around a campfire with some people he didn't recognize--or maybe he did recognize them--he thought about going up to the back house and seeing what Sky Dog and the spades were up to, but then he thought he wouldn't. Better not press his luck. There were people who wanted him gone--and here Alfredo's face loomed up out of a shallow grave in the back corner of his mind, followed in quick succession by Reba's and Verbie's--and what happened the other night had split the place down the middle. Lester and Sky Dog and the rest had been voted out, and that meant they didn't show for meals and kept strictly to themselves, running the Lincoln down to the store for wine, cigarettes and processed cheese sandwiches every couple hours, but they might as well have been in another county for all they had to do with Drop City. They'd smelled the meat--Ronnie had seen them out on the porch of the back house as the light faded, and he almost wished they would have come down and joined the party so he could show them what he'd done with a .30-06 rifle and two shining copper-jacketed bullets, but they weren't interested, because it was war now, and you had to choose sides. And that was no contest as far as Pan was concerned. He was for the side in control, the side that had all the chicks and the food and the big house with the KLH speakers and all of those five hundred or eight hundred or however many records that were lined up on the shellacked pine bookcases in random order and was there a radio station in the _country__ with a better collection?
    The night deepened. Shouts and laughter ran at him across the lawn and the music pulsed steadily from the back of the main house. He was standing there in the bushes, where he'd just zipped up after responding to the call of nature, and he could feel a headache coming on. It had been a _day,__ all right, and he felt pretty glorious, all things considered, but what he needed was maybe a little of that sticky Spañada Star was always drinking--or Mateus, if anybody had any. Sure. That's what he needed, to knock down the headache and put a mellow cap on the evening, and he headed back across the lawn, toward where the shadows danced round the cookfire.
    Star wasn't there. She wasn't up in the treehouse either, because he hoisted himself up the ladder to see, and