Drop City

Desperately. He found his cutoffs and stepped into them, and forget the shirt, forget the huaraches, he was in the grip of something urgent here. He was thinking _Leaves, I'll just use leaves,__ when Lydia's purple Elizabeth Taylor eyes flashed open. “Oh,” she said. “What? Oh, it's you.” And then she was on her hands and knees, stretching, her great pumped-up tits suspended beneath her like airships, like zeppelins, and she was saying “Come on over here, Ronnie, _Pan,__ come on, just hold me, just for a minute, huh? You got a minute, don't you?”
    He didn't have a minute. He didn't have fifteen seconds. The deer, all that gamy protein and wild hard gristle and backwoods fat, was having its revenge. His stomach clenched again, the image of gas rising in a beaker in Chemistry class set up camp in his brain, and he was out the door, through the house--startled faces, oh, it's Pan and what's the hurry?--and out across the blistered lawn and into the nearest clump of bushes he could find. And then, finally, he was squatting, no thought of septic fields or clogged toilets or luxury accommodations in mind, and it was all coming out of him in a savage uncontainable rush.
    What he thought was that he'd feel better as the day wore on, but he thought wrong. His head throbbed, his insides kept churning. And though he made his slow careful way through a plate of rice mush, grain by grain, _that__ went right through him too. He wound up lying beside the swollen green carpet of the pool through the late afternoon and into the evening, refusing all attempts at conversation and invitations to eat (Merry), ball (Lydia) or inhale drugs (half a dozen people, cats and chicks alike). Every once in a while, hammered by the sun, he'd wallow lethargically in the pool, but even that made his brain pound and his gut clench, and he didn't really rouse himself till somebody pulled the shades down over the day and dusk came to sit in the trees like a vulture and everything went gray. Then he had a few shaky hits from a bottle of Don Ricardo special re-posado tequila he kept under the seat of the car and went out across the lawn to inspect the remains of the deer. There was no one around, and the fire he and Marco had made--the smoking fire, not the barbecue, because the meat had to be preserved somehow--wasn't even warm. It was a circle of white ash flecked with cinders, and you could lay your palm on it and feel absolutely nothing. The deer--the unchoice cuts, the parts they hadn't bothered with in the rush to get the blood off their hands and the party under way--dangled from a thin strand of wire like the leavings of some twisted vigilante squad, its head skewed at an impossible angle, backbone gnawed to a blue-black ripple of bone. While he'd been asleep, while he'd been lying up beside the pool as if he'd been gutshot himself, the flies had been busy making a playground of the thing, and he saw that now, but it didn't affect him one way or the other. He didn't even bother to raise a hand and flick them away. It was getting dark. And the meat--the deer, his triumph--had already begun to stink.

Drop City
    PART TWO
    THE THIRTY MILE
    The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife.
    --St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 7:4

Drop City
    7
    Cecil Harder was fortifying himself at the bar of the Three Pup Roadhouse, half a mile down the Fairbanks Road from Boynton. He was on his third Oly and his second shot of Wild Turkey, and in about three minutes he was going to slam his way out the screen door, get into Richard Schrader's pickup and drive the remaining hundred fifty-nine and a half miles into the city. There were a few things he needed for the cabin--a new axe handle, duct tape, kerosene for the lanterns, rice, .22 cartridges, beans, yeast, sugar--and Richard had given him a whole long list too, but that wasn't the reason he was going.
    He gazed up from his nested hands. The air in the roadhouse was as thick as a wall with residual dimness and the dust that was nailed to it in two thin streams of sunlight. Mosquitoes faded in and out of it, all but stationary, and they beat at both sides of the windows as if it were some kind of contest, as if all they'd ever subsisted on was glass. He threw back the Wild Turkey and took a long pull at his beer.
    There was a new woman working the place, a summer person, a tourist, as lean and tall and plain-faced as a