Drop City

were planning to use for yogurt, not to mention cornflakes and coffee, washed out into the dirt.
    “Wow,” said a voice behind her, “--an offering to the gods. I _am__ impressed.”
    She was squatting in the shade of the oak tree they tethered the goats to overnight so as to prevent them from stripping every last green and burgeoning thing off the face of the earth, and she pulled up her smile and swung her head round. She was happy--exalted, ready to shout out and testify, spilled milk and all--because this was what she'd always wanted, living off the land with her brothers and sisters, and fuck Ronnie, really, just _fuck him.__ Okay. Fine. But she was smiling at nothing: there was no one there.
    Was it that bad, then? Flashbacks were one thing, but aural hallucinations?
    “Up here,” the voice said, and she looked up into the broad gray avenues of the tree and saw the soles of a pair of dirt-blackened feet, feet like the inside of a tomb, and the naked white slash of a man's thighs and hips and then his bare chest and his hair and his face. He was grinning down at her. Spraddling a branch as big around as the pipes that fed water to the kids-on-bicycles and mom-in-the-kitchen suburban development where she'd grown up amidst the roar of lawnmowers and the smoke of the cooking grills. _Barbecue. Lilac bushes. K through 12.__
    What could she say? She automatically raised the rigid plane of her hand to shield her eyes against the glare, but there was no glare, only the deep shadows of the tree and the soft glowing nimbus of the sun.
    Behind him--to his left and just above him, and how could she have failed to notice it?--was a treehouse, the very image of the one her father had built for her in the wild cherry tree in their backyard when she turned eight because that was what she'd wanted for her birthday and nothing else. His voice came floating down to her: “Goats being naughty or were you really trying to propitiate the gods?”
    Propitiate? Who _was__ this guy?
    “I was going to make yogurt--for everybody--but Dewlap here, or maybe it's Amanda--doesn't seem to want to cooperate.”
    “You need a goat wrangler.”
    “Right. You wouldn't be a goat wrangler, would you--by any chance, I mean?”
    He was a naked man sitting in a tree. He laughed. “You got me pegged. But really that's only my avocation--my true vocation, what I was born here on this earth to do, is build treehouses. You like it, by the way?”
    His name was Marco, and Norm Sender, the guy--cat--who'd inherited these forty-seven sun-washed acres above the Russian River and founded Drop City two years ago, had picked him up hitchhiking on the road out of Bolinas. Marco had built the treehouse from scrap lumber in a single afternoon--yesterday afternoon, in fact, while she was taking a siesta, meditating, pulling weeds and scrubbing communal pots--and when he reached down a bare arm to her she took hold of his hand and he pulled her up onto the branch alongside him as if she weighed no more than the circumambient air. She was in his lap, practically in his lap, and he was naked, but not hard, because this wasn't about that--this was about brother- and sisterhood, about being up in a tree at a certain hour of the morning and letting the world run itself without them. “This is Mount Olympus,” he said, “and we are the gods and givers of light, and can you see that stain in the dirt down there on the puny earth where the goat girl made sacrifice?”
    She could, and that was funny, the funniest thing in the world, goat's milk spilled in the dirt and the unadorned tin pail on its side and the goats bleating and dropping their pellets and some early riser--it was Reba, blowsy, blown, ever-mothering Reba--coming out of the kitchen in the main house with a pan of dishwater to drip judiciously on the marguerites in the kitchen garden. She laughed till her chest hurt and the twin points of oxygen deprivation began to dig talons into the back of her head, and then he led her into the treehouse, six feet wide, eight long, with a carpet, a guitar, an unfurled sleeping bag and a roof of sweet-smelling cedar shake. And what was the first thing he did then? He rolled a joint, licked off the ends, and handed it to her.

Drop City
    2
    The roadside was silken with ferns, wildflowers, slick wet grass that jutted up sharply to catch the belly of the fog, and he was standing there in his interrupted jeans with his thumb out. He was wearing a faded denim jacket,