Drop City

horse,” he muttered, and there it was, on its side and heaving in the ditch.
    “I just hope for your sake, mister,” the old man was saying--and there _he__ was, like a pop-up doll at Norm's elbow, with a white strained face and teeth that didn't seem to fit in his head (borrowed teeth, and that was a concept)--“I just hope you got insurance is all I got to say.”
    Next thing Marco knew, he was running. Half a mile down the streaming blacktop to the Drop City turnoff, and then up the rutted dirt road to where the main house stood rippling against the trees. “Get help!” Norm had shouted in his face. “Get Alfredo! Get anybody!” And suddenly Marco was running, heaving himself down the road in a kind of pure white-hot acid-fueled panic, his boots flapping first at the pavement, then the dust. Somebody, anybody! He vaulted a rotting fence and pounded across an open field, thinking he'd better calm himself, better do whatever it was people were expected to do in a situation like this--shake it off, wake up, take responsibility--but the drug wouldn't let him. It was in his throat, in his head, it was strangling his heart, eating his lungs.
    There was nobody on the front porch, nobody in the front room. The music was there, though, playing all on its own, loud, raucous, a clash of metal like a whole marching band falling down the stairs, and why didn't he recognize the tune? He saw plates of half-eaten food perched on the arms of chairs, the still-wet chopsticks like evil insects crouched over a splay of rice, beans, tofu; he saw record jackets come to ground like wind-swirled refuse, and in the back corner of the bookshelf, the black glistening puddle of a record working its way round the turntable. And that was strange, the music living a life of its own in a house with no human occupants. It was like a ghost story. A fairy tale. Nobody home and the porridge still warm on the table. The meeting room presented more of the same. Ditto the kitchen. He looked up and the square-headed orange tom looked down on him from its perch atop the refrigerator.
    And then, beneath the music--or threaded through it--he heard the human noise in the backyard, a wailing, a hush, then a clamor of voices, repeating now, slight return: wailing, a hush, clamor of voices. He took himself out the screen door and there they were, the whole tribe, gathered round the swimming pool and what appeared to be a very wet cloth doll stretched out on the flagstone coping. That was when the acid let go of him just long enough to record the scene: it was one of the kids, one of Reba's kids, and Jiminy was pumping at the kid's chest like a Marine Corps medic on the evening news and everybody else was wringing their hands and jumping in and out of the green murk that was the pool. He saw Ronnie inflate his cheeks and go down, and then Alfredo bobbing to the surface in a maelstrom of hair. “What's wrong?” he wanted to know, snatching at the first person his hand led him to, but he was so full of Norm and the accident he didn't recognize her, not at first.
    “It's Che,” Merry told him. She was naked to the waist, shivering. She wore body paint, red and blue tendrils striating her limbs like extruded veins. Her eyes didn't seem to be in her head--they were just floating there, three inches to the left of her face. “He drowned, or he fell in or something, and we can't--I mean, nobody knows where _Sunshine__ is.”
    A shriek cut the air, every mother's nightmare. “Sunshine!” Reba wailed, drawing out the last syllable till it caught in the back of her throat. “Sunshine! Come out, baby, come out! It's not funny!” She flung herself across the yard, beat at the stiff brush of the chaparral with angry hands. She was puffed up, furious, just coming on to boil. “It's not a game. Come out, goddamnit! Come out, you hear me, you little bitch!”
    “She's not in the pool,” somebody said, and in the confusion, Marco couldn't see who it was.
    “The river, what about the river?” He glanced up to register Verbie--she was perched on the wet coping, her eyes dilated, hair glued to her head. “Did anybody search the river?”
    A look of helplessness swept over them, lost eyes, mouths agape, the slumped shoulders and agitated hands, and how could anybody be expected to do anything at a time like this? It was Druid Day. They were wiped, all of them. They didn't want to save children, they wanted to _be__ children. “What do you mean, the