Drop City

penance, Ronnie included. As soon as Mendocino Bill opened his mouth, both cops went for him, even as Merry, Maya and the Krishna cat began chanting “Peace and Love, Peace and Love, Off the Pigs, Peace and Love.” Ronnie--_Pan__--gave the cops as wide a berth as he could, but he found himself crushed up against the railing as they dragged the big man from the porch, kicked his legs out from under him and forced his pale blubbery arms behind his back for the wedding of the cuffs. “He's not here,” Maya squeaked, “Norm's not here!” The cops ignored her. They weren't even breathing hard, and what they were scenting now was a kind of freedom they'd only dreamed of: hippies, a whole parade of them, resisting arrest.
    Mendocino Bill--he was a loudmouthed know-it-all like Alfredo, up to his ears in _Popular Mechanics__ in high school, no doubt a ham radio operator and an eagle scout on top of it, and here he was writhing in the dust on the fulcrum of his belly like a bowling pin set spinning by a strike right down the middle of the alley. So what if he'd been to Selma, so what if he could eat four plates of mush to anybody else's two, so what if he was one of the brothers and sisters of Drop City and the cops were the pigs? Despite himself, Pan felt something soar inside him to see the loudmouth brought low--until the second cop, the silent one, herded everybody off the porch and lined them up, hands against the wall and legs spread.
    “What's the problem, Officer?” Dale Murray was saying as the first cop patted him down. “I mean, what'd we do? A little kidding? Is that it? I mean, I was only joking. Can't you take a joke? You want to tell me jokes're against the law now?”
    “Norm's not here,” Maya kept repeating in her thin strand of a voice. She had her head down, her hands framed on the wall and the dried-out ends of her hair dangling, and she was talking to the ground. She was no beauty, and if it weren't for the very loose scene at Drop City, and all those strung-out horny cats like Mendocino Bill and Jiminy, she'd never have gotten laid in a million years. “He's not. I mean, _really.__ He went to Santa Rosa for like supplies and things and he never--”
    “What was he driving?” the cop wanted to know, the first one, the talker. “VW van, right?”
    “Don't tell him anything,” Merry said, and Ronnie saw that she'd clenched her face against the whole world, even as her eyes bled out of her head with the residue of the acid. He felt something for her then, something that took in her straining legs, her arched back and the painted breasts that stood up firm under the pressure of her out-thrust arms, and it wasn't just lust. She was all right, and more than all right--she was like Star, only better.
    “You got ID?” the second cop repeated. “You? And you?”
    Ronnie showed him his New York driver's license--_Ronald Daniel Sommers, 8 Crestview Avenue, Peterskill, New York, D.O.B .12/2/48, eyes hazel, hair brown, 5'10", 162 lbs.--__and kept his mouth shut. They weren't interested in him. They were interested in Dale Murray, who had the better part of a lid of grass tucked down the front of his pants in a crotch-warmed plastic bag, and they were even more interested in Merry, who was wearing nothing but body paint from the waist up. If Norm had been in the house when the commotion started up, he was long gone by now--out the back door, across the yard and into the trees--and whatever he'd done with the van, the cops weren't going to find it here. They weren't going to find anything beyond Dale Murray's pot, Mendocino Bill's sweating carcass and Merry's tits--which was plenty, for one day--and as the people out back began to drift round the house and surround them, the cops lightened up noticeably.
    Ronnie was still flying high, way up there at thirty-five thousand feet, cruise control, the billowing clouds--_leavin' on a jet plane__--and none of it really affected him, though he resented the prodding and poking. Resentment, that was what he was made of, and the realization made him bristle inwardly, just a bit. He resented the cops, resented Mendocino Bill and Alfredo and Reba and her tripped-out filthy little suicidal brats, resented his parents and Star and Marco and maybe even the teepee cat out in the desert. Standing there in the late sun, with his hands spread flat against the outside wall of the house and his brothers and sisters gathered all around him and the cops starting to hedge