Drop City

doubt, tripping her brains out and balling anybody who could manage to get his zipper down. “What do you think, Norm--think they'll be back?”
    It was a stupid question, and Norm didn't respond--and if he had, it probably would have been with some put-down like _Where do you think they'll come looking for me, city hall?__ He didn't respond because he hadn't come down all the way yet--he was just a little too jittery and bug-eyed--and in a rare moment of empathy, Ronnie saw how the day must have cut through him, what with the accident and watching the horse breathe its last and then having to hightail it into the woods. _Hightail it. And where had that expression come from? Some cowboy movie?__ Pan had a brief glimmer of Hopalong Cassidy spurring a big white horse through the sagebrush, a round black-and-white screen the size of a fishbowl and his father screaming from the kitchen because some ingrate--that's what he used to say, _ingrate__--had used up all the ice in the tray without filling it again. Norm just stood there. He fed the rest of the bun into his mouth and chewed mechanically, and when Ronnie handed him a second hot dog nestled in a fresh bun, he took it wordlessly.
    It was a moment, and Ronnie was enjoying it. But then Reba came dragging her six-hundred-pound face across the back lot like some sort of bled-out zombie, already complaining from a hundred feet away, and the moment was gone. “Norm,” she was hollering, “did you hear? The cops. They were here. They're looking for you.”
    Norm had heard. He'd been crouching in the woods in an acid coma for three hours with the blood crusting on his face and his glasses snapped in two, hadn't he? What did she think--he was hiding out there for the sheer thrill of it? They watched her, all three of them, as she made her way toward the flash and snap of the fire. “You heard about Che?” she called from twenty feet away.
    Norm grunted something in response, something vaguely affirmative, and then she was right there, swaying over the balls of her feet, her pigtails unraveling round twin ligatures of pink rubber bands. “He's all right, he's going to be cool, but I tell you, he really freaked us out . . . I mean, for a while there he wasn't even breathing.” There was a pause, and nothing filled it. Her eyes were like grappling hooks, tearing at them, tugging and heaving and pulling. “But Charley Horse,” she said, “what a bummer.”
    Lydia said, “Yeah, bummer,” and nodded her head.
    Norm looked at his feet. “You know what you do with a dead horse?”
    “Beat it,” Ronnie said.
    “Render it. They use it for dog food, glue, whatever. I never liked the thing anyway. It was just this big, stupid, four-legged sack of shit my ex-wife just had to have. _You got a ranch, don't you? Well then you gotta have a horse.__ Brilliant logic, huh?”
    Reba stood there, hard-eyed and pugnacious, her feet splayed, braids coming undone, already hurtling into middle age. Ronnie saw the two vertical lines gouged into the flesh between her eyebrows, the parentheses at the corners of her mouth: married too young, knocked up too soon, that's what she was all about. And what did she want? Answers. She wanted answers. “So what are we going to do, Norm? You know they're going to come back with a search warrant. You know they're going to close us down. What then? Where we going to go? I mean, Alfredo and me, we've given like two years of our _life__ to this place--I mean, this is it. This was where we were going to stay for the rest of our lives--and Che's life, and Sunshine's.” She looked away, as if she couldn't bear the sight of him with his slumped shoulders and bloodied face and taped-up glasses, and then she lifted her head and came right back at him. “So what's it going to be, Norm? What are we going to do now?”
    Pan skewered another hot dog on his willow stick and thrust it into the flames. _Close the place down?__ He was just getting comfortable. Sure, some of his brothers and sisters might have been a pain in the ass, but they all knew him, and for the first time in his life he had a purpose, whether anybody wanted to admit it or not--he was the provider here, or one of them. One of the main ones. He'd got the deer, hadn't he? And quail--he'd shot quail too. And fish--that's all he did was fish, and even the vegetarians couldn't complain about that. They ate for free, and that was the whole point of going back to the land, wasn't it?
    Reba's