Drop City

words hung on the air, accusatory, demanding, tragic, self-pitying: _What are we going to do now?__
    Norm wasn't staring at his feet anymore. He straightened his shoulders as if he'd just woken up, tucked the remains of the second hot dog in his mouth and slicked back his hair with the palms of his hands. He was thirty-seven years old. There was gray in his beard. His toes were so twisted they looked as if they'd been grafted on. “What are we going to do now?” he echoed. “We're going to have a meeting, that's what we're going to do.”

Drop City
    14
    This meeting wasn't anything like the last one. All the air had gone out of the day, a slow insidious deflation that was so wearying it wasn't even worth thinking about, and by the time Norm put out the word, half the population of Drop City had already crashed and burned. People were stretched out on sofas, stained mattresses, sleeping bags, on mats of pine boughs and the backseats of cars, their faces drawn, hair bedraggled, sleeping off the effects of simultaneously opening all those doors in their minds. Star was asleep herself, her face pressed to the gently heaving swell of Marco's rib cage, when Verbie came up the ladder to the treehouse and told her to get up, it was an emergency, and everybody--everybody, no exceptions--was due in the meeting room in fifteen minutes.
    Star didn't know what to think. She was in the treehouse, with Marco, and she'd been asleep--that much was clear. Beyond that, everything was a jumble. It felt like the middle of the night, but it was light out, and for the life of her she couldn't have said whether it was dawn or dusk. The light had no source, no direction--it just held, as gray and dense as water, and the limbs of the oak were suspended in it like the superstructure of a dream. But she hadn't had any dreams--she couldn't even remember going to bed. She looked up into the branches of the tree for clues, but it was just a tree, hanging over her with all its ribs showing. It gave off a smell of gall, astringent and sharp, and whether it was a morning smell or an evening smell, she couldn't say. Birds came to the branches like dark, flung stones. Marco slept on. She couldn't find her panties--or her shorts--and something seemed to have bitten her in a series of leapfrogging welts that climbed up her naked abdomen and then vanished beneath her breasts. Where were her shoes? She sat up and looked around her.
    Suddenly she was frightened. Emergency? What emergency? She summoned up a picture of the little boy then--Che--his hair kinked and wild, skin the color of olive oil thickened in the pan and his eyes sucked back into his head as if they were going to hide there forever, and she felt the impress of his cold lips on hers, lips like two copulating earthworms, like flesh without fire--but hadn't all that been settled? Hadn't she saved him? Saved the day?
    It wasn't morning. That would be too much to hope for. It was dusk, and she knew it now. She could taste it on the air, hear it in the way the birds bickered and complained. It was Druid Day, the longest day of the year, and the worst, by far the worst--and it was still going on. Marco lay there beside her, his hair splayed across his face, his right fist balled up over his temple as if to ward off a blow. She listened to him breathe a moment, absorbed in the slow sure weave of it--ravel, unravel, ravel again--and then she shook him awake.
    “What?” he said, propping himself up on his elbows so she could see the full spill of him.
    “It's Norm. Some kind of emergency. Norm called a meeting--”
    “Emergency? Now? What time is it?”
    “Nine, maybe--I don't know. I thought it was morning.”
    “What kind of emergency--did the pump burn out in the well or something? Or let me guess: Reba lost her kids again. Or Pan, what about him? Did he fall into his wienie fire and get all singed around the ears?”
    “Verbie didn't say. But she sounded freaked out.”
    “She always sounds freaked out.”
    He was reaching for her, to pull her back down into the sleeping bag, but she pushed his hand away. “I'm scared,” she said. “After today . . . the kids, the horse, I mean. The whole thing. We're out of control here, Marco--everybody's out of control.”
    “Yeah,” he said, giving her a smile so faint it was barely there. “But isn't that the point?”
    The main house was ablaze with the power company's light, the light Norm and Alfredo were always hassling them to