Drop City

long week mobilized in grief--_Paulette! You're throwing your life away, your life away!__--but she was calm that day too. She'd made up her mind to go, and that was it.
    The sweet cold wine massaged her throat and condensed her headache till it was a hard black little India rubber ball come to rest somewhere in the backcourt of her mind. She was standing in a knot of people--Marco, Norm, Alfredo, Reba, Harmony, Deuce, all of them talking at once, talking logistics, talking _Alaska__--and she closed her eyes and rode the wave of exuberance that was washing over Drop City even now, even as Druid Day became something else--the day after Druid Day--and that was a holiday too. Sure it was. Didn't they have a bonfire? Didn't they have drugs, wine, beer? And weren't they going to dance till they dropped?
    Just before the fire went up, when everybody was gathered in the field to watch Norm wave the ceremonial torch and make another of his rocket-propelled speeches--_Part of ourselves, people, let's all just step up and throw some part of ourselves on the funeral pyre of old Drop City__--Merry had retrieved the atlas from the high shelf in the kitchen where it was wedged between _The Whole Earth Catalogue__ and _Joy of Cooking.__ Star had come in to refill her glass, and Lydia and Maya were there too, mashing avocados for guacamole, and they all stood round the kitchen table as Merry traced her finger across the map of Alaska to the black dot on the swooping blue river that was Boynton. “There it is,” she said, “Drop City North,” and they all leaned forward to see that it was real, a place like any other, a destination. “And look,” she added, measuring out the distance with the width of a fingernail, “there's Fairbanks. And wow, _Nome.__”
    No one said a word, but they all seemed to have caught the same fever. They'd all traveled to get here--that was part of the scene, seeing the country, the world, before you were shriveled up and dead like your parents. Lydia was from Sacramento originally, but she'd been to Puerto Vallarta, Key West and Nova Scotia, and Maya had hitchhiked all the way out here from Chicago. Merry was from Iowa, and Star had been across the Great Plains, through the Rockies and the high desert--all those rambling brown dusty miles--and that was nothing, nothing at all. Here was the chance to fall off the map, to see the last and best place and lay claim to bragging rights forever. _So you went to Bali, the French Riviera, the Ivory Coast? Yeah? Well, I was in__ Alaska.
    But where was the music? Weren't they going to dance? Wasn't that what Norm had said--_We are going to dance like nobody's ever danced?__ Her eyes snapped open on the thought, and the first thing she saw was Ronnie, standing shirtless beside Dale Murray on the far side of the fire, a beer in one hand, a poker in the other. She was wondering what Ronnie thought about all this, because he was still her anchor to home no matter what happened, and the sight of him, of the neutral, too-cool-for-human-life look on his face, made her doubt herself a moment--was he in for this, was he going to commit? Or would he put them all down with some sort of snide comment and slip out the back door? She leaned into Marco. “I'll be back,” she whispered, but Marco was already in Alaska, at least in his mind--_Mud and moss? You mean that's it for insulation?__--and he never even heard her.
    She skirted the fire as people rushed up out of the dark to throw branches, scraps of lumber and trash into the flames. Jiminy and Merry came out of nowhere with a derelict armchair that had been quietly falling into itself under the front porch, and she could see the guy they called Weird George--all shadow and no substance--laboring across the yard with the crotch of a downed tree.
    And here was Ronnie, lit like a flaming brand, his face a carnival mask of yellow and red, twin fires burning out of the reflective lenses of his eyes. She stood at his side a moment, watching as the glowing skeleton of the fire revealed itself like a shimmering X ray, and then she said, “Hey,” and Ronnie--in chorus with Dale Murray--returned the greeting.
    “Wow, you're out,” Star said, looking to Dale Murray. “We were worried.”
    “Right,” he said, and he leaned over to spit in the dirt. “But it's no thanks to you, is it? Any of you. If it wasn't for my buddy here”--he jerked his head and Sky Dog's profile emerged from the warring shades of the night, a