Drop City

cocked their ears--a vehicle was coming up the drive, something big, preceded by a rumble of wheels or maybe treads and the stuttering alien wheeze of a diesel engine. Marco was still in the kitchen, sitting at the window with a book, feeling confined and constrained, but in no mood to go back and crouch over a wet sleeping bag in a leaky treehouse for the rest of the day. He was bored. Anxious to get started, to do something, see to details, arrange things, get this show on the road--Alaska, Alaska or Bust, and all he could see was a log cabin in a glade overlooking a broad flat river so full of salmon you could walk across their backs to the other side, and moose, moose standing in shallow pools with long strips of vegetation decorating their antlers. But it was raining, and he had a book, and he was going nowhere. As for the rest, the cast of characters had changed somewhat--Reba was at the stove now, making a casserole to go with the soup, and Alfredo was hunkered over a game of solitaire at the kitchen table while Che and Sunshine hurtled in and out of the room in a sustained frenzy that might have been called tag or hide-and-go-seek or gestalt therapy. Star and Merry were making piles of things in the corner--_Six teapots, do we really need six teapots?__--and Maya was sliding jars of preserves into a cardboard box with the grudging slow imponderability of a prisoner. The light was a gray slab. Things were slow.
    But the dogs were on their feet now, clicking across the floor on stiff black nails. Freak began to bark suddenly, and then Frodo joined in, and everybody was thinking the same thing--the bulldozers. “Oh, shit,” Alfredo said, his head jerking up as if it were on a string. Reba gave him a stricken look. “It couldn't be,” she said, “not yet. Norm said Friday, didn't he?” Marco flung down the book without marking his place--_Trout Fishing in America,__ one of the titles Star had mysteriously interred beneath the leaves yesterday, and he still couldn't fathom what she'd been thinking--and then he was out the door, down the steps and into the battleground of the yard.
    At first there was only the noise, a grinding mechanical assault tearing at his heart and his brain till he didn't know whether to stand his ground or run--and what would he tell them, what would he do when they started battering it all to pieces? He clenched his toes in the mud, heard the others gathering on the porch. “They can't just come in here like this”--Reba's voice, wound tight, spinning out behind him--“can they?” There was a flash of yellow--bright as Heinz mustard--and the shape of something moving through the trees along the road, and it was no bulldozer, it was too big for that, too _yellow . . .__
    It was a bus. A school bus. And Norm, sleepless Norm, fueled on amphetamine and black coffee, was at the wheel, the suede cowboy hat pulled down to the level of the black broken frames of his glasses and Premstar perched in his lap like a ventriloquist's dummy. The gears ground with a shriek, the massive face of the thing swung into the yard and beat the mud into submission and the rain sculpted the two long streaming banks of windows in a smooth wrap. There was the wheeze of the air brakes, a heavy dependable sloshing, and then the bus was idling there before them, as if all they had to do was pick up their schoolbags and lunchboxes and climb aboard.
    The door folded in on itself with a sigh, and Premstar, the former Miss Watsonville, with her high tight breasts and perfect legs, was stepping down from the platform, an uncertain smile puckering her lips. She was wearing white lipstick, blue eyeshadow and a pair of big blunt high-heeled boots that crept up over her knees. Marco watched, riveted, as she stepped daintily into the mud, brushed the hair out of her face, and glanced up at him. “We got a school bus,” she said in a breathy little puff of a voice, and she might have been describing a trip to the grocery for toilet paper, “--me and Norm.”
    Norm pulled the hand brake and came down the steps behind her, the bus idling with a stuttering grab and release, the smell of diesel infesting the air. The rain spattered his hat and his fringed jacket, the drops dark as blood against the honey-colored suede. His eyes were tired. The rain made him wince. “Go ahead,” he said, waving an arm, “take a look. It's a ninety-one-passenger 1963 Crown, is what it is, the kind of thing you could get if you were