Drop City

through the mud and embraced the cold metal of the hood as if it were living tissue. “Magic bus,” he murmured, and then he began chanting it under his breath, “Magic bus, magic bus, hey, hey, magic bus.” Marco was holding a flashlight for Mendocino Bill, who was peering into the engine compartment with a wrench in one hand and a screwdriver in the other, and Alfredo, for lack of anything better to do, was supervising. Reba had hung a Coleman lantern from one of the hooks inside, and the women were in there, five or six of them--Star included--adjusting things, running a sponge over the seats and a mop over the floor, already seeing to the division of space.
    “You know what we can do?” Jiminy said, his cheek pressed to the front fender. “We can paint it. Like Kesey, like the Pranksters. Mandalas, peace signs, weird faces, and fish--fish all over it, like Peter Max fish, blowing bubbles. And porpoises. That kind of thing. We'll freak them out from here to fucking Nome.”
    Mendocino Bill made an affirmative noise in the back of his throat, but it wasn't particularly enthusiastic--here was another adolescent fantasy, and what was wrong with WASHO UNIFIED skirting both sides of the bus in black bold adamantine letters?
    “I don't want to tell you what to do,” Alfredo put in, “but we have to cross the Canadian border here--like twice--and the last thing you want is a freak parade, you know what I mean?” He jumped down from the bench Bill had propped himself up on and gave Jiminy a look. “Like you, for instance, _Jiminy__--that's how we know you, but what's your real name? I mean, like on your draft card?”
    Jiminy looked down at his feet. “Paul Atkins.”
    “Paul Atkins? Yeah, well, that's what they're going to want to know at the border, and you better have a draft card to show them too. And maybe a birth certificate on top of it. What are you, 4-F?”
    Jiminy looked hurt, put-upon, and Marco wanted to say something, but he didn't. “They don't ask that shit at the border,” Jiminy said. “Just are you a citizen, right? And how long'll you be in Canada?”
    “Look, man,” Alfredo was saying, “you were probably still in junior high the first time I went up to Canada--in Ontario, this was--and maybe they might have been cool about it back in those days, but believe me, with the war on and all these draft dodgers--who I support, by the way, so don't get me wrong--it's going to be a trip and we are really going to have to play it right. Get it through your head, man--this is no game, no three-day rock festival where you can just go on home when it's over. This is survival we're talking about here--they're driving us off the _ranch,__ for Christ's sake. What do you think that says?”
    Marco wasn't listening anymore, because he was seeing that border, a vague scrim of trees, a checkpoint dropped down on the highway in a pool of darkness, and what was he going to do if they questioned him? Work up a fake ID? Get out three miles down the road and sneak across through the scrub? Was there a wire? Was it electrified?
    “Keep the light steady, will you?” Bill said. “I can barely see what I'm doing here.”
    “So what are we supposed to be then,” Jiminy wanted to know. “The Washo Unified Lacrosse Team? With our cheerleaders and band along for our triumphant tour of British Columbia?” He pushed himself away from the bus and hovered over the twin craters his feet made in the mud. “Easy for you to say, but you don't have to worry--you're too old for the draft.”
    The rain was nothing more now than the faintest drizzle, and the flanks of the bus shone with it as if they'd been polished. The moon glistened in the mud. From inside the bus, the sound of giggling.
    Alfredo didn't answer right away. “That's right,” he said finally, “I'm too old by four years and three months. But that doesn't mean I'm not looking out for you and Marco and Mendocino Bill and all the other cats here. This is a war, man, and we are going to win it. Drop City North, right? Am I right?”
    “It's still America,” Marco said. “The forty-ninth state. They've got the selective service up there too.”
    “Yeah, but we're going to be so far out there nobody's even going to know we exist.”
    In the morning, while Marco was up atop the bus with Star, trying to fashion scavenged two-by-fours into the world's biggest luggage rack, he reached over the side for another stick and found himself peering into the