Read Online Drop City by T. C. Boyle - Free Book Online Page A

where are you? Verbie? Star?”
    There was a hiss from just in front of her and Ronnie swung round on them, the pale ball of his face hanging there in the night like a broken streetlight. “Keep it down, will you?”
    â€œWhy?” Verbie’s voice bloomed in the darkness. “What do you mean keep it down? Why should we? You think this is a raid or something? What are we, commandos? These are our brothers we’re talking about here, and this is our place, all of it, free to everybody, power to the people—why should we have to keep it down, huh? You tell me, huh? ”
    Lydia and Merry were back in the main house, sitting round the scrapwood fire Norm had made to take the chill off the night, curled up, out of it, hunkering down with the rest of them to watch Charlie Chaplin eat his own shoe (“No, no, it’s really a gas, like he boils it in a pot and serves up the laces like spaghetti ”). People were helping themselves to brownies and tea, settling into little groups, stretching out on quilts, thumping the taut bellies of the dogs as if they were drumskins. Nobody made a move as the posse formed behind Marco (and Ronnie, who had no choice but to go if he was going to have any credibility with anybody), because it was too much trouble, let’s plead laissez-faire and kick back and let the problem take care of itself. Star didn’t want any hassles either—she hated confrontation, hated it—but this was something she had to do, not just for the family or because Marco had stood up and taken it all on himself, but for the girl, for her. Because it had to stop someplace.
    Star hadn’t even seen her. She’d been baking, scrubbing, gardening, dreaming. People came, people went. Half the time she didn’t recognize the faces round the dinner table, especially on weekends. It didn’t matter. She might not have seen her, but she knew her from the inside out, somebody’s little sister, skin the color of skim milk, theorthodontically assisted smile and the patched jeans and R. Crumb T-shirt, grubby now from the road and the leers and propositions and big moist hands of all the cats who’d stopped for her out-thrust thumb and she didn’t even need to turn and face the traffic because they would stop for her hair and the shape and living breath of her. Her boyfriend was an asshole. Her mother was a clone. There was verbal abuse, physical abuse maybe. She didn’t fit in. She wanted something more than diagramming sentences and Mi casa es su casa, and she’d come to them, to the hip people, the people she’d heard about till they were legends of redemption and hope, and found out that in the end she was just another chick, so roll over and make it bald for me, honey.
    Star stretched her hands out before her, red light, green light, moving forward one step at a time. It couldn’t have been more than a couple hundred yards between the two houses, but it seemed like miles, their footsteps shuffling through the beaten dust and the clenched brown leaves of the oaks that were like little claws, everybody quiet for the first time since the door had shut behind them. “Man, it’s dark,” Jiminy muttered after a moment, just to break the silence, but now there was the low thump of music up ahead, and they moved toward it until two faintly glowing windows floated up out of the shadows. Ronnie tripped over something and kicked it aside in a soft whispering rush of motion. Candlelight took hold of the gutted shades in the windows, let go, took hold, let go.
    This was it, the back house, a place the size of a pair of trailers grafted together at the waist, with a roof of sun-bleached shingles and an add-on porch canted like a ship going down on a hard sea. Migrant workers had been housed here in the days when Norm’s father ran the place, or so Alfredo claimed, pickers moving up and down the coast with the crops, apples in Washington,