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

cherries in Oregon, grapes in California. Star could believe it—the place was a crash pad then and it was a crash pad now, the single funkiest building on the property. The windows were nearly opaque with dirt, there was norunning water or electricity, and somebody had painted DROP CITY DROPOUTS over the door in a flowing swirl of Gothic lettering. She’d been inside maybe half a dozen times, attached to one movable feast or another—until Lester moved in, that is.
    Marco didn’t knock. He pushed the door open and they all just filed in, more like tourists than an invading army, and she tried to put on her smile, but it failed her. It took a minute for her eyes to adjust, a whole flurry of movement over the stale artificial greetings of the tribe, what’s happening, bro, candles fluttering, the soft autonomous pulse of Otis Redding, sitting on the dock of the bay. Who was there? Lester, Franklin, three cats, two black and one white, she’d never seen before, even at mealtimes when everybody tended to get together, and—this was a surprise—Sky Dog. It was a surprise because he hadn’t shown up for the noon meal or dinner either and everybody assumed he’d gone back to the Haight, or Oregon—wasn’t he from Oregon originally, and what was his real name, anyway? She looked at him sitting there cross-legged on the floor, bent over his guitar and playing along with the record as if he didn’t have a care in the world, as if nothing had happened, as if forcing yourself on fourteen-year-old runaways was no more sweat than brushing your teeth or taking a crap, and she felt something uncontainable coming up in her.
    â€œHey, man,” Verbie was saying, “how’s it going? All right? Yeah? Because we just, you know, felt like dropping in and seeing what the scene was over here, you know?” She was five foot nothing, red hair clipped to the ears, with a tiny pinched oval of a face and a black gap where her left incisor should have been. The face paint clung like glitter at her hairline and she was twirling the cape and shuffling her feet as if she were about to tap dance across the room. “I mean, is it cool?”
    No one offered any assurances, and it didn’t feel cool, not at all. It felt as if they’d interrupted something. Star edged into the room behind Ronnie.
    There was no furniture other than a plank set atop two cinder blocks, and everyone was sitting on the floor—or not on the floor exactly, but on the cracked and peeling vinyl cushions scavenged from the rusty chaise longue out by the pool and a khaki sleeping bag that looked as if it had been dragged behind a produce truck for a couple hundred miles. Someone had made a halfhearted attempt to sweep the place, and there was a mound of brown-paper bags, doughnut boxes, shredded newspapers and broken glass piled up like drift in the far corner. The only light came from a pair of candles guttering on either end of the plank—calderas of wax, unsteady shadows, a hash pipe balanced atop a box of kitchen matches—and as the jug of cheap red wine circulated from hand to hand it picked up the faintest glint, as if a dying sun were trapped in the belly of the glass.
    â€œSo what is it,” Lester said, looking up from the floor with a tight thin smile, “Halloween?” Beside him, Franklin ducked his head and gave out a quick truncated bark of a laugh. “It’s trick or treat, right?” Lester said. “Is that what it is?”
    â€œYeah,” Franklin said, and he lifted the jug to his lips but had to set it down again because the joke was just too much, “but we ain’t got no candy.”
    Ronnie found a spot on the floor and eased himself down as if he belonged, and maybe he did, but the others just stood there, shifting from foot to foot. “It was a meeting,” Ronnie said, and then Verbie, who never knew when to shut up, started in on a