Up front, behind the wheel, Norm came back to life. It was amazing. One minute he was dead and buried and the next he couldn’t stop bobbing his head, couldn’t stop talking, and Marco wondered about that, about how much of the holy and rejuvenating pharmacopoeia Drop City had brought along in their private and communal stashes—ounces, pounds, bales? Norm drummed at the wheel, rotated his shoulders, tapped his feet. He was a tour guide now, leaning into the windshield and crowing out the names of every creek and culvert they passed, lecturing anybody within earshot on the history, geology and botany of the sub-Yukon and the lore of the skin-hunters and prospectors, or what passed for it. “See that?” he said, pointing to an expanse of bleached-out scrub crowded with the thin dark slashes of spruce trees tipped and scattered as if they’d been bulldozed.
Marco was tasting wine in the back of his throat. He passed the bota bag to Star and pressed his face to the window. Across from them, Premstar, her hair lank and unwashed, had a seat to herself. She was wearing shorts and her legs were tented on the cracked vinyl seat so you could see the crease between them, her knees knocking rhythmically, her bare ankles scalloped and white. She was reading a magazine with the picture of a glossy woman on the cover. Norm might as well have been talking to himself.
“See the way the trees are leaning all over the place—see those two right there, like crossed swords? That’s what they call the drunken forest, as if the trees were all whacked out of their minds and couldn’t stand up straight.” He swung round in the seat, squeezing the words out of the corner of his mouth. “Marco, you listening?”
Star answered for him. “We’re listening,” she said. “What else have we got to listen to?”
“Premstar?”
Premstar didn’t look up from the magazine.
Norm’s head swung back round and he addressed his words to the windshield as the engine churned and the bus heaved over the ruts. “Permafrost, that’s what does that. Two feet down it’s like rock, frozen since the Ice Age, before the Ice Age, like back in the time of the woolly mammoths and all that. Saber-toothed tigers. The dire wolf. Remember those mammoths, Prem, what a bitch they used to be? Premstar. I’m talking to you. I said you remember what a bitch it used to be saddling up those mammoths?”
Her voice leaked out from behind the magazine, barely a whisper: “Yes, Norm. A real bitch.”
“So what happens is the trees can’t put down their roots more than maybe twenty-four inches or whatever and then the wind comes along and gives them a shove. And don’t think there’s anything wrong with them—it’s not that at all. They’re alive and thriving. It’s just that they’re never going to grow straight. Or much.”
Permafrost. The drunken forest. Now here was something, the kind of revelation that made all this concrete, that made these scrubby hills and swamps and miniature forests seem exotic, and they were exotic, Marco kept reminding himself, because this was Alaska, appearances to the contrary. He’d begun to have his doubts. Where were the glaciers, the waterfalls, the snow-capped mountains and untrammeled forests? Not here, not in the interior, anyway. This looked more like Ohio, like Michigan or Wisconsin or a hundred other places. He strained his eyes looking for eagles, looking for wolves, but there was nothing out there but scrub and more scrub.
Norm was onto something else now, his mind peeling back memories layer by layer—he’d expected a wolf behind every bush the first time he’d come up here, salmon hanging from the trees, gold dust in his coffee grains—but Marco wasn’t listening. He wasn’t feeling all that steady. Everybody on the bus had been trading round the same cold for a week, one of the hazards of communal living, especially when you were cooped up like this, and now he had it too. His head ached. He was sniffling. And the wine scoured the back of his throat and sat hard on his stomach, a mistake, and he knew it was a mistake even before he’d passed the bag to Star and she’d passed it to Premstar and Premstar took a delicate white-throated sip and passed it to Mendocino Bill. The bus lurched, righted itself, lurched again, and he looked down at Star’s hand entwined in his own as if he didn’t know what it was. The next moment he was making his way down the aisle to the bathroom.
Though the sun was high and it couldn’t have been past seven or so, most people were asleep, Reba with her head back and snoring, Jiminy and Merry camped under one of the faded Navajo blankets that had hung in the back room at Drop City in a time that seemed so distant now he could barely remember it. Mendocino Bill and Deuce were playing chess on a magnetic board, the dogs were curled up beneath the seats and Che and Sunshine, snot glistening on their upper lips, stared numbly up the aisle as if they were watching a home movie, of which Marco, suddenly sick to his stomach, was the star. The bus lurched again and he staggered against one of the seats, then he was through the kitchen and into the rear of the bus, rattling at the door of the makeshift bathroom. The smell didn’t help. The whole bus reeked of unwashed bodies and festering feet, of the tribe that dabbed powdered hand soap under their arms and rinsed their hair in grimy truck stop rest rooms, but the chemical toilet was something else altogether—this was where the thin gruel of the road poured out of them, brothers and sisters alike. Marco forced himself inside and flipped the latch.
He was sweating, the hair pasted to his forehead under the red bandanna he hadn’t unknotted since they’d left California. It was dark and close, the only light a peep-show flicker through the grate in the door. He needed to vomit, because if he vomited he’d feel better—or that was the theory, anyway—and so he crouched over the stainless steel seat and thrust two pinched fingers down his throat. He gagged, but nothing came up. The contents of the bowl sloshed and rotated and gave off an evil smell. He braced himself against the ringing metal wall and was about to try again, two wet fingers poised at his lips, when the floor suddenly skewed away from him and then came bucking back up to pitch him face-first into the door. Then they weren’t moving anymore and everybody seemed to be shouting at once.
His nose wasn’t broken, or at least he didn’t think it was, but the blood had darkened his T-shirt and pretty well ruined the gold-and-black brocade vest Star had picked out for him at a thrift shop in Ukiah, and that was a shame—a drag, a real drag—because it had become part of his identity, his signature article of clothing, the essential garment that announced to the world who he was and what he intended to do about it. It was hip, quintessentially hip, and now it was ruined. But that was all right, he told himself. In six months he’d be wearing caribou hide, wearing wolf, bear, ermine—and what was an ermine, anyway? A kind of weasel, wasn’t it?
The excess blood had dried in his mustache and at the corners of his mouth, and he sat by the side of the road alternately rubbing the flecks of it loose and swatting at mosquitoes while the rest of the tribe milled around watching Mendocino Bill and Tom Krishna trying to work the wheel with the shredded tire off the axle, and of course it had to be an inner wheel—what else would you expect? Truly, at this point he didn’t care whether his nose was broken or not, didn’t care about the blood or the throbbing dull pain in his sinuses and couldn’t remember what he’d been doing in the steel cage of the bathroom in the first place, but like everyone else he was so frustrated he could cry. By Norm’s calculation, they weren’t more than three or four miles from Boynton, walking distance, no less—and here was one more delay, one last impediment to keep the tents from going up and the trees from coming down. Just to sleep on the ground for a change, that was all anybody was asking. To get there. To arrive. To sit around an open fire and be a family again instead of a traveling circus.
Star had been sitting with him, the mosquitoes coming fast and furious, but she’d climbed back into the bus to change into a pair of long pants and a jacket, and he’d asked her to dig a bottle of bug repellant out of his backpack so he could get some relief himself. It was a wet country, boggy, the top two feet of the ground defrosting in summer but holding the water like a sink because it couldn’t permeate the frozen layer beneath, and th
at was ideal for Culex pipiens and their wriggling waterborne larvae. They’d swarmed through the summer nights in Connecticut when he was growing up, and he’d been south too, to Florida and Louisiana, but the mosquitoes here—his first introduction to Alaskan wildlife, how about that?—were something else altogether. He slapped at his arms and clapped a hand to the back of his neck, and when he sneezed a wad of disjointed insects blew out of his nostrils in bits and pieces. His nose pulsated like a freshly rung bell, and he was drinking Spañada out of the bota bag to compensate—Alfredo had gotten a deal on a case of half-gallon bottles in some outpost somewhere along the way—and with each sip he told himself to stay calm, be patient, go with the flow. At least he wasn’t queasy anymore, at least he had that.
He watched Star climb down out of the bus with Merry, Maya and Jiminy in tow, all four of them looking conspiratorial. She’d changed into a pair of red corduroy bells and her denim shirt with the signs of the zodiac embroidered up and down the arms and across the plane of her shoulders—the archer, Sagittarius, flexing his bow back there as if to ward off any harm that might come to her. The four of them trooped across the road to him, their faces shining and triumphant under the high slant of the sun, and he could see from the way she cupped her right hand and held it close to her body that it was more than just insect repellent she was carrying. He watched her hips slice back and forth, watched her sandals compact the dust of the road. Her features were regular, her eyes luminous. She gave him a smile so serene she could have been a Renaissance Madonna—or maybe she was just stoned. Maybe that was it.
“Let me guess,” he said, “nobody could wait, right?”
They eased down in the weeds beside him, the homey familiar scent of marijuana clinging to their hair and clothing. There was a rustle of vegetation, wildflowers crushed and displaced—lupine, fireweed, what looked to be some sort of poppy—and Jiminy’s knees cracking as he dropped down and inserted half a dozen joss sticks into the friable dirt at their feet. “That’s right,” he said, leaning forward to touch a lighter to the tapering ends one by one, “and we’re mosquito-proofing this holy shrine that surrounds you too, my good man. Be gone, bothersome insects. And for the rest, be merry and of good cheer.”
“Some of us were thinking of walking it,” Maya said, “just to see what the town’s like—I mean, we’re so close. But Norm didn’t think so. He didn’t think it would be cool.”
People were out in the road throwing Frisbees and shouting while the dogs irrigated the bushes and Norm rasped and gesticulated and tugged at his beard, and Pan—the back of his head with its thin wisps of hair visible just below the line of vegetation clinging to the far shoulder—flung a lure at the dark surface of the river that slid along the road here like the lining of a jacket. There was no traffic. There’d never been any traffic. They might as well have had a flat out on the Serengeti or the Kirghiz steppe.
“I’d walk it in a heartbeat,” Marco said.
“Me too,” Jiminy said without conviction. Smoke had begun to rise from the joss sticks, and the clear cool unalloyed air carried a freight of burnt punk.
“Just to see it, you know what I’m saying?” Marco persisted—he couldn’t help himself. “I’ve seen it in my head to the point where I know I’m going to be disappointed. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised. That happens, doesn’t it? Don’t you get pleasantly surprised once out of a hundred times?”
“Nothing’s the way you picture it,” Star said. “The mind creates its own reality, and how could the real and actual thing ever match that? It’s like a movie compared to a cartoon.” She was right there beside him, and in her palm the veined and speckled pill that looked like one of the color tablets you’d use to dye Easter eggs.
“Or a book,” Maya said. “A book compared to a movie.”
“I don’t know, I think I’d listen to Norm,” Merry said, leaning back on the twin props of her elbows and stretching her legs out into the roadway as if she were sinking into an easy chair. Her pupils were dilated to the size of a cat’s. She was wearing a serape over her jeans and a flop-brimmed vaquero’s hat and her feet were bare and dirty and fringed with mosquitoes. Marco saw that she’d painted each of her toenails a different color, and though he wasn’t stoned—not yet, anyway—he thought he’d never seen anything so beautiful, and why didn’t all women paint their toenails like that? All men, for that matter? “I mean, what’s the hurry?” she said. “Can’t we just groove on this sky, the wildflowers, the river? I mean, look at it. Just look.”
Marco took it as an injunction and looked off down the sunstruck tunnel of the road, and there was the Studebaker and there the Bug, pulled up on the shoulder, but there was no Dale Murray on his motorcycle, and where was he when you needed him? It would be nothing to horse the thing into Boynton and back, see the river, ride right into it, snuff the breeze, all hail and hallelujah, Boynton or Bust. But Dale Murray had turned back the day after they’d crossed into Canada to see what had become of Lester and Franklin and Sky Dog, and he’d never reappeared. Marco didn’t feel one way or the other about it, because when you came right down to it he hardly knew the guy and he certainly couldn’t write any recommendations for the people he associated with. But Dale Murray had two legs and two arms and a pair of hands and they were going to need every pair of hands they could muster to put this thing together—it would be a long dark age before any runaways or weekend hippies found their way up here to swell their ranks, that was for sure.
There was some noise from the direction of the bus, a lively debate between Mendocino Bill and Norm as to the viability of the spare—“There’s no doubt in my mind,” Norm was saying, “no doubt whatsoever, so go ahead, put it on”—and then Star was pressing the pill into his hand. He accepted it, accepted it in the way he’d been conditioned to—if somebody gave you drugs, you took them, no questions asked—and he even went so far as to bring his hand to his mouth and make the motions of swallowing. Burnt punk rose to his nostrils. The sun cupped a hand at the back of his neck. No one was watching him—their gazes were fixed across the road, on the bus, on Norm, on the black wheel laid out like a corpse in the dirt. They weren’t there yet, that was what he was thinking, and he wasn’t going to celebrate until they were. He slipped the pill into the bloodstained pocket of his ruined vest.
Star let out a laugh in response to something Jiminy had said, and then they were all laughing—even him, even Marco, though he had no idea what he was laughing about or for or whether laughing was the appropriate response to the situation. No matter. The smoke rose from the joss sticks, the Frisbee hung in the air like a brick in a wall and they were stretched out on the side of the road and laughing, just laughing, and you would have thought the cabins had already been built, the wood split for the stove, the gold panned, the furs stretched and the larder stocked, because nobody here had a care in the world. Merry handed a roach to Star and she held it to her lips till the stub of it glowed red and then she handed it to Marco, who pinched it from her fingers and held it to his own lips a moment, sucking in the sweet seep of smoke as he’d done a thousand times before. Everything seemed to slow down, as if the earth were transfixed on its axis and the fragment of sky overhead was all they would ever need. And then, out of the corner of his eye, the laziest, slowest movement in the world: the dogs were emerging from the strip of blue shadow beneath the bus and stirring themselves with a dainty flex and release of their rear paws. They both gazed intently up the road, and Freak, his hackles rising, let out a low woof of inquiry.
A dog had appeared round the far bend—or no, it was a wolf, with the rawboned legs that seemed to veer away from its body as if they’d been put on backward, a wolf trotting down a road in Alaska. Marco was on his feet. “Look,” he said, “look, it’s a—” He caught himself. There were two figures coming round the bend now, a man and a woman striding along easily under the weight of their backpacks, and this was no wolf, or no wild wolf anyway. The Frisbee slid back down its arc, p
eople eased to their feet. “Norm,” somebody said, “hey, Norm.”
The man was tall, hard-muscled, lean. He was wearing a weather-bleached flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of jeans so knee-sprung and tattered they made Marco’s look new. His hair was short, thick, and it stood up straight from his head. He was walking as if walking were a competitive event, the steady pump of his legs and the clip of his boots reeling in the road before him, a man moving in silhouette against the bright splash of the day, and Marco couldn’t tell what he was, a bum, a gas station attendant, the Scholar Gypsy himself. The woman—she was in her twenties, her blond hair tied back in a ponytail like a cheerleader’s, her shorts showing off the muscles of her calves and the clean working lines of her buttocks and thighs—raised a hand to shade her eyes as if she couldn’t quite decide whether the bus was a mirage or not. Up the road shot a yellow blur, paws gathering, muscles straining, and Freak and Frodo were on them, but the man never broke stride and his dog never wavered either—it just ducked its head and followed at his heels. For a moment the yellow dogs bobbed round them, dust rose, and then the gap closed to nothing and the man and woman were standing right there amongst them on the deserted road.
Tom Krishna had been busy with the axle, with the big ridged tire and the stubborn wheel that just that moment slid forward to kiss the spare. He looked up into the silence and saw the hikers standing there with their swollen backpacks and the dogs moiling around and the road dust rising. “Hey,” he said, coming up out of his crouch, “what’s happening, brother,” and he reached out a greasy hand for the soul shake that never came.
The man just looked at them with an amused grin, looked at them all, while the sun glanced off Norm’s glasses and Marco stood suspended at the side of the road and Merry and Maya exchanged a giggle. “You people aren’t—” the man began, and then caught himself. There was flat incredulity in his tone. “You aren’t hippies, are you?”