Drop City by T. C. Boyle Page B

about flowers or death or Grecian urns, but this, this was about fucking a swan. She remembered her amazement, wondering how that could be—did birds even have penises?—and not just the mechanics of it, but the scene itself. Did he carry her off into the sky, or did it just feel that way? How big was he? And whose seed was he carrying—Zeus’s, the professor said—but how did that work out, and wouldn’t Helen be half-bird, then?
    Marco had handed her a joint and she’d taken it reflexively. She’d had three days to clear her head, nothing stronger than Red Zinger running through her veins, Maya peeling onions and rattling on in her thin spidery voice about getting beyond drugs to a natural high, the oneness of the gurus, pure bliss in an overheated kitchen, but three days was enough. She needed something to kick-start her again, a quicker way to alter her consciousness than chanting Om Mani Pema Hung a thousand times, because her consciousness was clogged like a drain with all the residue of Ronnie and the dregs of back home. Plus, she had to admit she felt awkward in the presence of this new cat with his clothes off and his red-gold hair swinging like a curtain across his face and masking his eyes, because now that she was actually up there in his aerie, everything had changed. He didn’t know what to say, and neither did she. The joint was an offering. It was the great equalizer, the holy communion, get wrecked and stare off into space and who actually needed to talk? They smoked it downto the last disintegrating nub of a roach, pressing it finger to finger, lip to lip, and neither of them said a word.
    The air was sweet with the smell of it. Birds lighted on the split-wood railing and peered at them as if they were just another extension of the tree, some unlooked-for fruit or shell-less nut, or maybe some canker working its way out of the bark. She lay back, dissolving into herself while the sounds of the stirring commune—soft voices, the splash of the pool, music on the radio—drifted up to them from what seemed like miles away.
    â€œLaundry day,” he said, appending a strained little chuckle that was meant to set them both at ease, and it might have if it hadn’t turned to dust in his throat. Behind him, a limp array of jeans, T-shirts, ragged underwear and mismatched socks lay spread-eagled over the branches as if they’d dropped down out of the sky. She pictured a sudden cataclysm, a whirlwind that had ripped the clothes off people’s backs and spared the flesh beneath. Or bombers, high overhead, on their way to Vietnam, dropping soggy underwear instead of death.
    â€œYeah,” was all she said, but it seemed as if the word stretched to eight syllables.
    â€œIt’s been a week, at least. I was beginning to smell like roadkill.”
    â€œTell me about it,” she said, and suddenly all her burners were on high, “because when Ronnie and I drove across country it was exactly like that—you know Ronnie? Pan, I mean? Every town, we were trying to get our quarters together for the laundromat, but we either got lost or they’d never heard of washing machines and dryers and those little one-scoop boxes of Tide and bleach—remember those? They just say Bleach, that’s it. No brand name or anything, just Bleach. Don’t you hate that?”
    â€œYeah,” he said, staring at a place just over her shoulder and nodding as if he’d been there with them through every turning in every soulless gloom-blasted dead-end town Oklatexahoma could offer. “I guess. But isn’t that what’s wrong with the whole consumer society—brand names?—as if my soap’s better than yours? See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet. Buy, buy, buy, kill, kill, kill, eat, eat, eat. That’s what the war’s all about—products, brand names, keep the economy going and who gives a shit if a couple hundred women and children