Drop City by T. C. Boyle Read Free Book Online

room–dining hall anyway, and they were chasing each other around the pool as if they’d never stopped, their cheeks distended with corn mush and cauliflower, their bodies naked and brown and stippled with cuts, contusions, poison oak, dirt. He dropped the hose and moved toward the water like a zombie. Then he was in, the green envelope, the cessation of sound, his limbs moving under command of the autonomous system, pump and release, pump and release, till he cracked his head on the far side of the pool and heaved himself streaming from the water.
    Somebody else was in now, cannonballing and shouting, the twoyellow dogs barking at their heels, Lydia—was that Lydia?—and the greenish water lapped at his knees and he was feeling he ought to shake the water out of his hair and get himself a plate of mush just for the ballast, when he locked eyes with Alfredo across the lawn. Alfredo gave him a look, niggardly little eyes, his mouth like a wad of gum stuck up under a desk at school, and Ronnie gave him a look back. He wasn’t going to take any shit. He had as much right as anybody to be here—LATWIDNO, right?—and he wasn’t about to apologize to Alfredo or Norm Sender or anybody else. Then he felt a hand on his knee and it was Lydia, her breasts bobbing, the hair pressed flat to her head. “Where you been?” she said. “We looked all over for you last night.” The water lapped, dragonflies hovered. And then: “Did you hear what happened?”
    No, he hadn’t heard.
    She blinked the water out of her eyes, snaked a hand up his leg, and he felt himself go hard against the rough wet folds of his cutoffs. “A girl got raped.”
    â€œRaped? What do you mean raped? ”
    â€œI mean she was some runaway—fourteen, she was only fourteen—and Norm’s freaked about the whole thing, running around the kitchen jabbering about the man—the man’s coming, the man’s coming—and hide the dope and all, and clean this shit up, and do this and do that, and Alfredo’s right there with him. They want Lester out. And Sky Dog and the rest of them.”
    Ronnie considered this, the water lapping at his legs, Lydia’s breasts bobbing at his ankles, her hand crawling up his thigh. His normal response would have been something like “Bummer” or “Heavy,” but the moment was huge and hovering and his head wasn’t clear yet, not even close, so he just stared down at the white ghosts of her legs kicking rhythmically beneath the surface.
    â€œWhat I hear is they got her stoned, and then they pinned her down, and it wasn’t just Lester and Sky Dog either. It was all of them.” She paused, kicking, kicking, the slow fluid rhythm of her legs. Che threw something—a scarred Frisbee—at his sister and shelet out a shriek, and then the dogs started barking and Reba, at the far end of the pool, went off on a laughing jag, ha-ha, ha-ha, ha-ha. Lydia’s hand was cold. She clutched him tighter. “Somebody said you were there,” she breathed, and then trailed off.
    He was there. Sure he was. And he’d gotten into it with a couple of them too, hadn’t he? Sure, sure. He must have. Because he didn’t care how stoned he was or how voluntarily primitive it got, he wasn’t about to stand by and watch something like that . . . And the thought of it, the thought of that cheap little acidic moment in the back house with all those null and void faces and the thump, thump, blat of the stereo and the girl with her stick legs flailing just made him feel so black inside he wished he’d never left home himself. What could he say? How could he explain it?
    â€œYeah,” he said, “yeah. I was there.”
    Lydia seemed to consider this a moment, her eyes glittering like planets in the uncharted universe of her face. She was a big girl, big in the shoulders and the hips, big all over, black