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down beside him, “--what you doing out here, swimming?”
    “I don't know. Yeah. I guess. I was swimming before--earlier, you know?” The words seemed to be stuck in his mouth, like the crust at the bottom of a pan. “Kind of cold now, I guess. But what's happening with you?”
    Franklin was just standing there, the jug of wine--Cribari red--dangling from his fingertips like a big glass bomb. Lester grinned. “Same old shit,” he said. “We're having a party in the back house, brother, and you're welcome to join us--we'd be real pleased about that, in fact; I would, at least--how about you, Franklin?”
    Franklin said he'd be pleased too.
    “By the way,” Lester said, and they were already gathering themselves up, “you wouldn't happen to have a couple of hits of that mescaline I heard you got left, would you?”
    Well, he did. And two minutes later he was in the back house and there were six or seven cats sitting around listening to Marvin Gaye out of a battery-powered portable stereo with a blown bass, thump, thump, _blat,__ thump, thump, _blat.__ Sky Dog was there, cradling his guitar, somebody had lit a couple of scented candles because there was no electricity in the back house, and there was a new girl there--a chick--and she couldn't have been more than fourteen or fifteen. A runaway. What was her name? Sally. Where was she from? Santa Clara. And what was her father like? He was a son of a bitch. They probably got twenty a week just like her, and none of them stayed more than a night or two, as if this whole thing--Norm Sender, Alfredo, Reba, Drop City itself--was no more than a kind of extended slumber party.
    Ronnie introduced himself as Pan, gave her a little brotherly and sisterly squeeze, and then settled in on the floor against the back wall and took it upon himself to make sure the jug kept circulating. All was peace. Silken voices murmuring, Marvin Gaye, Sly and the Family Stone, Hendrix, thump, thump, _blat,__ and Pan was in the middle of an elaborate story about a free concert in Central Park and the good and bad drugs he'd done that night and how somebody had vomited all over the windshield of his mother's car, which he'd borrowed with every warning and proscription attached, when Sally, the skinny-legged fourteen-year-old runaway in the patched jeans and stretch top, cried out. Or she screamed, actually. “Get off me, you freak!” she let out in a piping wild adolescent vibrato that shot up the scale like feedback, and Ronnie glanced away from his story to see Lester simultaneously pinning her down and going at her breasts with both hands and the pink slab of his tongue, and Sky Dog--_Sky Dog,__ Mr. Mellow Peace-and-Love himself--stripped to his tanned buttocks and working hard to peel her jeans down the flailing sticks of her legs.
    Ronnie was right in the middle of a story, his voice droning on through the standard interludes and rich with the twenty nasal catchphrases of the day, and he was so _mellowed out__ he could barely keep his head up off the floor, but this--this scream, this scene going down in the corner--sent a shock wave through him. _“Get off, get off!”__ the girl kept screaming, and now her legs were bare and Sky Dog's buttocks were clenching and thrusting in a way that hurt to watch, a way that was wrong, dead wrong, and Ronnie tried to get up off the floor, tried to say, _Hey, man, what do you think you're doing,__ because this wasn't right, it wasn't--but by the time he got to his feet he realized everyone in the room was looking at him with eyes that had no brotherly or even human spark in them.
    In the morning, which came hurtling out of the sky like a Russian missile aimed straight at his brain, Pan opened his eyes on the stiff tall grass and the golden seedheads drooping over him as if he were already dead and decomposed. He seemed to be lying supine in the weeds beyond the back house, and this was a nasty little surprise, speaking of snakes, rattle or otherwise. His