Excerpt from Drop City by T.C. Boyle, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

That was a taste, only a taste. Because before long the police zeroed in on the place and made it a real hassle even to drive down the dark overgrown street to get there, the flashing lights and out of the car and where are you going this time of night and don't I know you? And it was too dependent on drugs, everybody zoned out after a while, and no real cooperation - they all still had their own jobs in the plastic world. Suzie got busted, and then her boyfriend, Mike, and the whole thing seemed to just fade away. But now Star was here, in California, the sunshine ladled over her shoulders and the goats bleating for her, really part of something for the first time, something important. And how about this? Until two weeks ago, she'd never even seen a goat - or if she had, it might have been at a petting zoo or pumpkin patch when she was ten and her jaws were clamped tight over her braces because she wouldn't dare smile with all that ugly metal flashing like a lightbulb in her mouth - and here she was milking the two of them like an expert, like a milkmaid in a Thomas Hardy novel, Star of the D'Urbervilles, and the whole community dependent on her.

All right. The yellow milk hissed into the bucket. But then the second goat - it was either Amanda or Dewlap, and she couldn't tell them apart for all the squeezing and teat-pulling she'd done for how many mornings in a row now? - stepped in it, and the milk, which they were planning to use for yogurt, not to mention cornflakes and coffee, washed out into the dirt.

"Wow," said a voice behind her, " - an offering to the gods. I am impressed."

She was squatting in the shade of the oak tree they tethered the goats to overnight so as to prevent them from stripping every last green and burgeoning thing off the face of the earth, and she pulled up her smile and swung her head round. She was happy - exalted, ready to shout out and testify, spilled milk and all - because this was what she'd always wanted, living off the land with her brothers and sisters, and fuck Ronnie, really, just fuck him. Okay. Fine. But she was smiling at nothing: there was no one there.

Was it that bad, then? Flashbacks were one thing, but aural hallucinations?

"Up here," the voice said, and she looked up into the broad gray avenues of the tree and saw the soles of a pair of dirt-blackened feet, feet like the inside of a tomb, and the naked white slash of a man's thighs and hips and then his bare chest and his hair and his face. He was grinning down at her. Spraddling a branch as big around as the pipes that fed water to the kids-on-bicycles and mom-in-the-kitchen suburban development where she'd grown up amidst the roar of lawnmowers and the smoke of the cooking grills. Barbecue. Lilac bushes. K through 12.

What could she say? She automatically raised the rigid plane of her hand to shield her eyes against the glare, but there was no glare, only the deep shadows of the tree and the soft glowing nimbus of the sun.

Behind him - to his left and just above him, and how could she have failed to notice it? - was a treehouse, the very image of the one her father had built for her in the wild cherry tree in their backyard when she turned eight because that was what she'd wanted for her birthday and nothing else. His voice came floating down to her: "Goats being naughty or were you really trying to propitiate the gods?"

Propitiate? Who was this guy?

"I was going to make yogurt - for everybody - but Dewlap here, or maybe it's Amanda - doesn't seem to want to cooperate.""

"You need a goat wrangler."

"Right. You wouldn't be a goat wrangler, would you - by any chance, I mean?"

He was a naked man sitting in a tree. He laughed. "You got me pegged. But really that's only my avocation - my true vocation, what I was born here on this earth to do, is build treehouses. You like it, by the way?"

Reprinted from Drop City by T. C. Boyle by permission of Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © 2003 T. C. Boyle, all rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.