Drop City (11 page)

The smile drew down to nothing. “Richie Oliver and Howard Walpole,” she said. “Just them. And you. And you know what, Sess?” Her hand was on the table now, lying there, palm up, like a double-spring Victor trap with the snow blown bare of it. And what did he want? He wanted to be caught, he did, he was praying for it every day and night of his life, and he reached out and slipped his fingers through hers. “No, what?” he said.

“You've got nothing to worry about.”

He didn't remember much of the ride back, just a sensation of floating over the road as if he were in an airplane instead of a car, Pamela in the lotus position on the seat beside him, her bare legs glistening in the sun through the window. They were both feeling good, convivial and full of high spirits, and just about everything he said made her laugh and show her teeth. The country unfurled before them like a camouflage jacket, gray and green and brown, and they saw goshawks and Brewer's blackbirds wheeling overhead. At one point, just before the turnoff for Boynton Hot Springs, they stopped to watch a fox hunting in the bush alongside the road and he had to fight down the impulse to shoot it with the .22 Richard kept under the seat for just such an opportunity as this—the fur was worthless this time of year, but it would have been fresh meat for the pot, and he
was
on trial here, after all.

“Look at the way he pounces,” she said, leaning out the window so far he thought she was going to fall. “Just like a dog playing with a ball.”

“What he's doing,” Sess said, and he slid across the seat to look over her shoulder, so close now he could smell the soap she used on
her skin, “he's trying to scare up whatever might be hiding under the bushes, you know, voles, grasshoppers, maybe a fat juicy wood frog or two—”

She turned to him now, and she was right there, her face inches from his, and he had to back off, he had to, and she could chalk that up in the credit column under his name. Let her make the first move. Sure. Let
her.
“Sounds appetizing,” she said, smiling wide.

Reddening, he slid back across the seat and put the truck in gear. “You hungry?” he asked. “Not for frog legs, I mean, but something like a steak or a sandwich, maybe a couple more beers to celebrate? Because by the time we get to the cabin, I mean, and unload all this stuff, feed the dogs and see what the garden looks like, I don't know if we're going to have time to—” He trailed off. With her here, actually here, living and breathing and watching him out of her eyes that were like two guided missiles homing in on his, he couldn't really get much past the picture of walking her in the door of the cabin. After that, the screen went blank.

But she said sure, sure she was hungry, and twenty minutes later he was escorting her up the bleached wooden steps of the Three Pup, as proud as if he'd made her out of clay and breathed the life into her himself.

It was eight o'clock in the evening and the sun was right there with them, showing all its teeth. The trees were staked to their shadows, the guest cottages that hadn't housed a guest in ten years sank quietly into the muskeg, birds flitted over the decaying snow machines scattered across the yard. There was the rattle of the generator, and beneath it, the whine of the mosquitoes—they were there, of course, always there, ubiquitous, but by now the daytime crew had gone home to sleep off the effects of breakfast, lunch and dinner, and the night shift had taken over. He swatted half a dozen on his forearm and flapped a protective hand round the crown of Pamela's head as they pushed through the screen door and the perpetual gloom of the place rose up to envelop them.

Half the town was gathered at the bar, including Richard Schrader
and Skid Denton, who must have gone home in the interval because even he couldn't manage to drink straight through for nine and a half hours—or could he? As soon as they walked in, a general roar went up, people showing off their wit with comments like “Look what the cat dragged in,” and a couple of the guys whistled at the sight of Pamela. Who whirled round, her hands outstretched, and did a little pirouette for them. Reticence was not one of her drawbacks, that was for sure.

They had a beer at the bar, and he luxuriated in the sweet proximity of her, in the blond bundle of her hair all coiled up in a no-nonsense braid, in the grip and complexity of the muscles of her legs, in her smile. He bought her Beer Nuts, Slim Jims, pickled eggs, and they each had a shot to go with their beers while Lynette fried up a pair of steaks for them, the holster riding her hip like an excess flap of skin. It was a moment, all right—so glorious and pure he never wanted to let go of it.

Over their steaks, which they ate at a table in the corner, she told him what he already knew or suspected or had heard elsewhere. She'd been born and raised in Anchorage, but every summer of her childhood her father had taken the family—her and her sister and mother—to live out of a tent in the Endicott Mountains of the Brooks Range while he prospected unnamed creeks in nameless canyons and reappeared every third day or so with something for the pot. They'd contract with a bush pilot to drop them off just after breakup, and the pilot would come back and pick them up again at the end of September, and so what if they missed a whole month of school? She and her sister, Priscilla, would fish and roam and scare up birds, listen to the wolves at night and have face-to-face encounters with just about every creature that made its living north of the Arctic Circle. And now, now that she was a college graduate and twenty-seven years old and sick to death of working nine-to-five in a city of concrete and steel, she wanted to go back to the bush, and not just for a vacation, not as a tourist or part-timer, but forever. That was it. That was the deal.

He'd begun to feel the effects of the long day—the two-way drive, the alcohol, the excitement that burned in the back of his throat like a shot of Canadian on a subzero night—when he looked up from her eyes and saw Joe Bosky across the room. “Shit,” he said. “We got to go.”

“Already? Aren't you going to ask me to dance? At least once—one dance?”

The jukebox was going—“Mystic Eyes,” one of his favorite songs, but hardly the sort of thing you could dance to. “Next time,” he said.

She let out a laugh then. “You're just like all the rest of them, afraid of their own two feet. How about if we wait for a slow one?”

And now he was hedging. “But I wouldn't want you to have to spend your first night in my shack in town, and you wouldn't want that either, would you? Because don't forget, we've got a three-hour paddle, upstream, to get to the cabin—”

She told him he was cute. Told him she liked the way the two parallel lines creased his brow when he worked himself up. And she smirked and stretched out her legs so he and everybody else in the place could admire the full shimmering length of them, and agreed with him. “You're right,” she said. “I do want to see the cabin, I mean, that's the whole point, isn't it? Or half of it, or part of it, anyway. It's just that I was really enjoying this.”

That was when Joe Bosky butted in.

He was hovering over their table like a waiter, stinking of something—fish, vomit, B.O.—and he was grinning like some sort of trapped animal from the deeps of his beard. He was wearing a fatigue shirt that had U.S.M.C. stenciled across the pocket and a khaki cap with the brim worked flat. His jeans looked as if they'd been salvaged from a corpse. And smelled like it too. “Hey,” he said, leaning into the table and ignoring Sess, “I hear you're the lady that's looking for a man, is that right?”

Pamela didn't know him from Adam, and she was the kind of person who had a smile for everybody, so she gave him his grin back and said, “That's right. But I didn't realize I was so famous.”

Sess was up out the chair. “We got to go,” he repeated.

“I was just wondering if I could get in on the action,” Joe Bosky was saying, ignoring him still. “You know, I'm a pretty good man in the bush myself—and I'm building a cabin up Woodchopper Creek even as we speak—and I was just wondering if, you know, there might be any free tryouts?”

Pamela's smile faded.

“I mean, I've got a sleeping bag out in the car if you've got maybe fifteen minutes to spare—”

Sess hit him—or attempted to hit him—square in the side of the head, but Bosky had been watching him out of the corner of his eye and had time to get his forearm up and deflect the blow. In the next instant, they were at each other, flailing across the floor, and there was some small damage done to the glassware and one of the rickety dried-out chairs before they were separated. Bosky made some ugly comments—shouted them, raging in the grip of three men, threats, accusations and promises, and there was no law up here unless you got the sheriff to fly in from Fairbanks to inspect the corpse—and Sess threw them back at him. He hadn't meant to, hadn't meant to show that side of himself in front of Pamela—cursing and the like—but of all the men on earth Joe Bosky was the one who could make him boil over till the lid rattled against the pan.

Out in the lot, as the mosquitoes dive-bombed them and they slammed back into the truck for the half-mile drive down to the shack on the river and the canoe that awaited them, Pamela looked shaken, and he felt sorry for that, he did. “What was that all about?” she said. “That guy—I mean, I've seen some bush crazies in my time, but that guy was scary.”

In the front seat now, the truck rumbling to life beneath him, Sess just stared out the window a moment. Joe Bosky was what was wrong with the world. Joe Bosky was what people came into the country to escape. And Joe Bosky, hammered, polished and delivered up by the U.S. Marine Corps, was right here at the very end of the very last road in the continental United States, going one on one with the
world. Sess was breathing hard, upset despite himself. “You don't know the half of it,” he said.

And then they were on the Yukon, the big nineteen-foot Grumman freighter loaded down to the gunwales, the ten o'clock sun picking its way through the rolling black shadows of the debris on the surface, and he was calm again, in his element, off the road, out of the bar and into the embrace of the country. He watched Pamela's shoulders dig at the paddle, studied the heavy braid of her hair, the beautiful locus of her back muscles and the sweet place where she sat the seat. The birds were there, the spruce marshaled along the banks and climbing up into the hills like an emperor's army, naked bluffs, a million cords of driftwood flung up against the shore waiting for the river to decide what to do with them. A breeze came up and took the mosquitoes away. They saw moose in the shallows, a black bear with two cubs hurtling up the far bank as if she'd been shot out of a cannon. They spoke in low tones. They were silent, and the country spoke for them. And then she said something, and he said something, and it was as natural to him as if he were speaking to himself.

It must have been around midnight, the sun hovering on the horizon, when they swung into the mouth of the Thirtymile River and the cabin came into view. Already the five dogs were up and yammering, dust rising round their feet in a distant cloud, the proto-barks drifting off into wolfish howls of greeting. “Hear that?” Sess said, digging into the paddle. “That's your welcoming committee.”

She turned to look over her shoulder. “Oh, really? And what are they saying?”

“ ‘Pam-e-la, we looooooove youuuu!' ”

And she laughed, even as a pair of loons went racketing up off the water. “You sure they're not saying, ‘Here we are, now feeeeeeeeed us'?”