Drop City (47 page)

Inside, everything was familiar, and it was all right. There was a routine here, a routine to follow, and it had nothing to do with scraping hides or hippie drugs or the sky coming unhinged. She stoked the fire. Lit a cigarette. Added water to the cooked-down meat and chopped vegetables at the cutting board. Outside, the thunder detonated over the hills, lightning lit the room and the rain came with a hiss, sweeping out of the woods and stabbing at the dirt of the yard in swift violent pinpricks of motion. Star had lit the marijuana as casually as she might have lit a cigarette and passed it to Merry, who drew in the thin pale smoke that smelled of incense, of myrrh, and what was it?—frankincense—and then Merry passed it to her. She put it to her lips, inhaled, and it was no different from a Marlboro, except there was no taste to it. “You want to know something?” Star said. “You don't know what making love is till you've done it with this. Really. It's like every neuron is firing at once, and your skin, your skin just
burns
for the touch of a man.”

At some point she went out in the rain and brought in the rum and the cups and the ashtray with the wet stick of marijuana in it, and at some point she laid the marijuana on the stove to dry and dipped herself a bowl of bear stew. She was hungry, hungrier than she'd ever been before. She had a second bowl. A third. She wiped up the gravy with bread, poured herself a cup of coffee. The rain held steady and she put wood on the fire and let the faintest hint of worry over Sess run in and out of her head—he could take care of himself; this was nothing, nothing but rain. Later, she stared at a magazine for what seemed hours, and still later, she went to the stove, picked up the dried-out stub of the marijuana cigarette and smoked it down to
nothing, to two thin strips of saliva-yellowed paper which she tossed into the fire by way of hiding the evidence. It was dark when Sess came in, and though he stank of dog and the wet of the woods, though the cabin reeked of boiled bear and bear fat and the first death of a multitude to come, she stripped his clothes off him, piece by piece, and pulled him down and let herself melt beneath the living weight of him.

26

He would never admit it, least of all to himself, but Sess Harder's hands were cold, and if his hands were cold, Pamela's must have been freezing. They were both wearing thermals, sweaters and the matching flannel shirts with the red and black checkerboard pattern Pamela's sister had given them as a wedding present, but their gloves were tucked away in their breast pockets, high and dry. He didn't know what time it was—never did—but he figured it couldn't have been much later than nine
A
.
M
., the temperature stuck in the high teens despite the early influence of the sun, and with every dip of the paddle the river took a nip out of his hand. He'd stroke twenty times, then switch sides, but now the rising hand, still wet, was exposed to the wind raking upriver from the southwest, and that went numb on him. Patches of ice floated the water like gray scabs and both shores were crusted with it. Each breath came in a cloud. Up front, Pamela leaned into her paddle, switched sides with a quick flick of her wrists, and never uttered a word of complaint.

Mid-October, the alder, willow and birch gone into a blaze of dead red and streaky yellow, a hard freeze every night, and the swing of the season felt good, as if the whole country were undergoing a blood transfusion, and Sess Harder himself had never felt better. He'd got his meat—the lucky bear and an even luckier moose, a big bull in rut that had drunk so much water Sess had heard the sloshing of it in his gut from a hundred yards away—and he'd netted maybe a
hundred washtubs full of whitefish and suckers on their annual migration to the deep holes of the river where freeze-up wouldn't affect them. And rabbits. The newborn of the year, crazy for anything green to put on winter fat, and as easy to snare as the air itself. The cache was full, the berries picked and the vegetables canned, and this was his wife, his sweet-cream wife, sitting the seat in front of him with the long arch of her athlete's back rising up out of the anchor of her hips and flank, working the paddle with her squared-up shoulders and tailored arms, and not so much as a peep out of her.

They were on their way to Boynton and thence to Fairbanks in Richard Schrader's truck, if Richard Schrader's truck was available, and he had no doubt it would be, unless maybe the rear end had fallen out of it, which, come to think of it, it was threatening to do last time he'd driven the thing. Pamela had wanted a break for a few days, and so had he, bright lights, big city, one more dose before winter set in. They were both of them hankering to spend a little of the money that had come their way in the form of much-handled bills wrinkled up in plain envelopes or stuffed inside wedding cards, and there were things they needed, obviously, to fill up the new room of the cabin and top off their store of dried beans, rice, tea, coffee, cigarettes, pasta and the like. And toothpaste, never forget toothpaste. He'd spent one whole winter brushing his teeth with his forefinger and another using a mixture of baking soda and salt that ate the bristles out of the brush. Soon the river would be impassable, and then they'd have to wait till freeze-up to come downriver with the dogs, and their destination would have to be Boynton, unless they wanted to mortgage the farm and fly to a place where the sun was more than just a rumor.

So here they were, out on the river. With cold hands. But there would be warmth in spades at the Nougat and the Three Pup, and by the time they hit the Fairbanks Road the sun would be well up and the temperature peaking in the forties or maybe even fifties. A wedge of noisy scoters shot past overhead, moving south, intelligent birds,
get out while the going is good. His paddle shifted ice. “How you doing up there, Pamela?” he asked. “Hands cold?”

She looked over her shoulder, smiling wide, the dimple bored into her near cheek and those neat white teeth and little girl's gums on display. “Super,” she said, in answer to the first question. And, “A little, I guess,” in answer to the second.

He loved her. Loved her more than anything he could ever conceive of. “Hang in there,” he said, proud of her toughness, glowing with it. “When we get to the Three Pup,” he said, digging at the paddle, “the first shot's on me.”

“Big spender,” she said, and her laugh trailed out over the river, hit the bank and came rebounding back again.

They'd both removed their sweaters and their hands were fully recharged by the time the big sweeping bend that gave onto Boynton came into view. It had warmed more than he'd expected—into the sixties, he guessed—and with both shores lit with fall color the last few miles were nothing but pleasure. His eyes were roving ahead—always roving, a hunter's eyes—when something moving in the shallows at the head of Last Chance Creek caught his attention. He held the paddle down on the last stroke and angled them in on a line for the creek, puzzled, because this was no moose or bear or congress of beaver, no half-submerged sweeper bobbing in the current and no boat either—it was something unexpected, out of place, one of those aberrations of nature that made life so damned interesting out here in the wastelands, because just when you thought you'd seen it all—

“Who is that out there wading in the creek?” Pamela said, and her eyes were keener than his, how about that? And then it—they—came into focus for him. He saw the two figures grow together and then separate like shards of glass in a kaleidoscope, the canoe slicing closer now, the two of them bending to the water and coming back up again, standard-issue hip waders, glossy shirts, the flash of light from the linked silver band that looped the crown of a flat-brimmed hat. He was dumbfounded, absolutely dumbfounded. There were two
black men—two Negroes,
hippie
Negroes—out in the sun-spangled wash of Last Chance Creek, panning for gold.

“Hello,” he called as the canoe drifted up on them, “how you doing?”

Neither man said a word. They gave him looks, though, fixed dark eyes bristling with distrust and hostility. The current surged at their thighs, at the sagging skin of their waders. They regarded the canoe for a long solemn moment, as if it had appeared there spontaneously as some sort of compound of the water and air, and they looked first to Pamela, and then Sess, before turning back to their work, rinsing scoop after scoop of sand in the dull gleam of their pans till all the false clinging grains of silica were washed free.

“Showing any color?” Sess asked, because he had to say something.

The smaller one looked up out of a face like a tobacco pouch worn smooth with secret indulgence. His voice was soft, a whisper. “Naw, ain't nothin' here, isn't that right, Franklin?”

The other one glanced up now, one wild eye and a look that invited nothing. “Naw,” he seconded, “nothin'.”

Then the first one: “Place isn't worth shit. Right, Franklin?”

“Right.”

Sess said he guessed he'd be seeing them later, then, and Pamela said good luck, and they both dug at their paddles, eager to work their way out of earshot and run this episode through the grinder. They'd gone three or four hundred yards, when Pamela lifted her paddle on the glide and turned her head to him. “What was that all about?”

“Beats me,” he said. “But they wouldn't find half an ounce of gold in that creek if they panned it for a hundred years.”

“They sure don't act that way. They act like those wild hairs in
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,
like Humphrey Bogart and I don't who—”

“Walter Huston,” he said.

“Right, Walter Huston.”

The canoe drifted. The sun cut diamonds out of the water. “They were black men, Pamela. Negroes. Where in god's name do you find Negroes up here?”

Boynton had come into view now and she arched her back and dipped her paddle. “Jesus, Sess,” she said, throwing the words over her shoulder, “black men, red men, Chinese, what difference does it make? You sound like you've never seen a black man before.”

He was going to say, “I haven't,” but just then a new feature, as strange in its way as the two figures in the creek, leapt out of the shoreline at him in an explosion of color. It wasn't a house exactly, more like a Quonset hut, wedged in between Richard Schrader's weathered gray clapboard box and the shack, and the presence of it there stymied him a minute, but then he knew what it was and knew the answer to his question all in a single flash of intuition: Where do you find Negroes up here? In a hippie bus, that's where.

If he expected warmth and conviviality at the Three Pup, he was mistaken. Lynette was laying for him, and so was Skid Denton. The minute he ushered Pamela in the door, Lynette backed away from the bar and said, “Whoa, here he is, the hippie king himself. Or should I say, hippie landlord?”

Skid Denton was welded to his seat at the end of the bar, as usual, a plate of home fries at his elbow and a glass of beer sizzling in his hand. He leaned forward from the waist to put in his two cents: “It's a bonfire every night and that hippie music never stops. I hear they're screwing themselves raw upriver, screwing everything but the dog, and smoking drugs all day long. They really get a cabin built?”

“That one with the bones in his hair,” Lynette said.

“And the niggers.” Richie Oliver looked up red-eyed from his scotch and water as if he'd been dog-paddling in a sea of it for the past three days. “Don't forget the niggers.”

Eight people were gathered at the bar and there wasn't a single genuine smile for him—or for Pamela either. And that hurt, because
what did she have to do with it? No more than he did. Or less, a whole lot less. He tried his best to ignore Lynette and Skid Denton, who was a first-class jerk, anyway, greeted everybody by name and pulled out a chair for Pamela at the table by the window, thinking ham and eggs, or bacon, or maybe a burger, and a beer and a bump to go with it, because he'd be goddamned if they were going to chase him out of his own chosen roadhouse and bar. Pamela gave him a thin smile and took his hand across the table. “Lynette,” he called, and maybe he did raise his voice just a hair more than was called for, “can we have a little goddamn service over here?”

They drank. They ate. And they took their sweet time about it. People pulled up chairs and plopped down to butt in, one after another, two at time, three, and all the news and all the burning gossip started with the hippies and ended with them too. Lynette sat right at the table with him and Pamela and watched them cut their meat and lift the forks to their mouths as if they might need instruction, and she never stopped talking, not even to draw breath. “The one with the bones in his hair and the garlic strung round his neck? Mr. Vampire, that's what I call him. He come in here and ordered a pitcher of beer and wanted to know if he could get it on credit and when I said nobody gets credit here he went around the bar and asked if anybody had any change to spare.”

But Richard Schrader—the best friend Sess had on the river, the
best man
at his wedding—Richard Schrader took the cake. He hadn't been home when they came up from the canoe, and they'd skirted the tarted-up bus and the hippie out there hovering over his kiln and the shining glazed line of bowls and plates and ashtrays he'd arranged on a split log as if he was going into business in Sess's weedpatch, and now he—Richard—pulled the truck into the lot and came through the mosquitoless door and the first thing out of his mouth was “Sess, these people have got to go, they're making a three-ring circus out of my yard and I don't think I've had more than two hours sleep a night since they got here with their whooping and screaming and that unholy racket of guitars and tambourines and whatnot and did you
know they took the speakers out of the bus and mounted them up on the roof so they could blast that shit out over the river and everyplace else? And I've tried to reason with them, I have, but it's Peace, brother, and fuck you—”