Drop City (55 page)

For a long while she just sat there, staring down at the pattern of her things spread out over the bed. Then she went through everything again, sobbing deep in her chest, rubbing at her nose and eyes with the back of her sleeve. Then she got up and searched round the cabin, peering down the length of the shelves, fanning through the paperbacks, though she knew she hadn't moved that money—not unless she was losing her mind, not unless she'd been sleepwalking or dreaming herself into another dimension. She retraced her steps. Searched through the empty pack again and yet again and finally used her penknife to take the lining out of the pocket, but what she
clenched in her hand was only nylon, navy blue nylon, manufactured in Taiwan.

The money hadn't vanished into thin air. It hadn't grown legs and run off. Someone had stolen it, that was the only conclusion, some thief, somebody who'd had the nerve, and the leisure, to go through her things behind her back—Merry, Maya, Jiminy, Marco. But no. She couldn't believe it of any of them, and besides, no one had known the money was there—it was her secret, her secret stash. She was desolated. This was the end of brother- and sisterhood, this was the way it played out. In betrayal. Selfishness. Meanness. In thievery. Where was the flow in that? Where was the breakthrough? It came to her that everybody must have had a secret stash, something they were holding out on for their own selfish little reasons, even Marco, even Merry, and so it was only logical that they would suspect each other and rifle—that was the word, wasn't it?—rifle each other's possessions.

Once more she went through everything, desperate now, flinging wrung-out socks and unfurled sweaters and spine-sprung paperbacks over her shoulder, and she was looking at the door and listening for footsteps as if she could hear them through the screen of the storm, a heartbeat away from
rifling
Jiminy's things, Merry's, Marco's, when she thought of Ronnie. He'd been alone here, with Lydia, and if anyone knew her secrets Ronnie did, if anyone would have gone through her things, if anyone would even have thought of stealing from her, lying to her, cheating and two-timing and offering her up to teepee cats like a prostitute and playing the unwitting victim all the while, it was Ronnie. Ronnie had her money. Ronnie.

She looked up into the devastation of the room. It was like a pit, like a cage. Smoky, stinking, everything a jumble and nowhere to escape to. The joints of the stovepipe didn't fit right, the gusts ran right through the chinking in a hundred places, the door was like a wind tunnel no matter how many layers of rags and paper they stuffed into the gaps round the frame. It was hopeless, everything was hopeless,
and she couldn't seem to stop crying. Time passed—minutes, hours, she didn't know. The wood of the stove burned to coals and then ash. She was shivering. Sitting there and shivering, with no will to feed the stove or even wrap herself in a blanket. And then the door rattled on its hinges and she looked up and Marco was there.

Marco. He was a sheet of white, white everywhere, layered with it, his mustache frozen over his lips, his lips white, the flesh of his cheekbones gone the color and texture of dripped wax. He didn't unwrap his scarf, didn't remove his hat or tug at the straps of the guns slung over his shoulder—he just moved into the room on stiff shuffling feet and caught her in the deadfall of his arms.

30

Pamela was sitting at the window of the darkened cabin, lighting one cigarette off another and staring out into the moonlit yard. This was her favorite form of recreation, once the cooking was done and the dishes washed and she'd worked the furs as long as she could stand the tedium of it and patched Sess's clothes and patched them again till his pants and shirts could have stood up and paraded around the room like walking quilts—once that was over, once the wood had been hauled in and the stove tended and tomorrow's bread set to rise in the pan, she sat and watched. The weather had been clear and cold for the past week, and the moon had become her sun, omnipresent, unimpeded, lighting up the snow of the hills like a stage set. She'd been out earlier (at five
P
.
M
. by the windup clock Sess had made his obsession; the ticking drove him to distraction, he claimed, and over and over again he wondered aloud how she could possibly care what time it was anyway), and she'd watched the pulse and stagger of the northern lights going green and yellow-green and shading to purple, to red, until she'd felt the cold and come back inside. Sitting here, at the window, was better than reading a novel or laying out a hand of solitaire or doing crosswords. It was her downtime, her contemplative time, and she stared into the landscape in the way other people might have stared into a picture or a television screen. A fox in winter coat came through the yard every day, twice a day. Owls sat the trees. Ravens stirred like black rags thrown down out of the night.
Twice she'd felt some inexpressible shift in the current of things and looked up to see a train of wolves clipping through the crusted snow on the proscenium of the riverbank.

As for the clock, she insisted on it. Yes, she'd given herself over to her man, and yes, she trusted his judgment, valued it, and she looked to him for sustenance and protection, all of that. And she saw his point. To live here, in the bush, was to live in primitive time, timeless time, and to have clocks ticking away the artificial minutes of man-made hours defeated the purpose, undermined the whole ethos of the natural world. But you had to make concessions, that was the way she saw it, or they'd be living in a cave and rubbing sticks together—and what about the chainsaw, the auger, the fiberglass fishing rod, the outboard engine he was talking about buying come spring? They were necessary, he argued, tools that helped them live better, because he didn't have to tell her, of all people, how thin was the wire stringing their life together out here under the immitigable sky where disaster was in the offing every minute of every day.

All right. For him it was the chainsaw and the outboard motor, but for her it was the clock, the calendar, the thermometer. If it weren't for the clock she wouldn't know if it was six in the evening or six in the morning, and people might argue that it didn't make a lick of difference, because morning and evening were artificial constructs like the days of the week and the counting out of the years from the birth of Christ, as if that mattered, as if it were real, as if God existed and the Argument from Design was a fact. She didn't care. She liked numbers, liked figures, needed to know that it was six twenty-five on December eighteenth, nineteen hundred and seventy, Anno Domini, and that the thermometer had stood at thirty-two degrees below zero when she last looked—and she might just get up again and step out the door and see how far it had dropped in the interim. She might. And she might keep a diary too, just simple things, just facts—the day, the time, the temperature, what they were eating, what was in the sky, in the trees, on the ground. That was her business, her
thing,
as Star would say, and who could deny her that? Not Sess. Certainly
not Sess. So let him wake in the night to the ticking of the clock. It wouldn't kill him.

She was about to get up and do just that—check the temperature—when she saw an upright shadow isolate itself from the trees and move on up the bank toward the cabin with the slow disconnected movement of a figure in a dream. She held the nub of the cigarette to her lips, smoking it right down to the filter, and watched. The figure moved closer, huddled, kicking through the snow on limbs that separated and joined and separated again, and she felt her whole being leap up inside her: it was Star, coming to relieve her of the burden of contemplation. What was it—what would Star say? It was far out. It was party time.

She was at the door before Star could knock, afraid that she might see the darkened windows and think no one was home and turn back for the hippie camp. “Well, hello, hello,” she said, sweeping her into the room, “what a surprise, what a nice surprise, and Merry Christmas, have I wished you a Merry Christmas?”

Star accepted a cup of tea, the expensive Darjeeling blend Pamela kept in a sealed tin for visitors, and Pamela found herself rocketing around the room in a high state of excitement, stoking the fire, lighting lamps, setting out a plate of crackers and cheese, bread, butter, two-berry jam, and spoons and a knife—where was the knife?—all the while talking nonstop, talking as if she'd been the prisoner of a tribe of deaf-mutes on a desert shore. She talked so much, so steadily and without remit, that it must have taken a quarter of an hour to realize that Star wasn't right there with her. Star wasn't saying anything, or hardly anything—just answering yes or no to the flock of questions she was throwing at her, nodding or grunting or chiming in with an
Uh-huh
or
I know what you mean
in a kind of call and response. Finally Pamela got hold of herself. She bit her tongue. Forced herself to take a long sip of the tea that was already going cold on the table before her. “Right,” she said, “right,” as if she'd just solved an equation that had been baffling a whole team of mathematicians for weeks, “why don't you tell me about it?”

She lit another cigarette. Star joined her. They held the taste of tobacco on their tongues a moment, looking into each other's eyes, then exhaled simultaneously. “Is it Marco?” she asked in a long trailing sigh of recycled smoke. “Is that it? Are you worried about him?”

Star shrugged. She was tiny—petite, a size four—and she'd never looked more lost and childlike than she did now, the hair pulled back neatly from the central parting and tucked behind her ears as if a mother had fussed over it, her shoulders thin and slumped, her eyes gone lifeless with a child's renewable grief. Marco was out on the trapline with Sess—he'd wanted to learn by doing, he said, and Sess had taken him under his wing—and they were siwashing, camping out on the trail, in temperatures that would certainly drop to minus forty or lower overnight. Or they weren't siwashing exactly—Roy Sender had built two crude timber-and-sod cabins at strategic junctures along the forty-odd miles of the trapline, and though they had dirt floors and none of the amenities of a year-round cabin, barely even a window between them, they did have sheet-metal stoves that Sess always kept in good repair, with an armload of kindling and neat lengths of stovewood ready to hand. Plus, Sess had gotten the two extra dogs he'd wanted—Howard Walpole's dogs, actually, sour as vinegar but good pullers. (Howard didn't need work dogs anymore because he was trading up for speed so he could try his hand at racing, just for the kick of it, he said—and had she heard the rumors about the Iditarod starting up again, with real prize money?—but everyone knew he'd never get off the seat of his snow machine long enough to get the dogs in harness.) And so Sess would be able to cover ground a whole lot faster and more efficiently than he would have a year ago.

“Because if that's what worrying you, honey, you can just put your fears aside—Sess knows what he's doing. He's the most capable man in the country, just ask anybody.” She gave a little laugh, picturing him out there in the patched-up parka she'd trimmed with wolverine for him, best fur in the world because it wouldn't ice up with the
tailings of your breath, standing tall on the back runners, his eyes squinted against the wind, the sinew pulling and muscle jumping in his arms. “That's why I picked him, you know that. And listen, thirty-five, forty below isn't critical, not really. At sixty I'd worry.” She laughed again. “But only just a little. Sess is smart. He could weather anything out there. But what about Marco—he come through that frostbite okay? When was that, anyway—about a month ago now?”

It was cold at the table. The wind always seemed to find the smallest cracks and slivers, as if exposing a cabin's flaws was its whole purpose and function. She thought of getting up to fine-tune the draught of the stove, maybe lay on more wood, but something kept her rooted in the chair, something just beginning to unravel like a ball of yarn, comfortable, newsy, the news of people and their complaints.

Star just shrugged, as if that were the only gesture she knew. “I guess,” she said. “But, yeah, he's okay. He's got these two white lines, they look like scars or something, over his cheekbones—but you've seen that, right?—and his toes are okay, like the two that turned black, his little toe and the one next to it on his right foot?” She stared off across the room, her brow wrinkled, thin white fingers tugging at the ends of her hair, summoning the picture. There was no sound but for the faint rattle and sigh of the stove sucking air.

“Reba said they were going to have to go and Norm said but wouldn't they just rot and fall off and Reba said you're thinking of toe
nails,
this is toes we're talking about. But they recovered. Miraculously. They're not exactly beautiful, and he did lose both nails, but there's no infection and I was like mortified because he wanted me to cut them off of him with the hatchet, I mean, can you believe it? Me? With a hatchet?”

So they laughed over the horror of that and puffed at their cigarettes and Pamela fed some wood to the fire and they both went over and sat on the bed and curled their feet under them in sympathy. After a while Star said, “That's not why I'm depressed. I know he'll be cool with Sess—”

“Cold, honey, he'll be cold.”

Star gave her a weak smile. “It's Drop City,” she said. “It's like the whole thing's just falling apart—did you hear Weird George, Erika and Geoffrey just walked out with the clothes on their backs?”

She hadn't heard. She knew the nephew was gone, and the little pie-face with the false eyelashes, and a handful of them kept pestering Sess—they'd pay him anything, whatever he wanted—to mush them and their guitars and she didn't know what else on into Boynton. And he was willing, why not, cash was cash, but the trapline came first because once you set those traps you were obligated by every moral force there was in the universe to tend them, if only to curtail the mortal suffering of the living beings that gave you your sustenance, because you didn't waste, you never wasted—waste was worse than a sin; it was death.

“That's terrible,” she said, and she meant it. She'd got used to having neighbors, Star, Merry, Maya, Reba, people she could talk to, women, other women. Last winter she'd been in an apartment, in a city, working in an office full of people. There were movies, shops, bars, restaurants. Now there were furs, now there was Sess. She was happy—she was, she knew she was, happier than she'd ever been—but the ineradicable nights were already stacking up, the stir-crazy nights, the nights when Sess wasn't enough, when nobody could be enough. And there was something else too, something bigger than all of that, her news, her secret, and if she didn't have Star to tell it to she'd go mad with keeping it in.

Star's face floated there beside her in the soft light of the lamp, sweetly pretty, unblemished, no more a hippie face than her own. “People are eating by themselves now,” she said. “And the food, they're fighting over the food.”

“But I thought you said there was plenty, more than enough—didn't you tell me Norm laid in six months' worth of the basics? He spent hundreds of dollars you told me—”

“We're not running out. It's more like hoarding, I guess you
would call it. People are raiding the pantry, just taking anything they want, almonds, raisins—all the dried fruit disappeared. You can forget the powdered milk too. And the chocolate.” She made a face, lifted her hands and let them drop. “The flour's all full of these little black specks—I thought it was pepper at first, that somebody'd maybe dropped the pepper shaker in there when they were battering fish—but actually they were mouse turds, millions of them. And Reba—she seems to think she's in charge since Norm split, and she's always calling these meetings, her and Alfredo, to quote ‘address the food situation,' but nobody comes.”

“It's not even Christmas yet,” Pamela said. She didn't know why she said it—she didn't want to be negative—but these people, these
hippies,
had to understand what they'd gotten themselves into here. It was like that fable her mother used to read to her and Pris when they were little, Aesop, she thought it was, about the ant and the grasshopper.