Drop City (59 page)

External injuries were bad enough out here, but internal injuries, what you couldn't see, didn't really offer up much hope. They would have to go back for the sled, load him into it, mush past Drop City, Sess's cabin, Woodchopper, and on into Boynton, and somebody would have to fly out of Boynton and take him to the hospital in
Fairbanks, and all of that with internal injuries, the ruptured organs, the severed spinal cord, the slow seep of secret blood. But Sess had the gun in his face, had the muzzle of it resting right on the bridge of his nose, the cold kiss of the barrel marking the place where his black bushed eyebrows met, and Joe Bosky was struggling to say something, final words, and what he said, even as Sess Harder lifted the gun out and away from him and rested it over one solid moon-white shoulder, what he said was, “Fuck you.”

33

At first she didn't know what to say, thinking of Che and Sunshine, their squalling faces and stamping inconsolable feet, the noise of them, the dirt—always dirty, born dirty—and she looked away, trying to compose herself. She ran a finger round the rim of the coffee mug and plugged in her million-kilowatt smile, and though she wanted to say
No, oh, no,
as she would have responded to news of cancer, heartbreak or any run of sorrow or affliction, she managed finally to murmur something appropriate, or at least compliant. And then, before she could think: “Do you—I mean, did you—?”

Pamela took one look at her and burst out laughing—she had to set down her cup because she was laughing so hard, her eyes squeezed down to semicircular slits, her hands gone to her temples as if to keep her head anchored on her shoulders. “You'd think I'd just announced that the roof was on fire or something from the look of you—really, Star, you should see herself.” She let out another laugh, slapped a hand flat on the resounding plane of the table. “God, you're funny.”

Star laughed too, easing into it—sure, all right, she'd let herself in for it—but even as she laughed, as the two of them laughed, she was thinking of herself, of what she would do if it was her. She'd stocked up on birth control pills—they all had, Reba's idea, her obsession, actually—but she'd come to the end of them weeks ago. When she and Marco made love it was cautious love now, restrained love, with the threat of repercussions hanging over the act, and he always pulled
out of her at the crucial moment—
coitus interruptus
—as if that could forestall the inevitable, and how many of the girls she'd gone to Catholic school with were on their second or third child already? She'd kill herself. She'd have an abortion. But where? How? Somebody told her the Indian women knew of a way, some root they boiled into a tea, or maybe they made it into a poultice that drew out the fetus like pus from an infection—

“You know, you're supposed to congratulate me. You're supposed to squeal and jump around—we're both supposed to squeal and jump around. I'm going to have a baby. You're the first person I've told and you look as if you just found me floating in the river in a sack.”

She wanted a cigarette. She'd already had her first of the day and she was trying to cut back, not only because of the expense and the fact that your brothers and sisters were constantly bumming them off you day and night, but because they were a habit, and she didn't want to develop any habits except love and kindness. Pamela's pack of Marlboro's lay on the table between them. Star eased a cigarette from the pack, lit it, exhaled. “I'm sorry,” she said. “It's just that I can't imagine—personally, I mean. I mean, I've got so much to live for—” But that sounded wrong—it was wrong. She tried to recover herself, because Pamela—her friend, her sister—wasn't laughing anymore. “You want a boy or a girl?” she said finally.

Pamela went off then, everything copacetic, pleased with herself, lit up with it. She wanted a girl, couldn't imagine anything else, but when she and Sess had talked about it—theoretically, that is—he'd leaned toward a boy, which was only natural. He was quiet about it, but he wanted to see a new generation in the country, of course he did, and with a boy he could teach him everything he knew about living off the land and respecting it. “He'd want a boy,” she said, and she slipped a cigarette out of the pack now too. “But so did my father.”

“And he got two girls.”

“That's right.”

And then they were laughing again.

They smoked their cigarettes and thought their private thoughts, drank coffee, played a second game of chess—which Star won—and then the rubber match, which went to Pamela. Together they made lunch, a thick cooked-down broth with egg noodles and put-up vegetables from the Harder larder, and then they settled in to read by the stove. Though they hadn't discussed it, the unspoken arrangement they'd arrived at telepathically at some point the previous night was that Star was going to stay on till their men returned from the trail. Star had washed and dried the dishes—she insisted on it—and let Pamela sit there by the window as she put everything back on the shelves in proper order. She took pride in that—she knew the place as well as she knew her own. And the pans glistened when she was done with them.

After a while she moved from the chair to the bed, pulled a fur over her legs. She could feel the nicotine and caffeine ricocheting off the walls of her blood vessels, but she wasn't nervous or coffeed-out, just steady and calm and alert. The book she had with her was by Richard Fariña,
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me,
the hippest thing going, recommended by everybody and dog-eared and chewed-over so many times it had to be the sorriest volume in the Drop City library. It was all right. Funny, wild. But the scene it described—college, dope, thumbing your nose at the straight world—just seemed alien to her now. Or remote—that was a better word. Before long, she was asleep.

She woke to lamplight, a smell of baking. Pamela was there at the stove, her hair coiled atop her head and shining with the soft flickering pulse of the lamp's wick. The windows were black. A distant voice, thin and disconnected, carried down out of the hills, and then it was answered by another and another. “What time is it?” she said, pushing herself up from the pillow. She felt as if she'd been asleep forever.

“It's early yet. Four-fifteen.”

“I'll never get used to this.”

Pamela was taking something out of the oven—a cake in a
circular pan—and she paused, the hot pan held out before her, the sweet all-embracing scent filling the room even to the farthest corners, to give Star a look over her shoulder. “You'll get used to it,” she said. “Believe me.”

They were eating cake—angel food, barely cooled, with chocolate fudge icing—when they became aware of a subtle change in the tenor of the night, the faintest chink of the clip on a dog's harness, a sound as of the earth breathing in and out again, and then they were up from the table and standing at the open door of the dogtrot, peering out into the moonlit yard. The men were there—Marco and Sess—and the patient line of the dogs, sitting in their harnesses, waiting to be freed and staked and fed. Pamela turned back into the room to put the kettle on and Star followed her to get her parka, and in a moment the two of them were out in the moonlight, the shock of the supercooled air searing the nicotine from their lungs.

A quick hug, one man, one woman, and Pamela was down amongst the dogs, unclipping them individually from the gangline and leading them to their separate houses and their separate stakes. Star stood there in the cold, shifting from foot to foot, wanting to help, but she didn't know the dogs or what to do with them and so she drew back and waited. One of the dogs, she saw that much, was injured and riding up atop the sled, the frame of which seemed overburdened, piled up beyond sense or reason, and where were the furs? She'd looked forward to the furs in the way a prospector's wife might have looked forward to the jar of gold flakes brought down to her out of the hidden seams of the hills—absent the killing of the animals and the mechanics of their suffering, that is, because she didn't want to think about that, didn't want to know or even imagine it. The furs, the furs alone were what interested her. The beauty and richness of them, mink, otter, fox, delivered up from nowhere, magically, like the salmon that gorged the streams and the ducks crowding the skies. But where were they? And what was this protruding from the frame—boots? A spare pair of boots?

She was about to say something when Marco loomed up out of the
blue glitter of the snow, took her by the arm and led her through the dogtrot and into the cabin. His beard was ice. His eyes were cracked and broken. The tip of his nose was the wrong color. “Something happened,” he said.

There were sounds from outside, Sess's voice, Pamela's, the dogs yapping and clamoring for their food. “What?” she wanted to know, straining to read his face even as he turned away from her and held his hands out to the stove. She felt sick suddenly. There was a shadow sweeping over the ground, over the cabin, over Drop City. “What? What is it?”

“Ronnie,” he said.

“Ronnie?” She didn't understand him. What could Ronnie possibly have to do with a hurt dog and three days out on the ridges and down in the ravines in forty-below-zero weather? Ronnie the thief? Ronnie the irrelevance? Who cared about him? Who cared about him, really? He'd gone to high school with her. He'd been her lover. He'd stolen her money.

Marco wouldn't look her in the face, and that scared her.

“What?” she demanded. “What happened?”

“He—they tried to, him and Bosky, in the plane. He died. He's dead.”

Still she didn't understand. “Who? You mean Joe Bosky?”

“Both of them. It was a plane crash.”

She had to sit down then, and Pamela was in the room now and Sess right behind her, the door slamming to, the last breath of the cold trapped and dissipating inside the furnace of the four walls, the shrinking space of the cabin crowded suddenly, shoulders, faces, limbs, three people in parkas stalking around and recoiling from one another as if they were trying to make their way through Grand Central at rush hour:
Ronnie? Dead?

Eventually—it must have been an hour, an hour or more—she went out into the yard, her hand clasped in Marco's, to look at him there in the sled, because she still didn't believe it, didn't believe really that anybody could die—the old maybe, maybe them—but
nobody she knew, nobody like Ronnie. Like
Pan.
They'd come across country together. He'd made her laugh. He'd pressed himself to her in the hush of her room, on the seat of the car, in the starched sterile drum-tight beds of motels in anonymous towns, he'd read to her, sung to her, praised her and loved her. And now he was lying there frozen in the sled, a shadow, a dead lump of nothing pressed in death to the dead lump of Joe Bosky—and those were his boots, Bosky's, sticking out of the bottom of the sled on his dead frozen feet. For a long moment she stood there looking down at the dark hummock of the sled, Sess and Pamela immured in the cabin, Marco beside her. She was trying to cry, but there was nothing there. “I want to see him,” she said, and her voice betrayed her.

Marco's breath trailed away from his lips, silvered and alive. “You don't want to see him. Really, you don't. Come on, let's go inside. We'll spend the night and decide what to do in the morning. Okay?”

It wasn't okay. She stepped forward, the dogs rustling at their chains, the stars riding up and away from her till the whole night seemed to plead for intercession, and then she pulled back the blanket and the moon showed her what was there.

“That's not Pan,” she said.

And it wasn't. It was something twisted to impossibility, nothing natural, nothing she could identify, no face even, because it was turned from her in its frozen cowl, just the slant of a face, that was all, and it could have been anybody. “Come on, Star,” Marco whispered. She saw the hair then, spilling off the spool of his head, grown out finally to its maximum length, hip, very hip, as hip as anybody could ever have wished or dreamed, and she slipped the glove from her hand for just an instant to feel it move beneath the pressure of her five bare fingers.

On Christmas Eve, just after the light faded from the sky, it began to snow. Marco and Jiminy had cut a tree and set it up in the back corner of the meeting hall, and everybody gathered over eggnog (rum
and evaporated milk, whipped with nutmeg, sugar and powdered egg) to decorate it with God's eyes made of yarn, scraps of silver foil, strings of glass beads and paper chains. The twelve-volt battery, newly charged in Boynton and retrieved on the back of Iron Steve's snowmobile, was hooked up to the stereo in the loft, and so there was music, people shuffling through the albums to find their favorite cuts, nothing religious, really, no hymns or carols, but mystical stuff, Ravi Shankar, Mahavishnu John McLaughlin, Coltrane, Rollins, Dylan.