Drop City (60 page)

There were four stoves at Drop City, one in each of three finished cabins, and the ancient Great Majestic range they'd brought upriver in the boat to do the communal cooking in the meeting hall, and all four were in use. They were roasting two turkeys and a goose delivered frozen from the general store in Boynton by Sess Harder, and a pair of spruce hens Marco had managed to shoot under a tree somewhere, with potatoes, stuffing and gravy, and for the vegetarians there was a broccoli and cheese casserole, meatless lasagna and mashed turnips. And cookies. A thousand cookies.

Star was in the midst of it all, juggling pots on the range, slicing, chopping, whipping, the music getting up inside her till it was like a whole new circulatory system working in symbiosis with the original one, the one she was born with, and when somebody handed her a joint, she took it and held it to her lips a moment and passed it back again. She sang to herself, hummed, made up lyrics for the tunes that didn't have any. The gravy thickened, the snow faltered. Lydia was dancing with Tom Krishna and Deuce, and Jiminy was dancing by himself, Harmony and Alice handed out personalized ceramic mugs to every one of Drop City's eighteen remaining residents—each one with a reasonably faithful representation of the recipient's face molded into it—and Marco came up and surprised her with a pair of earrings—peace symbols—he'd carved out of a scrap of caribou antler. And just when she thought it couldn't get any better, Pamela appeared at the door with two bricks of fruit cake and a bottle of brandy tucked under her arm.

There was a jabber of greeting, dishes already set out on the sheet of plywood they'd extended the table with, steam rising, the dog—Freak—looking hopeful, and then Star took Pamela's coat and flung it up to Mendocino Bill in the loft, because that's where the coats were going, no room anywhere else. Pamela stood there, giving off energy, and then she was hugging people, one after the other. She was looking good—healthy, pretty—her face colored by the wind, her hair parted in the middle and trailing down over her sweater till the reindeer dancing across her chest were hidden in a spill of honey-blond hair, and she was wearing the beaded headband Star had given her. “You know what you look like?” Star said, handing her the joint that had just appeared magically in her hand.

“No, what?”

“Like a hippie.”

“You mean a hippie
chick
?”

It took her a minute. “Are you playing with my head?”

“Who me? Never.”

She watched Pamela make a pretense of inhaling, then took the joint back from her. “So where's Sess?” she asked.

A shrug. “Out on the trail. But he'll be here. He'd better be.” She shook out her hair with an abrupt flip of her neck. “It's our first Christmas together. I'll kill him if he doesn't make it.”

The notion struck her as funny, because why wouldn't he make it? Was it that compelling out there? As far as Star could see there was nothing beyond the windows but the night and the cold and the hills that folded back into another set of hills and another set beyond that. This was where the life was, the only life within miles. There was food, music, beer, wine. There was eggnog, there were cookies. Laughter and conviviality. There were people here. Brothers and sisters. “Oh, he'll make it,” she said. “I'm sure he will.”

Later, after they'd eaten, Verbie and Iron Steve showed up, extending the party all the way out from Boynton, and they danced, everybody, all of Drop City, even Che and Sunshine, and there was nothing lame about it and nobody to sulk and lie and exaggerate and
cheat and steal and pronounce it lame, nobody. At midnight, Bill dropped down out of the loft, got up as Santa Claus with a cotton-puff beard and every strip of red clothing Drop City owned draped round the bulk of him, and announced he had a present for everybody, right outside the door. People stirred, exchanged glances. Outside? There were groans, catcalls. “Is he for real?” Merry said.

“Believe me,” Bill coaxed, “you're going to like it.”

Star was drifting, nestled in beside Marco and Pamela on the bunk closest to the stove, sated, warm, letting the music infest her. She hadn't said a word in an hour. She felt bad for Pamela, because Sess hadn't showed, and that was the one damper on the evening—the bummer, the downer—the one thing that hadn't worked out. Pamela was worried, she could see that, and as the hours slipped by she'd said all the conventional things till there was nothing more to say, and then a joint went round, and a jug of wine, and she leaned back into Marco and let herself drift. But now, now Bill was in the middle of the room and people were coming back to life—it was Christmas, there was a surprise, a present. For everybody, he said.

It took a while, people fumbling into their jackets and boots, searching for gloves and scarves in the tangle of clothes in the loft, but then they were filing out the door into the cold. Bill led them. He was in the yard out front of the meeting hall, Santa with his freak's flag of hair and cotton-puff beard, his arms spread wide. It was clear now and cold to the teeth of the stars. “Here it is!” he shouted, and they lifted their eyes to the sky and saw the light pulsing there, cosmic light, yellow-green, blue, a tracery of red, indefatigable light, light that soared up out of the black shell of the horizon and burst and shattered and renewed itself all over again.

34

He was moving as fast as he could, the storm blown out now and the quarter moon slicing through the cloud tatters to illumine his way. The wind was in his face, the cold rode his shoulders like a hitchhiker. There was no sound but for the whisper of the sled's runners in the fresh powder and the faint, wind-scoured chiming of the cold steel clips on the dogs' harnesses. He was late, very late, ten or twelve miles out, thinking of Pamela waiting for him at the hippie camp, of Christmas and the present he'd kept hidden in the back doghouse since before she was his wife and just a hope flickering on the horizon. It was in the sled now—he'd snuck it in there, all wrapped in a spangle of colored paper that featured candles and bells and holly and suchlike, three mornings ago, early, when she was still in her slippers and the light hadn't yet come into the sky. He'd harnessed the dogs then, kissed her at the door and moved out across the yard and into the trees with a promise, three days, Christmas, the hippie camp.

The dogs knew they were heading home, six dogs now because Sky would never run again, and they ran as a team, as smooth and efficient as the conjoined wheels of a locomotive, streaming through the night, barely aware that he was there with them. They were going a good flat-out ten miles an hour, he guessed, and so he'd be there before long—by midnight anyway, judging from the stars. The present was nothing he'd made or bought, nothing you could mail-order or find in a store. It was a gift of nature, like the furs, the salmon, the moose, like gold. He'd found it projecting from the bank of the river
after breakup had torn the earth away to leave it exposed, a bone-yellowed gleam against the flat alluvial gray of the gravel bank. He knew right away what it was—Charlie Jimmy, of the Indian Village at Eagle, had showed him one once—the curving dense-grained tusk of a mastodon, intact, earth-stained maybe, but a magical thing, a blessing, a totem to take away your fears and sharpen your prowess till you were one with the frost and the melt and the cycle of lives gone down and sprung up again.

He squinted into the wind and pictured the animal itself, the pillars of its legs, the rich red pelt stretched over a mile of hide, the tumbling sluggish winter life of the shadowy herds emerging like phantoms from the impacted ridges and wind-blown plains and then vanishing again as if they'd never been there in the first place. But would she like it? He didn't have a clue. It could be carved, certainly, made into jewelry, bric-a-brac, chess pieces, but to his mind that would be a sort of desecration. She could take it to bed with her, make use of it as a fertility charm, but she didn't need any charms, not Pamela. He smiled at the thought and the ice cracked at the corners of his mouth.

He was late because he'd had an accident, one of those things that happen once or twice a winter, no matter how careful you are. He'd been leaving the cabin on No Name Creek with the new furs he'd taken and the ones he'd had to leave behind the previous week in order to accommodate the mortal remains of Bosky and Pan, two dead men, frozen and dead, and he'd miscalculated along a stretch of the creek thick with overflow ice. It had warmed for a few days and then dropped back down to zero and the stream had bubbled up through the ice and then frozen in layers beneath it, and both his feet plunged in up to his calves before he could get back up onto the runners of the sled. He wasn't wet all the way through—the three pairs of socks and the two felt liners saved him there—but there was still nothing else for it but to stop, tie up the sled, make a fire in the lee of a rock ledge and dry everything out.

It wasn't a crisis. Just one of those things. And he'd taken
advantage of the time to check the dogs' feet for ice and any scrapes or open cuts and rub them with ointment, and then there was a period where he just lay there under his tarp and watched the fire as the snow sifted down out of the branches of the trees and erased the sky overhead. It gave him time to think, because the last week had been chaotic, questions from the sheriff and the sheriff's deputy, a round of drinks at the Three Pup in memory of the dead men, more questions, papers to fill out, the life of the town, the funeral. Bosky had frozen to death, and so had Pan—after doing something so unthinking and senseless not even the wild hairs could believe it. Or maybe they could. Same thing had happened to a soldier on maneuvers out of Fort Wainwright once, oh, three, four winters ago, thought he'd eschew the regulations and bring himself a little comfort out there on sentry duty in the dead cold heart of the night. It was a shame. It was a pity. But up here planes crashed and people froze. That was the way it was.

What nobody knew, except for him and Marco, was that while the hippie—Pan—was already a corpse when they got there, Bosky was alive and breathing and aware enough to put his last two words together. It was a hard moment. The moment Sess had been chasing after for two years and more. He stood there over him with the .22, and he was going to squeeze the trigger—out of anger, sure, there was that, hate and anger—but out of something else too, call it compassion, call it habit. He brought the barrel of the rifle up to finish Bosky in the way he would have finished any spine-sprung thing caught in a deadfall or a trap meant for something bigger, death in an instant instead of an hour—that was human mercy in a place that had none to spare. But he didn't. A bullet hole would have required explanations, and those explanations would have led down a trail of deceit and dissembling he wanted no part of. And another thing: Bosky didn't deserve a bullet—better save it for the rabid skunk, the porcupine, the summer rat. What he did finally, after duly recording the man's final words, was turn his back, and he didn't argue about it with Marco—he wasn't in an arguing mood. Or a democratic one either.
The two of them just backed away from the fire, the wreckage, the corpse of the one and the slowly congealing flesh of the other, and then they came back in the morning and loaded up the human weight and hauled it in. “No reason,” he said to Marco, “to mention anything. The plane went down, that's all, and we brought them in.”

So that was the end of it. And though he'd never gloated over the death of any man—or any creature, for that matter—he had to consider that for him, at least, Christmas had come early. Somebody, some stooped and weeping parent or aunt or black-eyed sibling, would come in the spring and take the small things of sentimental value out of the cabin on Woodchopper Creek, and then the place would stand open to anybody who wanted it, though nobody would. Over the years the roof poles would rot, the sod would give way to the pull of the earth, the walls would buckle, the floorboards subside. Birds would nest in the stovepipe, mice in the bureau drawers. On a given night, in the still of winter, a wolf would trespass in the yard, divine the last dim lingering whiff of the scent of Bosky, Pan, Sky Dog, and lift a leg to eradicate it.

Sess could appreciate that, the natural order—let it stir, let it settle again. The wind was in his face. The northern lights were out, driving down the clouds. The snow whispered at his feet, talked to him, sang out with the rhythm of the night. He was heading home, riding the runners, breathing easy, a man clothed in fur at the head of a team of dogs in a hard wild place, going home to his wife.