Drop City

  Sess told him to shut the fuck up and the tone of it was warning enough to everybody in the place—this was no laughing matter, no subject for lickerish grins and elbow prodding and the kind of behind-your-back laughter he’d had to endure over the Jill situation. Everybody, at that hour, included Richie Oliver, who was sitting at a corner table with a woman nobody had ever seen before, and Richie Oliver wasn’t going to say anything because he’d already had his three-day trial with Pamela, and they were both in the same boat. Besides which, the woman he was with was no beauty, and no girl either, and there was only one thing Richie Oliver or anybody else could have wanted out of that relationship. Sess put a quarter in the jukebox and played “Mystic Eyes” three times running and he ordered a shot and a beer and when he was done with it he ordered another and sat at the window studying a two-year-old copy of Time magazine he’d already read cover to cover at least six times.

  People came and went. Two middle-aged tourists in a white station wagon with three inches of grit plastered to it chatted him up a while and he told them some creative lies about the country and what they could expect from it. (“Moose? Really? You mean they’ll actually charge the car?”) Around six he had Lynette make him a tuna sandwich and a plate of fries for ballast, and then he moved over to the Nougat to see who was around and maybe shoot a couple games of pool, and there were two Hungwitchin Indians there he knew from upriver, beyond Eagle, and he drank with them for an hour or two until one of them vomited on the table and Clarence Ford, who was bartending, asked them to leave. The Indians stumbled into their pickup, fired it up and waved a clumsy goodbye, but wait a minute, could they give him a lift up the road to the Three Pup because his legs didn’t seem to want to work right? And sure, sure they could.

  That was where things got hazy. Joe Bosky was there, that much was certain, and he got into it with him all over again, and who said what to whom or who started it was beyond irrelevance. He did seem to recall Lynette unholstering her pistol and maybe even firing it once or twice in the lot outside, but the upshot of it was that he was eighty-sixed while Joe Bosky stood tall at the bar with ten or twelve people and drank in dignity the rest of the night. But what Joe Bosky hadn’t figured on, or anybody else, for that matter, was the fact that Joe Bosky’s car, his white fastback Mustang with the blue racing stripe he rented a special garage for and only drove in the summertime, was parked right there amongst the weeds of the lot. Right there, like a steel-and-glass wall, for Sess to stumble into. And it was nothing, a matter of a few fleeting drunken minutes, to pop the hood and relieve himself on the black shining stump of the distributor cap and then wander off toward the river with the vague idea of settling in for the night.

  To say he woke with a headache was to say nothing. He was crushed, poleaxed, transfixed on a stake of hurt and regret and the simple dull physical enervation of alcoholic excess. He hadn’t quite made it to his shack, and he woke to the sun in his eyes and the gentle prodding of the toe of Richard Schrader’s boot. “Sess,” Richard was saying, and his face was a shining planetoid orbiting the sky, and there was a moon there beside it, and the moon was the too-white face of the woman Richie Oliver had been with the night before—or maybe a clone of her. He sat up. He was fifteen feet from the door of his shack, nestled in a heap of tires and rusting machine parts just off the south end of Richard’s porch. The river humped by behind him. Everything was wet and cold. “Jesus,” the woman said, “look at you.”

  He was a monk. He was a penitent. He refused coffee, Band-Aids, calamine lotion for the damage the mosquitoes had inflicted on him, and he got in his canoe—no fresh supplies, nothing, not even a bottle of water—and headed upriver. He dipped water and drank as he went, and he found a couple of slivers of caribou jerky in his day pack and chewed them in shame and abnegation as he stabbed at the current with the knife of his paddle. It was drizzling still, and he shivered, then pulled over in a quiet eddy against the far bank to beach the canoe and start a fire to warm up, though it was probably sixty-five degrees out—when you’re wet and you’ve got a breeze in your face, it wouldn’t matter if it was eighty-five.

  The fire was a small, good thing. He had his spinning rod with him, always had his spinning rod, and he figured he’d make lunch simple. Three casts with an orange Mepps spinner and he had a grayling to toast on a stick, and that was so good he switched to a heavier rig and a silver spoon with a bit of green glitter in the center of it to represent the eye of some half-formed oblivious creature of the shallows, and flung it out in the hope of pike for dinner back at the cabin. Out it went with a hiss and a distant splash, and it came back with a whisper, over and over, and all he could think about was Pamela, Pamela in Howard Walpole’s three-room cabin with the blond grizzly rug in front of the stone fireplace he used to supplement his stove because he liked the aesthetics of an open fire for all his grease and the raw-boned stink of him. But Pamela would never choose a man like that, skinny, flat-headed, dumb as tar, no matter how much he’d made on a lucky placer strike two years back or how many conveniences he built into his cabin, would she?

  It was a question that tormented him all the dilatory, headachy way back up the river, and it tormented him even after he got a pike as long as a Louisville Slugger to rise up out of a hole under a cutbank and take the silver lure in its spiky dentition and leap clear of the water half a dozen times. Maybe he forgot about it—about her—for the space of five minutes there as he worked the canoe into shore and wrestled the thing up out of the shallows like one long whipcrack of muscle, but he thought of her again when he slipped the knife from the sheath and inserted it between the pike’s eyes and drove it in till the muscle went slack.

  That night he nursed two beers, fed the dogs and set snares for rabbit where there was sign along the far verge of the garden. It was warm, and he didn’t bother with a fire. For dinner, it was cold beans and petrified biscuits the mice had gnawed around the edges—he didn’t feel up to the smell of fish frying in a pan. He woke once in the middle of the night to a frenzy of barking and stepped out on the porch with his rifle in the pale half-light of three A.M. to see a bewildered moose—an old cow, something under eight hundred pounds and fallow, from the look of her—planted in the center of the garden, her legs like saplings growing out of the sea of black plastic. His first impulse was to shoot her, but he resisted. You didn’t shoot moose during Ducks, didn’t shoot moose until fall, when the meat would keep. Not to mention that it was out of season and the country was just beginning to set the table for the big summer-long banquet of ducks and geese and salmon and berries. So what did he do? He wasted a bullet and scared the thing off in the fond hope that she would avoid this place like the plague. Until fall, anyway.

  In the morning he fired up the stove and made himself coffee and two pike fillets rolled in flour and bread crumbs and fried in an inch of snapping Crisco, and sat in the doorway of the cabin slapping mosquitoes and watching the rain clouds gather and swell over the river. He didn’t feel right, and it had nothing to do with the tear he’d been on the other night either. What it had to do with was Pamela. He could smell her, a lingering female aura that was caught in the furs of the bed, in the ambient odors of the place, and if he looked over his shoulder to where she’d been sitting two mornings ago, he could almost see her there too. Pamela. She was his, no doubt about it. You’ve got nothing to worry about, Sess, isn’t that what she’d said? But then Howard Walpole’s grinning fleshless face rose up before him, superimposed over Richie Oliver’s solemn bearded gaze: What if she’d been lying to him? Mollifying him? What if she was just being polite?

  Before he knew what he was doing, he was back on the river, moving with the current, moving fast, the near bank racing along beside him and the wind rushing at his face. Howard Walpole’s place was below town, near the mouth of Junebug Creek, and it was set back on a bluff that commanded a hundred-and-eighty-degree sweep of the river. Worse, it featured double-insulated windows shipped all the way up from Oakland,
California, that gave Howard a full, unobstructed, breakfast-lunch-and-dinner view of anything moving along the shore or out on the water, and Howard always kept a good pair of Army surplus 7x42 binoculars ready to hand. Sess was thinking about that as the rain started in and the wind begin to flail his face and hands with cold hard stinging pellets that were less like rain and more like sleet than he’d care to admit. No matter, he thought of Pamela, and kept close to the bank where the wind wouldn’t discover him as readily.

  It would be a major embarrassment—life-quenching, horrific—to be caught anywhere within ten miles of Howard’s place, the kind of thing he’d never live down, not in a thousand years. If anybody saw him out there—if Howard saw him, or Pamela—he’d have to move out of the country altogether, go find himself a room in the heart of some run-down collapsing urban jungle like Cleveland or Brooklyn or some other godforsaken place where the rumor of it would never reach him. But there was no turning back now, and as the morning rectified itself into afternoon, he slipped past Boynton on the far side of the river in a heavy shroud of weather.

  He didn’t know what he was doing, didn’t know what he expected, didn’t have a plan or hope. He had binoculars of his own though, and he was as good on the river and in the woods as any man in the country, except for some of the old-timers, and the old-timers were too old to be good anymore. When he passed Ogden Stump’s fish camp, deserted this time of year, he knew the next bend would take him within sight of Howard Walpole’s place, so he trailed his paddle and pulled into shore. He didn’t have to hide the canoe, but he did—what if Howard was taking her for a scenic ride upriver or somebody went by collecting driftwood and saw it there?—and then started along the mud bank with his ancient .30-06 Springfield rifle in one hand (for bear discouragement, only that) and his binoculars in the other.

  It was raining hard now, raining as if it were water human beings breathed and not air, and though he was wearing his olive green poncho and a cap under the hood of it, he was wet through to the skin from the waist down. And shivering, shivering already, and there was no way to make a fire anywhere near here without Howard Walpole nosing round to warm his hands and feet, and jaw about the weather and wondering if he couldn’t help out with a piece of meat for the spit and inserting the sly observation that Sess was pretty far afield of his cabin, wasn’t he? So he shivered and edged closer, keeping to the dense growth along the riverbank, tightroping a game trail through the willows that no human being had traversed in the history of mankind, or at least since breakup. He saw moose track, black bear, wolverine, wolf. Moose droppings, bear scat. The rain was steady, the leaves dripped.

  When he got within a hundred yards of the cabin, he dropped to hands and knees, because there was no sense in putting Howard’s dogs on alert. The crawling calmed him—being down like this took him back to the deer stalks he’d made as a boy through grown-over burns in the Sierra foothills, and it gave his elbows a chance to get as wet as his knees. Crawling, he thought about that, about the dairy farm outside Porterville where he’d been raised, where he’d worked beside his father day by day, slowly acquiring the muscle he could have put to use on the football field, but the coach was a jerk of the first degree and he quit that before he’d hardly got started, and he’d quit college too, because he couldn’t see boxing himself in behind a desk. His every free moment was spent roaming, hunting, fishing. He was good at it, good at concealment, good at this.

  Fifty yards out, he eased into a clot of highbush cranberry and raised the binoculars to his eyes, and he didn’t feel low or cheap at all. He didn’t feel like a hopeless, sick-at-heart, unmanly, voyeuristic creep. Not him. No, he felt more like a—well, a commando, that was it. A commando on a secret vital mission essential to the well-being of the entire country, not to mention a very specific plot of painstakingly husbanded bush at the mouth of the Thirtymile.

  The only problem was, there was no one home. Or at least that was the way it appeared. From the angle he’d chosen, he could see up and in through the eastern window of the main room, across an inconvenient slice of vacant space, and out the southern windows. All was still, but for the sizzle of the rain. The dogs were huddled at the ends of their chains, deep in the miniature log houses Howard had built for them. Sess watched the windows, and then he watched the doghouses, the dark drawn-down faces of the dogs themselves, a squirrel, a robin, and he studied the way the rain dripped from the eaves in a long gray linkage of individual beads.

  Where could they be? There was no smoke either from the stovepipe or the chimney, no movement, no sound. Howard’s boat was there, tugging at its painter, and his floatplane too. Could they be out for a hike? Asleep? In bed? That was a possibility he didn’t want to entertain—it made his digestive tract broil just to imagine it—but it was a possibility that grew into an inevitability as the day wore on. They were in bed. Fucking. That’s what they were doing. They were fucking and she’d lied to him and Howard Walpole was the chosen one all along because Howard Walpole had money and credibility and Sess Harder had neither, and right now, right now as he crouched here shivering and wet in the bushes like some heartworn adolescent, Howard was trying out his new toy, his squeeze box, his jelly roll. Isn’t that what they called it in the old blues tunes, jelly roll?

  Suddenly he was in a rage. It was all he could do to keep himself from just opening up on the place, blowing out the windows, making meat of the dogs as they came yowling and bewildered out of their houses, cutting down Howard Walpole in his greasy long johns and worn-out carpet slippers. How had he ever gotten himself into this mess? What had he been thinking? A woman—a good-looking woman, a stunner, with strong hands and a stronger back—advertises for a man? What kind of world was that? And how could he ever have expected anything other than heartbreak and humiliation out of the whole mess?

  He was standing then, standing up to his full height and damn the subterfuge—he was going to march up to that cabin and bang on the door till it opened and demand an answer of her, right then and there: Is it me or him? Me or him! But when he came up out of the bush he detected the faintest shadow of movement through the front room window, and before he could think or act the dogs were rushing at their chains in a froth of champing teeth and bitter startled yips and howls. Was there a face in the window? Was it her? Was it Howard? He fell to his hands in the liquefying mud and began a mad scrambling retreat even as he heard the door swing open on rusted hinges and Howard’s voice ringing out, “Who’s there?” and her voice answering, “It’s probably a moose, that’s all,” and Howard saying, apropos of what, Sess could only wonder, “Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I?”

  Two days later, at twelve noon on the dot, Howard Walpole’s flat-bottomed boat planed round the gravel bar off the Boynton beach and drifted in on the crest of its own wake. Sess was standing there in the mud in his boots, just like Howard before him. He hadn’t slept. He hadn’t eaten. He was as hopeless and ragged and pie-eyed as a beggar on the streets of Calcutta. When the boat touched shore with a scrape of gravel and a single sharp cry from one of the gulls overhead, Pamela—she was wearing shorts and a T-shirt under a cotton jacket and a wide-brimmed floppy hat that masked her eyes so he couldn’t gauge a thing—sprang out so lightly and gracefully it was as if a breeze had propelled her. He hung his head. Sucked in his breath. “Well?” he said.

  She gave him a smile, she gave him that. “I’ve got to go back to Anchorage for a few days,” she said, and there was Howard, behind her, dragging the painter up the shore with the intention of looping it round any convenient boulder or tree stump.

  Sess just looked at her. “Why?”

  She stopped there, right in front of him, and she never flinched or looked away. “Why? To get my wedding dress, what do you think? And my sister, who’s going to be my lone bridesmaid, and my mother—she’s going to have to fly up from Arizona. I always did want to be a June bride.”

  Still nothing. Still it wasn’t sinking in. He was dangling in the wind, no more able
or sentient than a river-run salmon split down the middle and hung out to dry.

  A long moment ticked by, the longest moment of his life, and then she said, “How about the twenty-first, Sess? Will that work?”

  10

  Pris brought the cake all the way up from Anchorage in the back of her station wagon, and it was a cake the likes of which Boynton had never seen, at least not since the days of the gold rush, when all sorts of excess had bled in and out of the country: five tiers, alternating layers of pink and white glacé royal frosting, princess white cake inside and the plastic figurine of a veiled bride on top standing arm-in-arm with a bearded trapper in a plaid shirt. Pamela’s mother arrived by bush plane, two hops and a jump out of the Fairbanks airport, no weather to speak of, her smile uncrimped and blazing like a second sun on everybody in town, even the bush crazies and the Indians. And Pamela herself, established with Pris in the back room of Richard Schrader’s cabin to get into her makeup and the white satin gown trimmed with Brussels lace her mother had worn on a similarly momentous occasion two weeks after the Japanese let loose on Pearl Harbor, couldn’t seem to stop smiling either and didn’t want to. “Give me a drag on that,” she said, fixed before the mirror and gesturing at the mirror image of the pale white tube of a Lark that jutted from her sister’s lower lip.