Drop City

  Immediately the speedometer jerked down to forty and he turned to her with a grin. “Like it?” he asked, a froth of chocolate and saliva obliterating his front teeth so that he looked like some mugging comedian on TV, like Red Skelton or she didn’t know who. There was something wild in his eyes, some bubbling up of emotion she hadn’t seen before, and she reminded herself that she was still learning to read him—this was her honeymoon, after all. He was her husband and she loved him, but how well did she really know him after two weeks?

  She gave him the grin back, gave his wrist a squeeze where it rested on the gearshift as the wheels beat at the road and the road beat back. “Sure, it’s nice. But there’s no backseat or anything, so how are we going to—”

  “Dogs, you mean? Hell, we’ll strap them to the roof.” He goosed the accelerator and the car shot forward with a jerk and then fell back again as he let up. He hadn’t stopped grinning yet, and she was going to repeat her question—Where’d you get the car?—when she noticed that there was no key in the ignition, just a shining empty slot staring at her like a blind eye. And below it, below the steering column, there was some sort of plug hanging loose in a bundle of dangling wires.

  A moment slipped by, scrub on either side of them, trees flapping like banners in a stiff breeze. Then he was fishing under the seat for something, his head cocked to keep one eye on the road. “Here,” he said, straightening up and handing her a can of Oly, “I already got a head start on you and didn’t we say we’d reward ourselves with a couple beers this morning?” He stuck a second can between his thighs and worked the punch top while the car fishtailed across the road and righted itself again.

  She accepted the beer, popped it open, took a sip. “You’re drunk, is that it? Is that why you’re acting like this?”

  The grin had faded while he was rummaging under the seat, but now it came back, tighter than ever. “Hell, no, Pamela—I mean, two beers and a chocolate bar on a mostly empty stomach? Just feeling good, that’s all. Super. On top of the world.”

  She cradled her beer, studying him. “Where’d you get the car, Sess?”

  He looked straight ahead, the grin frozen on his lips. He shrugged, but didn’t shift his eyes to her. “Around.”

  “Oh, yeah?” she said, and this wasn’t cute, not anymore. This was criminal, that was what it was. Irresponsible. Wrong. “Then why are there no keys in it? And what’s that mess of wires down there?”

  Another shrug. He put the beer to his lips and gunned the engine again. “I borrowed it.”

  “Borrowed it? From who?”

  “You want to see if we can scare up anything on the radio?”

  “From who, Sess?”

  Now he looked at her and the grin was gone. Something—a tawny streak—darted across the roadway in front of them. “Joe Bosky.”

  “Joe Bosky?” she repeated, as if she hadn’t heard him right, and maybe she hadn’t—maybe the roar of the engine and the wind through the open window was playing tricks with her ears.

  He didn’t say anything, just stared at the broad brown tongue of the road before them.

  “You mean Joe Bosky who you were ready to kill a couple weeks ago? That Joe Bosky?”

  She studied him in profile a moment and there was no give in him at all. “You’re talking grand theft auto here, Sess. You’re talking jail time. Is it worth it? Is it really worth it just to, to what—show off? Be the big man? Is that what you’re doing? Showing off for me?”

  “Tit for tat. You hurt me, I hurt you. It’s the law of the jungle out here, Pamela, and you better get used to it.”

  “Don’t give me that crap,” she said, “don’t even think about it,” but they drove on, going too fast, and the stones flew up to nick the paint and corrupt the body of Joe Bosky’s 1965 Shelby Mustang GT350, which he’d bought the day he set foot in San Diego after his second tour in Vietnam with the money his dead mother left him, and which he’d shipped up to Anchorage and driven at twenty-five miles an hour out the Fairbanks Road to store in the only garage in Boynton, courtesy of Wetzel Setzler and a ten-dollar-a-month rental fee. She didn’t know what to say. She was furious. All this was so childish, two overgrown boys bullying each other, and what did Sess hope to gain? His dogs were dead and he was taking it out on Joe Bosky’s car. But what if Joe Bosky got wind of it because Sess had been right out there in the main street honking the horn for all the world to see? What if he got Wetzel Setzler to call the sheriff on his ham radio? Then what?

  “Stop the car, Sess,” she said. “Stop the car. I’m not going to be party to this.”

  His hands choked the wheel. He stared straight ahead. “You already are.”

  There was a patrol car sitting alongside the Steese Highway when they came into Fairbanks, a long, low, ominous-looking sedan with the sun glancing off the windshield so you couldn’t see inside. Just the sight of it made her heart skip, but Sess eased off the accelerator, stuck an arm out the window and gave the invisible cop a hearty wave. She didn’t dare turn her head, but she watched the patrol car in the side mirror as if she could fix it there by force of will, all the while expecting it to spring to life in a fierce tumult of light and noise. Nothing happened. The police car receded in the mirror, lifeless as a pile of stone. A pickup truck passed them. They went round a bend. Sess put both hands on the wheel and drove like an egg farmer on his way to market.

  They had lunch out on the deck at the Pumphouse, her favorite place in Fairbanks, and the sun on her face and the breeze and the two beers she tipped back went a long way toward calming her. She got a copy of the paper and they scanned the classifieds under “Pets,” but none of the dogs sounded promising to Sess—he was being difficult now, all the gaiety gone out of him—and they could both see that the day was going to be a waste. He kept saying they ought to be back at home, setting out their gill nets, but then he’d tip back his beer and drain his shot glass and rumble that there was no point in worrying about salmon or anything else if you didn’t have dogs because if you didn’t have dogs you were doomed to failure anyway and the whole idea of living in the wild was just a pipe dream, a joke. It depressed her to see him like this—worse, it scared her. He was her rock and foundation, the dominant male she’d chosen out of a whole pack of lesser males, the man she’d been waiting for all her life to lead her into the wilderness, and if he was defeated, she was defeated too. The waitress was hovering, and she could see in his eyes that he was about to order another round, so she said, “Listen, what about the pound?”

  “I don’t even know where it is,” he said, throwing up obstacles.

  “Oh, you mean the dog pound?” the waitress put in, reaching for the bottles on the table and giving each an exploratory shake. “I can tell you where that is, because my boyfriend and me just found the cutest little toy poodle there—Mitzi. That’s what we call her. Wait. You want to see a picture?”

  The pound was behind some sort of factory or warehouse on a piece of flat foot-worn ground devoid of trees or even shrubs, a squat prefabricated building in front of which a single battered panel truck was parked at a skewed angle, as if the driver had run off and abandoned it. The railroad tracks ran within a hundred feet of the back end of the place and the boxcars sat there humped up to the horizon like dominoes. Sess didn’t even want to get out of the car, but she prodded him, and a moment later they were standing there in the lot, gravel crunching under their feet, and she was thinking this was about as far from the Thirtymile as you could get and still be in the state of Alaska. An ammoniac smell hit them then, carried on a light breeze with a handful of mosquitoes in it. There was a feeble anguished sound of yipping and whining, and it seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. “What can we lose?” she said, trying to mollify him as he gave her a glum look over the roof of the ridiculous car.

  Inside, the smell was concentrated, and she thought of the only big-city zoo she’d ever been to, in San Francisco, where the ratty animals lay festering in concrete troughs and
the multiplied stink of them—a stink so intense it made her panicky—was the only lasting impression she had of the place, of the whole city, in fact. The floor was concrete, the light inadequate. A blocky woman with pouffed-up hair and teardrop glasses grinned at them from behind a plywood counter with a Formica top. “You here for an adoption?” she asked over the racket of the dogs, which had gone up a notch since they’d stepped in the door. “Or just thinking about it maybe?”

  Then they were walking down a cement corridor between rows of mesh cages, dogs of every size and description leaping at the wire, yodeling, yapping, whining, their paws like windmills, their eyes alive with eagerness and hope. The woman stooped to one or another of them, cooing, and they poked their shining noses through the mesh to worship her fingers and the back of her hand. There was a terrific scrabbling of nails as the dogs fought for purchase on the wet concrete. One of them, a beagle mix with flapping ears and deep, liquid eyes, clambered up on the backs of three others to stick its snout through the gap where the cage door had pulled back from its hinges, and Pamela slid her hand in against the wall to feel the dog’s appreciation, its pink tongue extracting every molecule of flavor from her skin. She wanted to adopt them all.

  “Now, Buster,” the woman was saying, pressing her hand to the mesh where a white-faced retriever crouched over its bad hips, “Buster’s the sweetest thing you’d ever want to see. He’d make a perfect house dog. And he loves kids. You two have kids?”

  Sess was right there with her, but he didn’t seem to hear her. He was focused on a dog in the back of the cage, a lean big-headed thing with paws like griddles that couldn’t have been more than eight or ten months old. “That one,” he said, “can I see that one?”

  The woman looked dubious. “You mean Peaches? That’s Peaches,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at Pamela. “He’s not a house dog, but if you live in the country and you’ve got some space, well, I guess he’d be fine. He’s shy, that’s all.”

  “That’s because he’s got wolf in him,” Sess said, and his mood had lifted—she could hear it in his voice. “You see the angularity of those back legs, Pamela? And the snout? The pointy snout means he’s got longer vertebrae so his chest muscles fan out and he can really cover ground. That’s a fast dog there. And he’ll pull too.” And then he was in the cage, three or four dogs swarming at his hands, tails whacking. The wolf dog shrank back in the corner and Sess went down into a crouch, squatting over his knees and extending his right hand. “Peaches,” he said, his voice burnished and low, “what kind of a name is that for a dog? Come here, boy, come on.” It took a minute, Pamela and the woman watching from outside the cage, and then the dog came to him, five feet across the cement floor, in the submissive posture of a wolf, creeping on its elbows and dragging its belly. Sess smoothed back its ears, ran a hand over its snout. “I’ll take this one,” he said.

  At the grocery he wouldn’t let her get more than they could carry on their backs, and he didn’t offer any explanations and he didn’t bother coming in with her to push the stainless steel cart up and down the aisles of plenty like every other husband and wife in creation. He stayed out in the dirt lot with the dog—at the very end of it where it trailed off into knee-high weed—and though he’d brought a homemade leather leash and collar along, he didn’t use it, not yet. He controlled the dog with his voice alone, and when she went in the store he was just squatting there, watching it, the soft soothing flow of his words working on the animal like an incantation. She could have bought the store out, but she had to settle for some cosmetics, toothpaste, fresh fruit and vegetables—which she was already starved for—and as much pasta and stewed tomatoes and tomato sauce as she reasonably thought they could carry. When she came out of the store wheeling a cart, Sess rose to his feet and crossed the lot to her, never even glancing back at the dog, but the dog put its head down and followed him.

  On the way back, he was nothing short of exuberant, chattering away at her as if he’d just won the lottery. The groceries were stuffed down behind the seat, and the dog—he wouldn’t demean it by calling it “Peaches”—sat like a tensed coil in her lap, its head out the window. He drove slower now, but still shot ahead in bursts and cranked through the gears as if he wanted to rip them out of the transmission, slamming into potholes and flinging up sheets of coffee-colored water as if the car were a skiff shearing across a muddy inlet. Every other minute he’d reach out a hand to stroke her arm or pat the dog. Before long, he was whistling.

  “Trotter,” he said, “what about Trotter? That’s a good name. Descriptive, you know? Or Lucius. I’ve always liked Lucius. As a name, I mean—”

  She’d almost forgotten they were in a stolen car, playing a dangerous game with a man who put bullets in the skulls of another man’s dogs and that there was retribution to come, because she was in this moment, now, and they were both working on fresh beers to celebrate the fact of this sterling dog in her lap and the two others Sess had paid five dollars each for against the day he’d be back with Richard Schrader’s pickup. “How about Yukon King?” she said.

  He let out a laugh and reached again to stroke the dog, which reeled its head in to give him a look of subjection and fealty. “Never thought of that one. But sure, I mean, what could be more fitting than to name a real dog after some actor dog that probably couldn’t get out of the way of a sled if it ran him over, and by the way, did you know that Lassie is really three different dogs and they’re all male?”

  She didn’t know. But she did know the origin of the feud between him and the black-haired man, because he’d told her over his second morose shot of Wild Turkey at the Pumphouse while she read off the descriptions of the dogs for sale or trade or “free to good home,” and he rejected them one after another before she could get to the end of the first line. Two winters ago Joe Bosky had appeared in Boynton dressed up like something out of the pages of National Geographic in a caribou-skin parka lined with wolf and a rifle slung over one shoulder. The plane that delivered him hadn’t even refueled yet for the return trip to Fairbanks, and he was already hip-deep in bullshit at the Nougat, with the deed to Tilda Runyon’s cabin spread out on the bar—the cabin she’d left to her half-breed son, who was a drunk and a gambler, a thief and liar, and who’d apparently been in the Corps with Bosky. What was he doing in the country in the middle of February? He was going to live wild, that was what. And he moved into Tilda Runyon’s cabin, chopped wood, drank to excess and lived off what the mail plane brought him two days a week. By the first summer he was building himself a cabin on Woodchopper Creek and making money hand over fist flying tourists and fishermen into the backcountry in the Cessna 180 he floated in on one fine day, and by the fall he was wandering the hills and watercourses, scouting out the country for signs of fur. He settled finally on Roy Sender’s trapline, the trapline Roy Sender had cleared and maintained and expanded over the course of forty-odd years and ceded to Sess when he left the country. The first winter, it was stolen bait and sprung traps and no evidence of a man’s footprints in the snow, as if the perpetrator could fly, because Joe Bosky was clever and a quick study and the country grew out of his skin. By the second winter, he was running his own traps and poaching from Sess’s.

  “You didn’t know that about Lassie? You really didn’t?”

  She shook her head. “You read it someplace?”

  “I read it someplace. TV Guide, most likely.”

  “TV Guide? Why in god’s name would you read TV Guide when you’ve never had a TV in your adult life and never will?”

  He gave her a look. Shrugged. “I was flat broke one winter when I was still in Fairbanks—remember, I told you? Drinking too much, and out of money for drink. This bookstore had a box of old TV Guides they were giving away. I must have read every one cover to cover. Twice. At least twice. You know Citizen Kane?”

  A black-and-white image came into her head, the darkened room, the roll and flicker of the tube and her mother with her feet up, doing her nails, the
jowly glow of Orson Welles’s face, the stark rectilinear halls of a mansion whole armies could camp in. “I’ve seen it. Or parts of it, anyway.”

  “Nineteen forty-one. Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten. Directed by Welles. Four stars. The Mummy’s Ghost? Nineteen forty-four. Lon Chaney Jr. Two stars. The Savage Innocents, Anthony Quinn, 1960—and they must have played that one six times a week—three stars. I could tell you the ratings for every movie ever made, but I doubt if I’ve seen more than maybe fifty of them in my whole life—and that was when I was a kid at home with my parents.”

  The dog shifted in her lap. “You miss it—TV, movies?”

  She expected him to say no, to give her the usual bush crazy’s party line—too busy out there, too beautiful, the whole natural world better than anything you could ever hope to see on a little screen and the aurora borealis blooming overhead in living color too—but he surprised her. “On a moonless January night with the stove so hot the iron glows and the floor so cold you don’t want to get out of bed to save your life, you miss just about everything.”

  Then they were silent and the dog hung his head out the window and the sun defeated the clouds to light the road ahead of them like an expressway and Joe Bosky’s Mustang lurched into the ruts and sought out the puddles. Traffic wasn’t a problem. They overtook two cars going their way—probably heading for Boynton Hot Springs, where there was an old tumbledown resort for summer people—and six or seven vehicles came at them headed for Fairbanks, all of which Sess recognized. He whistled his way through four quavering versions of “My Favorite Things,” something from Dvor ˇák, she wasn’t sure what, and, maddeningly, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus (Underneath the Mistletoe Last Night),” and then it was evening and they were three miles outside of Boynton and he was pulling over on the side of the road in a place where Birch Creek meandered along the shoulder and the odd fisherman had worn a blistered dirt hump in the bank. “Time to get out, Pamela,” he said, and before she could find the door handle he was around her side of the car and pulling open the door for her. “Time to stretch your legs. Come on, Lucius, that’s a good dog. You want to stretch too?”