Marco was just standing there with the rest of them, hands at his sides. It wasn’t his fight. Then he saw Bill scrabbling in the dirt with a split lip and a film of blood enlivening his teeth and Bosky standing over him in his paramilitary getup, and began to grope toward the re-alization that maybe it was his fight after all. What was Bosky doing here, even? And what was this business with Star—he’d been coming on to her all day and Marco had let it pass. Maybe, he was thinking now, he shouldn’t have.
But here was Jiminy, all hundred and thirty-five pounds of him, pushing his way through the crowd. “Who the hell are you?” he said, throwing it back at Bosky. “You’re not part of this—you don’t even belong here.”
“That’s right,” somebody said, and then Reba was there, her face a mask of war, doing what nobody had yet thought to do—namely, help Bill up out of the dirt.
Bill was heaving. There was blood on his coveralls. Reba stood there beside him with her honed eyes, propping him up. She looked first to Ronnie, then to Bosky. “We don’t need this kind of shit here,” she hissed. “You want to have your drunken brawls, take it someplace else. We’ve got kids here.”
And there they were, Che and Sunshine, backed up against the slashed crossbars of the cabin porch, hair in their faces, their eyes reduced to twin nubs of malleable black rubber, and anybody could mold those eyes, Marco thought, make them laugh, make them cry. He felt nothing but sad. “I’m with Reba,” he said.
“All right,” Joe Bosky spat, “I know when I’m not wanted, don’t let the door hit you on the way out, right?” and he started off toward the plane, unsteady on his feet. He hadn’t gone five yards before he turned round and focused the glare of his silver shades on Pan, on Ronnie. “You coming,” he said, “or what?”
Ten minutes later, while people milled and debated and groused and Bill pressed a cold wet towel to his face, they heard the plane’s engine start up with a sucking roar, as if someone were out there vacuuming off the surface of the river. Then the accelerating whine of the propeller came to them and they looked up to see Joe Bosky’s floatplane glide out from shore, catch the current and taxi into the mouth of the trees only to rise a moment later and flare off into the night sky with a single reflective flash of the declining sun. Marco stood there watching it a moment, then took Star by the hand and walked her down through the field of foot-worn flowers and trampled weed to a place where they could look out over the ripples and braids of the current. He eased himself down, and she sat in the gravel beside him. “There goes Ronnie,” he said.
Star drew her knees up and knotted her arms round them. For a moment she said nothing, just seesawed back and forth, her white compact feet beating time to the motion of her body. “He’ll be back,” she said.
“You really think so?”
She looked off across the river. It was late, midnight or thereabout. The colors went up in layers, from the scoured tin of the river to the dense black-green of the trees to the pink band of the sun-brushed hills. A sickle moon, pale as ice, sketched itself in over the trees. She cursed and slapped a mosquito on her ankle, then another on the back of her arm. “Really?” she said finally, turning to hold his eyes. “Truly?”
He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter one way or the other.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so. I think he’s—” There was a catch in her voice and he wanted to rock her in his arms but that catch made him hesitate, made him angry and hateful and jealous. “I think he’s gone,” she said. “For good.”
That was when they heard the motor out on the river and they looked up unbelieving, because this had been a day of arrivals and departures, an unprecedented day, nothing like it yet in the brief history of Drop City North—first Bosky and Ronnie, then Verbie, Sky Dog and Dale Murray—and now who was this slashing up against the dark run of the current? They watched as the boat—it was a skiff, flat-bottomed, snub-nosed, like any dozen of them up and down the river—took on color and shape and finally emerged from the dark screen of the littoral and swung into shore fifty feet from them. A stooping, raw-boned figure clambered over the seat from stern to bow, flinging something ashore, a sleek bundle that fell formless to the gravel, and then a pair of scissoring legs splashed ashore and there he was. “Hey, hello there,” he said, stooping to the bundle and pulling himself up out of the fade of light. “Isn’t that—?” Star began, and they were both on their feet now, but she couldn’t supply the name.
Marco gave back the greeting and the man came toward them, the stripped bones of his face under the long-billed cap, the awkward challenging height of him, and then he knew: it was the one from the bar, from the Three Pup, the one they called Iron Steve.
Iron Steve was in gum boots and a plaid flannel shirt and his hair was slicked tight to his head, and his every step was like a leap, as if the ground were cratered beneath his feet. “Hey, I sure hope I’m not bothering you people this late, but I was, uh, well—I was looking for Verbie. She around?”
Star said sure, she thought so, if she hadn’t gone to bed yet, and there was an unspoken question tagged on to the end of it.
Iron Steve raised his right arm and the bundle came with it, stiffened feet and limp naked ears, the sleek jackets of fur—rabbits, he was holding up a string of rabbits on a twisted coil of wire, and all Marco could think of was fish, dark dangling strips of flesh strung through the gills. “I brought these for her,” Iron Steve was saying. “I thought I might surprise her. You know which tent is hers?”
Star gave Marco a look and they were both thinking the same thing, thinking dead meat for a vegetarian? And rabbits—bunnies—no less? But then Marco saw the beauty of the equation: Ronnie was gone, gone no more than half an hour, and here was his successor. Subtract one Pan, add one Iron Steve.
“I also brought her this,” Steve said, and he held out his palm to show them a coil of wire and a medicine bottle with what looked to be matches packed inside.
“What is it?” Star asked. It was twilight now, the sun edged down beyond the ridge, the sickle moon brightening. She stood with her legs apart, hands on her hips, and the mosquitoes meant nothing to her though they danced and swarmed and played their thin music over the backbeat of the river.
“This? Oh, this is just a little something I thought she ought to have—in case she gets lost.”
“Gets lost?” Star said.
Iron Steve pulled back his hand, ducked his head. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “everybody gets lost up here, whether it’s your plane going down or your tracks getting obliterated in a whiteout or you’re just out there chasing after something and you turn around and can’t tell one tree from the other.”
“So what is it,” Marco said, “some kind of compass?”
“Oh, hell, no,” Steve said, grinning, and out came the hand again, the palm supinated to display the wire and the thick brown glass of the medicine bottle. “Long’s you have wire, you can snare rabbits,” he explained, “and the matches, I dipped them in paraffin myself and sealed them up tight. Because if you keep your matches dry you got yourself a fire to kick back the cold and roast your rabbits—”
Star gave him a blank look. Marco couldn’t help but smile.
“You know,” Steve said, “for emergencies.” He kicked a foot in the fan of gravel and studied the slow rotation of the toe of his boot as if it were a divining rod. Then he looked up, grinning still. “Up here we call it living off the land.”
25
It was the first really brisk day, August tapering off into September, high summer giving way to low fall, and Pamela was alone in the cabin, baking bread in the woodstove in the front room. The recipe was her mother’s—3 cups white flour; 1 cup whole wheat flour; 3 tablespoons sugar; 1 teaspoon salt; 2 cups sourdough sponge; 2 to 3 tablespoons melted bear fat (she was using canned butter because as far as she knew the bears were all still alive and well and judiciously carrying their own fat around with them)—and she’d modified it a bit through the ten or twelve times she’d b
aked here on the Thirtymile, but still, if the stove was hot enough and she had the patience to let the dough rise for two hours or more, she usually got a rich heavy glistening loaf that had Sess pulling the superlatives out of his slow-grinding jaws. Outside, a sky the color of soapstone hung low over the hills. The wind was blowing down out of the northwest, tearing leaves from the trees along the river, fanning the cabbage and lashing at the stiff canes of the Brussels sprouts in the garden. Every once in a while a gust would rattle the windows.
Sess was out in the yard with Iron Steve, who’d stopped by on his way down from the hippie camp. The two of them were splitting wood (Steve as a down payment on the dinner he knew to expect), drinking beer out of Mason jars and keeping an eye on the weather. It looked like rain—or sleet—and if the wind settled there would be frost for sure. Sess had his woodpiles heaped up at the four corners of the garden, ready to generate some heat through the night, because like every tiller of the earth he wanted to extend the growing season as long as possible, and you never knew, you could have a killing frost tonight and then a week or two of Indian summer to follow. He’d grown some champion tomatoes in the greenhouse, Early Girls and Beefsteaks both, and the cherries had run riot till he had to lift a panel off and let them creep out into the world. They’d had butternut squash till it was coming out their ears, and there was plenty more of it ballooning on the vine, and pumpkins too. She’d been canning day and night, stewing beans and tomatoes and zucchini in the big pot on the stove, peas, broccoli, anything that came up out of the ground in the crazy abundance of light. Her herb garden was a jungle in itself, and the root cellar was stacked high with carrots, onions, potatoes, turnips.
She’d just put the bread in the oven when there was a tap at the door and Iron Steve shifted into the room. He was bent nearly double to avoid cracking his head on the doorframe, which he’d already managed to do twice in the course of the afternoon and too many times to count in the past. Pamela didn’t know how tall he was exactly—six-six, six-seven—but he towered over everybody in Boynton like an old-growth tree, and with his long-billed cap cocked at an angle on his head he grazed the ceiling of the cabin and had to work his way through a gauntlet of lanterns, kettles, tools, spatulas and fry pans hanging from the rafters just to get to the table to sit down. Pamela had no problem with that. She liked him. He might have been tight-lipped and more than his share of odd, not yet thirty and already a proto-coot, drunk more often than he was sober, but for all the raw-boned mass of him and the hard Slavic architecture of his face, he was gentle and good at heart. Before he’d got his hat and gloves off she handed him a cup of coffee, a can of evaporated milk and the sugar bowl.
“Bakin’, huh?” he said, blowing steam off the cup.
“That’s right,” she said. “What else is a young housewife to do—especially on a day like this. Think it’ll snow?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Frost?”
“Oh, yeah. No doubt.”
There was a pause. She laid a few more sticks on the fire—the trick was to keep a consistent temperature for the hour or so till the bread was done. “Those hippies ever get anything out of their garden?”
“Not much. Rabbits got most of it.”
“Plus they started late.”
Steve just nodded. He drank off an inch of coffee, poured half the sugar jar into the cup and then filled it back up with evaporated milk.
“They know enough to light smudge fires tonight?” She couldn’t help worrying for them—for Star, especially, and Merry, she liked Merry too and wanted to see her make it through all this without suffering, or suffering more than she could bear. It was amazing—they were all so naive, so starry-eyed and simplistic, filled right up to the eyeballs with crack-brained notions about everything from the origins of the universe to the brotherhood of man and how to live the vegetarian ideal. They were like children, utterly confident and utterly ignorant—even Norm Sender, and he must have been forty years on this planet. They should have known better. All of them.
“I already told them, but they’re mostly just sitting around the stove in that big clubhouse they built, you know, playing cards and board games and that sort of thing.”
“What about Verbie, you tell her?” She poured herself a cup of coffee and eased in at the table across from him, the space so tight their elbows clashed every time they lifted the cups to their mouths. “If anybody’ll get it done, she will. She’s a pretty dynamic girl.”
Steve ducked his head and looked away. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I told her.”
Another pause. A gust ran across the roof like a jet plane coming in for a landing. She glanced up at the window and saw the first white driven flakes in horizontal motion. “How’s that coming,” she said, “you and her?”
He caught her eye for an instant, then glanced up at the window. “Guess I was wrong,” he said. “But it won’t amount to anything. Won’t even whiten the ground.”
“You and Verbie,” she said, and she felt her lips forming into a smile. “It’s a romance, isn’t it? Come on, Steve, we all know you like her—Star says you two have been going at it pretty hot and heavy—”
Now his eyes came back to her, two settled green eyes with a hazel clock in one of them. “It’s more than that, Pamela—I love her. I do. To me, she’s the greatest thing that ever happened—I’ve been helping them with those half-built cabins, you know that, right? Because they’re a little short on manpower since Pan and Sky Dog and what’s his name—that one that looks like a horse going backwards—”
“Dale.”
“Right, Dale—since they left.”
“What did they, go back to California?”
“No, hell, no—they all moved in with Joe Bosky in that place he’s got down on Woodchopper. The bachelor hole. Four skunks in a burrow.” He looked beyond her, into the intermediate space of the cabin that was like any other cabin, cramped and cluttered and hung with all the accoutrements of life lived in a place without a garage or a basement or a convenient three-bedroom, two-bath, kitchen/dining, liv/fam floor plan. “I don’t want her sleeping in a tent all winter, but I tell you, they haven’t even got roofs on those cabins, or stoves either. You know, I was thinking, I’ve got my place in town and all, and I know it isn’t much, but—”
There was a thump at the door, and Sess was there, his hair dusted with snow, a look of high excitement in his eyes. “Better sharpen up your ulu, Pamela,” he was saying, the words jerked out of him as if he could barely stand to waste breath on them, and then he was snatching the rifle down from the crossbeam above her head and spinning back out the door, checking the action. “The garden,” he said, “look at your garden,” and the door pulled shut behind him.
The startle came into Steve’s eyes and he jumped up from the table and cracked his head on the crossbeam, heading for the door behind Sess even as she dashed into the new room to look out the window above the bed, where she could get a view of the garden and this strange white element beating against the green of the leaves and the black nullity of the plastic. She had a moment, only that—seconds—to register the hulking dark form grazing there in the midst of the windblown vegetable garden like an overfed cow, and then there was the report of the rifle and the thing went down without a fuss, without a whimper, three hundred fifty pounds of meat, fur and fat delivered right up to them, right in their own garden, and she hardly had time to register the joy and triumph of it when she spotted the cub. It was a yearling, with its big bottom and narrow shoulders and pale stricken face, and it hurtled through the Brussels sprouts like a cannonball, going so fast Sess’s second shot didn’t have a chance of catching up to it.
The snow didn’t last—a few handfuls of white pellets flung at the windows and lost in the gray-green weave of the tundra—but there was a hard frost that night and the next morning dawned cold. Sess was up at first light, out in the yard fooling with the dogs. He had five of them now, enough to pull a sled over his forty miles of trapline, bu
t he kept saying he’d like two more, for speed, so he could mush his wife down the river to Boynton in style on a Saturday night and have a few shots and a burger and maybe dance to the jukebox into the bargain. Pamela had felt the bed give when he slipped out of it and she’d smelled the rich expiatory aroma of coffee wafting in from the other room, but she’d stayed in bed, wrapped in furs, listening to the cabin tick to life around her. Sess had done a pretty good job of banging things about in the next room, metal clanking on metal, the thump of the big black cast-iron pan hitting the stove, and then the crackle of meat sizzling—bear, fried in the fat it was no longer wearing out there in the watercourses and swamps of the world. The smell was something new to her, or reminiscent, anyway—she hadn’t eaten bear since she was a girl out there in a summer tent with her mother and Pris and the man with the gray-seamed beard and cracked blue eyes she called Daddy—and her olfactory memory triggered a hundred other memories until she drifted back to sleep over the image of her father stumping into camp with the hindquarter of a black bear slung over one bloody shoulder and a grin as wide as the Koyukuk River.
She woke to the sound of Sess’s voice rising high and strained over the clamor of the dogs and the bludgeoning thump and screech of a resistant object jerked by main force through the high grass and willow. “Gee!” he shouted, “gee, you fuckers!” And “Haw! Haw! I said. Haw!” She raised her head, peered out the window. Sun slammed at the yard, at the garden, at the still-smoldering smudge fires. Most of the plants were standing and green still, but she could see where the frost had blackened some of the leaves of the snap beans and the cherry tomatoes. It was something that registered with her in the moment of waking—frost, smudge fires, minimal damage, new sun, more sun—but which she hardly had time to reflect on before a blur of man, dog and sled interposed itself between the window and the garden and then was gone. “Haw!” Sess cried. “Haw!”