T. Boyle - Drop City

As for the clock, she insisted on it. Yes, she'd given herself over to her man, and yes, she trusted his judgment, valued it, and she looked to him for sustenance and protection, all of that. And she saw his point. To live here, in the bush, was to live in primitive time, timeless time, and to have clocks ticking away the artificial minutes of man-made hours defeated the purpose, undermined the whole ethos of the natural world. But you had to make concessions, that was the way she saw it, or they'd be living in a cave and rubbing sticks together-and what about the chainsaw, the auger, the fiberglass fishing rod, the outboard engine he was talking about buying come spring? They were necessary, he argued, tools that helped them live better, because he didn't have to tell her, of all people, how thin was the wire stringing their life together out here under the immitigable sky where disaster was in the offing every minute of every day.

All right. For him it was the chainsaw and the outboard motor, but for her it was the clock, the calendar, the thermometer. If it weren't for the clock she wouldn't know if it was six in the evening or six in the morning, and people might argue that it didn't make a lick of difference, because morning and evening were artificial constructs like the days of the week and the counting out of the years from the birth of Christ, as if that mattered, as if it were real, as if God existed and the Argument from Design was a fact. She didn't care. She liked numbers, liked figures, needed to know that it was six twenty-five on December eighteenth, nineteen hundred and seventy, Anno Domini, and that the thermometer had stood at thirty-two degrees below zero when she last looked-and she might just get up again and step out the door and see how far it had dropped in the interim. She might. And she might keep a diary too, just simple things, just facts-the day, the time, the temperature, what they were eating, what was in the sky, in the trees, on the ground. That was her business, her _thing,__ as Star would say, and who could deny her that? Not Sess. Certainly not Sess. So let him wake in the night to the ticking of the clock. It wouldn't kill him.

She was about to get up and do just that-check the temperature-when she saw an upright shadow isolate itself from the trees and move on up the bank toward the cabin with the slow disconnected movement of a figure in a dream. She held the nub of the cigarette to her lips, smoking it right down to the filter, and watched. The figure moved closer, huddled, kicking through the snow on limbs that separated and joined and separated again, and she felt her whole being leap up inside her: it was Star, coming to relieve her of the burden of contemplation. What was it-what would Star say? It was far out. It was party time.

She was at the door before Star could knock, afraid that she might see the darkened windows and think no one was home and turn back for the hippie camp. “Well, hello, hello,” she said, sweeping her into the room, “what a surprise, what a nice surprise, and Merry Christmas, have I wished you a Merry Christmas?”

Star accepted a cup of tea, the expensive Darjeeling blend Pamela kept in a sealed tin for visitors, and Pamela found herself rocketing around the room in a high state of excitement, stoking the fire, lighting lamps, setting out a plate of crackers and cheese, bread, butter, two-berry jam, and spoons and a knife-where was the knife? — all the while talking nonstop, talking as if she'd been the prisoner of a tribe of deaf-mutes on a desert shore. She talked so much, so steadily and without remit, that it must have taken a quarter of an hour to realize that Star wasn't right there with her. Star wasn't saying anything, or hardly anything-just answering yes or no to the flock of questions she was throwing at her, nodding or grunting or chiming in with an _Uh-huh__ or _I know what you mean__ in a kind of call and response. Finally Pamela got hold of herself. She bit her tongue. Forced herself to take a long sip of the tea that was already going cold on the table before her. “Right,” she said, “right,” as if she'd just solved an equation that had been baffling a whole team of mathematicians for weeks, “why don't you tell me about it?”

She lit another cigarette. Star joined her. They held the taste of tobacco on their tongues a moment, looking into each other's eyes, then exhaled simultaneously. “Is it Marco?” she asked in a long trailing sigh of recycled smoke. “Is that it? Are you worried about him?”

Star shrugged. She was tiny-petite, a size four-and she'd never looked more lost and childlike than she did now, the hair pulled back neatly from the central parting and tucked behind her ears as if a mother had fussed over it, her shoulders thin and slumped, her eyes gone lifeless with a child's renewable grief. Marco was out on the trapline with Sess-he'd wanted to learn by doing, he said, and Sess had taken him under his wing-and they were siwashing, camping out on the trail, in temperatures that would certainly drop to minus forty or lower overnight. Or they weren't siwashing exactly-Roy Sender had built two crude timber-and-sod cabins at strategic junctures along the forty-odd miles of the trapline, and though they had dirt floors and none of the amenities of a year-round cabin, barely even a window between them, they did have sheet-metal stoves that Sess always kept in good repair, with an armload of kindling and neat lengths of stovewood ready to hand. Plus, Sess had gotten the two extra dogs he'd wanted-Howard Walpole's dogs, actually, sour as vinegar but good pullers. (Howard didn't need work dogs anymore because he was trading up for speed so he could try his hand at racing, just for the kick of it, he said-and had she heard the rumors about the Iditarod starting up again, with real prize money? — but everyone knew he'd never get off the seat of his snow machine long enough to get the dogs in harness.) And so Sess would be able to cover ground a whole lot faster and more efficiently than he would have a year ago.

“Because if that's what worrying you, honey, you can just put your fears aside-Sess knows what he's doing. He's the most capable man in the country, just ask anybody.” She gave a little laugh, picturing him out there in the patched-up parka she'd trimmed with wolverine for him, best fur in the world because it wouldn't ice up with the tailings of your breath, standing tall on the back runners, his eyes squinted against the wind, the sinew pulling and muscle jumping in his arms. “That's why I picked him, you know that. And listen, thirty-five, forty below isn't critical, not really. At sixty I'd worry.” She laughed again. “But only just a little. Sess is smart. He could weather anything out there. But what about Marco-he come through that frostbite okay? When was that, anyway-about a month ago now?”

It was cold at the table. The wind always seemed to find the smallest cracks and slivers, as if exposing a cabin's flaws was its whole purpose and function. She thought of getting up to fine-tune the draught of the stove, maybe lay on more wood, but something kept her rooted in the chair, something just beginning to unravel like a ball of yarn, comfortable, newsy, the news of people and their complaints.

Star just shrugged, as if that were the only gesture she knew. “I guess,” she said. “But, yeah, he's okay. He's got these two white lines, they look like scars or something, over his cheekbones-but you've seen that, right? — and his toes are okay, like the two that turned black, his little toe and the one next to it on his right foot?” She stared off across the room, her brow wrinkled, thin white fingers tugging at the ends of her hair, summoning the picture. There was no sound but for the faint rattle and sigh of the stove sucking air.

“Reba said they were going to have to go and Norm said but wouldn't they just rot and fall off and Reba said you're thinking of toe_nails,__ this is toes we're talking about. But they recovered. Miraculously. They're not exactly beautiful, and he did lose both nails, but there's no infection and I was like mortified because he wanted me to cut them off of him with the hatchet, I mean, can you believe it? Me? With a hatchet?”