T. Boyle: Drop City

They both moved in close to the stove as the fire caught and rose in a roar of sucked air and the room came to life with a slow tick and release. Smells came back. The kettle jolted and rattled, seeking equilibrium. “What's in the pot?” Marco wanted to know, and he'd never been hungrier in his life, in need of sugar, of fat, lard, sticks of butter, the basic grease of life, and no wonder the Eskimos subsisted on seal blubber-you really had to readjust your carburetor up here.

“Moose stew.” Sess was fumbling around on the shelf behind the stove, looking for bowls, spoons, cups. “Made it last time through. What you do is you hack off a healthy chunk of that moose flank outside, fry it in bear fat with some flour and onions, salt, pepper, a little Tabasco, whatever vegetables you've got on hand-it was dried peas and lentils in this case-then fill it to the top with liquid, boil it down and toss your rice in. And voilà, Moose Stew à la Harder. And the beauty of it is, you just set the pot down on the floor when you close the place up and it's frozen like a rock inside of the hour.” He rubbed his palms together and held them out over the stove. “Roy taught me that.”

“And now you're teaching me.”

“That's right. Now I'm teaching you.”

If he'd had his doubts-camping, _siwashing,__ in forty-below weather-the stew drove them down till he could begin to envision himself in Sess's place, at home out here no matter what the conditions, taking what the land gives you, living small and a million light-years from the suburbs and the compulsively trimmed bushes and the rolling lawns and ornamental trees, because whoever landscaped this place outside the window did one hell of a job and no denying it. The stew was delicious. He had three bowls and polished the bowl when he was done with the pilot bread Sess kept sealed in a glass jar on the shelf. There was coffee, with sugar and evaporated milk, half-thawed blueberries in thick syrup for dessert and three shots of E&J brandy each. They sat cramped in at the little table by the window and fingered their cups and watched the way the moon dodged and shifted and went about its business amongst the trees. They talked trapping, talked snares and baits, talked Drop City, talked women.

“I'm not surprised, truthfully, to hear the nephew sprouted wings,” Sess said, “considering that girlfriend of his, because she's a downtown girl if I ever saw one.”

“He'll be back,” Marco said, and even as he said it, out here with nothing but a makeshift stove and a half-rotten spruce wall to keep him from becoming another casualty of the country, the mortal punctuation to yet another cautionary tale, he doubted himself. When Norm had pulled out, all of Drop City went into a panic, and after the panic, they went into mourning. Norm was their rock, their founder, their guru-he'd brought them all out here into the wilderness with the irreducible power of his vision, his money, his energy-and now he'd deserted them. Star sobbed till Marco thought her ribs were going to crack. Reba ate Seconal by the fistful. Jiminy wanted to shoot the skis off Bosky's plane, handcuff Norm if necessary, anything, kidnap Premstar. Bill roared in Norm's face for a whole day and a half, and you could hear his voice starting up like a chainsaw every few minutes and falling off again till it was the defining sound of Drop City, available even to the last cabin out. And then the plane came and Norm and Premstar were gone, peace, brothers and sisters, and screw you all- “Yeah,” Sess said, “I'm sure he will. If he gets another girlfriend.”

Marco shrugged. They'd put out the lantern to save fuel and to give them a better view of the night beyond the window. “I don't know,” he said, “maybe we don't need him. Maybe it's all part of the greater plan.”

“The greater plan? You're not getting mystical on me, are you? Here, have another shot of brandy. It's good for you.”

“I mean, some people are serious about this and some aren't-Alaska, let's all go to Alaska, kids, and we'll dance to the light of the moon. You know what I'm saying? We'll see how it shakes out now that we're on our own.”

“Lydia,” Sess said. “She's the one. If I had my pick, she'd be the one I'd go for. But don't tell Pamela.” He looked down into his cup. “By the way, just out of curiosity, did you ever-?”

Marco shook his head. “Not my type. But I guess you heard she brought us a little present from Fairbanks, right?”

“Present?”

“Yeah,” Marco said, holding his eyes. “Crabs.”

Sess leaned into the table. He was grinning. “You don't mean Alaskan king, do you?”

“I don't have them,” Marco said. “And neither does Star. So that says something right there.”

“Oh, you're hooked, brother, you're hooked. Your wandering days are over, all she wrote.” He lifted the cup to his lips, set it down again. “But seriously, you need a woman up here. If you're serious about the country, I mean. If it wasn't for Pamela, I'd be climbing a tree right now, I'd be picking fights at the Three Pup, passed out on the floor, too sick to run my traps and club that lynx today out of its misery. Which, by the way, I ought to drag in here and skin.” There was a silence. “Stay tuned,” Sess said after a while, “that's my advice. But listen, we've got a long day tomorrow, up to the next camp on No Name Creek, and I've about had it, how about you?”

They were up with the first light, which came just after nine A.M. in a gradual dull accretion of form and shadow beyond the window. Breakfast was moose stew. The dogs had dried salmon, choked down in a fury of wild-eyed snarling and jockeying for position. The sky was low and ironclad. The temperature was minus thirty-eight and rising.

He helped Sess put the cabin in order-moose stew on the floor, water in the kettle, kindling and stove-cut lengths of birch and poplar stacked up in a crude box in the corner-and then they harnessed the dogs. To Marco's eye, the dogs weren't much-savage-tempered, erratically colored and furred, with long angular stick legs, narrow waists and big shoulders. Back home, in Connecticut, they would have languished in the dog pound for the required two weeks, unlovable, inelegant, unadoptable, and then they would have been put down one by one, a gentle stroking of the ears and then the quick sure jab of the needle. The two close in to the sled-the wheel dogs-were called Lester and Franklin, a Sess Harder reference (and homage, or so he claimed) to the Drop City dropouts he'd seen panning for water in a goldless creek one glorious summer day, and the one just behind Lucius, the lead dog, was called Sky, just to extend the joke. “Let's not make this a shaggy dog story,” Marco told him when the introductions went round out front of the cabin on the Thirtymile, and Sess liked that. “I guess I should've called one Norm,” he said.

But now it was thirty-eight degrees below zero and there was no time for joking. The dogs were in a frenzy to get into the traces and get going-you could hardly slow them down for the first hour or so-and Marco was bitten twice, right down through his gloves and into the flesh, as he tried to clip Sky into the gangline, and if that wasn't bad karma he didn't know what was. “Jesus,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the din of the dogs, “are they always like this?”

Sess had just waded into the middle of a three-dog fight, rearranging ribs with his moccasins and hammering the big furred heads with his balled-up fist. “You want dogs with spirit,” he said, and then they were off.

That was a rush, pure exhilaration, the air so cold it burned, your lungs on fire with it, arms pumping like a marathoner's, now on the runners, now off, feeling the surge of uncontainable power that ran like an electric jolt through the spines and churning legs of the wolf-dogs and right into the sizzling core of you. Marco had never experienced anything like it. They hurtled along the trail, too energized to feel the cold, until they came to the first set and the dogs sensed it, smelled it, and pulled up short.