T. Boyle - Drop City

There was a new woman working the place, a summer person, a tourist, as lean and tall and plain-faced as a warden-a male warden out of a Jimmy Cagney movie, that is-and she came out from behind the bead curtain that masked the grill from view with his ham and cheese on very old rye wrapped up in a sheet of waxed paper. Her name was Lynette, she was in her fifties, and it would be a long cold night of a long cold winter before anybody looked at her twice. Skid Denton was sitting at the other end of the bar. Sess knew him as a denizen of the Nougat, the only other place where you could get a drink in Boynton, population 170. “Hey, Lynette,” Skid said, “Sess is going into Fairbanks for a little shopping, did you know that?”

She set the sandwich down as if it weighed a quarter of a ton, gave a smile that barely wrinkled her lip and took a drag of her cigarette. She only worked here. She'd only just started. She was trading free rent on a shack out back for zero wages and zero tips and all she could eat and drink when Wetzel Setzler, who owned the place, was away. As he was now. “That so?” she said, glancing from one of them to the other.

Sess looked away. He was impatient. Time to go, oh yes indeed, and he could already picture the wide familiar planed dirt road rolling under his tires, and then the first pavement he'd have seen in eight or nine months stretched out as smooth as black ice coming into the city, and then the stores and the houses and the saloons. He drained his beer, shrugged.

“Going to get him a wife, isn't that right, Sess?”

He remembered in that moment why he didn't like the man-he talked like a tourist's idea of a sourdough, though he'd been raised in Los Angeles and had a degree in French literature. “You know, pick up some flour, eggs, milk, a new wife, that sort of thing-”

Lynette was wearing a faded flannel shirt buttoned up to her throat, blue jeans and boots. Her hair was cut short as a man's, she'd driven up from Seattle in a brand-new Pontiac station wagon and nobody knew whether she was married, divorced, a spinster or an ex-nun. She wore a pistol in a snug leather holster that looped over her belt, and to Sess's mind that marked her as a particularly dangerous brand of oddball, the kind who come into the country to play out their Technicolor fantasies of the Wild West. “What you wearing that gun for?” he'd asked when he ordered the second beer. She gave him a defiant look. “Protection,” she said. “Protection?” he'd echoed. “From what?” The stony look now, the look of a thousand bars and dancehalls and another thousand nights alone staring into the black hole of the TV. “It's not bears,” she said. “Or moose or wolves either. It's the two-legged beast worries me.”

Now she said, “New wife? I didn't even know you had an old one.”

Could he dignify the question with a response? Was it worth the time and effort? Did he want to act inappropriately, act out, tell her to go fuck herself and then maybe bounce Skid Denton's head up and down off the bar as if he were dribbling a basketball downcourt through a swarming defense? No. No, he didn't. The fact was that he'd never had a wife of any kind, new or old, because the last woman-Jill-who'd spent a lush summer and a sere and broken-hearted winter in his twelve-by-twelve log cabin with all the appointments, or at least necessities, had embarrassed him. People still talked about it. People still shook their heads, as if it were some kind of joke, some kind of routine he'd gone through-and Jill had gone through-just for their amusement. A soap opera. A TV show.

He scraped his change up off the bar, having a little trouble with the dimes because he'd chopped off the tips of his fingernails with a penknife just this morning as part of a general effort to spruce up his image. He tucked in his shirt, wheeled and headed for the door. Where he paused, the door open a crack so that the outside mosquitoes and the inside mosquitoes could change places, the agenda they seemed most intent on throughout the duration of their brief bloodsucking lives. “If I get lucky,” he said. “Real lucky. So wish me luck.”

He let his mind drift during the long drive in, watching in an abstracted way for game, rolling down the window so he could smell the country and the chill coming up off the Chatanika River. A handful of cars passed him going the other way, a camper or two, but this wasn't a busy road, even in the best of times-like now. In winter, once it snowed, the road was closed, drifted in, iced up, landslid and buckled, and Boynton was like a ship at sea with no land in sight. If you wanted out, you flew. In a bush plane that had no paint on it because paint added an unnecessary thirteen pounds to the total load. You flew, that is, unless the temperature had dropped past forty below, the range at which fuel lines tended to freeze, and if you didn't have fuel to the engine you came down out of the sky like a big winged rock. But that was life in the bush, and to his mind, it was a small price to pay for what you got in return.

When he reached Fairbanks he was amazed at the traffic, two cars to the left of him, three lined up at a light, pickups pulling in and out of gravel lots as if they were coming out of the gate at the Indianapolis Speedway, women, children, bicyclists, dogs. He had to remind himself to be careful, because he wasn't used to driving and didn't much like it-in fact, he was more than a little suspicious of people who did.

Plus he was drunk, or residually inebriated, though most of the effects of what he'd downed at the roadhouse had dissipated during the drive and the long slow gnawing at the ham-and-cheese sandwich Lynette had made for him with all the care of a veteran hash-slinger. The city clawed at him. The traffic lights made him frantic with impatience. But he knew right where he was going, and nothing-absolutely nothing-had changed since he'd been here last, in September of the previous year.

She was waiting for him at a table out on the deck of a restaurant on the riverfront, the nicest place in town, and it was nice for people to be able to sit outside and take advantage of the sun and the views. He saw her before she saw him, and he held back a moment so he could compose himself. In profile, against the river and the broad slap of the sun on the water, she was like a figure in a dream. Her bare legs and arms gleamed, her hair shone. She was wearing khaki shorts and hiking boots with thick gray socks rolled down over the tops and a pink T-shirt three sizes too small that pulled tight across her chest. Her name was Pamela, and he'd met her twice before, but that didn't make him any less nervous. He tucked in his shirt all the way round, slicked down his hair with two saliva-dampened fingers, and walked out onto the deck.

At that moment, the very moment his boots hit the planks, she turned to slap a mosquito on her upper arm and saw him. A quick burn of puzzlement went through her face, as if she hadn't been expecting him or had forgotten all about him, what he looked like even, but then she was on her feet and he was there and they went through that awkward man-woman greeting business with a restrained hug and a touch of her cheek to his as she stood up on her tiptoes and pulled him down to her. “Sit down,” she said, showing off her perfect white teeth, the teeth of a dental hygienist or a stripper, teeth that said _hello__ and _watch out__ at the same time. “Sit down and join me, Sess, and don't be so bashful. God,” she said, and she let out a laugh, “you're like a little lost boy on the playground.”

He fumbled into the chair across the table from her and murmured something like “Nice to see you, Pam,” but before the words were out she'd already corrected him: “Pamela,” she said, smiling still, smiling so hard, so persistently, so radiantly, that he began to feel a little afraid of her despite himself. Was there something wrong with this picture? Or was she as nervous as he was? He gave an inward shrug-either way, she was beautiful. God, she was beautiful. And what cabin in the bush couldn't use an ornament like that, perfect teeth and all?