T. Boyle - Drop City

Then it was dusk and the canoe was up on the gravel bar, the dogs straining at their chains, and he and Pamela were walking hand in hand up the path that beat through the weeds to the cabin. He wished he could show her something grander-the rambling spread of outbuildings, the smokehouse, sauna and enclosed dog runs he planned to put up once he found the time and the money, not to mention a more spacious cabin-but he was proud of what he'd already accomplished, and he could feel the pride beating at his rib cage as he took down the bear-proof shutters and unlatched the door for her. The door faced south, of course, as did the two double-paned windows set on either side of it, but before they were in the cabin proper they had to go through the five-by-five dogtrot-or mud room, as somebody who lived in town might call it. “This,” he said, breathing hard in the dimness and taking in the familiar smells of oil, gasoline, ancient bait and bloodied traps and mold and whatever else had awakened out of the dirt, “this is the mud room.”

She was right there, a good eight or ten inches shorter than him, her pale hair and white arms ghostly in the half-light, and she wasn't saying anything, just staring wide-eyed, like a girl on a school trip. He guided her through the inner door and into the cabin itself, dodging round her to put a match to the lantern he kept on a hook just inside the door. “And this,” he said, his voice almost strangled in his throat with the sheer tension of the moment, “this is what I call home.”

She stood in the middle of the room and she didn't say a word. Her hair was luminous, her shoulders squared. He wanted to say something, wanted to ask her if she liked it, but he couldn't find his voice. After a moment she drifted toward the shelves on the near wall and idly fingered the things there, his few grease-slick books _(Tanning: From A to Z; How to Stay Alive in the Woods; Arctic Wilderness; The Home Brewer),__ a bottle of Pepto Bismol set beside a string of dried habanero chiles, Three-In-One oil in a rusted can, a candle six inches around he'd made from the wax of the bees he'd mail-ordered last summer, the odd tool. Still, she didn't say anything.

How long she stood there, picking up one thing after another and gently setting it down again, he couldn't say-no more than a minute or two, certainly, but it was the longest minute or two of his life. Was she in shock, was that it? For all her talk, she was a city woman, and maybe she had a whole different idea of what a cabin in the woods really was, a whole unspooling romantic fantasy of a big Ponderosa TV cabin with forest green shutters and a wide veranda and a kitchen with a tile floor and a hand pump for water. His heart was hammering. He couldn't seem to swallow. Outside, the dogs howled. And never had the place seemed so close, so dingy and confining, so much like a cell, like a bum's palace, like the meanest, crackbrained idea of a tumbledown shack in the world. The floor was caked with dirt. It was cold as a grave. He wanted to get down on his knees and sob. What had he been thinking? What in God's name had he been thinking?

“I'm going to put a coat of varnish on the floor,” he said. “That's the next thing. The very next thing.”

And then she turned to him, and the tears were in _her__ eyes. “Oh, Sess,” she said, “it's so, so _beautiful.__”

Together they fed the dogs-pots of cornmeal mush with dried chum salmon and the odd greenish scrap of last fall's moose stirred in-and then he got the stove going and made her coffee with evaporated milk and so much sugar the spoon stood upright in it. Down came the table and the bed, both of which folded up against the wall when they weren't in use and rested on dowels of white spruce when they were-“Space management,” he told her, “nothing to get in your way and trip over.” She perched on the bed, on the thin single mattress he'd hauled upriver in the canoe two years ago, and on the sleeping bag he'd sewn from the hides of a hundred ground squirrels. Within minutes the stove had driven the chill from the place and conquered the lingering odor of dampness and mold.

He sat on the far edge of the bed from her, cradling his cup in his hands. “It's a tight cabin,” he said, selling its virtues. “Even at sixty below. You'd be surprised. I mean, you would.”

She'd taken off her jacket now, and she stretched and leaned back into the pile of furs-lynx, fox, wolf-he'd heaped up around her. Her eyes were feasting. “That's nice to know,” she said. “But with all these furs, and this beautiful sleeping bag-very neat stitchwork, Sess, by the way; I'm impressed-with all of this you'd be warm without the stove.”

He was thinking he'd be even warmer if he had somebody inside it with him, and before he could stop himself, he'd said as much. He said it, and then he looked away.

Her first response was a laugh, musical and ringing, a laugh that made the place swell till it was like a concert hall. He brought the coffee mug to his lips so he could steal a look at her. Her face grew serious. She shifted herself closer to him and reached out her hand for his. “That'd be nice,” she said, her voice gone raw in her throat. “But I don't want you to get the wrong idea here, because it would be easy to, I suppose, you know, with me advertising for a man and all-”

He held her hand across the expanse of the bed, flesh to flesh, his every cell on fire. He didn't know what to say.

“Because I'm not that kind of girl, not the kind you hear about-or read about in the magazines. I'm old-fashioned, Sess, and I'm sorry, but that's the way it is. I've waited twenty-seven years for the right man and I guess I can wait a few weeks longer. Till I'm married. Can you understand that? Can you?”

He was thinking about Jill, her hair cut short with a pair of shears till it stood out from her head like a clown's, her legs hard-muscled and short, the heavy gravitational pull of her breasts as she swung into the sleeping bag naked, always naked, even on the coldest nights. Jill. He was thinking about Jill. “Yes,” he said. “Sure.”

And finally, when they thought of sleep with the sun propped back up in the sky and the night as still as a dead man's dream, he was the one who gave up the bed and went out into the pale drizzle of light to pitch his tent amongst the dogs.

At eleven-thirty the next morning she was sitting on the edge of the bed, combing out her hair and watching the way the muscles rearranged themselves in his shoulders as he leaned into the stove and cooked her breakfast. He was wearing patched jeans and a sun-faded workshirt that might once have been blue or maybe green. His hair, movie-star black and thick as a wolf pelt, stood up off his head as if he'd been hanging by it all night long in a closet someplace. He was barefoot. The sleeve of his shirt was gutted under the left arm and both cuffs were furred with dangling threads. “Moose sausage,” he said, giving her a look over his shoulder, “and your extra-super-special Sess Harder flapjacks with last year's sugared blueberries. What do you think of that?”

Through the two windows came a soft white layered light and both doors stood open to the sun and the sunstruck haze beyond. She could see his bees moving in golden flecks among the birch and aspen in the yard and she could smell the new-made scent of the Thirtymile where it joined with the Yukon and drew wet sparks from the rocks. Her hair was a travail, especially when she was out in the bush, and she'd meant to leave it braided-but when she woke and saw him there at the stove, laying on wood, fussing with the draft, she thought she'd comb it out and let it hang like a flag of surrender. Or enticement. Because she was on trial too, and she wanted to show him what she had, and not only mentally, not only verbally, but physically as well.