T. Boyle - Drop City

So instead of a homecoming, instead of lifting his bride in his arms and carrying her through the dogtrot and across the threshold, instead of sorting out the wedding gifts and stocking the larder and maybe lying out nude with her on a blanket in the sun-one of his enduring sexual fantasies-he had to dig five holes while his heart clenched with hate and regret and his head rang with the bloody whoop of revenge. Pamela tried to comfort him, but it did no good. She was in shock herself, and that was the worst of it-that just compounded the crime right there. Bad enough that the psychopathic son of a bitch of a sneaking gutless leatherneck reject had done the deed, but to expose Pamela to this kind of thing, and on the day after her wedding, no less? He was going to kill Joe Bosky, as soon as he could, and there were no two ways about it. Joe Bosky had made his declaration. Joe Bosky was asking to be killed. He was begging for it.

“You can't, Sess, so don't even think about it. You'll go to jail-it's murder. There are laws up here too, you know-”

He was down in a hole, breaking through permafrost, flinging dirt. He'd been back an hour, with his bride, and he hadn't unloaded the canoe, looked to the garden, settled her in the house or even so much as pecked a kiss to her cheek. “What do you know about it?” he said, and he didn't just say the words, he snarled them.

She was right there beside him, in her shorts, with her magnificent legs on display, her hands on her hips. Her mouth was set. This was their first argument, one day married, a night in heaven, and now this. “I'm not going to talk to you like you're a child, Sess, and I'm not going to remind you that I'm part of this now too… We'll go to the law, like civilized people, put the law on him-”

“The law doesn't come for dogs.”

“For murder? Does the law come for murder? You think I married you so I could visit you three hours a week in some prison someplace?”

He drove his pick at the frozen earth, all his rage concentrated in his shoulders and arms and the iron-clad muscles of his chest. “I see him,” he grunted, and the pick dropped again, “I'll kill him.”

“All right. Fine. I can see you're upset, so I'll leave you to do what you have to do here and I'll start bringing the things in. Does that sound like a plan?”

_Upset?__ he was going to say. _You think this is upset? Wait till I get my hands on a gun, then you'll see upset-wait till I pin that son of a bitch to the wall and make him cry like a woman.__ He didn't have the opportunity, though, because she'd already turned on her heels and headed down the slope, through the sun-bright glitter of bluebells and lupines and avens and saxifrage, to where the canoe shone against the everlasting gleam of the water.

She made supper that night, things left over from the wedding feast, salads and cold cuts and whatnot that wouldn't keep, and they ate at the picnic table in seventy-five-degree sunshine while the silence of the world closed in around them. He was in a T-shirt and patched jeans; she wore a top that bared her midriff and she'd combed her hair out so it draped her shoulders like a golden flag, and that was something, really something. The sight of her there in his yard, at his table, living and vibrant under the stretched-away sky, moved him and humbled him and made him forget his rage for whole minutes at a time. She was his wife. He was married. Married for the first and last time in his life.

Down the rise, two hundred feet away, the river played a soft tinkling accompaniment to the shrugs and whispers of their conversation, and it could have been the silken rustle of a piano in a dark lounge. Even the mosquitoes, their whys and wherefores beyond any man's capacity to guess, seemed to have taken the night off. He ate cold ham and three-bean salad and listened to his wife, hungering after each inflection, watching her lips, her eyes. A bottle of wedding wine stood open on the table, Inglenook Pinot Noir, 1969, Product of the Napa Valley, and beside it, a pitcher of Sess's own dark bitter beer. He'd become a brewer when he moved out here and built the cabin because the nearest convenience store wasn't all that convenient, and when he wasn't off getting married or spying on Howard Walpole he produced a six-pack or so a day in the big plastic trash can just inside the door. So drink up, that was his motto, because he had only thirteen quart bottles and what didn't get bottled or consumed turned to swill in a heartbeat. He reached for the pitcher, poured himself another, then toasted her with a soft metallic clink of tin cups that echoed as sweetly as the finest crystal.

An hour ago, when he was done with the dogs, he'd come into the cabin and saw that she'd already packed everything in and found a place for it, rearranging his own squirreled-away bachelor lode in the process, and he'd felt a flash of irritation. The canned food was on the wrong shelves, a dress was hanging like a curtain from a cord in the middle of the room and there was a tumble of boxes full of clothes and books and even an alarm clock-an alarm clock, for Christ's sake! — crawling up the wall where the bed had to come down every night. And posters. She'd hung posters of some musician with a pageboy haircut-Neil Diamond, that's who it was-on the back wall. What was she thinking? This was a cabin, a wildwoods cabin, not some dorm room.

He didn't say anything. This was her first day, their first day, and he was crazy with rage over what Joe Bosky had done, and he had to tell himself that, tell himself not to let Bosky in, not to let him spoil this, and he went over to her where she stood arranging flowers in a coffee can and hugged her from behind. And that led to kissing and stroking and her softest whispered words of melioration and surcease. “If it's a question of money,” she said, pulling back from him to look into his eyes, “I've got money.”

His irritation flashed up again. “What are you talking about?”

“The dogs. We can buy dogs. Go back to Boynton. Fairbanks. Wherever.”

“What, and put an ad in the paper? 'Wanted, trained sled dogs for trapline'? I'd be the joke of the town. I'd never live it down, never. Besides, nobody traps anymore, nobody hardly even mushes.”

She gave him a look he hadn't seen before, hard lips, a dual crease come to rest between her perfect eyes. “Everybody has dogs,” she insisted, “and everybody has litters. You ever been to Kiana or Noorvik or any of the Eskimo villages? Because there's five dogs to every man, woman and child up there.”

“Okay, so let me get this straight-we're supposed to fly to some Eskimo village and buy dogs and fly them back in a four-seater Cessna?”

“I'm not saying that. I'm saying we could ask around Boynton. Or Fairbanks.”

Every sort of emotion was at war inside him, love, hate, sorrow, grief. “Look,” he said, “look, let's just drop it.”

And so what did he do? He drank too much. On her first night as his wife in his hand-hewn cabin in the middle of nowhere, when she must have been as confused and disoriented and as full of second-guesses and doubts as any bride who'd ever leapt without looking and found herself in a strange place with a man who was revealing himself to be stranger and stranger by the minute, he finished off the bottle of wedding wine and two pitchers of beer and insisted on digging out his quart bottle of Hudson Bay rum, 150 proof, and throwing back flaming shots till the sun fell down in back of the hills. At first she matched him, cup for cup, shot for shot-she was a good drinker, Pamela, with real endurance, strong in every way-but finally her eyes lost their focus and he was the only one talking.

“You want to know about trapping?” he was saying, lecturing now, whether she wanted to hear it or not. “I'll tell you about trapping.”