T. Boyle - Drop City

And he told her. Told her about the work Roy Sender had put into clearing forty-some-odd miles of paths through the trackless waste, all the way up one side of the Thirtymile and each of its attendant tributaries, and then down the other, a nine-day loop tramped in weather so bitter it would have killed anybody who was less than superhuman, and Roy Sender working the line till he was seventy-one years old. Roy had taken him under his wing, taught him how to make his sets for every kind of animal, to build a sled of birch eight feet long and no wider than his own shoulders, to skin out lynx and fox and ermine and make baits that were little atom bombs of stink designed to prick the nose and perk the ears of every predator in the country. He was a bachelor-a coot-cranky as a Ford with two cylinders missing, chewing him out and cursing him every step of the way, a man no woman had ever wanted to waste her time on, and he lived like a coot, denned up all winter in his cabin where he spent his time rearranging his things and making his living space as comfortable and squared-away as the picture of some low-slung and wood-gleaming saloon in a sailing ship. Sess sat at the feet of the coot of all coots, glad to be in his crusty company, and after the months sailed off over the horizon and they began to talk in seasons, seasons stretching to years, the old man warmed to him.

“Why don't you build down at the mouth of the river there?” he said one spring night with the snow coming down like ticker tape and Sess camped in a canvas tent out back of the cabin. “Plenty of country for you here and the snowshoes coming up on their ten-year boom so there'll be plenty of fur for everybody, if anybody even wants it anymore. Hell, I don't have to tell you I'm not the man I used to be, you follow me? I got my knee, my back, my lungs for shitsake that make me feel like I'm drowning all the time-all of that, the price of getting old. And I get thinking about all the hard work I've put into this country and thinking it's all going to waste.”

That was Roy Sender, that was his blessing. And to think of it now, out here in the cabin that had materialized out of the hopeful solicitation of that night-out here with his wife, with Pamela-was enough to stop him up with an emotion so transcendent he could barely draw his next breath. Suddenly he was sentimental, the glass of him half-filled with sorrow and half with joy. Suddenly, he was drunk.

Pamela was two feet from him, sitting there at the table with her chin propped up on two fists, and her eyes were slipping south. Something rustled in the bush out back of the garden, and it wasn't the dogs-the dogs wouldn't be rustling anymore. He poured another shot of rum, struck a match and watched the blue flame flicker atop it before throwing it back. The night was mild, still mild, and the mosquitoes hadn't come on yet. Maybe they were observing a nuptial truce, maybe that was it, he thought. Damn decent of them too. He'd have to remember that next time he crushed half a dozen of them on his forearm or temple-live and let live, right? “Pamela,” he said, and her eyes flashed open.

“I'm drunk, Sess,” she said. “I'm afraid I've gone and got drunk here.” And she smiled, a slow, weary, sanctified smile. “It's all your fault. Bringing a girl out here, getting her drunk. I'll bet you think I'm easy, don't you, huh?”

He gave her the smile back, reached out for her hand and closed it in his own. He didn't want to talk anymore, all that fuel was gone from him now, didn't want to tell her how it felt the first time he walked the trapline and found a wolf like a big dog caught by one half-gnawed foot in a double-spring Newhouse trap intended for fox and how it just sat there staring at him out of its yellow eyes as if it couldn't comprehend the way the country had turned on it in this cold evil unnatural way and how he'd felt when he shot it and missed killing it and shot it again and again till the pelt was ruined and a hundred and ten pounds of raw wilderness lay spouting arterial blood at his feet, or how Roy Sender had taught him to rap a trapped fisher or ermine across the snout with a stick and then jerk at its heartstrings till the heart came loose from its moorings and the animal went limp without spoiling the fur. He didn't tell her he was just one more predator, one more killer, as useless as the wind through the trees, taking life to feed his own. He didn't tell her any of that. “You want to go to bed now,” is what he said, “I can see that. You want your man in your arms. You want to be naked.”

She moved in close, threw an arm over his shoulder and pressed her forehead to his so that he couldn't see anything of her but her eyes, huge eyes, pale as water. “I'll tell you a secret,” she whispered, and the _s__-sound went slushy on her. “I am easy. For you. Only for you, Sess Harder.”

He was very drunk. Profoundly drunk, but what did that mean, anyway? Profoundly drunk? That he was ready to go deep, get deep, be deep? Her breath, fecund with wine, with smoked and processed ham, with his beer and what lay at the very essence of her, was a thing that stirred him. He was instantly hard. His breath mingled with hers. “What do you want me to do?”

“Everything,” she said.

In the morning it was all right. He hadn't got this far without adversity, hadn't felled the trees for his own cabin and trapped two winters and sold the furs and refused unemployment and food stamps and any kind of institutional handout or government tit without things going radically wrong at one time or another. Adversity hardened him, annealed him. It made him rise to the challenge and beat it back till he knew in his own mind that there was no man like him in all the country, nobody tougher, more resourceful, more independent. The dogs were dead. He would get new ones. And when the time came, when he had the leisure and the inclination, he would settle his scores.

But now it was morning and the cabin was lit by a thick wedge of sun that held the window over the bed in its grip and set fire to the jars of honey on the shelf behind the stove. He lay there a minute, a long minute, Pamela's sweet palpable form pressed to his till they were like two spoons in a drawer, and watched the sun on the wall as if he'd been locked in a closet all his life and never seen anything like it before. They'd slept late, but that was the way it was in summer-you stayed up half the night with the sun looping overhead and then slept in till the next day took hold of you. He had a hangover-and the half-formed feeling of shame and unworthiness that goes with it-but he wasn't going to let it affect him, not one iota. Today was going to be Pamela's day, all day, a day that would make up for yesterday, and if she wanted to just sit naked in the sun and weave slips of forget-me-nots or bluebells into her pubic hair like Lady Chatterley (another of his enduring fantasies), then that was all right with him. Of course, just thinking about it got him hard and he woke her to the slow gentle propulsion of his lovemaking.

And what did she want to do after he served her a plate of eggs, bacon and potatoes fried in four tablespoons of semi-rancid lard whose origins even he suspected? She wanted to do, to make, to get going on the rest of their lives, setting one brick atop another-or log, as the case may be. “Show me where the add-on goes,” she said, and she was already out the door, in the knee-high weed, pacing off a room she could see in her mind, a cleaner, airier space that would more than double what they had and give them a proper bedroom with a real and actual freestanding bed in it. And shelves, miles of shelves, and built-in drawers maybe. Bentwood rockers. Little tables. She had that little-table look in her eye, he could see it, could see the way she was calculating.

“You want to catch the sun,” he said.