T. Boyle - Drop City

They left for Boynton at six the next morning, and by eight-thirty they were beaching the canoe and striding hand in hand up the hill to the shack. And that was an odd feeling for both of them-a sentimental feeling, nostalgic already. The vegetation was trampled in a wide oval where the dancing had gone on, and the odd bottle or spangle of confetti caught the sun from clumps of fireweed along the margins, artifacts of the ritual they'd enacted there two weeks ago. You could see where the birds had been at the flung rice, filling their crops to bursting, and there was a crescent-shaped depression where the barbecue pit had been. It was filled with cold white ash, through which scraps of charred bone protruded like the trunks of miniature trees in a burned-over forest, and the ash was crisscrossed with the tracks of weasel and ground squirrel. All the rest was gone, like a gypsy circus, like a magic act. “It was one hell of a party,” Sess said, “and I bet nobody's going to forget it.”

“Right,” she said, giving him a sidelong look. “Till the next one.”

They poked aimlessly around the shack for a few minutes, silently taking inventory and setting aside things-tools, mainly-they might want to haul back up to the cabin, and then they leaned into the screen door at Richard Schrader's place and chorused his name until it became apparent that he was either dead and stuffed or out somewhere on business. His pickup stood in the front yard-the pickup that was essential to the expedition under way since Pamela's Gremlin now belonged to the short-order cook at the Northern Lights Diner on C Street in downtown Anchorage and Sess hadn't owned a car in three years-and so they reasoned he hadn't gone far. They further reasoned that they deserved a drink after a beerless run down the river under a spitting sky, and Pamela wanted to call her mother to make sure she'd got home safe and to reassure her that all the tricky business of love had worked out to her satisfaction. And Sess was fine with that. He was fine with everything. The rain would be good for the garden, they'd just put in two weeks' work that was like no honeymoon anybody ever spent, there were some faces at the Three Pup and the Nougat he wouldn't mind reacquainting himself with in the afterglow of the wedding, and though he wouldn't breathe a word of it to anybody, he was going to need to acquire some dogs, and Fairbanks was the place to do it, where nobody would be asking any questions.

He dropped Pamela at the general store, where Wetzel Setzler had a ham radio set up to patch into the phone lines Bell Telephone so generously provided for everybody but the renegades, anarchists, xenophobes and wild hairs who chose to live at the dead and final end of the last road in the country, and then he ambled over to the Nougat, just to stick his head in the door. He had no expectation of running into Joe Bosky, because Joe Bosky was a coward and a backstabber and he wouldn't show his face after what he'd done, but Sess wouldn't mind scaring up Richard to see what the chances of borrowing the pickup were.

The Nougat featured the same setup as the Three Pup, only it was half the size, didn't have a kitchen and limited its offerings to booze and potato chips out of the eight-ounce bag, with cellophane-wrapped beer nuts and stale pretzels for the connoisseurs. A pair of mounted caribou heads stood watch over the bar and a moose with soot-blackened jowls presided over the woodstove. Clarence Ford, who owned the establishment, had meant to call it “The Nugget,” but orthography wasn't his strong suit.

When Sess stepped into the early-morning gloom of the place, there was nobody there but Iron Steve and an Indian he didn't recognize, both of them passed out at the bar. Wetzel Setzler's youngest, Solly, was in the back room, rattling bottles around in their slit-top cardboard boxes and making notations on a steno pad. Six hundred billion flies-at least-rumbled against the windowpanes and made a collective noise like a cello at mid-range. Iron Steve's breathing was slow and stertorous, every second breath catching on the horns of a snore. The whole place smelled of extinguished cigarettes-old extinguished cigarettes-and it was a sad smell, a reminder of all the traffic that had gone down here, the elbows propped, the glasses drained, the arguments, the bullshit, the women won and women lost. At quarter past nine in the morning, to a dogless man with his lungs full of sweet river air, it was almost depressing.

“Hey, Solly,” Sess called in an exaggerated whisper, lest he should wake anybody prematurely, “can a man get a beer out here? Or is this the place people come to die of thirst?”

Solly Setzler was twenty-four years old, with his father's ski-slope shoulders, milky eyes and colorless eyebrows, and nobody really thought it odd that he worked for the competition because it was a kind of miracle that anybody at all would want to stand behind the bar of a roadhouse this time of year. His hair was a miracle in itself, the exact color of fiberglass insulation, and his eyes lacked a human sheen. He'd been home-schooled, and he was as misinformed, brooding and ignorant as anybody Sess had ever met, especially anybody that young. Now he looked up with a wrung-out neck, like a bird in the nest craning for a grub in the parental beak. “Sess,” he said, looking lost in the bar he'd been working for three years, as if he'd awakened there out of a dream, “I thought you went upriver.”

He didn't know where Richard Schrader was, but he located an Oly and cracked it and never thought to offer up a celebratory shot for the newlywed, which Sess would have declined in any case because it was early yet and he had a drive ahead of him and all the responsibilities of a married man who couldn't just come into town and go on a bender like some talk-starved bush crazy with ingrown toenails and hair coming out his ears and nostrils.

At the Three Pup, he ran into Skid Denton, who seemed to have changed his allegiance from the Nougat, at least since Lynette had come to town. Skid Denton was having a breakfast of steak and eggs drowned in Tabasco and chopped onion, along with home fries, toast and a mug of beer with a shot of tomato juice in it-“Bloody beer,” he called it, whenever anybody bothered to ask, “-it's how I get my vitamin C.” He looked up from his plate to inform Sess that Richard Schrader had gone downriver to his fish camp in the expectation that the kings would be running any day now. Lynette, slouching over the bar so that her sidearm rode up her skinny hip, confirmed the intelligence. “Some tourist,” she said, as if she'd lived here fifty years, “caught a thirty-two pounder right off the gravel bar out there not two days ago. Or was it three?”

He had another Oly, just to balance out the one he'd thrown down at the Nougat-spread the trade around, that was his motto-and nobody offered to buy him a celebratory shot here either, and that was just fine, as per his resolution, so he went back up the road into town to check on Pamela at the general store. He wanted to tell her the bad news-no truck available-and let her stock up on what she would, because if they weren't going to Fairbanks where there was free and open competition, they'd have to pay Wetzel Setzler's captive prices, at least for now. Of course, in the winter they wouldn't have any choice, and if they didn't have dogs they wouldn't be sledding down the river to Boynton in any case, so there would be no picking up the odd forty-ounce can of Greek olives that you could expire for the want of or socializing at the roadhouse or at Richard's or anyplace else.

But then, two beers sitting pleasantly on his stomach, a light breeze off the river ruffling his hair as he put one foot in front of the other and the near shacks of the paint-blistered town rose up to greet him like so many old friends and boon companions, he had a thought involving a prime 1965 fastback Mustang he just happened to know about. It was a criminal thought, but then one good criminal act deserved another, didn't it?