T. Boyle - Drop City

Pamela had been young then, just eight the first year they went into the backcountry, and her only memories of that time were happy ones. She remembered the three of them-she and her mother and Pris-sprawled in the big canvas tent while the rain made a whole Latin rhythm section out of the walls, her mother dealing out the cards for pinochle, poker, hearts or euchre while the smell of ginger-marinated rabbit or squirrel stew ruminated in the corners. There were oatmeal cookies baked to sweet density in a camp oven, brownies, even cakes. She read all of Nancy Drew, the Brontë sisters, Sherlock Holmes. They swam, fished, canoed, and for the month of June and half of September, her mother led her and Pris through their arithmetic, their spelling, their essays on Andrew “Old Hickory” Jackson and Thomas Paine. It was a kind of dream. And, as in a dream, the memories came back to her in fragments of color and emotion, one moment blurred into the next in a montage that spanned all those six summers till her father wandered off and never came back again.

She didn't know how long she drifted through the store in a fog, fingering one object after another as if she'd never before in her life seen hinges or threepenny nails, but the soft, almost apologetic toot of a horn from beyond the front window brought her out of it. There was a car out on the street-white, with blue stripes, some sort of racing car that was totally out of place in a town where vehicles were worked like dogs and if you didn't have a pickup you had a wagon. At first she thought the man behind the wheel must have been a tourist come up from Anchorage or even the lower forty-eight, but he seemed to be gesturing to her through the intervening lens of the windshield and there was that toot again, insinuating, persistent, familiar even. It took her a moment, and then she had to laugh to think she didn't even recognize her own husband, because there he was, leaning out the window now and calling her to him with an urgent rippling curl of the fingers of both hands. All right. But here she was in front of the precisely labeled bin of Hershey bars, no shopkeeper in sight and a long ride ahead of her. She took two without thinking and had almost made it to the door when she caught herself. And though Sess tapped twice more at the horn, she turned away, tripped down the aisle to where the cash register sat untended on the back counter and laid two quarters beside it.

Outside, in the light of day, the car looked even stranger, as if it had been set down here in the heart of the country by some demented pit crew with access to one of those big Huey transport helicopters you saw in the TV coverage of the war. It just did not compute-a race car in Boynton, one hundred and sixty miles from the nearest paved road? She slid into the seat beside Sess and handed him a Hershey bar, even as he put the thing in gear and tore a patch of gravel out of the road. “Nice car,” she said, her shoulders pinned to the seat. “Where'd you get it?”

He was tearing open the candy with his teeth, racing the engine in first gear and using his left hand and right elbow to steer the car through a series of ruts and bottomless puddles and out onto the Fairbanks Road. He hit second gear then and the chassis shivered over a stretch of washboard ridges, mud flying, stones beating at the fenders like machine-gun fire, and they shot past the Three Pup before she could even begin to think he might be evading the question. “Make your phone call?” he shouted over the roar.

“There was nobody there,” she said, and the tension of the springs over the unforgiving surface keyed her words to a shaky vibrato. He hadn't slowed down yet, the speedometer jumping at eighty on a road that was barely safe at half that, and what was he up to, her husband with the big hands and pelt of hair and the grin etched in profile as he gnawed at the chocolate out of one corner of his mouth? Was he trying to impress her like some teenager out on a date in his father's souped-up street machine? Was he turning adolescent on her, was that it, or was he just shot full of high spirits? Whatever the cause, he was going to tear the car apart if he didn't slow down-or maybe kill them both. She took his arm. “Sess,” she said, “Sess, slow down, will you?”

Immediately the speedometer jerked down to forty and he turned to her with a grin. “Like it?” he asked, a froth of chocolate and saliva obliterating his front teeth so that he looked like some mugging comedian on TV, like Red Skelton or she didn't know who. There was something wild in his eyes, some bubbling up of emotion she hadn't seen before, and she reminded herself that she was still learning to read him-this was her honeymoon, after all. He was her husband and she loved him, but how well did she really know him after two weeks?

She gave him the grin back, gave his wrist a squeeze where it rested on the gearshift as the wheels beat at the road and the road beat back. “Sure, it's nice. But there's no backseat or anything, so how are we going to-”

“Dogs, you mean? Hell, we'll strap them to the roof.” He goosed the accelerator and the car shot forward with a jerk and then fell back again as he let up. He hadn't stopped grinning yet, and she was going to repeat her question-_Where'd you get the car?__-when she noticed that there was no key in the ignition, just a shining empty slot staring at her like a blind eye. And below it, below the steering column, there was some sort of plug hanging loose in a bundle of dangling wires.

A moment slipped by, scrub on either side of them, trees flapping like banners in a stiff breeze. Then he was fishing under the seat for something, his head cocked to keep one eye on the road. “Here,” he said, straightening up and handing her a can of Oly, “I already got a head start on you and didn't we say we'd reward ourselves with a couple beers this morning?” He stuck a second can between his thighs and worked the punch top while the car fishtailed across the road and righted itself again.

She accepted the beer, popped it open, took a sip. “You're drunk, is that it? Is that why you're acting like this?”

The grin had faded while he was rummaging under the seat, but now it came back, tighter than ever. “Hell, no, Pamela-I mean, two beers and a chocolate bar on a mostly empty stomach? Just feeling good, that's all. Super. On top of the world.”

She cradled her beer, studying him. “Where'd you get the car, Sess?”

He looked straight ahead, the grin frozen on his lips. He shrugged, but didn't shift his eyes to her. “Around.”

“Oh, yeah?” she said, and this wasn't cute, not anymore. This was criminal, that was what it was. Irresponsible. Wrong. “Then why are there no keys in it? And what's that mess of wires down there?”

Another shrug. He put the beer to his lips and gunned the engine again. “I borrowed it.”

“Borrowed it? From who?”

“You want to see if we can scare up anything on the radio?”

“From who, Sess?”

Now he looked at her and the grin was gone. Something-a tawny streak-darted across the roadway in front of them. “Joe Bosky.”

“Joe Bosky?” she repeated, as if she hadn't heard him right, and maybe she hadn't-maybe the roar of the engine and the wind through the open window was playing tricks with her ears.

He didn't say anything, just stared at the broad brown tongue of the road before them.

“You mean Joe Bosky who you were ready to kill a couple weeks ago? That Joe Bosky?”

She studied him in profile a moment and there was no give in him at all. “You're talking grand theft auto here, Sess. You're talking jail time. Is it worth it? Is it really worth it just to, to what-show off? Be the big man? Is that what you're doing? Showing off for me?”

“Tit for tat. You hurt me, I hurt you. It's the law of the jungle out here, Pamela, and you better get used to it.”