T. Boyle - Drop City

On the way back, he was nothing short of exuberant, chattering away at her as if he'd just won the lottery. The groceries were stuffed down behind the seat, and the dog-he wouldn't demean it by calling it “Peaches”-sat like a tensed coil in her lap, its head out the window. He drove slower now, but still shot ahead in bursts and cranked through the gears as if he wanted to rip them out of the transmission, slamming into potholes and flinging up sheets of coffee-colored water as if the car were a skiff shearing across a muddy inlet. Every other minute he'd reach out a hand to stroke her arm or pat the dog. Before long, he was whistling.

“Trotter,” he said, “what about Trotter? That's a good name. Descriptive, you know? Or Lucius. I've always liked Lucius. As a name, I mean-”

She'd almost forgotten they were in a stolen car, playing a dangerous game with a man who put bullets in the skulls of another man's dogs and that there was retribution to come, because she was in this moment, now, and they were both working on fresh beers to celebrate the fact of this sterling dog in her lap and the two others Sess had paid five dollars each for against the day he'd be back with Richard Schrader's pickup. “How about Yukon King?” she said.

He let out a laugh and reached again to stroke the dog, which reeled its head in to give him a look of subjection and fealty. “Never thought of that one. But sure, I mean, what could be more fitting than to name a real dog after some actor dog that probably couldn't get out of the way of a sled if it ran him over, and by the way, did you know that Lassie is really three different dogs and they're all male?”

She didn't know. But she did know the origin of the feud between him and the black-haired man, because he'd told her over his second morose shot of Wild Turkey at the Pumphouse while she read off the descriptions of the dogs for sale or trade or “free to good home,” and he rejected them one after another before she could get to the end of the first line. Two winters ago Joe Bosky had appeared in Boynton dressed up like something out of the pages of _National Geographic__ in a caribou-skin parka lined with wolf and a rifle slung over one shoulder. The plane that delivered him hadn't even refueled yet for the return trip to Fairbanks, and he was already hip-deep in bullshit at the Nougat, with the deed to Tilda Runyon's cabin spread out on the bar-the cabin she'd left to her half-breed son, who was a drunk and a gambler, a thief and liar, and who'd apparently been in the Corps with Bosky. What was he doing in the country in the middle of February? He was going to live wild, that was what. And he moved into Tilda Runyon's cabin, chopped wood, drank to excess and lived off what the mail plane brought him two days a week. By the first summer he was building himself a cabin on Woodchopper Creek and making money hand over fist flying tourists and fishermen into the backcountry in the Cessna 180 he floated in on one fine day, and by the fall he was wandering the hills and watercourses, scouting out the country for signs of fur. He settled finally on Roy Sender's trapline, the trapline Roy Sender had cleared and maintained and expanded over the course of forty-odd years and ceded to Sess when he left the country. The first winter, it was stolen bait and sprung traps and no evidence of a man's footprints in the snow, as if the perpetrator could fly, because Joe Bosky was clever and a quick study and the country grew out of his skin. By the second winter, he was running his own traps and poaching from Sess's.

“You didn't know that about Lassie? You really didn't?”

She shook her head. “You read it someplace?”

“I read it someplace. _TV Guide,__ most likely.”

“_TV Guide?__ Why in god's name would you read _TV Guide__ when you've never had a TV in your adult life and never will?”

He gave her a look. Shrugged. “I was flat broke one winter when I was still in Fairbanks-remember, I told you? Drinking too much, and out of money for drink. This bookstore had a box of old _TV Guide__s they were giving away. I must have read every one cover to cover. Twice. At least twice. You know _Citizen Kane__?”

A black-and-white image came into her head, the darkened room, the roll and flicker of the tube and her mother with her feet up, doing her nails, the jowly glow of Orson Welles's face, the stark rectilinear halls of a mansion whole armies could camp in. “I've seen it. Or parts of it, anyway.”

“Nineteen forty-one. Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten. Directed by Welles. Four stars. _The Mummy's Ghost__? Nineteen forty-four. Lon Chaney Jr. Two stars. _The Savage Innocents,__ Anthony Quinn, 1960-and they must have played that one six times a week-three stars. I could tell you the ratings for every movie ever made, but I doubt if I've seen more than maybe fifty of them in my whole life-and that was when I was a kid at home with my parents.”

The dog shifted in her lap. “You miss it-TV, movies?”

She expected him to say no, to give her the usual bush crazy's party line-too busy out there, too beautiful, the whole natural world better than anything you could ever hope to see on a little screen and the aurora borealis blooming overhead in living color too-but he surprised her. “On a moonless January night with the stove so hot the iron glows and the floor so cold you don't want to get out of bed to save your life, you miss just about everything.”

Then they were silent and the dog hung his head out the window and the sun defeated the clouds to light the road ahead of them like an expressway and Joe Bosky's Mustang lurched into the ruts and sought out the puddles. Traffic wasn't a problem. They overtook two cars going their way-probably heading for Boynton Hot Springs, where there was an old tumbledown resort for summer people-and six or seven vehicles came at them headed for Fairbanks, all of which Sess recognized. He whistled his way through four quavering versions of “My Favorite Things,” something from Dvor?ák, she wasn't sure what, and, maddeningly, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus (Underneath the Mistletoe Last Night),” and then it was evening and they were three miles outside of Boynton and he was pulling over on the side of the road in a place where Birch Creek meandered along the shoulder and the odd fisherman had worn a blistered dirt hump in the bank. “Time to get out, Pamela,” he said, and before she could find the door handle he was around her side of the car and pulling open the door for her. “Time to stretch your legs. Come on, Lucius, that's a good dog. You want to stretch too?”

The creek was a river actually, slow and deep here, with water the color of steeped tea. The dog lifted his leg, sniffed. Sess took her in his arms and gave her a kiss full of passion and hunger, and then he let her go and started fitting the groceries into the two backpacks they'd brought along. The mosquitoes were overjoyed. “What are you up to, Sess?” she asked, standing over him. “You're going to leave the car here, is that it?”

He didn't answer. The tendons stood out in his neck as he stuffed cans, jars and plastic bags of pasta and marshmallows into the packs with an eye to balancing out the load.

“I don't see that it matters, Sess,” she heard herself say, and she didn't mean to nag-tried to catch herself, in fact, but couldn't. “Because you were right out there on the main street of town this morning where everybody could see you, beeping the horn even, and if anybody wanted to know our fingerprints are all over the thing. Dog hair too.” She tried to inject something light into it, though she was fuming all over again: “What would Perry Mason make of that?”

He looked up from the squat of his knees, genuinely puzzled. “Who's Perry Mason?” Then he rose to his feet, lifted both backpacks by their straps and set them to one side in the tall weed. “Pamela,” he said, “I need you to do me a favor here for just a minute, would you?” He didn't wait for a reply. “Just take hold of Lucius so he doesn't get spooked, okay?”