T. Boyle - Drop City

“What do you think you're _doing?__” Verbie leaned into the turn, the breeze kicking up tufts of her chopped red hair. She tried to swing round to confront him, but the centrifugal force was too much for her.

Pan snuffed the breeze, exulting in the river smell and the speed that drove it to him. The skiff planed over the surface. He didn't bother to answer.

“We've got no time for this, Pan. _Ronnie.__ Come on. You know we've got to grub everything out of that little shitbird of a store owner, who like threw a fit over the food stamps last time, and get the mail and all that and be back by tomorrow night-and that's _if__ Lydia and Harmony ever went into Fairbanks for the window glass and the batteries and I don't know what else.”

“Hey, this is _Alaska,__ Verbs,” he said, and he cut the throttle and let the skiff coast into shore on its own steam. “These people are our neighbors. I mean, I just want to ask them if they need anything-don't you think they'd do the same for us?”

“No,” she said, “no they wouldn't. Not if their mother was dying and they had twenty-four people depending on them and three cabins and a meeting hall to put up before winter-”

So she was a pain in the ass. She was born a pain in the ass. Like Alfredo. Like Reba. Such were the joys of communal living. “Five minutes,” Pan said. “I swear.”

Sess hardly glanced up as the boat swung into shore. He and Pamela had just set the log in place, chest-high, and he was smoothing the upper surface of it with a drag knife, slivers of wood leaping away from his hands like insects in a field. He was wearing an old thermal shirt with the sleeves ripped out and his patched jeans and work boots and he'd sweated through the shirt so many times it looked as if it had been tie-dyed in eight progressively paler-and _ranker__-shades of yellow. The hair hung in his eyes, trailed down his neck and over his ears, almost long enough to qualify as hip. And from the look of him he wasn't exactly wearing out his razor either.

Ronnie tied up the boat and leapt ashore, Verbie clambering over the gunwale behind him and getting her feet wet in the process, and now the wife looked up and waved, and she was wearing dirty jeans and a plaid shirt three sizes too big for her, her hair tied back in a ponytail and her arms bare and smudged with what might have been grease or maybe mud. If Sess was the original dropout-_Sess Harder, mountain man__-then she was already halfway there, the prom queen shading to pioneer, to helpmeet, to fish skinner and plucker of goose and duck. And wasn't life beautiful?

The dogs were racketing, jerking at their chains and nosing at the sky, elevating dust. Behind them was the garden, probably a quarter acre of squash and peas and whatnot, tomatoes in a greenhouse made out of Visquine thrown over a willow frame, and to the right of that was the cache, a miniature cabin set up on timbers eight feet off the ground, where the meat was stored in winter. Sess had nailed flattened Blazo cans round each of the four posts, to discourage weasels and wolverines and anything else that might want to scramble up there and make off with tender frozen morsels of moose, duck and fish, and there was a crude ladder set to one side of the cache so humans could get at it. Then there were the drying racks. They were set out along the bank in the full blaze of the sun, and they were so congested with salmon split down the middle they were like walls of flesh-they _were__ walls of flesh-and all of it free from the river. And what did you do in the summer? You collected food for winter. You hunted, farmed and fished and sat up all night under the sun that never set with a beer in one hand and a smoke in the other. And they called this work.

Ronnie came up through the brittle weed and clinging wildflowers, grinning with the thought of it-Sess Harder was the _man,__ and didn't he have the world snowed? “Sess,” he was saying, “what's happening, man? And, Pamela. Hey, what's happening?”

“Nothing much,” was all Sess said. He went right on working, smoothing the log, blowing away the debris, even laying his head flat on the planed surface to sight along the length of it. The dogs took it up a notch as Verbie sloshed up the bank, and Pamela, holding her end of the log fast, gave her a smile with nothing but welcome in it. “You two want some tea?” she called. “I can put on the kettle.”

“Oh, don't bother about us,” Verbie said, kicking at the heels of her hiking boots as if that could even begin to dry them out. “We were just-”

“Sure,” Ronnie said. “That would be cool. You need a hand there, Sess? And by the way, we just stopped to ask if you might need anything from town because we've got a load of stuff to pick up and we were just wondering-I mean, it would be no problem, no problem at all…”

They drank the tea out of shiny new ceramic cups that looked as if they'd just been unpacked from the box, and this was no herbal _rinsewater__ but the real and actual stuff, brewed so strong it made your jaws ache, and they sat at the picnic table in the yard and took a break while Verbie chattered at Pamela and Pamela chattered right back and the dogs settled down around their chains. Pan was feeling uncluttered and _clean,__ just soaring on the wings of the day and the glimpse he was getting into Sess Harder's intimate life. He had a thousand questions for him, but Sess wasn't quite as lively as he'd been the last time Pan had run into him (at the Bastille Day Wildflower Festival and Salmon Feast Norm had proclaimed a week back), and the only answers he got came in the form of grunts and semaphore. Sess was looking from his woodpile to his garden to his dogs, purely distracted, and after ten minutes of tea-sipping, he pushed himself up from the table and said, “Okay, Pamela, let's get back to it.”

Verbie fell all over herself assuring them that it was no problem-she and Pan really had to get going, because of _x, y__ and _z__-and she thanked Pamela for the tea and Sess for the company and _blah-blah-blah.__ But Pan was soaring and he just had to do something for them, to express his awe and gratitude, and he kept saying, “It's no hassle at all, man, really, we'll be back like tomorrow night, I mean, store-bought bread, hamburger buns, a pint of scotch, whatever you want,” until finally Pamela reached into the pocket of her jeans and extracted a bleached-out five-dollar bill that looked as if it had been printed during the Roosevelt administration and said, “Some cigarettes, maybe-Marlboro's-and we could use, I don't know, some of those Hershey bars with almonds, maybe five or six, and that good coffee Wetzel has on special-the Maxwell House? In the five-gallon can?”

Then they were back on the river, skating out of the Thirtymile and into the roiling big freightyard of the Yukon, Verbie as entranced with talking to herself as she might have been delivering up her wit and wisdom to an audience of thousands, a sweet mist of spray in their faces, clouds whipping by overhead and Pan scanning both shores for movement. The only time he responded to anything she was saying was when she lit on the subject of Jiminy and Merry and how right for each other they were and then locked her pincers into what had gone down last night. Somebody said he'd been involved. Was that true? No, he said, shouting over the motor, it was just bullshit, that was all. And he wasn't lying, necessarily, or even fudging the truth. The way it turned out, he _wasn't__ involved, if involved meant getting his dick wet, because Merry snapped her legs shut, jerked her pants back up over her hips and crawled out of the tent to get all weepy and forgiving and apologetic with Jiminy, and up the river they went, his right arm in a sling and hers wrapped like a field dressing round his waist.

Half an hour slid by, the throttle open wide and the current pulling them by the nose, and he turned the volume all the way down on Verbie and listened to the way the outboard engine broadcast its news to the world. He'd just about given up on seeing anything substantial-like a moose up to its nose in a willow thicket or maybe an eagle with a fish in its claws-when something moving in the water up ahead caught his attention. It looked like a pillow off one of the sofas in his grandmother's den-or no, an ottoman, the whole ottoman, bobbing in the foam as if this were the East River instead of the Yukon. Still too far to make it out… but now, closing fast, he could see that it was moving against the current, and wait, wasn't that a pair of ears-and a snout?