T. Boyle - Drop City

Verbie shut down her monologue long enough to shout, “Hey, are you crazy or what?” even as the skiff veered sharply to the left and the ottoman was transformed into the head of a bear, a grizzly, with its scooped-out face and the silver hump of its back spiking out of the glacial milk of the river like a paradigm of power. Pan was electrified. _A grizzly. His first grizzly.__ And here it was, all but helpless, caught out in the middle of the river, swimming. He wasn't thinking of the meat or even the hide as he eased back on the throttle and reached for the rifle. It was the claws he wanted. He'd seen an Indian shooting pool one night at the Three Pup and when the guy leaned over to line up a shot you could see the necklace dangling free of his shirt, five grizzly claws strung out on a piece of rawhide, each of them as long and thick and wickedly curved as a man's fingers-a big man's fingers. Ronnie had wanted that necklace badly enough to ask the Indian to name his price, but the Indian just gave him a blunt-eyed look and bent forward to line up his next shot. And he'd understood: you didn't buy a necklace like that; you went out to where the bear dictated the terms and you tracked him down and took it.

He cut the throttle with his left hand and shoved back the tiller so the boat looped in on the big floating head and the rippling shadow of the hulk that trailed behind it, all the while clicking off the safety on the rifle and trying to keep his hands from trembling with the sheer _excitement__ of it all, and this had to be the ultimate trip, right here and now-nobody was going to believe this, least of all his Hush-Puppied, slope-shouldered, lame-ass father entombed in his Barcalounger with a gin and tonic clenched in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The rifle was at his shoulder, the boat was pitching, the big head swiveled to take him in, and there were eyes in that head, eyes that locked on his with a look of mortal surprise and maybe terror, because what was this floating piece of jetsam _bearing__ down on him with people in it, people and _guns-__

“Ron_nie__!” Verbie was shouting. “Don't, don't, _Ronnie__-Pan, no!” And before he could register this new threat on the horizon she'd swung round in the seat and swiped at the gun, and that threw off his aim because he flinched at the crucial moment and felt the stock kick back at his shoulder as if the bullet were coming out the wrong end and simultaneously saw the bear's head shy away in a pink puff of spray. He'd hit it-or no, he'd grazed it, and the thing only had one ear now and there was blood, grizzly blood, streaking the water in long raking fingers of color.

Verbie was on him, her balled-up fists exploding on his forearms and her still-wet hiking boots lashing out at his knees, his thighs, his crotch, the boat pitching and yawing and the engine caught in the waking dream of neutral even as the stern dipped to the right and the first bucket of water sloshed in. “You asshole! You fucking asshole! What do you think you're doing? Did that animal ever do anything to you, huh? What is it with you? Big man, right? You've got to be the big man all the time!”

That was when the engine died. That was when, fighting her for the gun, Pan realized that the bear's big humped ottoman head had a mouth full of teeth in it and that the bear wasn't heading for shore anymore. No, the bear was coming for _them__ now, plowing through the weave of the current like a torpedo in one of those grainy old _Victory at Sea__ reruns his father couldn't get enough of. He snatched a look at Verbie and saw that she'd reconsidered her position-_Verbie,__ the den mother, the Buddha, the hack-haired chick who was never wrong. Who never faltered. Who knew it all and was ready to tell you about it twenty-four hours a day. That was her thing, that was her trip, that was why she'd been christened _Verbie__ in the first place. But now a look came over her face that fomented as much real terror in him as he'd ever known, a look that said she'd miscalculated, she'd interfered, she'd opened her big downer mouth at the wrong time and was going to pay for it with her life. And his.

Ronnie shoved her down, hard. The big head was surging across the water, no more than twenty yards away. This was a crisis. The first real crisis of his life. Nothing like this had ever happened to him, nothing, and his heart clenched and unclenched even as he tugged at the starter cord and heard the engine cough and die, cough and die. He never even thought of the gun. It was lying in the bottom of the boat where he'd dropped it, lying there inert in three inches of water. Nor did he think of the.44 strapped to his right thigh or the bowie knife strapped to his left. _The oars,__ that's what he thought. And in a pure rocketing frenzy of panic he snatched them up, jammed them into the oarlocks and began digging for all he was worth. Which, admittedly, wasn't much, because he hadn't actually had a pair of oars in his hands-hadn't actually _rowed__ a boat-since he was twelve or thirteen. The oars slipped and missed, chopping at the water. Back they came, and missed again. But then they caught and held and the boat swung its nose into the current and the seething monumental toothy head of the bear-which had been so close, ten feet away, ten feet or less-began to fall back, inch by inch, foot by foot, till he couldn't hear the roar of its breathing anymore, till he couldn't hear anything but the creak of the oarlocks and the deep punishing hiss of the river.

Boynton wasn't much-a collection of unpainted shacks and log cabins the color of dirt, explosions of weed, clots of trash, stumps, rusted-out pickups, eight or ten powerboats pulled up on the gravel bar or drifting back from their painters like streamers on a kid's bike-and it would have been easy to miss if it wasn't for the bus. The bus was right there, fifty feet from the gliding dark surface of the river, planted amidst the debris outside Sess Harder's shack-or his pied-à-terre, as Skid Denton liked to call it. Pan focused on the bus as he swung the skiff round the final bend east of town-and yes, the engine was working just fine, thank you, after he'd got done performing fellatio on the fuel line and pulling the starter cord so many times it felt as if his arm was coming out of the socket-but the bus wasn't yellow anymore, or not strictly yellow. He saw that Lydia and the other truants had been at it with their paints, an exercise in boredom at base camp, playtime, free time-_recess,__ for Christ's sake-while everybody else had been humping logs and eating mush out of the ten-gallon pot. But how could he complain? This was _art,__ the fruit and expression of civilization, and the strictly functional schoolbus yellow had given way to fluorescent purple and cherry-apple red, to doppelgänger green, Day-Glo orange and shattered pink. Freaks should be freaky, shouldn't they?

“Wow,” Verbie said, and it was the first syllable out of her mouth since the bear incident, “wow, do you dig that?”

“What?”

“The bus. It's all done up in faces, in what do you call them-caricatures. Cartoons, I mean. Look, that's Norm, right there by the door? And Reba. And look, it's you, _Pan,__ down there by the tailpipe, with a fish in your hand-”

He skated the boat in, watching for obstructions, but when it was safe, when he'd tipped the propeller up out of the water and let the thing ride, he took a closer look, and there he was, at the far end of the bus, with a head like a lightbulb and a tiny dwindling little anemic body and two fish-two _minnows__-dangling from the stringer in his hand.

“Pan,” she said, “the mighty hunter.”

“Verbie the yapper,” he said.

He was climbing out of the boat now and he'd just about had it with her shit-they'd almost died out there, didn't she realize that? “I don't see _you__ up there,” he added, just to stick it to her.