T. Boyle - Drop City

She'd just put the bread in the oven when there was a tap at the door and Iron Steve shifted into the room. He was bent nearly double to avoid cracking his head on the doorframe, which he'd already managed to do twice in the course of the afternoon and too many times to count in the past. Pamela didn't know how tall he was exactly-six-six, six-seven-but he towered over everybody in Boynton like an old-growth tree, and with his long-billed cap cocked at an angle on his head he grazed the ceiling of the cabin and had to work his way through a gauntlet of lanterns, kettles, tools, spatulas and fry pans hanging from the rafters just to get to the table to sit down. Pamela had no problem with that. She liked him. He might have been tight-lipped and more than his share of odd, not yet thirty and already a proto-coot, drunk more often than he was sober, but for all the raw-boned mass of him and the hard Slavic architecture of his face, he was gentle and good at heart. Before he'd got his hat and gloves off she handed him a cup of coffee, a can of evaporated milk and the sugar bowl.

“Bakin', huh?” he said, blowing steam off the cup.

“That's right,” she said. “What else is a young housewife to do-especially on a day like this. Think it'll snow?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Frost?”

“Oh, yeah. No doubt.”

There was a pause. She laid a few more sticks on the fire-the trick was to keep a consistent temperature for the hour or so till the bread was done. “Those hippies ever get anything out of their garden?”

“Not much. Rabbits got most of it.”

“Plus they started late.”

Steve just nodded. He drank off an inch of coffee, poured half the sugar jar into the cup and then filled it back up with evaporated milk.

“They know enough to light smudge fires tonight?” She couldn't help worrying for them-for Star, especially, and Merry, she liked Merry too and wanted to see her make it through all this without suffering, or suffering more than she could bear. It was amazing-they were all so naive, so starry-eyed and simplistic, filled right up to the eyeballs with crack-brained notions about everything from the origins of the universe to the brotherhood of man and how to live the vegetarian ideal. They were like children, utterly confident and utterly ignorant-even Norm Sender, and he must have been forty years on this planet. They should have known better. All of them.

“I already told them, but they're mostly just sitting around the stove in that big clubhouse they built, you know, playing cards and board games and that sort of thing.”

“What about Verbie, you tell her?” She poured herself a cup of coffee and eased in at the table across from him, the space so tight their elbows clashed every time they lifted the cups to their mouths. “If anybody'll get it done, she will. She's a pretty dynamic girl.”

Steve ducked his head and looked away. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I told her.”

Another pause. A gust ran across the roof like a jet plane coming in for a landing. She glanced up at the window and saw the first white driven flakes in horizontal motion. “How's that coming,” she said, “you and her?”

He caught her eye for an instant, then glanced up at the window. “Guess I was wrong,” he said. “But it won't amount to anything. Won't even whiten the ground.”

“You and Verbie,” she said, and she felt her lips forming into a smile. “It's a romance, isn't it? Come on, Steve, we all know you like her-Star says you two have been going at it pretty hot and heavy-”

Now his eyes came back to her, two settled green eyes with a hazel clock in one of them. “It's more than that, Pamela-I love her. I do. To me, she's the greatest thing that ever happened-I've been helping them with those half-built cabins, you know that, right? Because they're a little short on manpower since Pan and Sky Dog and what's his name-that one that looks like a horse going backwards-”

“Dale.”

“Right, Dale-since they left.”

“What did they, go back to California?”

“No, hell, no-they all moved in with Joe Bosky in that place he's got down on Woodchopper. The bachelor hole. Four skunks in a burrow.” He looked beyond her, into the intermediate space of the cabin that was like any other cabin, cramped and cluttered and hung with all the accoutrements of life lived in a place without a garage or a basement or a convenient three-bedroom, two-bath, kitchen/dining, liv/fam floor plan. “I don't want her sleeping in a tent all winter, but I tell you, they haven't even got roofs on those cabins, or stoves either. You know, I was thinking, I've got my place in town and all, and I know it isn't much, but-”

There was a thump at the door, and Sess was there, his hair dusted with snow, a look of high excitement in his eyes. “Better sharpen up your _ulu,__ Pamela,” he was saying, the words jerked out of him as if he could barely stand to waste breath on them, and then he was snatching the rifle down from the crossbeam above her head and spinning back out the door, checking the action. “The garden,” he said, “look at your garden,” and the door pulled shut behind him.

The startle came into Steve's eyes and he jumped up from the table and cracked his head on the crossbeam, heading for the door behind Sess even as she dashed into the new room to look out the window above the bed, where she could get a view of the garden and this strange white element beating against the green of the leaves and the black nullity of the plastic. She had a moment, only that-seconds-to register the hulking dark form grazing there in the midst of the windblown vegetable garden like an overfed cow, and then there was the report of the rifle and the thing went down without a fuss, without a whimper, three hundred fifty pounds of meat, fur and fat delivered right up to them, right in their own garden, and she hardly had time to register the joy and triumph of it when she spotted the cub. It was a yearling, with its big bottom and narrow shoulders and pale stricken face, and it hurtled through the Brussels sprouts like a cannonball, going so fast Sess's second shot didn't have a chance of catching up to it.

The snow didn't last-a few handfuls of white pellets flung at the windows and lost in the gray-green weave of the tundra-but there was a hard frost that night and the next morning dawned cold. Sess was up at first light, out in the yard fooling with the dogs. He had five of them now, enough to pull a sled over his forty miles of trapline, but he kept saying he'd like two more, for speed, so he could mush his wife down the river to Boynton in style on a Saturday night and have a few shots and a burger and maybe dance to the jukebox into the bargain. Pamela had felt the bed give when he slipped out of it and she'd smelled the rich expiatory aroma of coffee wafting in from the other room, but she'd stayed in bed, wrapped in furs, listening to the cabin tick to life around her. Sess had done a pretty good job of banging things about in the next room, metal clanking on metal, the thump of the big black cast-iron pan hitting the stove, and then the crackle of meat sizzling-bear, fried in the fat it was no longer wearing out there in the watercourses and swamps of the world. The smell was something new to her, or reminiscent, anyway-she hadn't eaten bear since she was a girl out there in a summer tent with her mother and Pris and the man with the gray-seamed beard and cracked blue eyes she called Daddy-and her olfactory memory triggered a hundred other memories until she drifted back to sleep over the image of her father stumping into camp with the hindquarter of a black bear slung over one bloody shoulder and a grin as wide as the Koyukuk River.

She woke to the sound of Sess's voice rising high and strained over the clamor of the dogs and the bludgeoning thump and screech of a resistant object jerked by main force through the high grass and willow. “Gee!” he shouted, “gee, you fuckers!” And “Haw! Haw! I said. _Haw!__” She raised her head, peered out the window. Sun slammed at the yard, at the garden, at the still-smoldering smudge fires. Most of the plants were standing and green still, but she could see where the frost had blackened some of the leaves of the snap beans and the cherry tomatoes. It was something that registered with her in the moment of waking-frost, smudge fires, minimal damage, new sun, more sun-but which she hardly had time to reflect on before a blur of man, dog and sled interposed itself between the window and the garden and then was gone. “Haw!” Sess cried. _“Haw!”__