T. Boyle - Drop City

Sess didn't know how long he went on, but after a while Harmony was joined by his wife or girlfriend or whoever she was, a thin raggedy little woman with a serene smile and the usual hair and a pair of breasts that should have been matched to somebody twice her size, and the two of them just stood there and listened to him as if they were SRO in a lecture hall. When he was done, when he'd talked himself out and begun to think of getting back in the truck, picking up Pamela and heading into Fairbanks to celebrate life and the season and the cache that was full to bursting with dressed-out meat, the record he'd been subconsciously screaming over came to a superamplified halt, and Harmony said, “I hear you, man.” He put an arm round the woman's shoulders and drew her to him. “You've been like supercool, and we all appreciate that, even Weird George. And listen, we've been maybe a little remiss in this, but Alice and I have been wanting to like show our appreciation. Here,” he said, gesturing toward the long tottering line of misshapen ashtrays and bongs and fluted drinking cups set out on the naked board and gracing the tree stumps of the field, “you just take your pick-”

Three days later, when they got back from Fairbanks, the bus was still there. Of course it was-what did he expect them to do, paint it over with vanishing ink? The thing probably wouldn't even start. Why fool himself? — it was there for the duration. Maybe when the next glacial age hit in another ten thousand years the big mile-high wall of ice would creep across the tundra and grind it to dust, but for now, Sess figured, he might as well get used to it because it wasn't going anywhere. And at this point-three days on-he couldn't really get himself worked up about it. He and Pamela had had a matchless time, their second honeymoon-or first, actually-lazing in bed at the Williwaw Motor Inn, smoking cigarettes and drinking rum and Coke out of plastic disposable cups and watching the mystical flicker of the world caught and sealed in the little box everybody called by the diminutive just to express their sodality with it. They bought things. Made the rounds of the bars. And though he was disappointed to find that the dog pound had nothing with four legs and a tail that weighed more than maybe fifteen pounds-the Chihuahua meets the toy poodle meets the bichon frise in the dumped-down hills of Fairbanks-he was satisfied. He was going upriver with his wife and all the necessities and luxuries they could carry and hippie pottery too, and he didn't give a blue damn for how things sorted out in Boynton.

They got in from Fairbanks in the late afternoon, and it was blowing up cold. Sess went right on by the Three Pup, pulled the pickup into Richard's drive and backed it down to the river. “Is there anything we need out of the shack?” he wondered aloud as Pamela handed him boxes of groceries, cans of Blazo gas and two-stroke oil, a bag of brand-new socks and underwear and felt linings for his mukluks. He was leaning forward, distributing the weight in the bottom of the canoe. The wind took his hair and gave it a yank.

“Nothing I can think of,” she said, straightening up and looking out over the anvil of the river. The sky was dark. Whole armadas of ice had come down to do war with the open water.

“All right, then,” he said, “because I don't like the looks of that sky, not one bit.”

Pamela was wearing her parka and she'd put the hood up the minute she got out of the truck. Her hands were thin gray flaps of skin working out of her sleeves, her shoulders were hunched against the wind and the tip of her nose and her cheeks were already drawing color. When she took the paddle up out of the thwarts, he saw that her knuckles showed white against the dark oiled grain of the wood. She gave him a tired smile and settled herself in the bow and he couldn't help thinking of the contrast between this and the first time they'd gone upriver together, all the way back in the fullness of June, but then a little discomfort was what the country offered everybody without prejudice, and soon enough he'd have her back in the cabin, the fire stoked and a cup of something hot in her hands. As they shoved off, the canoe shattered the spider ice that clung to the shore. No one had to tell him this would be the last canoe trip of the year.

They hadn't gone more than half a mile, the wind in their faces, when Pamela turned to him. “The keys,” she said. “What about the keys?”

“I left them in the truck. Didn't I?”

“Check your pockets, Sess-you remember what happened last time.”

His hand was so numb he could barely work it into his pocket, and what did he feel there taking shape under his fingers? A pack of matches, his pocketknife, the money clip-and the keys to Richard Schrader's truck. So they turned around and went back and he climbed up the bank past the battened and silent hippie bus-they must have all gone upriver, that's what he figured-slipped the keys into the truck's ignition and came back down the bank at a jog and shoved off again.

The wind was fiercer now, really cutting up, and they had to stick in close to shore to stay out of the main thrust of it, but that was a problem too because the ice was forming there and keeping them at arm's length. Twilight came down. They dug at the paddles in silence. He was thinking nothing, working on autopilot, stroke and stroke again, when the sound of the plane came to him. He heard it-they both heard it-before they saw it, and when it came into view, materializing out of the blow, it couldn't have been more than two hundred feet off the river and heading in the same direction they were. The noise exploded on them as the plane passed directly overhead and then made a wide loop out front of the canoe and came back at them, and Sess was thinking _It's Howard Walpole or Charlie Jimmy out of the Indian village at Eagle, circling back to see if we're okay-__

But it wasn't Howard Walpole and it wasn't Charlie Jimmy either. The plane was running three lights, but the one under the left wing was out of sync with the pulse of the other two-faulty wiring, a loose bulb-and as it drew nearer, swooping on them now, he saw the pontoons naked of paint and glinting dully in the erratic blue flash of light. He knew those pontoons, pontoons that would give way to skis by morning if the weather kept up, and he didn't have to see the paintless fuselage or the fading black stencil of the _N__-number to know whose plane it was. It was coming at them, low over the ice-flecked water, low in the dusk and urged on by the wind. He didn't have time to think, didn't have time to jam the paddle down and jerk the bow out of plumb or run for the cover of the trees, because the Cessna was right there in his face, in Pamela's face, and even as they ducked their heads and the pontoons lifted he felt the shock of the concussion and a hippie fruit bowl burst to fragments and there was water-Yukon water, cold as death-roiling in through the invisible tear in the hull.

Now he acted. He hit the water, hard, and held the paddle down till the canoe swung round a hundred eighty degrees like the needle of a compass and they were suddenly running downriver with the current and the wind. There was a dark clump of trees projecting out into the river five hundred yards ahead of them on the near bank and he shouted to Pamela to run for them even as he fumbled for the rifle amidst the strapped-down clutter of cans and boxes and hippie pottery, thinking _This is it, this is war,__ thinking _Make one more pass, you son of a bitch, one more.__

The flashing blue lights faded to nothing downriver, then sparked back to life as the plane banked and reversed direction. “Dig!” Sess shouted, working a bullet into the chamber and laying the rifle across the thwarts so he could lean into the paddle and keep the stern from swinging out. Pamela's face came to him in profile, a faint pale emanation against the obscure band of the shore. “He was-” she stammered. “He didn't-?” They could hear the plane whining for power, see the lights sharpening as the distance closed. “You better fucking believe he did!” Sess roared, driving the paddle with the piston of his shoulder, and they were no more than two hundred yards from where the shore ice was forming under the cover of the trees.