Drop City

7

Cecil Harder was fortifying himself at the bar of the Three Pup Roadhouse, half a mile down the Fairbanks Road from Boynton. He was on his third Oly and his second shot of Wild Turkey, and in about three minutes he was going to slam his way out the screen door, get into Richard Schrader's pickup and drive the remaining hundred fifty-nine and a half miles into the city. There were a few things he needed for the cabin-a new axe handle, duct tape, kerosene for the lanterns, rice,22 cartridges, beans, yeast, sugar-and Richard had given him a whole long list too, but that wasn't the reason he was going.

He gazed up from his nested hands. The air in the roadhouse was as thick as a wall with residual dimness and the dust that was nailed to it in two thin streams of sunlight. Mosquitoes faded in and out of it, all but stationary, and they beat at both sides of the windows as if it were some kind of contest, as if all they'd ever subsisted on was glass. He threw back the Wild Turkey and took a long pull at his beer.

There was a new woman working the place, a summer person, a tourist, as lean and tall and plain-faced as a warden-a male warden out of a Jimmy Cagney movie, that is-and she came out from behind the bead curtain that masked the grill from view with his ham and cheese on very old rye wrapped up in a sheet of waxed paper. Her name was Lynette, she was in her fifties, and it would be a long cold night of a long cold winter before anybody looked at her twice. Skid Denton was sitting at the other end of the bar. Sess knew him as a denizen of the Nougat, the only other place where you could get a drink in Boynton, population 170. “Hey, Lynette,” Skid said, “Sess is going into Fairbanks for a little shopping, did you know that?”

She set the sandwich down as if it weighed a quarter of a ton, gave a smile that barely wrinkled her lip and took a drag of her cigarette. She only worked here. She'd only just started. She was trading free rent on a shack out back for zero wages and zero tips and all she could eat and drink when Wetzel Setzler, who owned the place, was away. As he was now. “That so?” she said, glancing from one of them to the other.

Sess looked away. He was impatient. Time to go, oh yes indeed, and he could already picture the wide familiar planed dirt road rolling under his tires, and then the first pavement he'd have seen in eight or nine months stretched out as smooth as black ice coming into the city, and then the stores and the houses and the saloons. He drained his beer, shrugged.

“Going to get him a wife, isn't that right, Sess?”

He remembered in that moment why he didn't like the man-he talked like a tourist's idea of a sourdough, though he'd been raised in Los Angeles and had a degree in French literature. “You know, pick up some flour, eggs, milk, a new wife, that sort of thing-”

Lynette was wearing a faded flannel shirt buttoned up to her throat, blue jeans and boots. Her hair was cut short as a man's, she'd driven up from Seattle in a brand-new Pontiac station wagon and nobody knew whether she was married, divorced, a spinster or an ex-nun. She wore a pistol in a snug leather holster that looped over her belt, and to Sess's mind that marked her as a particularly dangerous brand of oddball, the kind who come into the country to play out their Technicolor fantasies of the Wild West. “What you wearing that gun for?” he'd asked when he ordered the second beer. She gave him a defiant look. “Protection,” she said. “Protection?” he'd echoed. “From what?” The stony look now, the look of a thousand bars and dancehalls and another thousand nights alone staring into the black hole of the TV. “It's not bears,” she said. “Or moose or wolves either. It's the two-legged beast worries me.”

Now she said, “New wife? I didn't even know you had an old one.”

Could he dignify the question with a response? Was it worth the time and effort? Did he want to act inappropriately, act out, tell her to go fuck herself and then maybe bounce Skid Denton's head up and down off the bar as if he were dribbling a basketball downcourt through a swarming defense? No. No, he didn't. The fact was that he'd never had a wife of any kind, new or old, because the last woman-Jill-who'd spent a lush summer and a sere and broken-hearted winter in his twelve-by-twelve log cabin with all the appointments, or at least necessities, had embarrassed him. People still talked about it. People still shook their heads, as if it were some kind of joke, some kind of routine he'd gone through-and Jill had gone through-just for their amusement. A soap opera. A TV show.

He scraped his change up off the bar, having a little trouble with the dimes because he'd chopped off the tips of his fingernails with a penknife just this morning as part of a general effort to spruce up his image. He tucked in his shirt, wheeled and headed for the door. Where he paused, the door open a crack so that the outside mosquitoes and the inside mosquitoes could change places, the agenda they seemed most intent on throughout the duration of their brief bloodsucking lives. “If I get lucky,” he said. “Real lucky. So wish me luck.”

He let his mind drift during the long drive in, watching in an abstracted way for game, rolling down the window so he could smell the country and the chill coming up off the Chatanika River. A handful of cars passed him going the other way, a camper or two, but this wasn't a busy road, even in the best of times-like now. In winter, once it snowed, the road was closed, drifted in, iced up, landslid and buckled, and Boynton was like a ship at sea with no land in sight. If you wanted out, you flew. In a bush plane that had no paint on it because paint added an unnecessary thirteen pounds to the total load. You flew, that is, unless the temperature had dropped past forty below, the range at which fuel lines tended to freeze, and if you didn't have fuel to the engine you came down out of the sky like a big winged rock. But that was life in the bush, and to his mind, it was a small price to pay for what you got in return.

When he reached Fairbanks he was amazed at the traffic, two cars to the left of him, three lined up at a light, pickups pulling in and out of gravel lots as if they were coming out of the gate at the Indianapolis Speedway, women, children, bicyclists, dogs. He had to remind himself to be careful, because he wasn't used to driving and didn't much like it-in fact, he was more than a little suspicious of people who did.

Plus he was drunk, or residually inebriated, though most of the effects of what he'd downed at the roadhouse had dissipated during the drive and the long slow gnawing at the ham-and-cheese sandwich Lynette had made for him with all the care of a veteran hash-slinger. The city clawed at him. The traffic lights made him frantic with impatience. But he knew right where he was going, and nothing-absolutely nothing-had changed since he'd been here last, in September of the previous year.

She was waiting for him at a table out on the deck of a restaurant on the riverfront, the nicest place in town, and it was nice for people to be able to sit outside and take advantage of the sun and the views. He saw her before she saw him, and he held back a moment so he could compose himself. In profile, against the river and the broad slap of the sun on the water, she was like a figure in a dream. Her bare legs and arms gleamed, her hair shone. She was wearing khaki shorts and hiking boots with thick gray socks rolled down over the tops and a pink T-shirt three sizes too small that pulled tight across her chest. Her name was Pamela, and he'd met her twice before, but that didn't make him any less nervous. He tucked in his shirt all the way round, slicked down his hair with two saliva-dampened fingers, and walked out onto the deck.

At that moment, the very moment his boots hit the planks, she turned to slap a mosquito on her upper arm and saw him. A quick burn of puzzlement went through her face, as if she hadn't been expecting him or had forgotten all about him, what he looked like even, but then she was on her feet and he was there and they went through that awkward man-woman greeting business with a restrained hug and a touch of her cheek to his as she stood up on her tiptoes and pulled him down to her. “Sit down,” she said, showing off her perfect white teeth, the teeth of a dental hygienist or a stripper, teeth that said _hello__ and _watch out__ at the same time. “Sit down and join me, Sess, and don't be so bashful. God,” she said, and she let out a laugh, “you're like a little lost boy on the playground.”

He fumbled into the chair across the table from her and murmured something like “Nice to see you, Pam,” but before the words were out she'd already corrected him: “Pamela,” she said, smiling still, smiling so hard, so persistently, so radiantly, that he began to feel a little afraid of her despite himself. Was there something wrong with this picture? Or was she as nervous as he was? He gave an inward shrug-either way, she was beautiful. God, she was beautiful. And what cabin in the bush couldn't use an ornament like that, perfect teeth and all?

The waitress saved him. She was there, short skirt, two breasts and a face, hovering over him. She wanted to know if she could get him something to drink. And was he going to have lunch today?

Pamela was drinking iced tea. The menu lay facedown beside her plate.

“I think I'll have a beer,” he said, “an Oly,” and for some reason he was looking at Pam instead of the waitress, as if he were asking permission or trying to calibrate her response. “And-I'm sorry, did you order yet?”

“No,” she said, “but go ahead. You know what you want?”

He had a cheeseburger, medium rare, with everything on it, fries, and a salad with ranch dressing. She glanced up at the waitress without even lifting the menu from the table. “I'll have the same,” she said, with a grin. “And a beer sounds good.”

“Oly?” the waitress wanted to know.

“Yeah,” Pamela breathed, and she was looking at him now, at Sess, looking right into his eyes, “Oly.” As soon as the waitress was out of earshot, she said, “So, are you prepared to turn right around and drive back this afternoon, because I'm all packed and ready and there's no sense in wasting any time-you know, another night in the city when we could be out in the bush, in your cabin, I mean. You're on the Thirtymile, right?”

He just stared. Things were moving way too fast-but wasn't that the way he'd envisioned it in his fantasies, she lying naked on the bed beneath his window, her skin as white as Ivory soap against the deep pile of his furs, her limbs spread wide in invitation? “I was going to pick up a few things at the hardware and the grocery, and I was supposed to…” He drifted off a moment and gave her a strained smile. “For Richard, Richard Schrader. You know, because he let me borrow his truck-”

The waitress arrived with their beers and there was a moment of silence as they watched her go through the ritual of tipping and pouring. Someone let out a bark of laughter from the next table over. A pair of silver canoes slid by on the far side of the river.

“I know Richard,” Pamela said, and his heart froze inside him.

“You don't mean-was he one of the ones?”

“No,” she said, as abruptly as if she were taking a bite out of something, and she shook her head emphatically. “Not Richard, no way. Remember, I'm a practical girl here and the whole point of this is I want somebody to love me, sure, but somebody who can take _care__ of me, know what I mean? In the bush. Somebody-_like you__-who knows his way around, who has the survival skills, who's a real woodsman and not just some townie wanna-be.”

Was he blushing? The compliment went right to him. He lifted the beer to his lips, took a sip and watched her eyes as if they were fish under the surface of the ice or ptarmigans in a clump of willow, something he was hunting, a brace of geese or old squaws. Suddenly he was Mr. Confidence. Suddenly he wanted to get up from the table and lift the whole deck, the whole restaurant, right up on his shoulders, just to show her what he was. “Is it fair to ask who I'm up against then? And what seed I am in this tournament?”

The smile drew down to nothing. “Richie Oliver and Howard Walpole,” she said. “Just them. And you. And you know what, Sess?” Her hand was on the table now, lying there, palm up, like a double-spring Victor trap with the snow blown bare of it. And what did he want? He wanted to be caught, he did, he was praying for it every day and night of his life, and he reached out and slipped his fingers through hers. “No, what?” he said.

“You've got nothing to worry about.”

He didn't remember much of the ride back, just a sensation of floating over the road as if he were in an airplane instead of a car, Pamela in the lotus position on the seat beside him, her bare legs glistening in the sun through the window. They were both feeling good, convivial and full of high spirits, and just about everything he said made her laugh and show her teeth. The country unfurled before them like a camouflage jacket, gray and green and brown, and they saw goshawks and Brewer's blackbirds wheeling overhead. At one point, just before the turnoff for Boynton Hot Springs, they stopped to watch a fox hunting in the bush alongside the road and he had to fight down the impulse to shoot it with the.22 Richard kept under the seat for just such an opportunity as this-the fur was worthless this time of year, but it would have been fresh meat for the pot, and he _was__ on trial here, after all.

“Look at the way he pounces,” she said, leaning out the window so far he thought she was going to fall. “Just like a dog playing with a ball.”

“What he's doing,” Sess said, and he slid across the seat to look over her shoulder, so close now he could smell the soap she used on her skin, “he's trying to scare up whatever might be hiding under the bushes, you know, voles, grasshoppers, maybe a fat juicy wood frog or two-”

She turned to him now, and she was right there, her face inches from his, and he had to back off, he had to, and she could chalk that up in the credit column under his name. Let her make the first move. Sure. Let _her.__ “Sounds appetizing,” she said, smiling wide.

Reddening, he slid back across the seat and put the truck in gear. “You hungry?” he asked. “Not for frog legs, I mean, but something like a steak or a sandwich, maybe a couple more beers to celebrate? Because by the time we get to the cabin, I mean, and unload all this stuff, feed the dogs and see what the garden looks like, I don't know if we're going to have time to-” He trailed off. With her here, actually here, living and breathing and watching him out of her eyes that were like two guided missiles homing in on his, he couldn't really get much past the picture of walking her in the door of the cabin. After that, the screen went blank.

But she said sure, sure she was hungry, and twenty minutes later he was escorting her up the bleached wooden steps of the Three Pup, as proud as if he'd made her out of clay and breathed the life into her himself.

It was eight o'clock in the evening and the sun was right there with them, showing all its teeth. The trees were staked to their shadows, the guest cottages that hadn't housed a guest in ten years sank quietly into the muskeg, birds flitted over the decaying snow machines scattered across the yard. There was the rattle of the generator, and beneath it, the whine of the mosquitoes-they were there, of course, always there, ubiquitous, but by now the daytime crew had gone home to sleep off the effects of breakfast, lunch and dinner, and the night shift had taken over. He swatted half a dozen on his forearm and flapped a protective hand round the crown of Pamela's head as they pushed through the screen door and the perpetual gloom of the place rose up to envelop them.

Half the town was gathered at the bar, including Richard Schrader and Skid Denton, who must have gone home in the interval because even he couldn't manage to drink straight through for nine and a half hours-or could he? As soon as they walked in, a general roar went up, people showing off their wit with comments like “Look what the cat dragged in,” and a couple of the guys whistled at the sight of Pamela. Who whirled round, her hands outstretched, and did a little pirouette for them. Reticence was not one of her drawbacks, that was for sure.

They had a beer at the bar, and he luxuriated in the sweet proximity of her, in the blond bundle of her hair all coiled up in a no-nonsense braid, in the grip and complexity of the muscles of her legs, in her smile. He bought her Beer Nuts, Slim Jims, pickled eggs, and they each had a shot to go with their beers while Lynette fried up a pair of steaks for them, the holster riding her hip like an excess flap of skin. It was a moment, all right-so glorious and pure he never wanted to let go of it.

Over their steaks, which they ate at a table in the corner, she told him what he already knew or suspected or had heard elsewhere. She'd been born and raised in Anchorage, but every summer of her childhood her father had taken the family-her and her sister and mother-to live out of a tent in the Endicott Mountains of the Brooks Range while he prospected unnamed creeks in nameless canyons and reappeared every third day or so with something for the pot. They'd contract with a bush pilot to drop them off just after breakup, and the pilot would come back and pick them up again at the end of September, and so what if they missed a whole month of school? She and her sister, Priscilla, would fish and roam and scare up birds, listen to the wolves at night and have face-to-face encounters with just about every creature that made its living north of the Arctic Circle. And now, now that she was a college graduate and twenty-seven years old and sick to death of working nine-to-five in a city of concrete and steel, she wanted to go back to the bush, and not just for a vacation, not as a tourist or part-timer, but forever. That was it. That was the deal.

He'd begun to feel the effects of the long day-the two-way drive, the alcohol, the excitement that burned in the back of his throat like a shot of Canadian on a subzero night-when he looked up from her eyes and saw Joe Bosky across the room. “Shit,” he said. “We got to go.”

“Already? Aren't you going to ask me to dance? At least once-one dance?”

The jukebox was going-“Mystic Eyes,” one of his favorite songs, but hardly the sort of thing you could dance to. “Next time,” he said.

She let out a laugh then. “You're just like all the rest of them, afraid of their own two feet. How about if we wait for a slow one?”

And now he was hedging. “But I wouldn't want you to have to spend your first night in my shack in town, and you wouldn't want that either, would you? Because don't forget, we've got a three-hour paddle, upstream, to get to the cabin-”

She told him he was cute. Told him she liked the way the two parallel lines creased his brow when he worked himself up. And she smirked and stretched out her legs so he and everybody else in the place could admire the full shimmering length of them, and agreed with him. “You're right,” she said. “I do want to see the cabin, I mean, that's the whole point, isn't it? Or half of it, or part of it, anyway. It's just that I was really enjoying this.”

That was when Joe Bosky butted in.

He was hovering over their table like a waiter, stinking of something-fish, vomit, B. O. -and he was grinning like some sort of trapped animal from the deeps of his beard. He was wearing a fatigue shirt that had U. S. M. C. stenciled across the pocket and a khaki cap with the brim worked flat. His jeans looked as if they'd been salvaged from a corpse. And smelled like it too. “Hey,” he said, leaning into the table and ignoring Sess, “I hear you're the lady that's looking for a man, is that right?”

Pamela didn't know him from Adam, and she was the kind of person who had a smile for everybody, so she gave him his grin back and said, “That's right. But I didn't realize I was so famous.”

Sess was up out the chair. “We got to go,” he repeated.

“I was just wondering if I could get in on the action,” Joe Bosky was saying, ignoring him still. “You know, I'm a pretty good man in the bush myself-and I'm building a cabin up Woodchopper Creek even as we speak-and I was just wondering if, you know, there might be any free tryouts?”

Pamela's smile faded.

“I mean, I've got a sleeping bag out in the car if you've got maybe fifteen minutes to spare-”

Sess hit him-or attempted to hit him-square in the side of the head, but Bosky had been watching him out of the corner of his eye and had time to get his forearm up and deflect the blow. In the next instant, they were at each other, flailing across the floor, and there was some small damage done to the glassware and one of the rickety dried-out chairs before they were separated. Bosky made some ugly comments-shouted them, raging in the grip of three men, threats, accusations and promises, and there was no law up here unless you got the sheriff to fly in from Fairbanks to inspect the corpse-and Sess threw them back at him. He hadn't meant to, hadn't meant to show that side of himself in front of Pamela-cursing and the like-but of all the men on earth Joe Bosky was the one who could make him boil over till the lid rattled against the pan.

Out in the lot, as the mosquitoes dive-bombed them and they slammed back into the truck for the half-mile drive down to the shack on the river and the canoe that awaited them, Pamela looked shaken, and he felt sorry for that, he did. “What was that all about?” she said. “That guy-I mean, I've seen some bush crazies in my time, but that guy was scary.”

In the front seat now, the truck rumbling to life beneath him, Sess just stared out the window a moment. Joe Bosky was what was wrong with the world. Joe Bosky was what people came into the country to escape. And Joe Bosky, hammered, polished and delivered up by the U. S. Marine Corps, was right here at the very end of the very last road in the continental United States, going one on one with the world. Sess was breathing hard, upset despite himself. “You don't know the half of it,” he said.

And then they were on the Yukon, the big nineteen-foot Grumman freighter loaded down to the gunwales, the ten o'clock sun picking its way through the rolling black shadows of the debris on the surface, and he was calm again, in his element, off the road, out of the bar and into the embrace of the country. He watched Pamela's shoulders dig at the paddle, studied the heavy braid of her hair, the beautiful locus of her back muscles and the sweet place where she sat the seat. The birds were there, the spruce marshaled along the banks and climbing up into the hills like an emperor's army, naked bluffs, a million cords of driftwood flung up against the shore waiting for the river to decide what to do with them. A breeze came up and took the mosquitoes away. They saw moose in the shallows, a black bear with two cubs hurtling up the far bank as if she'd been shot out of a cannon. They spoke in low tones. They were silent, and the country spoke for them. And then she said something, and he said something, and it was as natural to him as if he were speaking to himself.

It must have been around midnight, the sun hovering on the horizon, when they swung into the mouth of the Thirtymile River and the cabin came into view. Already the five dogs were up and yammering, dust rising round their feet in a distant cloud, the proto-barks drifting off into wolfish howls of greeting. “Hear that?” Sess said, digging into the paddle. “That's your welcoming committee.”

She turned to look over her shoulder. “Oh, really? And what are they saying?”

“ 'Pam-e-la, we looooooove youuuu!' ”

And she laughed, even as a pair of loons went racketing up off the water. “You sure they're not saying, 'Here we are, now feeeeeeeeed us'?”

“Well, Pamela,” he said, and he winked at her because he was feeling so light in his bones and his organs he might have been a bird that could sail right up out of the canoe and across the flux of the water in a single wild rush of feathers, “to be truthful with you-and I'm going to be truthful with you, always, whether this lasts the weekend or till you're a hunched-over old lady and I'm an old man-I think you do have a point there.” He let the paddle trail an instant and cupped a hand to his ear. “Yep. Now that I concentrate, I think I _can__ detect maybe just a trace of hunger in that chorus-but that's Bobo, that sharp contralto in there, and he's always hungry. So don't blame him for spoiling the surprise.”

Then it was dusk and the canoe was up on the gravel bar, the dogs straining at their chains, and he and Pamela were walking hand in hand up the path that beat through the weeds to the cabin. He wished he could show her something grander-the rambling spread of outbuildings, the smokehouse, sauna and enclosed dog runs he planned to put up once he found the time and the money, not to mention a more spacious cabin-but he was proud of what he'd already accomplished, and he could feel the pride beating at his rib cage as he took down the bear-proof shutters and unlatched the door for her. The door faced south, of course, as did the two double-paned windows set on either side of it, but before they were in the cabin proper they had to go through the five-by-five dogtrot-or mud room, as somebody who lived in town might call it. “This,” he said, breathing hard in the dimness and taking in the familiar smells of oil, gasoline, ancient bait and bloodied traps and mold and whatever else had awakened out of the dirt, “this is the mud room.”

She was right there, a good eight or ten inches shorter than him, her pale hair and white arms ghostly in the half-light, and she wasn't saying anything, just staring wide-eyed, like a girl on a school trip. He guided her through the inner door and into the cabin itself, dodging round her to put a match to the lantern he kept on a hook just inside the door. “And this,” he said, his voice almost strangled in his throat with the sheer tension of the moment, “this is what I call home.”

She stood in the middle of the room and she didn't say a word. Her hair was luminous, her shoulders squared. He wanted to say something, wanted to ask her if she liked it, but he couldn't find his voice. After a moment she drifted toward the shelves on the near wall and idly fingered the things there, his few grease-slick books _(Tanning: From A to Z; How to Stay Alive in the Woods; Arctic Wilderness; The Home Brewer),__ a bottle of Pepto Bismol set beside a string of dried habanero chiles, Three-In-One oil in a rusted can, a candle six inches around he'd made from the wax of the bees he'd mail-ordered last summer, the odd tool. Still, she didn't say anything.

How long she stood there, picking up one thing after another and gently setting it down again, he couldn't say-no more than a minute or two, certainly, but it was the longest minute or two of his life. Was she in shock, was that it? For all her talk, she was a city woman, and maybe she had a whole different idea of what a cabin in the woods really was, a whole unspooling romantic fantasy of a big Ponderosa TV cabin with forest green shutters and a wide veranda and a kitchen with a tile floor and a hand pump for water. His heart was hammering. He couldn't seem to swallow. Outside, the dogs howled. And never had the place seemed so close, so dingy and confining, so much like a cell, like a bum's palace, like the meanest, crackbrained idea of a tumbledown shack in the world. The floor was caked with dirt. It was cold as a grave. He wanted to get down on his knees and sob. What had he been thinking? What in God's name had he been thinking?

“I'm going to put a coat of varnish on the floor,” he said. “That's the next thing. The very next thing.”

And then she turned to him, and the tears were in _her__ eyes. “Oh, Sess,” she said, “it's so, so _beautiful.__”

Together they fed the dogs-pots of cornmeal mush with dried chum salmon and the odd greenish scrap of last fall's moose stirred in-and then he got the stove going and made her coffee with evaporated milk and so much sugar the spoon stood upright in it. Down came the table and the bed, both of which folded up against the wall when they weren't in use and rested on dowels of white spruce when they were-“Space management,” he told her, “nothing to get in your way and trip over.” She perched on the bed, on the thin single mattress he'd hauled upriver in the canoe two years ago, and on the sleeping bag he'd sewn from the hides of a hundred ground squirrels. Within minutes the stove had driven the chill from the place and conquered the lingering odor of dampness and mold.

He sat on the far edge of the bed from her, cradling his cup in his hands. “It's a tight cabin,” he said, selling its virtues. “Even at sixty below. You'd be surprised. I mean, you would.”

She'd taken off her jacket now, and she stretched and leaned back into the pile of furs-lynx, fox, wolf-he'd heaped up around her. Her eyes were feasting. “That's nice to know,” she said. “But with all these furs, and this beautiful sleeping bag-very neat stitchwork, Sess, by the way; I'm impressed-with all of this you'd be warm without the stove.”

He was thinking he'd be even warmer if he had somebody inside it with him, and before he could stop himself, he'd said as much. He said it, and then he looked away.

Her first response was a laugh, musical and ringing, a laugh that made the place swell till it was like a concert hall. He brought the coffee mug to his lips so he could steal a look at her. Her face grew serious. She shifted herself closer to him and reached out her hand for his. “That'd be nice,” she said, her voice gone raw in her throat. “But I don't want you to get the wrong idea here, because it would be easy to, I suppose, you know, with me advertising for a man and all-”

He held her hand across the expanse of the bed, flesh to flesh, his every cell on fire. He didn't know what to say.

“Because I'm not that kind of girl, not the kind you hear about-or read about in the magazines. I'm old-fashioned, Sess, and I'm sorry, but that's the way it is. I've waited twenty-seven years for the right man and I guess I can wait a few weeks longer. Till I'm married. Can you understand that? Can you?”

He was thinking about Jill, her hair cut short with a pair of shears till it stood out from her head like a clown's, her legs hard-muscled and short, the heavy gravitational pull of her breasts as she swung into the sleeping bag naked, always naked, even on the coldest nights. Jill. He was thinking about Jill. “Yes,” he said. “Sure.”

And finally, when they thought of sleep with the sun propped back up in the sky and the night as still as a dead man's dream, he was the one who gave up the bed and went out into the pale drizzle of light to pitch his tent amongst the dogs.

8

At eleven-thirty the next morning she was sitting on the edge of the bed, combing out her hair and watching the way the muscles rearranged themselves in his shoulders as he leaned into the stove and cooked her breakfast. He was wearing patched jeans and a sun-faded workshirt that might once have been blue or maybe green. His hair, movie-star black and thick as a wolf pelt, stood up off his head as if he'd been hanging by it all night long in a closet someplace. He was barefoot. The sleeve of his shirt was gutted under the left arm and both cuffs were furred with dangling threads. “Moose sausage,” he said, giving her a look over his shoulder, “and your extra-super-special Sess Harder flapjacks with last year's sugared blueberries. What do you think of that?”

Through the two windows came a soft white layered light and both doors stood open to the sun and the sunstruck haze beyond. She could see his bees moving in golden flecks among the birch and aspen in the yard and she could smell the new-made scent of the Thirtymile where it joined with the Yukon and drew wet sparks from the rocks. Her hair was a travail, especially when she was out in the bush, and she'd meant to leave it braided-but when she woke and saw him there at the stove, laying on wood, fussing with the draft, she thought she'd comb it out and let it hang like a flag of surrender. Or enticement. Because she was on trial too, and she wanted to show him what she had, and not only mentally, not only verbally, but physically as well.

“That,” she said, giving him a smile, “sounds like just the thing. Because, I mean, anybody could have offered me eggs Benedict, caviar and truffles and the like, but if I'm going to paddle three hours for breakfast, the least I could expect is the super-special flapjacks. With, what did you say, _moose__ sausage?”

He didn't answer, because he was executing some sort of arcane maneuver with a cast-iron skillet so black it might have been unearthed from a tomb. There was the sound of hot grease snapping in the pan, and suddenly the cabin was dense with the smell of it, and with smoke too. He stabbed the sausages with a long-handled fork, danced round the coffeepot, flipped the leaden dark cakes with a rolling snap of his wrist. “I ought to get you a toque,” she said, and he said, “What's a toque?”

They ate outside in the sun at a picnic table he'd fashioned from black spruce and varnished till it was the color of old leather, and they made use of his entire complement of dishware in the process: two tin plates and two tin mugs. In the center of the table, set in a can, was a sprig of wildflowers he'd gathered while she slept, and that touched her, the effort he'd put out and the essential sweetness it implied. He poured coffee, spooned up blueberries. “You know what I bet the best thing about living out here must be,” she said, mopping up her plate. “Aside from the beauty, I mean?”

He shrugged and grinned, tried not to look too pleased with himself. “Tell me,” he said.

“Safety. You've got to feel safe here, don't you?”

“Sure, as long as I don't have to perform any emergency appendectomies. On myself, that is. Or you.”

“The auto-appendectomy,” she said, and they both laughed.

“Or dental work. Imagine trying to pull your own tooth?”

They were silent a minute, contemplating the horror of that particular image, and then she said, “I'll pull yours if you pull mine,” and they were laughing again. It was laughter that took a while to subside, and when he got up, still chuckling, to scrape the plates and wash up, she told him to sit down and let her do it, because she'd seen enough-enough, already. What did he think, he had to wait on her hand and foot? “What I meant,” she said, sliding the dishes into the tub of water he'd heated on the stove, “was the kind of safety you could never feel in the city, or at least I couldn't. It got so I didn't want to go out at night, not alone.”

He'd followed her back inside and was sitting on the edge of the bed now, rolling a cigarette and watching her as she moved amongst his things. “Okay,” he said, “sure, I'll grant you that. As a woman you've got to be especially careful-”

“As a man too. The whole society's breaking down, assassinations, drugs in the schools, hippies-I know this guy from my office who used to like to walk his dog before he went to bed… just that, walk his dog. And you know what happened?”

Sess lit the cigarette. “Somebody jumped him?”

“You bet they did. Two guys with a knife, longhairs, and they weren't content to just take his wallet-they stuck the knife right up his nose and slit his nostril, and you should see it, it's like a permanent disfiguration, like a tattoo or something. And the dog. It was this sweet little thing, a cockapoo-Berenice, he called her-and she tried to protect him and they just turned on the dog and kicked her and kicked her till there wasn't hardly anything left of her. That's what I mean. That's what society's coming to.”

He'd risen from the bed and was standing beside her now, and she was aware of him in a way that made her skin prickle, the breadth of him, the smell of the tobacco, a tentative hand on her shoulder and his voice pitched deep: “You don't have to worry about any of that out here. Bears, maybe. Wolverines. But we know how to discourage them. Believe me.”

Her hands were in the water and it was as hot as she could stand it. The scrub pad moved mechanically against the crust of the blackened pan. “That's what I mean,” she said. “You have freedom out here, and not just freedom to do what you want, but freedom from that kind of crap-he was just walking his dog, for God's sake.” For some reason she couldn't name, she was on the verge of tears, and she wondered about that, about how she could let herself get so wrought up when this was what she'd wanted all her life, this place, and maybe this person, and the rest of the world, with its nose-slitters and dog-kickers, could sink into the ocean for all it mattered.

“Pamela,” he was saying, “come on, Pamela,” and she felt him lifting her arms out of the sudsing water till she was open to him and he pulled her close. “You're never going to have to think about any of that ever again, not for the rest of your life.”

People said she was crazy, wanting to live out in the hind end of nowhere, ten or twenty miles from the nearest store, church, roadhouse or post office, and another hundred sixty from anything even approximating civilization, if you could call Fairbanks civilized. And they said she was crazier still for willingly putting herself in the hands of some grizzled, twisted, sex-starved fur trapper with suet-clogged arteries and guns decorating his walls-in fact, that was exactly, word for word, the way Fred Stines, the man she'd been seeing in Anchorage, had put it-but she begged to differ. What they didn't understand-what Fred couldn't begin to imagine-was that everything they knew, the whole teetering violent war-crazed society, was about to collapse. On that score, she hadn't the slightest doubt. And the riots in the streets were just a prelude to what was to come, because if nobody worked and they all just sat around using drugs and having promiscuous sex all day, then who was going to grow the food? And if nobody grew the food, then what would they eat? To her, the answer was obvious: they'd eat your food, and when they were done with that, they'd eat you, just like in that science fiction book where all the dead and dying were made into potted meat. Sure. But you could work in an office building every day and go to the store in your new shiny car and then come home to your gas heater and your woodstove, and never think twice about it, and that was where the Fred Stineses of the world would be when it all came crashing down. Not her, though, not Pamela. She was going to live in the bush, and she was going to be one hundred percent self-sufficient. Anything less, to her mind, was a form of suicide.

On the afternoon of the second day, after breakfast and the embrace that became a clinch and then a kiss that went on till the blood was singing in her ears, Sess walked her around the place, showing it off. He demonstrated the clarity of the Thirtymile where it crashed into the opaque Yukon, which ran heavy with its freight of glacial debris, showed her where he planned to build a sauna and a workshop, lectured her on the garden that was already showing green against the black plastic he'd laid down for heat retention. He was growing cabbage, cauliflower, turnips, kohlrabi and Brussels sprouts, potatoes, onions, peas, lettuce, Early Girl tomatoes, basil, cucumbers, squash. “Everything has to be in the ground by the first of June,” he was saying, “though you risk a frost, which is why I keep that wood stacked up over there, just as a precaution, because we get a growing season out here of maybe a hundred five or so days, what with the influence of the river keeping things a tad less frigid, and every day counts, believe me, and round about February you'd kill to have a little pickled cabbage or stewed tomatoes with your six thousandth serving of moose-”

She was listening, because this was the information she needed, this was the knowledge that was proof against anything, but most of what he said drifted right through her-it was his voice she was listening to, not the words. His voice mesmerized her in a way Fred Stines's never could. It spoke to her in a tone that was like a current flowing through her, like the electric charge in a wall socket or the balky lamp she'd clumsily rewired when she was in college. He talked-and he wasn't shy anymore, not shy a bit-and she listened. “So,” he said finally, and they were down at the river staring into the canoe, “should we maybe go upstream a bit and see what we can scare up for dinner? You like duck, maybe? Duck with scallions and a super-extra-special Sess Harder spicy homemade barbecue sauce?”

The canoe rode the river as if it were floating on air, the strewn rock of its bed transformed into puffed and emboldened clouds, the fish like the black silhouettes of birds flitting past. She was on the river with Sess Harder, in the wilderness with Sess Harder, and she was in love with everything. They paddled hard, upriver, into a breeze. She could feel the weight of him behind her, the canoe a seesaw on the playground of the water, and she could feel the thrust of his paddle as they dodged rocks and downed trees and cut across the riffles where the current boiled around them. This was silent work, and for the first time since he'd stepped out onto the deck of the restaurant yesterday afternoon, neither of them felt compelled to talk. It was only when they swept round a bend and she was startled to see a building standing high atop the far bank that she broke the silence. “Good God, Sess,” she said, turning to look back at him, “what is that-a cabin? Way out here?”

Yes, it was a cabin. Obviously a cabin. Notched logs, the flash of window glass, sun on the skin of an overturned aluminum skiff laid in tight against the near side. It had a sod roof, and there were trees eight or ten feet tall sprouting from it as if it were the picture of a troll's den in a children's book. Sess kept paddling, the steadiest stroke in the world. “That's right,” he said.

“But you didn't tell me I was going to have to live in a subdivision.” She tried to inject a note of humorous disparagement, but she was shocked, genuinely shocked, because what was the sense of it all if there was a cabin around every bend?

“Don't you let it worry you, Pamela,” he said, the cabin already drifting out to the margins of her peripheral vision, “-nobody lives there. Nobody's lived there for over a year now.”

The paddle worked and she could feel it in her shoulders, feel herself toughening already. “But who-?” she said.

“An old guy, one of the old-timers, a real authentic cranky tattered river bachelor who stank of the goose wings soaked in beaver castor he used to bait lynx, the kind of guy who only bathed when he fell in the river, which was about twice a year.” He paused, but the paddle kept working. “The kind of guy-or coot-I'd become if it wasn't for, well, if it wasn't for you.”

She let the hopefulness of that sink in a minute, and then she said, “So where is he now-I mean, did he die?”

“Oh, no, no-he was way too cranky to die. He retired. Hung up his snowshoes and rinsed his gold pans for the final time and went on down to Seattle to live with his brother in a rooming house someplace. You know: central heating, color TV, washer and dryer. A little strip of macadam to park your pickup on.”

“That's horrible,” she said.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, and she looked back to see him grinning at her. “Nothing worse.”

Then they were beaching the canoe on a strip of gravel and hiking through a sweating dense tangle of birch, aspen and cottonwood that was held fast by the sheer mass of the mosquitoes that swarmed through it in all their regiments and brigades. She was wearing long sleeves and jeans and she'd rubbed herself like a leg of lamb in 6-12, but the mosquitoes got her in the one place she'd missed-the tip of her nose-and the swatting of them became automatic. “Five minutes more,” Sess whispered, a shotgun in one hand, a.22 slung over his shoulder. “I'm taking you to this series of little lakes where there's more ducks than mosquitoes even, if you can believe it.” And then he went on to tell her that the natives didn't call the season late spring or early summer, but just that-Ducks-because there were so many of them flown up from the south to nest and raise their young. It was like an open-air meat market. You couldn't miss.

But then they got there and he did miss, three times, and the lake that was once a stretch of the river in years gone by-an oxbow, they called it-was first a pandemonium of squawking and flapping ducks, and then it was duckless, a flat black expanse of duckless water. Sess took it hard. He made apologies-but no excuses, because that wasn't the way he was. “Wait here,” he said, and she waited the better part of an hour while he slipped off into the undergrowth as quietly as a breeze and the mosquitoes swarmed and the silence finally ruptured with the distant thump of three more shots, and when he came back to her he was still duckless and looking frustrated and angry. He gave her a tense smile. “Don't you worry,” he said, “we just-well, I hate to say it, but we just have to be patient. Can you appreciate that, Pamela? Can you?”

She was going to say that she _could__ appreciate it, of course she could, and that he didn't have to worry on her account because anything he wanted to cook was just fine with her, when the dark water at her feet began to move as if it had come to life, trailing an even darker _V__ across the flat surface, and he grinned and unslung the.22, and a moment later he was wading out of the muck with a dripping naked-tailed black thing depending from one hand, and she said, “What is it, a beaver?” and he said, “It's a rat.”

For dinner that night, and she was hungry, ravenous, all her cells crying out for fuel, he cooked her a fricassee of muskrat in a sauce of stewed tomatoes from the can with rice and greens and a sweetish yellow dollop of the prime fat the guest of honor wears under his coat while enacting his murky rituals in the ponds and sloughs of the backcountry. To wash it down, they each had two bottles of homemade beer so strong it was like the depth charges she used to drink in college. It was the best meal she'd ever had. And she told Sess that as she sat on the bed and grinned while he washed the dishes at the stove-“I insist,” he said, “because you did them this morning, and that's only fair”-and then he pulled out a harmonica and serenaded her and they wound up harmonizing on three separate run-throughs of “Oh Susannah,”

“You Are My Sunshine” and “She Loves You” (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah).

It was past midnight and they were both giddy with the singing, the beer and the company that just kept lighting them up and lighting them up again, when she said, “So tell me about Jill.”

That stopped things right there. He was tipping a beer to his lips, having just concluded a story about the night last winter when the thermometer showed sixty-two below and he went out to dump the dishwater and it froze before it hit the ground with a sound of marbles spilling out of a bag, and now he pulled the beer back and looked past her to the little window and beyond. “You don't want to hear about that,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, “I do.”

“It's nothing much. Nothing like you must have heard.”

“I haven't heard anything,” she said, and then, to be truthful, because she _had__ heard at least three versions of the story, the most disturbing and unfavorable of which had dripped like acid from the prejudicial lips of Howard Walpole, she added, “or hardly anything.”

“She was nothing like you,” he sighed. He got up from the table, took the lamp down from its hook and lit it. All his muscle seemed to have migrated to his neck, hard and attenuated, stripped away from the flesh. His face was heavy.

“Go ahead,” she said. “I want to hear it.”

Jill was young, just twenty-one, and he was young too-twenty-eight, at the time, and this was three years ago. He met her in Fairbanks, when he was tending bar in the winter after working a summer in the bush as a firefighter. He was drinking too much, sleeping late, living in a town that was like any other town and hardly even getting out to the Chena or the Nenana for fishing. He didn't know what he wanted. Jill was a college girl, or had been before she met him and dropped out of the University of Alaska, and they spent the winter sleeping together and talking about the country, about getting away from everything and just living free.

She came with him, just after breakup, to the very cabin they were in now, helped him build it, in fact. Neither of them knew what they were doing, but they learned by their mistakes and they had a cache of store-bought food to get them through the winter of the first year, until they could fish and garden and hunt on their own-sixty-pound sacks of rice, lentils and cornmeal, butter in one-gallon cans, smoked fish, that sort of thing. And it was good for a while. But Jill just wasn't built for the country-psychologically, that is. Once winter set in and the sun winked out she started to climb the walls, and anybody would have thought she was in prison, tried and condemned and held against her will. “I'm in for life,” she'd say in a voice that was dead and cremated to ash, “I'm a lifer. I'm a San Quentin drudge.” He was out, even in the coldest weather, stalking the woods for ptarmigan, porcupine, lynx, anything for the pot, but she just sat there by the stove, staring into the glow, reading the same books over and over-she must have read _Silas Marner__ twenty times, and that would put anybody round the bend. She played solitaire till the cards wore out and fell to dust. And then she started carving the days into the wall, four vertical lines and a slash, just like a prisoner.

Pamela let him go on. It was therapeutic, she could see that, and the air had to be cleared, because if things worked out, she was going to take this girl's place, and it would have been intolerable not knowing. Still, when he told her about the marks on the wall, he got up and leaned over her to run his finger across the bulge of the log she'd been resting her head against, and there they were, like cicatrices in a savage skin, the etchings of despair. The best she could do was throw out a question like a lifeline and cling to it: “So she was clinically depressed?”

“Cabin fever,” he said, sinking into the furs beside her, “a fatal case.” She offered her hand, but he wouldn't take it. “It happens to a lot of people in the bush. Women especially. Women seem to need the company of other women more than men need other men-we're more solitary. Like hermits or something. But you-you need to gossip and whatnot, right?”

She shrugged. “I suppose.”

“Of course, the men get pretty squirrelly out here too. You ever hear the one about the two trappers living in the high country outside of Eagle? Two coots, the kind that talk to themselves even when you see them in town for their semiannual visit? No? Well, anyway, it was February of a bitter winter and the one was half-mad for company, so he harnessed up his dogs and mushed thirty miles to where the other one was and the other man came to the door of his cabin and nodded at him in an inviting way and left the door open a crack. Well, the first man saw to his dogs and then came in without a word, shook out his parka and sat in a chair by the fire and just looked into the other man's face for an hour or so until the other man put a pot of moose stew on to boil and they ate in silence. Then they sat and smoked their pipes and when it was time for bed the first man unrolled his sleeping bag on the floor and conked out. In the morning they had breakfast together-more moose stew, biscuits and coffee-and then the first man went out, harnessed his dogs and waved goodbye while the other man stood at the door of the cabin. And you know what? Neither one of them spoke a word the whole time, not hello or goodbye or mighty tasty stew or I hate the sight of your grizzled ugly face, you son of a bitch.”

“Instructive story,” she said. “Are you trying to scare me?”

Sess looked surprised. “No, not at all. Why would I want to do that?”

“So Jill,” she said, after a moment. “She got out?”

The stove creaked and sighed. The last of the sun laminated the back wall with the faintest, rinsed-out ribbon of pink. “What have you heard?” The voice was harsh in his throat. “That I'm some kind of Bluebeard or something?”

She trusted him. She liked him. She could even love him-she did love him, loved him already. “No,” she said in a voice so soft she could barely hear it herself.

“You know where I showed you the garden?”

She nodded.

“Jill went out there where we'd cleared all the trees and she stomped these huge letters in the snow, I mean letters ten feet high and five feet across. You know what they read-from the air, that is? JILL WANTS OUT__. Jill wants out. You know how that humiliated me?” He went to the stove to pour another cup of coffee, and he even got so far as to lift the pot to his cup before he set it down again. “A week later this Cessna 180 equipped with skis lands on the frozen-up river and it's Joe Bosky. He comes to the door. 'You people having any trouble here?' he says.”

“And that was the end of Jill.”

His voice had gone soft now, all the harshness washed out of it. “I never laid eyes on her again.”

The sun faded from the wall. From outside, thin with distance, came the cry of a wolf that died out in a feverish glissando until the dogs took it up. She could see them beyond the window, erect at their chains, noses pointed to the sky, and the sound they made was inharmonious and raw, expressive of some deep unquenchable sorrow, the sorrow of the stake and the chain and the harness. Sess said something then, and she didn't hear the words, only the sound, till he repeated himself: “Do you really have to go?”

“I promised,” she said.

“The hell with your promise,” he said, and the dogs sent up a howl so plaintive it must have had the wolf smirking from his mountaintop.

“Howard Walpole,” she began, but Sess cut her off.

“Howard Walpole is shit,” he said, “and you know it and I know it. I'm the one. Tell me I'm the one.”

“It's only three days,” she said. He wouldn't look at her. He looked at the coffeepot, looked at the wall. The dogs howled. “Three days, Sess. Then I'll know for sure.”

9

Framed against the high dun bank and the random aggregation of shacks and cabins that composed the riparian view of Boynton, Howard Walpole stood rooted in the mud in a pair of gum boots and grease-slick chino pants. He was waiting for them as they came round the broad bend of the river that gave onto town, and from the look of him, Sess figured he'd been waiting for hours, though the agreed-upon time was twelve noon and it couldn't have been more than eleven-fifteen or eleven-thirty yet. It was an ugly day, overcast and close. The river was the color of the sky and the sky was the color of the primer you saw on pickups and wagons awaiting the benediction of paint. It was drizzling. The air smelled tainted, as if everything in the water, the woods and the sky had fallen down dead and gone to rot.

All the way down in the canoe Pamela kept chirping away about this or that-a moose in the shallows, an explosion of ducks, her mother's bad feet and her sister's reprobate of a boyfriend-but if he'd given her six words back it would have surprised him. He was feeling sour, sour and hateful, and he didn't care if she knew it. He dug savagely at his paddle, sprinting the last two hundred yards as if he couldn't wait to get rid of her, and in one compartment of his mind he was thinking he ought to take Howard Walpole aside and tell him what a pain in the ass she was, what a complete and utter screwup and bitch, but he knew it wouldn't work. Howard-he was thirty-eight years old, with a head that was almost perfectly flat in the back as if he'd been hit with a board the moment he popped out of the womb-Howard was the sort of man who never threw anything away and never took anybody's word for anything.

The canoe scraped gravel and Pamela hopped out, then let him sit as she lifted the bow up on shore. Howard was grinning, yellow teeth in a grizzled beard, and he'd shoved his begrimed engineer's cap up off his eyebrows so you could see the pale band of flesh to his hairline where the sun never touched. “Howdy, Pamela,” he crowed, “enjoy your stay at the Harder palace?”

She said she had and he said, “Howdy, Sess,” and then he took Pamela's backpack from her, tossed it onto the front seat of his big flat-bottomed boat with the twin Evinrude engines and held out a hand to help her aboard. “No sense in standing here in the rain,” he added, “when there's a whole world out there to show you, and I don't know what you got used to up there at the Harder palace, but my place is like a four-star hotel in comparison, so don't you worry about a thing.”

Then he shoved off, the engines roared to life, and Pamela was a receding speck of color on the broad gray back of the river.

He knew he shouldn't start drinking, knew he should turn around and paddle back upriver to his cabin, go out and clear brush along his trapline for the next three days, fish pike in the oxbows, put away some duck, but he found himself ambling past his shack and the various cabins of various people he knew and liked or disliked or was indifferent to, on up the main street, past the frame post office and the Nougat and the general store, in the direction of the Three Pup. He brought a whole new nation of mosquitoes with him, and while they sorted things out with the indigenous population, he ducked inside. Lynette was behind the bar, her eyes squinted against the smoke of the cigarette clenched between her teeth, and she was dealing cards to Richard Schrader as if dealing cards were the chief activity of the human species on this planet and why hurry to the end of the deck when you'd just have to deal them all over again? “Hey,” Richard said, without looking up. And then Skid Denton, who was in his usual seat at the end of the rectangular bar that doubled as a luncheonette counter, said, “Satisfaction Guaranteed or Your Money Back. Get your satisfaction there, Sess? Or you looking for a refund?”

Sess told him to shut the fuck up and the tone of it was warning enough to everybody in the place-this was no laughing matter, no subject for lickerish grins and elbow prodding and the kind of behind-your-back laughter he'd had to endure over the Jill situation. Everybody, at that hour, included Richie Oliver, who was sitting at a corner table with a woman nobody had ever seen before, and Richie Oliver wasn't going to say anything because he'd already had his three-day trial with Pamela, and they were both in the same boat. Besides which, the woman he was with was no beauty, and no girl either, and there was only one thing Richie Oliver or anybody else could have wanted out of that relationship. Sess put a quarter in the jukebox and played “Mystic Eyes” three times running and he ordered a shot and a beer and when he was done with it he ordered another and sat at the window studying a two-year-old copy of _Time__ magazine he'd already read cover to cover at least six times.

People came and went. Two middle-aged tourists in a white station wagon with three inches of grit plastered to it chatted him up a while and he told them some creative lies about the country and what they could expect from it. (“Moose? Really? You mean they'll actually charge the car?”) Around six he had Lynette make him a tuna sandwich and a plate of fries for ballast, and then he moved over to the Nougat to see who was around and maybe shoot a couple games of pool, and there were two Hungwitchin Indians there he knew from upriver, beyond Eagle, and he drank with them for an hour or two until one of them vomited on the table and Clarence Ford, who was bartending, asked them to leave. The Indians stumbled into their pickup, fired it up and waved a clumsy goodbye, but wait a minute, could they give him a lift up the road to the Three Pup because his legs didn't seem to want to work right? And sure, sure they could.

That was where things got hazy. Joe Bosky was there, that much was certain, and he got into it with him all over again, and who said what to whom or who started it was beyond irrelevance. He did seem to recall Lynette unholstering her pistol and maybe even firing it once or twice in the lot outside, but the upshot of it was that he was eighty-sixed while Joe Bosky stood tall at the bar with ten or twelve people and drank in dignity the rest of the night. But what Joe Bosky hadn't figured on, or anybody else, for that matter, was the fact that Joe Bosky's car, his white fastback Mustang with the blue racing stripe he rented a special garage for and only drove in the summertime, was parked right there amongst the weeds of the lot. Right there, like a steel-and-glass wall, for Sess to stumble into. And it was nothing, a matter of a few fleeting drunken minutes, to pop the hood and relieve himself on the black shining stump of the distributor cap and then wander off toward the river with the vague idea of settling in for the night.

To say he woke with a headache was to say nothing. He was crushed, poleaxed, transfixed on a stake of hurt and regret and the simple dull physical enervation of alcoholic excess. He hadn't quite made it to his shack, and he woke to the sun in his eyes and the gentle prodding of the toe of Richard Schrader's boot. “Sess,” Richard was saying, and his face was a shining planetoid orbiting the sky, and there was a moon there beside it, and the moon was the too-white face of the woman Richie Oliver had been with the night before-or maybe a clone of her. He sat up. He was fifteen feet from the door of his shack, nestled in a heap of tires and rusting machine parts just off the south end of Richard's porch. The river humped by behind him. Everything was wet and cold. “Jesus,” the woman said, “look at you.”

He was a monk. He was a penitent. He refused coffee, Band-Aids, calamine lotion for the damage the mosquitoes had inflicted on him, and he got in his canoe-no fresh supplies, nothing, not even a bottle of water-and headed upriver. He dipped water and drank as he went, and he found a couple of slivers of caribou jerky in his day pack and chewed them in shame and abnegation as he stabbed at the current with the knife of his paddle. It was drizzling still, and he shivered, then pulled over in a quiet eddy against the far bank to beach the canoe and start a fire to warm up, though it was probably sixty-five degrees out-when you're wet and you've got a breeze in your face, it wouldn't matter if it was eighty-five.

The fire was a small, good thing. He had his spinning rod with him, always had his spinning rod, and he figured he'd make lunch simple. Three casts with an orange Mepps spinner and he had a grayling to toast on a stick, and that was so good he switched to a heavier rig and a silver spoon with a bit of green glitter in the center of it to represent the eye of some half-formed oblivious creature of the shallows, and flung it out in the hope of pike for dinner back at the cabin. Out it went with a hiss and a distant splash, and it came back with a whisper, over and over, and all he could think about was Pamela, Pamela in Howard Walpole's three-room cabin with the blond grizzly rug in front of the stone fireplace he used to supplement his stove because he liked the aesthetics of an open fire for all his grease and the raw-boned stink of him. But Pamela would never choose a man like that, skinny, flat-headed, dumb as tar, no matter how much he'd made on a lucky placer strike two years back or how many conveniences he built into his cabin, would she?

It was a question that tormented him all the dilatory, headachy way back up the river, and it tormented him even after he got a pike as long as a Louisville Slugger to rise up out of a hole under a cutbank and take the silver lure in its spiky dentition and leap clear of the water half a dozen times. Maybe he forgot about it-about her-for the space of five minutes there as he worked the canoe into shore and wrestled the thing up out of the shallows like one long whipcrack of muscle, but he thought of her again when he slipped the knife from the sheath and inserted it between the pike's eyes and drove it in till the muscle went slack.

That night he nursed two beers, fed the dogs and set snares for rabbit where there was sign along the far verge of the garden. It was warm, and he didn't bother with a fire. For dinner, it was cold beans and petrified biscuits the mice had gnawed around the edges-he didn't feel up to the smell of fish frying in a pan. He woke once in the middle of the night to a frenzy of barking and stepped out on the porch with his rifle in the pale half-light of three A.M. to see a bewildered moose-an old cow, something under eight hundred pounds and fallow, from the look of her-planted in the center of the garden, her legs like saplings growing out of the sea of black plastic. His first impulse was to shoot her, but he resisted. You didn't shoot moose during Ducks, didn't shoot moose until fall, when the meat would keep. Not to mention that it was out of season and the country was just beginning to set the table for the big summer-long banquet of ducks and geese and salmon and berries. So what did he do? He wasted a bullet and scared the thing off in the fond hope that she would avoid this place like the plague. Until fall, anyway.

In the morning he fired up the stove and made himself coffee and two pike fillets rolled in flour and bread crumbs and fried in an inch of snapping Crisco, and sat in the doorway of the cabin slapping mosquitoes and watching the rain clouds gather and swell over the river. He didn't feel right, and it had nothing to do with the tear he'd been on the other night either. What it had to do with was Pamela. He could smell her, a lingering female aura that was caught in the furs of the bed, in the ambient odors of the place, and if he looked over his shoulder to where she'd been sitting two mornings ago, he could almost see her there too. Pamela. She was his, no doubt about it. _You've got nothing to worry about, Sess,__ isn't that what she'd said? But then Howard Walpole's grinning fleshless face rose up before him, superimposed over Richie Oliver's solemn bearded gaze: What if she'd been lying to him? Mollifying him? What if she was just being polite?

Before he knew what he was doing, he was back on the river, moving with the current, moving fast, the near bank racing along beside him and the wind rushing at his face. Howard Walpole's place was below town, near the mouth of Junebug Creek, and it was set back on a bluff that commanded a hundred-and-eighty-degree sweep of the river. Worse, it featured double-insulated windows shipped all the way up from Oakland, California, that gave Howard a full, unobstructed, breakfast-lunch-and-dinner view of anything moving along the shore or out on the water, and Howard always kept a good pair of Army surplus 7x42 binoculars ready to hand. Sess was thinking about that as the rain started in and the wind begin to flail his face and hands with cold hard stinging pellets that were less like rain and more like sleet than he'd care to admit. No matter, he thought of Pamela, and kept close to the bank where the wind wouldn't discover him as readily.

It would be a major embarrassment-life-quenching, horrific-to be caught anywhere within ten miles of Howard's place, the kind of thing he'd never live down, not in a thousand years. If anybody saw him out there-if Howard saw him, or Pamela-he'd have to move out of the country altogether, go find himself a room in the heart of some run-down collapsing urban jungle like Cleveland or Brooklyn or some other godforsaken place where the rumor of it would never reach him. But there was no turning back now, and as the morning rectified itself into afternoon, he slipped past Boynton on the far side of the river in a heavy shroud of weather.

He didn't know what he was doing, didn't know what he expected, didn't have a plan or hope. He had binoculars of his own though, and he was as good on the river and in the woods as any man in the country, except for some of the old-timers, and the old-timers were too old to be good anymore. When he passed Ogden Stump's fish camp, deserted this time of year, he knew the next bend would take him within sight of Howard Walpole's place, so he trailed his paddle and pulled into shore. He didn't have to hide the canoe, but he did-what if Howard was taking her for a scenic ride upriver or somebody went by collecting driftwood and saw it there? — and then started along the mud bank with his ancient.30–06 Springfield rifle in one hand (for bear discouragement, only that) and his binoculars in the other.

It was raining hard now, raining as if it were water human beings breathed and not air, and though he was wearing his olive green poncho and a cap under the hood of it, he was wet through to the skin from the waist down. And shivering, shivering already, and there was no way to make a fire anywhere near here without Howard Walpole nosing round to warm his hands and feet, and jaw about the weather and wondering if he couldn't help out with a piece of meat for the spit and inserting the sly observation that Sess was pretty far afield of his cabin, wasn't he? So he shivered and edged closer, keeping to the dense growth along the riverbank, tightroping a game trail through the willows that no human being had traversed in the history of mankind, or at least since breakup. He saw moose track, black bear, wolverine, wolf. Moose droppings, bear scat. The rain was steady, the leaves dripped.

When he got within a hundred yards of the cabin, he dropped to hands and knees, because there was no sense in putting Howard's dogs on alert. The crawling calmed him-being down like this took him back to the deer stalks he'd made as a boy through grown-over burns in the Sierra foothills, and it gave his elbows a chance to get as wet as his knees. Crawling, he thought about that, about the dairy farm outside Porterville where he'd been raised, where he'd worked beside his father day by day, slowly acquiring the muscle he could have put to use on the football field, but the coach was a jerk of the first degree and he quit that before he'd hardly got started, and he'd quit college too, because he couldn't see boxing himself in behind a desk. His every free moment was spent roaming, hunting, fishing. He was good at it, good at concealment, good at _this.__

Fifty yards out, he eased into a clot of highbush cranberry and raised the binoculars to his eyes, and he didn't feel low or cheap at all. He didn't feel like a hopeless, sick-at-heart, unmanly, voyeuristic _creep.__ Not him. No, he felt more like a-well, a commando, that was it. A commando on a secret vital mission essential to the well-being of the entire country, not to mention a very specific plot of painstakingly husbanded bush at the mouth of the Thirtymile.

The only problem was, there was no one home. Or at least that was the way it appeared. From the angle he'd chosen, he could see up and in through the eastern window of the main room, across an inconvenient slice of vacant space, and out the southern windows. All was still, but for the sizzle of the rain. The dogs were huddled at the ends of their chains, deep in the miniature log houses Howard had built for them. Sess watched the windows, and then he watched the doghouses, the dark drawn-down faces of the dogs themselves, a squirrel, a robin, and he studied the way the rain dripped from the eaves in a long gray linkage of individual beads.

Where could they be? There was no smoke either from the stovepipe or the chimney, no movement, no sound. Howard's boat was there, tugging at its painter, and his floatplane too. Could they be out for a hike? Asleep? In bed? That was a possibility he didn't want to entertain-it made his digestive tract broil just to imagine it-but it was a possibility that grew into an inevitability as the day wore on. They were in bed. Fucking. That's what they were doing. They were fucking and she'd lied to him and Howard Walpole was the chosen one all along because Howard Walpole had money and credibility and Sess Harder had neither, and right now, right now as he crouched here shivering and wet in the bushes like some heartworn adolescent, Howard was trying out his new toy, his squeeze box, his jelly roll. Isn't that what they called it in the old blues tunes, _jelly roll?__

Suddenly he was in a rage. It was all he could do to keep himself from just opening up on the place, blowing out the windows, making meat of the dogs as they came yowling and bewildered out of their houses, cutting down Howard Walpole in his greasy long johns and worn-out carpet slippers. How had he ever gotten himself into this mess? What had he been thinking? A woman-a good-looking woman, a stunner, with strong hands and a stronger back-advertises for a man? What kind of world was that? And how could he ever have expected anything other than heartbreak and humiliation out of the whole mess?

He was standing then, standing up to his full height and damn the subterfuge-he was going to march up to that cabin and bang on the door till it opened and demand an answer of her, right then and there: _Is it me or him? Me or him!__ But when he came up out of the bush he detected the faintest shadow of movement through the front room window, and before he could think or act the dogs were rushing at their chains in a froth of champing teeth and bitter startled yips and howls. Was there a face in the window? Was it her? Was it Howard? He fell to his hands in the liquefying mud and began a mad scrambling retreat even as he heard the door swing open on rusted hinges and Howard's voice ringing out, “Who's there?” and her voice answering, “It's probably a moose, that's all,” and Howard saying, apropos of what, Sess could only wonder, “Didn't I tell you? Didn't I?”

Two days later, at twelve noon on the dot, Howard Walpole's flat-bottomed boat planed round the gravel bar off the Boynton beach and drifted in on the crest of its own wake. Sess was standing there in the mud in his boots, just like Howard before him. He hadn't slept. He hadn't eaten. He was as hopeless and ragged and pie-eyed as a beggar on the streets of Calcutta. When the boat touched shore with a scrape of gravel and a single sharp cry from one of the gulls overhead, Pamela-she was wearing shorts and a T-shirt under a cotton jacket and a wide-brimmed floppy hat that masked her eyes so he couldn't gauge a thing-sprang out so lightly and gracefully it was as if a breeze had propelled her. He hung his head. Sucked in his breath. “Well?” he said.

She gave him a smile, she gave him that. “I've got to go back to Anchorage for a few days,” she said, and there was Howard, behind her, dragging the painter up the shore with the intention of looping it round any convenient boulder or tree stump.

Sess just looked at her. “Why?”

She stopped there, right in front of him, and she never flinched or looked away. “Why? To get my wedding dress, what do you think? And my sister, who's going to be my lone bridesmaid, and my mother-she's going to have to fly up from Arizona. I always did want to be a June bride.”

Still nothing. Still it wasn't sinking in. He was dangling in the wind, no more able or sentient than a river-run salmon split down the middle and hung out to dry.

A long moment ticked by, the longest moment of his life, and then she said, “How about the twenty-first, Sess? Will that work?”

10

Pris brought the cake all the way up from Anchorage in the back of her station wagon, and it was a cake the likes of which Boynton had never seen, at least not since the days of the gold rush, when all sorts of excess had bled in and out of the country: five tiers, alternating layers of pink and white glacé royal frosting, princess white cake inside and the plastic figurine of a veiled bride on top standing arm-in-arm with a bearded trapper in a plaid shirt. Pamela's mother arrived by bush plane, two hops and a jump out of the Fairbanks airport, no weather to speak of, her smile uncrimped and blazing like a second sun on everybody in town, even the bush crazies and the Indians. And Pamela herself, established with Pris in the back room of Richard Schrader's cabin to get into her makeup and the white satin gown trimmed with Brussels lace her mother had worn on a similarly momentous occasion two weeks after the Japanese let loose on Pearl Harbor, couldn't seem to stop smiling either and didn't want to. “Give me a drag on that,” she said, fixed before the mirror and gesturing at the mirror image of the pale white tube of a Lark that jutted from her sister's lower lip.

“What?” Pris said, feathering her hair with a tortoiseshell comb, both her arms lifted and bare.

“A drag. Your cigarette.”

“You? But you don't smoke.”

She was smiling past herself, her eyes in the mirror fastening on her sister's, and it was like being ten years old all over again. “Today I do. Today I'm going to do everything.”

And then they were gathering in the communal yard that wedded Richard's cabin to Sess's shack, most of the errant junk-the worn-out tires, rusted machine parts, discarded antlers, crates, fuel drums and liquor bottles, fishnets, tubs, traps, derelict Ski-Doos and staved-in boats-having been hauled around the far side of the buildings, out of sight for the time being. Sess was in a herringbone jacket he'd borrowed for the occasion and a tie so thin it was like a strip of ribbon, and the white of his shirt could have been whiter and the sleeves of the jacket longer, but this was no fashion show and the photographers from _Vogue__ seemed to have stayed home on what was turning out to be a fine, sunshiny afternoon. The bride and her sister had shared the better part of a pint of crème de menthe as well as half a dozen Larks, and Pamela was feeling no pain as she picked her way down the weather-blasted steps at the back of Richard Schrader's cabin and into the void left by her peripatetic father.

Since there was nobody to give the bride away, Sess had asked Tim Yule, the oldest man in town, to serve in that capacity, and now Tim looped his arm through hers and they started across the yard to the strains of “Here Comes the Bride” as rendered on Skid Denton's harmonica. Tinny, wheezy, flat, the music insinuated itself into the texture of the day, riding the refrigerated breeze coming up off the river, orchestrating the rhythm of the gently rocking trees. Tim smelled of bourbon and aftershave, and his boots shone with gobs of wet black polish. Stooped and white-haired, with a dripping nose and cheeks aflame with drink, he led her at a pace so stately it was practically a crawl. There was a murmur from the crowd. All her senses were alive. She didn't feel faint or nervous or sad, but just eager-eager and vigorous, ready to get on with the rest of her life. She'd waited twenty-seven years and there was no going back now.

Smoke from the barbecue pit crept across the yard. Every dog in town howled from the end of its chain, goaded by the sour repetitive wheeze of the harmonica and maddened by the wafting aroma of moose and caribou ribs, of broiled salmon and steaks and sausage lathered in barbecue sauce. At the far end of the yard, derealized in the sun off the river, Sess stood waiting for her with Richard Schrader, his best man, at his side. Her mother was there, just to the left of him, tear-washed and clinging to Pris as if she were trying to pull herself up out of a pit of shifting sand.

Wetzel Setzler, proprietor of the Three Pup and the general store, postmaster, mayor, undertaker and local representative of Prudential Life, presided over the ceremony. Three-quarters of the population of Boynton stood there amidst the weeds and wildflowers, bottles of beer and plastic cups of bourbon and vodka clutched in their hands, to watch her take the vows in her white heels with the smears of mud lapping up over the toes in a fleur-de-lis pattern. She saw Richie Oliver in the back of the press, hand in hand with a plain-faced woman in a red shirt and jeans, and Howard Walpole too, good sports, good sports all, though she could have done without Howard. The harmonica left off and the silence blew in. Even the dogs fell quiet. She could hear the river sliding over its riffles and sinking into its holes. Do you take this man? I do, she said, I do.

Then there was hilarity, the kind of unbridled, unself-conscious, rollicking, full-bore, take-no-prisoners hilarity that only a bush town sunk deep in its ruts could generate. Somebody had a guitar, somebody else a fiddle. A banjo appeared. A washboard. There was dancing, drinking, eating, the cake dwindled through its layers and disappeared in a pale picked-over detritus of frosting and crumbs, the steaks and ribs fell away to fragments of gnawed bone, bottles went clear and gave up the ghost. She stood there beside Sess, her arm round his waist, drinking river-cooled champagne out of a plastic cup, while people she didn't know came up and talked in her face and she thanked them for their gifts of smoked sheefish, nasturtium seeds, fish gaffs and motor oil, and the more practical things too, like a fifty-pound sack of cornmeal and a nightie the size of three slices of bread cobbled together.

“Sess, I know you're the outdoors type,” her mother was saying, “just like my Victor, but that doesn't mean you have to be out traipsing through the woods for days at a time while my girl lays up lonely and heartbroken in that tiny little cabin, does it? Because I worry. I do.”

“I worry too,” Sess told her with an even smile, “but you can bury any fears you might have on your daughter's account…” He was about to drop her mother's name into the void at the end of this little declaration, but Pamela could see he didn't know quite what to call her yet, whether “Mom” would float or if he should fall back on “Mariette” or “Mrs. McCoon” or maybe just clear his throat instead. That was cute, that little glitch. It was endearing. And Pamela was right there with him, heart and soul, tucked in under his arm like a text he hadn't read yet but meant to get to directly, and she hadn't stopped smiling since she'd woken up this morning.

“My wife's going to have plenty to keep her occupied,” Sess said, a hint of slyness creeping into his voice, “what with skinning out carcasses, tanning hides, hauling ice up out of the river for water, cutting wood for the stove, sewing, mending, feeding the dogs-feeding me, for that matter. Isn't that what wives are for?”

Her mother had been drinking vodka for three hours. The sun pounded at her face, beat cruelly at the thin flaps of skin the plastic surgeon in Tempe had worked like hide over her cheekbones and firmed round the orbits of her eyes. She gave a little laugh and took Sess's other arm, the free one, and leaned into him. “If you ask me,” she said, and she paused for effect, “a woman needs to be good, really good, at one thing only-”

Sess colored, and her mother, enjoying herself, went on: “And I don't think I have to tell a grown man like you just what that might be, now do I, Sess?”

That was when Pris, in the middle of the crush of dancers, let out a whoop and they all three turned their heads to see her in the grip of something uncontainable, a romping flailing black-headed blur of motion that might have been a bear going for her throat but wasn't. It took Pamela a minute to understand, because she was new here and she was caught up in the whirl of her own drama: Joe Bosky had crashed the party. He was wearing an old faded military shirt and the blue jeans that were a second skin to him, and he was flapping his feet like a spastic and leaning in to twirl Pris under the eggbeater of his right arm. And Pris, pretty in lavender satin and with her hair piled up atop her head, had no idea who he was or what his motives might have been or that he was the sole resident of the town and its environs who was here uninvited. Expressly uninvited. Adamantly uninvited. She had that wild look on her face that Pamela knew only too well, the cigarette look, the vodka look, the look that said the party had only just begun and there was no stopping her now. Joe Bosky brought her to his chest, spun her away, pulled her in close again. “Yee-ha!” she shrieked, and you could hear the piping breathless cry over the clash of the band like the mating call of some exotic bird.

Pamela felt Sess stiffen. Her mother said, “Looks like my youngest is not to be denied either. But I don't like her hair up like that. Do you like her hair up, Pamela?”

Pamela didn't answer. Her arm was thrust through her husband's-my _husband,__ she was thinking, my _husband's__ arm-and she was the stake in the ground, she was the chain, because there was going to be no violence on her wedding day, not today, no. “Sess,” she warned him, “Sess,” and then she moved flush into him and wrapped him up in her arms. “I want to dance, Sess,” she said. “Come on. Let's dance.”

But then she was jostled from behind and a man she didn't recognize-fisherman's hat with an eagle feather thrust up out of the band, frayed blue dress shirt, beard, yeast breath, hair growing out of his ears-wrapped them both up in a titanic embrace and just squeezed and rocked. “Sess!” he shouted in her ear. “Pamela! Congratulations! Many happy returns! Et cetera, et cetera!”

“Ogden,” Sess said, and she could feel him pulling back, trying to get loose, trying to get to the blood-spilling part of the ceremony. Pris let out another shout. Ogden tightened his grip, and then Pamela understood.

“We'll take care of it,” he said in a voice that rasped like the hull of a skiff plowing over a sandbar, “me and Richard and Iron Steve. Relax. Okay? Just relax.” And then he let go and he was gone, wading through the crowd of dancers on a collision course with Pris and Joe Bosky. She saw a tall, big-headed man closing in on them from one side, and Richard Schrader, looking grim, from the other. “Son of a bitch,” Sess spat, and still she held him. “Son of a fucking bitch.”

“Well, what-?” her mother began, her smile uncertain. “You sure do have enthusiastic friends, Sess-I thought he was going to crush the two of you-”

Joe Bosky was oblivious, or at least he pretended to be. She couldn't help watching-couldn't take her eyes from him-as he whirled and shimmied and flung Pris around as if he were one of the teen heartthrobs on _American Bandstand,__ all style, all limbs, his eyes bugging and hips thrusting. And Pris. She was lit up-here was the kind of man she'd been looking for, his quotient of animal spirits so far above the average you couldn't begin to put a cap on them. She made two moves for his every one, the gown riding up under her arms, her hair coming down in a slow soft tumble. All in fun. All in good fun. Except that the man was Sess's enemy, here to spoil the day, and make no mistake about it.

The tall man with the big head-Iron Steve, she presumed-caught Bosky under the arms as he rocked back from Pris's white-knuckled grip, and then Richard and Ogden Stump converged on him like tacklers on a football field. She watched his features draw down in surprise, a heartbeat's respite, Pris's empty hand and awakening face, and then he seemed to detonate. He flung himself in four directions at once, screaming like a woman, a long tailing high-pitched shriek that had nothing but fakery and hate in it, and then the four of them were rolling around in the weeds and the mud, good clothes spoiled, the crowd giving way and the band freezing out the chorus of Hank Williams's “Cold, Cold Heart.”

In two minutes it was over, black-headed Joe Bosky trussed in arms and Iron Steve's elbow pinned to his throat, the eight-legged walk to the verge of the property and the necessary threats and imprecations hurled back and forth, the band lurching again into the defeated chorus and Sess's eyes gone cold as a killer's. “Good God, Sess,” her mother was saying, “but you've got some excitable friends. Too much to drink, I guess”-with a laugh-“or maybe Pris was too much for him to handle. My daughters are like that, you know.”

And here came Pris, flustered, blotched, her hair a mess and the hem of her dress stiff with mud. “What was that all about?” she said, extracting a cigarette from her purse. “I was just starting to warm up there. Who was that guy, anyway-an escapee from the mental ward or something? I mean, I kind of liked him. His spirit, I mean.”

Sess wouldn't say a word. Her sister looked to him, her mother, but he just stood there rooted to the spot, rigid as a fencepost. “It's all right,” Pamela kept telling him, “don't let it spoil the day. It's all right, it is-”

But it wasn't. Sess wouldn't soften, wouldn't give. They danced, they drank champagne, received congratulations and gave thanks in return, and one after another people came up to them, lit with hilarity and goodwill, but it wasn't the same after Joe Bosky had put in his appearance. This was her wedding day, her wedding _night,__ and her husband was as distant and impenetrable as some alien out of a spaceship in one of those corny B movies she'd watched as a kid. _Wake up, Sess,__ she wanted to say. _Wake up and snap out of it, your bride's here-remember me?__

It must have been around ten when the party began to wind down, people gone off in pairs, migrating to the Nougat and the Three Pup, falling unconscious in the gravel on the bank of the river. Tim Yule was seated on an overturned bucket in a stripe of sun, stirring a plastic cup of Everclear with a big-knuckled finger and holding a sotto voce conversation with himself. Howard Walpole and Richie Oliver had long since drifted off, shoulders slumped in mutual commiseration. Pamela's mother was in the back of Pris's station wagon-“A little catnap, that's all I need, don't worry about me”-and Pris was holding court for the benefit of three drunken bush crazies who would have stripped the flesh from their bones for just a touch of her, while the band had been reduced to a single fiddle sawing away at the melancholy traces of a classical education. The hour had come. She pressed her husband's hand and felt the blood start in her veins. “Sess,” she said, her voice echoing oddly in her ears over the strains of the violin-saddest thing she'd ever heard, and what was it, Borodin? Shostakovich? Something like that. “Sess,” she said, “don't you think it's time the bride and groom went in and-”

“Went to bed?”

They were on the back porch of the house Richard Schrader had magnanimously vacated for the night. Mosquitoes sailed into their faces, softly rebounded from their lips, their eyelashes. She'd changed into a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved hooded sweatshirt, but she was conscious of the underthings she'd picked out in Anchorage with Pris, lacy satin panties and a brassiere that clung to her like a man's spread fingers. He leaned in close and they kissed, easeful and sweet, all the rage and the woodenness gone out of him finally, finally, and she murmured, “Yes, to bed.”

The drone of an outboard came to her then, to both of them, a speedboat planing up the river in the slanting sun of ten o'clock at night, droning closer, a glint of churned water trailing away from the stern and the bearded face of Joe Bosky, black-crowned, at the helm. Joe Bosky, back for one final thrust. Sess rose up off the porch even as the bow leapt out of the current and careened for shore. “Hey, Sess Harder, fuck you!” Bosky roared over the engine, dancing at the throttle. “Fuck you and your dog-faced woman too!” And then the bow cut back and the boat shot past and was gone.

Richard had left them a pair of vanilla-scented candles, one on each side of the bed, tapering pale phallic things rising up out of matching ceramic dishes his ex-wife had shaped and fired herself. The cabin was four rooms, two of which Richard closed off in winter, and it featured a kitchen sink with a hand-pump for water and a bathroom replete with a flush toilet that generally worked, at least in warm weather. As in most of the cabins and frame houses in Boynton, aesthetic considerations had been sacrificed to practicality, and all four rooms were lined floor-to-ceiling with flattened cardboard boxes-Birds Eye Peas, Rainier Pale Ale, Charmin Toilet Tissue-to provide a last line of defense against the winds screaming down out of the polar barrens in the dead of winter. The bedroom was constructed as a kind of loft, four steps up from the main room and the top-of-the-line Ashley stove Richard's ex had insisted on. There was no need of the stove tonight. It was as warm inside as a cabana on a white crescent beach in the Bahamas.

She was sitting on the bed, taking her hair down. She'd lit the candles and set aside the plastic cup of lukewarm champagne-the taste had gone saccharine in the back of her throat, and she didn't need any more. The cabin was still. The sun held. She could hear the sound of her own breathing, the tick and whirr of the blood coursing through her veins. After a moment she got up and pulled the shades over the two slits of the windows.

Sess was busy in the main room, fooling with something, his shoulders so squared-up and rigid you would have thought the vertebrae had fused in his neck. Something clattered, fell to the floor. He was struggling for control, she could see that, but Joe Bosky had poisoned the day, the moment, the night to come, and she didn't know what to say or how to defuse it. In her bag was a paperback her mother had given her, _The Bride's Advisor: 100 Questions and Answers for Your Wedding Night,__ but there was nothing in all its three hundred pages and appendices to address the situation at hand. Her husband was in no tender mood. He was twenty-five feet away, his back turned to her, and he might as well have been on another planet. There was a dull thump as some other object fell to the floor.

She stood up then, where he could see her when he turned round, and pulled the sweatshirt up over her head and dropped the jeans down round her ankles and stepped out of them. She was in her underwear, in her sixteen-dollar-and-ninety-nine-cent silk panties and matching brassiere from Oswalt's department store, and she wanted him to see her in them, to be turned on, to see her flat abdomen and the curve of her hips and her long, tapered legs. Her voice was caught in her throat. “Sess,” she was going to say, “Sess, why don't you turn around,” but she couldn't do it. A long deracinated moment shuddered by and she was thinking about high school, making out with Gary Miranda in the den of her parents' house while they were away at work, the Platters and the Ink Spots dripping honey from the hi-fi and the heat of his tongue and how it made her feel. His tongue was wet and thrusting and insistent, and he took her own tongue into his mouth and sucked it as if it were a peppermint candy or a jawbreaker, and it made her feel abandoned, made her feel wild, but she never let him touch her breasts or anything else, because she didn't believe in that. In college there was petting, the furious dry friction of it, the boys all sprouting second sets of hands and grinding against her like windup soldiers, the rhythm and movement as automatic as the pounding of their hearts, and half her sorority sisters going all the way with their steadies and not a bit shy about it either. Her panties were as wet as if she'd fallen in a lake, her jeans, her skirts, but no boy, even Eric Kresten, and she dated him for almost two years, ever got her to take anything off but her bra. And then she was in her twenties and Fred Stines came to her apartment and she stripped to her panties for him while he stroked her everywhere his fingers lighted and sucked at her nipples like an underfed puppy and she felt herself giving way time after time but she never did.

Howard Walpole was different. The three days with him were part of the compact, the program she'd set herself, and though she knew Sess was the one, knew it even before she climbed into the canoe with him and felt his weight there behind her like the perfect counterpoise to her own, she had to go through with it, because that was the kind of woman she was. You make a promise, you keep it. That was how she felt. That was who she was. But Howard-Howard was stiff as a board. He shook her hand when she got in the boat, as if they were signatories to a solemn truce between two warring factions, and he never thought of brushing his cheek to hers or clasping her shoulders in a welcoming hug. He just gave her his hand, took a minute to taunt Sess and then cranked the throttle on his twin outboard engines.

The day was biting and sharp, flecks of foam riding the wavelets, a spatter of windblown rain in her face. She was up front and Howard Walpole was in back. The fiberglass hull slapped at the water, over and over again, slap, slap, slap, and the noise of the engines made conversation a chore. She held on, thinking how much nicer the canoe had been, the pace of it, the silent liquid progress that was no intrusion on the day, the river, the hovering birds and furtive mammals. “Nice boat!” she shouted back over her shoulder, just to be polite, just to say something, and Howard, a plug of tobacco distending one cheek and his smudged cap pulled down tight against the wind so that his head looked as if it had been preshrunk to fit it, just nodded. The trip took an hour. She didn't say another word the whole way and neither did he.

When they got there, though, when the bow of the boat slid up the bank beneath his house and the dogs stammered out their elaborate greeting, Howard had a whole speech prepared. It was equal parts disclosure, pep talk and closer's spiel, and he never looked her in the face the whole time he was delivering it, and he went on delivering it for the better part of the three days and two nights she was to spend in his company. He told her about his boat and his airplane and his house, about his gold claims and how he'd lay a moosehide in the sluice box so the hairs could pick up the finest particles, showed her a mayonnaise jar with thirty-two thousand dollars' worth of gold flecks in it and asked her to lift it from the table and laughed to see her strain to do it. He talked through the dinner of black bear stewed in a mash of dried apples and prunes with a side dish of kippered salmon and pan-fried potatoes, talked till she yawned on the couch and kept talking as he laid a blanket over her and her eyes fell closed.

In the morning he woke her with talking, talk about his ailments-he'd broken his leg in three places just two years back, did she know that? — and talk about his dogs, the individual quirks and dietary predilections of each one, though he didn't really mush dogs anymore like Sess Harder and some of the other throwbacks because the snow machine was a real hoot, didn't she think so? Over breakfast it was his mother in Minneapolis; automobiles he'd owned; the evil, meretricious ways of his ex-wife, Irene; the insurance business-two years of his life down the drain with that laughable fraud of a con man's scheme, and could she ever see anybody taking out term life and betting against their own death? — and an hour-long tirade against the United States government and the land grab they were about to perpetrate on all Alaskans in the name of the black gold at Prudhoe Bay.

He was a bore. A windy, ignorant, opinionated, half-cracked bore with real staying power and the lungs of a packhorse. And he was unattractive too, now that she got a good long look at him, with his dodging red-flecked eyes, the wispy hair poking out from beneath the cap and his hands laid out on the table like slabs of boiled meat. All right, she was resigned to it, resigned to three days and two nights of boredom, and by the second hour of the first day she'd begun to see it as a kind of purifying ritual, a mortification of the flesh and the spirit to make herself worthy of Sess Harder, who was before her now like a shining promise. She ate the food Howard Walpole gave her. She looked at his dogs, his snow machines, his floatplane, his boat, his cache, his smokehouse. She answered when he paused at the end of a paragraph to put a rhetorical question to her and she fought off his advances. “Sex,” he said to her after dinner on the first night, and to the best of her recollection they'd been talking about two-stroke engines to this point, “you like sex? Because I do. And that's the thing I miss out here most of all-just that, sex.” He paused a moment, his eyes charging round the room like scattershot. “And I'm very sex-u-al, if you know what I mean.”

On the last day, no more than an hour before they were scheduled to plow back up the river so she could get on with the rest of her life, he appeared in the doorway of the main room where she was sunk into the easy chair reading a back issue of _Argosy__ for the second time in as many days and enjoying the briefest respite from the sound of his voice. “Pamela,” he said in a low glottal wheeze, “Pamela, look at me.” She glanced up, and she saw that he was naked but for his socks and the greasy cap, naked and erect and pulling at himself like a dairy farmer working at the long maculated teat of a cow. It took her a minute, the shock of it settling into her legs like a burden of the blood, and then she was up out of the chair and reaching for the fire poker. All she said was, “Put that thing away,” and in the next instant Howard was ducking out of sight, the bulb of his hand blooming with the waxy sheen of the stuff he'd dredged up out of himself as if it were gold dredged from the tailings of an abandoned claim.

And why was she thinking about that now? Because now it was appropriate, now was the time. She was a married woman and that man with the rigid back and the neck like a fireplug fooling with something in the other room was her husband and she could indulge her wildest fantasies, do anything she wanted-stroke him, suck him-and not feel dirty. This was her wedding night. This was the consummation of all those groping, panting hours and the rigor of self-control that was fiercer than any desire. “Sess,” she said, and she unfastened the brassiere and dropped it to the floor too, “Sess, look at me.”

He turned round then, her husband, and in his hand the thing he was fumbling with, shiny foil, the skin-like droop of plastic. “I was just-” he said, and she watched his face, watched his eyes, as he warmed to this new vision of her standing there in nothing but the thinnest pearly evanescent flap of Oswalt's silk. “I couldn't-I mean, I tore the thing getting it out of the package…”

She wanted to laugh. “You don't need that thing,” she said, spreading her arms wide, “you'll never need it, ever again. Don't you realize? I'm your wife.”

They were up early, both of them, bags packed, the canoe loaded to the gunwales with wedding gifts, and they breakfasted on whatever came to hand (Sess had a ham, Swiss and caribou-tongue sandwich on half a loaf of the French bread her sister had brought with her from Anchorage; she had a plate of leftover three-bean salad, marinated artichoke hearts, a wedge of iceberg lettuce and a scoop of potato salad to round it off). She hadn't slept-or she had, off and on, but in a way that was more like a waking dream than any sleep she'd ever experienced, and she couldn't stop reaching out for him, running a hand down the slope of his arm or over the mysterious topography of the shoulder that lay pressed to hers. She was an explorer, that was what she was, learning the lay of the land, creating it anew all over again, and then again.

He'd made love to her twice under the influence of the tireless copper sun that refused to set on her wedding day, the sun that irradiated the squared-off edges of the shades and painted the foot of the bed as if it existed for them alone, and he was nothing like Fred Stines or Eric Kresten or the straining intent hot-faced college boys whose idea of love was a purely mechanical thing, a kind of exercise, like squat thrusts or push-ups. No. He was patient. Loving. Grateful. He made her feel more than just wanted-he made her feel as if she were the center of the universe. She watched him sleep as the sun dipped behind the hills and the shades went gray with the dusk that wanted to be night, and then she woke him when it came back up and he made love to her again.

But now it was seven A.M. and they straightened up the cabin, made the bed, stowed the leftovers in Richard's icebox and went out hand in hand to the canoe. The sun flooded the trees, the river was a cauldron of light. Birds nattered. A pair of geese shot up off the water and Sess pointed to the black burr of a porcupine caught in the crown of a birch up the shore. And then they were paddling, in concert, the easy rhythmic accommodation of man and wife, paddling as if they'd been a team forever.

Everything looked new to her, every leaf, every turning, the river that resisted her paddle and re-created itself moment by moment. Her brain was flooded with endorphins. She was lighter than air. They talked in a hush, their soft, unhurried voices carrying out over the water, and they talked of practical things, of building a fish wheel, expanding the cabin, putting up a greenhouse for the tomatoes, of scattering seed for zinnias, marigolds, pansies and snapdragons. And the dogs. “The first thing I'm going to do is teach you to mush,” he told her, “so you can run the trapline with me, be my partner. You always wanted to be my partner, didn't you? Right from the start?”

Her answer was a smile, delivered over her right shoulder as the paddle slid back from the stroke. Sure she was his partner-she'd chosen him, hadn't she? Wasn't that what this was all about? She'd feed the dogs, she'd mush them, she'd stretch and tan hides, repair the rags of his clothes, feed him, keep him warm at night, and he'd hold her and take care of her in turn. That was her life, spinning out into the future, and it was as fixed and certain as anything on this earth ever can be.

After a time the churning milk of the Yukon gave way to the pellucid Thirtymile, and the cabin-their home-came into view like the last outpost of civilization in a world gone over to nature. The canoe cut across the current and the cabin loomed larger. Everything was still. Still and lush. She wanted to feel the silence, wanted to relax into it, but suddenly Sess was digging at the paddle in a kind of frenzy, out of sync with her for the first time, fighting it, ramming the canoe forward as if the river had caught fire. “The dogs,” he said.

And then it came to her: the dogs were silent. Two days at their stakes and no one home-they should have had their noses to the sky, expressing their impatience and their joy. But they were silent. Worse: they were lying still in the weeds, the chains like nooses at their throats. And when she and Sess got there, when they'd beached the canoe and sprinted up the bank with no breath left in them, the carcasses were already stiffening round the ragged dark openings where the bullets had gone to shelter.