Drop City

16

The honeymoon was over before it began, and that was a shame, worse than a shame-it was a crime. A crime committed by a man with a gun, a Remington semi-automatic.22-caliber Nylon 66, judging from the flattened pieces of lead Cecil Harder dug out of the corpses of Bobo, Hippie, Girl, Loon and Saucy. Of course, the slugs could have come from any.22 rifle, but Joe Bosky had a Nylon 66-he favored it, as many did, for the lightness of its plastic stock-and Joe Bosky was the only man on this green earth who would even so much as think of shooting somebody's dogs. You didn't shoot dogs, and you didn't burn down people's cabins or rape their wives or put a bullet between their shoulder blades as they were gliding past in their canoe. Sess Harder was trying to live off the land, and everybody knew that. The better part of his income came from furs, and without dogs to run the looping forty-odd miles of trapline he'd inherited from Roy Sender-and improved and extended on his own-he was out of luck. Everybody knew that. A child knew that.

So instead of a homecoming, instead of lifting his bride in his arms and carrying her through the dogtrot and across the threshold, instead of sorting out the wedding gifts and stocking the larder and maybe lying out nude with her on a blanket in the sun-one of his enduring sexual fantasies-he had to dig five holes while his heart clenched with hate and regret and his head rang with the bloody whoop of revenge. Pamela tried to comfort him, but it did no good. She was in shock herself, and that was the worst of it-that just compounded the crime right there. Bad enough that the psychopathic son of a bitch of a sneaking gutless leatherneck reject had done the deed, but to expose Pamela to this kind of thing, and on the day after her wedding, no less? He was going to kill Joe Bosky, as soon as he could, and there were no two ways about it. Joe Bosky had made his declaration. Joe Bosky was asking to be killed. He was begging for it.

“You can't, Sess, so don't even think about it. You'll go to jail-it's murder. There are laws up here too, you know-”

He was down in a hole, breaking through permafrost, flinging dirt. He'd been back an hour, with his bride, and he hadn't unloaded the canoe, looked to the garden, settled her in the house or even so much as pecked a kiss to her cheek. “What do you know about it?” he said, and he didn't just say the words, he snarled them.

She was right there beside him, in her shorts, with her magnificent legs on display, her hands on her hips. Her mouth was set. This was their first argument, one day married, a night in heaven, and now this. “I'm not going to talk to you like you're a child, Sess, and I'm not going to remind you that I'm part of this now too… We'll go to the law, like civilized people, put the law on him-”

“The law doesn't come for dogs.”

“For murder? Does the law come for murder? You think I married you so I could visit you three hours a week in some prison someplace?”

He drove his pick at the frozen earth, all his rage concentrated in his shoulders and arms and the iron-clad muscles of his chest. “I see him,” he grunted, and the pick dropped again, “I'll kill him.”

“All right. Fine. I can see you're upset, so I'll leave you to do what you have to do here and I'll start bringing the things in. Does that sound like a plan?”

_Upset?__ he was going to say. _You think this is upset? Wait till I get my hands on a gun, then you'll see upset-wait till I pin that son of a bitch to the wall and make him cry like a woman.__ He didn't have the opportunity, though, because she'd already turned on her heels and headed down the slope, through the sun-bright glitter of bluebells and lupines and avens and saxifrage, to where the canoe shone against the everlasting gleam of the water.

She made supper that night, things left over from the wedding feast, salads and cold cuts and whatnot that wouldn't keep, and they ate at the picnic table in seventy-five-degree sunshine while the silence of the world closed in around them. He was in a T-shirt and patched jeans; she wore a top that bared her midriff and she'd combed her hair out so it draped her shoulders like a golden flag, and that was something, really something. The sight of her there in his yard, at his table, living and vibrant under the stretched-away sky, moved him and humbled him and made him forget his rage for whole minutes at a time. She was his wife. He was married. Married for the first and last time in his life.

Down the rise, two hundred feet away, the river played a soft tinkling accompaniment to the shrugs and whispers of their conversation, and it could have been the silken rustle of a piano in a dark lounge. Even the mosquitoes, their whys and wherefores beyond any man's capacity to guess, seemed to have taken the night off. He ate cold ham and three-bean salad and listened to his wife, hungering after each inflection, watching her lips, her eyes. A bottle of wedding wine stood open on the table, Inglenook Pinot Noir, 1969, Product of the Napa Valley, and beside it, a pitcher of Sess's own dark bitter beer. He'd become a brewer when he moved out here and built the cabin because the nearest convenience store wasn't all that convenient, and when he wasn't off getting married or spying on Howard Walpole he produced a six-pack or so a day in the big plastic trash can just inside the door. So drink up, that was his motto, because he had only thirteen quart bottles and what didn't get bottled or consumed turned to swill in a heartbeat. He reached for the pitcher, poured himself another, then toasted her with a soft metallic clink of tin cups that echoed as sweetly as the finest crystal.

An hour ago, when he was done with the dogs, he'd come into the cabin and saw that she'd already packed everything in and found a place for it, rearranging his own squirreled-away bachelor lode in the process, and he'd felt a flash of irritation. The canned food was on the wrong shelves, a dress was hanging like a curtain from a cord in the middle of the room and there was a tumble of boxes full of clothes and books and even an alarm clock-an alarm clock, for Christ's sake! — crawling up the wall where the bed had to come down every night. And posters. She'd hung posters of some musician with a pageboy haircut-Neil Diamond, that's who it was-on the back wall. What was she thinking? This was a cabin, a wildwoods cabin, not some dorm room.

He didn't say anything. This was her first day, their first day, and he was crazy with rage over what Joe Bosky had done, and he had to tell himself that, tell himself not to let Bosky in, not to let him spoil this, and he went over to her where she stood arranging flowers in a coffee can and hugged her from behind. And that led to kissing and stroking and her softest whispered words of melioration and surcease. “If it's a question of money,” she said, pulling back from him to look into his eyes, “I've got money.”

His irritation flashed up again. “What are you talking about?”

“The dogs. We can buy dogs. Go back to Boynton. Fairbanks. Wherever.”

“What, and put an ad in the paper? 'Wanted, trained sled dogs for trapline'? I'd be the joke of the town. I'd never live it down, never. Besides, nobody traps anymore, nobody hardly even mushes.”

She gave him a look he hadn't seen before, hard lips, a dual crease come to rest between her perfect eyes. “Everybody has dogs,” she insisted, “and everybody has litters. You ever been to Kiana or Noorvik or any of the Eskimo villages? Because there's five dogs to every man, woman and child up there.”

“Okay, so let me get this straight-we're supposed to fly to some Eskimo village and buy dogs and fly them back in a four-seater Cessna?”

“I'm not saying that. I'm saying we could ask around Boynton. Or Fairbanks.”

Every sort of emotion was at war inside him, love, hate, sorrow, grief. “Look,” he said, “look, let's just drop it.”

And so what did he do? He drank too much. On her first night as his wife in his hand-hewn cabin in the middle of nowhere, when she must have been as confused and disoriented and as full of second-guesses and doubts as any bride who'd ever leapt without looking and found herself in a strange place with a man who was revealing himself to be stranger and stranger by the minute, he finished off the bottle of wedding wine and two pitchers of beer and insisted on digging out his quart bottle of Hudson Bay rum, 150 proof, and throwing back flaming shots till the sun fell down in back of the hills. At first she matched him, cup for cup, shot for shot-she was a good drinker, Pamela, with real endurance, strong in every way-but finally her eyes lost their focus and he was the only one talking.

“You want to know about trapping?” he was saying, lecturing now, whether she wanted to hear it or not. “I'll tell you about trapping.”

And he told her. Told her about the work Roy Sender had put into clearing forty-some-odd miles of paths through the trackless waste, all the way up one side of the Thirtymile and each of its attendant tributaries, and then down the other, a nine-day loop tramped in weather so bitter it would have killed anybody who was less than superhuman, and Roy Sender working the line till he was seventy-one years old. Roy had taken him under his wing, taught him how to make his sets for every kind of animal, to build a sled of birch eight feet long and no wider than his own shoulders, to skin out lynx and fox and ermine and make baits that were little atom bombs of stink designed to prick the nose and perk the ears of every predator in the country. He was a bachelor-a coot-cranky as a Ford with two cylinders missing, chewing him out and cursing him every step of the way, a man no woman had ever wanted to waste her time on, and he lived like a coot, denned up all winter in his cabin where he spent his time rearranging his things and making his living space as comfortable and squared-away as the picture of some low-slung and wood-gleaming saloon in a sailing ship. Sess sat at the feet of the coot of all coots, glad to be in his crusty company, and after the months sailed off over the horizon and they began to talk in seasons, seasons stretching to years, the old man warmed to him.

“Why don't you build down at the mouth of the river there?” he said one spring night with the snow coming down like ticker tape and Sess camped in a canvas tent out back of the cabin. “Plenty of country for you here and the snowshoes coming up on their ten-year boom so there'll be plenty of fur for everybody, if anybody even wants it anymore. Hell, I don't have to tell you I'm not the man I used to be, you follow me? I got my knee, my back, my lungs for shitsake that make me feel like I'm drowning all the time-all of that, the price of getting old. And I get thinking about all the hard work I've put into this country and thinking it's all going to waste.”

That was Roy Sender, that was his blessing. And to think of it now, out here in the cabin that had materialized out of the hopeful solicitation of that night-out here with his wife, with Pamela-was enough to stop him up with an emotion so transcendent he could barely draw his next breath. Suddenly he was sentimental, the glass of him half-filled with sorrow and half with joy. Suddenly, he was drunk.

Pamela was two feet from him, sitting there at the table with her chin propped up on two fists, and her eyes were slipping south. Something rustled in the bush out back of the garden, and it wasn't the dogs-the dogs wouldn't be rustling anymore. He poured another shot of rum, struck a match and watched the blue flame flicker atop it before throwing it back. The night was mild, still mild, and the mosquitoes hadn't come on yet. Maybe they were observing a nuptial truce, maybe that was it, he thought. Damn decent of them too. He'd have to remember that next time he crushed half a dozen of them on his forearm or temple-live and let live, right? “Pamela,” he said, and her eyes flashed open.

“I'm drunk, Sess,” she said. “I'm afraid I've gone and got drunk here.” And she smiled, a slow, weary, sanctified smile. “It's all your fault. Bringing a girl out here, getting her drunk. I'll bet you think I'm easy, don't you, huh?”

He gave her the smile back, reached out for her hand and closed it in his own. He didn't want to talk anymore, all that fuel was gone from him now, didn't want to tell her how it felt the first time he walked the trapline and found a wolf like a big dog caught by one half-gnawed foot in a double-spring Newhouse trap intended for fox and how it just sat there staring at him out of its yellow eyes as if it couldn't comprehend the way the country had turned on it in this cold evil unnatural way and how he'd felt when he shot it and missed killing it and shot it again and again till the pelt was ruined and a hundred and ten pounds of raw wilderness lay spouting arterial blood at his feet, or how Roy Sender had taught him to rap a trapped fisher or ermine across the snout with a stick and then jerk at its heartstrings till the heart came loose from its moorings and the animal went limp without spoiling the fur. He didn't tell her he was just one more predator, one more killer, as useless as the wind through the trees, taking life to feed his own. He didn't tell her any of that. “You want to go to bed now,” is what he said, “I can see that. You want your man in your arms. You want to be naked.”

She moved in close, threw an arm over his shoulder and pressed her forehead to his so that he couldn't see anything of her but her eyes, huge eyes, pale as water. “I'll tell you a secret,” she whispered, and the _s__-sound went slushy on her. “I am easy. For you. Only for you, Sess Harder.”

He was very drunk. Profoundly drunk, but what did that mean, anyway? Profoundly drunk? That he was ready to go deep, get deep, be deep? Her breath, fecund with wine, with smoked and processed ham, with his beer and what lay at the very essence of her, was a thing that stirred him. He was instantly hard. His breath mingled with hers. “What do you want me to do?”

“Everything,” she said.

In the morning it was all right. He hadn't got this far without adversity, hadn't felled the trees for his own cabin and trapped two winters and sold the furs and refused unemployment and food stamps and any kind of institutional handout or government tit without things going radically wrong at one time or another. Adversity hardened him, annealed him. It made him rise to the challenge and beat it back till he knew in his own mind that there was no man like him in all the country, nobody tougher, more resourceful, more independent. The dogs were dead. He would get new ones. And when the time came, when he had the leisure and the inclination, he would settle his scores.

But now it was morning and the cabin was lit by a thick wedge of sun that held the window over the bed in its grip and set fire to the jars of honey on the shelf behind the stove. He lay there a minute, a long minute, Pamela's sweet palpable form pressed to his till they were like two spoons in a drawer, and watched the sun on the wall as if he'd been locked in a closet all his life and never seen anything like it before. They'd slept late, but that was the way it was in summer-you stayed up half the night with the sun looping overhead and then slept in till the next day took hold of you. He had a hangover-and the half-formed feeling of shame and unworthiness that goes with it-but he wasn't going to let it affect him, not one iota. Today was going to be Pamela's day, all day, a day that would make up for yesterday, and if she wanted to just sit naked in the sun and weave slips of forget-me-nots or bluebells into her pubic hair like Lady Chatterley (another of his enduring fantasies), then that was all right with him. Of course, just thinking about it got him hard and he woke her to the slow gentle propulsion of his lovemaking.

And what did she want to do after he served her a plate of eggs, bacon and potatoes fried in four tablespoons of semi-rancid lard whose origins even he suspected? She wanted to do, to make, to get going on the rest of their lives, setting one brick atop another-or log, as the case may be. “Show me where the add-on goes,” she said, and she was already out the door, in the knee-high weed, pacing off a room she could see in her mind, a cleaner, airier space that would more than double what they had and give them a proper bedroom with a real and actual freestanding bed in it. And shelves, miles of shelves, and built-in drawers maybe. Bentwood rockers. Little tables. She had that little-table look in her eye, he could see it, could see the way she was calculating.

“You want to catch the sun,” he said.

She shaded her eyes with the slab of her hand and grinned at him. Wildflowers rose to her shins. Her skin glistened like buttered toast. He thought he'd never seen a picture so ready for framing. “So we build out to the east, then?”

“Depends on whether you like morning sun or afternoon. Of course, in the winter, we're talking moonlight. You ever been out here in winter-away from town, I mean?” He was thinking of Jill now, _Jill wants out.__ Everybody wanted out when the night set in, the night that never let up, when the cabin walls seemed to shrink till you felt like you were in one of those Flash Gordon serials where the walls came together like a vise to squeeze the pulp out of you. Flash always managed to escape, though. So did the better part of the women who came into the country, which was why there were three bush-crazy bachelors for every female in Boynton. The night took inner resources, and most people, women especially, didn't have anything more than outer resources to keep them going-shopping, gossip and restaurants with sconces on the walls, to be specific.

“I've been to Boynton,” she said. “I'm _from__ Anchorage.”

He wanted to explain to her that that wasn't enough, that was nothing, because in a town or a city you could always go to the bar or to a movie or watch TV, and sure, you wanted to see some sunshine, and maybe you flew to Hawaii, if you had the wherewithal, but the fact that it was dark day and night outside your gas-heated apartment's double-paned windows was no more than an afterthought. He wanted to tell her about the couple Jill had known who thought they'd try pioneering in an old miner's cabin up along the Porcupine River drainage and nearly fucked themselves to death out of sheer boredom, four, five, six times a day, till they were both rubbed to the consistency of flank steak and came out of there in spring looking like survivors of a concentration camp. After which they got divorced and probably went off to work in the doughnut industry. He held his peace, though, because she was too pretty and too pleased with herself and this wasn't the time or the place. This was the time for optimism, for love-for beginnings, not endings.

“I don't know,” she said, “I guess morning sun. What about you?”

“Afternoon sun's my ticket, which is why I put that little window to the west over there, but then your weather's coming down out of the northwest, and you can never get the window caulked up tight enough, not when the wind starts blowing.”

She wasn't listening. She'd balanced herself on one sylphine leg, a bare foot braced against her knee in the pose of a wading bird. She was looking off to the south, where a stand of black spruce clawed at the sky a hundred soggy yards off. “Is that what we're going to cut, that stand over there?” she said.

He came up to her then, took hold of her, rocked her in his arms. The trees were two hundred years old, at least, though they were no taller and no bigger around than fifteen-year plantation pines in the lower forty-eight. “I don't know,” he said, “those trees are awful pretty to look at. I thought we'd go upriver, maybe float some logs down like they did in the lumberjack days.”

“You've done that?”

No, he hadn't. He'd taken the wood for the present cabin from what was at hand, but he justified that to himself on the grounds that a cabin needed a clearing to stand in, and there were the stumps out there in the circumvallate yard, buried in fireweed, monkshood and yarrow. But it seemed like an idea, and he could see the two of them working side by side across the river from Roy's old place, maybe, he felling the trees and she knocking back the branches, and then just rolling them into the river and guiding them down with the canoe and some rope and maybe the gaff or a notched pole. It would be more work, especially down at this end, because the logs would take on water weight and they'd be a bitch to drag uphill, but then they'd need to dry out and season anyway. “Sure,” he said, “sure. It's no big deal. Especially now I have a royally tough bushwoman to do it all for me.”

For the next two weeks, he forgot all about his dead dogs, or at least he tried to. He and Pamela went up the Thirtymile each day and took white spruce off the riverbank for the roof poles, and black spruce that was maybe ten inches in diameter (and growing from seed when George Washington wasn't even born yet) from the hills stacked up in back of it. They packed a lunch and sometimes a supper too, and twice they camped under the stars in a steady drizzle of mosquitoes. The trees went down like cardboard and Pamela hacked tirelessly at the branches with a hatchet, the little-table look in her eyes day and night. They both felt the work, in their arms and shoulders and the rawness of their hands that pussed up, blistered over and toughened, and though they were exhausted by the time they quit for the night-sometimes as late as eight or nine-they found time to make love, in a sleeping bag or right out there on the sandy bank of the river, as if they'd invented the whole idea of sex and had to keep trying it out to make sure they'd got it right.

At the end of those two weeks they had a pretty fair collection of logs hauled up on the bar that fronted the cabin, and they were feeling pretty good about themselves, or at least that was the way Sess saw it. Pamela seemed to be enjoying herself, and never mind that she was a city girl and had her degree and could have been tanning herself at some resort on the Côte d'Or. She worked like a man, like two men, and she never stinted and never said quit until he did. And when the logs hung up on rocks or sleepers, as they invariably did, she was as likely as he to plunge chest-deep into the scour of forty-five-degree water to free them.

They were sitting there atop their log pile at the end of the last evening's run, forking up squares of the cold macaroni, tuna and cheese she'd made in the glare of morning, and looking up to the cabin where these logs would fit right into place, the worst part of the work behind them, when Pamela, in her khaki shorts and too-tight T-shirt, with her lumberman's hands and her hair pulled back tight, paused between bites and said it was time to go into town.

He gave her a look. The logs had to be peeled with an adze, hauled up the hill and stacked to dry, then notched and set in place. Then chinked. Then the roof had to go up and they'd both of them bust a double hernia working the center pole into place, if women got hernias, that is. “What for?” he said.

“And I don't just mean Boynton.”

“You want to go all the way into Fairbanks?”

She just nodded.

“Okay,” he said, and he would have driven her to Topeka and back if that was what she wanted, “I'll give it another try. What for? Shopping?”

“Oh, that's part of it,” she said, setting her plate aside. She perched atop the pile of river-run logs like a genie, as if all she'd had to do was snap her fingers to make them appear. “I do want some things to feminize that coot's den of yours, and stock up on groceries too-we might be eating moose all winter, but I see nothing wrong with some stewed vegetables, rice, condiments, pickles and all the rest to go with it. Lasagna. Spaghetti. Hershey bars. Saltwater taffy. Marshmallows.”

He pushed himself up, stretched his legs-he'd been sitting in one place too long and he felt the stiffness radiate from his backside and down both his thighs. “So that's it, marshmallows. The cat's out of the bag. Me and my wife are going to the big city for marshmallows.”

She gave him a grin that made him feel all over again what he already suspected-that he was no longer in charge of his own life and never again would be. “That's right,” she said, and paused to watch a cloud shaped like a wedding ring-or maybe a noose-blow over. “We're going to town for marshmallows.” Then her voice dropped and the grin disappeared. “And dogs. Don't you think it's time?”

They left for Boynton at six the next morning, and by eight-thirty they were beaching the canoe and striding hand in hand up the hill to the shack. And that was an odd feeling for both of them-a sentimental feeling, nostalgic already. The vegetation was trampled in a wide oval where the dancing had gone on, and the odd bottle or spangle of confetti caught the sun from clumps of fireweed along the margins, artifacts of the ritual they'd enacted there two weeks ago. You could see where the birds had been at the flung rice, filling their crops to bursting, and there was a crescent-shaped depression where the barbecue pit had been. It was filled with cold white ash, through which scraps of charred bone protruded like the trunks of miniature trees in a burned-over forest, and the ash was crisscrossed with the tracks of weasel and ground squirrel. All the rest was gone, like a gypsy circus, like a magic act. “It was one hell of a party,” Sess said, “and I bet nobody's going to forget it.”

“Right,” she said, giving him a sidelong look. “Till the next one.”

They poked aimlessly around the shack for a few minutes, silently taking inventory and setting aside things-tools, mainly-they might want to haul back up to the cabin, and then they leaned into the screen door at Richard Schrader's place and chorused his name until it became apparent that he was either dead and stuffed or out somewhere on business. His pickup stood in the front yard-the pickup that was essential to the expedition under way since Pamela's Gremlin now belonged to the short-order cook at the Northern Lights Diner on C Street in downtown Anchorage and Sess hadn't owned a car in three years-and so they reasoned he hadn't gone far. They further reasoned that they deserved a drink after a beerless run down the river under a spitting sky, and Pamela wanted to call her mother to make sure she'd got home safe and to reassure her that all the tricky business of love had worked out to her satisfaction. And Sess was fine with that. He was fine with everything. The rain would be good for the garden, they'd just put in two weeks' work that was like no honeymoon anybody ever spent, there were some faces at the Three Pup and the Nougat he wouldn't mind reacquainting himself with in the afterglow of the wedding, and though he wouldn't breathe a word of it to anybody, he was going to need to acquire some dogs, and Fairbanks was the place to do it, where nobody would be asking any questions.

He dropped Pamela at the general store, where Wetzel Setzler had a ham radio set up to patch into the phone lines Bell Telephone so generously provided for everybody but the renegades, anarchists, xenophobes and wild hairs who chose to live at the dead and final end of the last road in the country, and then he ambled over to the Nougat, just to stick his head in the door. He had no expectation of running into Joe Bosky, because Joe Bosky was a coward and a backstabber and he wouldn't show his face after what he'd done, but Sess wouldn't mind scaring up Richard to see what the chances of borrowing the pickup were.

The Nougat featured the same setup as the Three Pup, only it was half the size, didn't have a kitchen and limited its offerings to booze and potato chips out of the eight-ounce bag, with cellophane-wrapped beer nuts and stale pretzels for the connoisseurs. A pair of mounted caribou heads stood watch over the bar and a moose with soot-blackened jowls presided over the woodstove. Clarence Ford, who owned the establishment, had meant to call it “The Nugget,” but orthography wasn't his strong suit.

When Sess stepped into the early-morning gloom of the place, there was nobody there but Iron Steve and an Indian he didn't recognize, both of them passed out at the bar. Wetzel Setzler's youngest, Solly, was in the back room, rattling bottles around in their slit-top cardboard boxes and making notations on a steno pad. Six hundred billion flies-at least-rumbled against the windowpanes and made a collective noise like a cello at mid-range. Iron Steve's breathing was slow and stertorous, every second breath catching on the horns of a snore. The whole place smelled of extinguished cigarettes-old extinguished cigarettes-and it was a sad smell, a reminder of all the traffic that had gone down here, the elbows propped, the glasses drained, the arguments, the bullshit, the women won and women lost. At quarter past nine in the morning, to a dogless man with his lungs full of sweet river air, it was almost depressing.

“Hey, Solly,” Sess called in an exaggerated whisper, lest he should wake anybody prematurely, “can a man get a beer out here? Or is this the place people come to die of thirst?”

Solly Setzler was twenty-four years old, with his father's ski-slope shoulders, milky eyes and colorless eyebrows, and nobody really thought it odd that he worked for the competition because it was a kind of miracle that anybody at all would want to stand behind the bar of a roadhouse this time of year. His hair was a miracle in itself, the exact color of fiberglass insulation, and his eyes lacked a human sheen. He'd been home-schooled, and he was as misinformed, brooding and ignorant as anybody Sess had ever met, especially anybody that young. Now he looked up with a wrung-out neck, like a bird in the nest craning for a grub in the parental beak. “Sess,” he said, looking lost in the bar he'd been working for three years, as if he'd awakened there out of a dream, “I thought you went upriver.”

He didn't know where Richard Schrader was, but he located an Oly and cracked it and never thought to offer up a celebratory shot for the newlywed, which Sess would have declined in any case because it was early yet and he had a drive ahead of him and all the responsibilities of a married man who couldn't just come into town and go on a bender like some talk-starved bush crazy with ingrown toenails and hair coming out his ears and nostrils.

At the Three Pup, he ran into Skid Denton, who seemed to have changed his allegiance from the Nougat, at least since Lynette had come to town. Skid Denton was having a breakfast of steak and eggs drowned in Tabasco and chopped onion, along with home fries, toast and a mug of beer with a shot of tomato juice in it-“Bloody beer,” he called it, whenever anybody bothered to ask, “-it's how I get my vitamin C.” He looked up from his plate to inform Sess that Richard Schrader had gone downriver to his fish camp in the expectation that the kings would be running any day now. Lynette, slouching over the bar so that her sidearm rode up her skinny hip, confirmed the intelligence. “Some tourist,” she said, as if she'd lived here fifty years, “caught a thirty-two pounder right off the gravel bar out there not two days ago. Or was it three?”

He had another Oly, just to balance out the one he'd thrown down at the Nougat-spread the trade around, that was his motto-and nobody offered to buy him a celebratory shot here either, and that was just fine, as per his resolution, so he went back up the road into town to check on Pamela at the general store. He wanted to tell her the bad news-no truck available-and let her stock up on what she would, because if they weren't going to Fairbanks where there was free and open competition, they'd have to pay Wetzel Setzler's captive prices, at least for now. Of course, in the winter they wouldn't have any choice, and if they didn't have dogs they wouldn't be sledding down the river to Boynton in any case, so there would be no picking up the odd forty-ounce can of Greek olives that you could expire for the want of or socializing at the roadhouse or at Richard's or anyplace else.

But then, two beers sitting pleasantly on his stomach, a light breeze off the river ruffling his hair as he put one foot in front of the other and the near shacks of the paint-blistered town rose up to greet him like so many old friends and boon companions, he had a thought involving a prime 1965 fastback Mustang he just happened to know about. It was a criminal thought, but then one good criminal act deserved another, didn't it?

17

To Pamela's mind, the inside of the general store was a perfect example of order in chaos. She'd always believed in the kind of probity that comes of sparseness and the ascetic lifestyle, and she'd kept her Anchorage apartment free of the clutter and kitsch that dominated her friends' places-the soapstone and walrus tusk carvings, the polished caribou racks, taxidermy displays and native scenes in birchbark frames, not to mention the stereos and Crock-Pots and closets full of shoes, handbags, cableknit sweaters and beaded mukluks. Things oppressed her. Man-made things, trinkets and gizmos and the newest and the latest, all the incalculable piles of junk every good red-blooded American needed to survive. She wasn't buying into it, and she never had. What she admired was the kind of self-sufficiency of the early prospectors who thought nothing of going out for a month at a time with little more than a gun, a length of fishing line, a sack of rice, six ounces of salt and some loose tea in a tin. Strip it down to the basics. Live off what the land gives you.

Still, she had to admire what Wetzel Setzler had done with the two low-slung rooms of the big blackened overblown log structure that dominated the main street-the only street, really-of Boynton. Sess had told her the place was a remnant from the time at the turn of the century when Boynton boasted twelve hundred people, an opera house and twenty-eight saloons and the sourdoughs' pans were still showing color along the Kandik and the Charley, a time when the Northern Navigation Company ran thirty-two stern-wheel steamboats up and down the river to accommodate the traffic, and that made her wonder all the more what these hordes of people were thinking when they came swarming into a territory they didn't know the first thing about. But then she already knew the answer: rape and plunder, that was what they were thinking, and nothing beyond. Take the gold out of the country, take the meat, take the furs, and then fold up your tents and vanish to Cleveland, to Sacramento, to Montpelier and Miami Beach.

Wetzel Setzler probably had three thousand items on display, from spark plugs, cartridges, fishing lures, beaver traps and crescent wrenches to maraschino cherries, insulated socks, overalls, canned wax beans, hard liquor and sixteen different varieties of candy and gum, and every one of them in its separate bin and clearly marked with a price in hand-printed block letters so uniform they might have been stamped on by the manufacturer. There was a stove in the middle of the place with a couple of chairs set round it, a dangle of things trailing from hooks nailed into the overhead beams and a glass-front cooler with soft drinks, canned beer and even milk, butter and whipping cream brought in once a week from a supermarket in Fairbanks and sold at three times the price. If it weren't for the cooler the place could have jumped right out of the pages of a book of old-time photos or maybe even daguerreotypes, the kind of thing her mother always had out on the coffee table for guests to thumb through, _How Our Forefathers Lived__ or _Country Stores of the Old West.__

When Pamela stepped in the door, there was nobody in the place, though it was ten o'clock in the morning and people were moving up and down the street outside like bloodclots working their slow way through the veins of the town. A bell over the door announced her presence, but no one-not Wetzel Setzler or a shopboy, if the breed existed this far out-appeared from the back room to acknowledge her. It was preternaturally still, as if the place existed outside of time; the only light was what spilled in through the windows. The thought came into her head that she could rob them blind, take anything she wanted, take all she could carry and set up a rival store across the street, and they wouldn't be any the wiser. “Hello?” she called. “Anybody here?”

She found herself staring into the jaws of what must have been a bear trap dangling from a chain overhead, a huge dark wedge of blue-black steel, faintly glistening in the morning light. Here was a trap that meant business, lethal and unyielding, and she imagined it artfully buried next to a carcass or along a game trail like the discharge of a bad dream, and for just a moment, looking into its teeth, she felt the cruelty of it, and was this what Sess had been trying to tell her the night they'd got drunk? It was a trap. A necessary accoutrement to the wild life. You trapped things and then you killed them, skinned them and fed them to the dogs, and the money from the skins bought you sugar, coffee, cartridges, more traps. That was what she was buying into, and it was a matter of choice, of her own pleasure and inclination, as much as it was about survival-all those little lives would feed her own, as if she were some god on high demanding sacrifice.

Next to the trap, nailed to the swell of the shellacked beam as if to make light of the whole business, was an old-fashioned bicycle horn with its tarnished brass tube and black rubber bulb. Before she could think, she was reaching up to squeeze the bulb and a low flatulent wheeze of a sound announced her presence. “Hello?” she called again.

No response.

But maybe they weren't open yet, maybe that was it. Maybe they were all so trusting they just left their doors unlocked up and down the street and people could come and go as they pleased, pick out what they wanted and pay on the honor system. There was a door at the rear of the place marked OFFICE in the same meticulous block letters that set out the prices on the bins, and she went to it and tried the handle. She rapped formally with the knuckles of her left hand even as she pushed the door open and found herself on the threshold of a windowless den with a desk, a filing cabinet and cardboard boxes of liquor stacked floor to ceiling against the walls. There was a smell of burnt wax or lantern oil, something chemical, at any rate, mingled with the scents of Pine-Sol and the mold it was meant to defeat.

As she leaned into the doorway, the floorboards groaned beneath her feet and she stopped where she was, embarrassed suddenly. She had no business in the lair of a man she barely knew, his socks and yellowed T-shirt laid over the back of the chair to dry as if he'd done his washing one piece at a time, his tooth-worried pipes laid out in a row atop the filing cabinet beside a framed photo of his younger self and a woman twice his size in a print dress, both of them glaring into the sun as if they'd just emerged from a cave. There was a pair of boots in the corner, pipe cleaners in a jar, a dismantled fishing reel laid out on a piece of newspaper. She saw the radio then, right there on the desk with a set of headphones and a mike attached to it, and that impressed her in the way of the bear trap-this was a different world out here, a different life, and it was going to take some getting used to. Of course it was. And her mother could wait, she decided, thinking it would be cheaper to call from a real phone in Fairbanks, anyway-_if__ they could dig up Richard Schrader, and _if__ his truck was available-and she backed out of the office and eased the door shut behind her.

She called out once more-“Hello? Is anybody here?”-and then she drifted down the aisles, lost amidst the galvanized buckets and Blazo cans, the deck screws, pickaxes, fishing lures and cellophane-wrapped loaves of six-day-old bread. Just for an instant, she felt a pang. She did want to talk to her mother-it was vital-and not so much to reassure her as to let her know that she could succeed where her mother had failed, that she knew what she was doing and it was all turning out right, better than right. She was happy. Ecstatic. And her mother ought to know that.

Her mother had seemed to approve of Sess in a general way, but she'd been leery from the start about the whole idea of living in the bush. “I had enough of that when your father was prospecting all those summers when you were little,” she said, and it was like a litany, like a catechism Pamela could have repeated word for word. “Oh, it might have been a lark for you two girls, but for me it was just another cross to bear, trying to cook for four over an open fire, staying up half the night swatting mosquitoes and wondering if he was ever going to come back, if he'd broken a leg or been attacked by a bear or drowned fording a creek, and that was the worst of it, to think of him floating out there like some waterlogged piece of yesterday's meat, food for the ravens, for the ants-”

Pamela had been young then, just eight the first year they went into the backcountry, and her only memories of that time were happy ones. She remembered the three of them-she and her mother and Pris-sprawled in the big canvas tent while the rain made a whole Latin rhythm section out of the walls, her mother dealing out the cards for pinochle, poker, hearts or euchre while the smell of ginger-marinated rabbit or squirrel stew ruminated in the corners. There were oatmeal cookies baked to sweet density in a camp oven, brownies, even cakes. She read all of Nancy Drew, the Brontë sisters, Sherlock Holmes. They swam, fished, canoed, and for the month of June and half of September, her mother led her and Pris through their arithmetic, their spelling, their essays on Andrew “Old Hickory” Jackson and Thomas Paine. It was a kind of dream. And, as in a dream, the memories came back to her in fragments of color and emotion, one moment blurred into the next in a montage that spanned all those six summers till her father wandered off and never came back again.

She didn't know how long she drifted through the store in a fog, fingering one object after another as if she'd never before in her life seen hinges or threepenny nails, but the soft, almost apologetic toot of a horn from beyond the front window brought her out of it. There was a car out on the street-white, with blue stripes, some sort of racing car that was totally out of place in a town where vehicles were worked like dogs and if you didn't have a pickup you had a wagon. At first she thought the man behind the wheel must have been a tourist come up from Anchorage or even the lower forty-eight, but he seemed to be gesturing to her through the intervening lens of the windshield and there was that toot again, insinuating, persistent, familiar even. It took her a moment, and then she had to laugh to think she didn't even recognize her own husband, because there he was, leaning out the window now and calling her to him with an urgent rippling curl of the fingers of both hands. All right. But here she was in front of the precisely labeled bin of Hershey bars, no shopkeeper in sight and a long ride ahead of her. She took two without thinking and had almost made it to the door when she caught herself. And though Sess tapped twice more at the horn, she turned away, tripped down the aisle to where the cash register sat untended on the back counter and laid two quarters beside it.

Outside, in the light of day, the car looked even stranger, as if it had been set down here in the heart of the country by some demented pit crew with access to one of those big Huey transport helicopters you saw in the TV coverage of the war. It just did not compute-a race car in Boynton, one hundred and sixty miles from the nearest paved road? She slid into the seat beside Sess and handed him a Hershey bar, even as he put the thing in gear and tore a patch of gravel out of the road. “Nice car,” she said, her shoulders pinned to the seat. “Where'd you get it?”

He was tearing open the candy with his teeth, racing the engine in first gear and using his left hand and right elbow to steer the car through a series of ruts and bottomless puddles and out onto the Fairbanks Road. He hit second gear then and the chassis shivered over a stretch of washboard ridges, mud flying, stones beating at the fenders like machine-gun fire, and they shot past the Three Pup before she could even begin to think he might be evading the question. “Make your phone call?” he shouted over the roar.

“There was nobody there,” she said, and the tension of the springs over the unforgiving surface keyed her words to a shaky vibrato. He hadn't slowed down yet, the speedometer jumping at eighty on a road that was barely safe at half that, and what was he up to, her husband with the big hands and pelt of hair and the grin etched in profile as he gnawed at the chocolate out of one corner of his mouth? Was he trying to impress her like some teenager out on a date in his father's souped-up street machine? Was he turning adolescent on her, was that it, or was he just shot full of high spirits? Whatever the cause, he was going to tear the car apart if he didn't slow down-or maybe kill them both. She took his arm. “Sess,” she said, “Sess, slow down, will you?”

Immediately the speedometer jerked down to forty and he turned to her with a grin. “Like it?” he asked, a froth of chocolate and saliva obliterating his front teeth so that he looked like some mugging comedian on TV, like Red Skelton or she didn't know who. There was something wild in his eyes, some bubbling up of emotion she hadn't seen before, and she reminded herself that she was still learning to read him-this was her honeymoon, after all. He was her husband and she loved him, but how well did she really know him after two weeks?

She gave him the grin back, gave his wrist a squeeze where it rested on the gearshift as the wheels beat at the road and the road beat back. “Sure, it's nice. But there's no backseat or anything, so how are we going to-”

“Dogs, you mean? Hell, we'll strap them to the roof.” He goosed the accelerator and the car shot forward with a jerk and then fell back again as he let up. He hadn't stopped grinning yet, and she was going to repeat her question-_Where'd you get the car?__-when she noticed that there was no key in the ignition, just a shining empty slot staring at her like a blind eye. And below it, below the steering column, there was some sort of plug hanging loose in a bundle of dangling wires.

A moment slipped by, scrub on either side of them, trees flapping like banners in a stiff breeze. Then he was fishing under the seat for something, his head cocked to keep one eye on the road. “Here,” he said, straightening up and handing her a can of Oly, “I already got a head start on you and didn't we say we'd reward ourselves with a couple beers this morning?” He stuck a second can between his thighs and worked the punch top while the car fishtailed across the road and righted itself again.

She accepted the beer, popped it open, took a sip. “You're drunk, is that it? Is that why you're acting like this?”

The grin had faded while he was rummaging under the seat, but now it came back, tighter than ever. “Hell, no, Pamela-I mean, two beers and a chocolate bar on a mostly empty stomach? Just feeling good, that's all. Super. On top of the world.”

She cradled her beer, studying him. “Where'd you get the car, Sess?”

He looked straight ahead, the grin frozen on his lips. He shrugged, but didn't shift his eyes to her. “Around.”

“Oh, yeah?” she said, and this wasn't cute, not anymore. This was criminal, that was what it was. Irresponsible. Wrong. “Then why are there no keys in it? And what's that mess of wires down there?”

Another shrug. He put the beer to his lips and gunned the engine again. “I borrowed it.”

“Borrowed it? From who?”

“You want to see if we can scare up anything on the radio?”

“From who, Sess?”

Now he looked at her and the grin was gone. Something-a tawny streak-darted across the roadway in front of them. “Joe Bosky.”

“Joe Bosky?” she repeated, as if she hadn't heard him right, and maybe she hadn't-maybe the roar of the engine and the wind through the open window was playing tricks with her ears.

He didn't say anything, just stared at the broad brown tongue of the road before them.

“You mean Joe Bosky who you were ready to kill a couple weeks ago? That Joe Bosky?”

She studied him in profile a moment and there was no give in him at all. “You're talking grand theft auto here, Sess. You're talking jail time. Is it worth it? Is it really worth it just to, to what-show off? Be the big man? Is that what you're doing? Showing off for me?”

“Tit for tat. You hurt me, I hurt you. It's the law of the jungle out here, Pamela, and you better get used to it.”

“Don't give me that crap,” she said, “don't even think about it,” but they drove on, going too fast, and the stones flew up to nick the paint and corrupt the body of Joe Bosky's 1965 Shelby Mustang GT350, which he'd bought the day he set foot in San Diego after his second tour in Vietnam with the money his dead mother left him, and which he'd shipped up to Anchorage and driven at twenty-five miles an hour out the Fairbanks Road to store in the only garage in Boynton, courtesy of Wetzel Setzler and a ten-dollar-a-month rental fee. She didn't know what to say. She was furious. All this was so childish, two overgrown boys bullying each other, and what did Sess hope to gain? His dogs were dead and he was taking it out on Joe Bosky's car. But what if Joe Bosky got wind of it because Sess had been right out there in the main street honking the horn for all the world to see? What if he got Wetzel Setzler to call the sheriff on his ham radio? Then what?

“Stop the car, Sess,” she said. “Stop the car. I'm not going to be party to this.”

His hands choked the wheel. He stared straight ahead. “You already are.”

There was a patrol car sitting alongside the Steese Highway when they came into Fairbanks, a long, low, ominous-looking sedan with the sun glancing off the windshield so you couldn't see inside. Just the sight of it made her heart skip, but Sess eased off the accelerator, stuck an arm out the window and gave the invisible cop a hearty wave. She didn't dare turn her head, but she watched the patrol car in the side mirror as if she could fix it there by force of will, all the while expecting it to spring to life in a fierce tumult of light and noise. Nothing happened. The police car receded in the mirror, lifeless as a pile of stone. A pickup truck passed them. They went round a bend. Sess put both hands on the wheel and drove like an egg farmer on his way to market.

They had lunch out on the deck at the Pumphouse, her favorite place in Fairbanks, and the sun on her face and the breeze and the two beers she tipped back went a long way toward calming her. She got a copy of the paper and they scanned the classifieds under “Pets,” but none of the dogs sounded promising to Sess-he was being difficult now, all the gaiety gone out of him-and they could both see that the day was going to be a waste. He kept saying they ought to be back at home, setting out their gill nets, but then he'd tip back his beer and drain his shot glass and rumble that there was no point in worrying about salmon or anything else if you didn't have dogs because if you didn't have dogs you were doomed to failure anyway and the whole idea of living in the wild was just a pipe dream, a joke. It depressed her to see him like this-worse, it scared her. He was her rock and foundation, the dominant male she'd chosen out of a whole pack of lesser males, the man she'd been waiting for all her life to lead her into the wilderness, and if he was defeated, she was defeated too. The waitress was hovering, and she could see in his eyes that he was about to order another round, so she said, “Listen, what about the pound?”

“I don't even know where it is,” he said, throwing up obstacles.

“Oh, you mean the _dog__ pound?” the waitress put in, reaching for the bottles on the table and giving each an exploratory shake. “I can tell you where that is, because my boyfriend and me just found the cutest little toy poodle there-Mitzi. That's what we call her. Wait. You want to see a picture?”

The pound was behind some sort of factory or warehouse on a piece of flat foot-worn ground devoid of trees or even shrubs, a squat prefabricated building in front of which a single battered panel truck was parked at a skewed angle, as if the driver had run off and abandoned it. The railroad tracks ran within a hundred feet of the back end of the place and the boxcars sat there humped up to the horizon like dominoes. Sess didn't even want to get out of the car, but she prodded him, and a moment later they were standing there in the lot, gravel crunching under their feet, and she was thinking this was about as far from the Thirtymile as you could get and still be in the state of Alaska. An ammoniac smell hit them then, carried on a light breeze with a handful of mosquitoes in it. There was a feeble anguished sound of yipping and whining, and it seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. “What can we lose?” she said, trying to mollify him as he gave her a glum look over the roof of the ridiculous car.

Inside, the smell was concentrated, and she thought of the only big-city zoo she'd ever been to, in San Francisco, where the ratty animals lay festering in concrete troughs and the multiplied stink of them-a stink so intense it made her panicky-was the only lasting impression she had of the place, of the whole city, in fact. The floor was concrete, the light inadequate. A blocky woman with pouffed-up hair and teardrop glasses grinned at them from behind a plywood counter with a Formica top. “You here for an adoption?” she asked over the racket of the dogs, which had gone up a notch since they'd stepped in the door. “Or just thinking about it maybe?”

Then they were walking down a cement corridor between rows of mesh cages, dogs of every size and description leaping at the wire, yodeling, yapping, whining, their paws like windmills, their eyes alive with eagerness and hope. The woman stooped to one or another of them, cooing, and they poked their shining noses through the mesh to worship her fingers and the back of her hand. There was a terrific scrabbling of nails as the dogs fought for purchase on the wet concrete. One of them, a beagle mix with flapping ears and deep, liquid eyes, clambered up on the backs of three others to stick its snout through the gap where the cage door had pulled back from its hinges, and Pamela slid her hand in against the wall to feel the dog's appreciation, its pink tongue extracting every molecule of flavor from her skin. She wanted to adopt them all.

“Now, Buster,” the woman was saying, pressing her hand to the mesh where a white-faced retriever crouched over its bad hips, “Buster's the sweetest thing you'd ever want to see. He'd make a perfect house dog. And he loves kids. You two have kids?”

Sess was right there with her, but he didn't seem to hear her. He was focused on a dog in the back of the cage, a lean big-headed thing with paws like griddles that couldn't have been more than eight or ten months old. “That one,” he said, “can I see that one?”

The woman looked dubious. “You mean Peaches? That's Peaches,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at Pamela. “He's not a house dog, but if you live in the country and you've got some space, well, I guess he'd be fine. He's shy, that's all.”

“That's because he's got wolf in him,” Sess said, and his mood had lifted-she could hear it in his voice. “You see the angularity of those back legs, Pamela? And the snout? The pointy snout means he's got longer vertebrae so his chest muscles fan out and he can really cover ground. That's a fast dog there. And he'll pull too.” And then he was in the cage, three or four dogs swarming at his hands, tails whacking. The wolf dog shrank back in the corner and Sess went down into a crouch, squatting over his knees and extending his right hand. “Peaches,” he said, his voice burnished and low, “what kind of a name is that for a dog? Come here, boy, come on.” It took a minute, Pamela and the woman watching from outside the cage, and then the dog came to him, five feet across the cement floor, in the submissive posture of a wolf, creeping on its elbows and dragging its belly. Sess smoothed back its ears, ran a hand over its snout. “I'll take this one,” he said.

At the grocery he wouldn't let her get more than they could carry on their backs, and he didn't offer any explanations and he didn't bother coming in with her to push the stainless steel cart up and down the aisles of plenty like every other husband and wife in creation. He stayed out in the dirt lot with the dog-at the very end of it where it trailed off into knee-high weed-and though he'd brought a homemade leather leash and collar along, he didn't use it, not yet. He controlled the dog with his voice alone, and when she went in the store he was just squatting there, watching it, the soft soothing flow of his words working on the animal like an incantation. She could have bought the store out, but she had to settle for some cosmetics, toothpaste, fresh fruit and vegetables-which she was already starved for-and as much pasta and stewed tomatoes and tomato sauce as she reasonably thought they could carry. When she came out of the store wheeling a cart, Sess rose to his feet and crossed the lot to her, never even glancing back at the dog, but the dog put its head down and followed him.

On the way back, he was nothing short of exuberant, chattering away at her as if he'd just won the lottery. The groceries were stuffed down behind the seat, and the dog-he wouldn't demean it by calling it “Peaches”-sat like a tensed coil in her lap, its head out the window. He drove slower now, but still shot ahead in bursts and cranked through the gears as if he wanted to rip them out of the transmission, slamming into potholes and flinging up sheets of coffee-colored water as if the car were a skiff shearing across a muddy inlet. Every other minute he'd reach out a hand to stroke her arm or pat the dog. Before long, he was whistling.

“Trotter,” he said, “what about Trotter? That's a good name. Descriptive, you know? Or Lucius. I've always liked Lucius. As a name, I mean-”

She'd almost forgotten they were in a stolen car, playing a dangerous game with a man who put bullets in the skulls of another man's dogs and that there was retribution to come, because she was in this moment, now, and they were both working on fresh beers to celebrate the fact of this sterling dog in her lap and the two others Sess had paid five dollars each for against the day he'd be back with Richard Schrader's pickup. “How about Yukon King?” she said.

He let out a laugh and reached again to stroke the dog, which reeled its head in to give him a look of subjection and fealty. “Never thought of that one. But sure, I mean, what could be more fitting than to name a real dog after some actor dog that probably couldn't get out of the way of a sled if it ran him over, and by the way, did you know that Lassie is really three different dogs and they're all male?”

She didn't know. But she did know the origin of the feud between him and the black-haired man, because he'd told her over his second morose shot of Wild Turkey at the Pumphouse while she read off the descriptions of the dogs for sale or trade or “free to good home,” and he rejected them one after another before she could get to the end of the first line. Two winters ago Joe Bosky had appeared in Boynton dressed up like something out of the pages of _National Geographic__ in a caribou-skin parka lined with wolf and a rifle slung over one shoulder. The plane that delivered him hadn't even refueled yet for the return trip to Fairbanks, and he was already hip-deep in bullshit at the Nougat, with the deed to Tilda Runyon's cabin spread out on the bar-the cabin she'd left to her half-breed son, who was a drunk and a gambler, a thief and liar, and who'd apparently been in the Corps with Bosky. What was he doing in the country in the middle of February? He was going to live wild, that was what. And he moved into Tilda Runyon's cabin, chopped wood, drank to excess and lived off what the mail plane brought him two days a week. By the first summer he was building himself a cabin on Woodchopper Creek and making money hand over fist flying tourists and fishermen into the backcountry in the Cessna 180 he floated in on one fine day, and by the fall he was wandering the hills and watercourses, scouting out the country for signs of fur. He settled finally on Roy Sender's trapline, the trapline Roy Sender had cleared and maintained and expanded over the course of forty-odd years and ceded to Sess when he left the country. The first winter, it was stolen bait and sprung traps and no evidence of a man's footprints in the snow, as if the perpetrator could fly, because Joe Bosky was clever and a quick study and the country grew out of his skin. By the second winter, he was running his own traps and poaching from Sess's.

“You didn't know that about Lassie? You really didn't?”

She shook her head. “You read it someplace?”

“I read it someplace. _TV Guide,__ most likely.”

“_TV Guide?__ Why in god's name would you read _TV Guide__ when you've never had a TV in your adult life and never will?”

He gave her a look. Shrugged. “I was flat broke one winter when I was still in Fairbanks-remember, I told you? Drinking too much, and out of money for drink. This bookstore had a box of old _TV Guide__s they were giving away. I must have read every one cover to cover. Twice. At least twice. You know _Citizen Kane__?”

A black-and-white image came into her head, the darkened room, the roll and flicker of the tube and her mother with her feet up, doing her nails, the jowly glow of Orson Welles's face, the stark rectilinear halls of a mansion whole armies could camp in. “I've seen it. Or parts of it, anyway.”

“Nineteen forty-one. Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten. Directed by Welles. Four stars. _The Mummy's Ghost__? Nineteen forty-four. Lon Chaney Jr. Two stars. _The Savage Innocents,__ Anthony Quinn, 1960-and they must have played that one six times a week-three stars. I could tell you the ratings for every movie ever made, but I doubt if I've seen more than maybe fifty of them in my whole life-and that was when I was a kid at home with my parents.”

The dog shifted in her lap. “You miss it-TV, movies?”

She expected him to say no, to give her the usual bush crazy's party line-too busy out there, too beautiful, the whole natural world better than anything you could ever hope to see on a little screen and the aurora borealis blooming overhead in living color too-but he surprised her. “On a moonless January night with the stove so hot the iron glows and the floor so cold you don't want to get out of bed to save your life, you miss just about everything.”

Then they were silent and the dog hung his head out the window and the sun defeated the clouds to light the road ahead of them like an expressway and Joe Bosky's Mustang lurched into the ruts and sought out the puddles. Traffic wasn't a problem. They overtook two cars going their way-probably heading for Boynton Hot Springs, where there was an old tumbledown resort for summer people-and six or seven vehicles came at them headed for Fairbanks, all of which Sess recognized. He whistled his way through four quavering versions of “My Favorite Things,” something from Dvor?ák, she wasn't sure what, and, maddeningly, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus (Underneath the Mistletoe Last Night),” and then it was evening and they were three miles outside of Boynton and he was pulling over on the side of the road in a place where Birch Creek meandered along the shoulder and the odd fisherman had worn a blistered dirt hump in the bank. “Time to get out, Pamela,” he said, and before she could find the door handle he was around her side of the car and pulling open the door for her. “Time to stretch your legs. Come on, Lucius, that's a good dog. You want to stretch too?”

The creek was a river actually, slow and deep here, with water the color of steeped tea. The dog lifted his leg, sniffed. Sess took her in his arms and gave her a kiss full of passion and hunger, and then he let her go and started fitting the groceries into the two backpacks they'd brought along. The mosquitoes were overjoyed. “What are you up to, Sess?” she asked, standing over him. “You're going to leave the car here, is that it?”

He didn't answer. The tendons stood out in his neck as he stuffed cans, jars and plastic bags of pasta and marshmallows into the packs with an eye to balancing out the load.

“I don't see that it matters, Sess,” she heard herself say, and she didn't mean to nag-tried to catch herself, in fact, but couldn't. “Because you were right out there on the main street of town this morning where everybody could see you, beeping the horn even, and if anybody wanted to know our fingerprints are all over the thing. Dog hair too.” She tried to inject something light into it, though she was fuming all over again: “What would Perry Mason make of that?”

He looked up from the squat of his knees, genuinely puzzled. “Who's Perry Mason?” Then he rose to his feet, lifted both backpacks by their straps and set them to one side in the tall weed. “Pamela,” he said, “I need you to do me a favor here for just a minute, would you?” He didn't wait for a reply. “Just take hold of Lucius so he doesn't get spooked, okay?”

“Spooked? What are you talking about?”

“Just do it, will you?”

And then the grand finale that made her heart dwindle down to nothing, because he was out of control, this husband of hers, out of his mind, and there was no going back from this, this was final and irrevocable and you might just as well hope for peace between the Brits and the Irish, the Israelis and the Palestinians. He slid back into the car, fired up the engine with a roar and left the driver's side door swinging wide on its hinges. “You know, there's probably not five hundred of these Shelby Mustangs in all of the United States of America,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the engine, and then he gunned it up over the dirt hump and on into the creek, jumping wide as the water took hold of it and the tail end bobbed up for just an instant and then settled back down again, the slow steady seep of the current washing it clean.

18

Ronnie was loving this, absolutely and truly loving it. He was on the road again, his wrist draped casually over the wheel of the Studebaker, Star and Marco wedged in beside him, the roof piled high with roped-down boxes and Lydia stretched out across the backseat in a see-through blouse. He was dogging the bus, Merry and Maya making faces out the back window and the goats bleating away at sixty miles an hour from their ramshackle pen atop the thing, and that was a trip too-the bus was such a top-heavy, loaded-down piece of swaying and reeling spring-sprung shit even the Joads would have run screaming from it. Washo Unified, yes indeed. It gave him pleasure just to look at it, because it was a kind of in-joke, and he was in on it. And behind him-all he had to do was glance in the rearview mirror for the comfort of it-was Harmony's liver-spotted Bug, rattling along just beyond the nose of Lester's Lincoln.

And that was a whole other trip: Lester and Franklin. They showed up at the last minute, shuffling around in the dirt, hands going in and out of their pockets and their eyes locking on every face as if they were equipped with built-in lasers, and announced they were coming along for the ride even if they didn't think they'd make it all the way up to the frozen hinterlands, because it was a free country, wasn't it? Pan didn't really care one way or the other-they were all right, he'd hang with anybody, though he had his doubts about how much good they'd be trapping a lynx or shooting a moose or peeling logs for a cabin. And Sky Dog. He was in the backseat of the Lincoln amidst a heap of sleeping bags, cooking gear and a bleached-out tent that looked as if Eisenhower had used it in the Normandy Invasion, and his buddy Dale Murray was bringing up the rear on his bike. What was it Alfredo kept saying all week-the last thing we need is a freak parade? Well, here it was, and the sun was steady on the horizon, the gas tank topped up and the radio spewing rock and roll, and Pan, for his part, was proud and pleased to be part of it.

Not that it was all fun and games. Some real residual _nastiness__ had come out when everybody was deciding whether they were going to sign up or drift on back to San Francisco or try to hook up with one of the other communes, and a whole raft of people just packed up and left. And then there was the question of space-who was going to ride where and when and with whom? For a few days there, brotherliness and sisterliness just broke down like an old junker with a thrown rod and refused to budge. It was a mess. Totally disorganized. Reba tried to crack the whip, and of course Alfredo had his nose in everything, and the Krishna cat (Tom Krishna, everybody was calling him now) came out of his Krishna funk long enough to show some real skill with a hammer and saw, and the chicks, all of them, kept putting things in boxes like a disaster-relief crew-but still, it looked as if Drop City was going nowhere right up until the minute the county dicks came up the drive in their county dick cars with the little gumball machines whirring on top and the bulldozers swung in off the highway.

At least they brought the bulldozers in the night before and left them out on the main road so everybody could get a good long look at them in case they needed their memories jogged-two Cats the size of houses, one on either side of the dirt drive. Mendocino Bill wanted to pour sand down the gas tanks, and to Pan's mind that wasn't a half-bad idea at all-he'd done plenty of that sort of thing out back of the development when he was a kid just for the pure uncomplicated destructive _rush__ of it-but Norm said no, let them be. And that was no joy either, strung out across the hill in back holding hands and singing some lame Joan Baez song as the first of the Cats came clanking up the drive and took down the back house as if it were made of pasteboard and toothpicks, Jiminy shaking his fist and cursing, Star with tears burning down her cheeks and Norm all the while looking over his shoulder for the county sheriff with his arrest warrant. Dust rocketed up into the air. Walls fell. Harmony's yurt went down without so much as a whimper, and all Ronnie could think of was those World War II documentaries his father was always so obsessed with, the Battle of Britain, the Siege of Stalingrad, one wall down and a whole cozy little tea parlor exposed. And then _whump, whump,__ the bombs hit again and the dust just rose and rose.

“So where do you think Norm's planning to stop tonight?” Star said over the decelerating thump of Canned Heat-a miracle of a little college station out of Portland, and Pan was the one with the nimble fingers to find it. “I mean, _if__ he's going to stop, and with him there're no guarantees, right?”

“Right,” Marco said, “but the more miles we make, the better.”

“That's the theory,” Ronnie said, and before the caravan left Drop City he'd hunted and gathered one hundred pharmaceutical-grade Dexedrine tablets from a cat he knew in the River Run bar in Guerneville and handed them out like candy-_at cost__-to anybody who was even thinking about getting behind the wheel.

Star's legs were bare, and her feet-perched up on the dashboard like two fluttering white birds-were bare too. She was wearing a white midriff blouse and a pair of cutoffs and probably nothing else beyond her own natural essence, though she sometimes dabbed a little extract of vanilla behind each ear and in the crease between her breasts. Ronnie leaned into her and took a furtive sniff. She smelled of sweat, of the natural oils and artificial emollients she used on her hair, and there it was-just the faintest hint of vanilla, like the residue at the bottom of the glass after you've finished your shake and let it sit on the counter half an hour. She'd wanted to ride in the bus. But what had he done? He'd begged and pleaded and made her feed on her own guilt through all its thousands of layers and permutations because they'd come all the way across the country in this very same car, with this very same radio and her very same feet perched up on the very same dash, and didn't that count for anything? All right, she'd said finally, all right, sure, yeah, of course. Of course I'll ride with you. But only if Marco comes too.

Now she said: “It takes all the fun out of it that way. I want to see the country-especially like when we get into Canada. I want to feel it between my toes and stretch out in the sun if only for like ten minutes, smell the air, you know, and I wonder if that's too much to ask?”

No one said anything. The scenery streamed by in a wash of gray, green, brown.

“And all these creeks and rivers-it's like they don't even exist, as if I'm imagining them-like there, right there, see that? — and I just want to get out and swim, swim all the way to Alaska, like in that Burt Lancaster movie where he swims home from one pool to another. Don't you want to do that? Don't you want to get out and swim? Or just splash around even?”

“Burt Lancaster?” Ronnie said. “What planet are you coming from?”

Marco snaked his arm up over the back of the seat and put it around her and pulled her close, a little act of intimacy Pan didn't pay even a lick of attention to. “Yeah, but don't you want to get there? Don't you want to see the place, all of those millions of acres for the taking, the lakes there, the rivers? See the cabin? Walk off the site where we're going to build? Plus,” and he was smiling now, “I'll bet that water's just a wee bit chilly, wouldn't you think?”

Lydia's voice rose up out of the void of the backseat. “I'm hungry. And I have to pee.”

Ronnie glanced over his shoulder to where Lydia lay sprawled beneath her breasts, then exchanged a look with Star. “Lydia's got a point,” he said.

From the backseat: “What point? That I have to pee?”

Lydia was sitting up now, and he studied her a moment in the rearview mirror before he responded. She was looking good-if the light hit her just right, she could look very good, sultry, like one of those big-shouldered women in the Italian movies, her black hair windswept, her makeup smeared, and that randy, let's-lick-the-sauce-off-the-spoon-together look on her face.

“What I mean is, maybe it's time to pull over for the night. We've got to find a place to crash, right? And cook something up?”

“I don't know,” Star said, “yeah, sure, I could stop.”

So Ronnie calculated and took his chance and swung out into the fast lane till he came up abreast of the bus, the air roaring at the windows, insects giving themselves up to the superior force in a quickening series of thumps and splats-and why, he wondered, were they all uniformly yellow inside, was that their blood, was that it? And there was Norm, sitting up high in the driver's seat with his arms wrapped round the wheel as if it were the head of some seabeast he was wrestling, a fixed, no-nonsense, I-am-driving-the-bus look in his Dexedrine-tranced eyes, and Ronnie was flapping his left arm up over the roof of the car and laying on the horn. Marco rolled down the window and shouted to Norm to pull over at the next stop because Lydia had to pee and everybody was tired and hungry and wrung-out from driving straight through the first night and day and on into the evening that was even now spreading its wings out over the hills ahead of them like a big celestial bat.

Norm jerked his head back and gave them a faraway look, as if they were just anybody burning down the highway in a rusted-out Studebaker with New York plates, but then the shining white-hot gleam of recognition came into his eyes and he started fumbling with the little window at his elbow, all the while cupping a hand to his ear and pantomiming his bewilderment. What could they possibly want? Had he dropped a wheel? Run down a passel of Vietnamese orphans? Did the road ahead end in the sheer drop-off of a Roadrunner cartoon?

And this was fun, this was hilarious-anything for a little diversion. Side by side, hurtling down the road, Marco shouting and laughing, and Star and Lydia getting into the act now too, people in the bus-Premstar, Reba-making faces and sticking out their tongues like six-year-olds, _Casey Jones, you better watch your speed!__ But then, gradually, Ronnie became aware of another sound altogether-a horn, sharp and insistent-and people on the bus were pointing behind him, like _look out,__ and he brought his eyes up to the rearview mirror. It was only a heartbeat between awareness and recognition, but his first thought had been _the man,__ what else? But it wasn't the man, it was three crewcut young Oregonian shit-flingers in a Ford pickup the color of arterial blood. They wouldn't have liked hippies, anyway, and Ronnie had seen _Easy Rider__-three times now and counting-but that didn't figure into the calculus of the moment. They were giving him the finger, riding his bumper, laying on the horn. Assholes. Redneck assholes. Red-faced redneck assholes.

Ronnie feathered the brakes, then feathered them again-and again, till the rednecks had to ride their own brakes and the bus slid ahead of them like a big yellow wall, Harmony's Bug, Lester's Lincoln and Dale Murray's ratcheting bike pulled along in its wake like the twisted little things it had given birth to. When Dale Murray cleared the Studebaker, Ronnie was going about twenty-five and the middle finger of his right hand was fixed just over the reflection of his eyes in the rearview mirror. He expected the rednecks to pass on his right in a flurry of hoots and catcalls, but they just held there in the passing lane, right on his tail, and so he eased in behind Dale Murray and hit the accelerator.

But the occupants of the pickup surprised him. They swung in behind the Studebaker and put on a sudden burst of speed, looming up on his rear bumper as if they meant to hook on to it. “Son of a bitch,” Ronnie said, and it came out of him in a stunned and wounded gasp, as if he'd been punched in the stomach-he wasn't even driving anymore, just floating. And now Lydia made herself known, kneeling on the backseat so they could get a good look at her and alternately flashing the peace sign and blowing them kisses. Which enraged them even more. Twice they tapped the bumper-at something like fifty or fifty-five miles an hour, and what were they, not simple rednecks but redneck frat boys, because there were all the frat boy decals, DELTA UPSILON, U. OF OREGON, GO DUCKS, plastered across the windshield as if they meant something. Ronnie braced himself for the next thump.

“Are they crazy or what?” Marco said. He leaned out the window and showed them his fist.

The wind was wild, everybody's hair whipping, and it seemed to snatch the breath right out of Ronnie's lungs. “Stop the car,” Marco shouted, whirling on him. “Just fucking pull over!”

Star said no. “Just forget it,” she said. “Ignore them.”

“Forget it?” Marco's face was like a bad dream, and Ronnie saw that and registered it, because there was a violent divide here, and he wouldn't want to find himself on the wrong side of it. Ever. “I'm going to fucking kill them, all three of them! You with me, Ronnie-Pan? You with me?”

Ronnie's hands were frozen on the wheel, his eyes pasted to the rearview mirror. “Peace,” Star kept saying, “peace and love, remember?” Ronnie looked at the three faces ranged across the hood of the car behind him, looked at Lydia's shoulders, the mad flying tangle of her hair, and his heart was looping back on itself. “I hear you, man,” he said.

But then the whole procession was slowing, chain reaction-bus, Bug, Lincoln, motorcycle, Studebaker, pickup-and Norm had the big amber blinker going on the bus and the yellow wall was sliding into a turn, a side road, and there was the sign that spelled relief in foot-high letters: PUBLIC CAMPGROUND__, ALL CARS WELCOME__, 2$ PER NITE__. Now, surely now, Ronnie was thinking, the pickup would peel away from them and vanish on down the highway, but no, it came on still, the faces behind the windshield taut and pale and vengeful.

The pavement gave out beneath him, and the Studebaker was thumping into a big rutted dirt lot interspersed with trees, barbecue smoke snatching at the air, cars and Winnebagos pulled up around tents and picnic tables, kids chasing each other in a flash of motion while white-legged old stick-people sucked bourbon out of paper cups and dogs yapped in a territorial frenzy, and this was it, America the beautiful, home of the brave, all cars welcome. Lydia had to pee. She was hungry. They were all hungry. But before Ronnie could twist the key off and set the brake, the three frat boys were at the driver's side window, and a hand, a meaty red outraged hand, was snatching at his hair, even as he flung his head back and away and Star let out with a screech that just about stopped his heart.

“Fucking longhair!”

“Get out of the car, asshole!”

All in a flash, it came to him that his antagonists weren't simply the frat boy rednecks he'd taken them to be, but frat boy redneck football players, or maybe weight lifters, all puffed up like toads in their Oregon Ducks T-shirts. One of them, the guy who'd been driving, was like a monument ripped from its pedestal with two livid eyes and a blond crewcut drilled into his skull. _Son of a bitch.__ A bitter taste of impotence and rage clotted in Pan's throat, because he'd been here before and he knew what was coming. He was afraid, and then he wasn't, because all at once he was beyond fear, beyond anything, and he leaned back into the door and snatched at the handle at the very moment the meaty red hand converted itself into a fist that exploded in his left ear with a sound of wind rushing down a tunnel.

The sequel was mostly a blur, because he was dazed, that was it, though the speed was churning through him like a thousand little engines whizzing round the tracks of his veins, and he was in the car still, Star cradling his head. But Marco came round the hood of the Studebaker and slashed into the knot of them, that much he was sure of, and then Dale Murray and Sky Dog were there, and it was a scrimmage, everybody everywhere, down in the dirt and out across the lot, cursing and thumping at one another. Franklin stepped into it next, in one silent gliding motion, and put one of the frat boys down with a single blow, and now the whole bus was emptying out in a spangle of white-faced hippies and the old stick-people were sucking at their bourbon and all the flying kids gathering round and shouting in their piping attenuated half-grown voices.

Norm was the one who put an end to it. Two of the frat boys were on the ground and a whole flotilla of blunt-toed hippie boots was going at them at ramming speed, even while the third one-the driver-was engaged with Dale Murray, _slam, bam-bam,__ as if this were a heavyweight bout, when Norm stepped between them and it stopped right there, just like that. “Enough!” he said. “Peace!” and he barked it out as if he were shouting “Maim!” or “Kill!”

They were bleeding in mosaic, all three of them, shuffling their feet in the dirt and huffing like fat men going up an endless flight of stairs. They were outnumbered. They had nothing to say. But Pan did, oh, yes, his head hanging out the window of the Studebaker now, and his life in this moment as sweet as anything on this planet. “Next time you want to beat up on a bunch of hippies, you better think twice, you sorry-ass motherfuckers-”

They'd already edged back to their pickup, jeans, boots, T-shirts, muscles, and one of them, heaving still-the one with the blond crewcut and the scalp that shone through it like boiled ham-said, “Yeah, and fuck you too, all of you.” That was what he said, but it was just bravado, and everybody knew it. The three of them slammed back into the pickup, wiping grit and blood out of their eyes, licking at split lips and wondering what that ringing in their ears was, and as they put it in gear Ronnie just sauntered up to them with a shit-eating grin and flashed the peace sign. They didn't even bother to spin the tires.

Later, when the jug of wine was going round and the chicks were spreading out loaves of bread and jars of peanut butter and jelly and mixing up pitchers of Kool-Aid and everybody was congratulating themselves on the way they'd handled things there in the naked dirt of the lot, Pan sprang his surprise. On the morning before they'd left, he'd taken the Studebaker down through Guerneville and the cutover hills of the Russian River valley to Marshall, where the Pacific beat against the rocks and gave up a mist that hung in the sunlight like the smoke of a fire that never went out. The air was cold, the water colder. He waded right in in his cutoffs with Marco's hunting knife in one hand and two burlap sacks in the other.

There were gulls overhead, cormorants and pelicans scissoring the rolling green flats beyond the breakers. It was low tide, and the rocks were fortresses half-buried in the sand, every one of them glistening black with a breastwork of mussels. Pan worked under a pale sun, shivering in the wind that blew up out of nowhere and dodging the spray as best he could, and in the course of an hour he cut a hundred mussels from the rocks, two hundred, three, four, maybe even five, but who was counting? Back at the ranch, he rinsed and debearded them himself, and everybody was so preoccupied with the bus, with moving and packing and getting clear of the bulldozers, nobody even so much as glanced at him. He'd sneaked the two big sacks of mussels into the trunk of the Studebaker and set aside a pound of salted butter and half a dozen lemons from the tree out back of the pool. Now it was time to steam them. Now especially, because who wanted peanut butter and jelly on tasteless crumbling two-day-old home-baked bread, when they could glut themselves on the bounty of the sea?

Nobody said a word as he built a fire in one of the blackened cast-iron barbecue grills that grew up out of the dirt in the lee of each picnic table, but Merry-looking like two scoops of ice cream in a macramé top-drifted over when he set the five-gallon pot atop it. She handed him the nub of a joint she'd just removed from her lips, and nobody worried about that, about where the sacramental dope was going to come from through a long hard winter before they could have a chance to get a crop in the ground-nobody worried about anything, because this was the adventure, right here and now. He drew on the roach and she smiled. “What you got cooking?”

He shrugged, gave her back the smile. “Nothing. A little surprise. Something even a vegetarian could get behind.”

She poked one of the sacks with a bare toe. “What?” She smiled wider. “Clams? Lobster?”

“You'll see. In about five minutes. But you wouldn't eat anything with a face on it, would you? You wouldn't even slap a mosquito or breathe in a gnat, right?” The roach had gone out. He handed it back to her for form's sake.

“I don't know. Depends, I suppose.”

“On what?”

“On how hungry I am, and what's going in that pot. It's not meat, right?”

People had begun to set up tents in a cluster round the bus. Sky Dog, Dale Murray, Lester and Franklin were off by themselves, sitting on a picnic table in the near distance, their legs propped up on the buckled slats of the seats, and Sky Dog and Dale were strumming their guitars. A bunch of people were on the far side of the bus, visible only as lower legs and feet, and Che and Sunshine were at the center of a flying wedge of straight people's children, pale limbs, shouts, a kickball chasing itself from one end of the lot to the other.

“Would I do that to you?” Pan took a step back from the fire and glanced at the bus. The windows were down all along the near side and an invisible presence had just dropped the needle on “God Bless the Child,” a tune he loved, and for a moment he just looked out across the lot and listened to the horns feed off the vocals. Then he turned back to Merry. “Where you sleeping tonight? The bus?”

“I guess.”

“Want to sleep with me? Big seat in the back of that Studebaker. Or I might just do a sleeping bag on one of the picnic tables, like if there's no dew or rain or anything-”

“What about Lydia?”

“What about her?”

She settled into the corner of the picnic table with a shrug, one haunch balanced there, the dead roach pinched between her fingers. “I don't know,” she said. “Where's she sleeping?”

He didn't answer her, just upended the first of the burlap sacks into the big gleaming pot. It was like shifting rocks. There was a clatter and a hiss, and then he dumped the other bag in. “That's a Billie Holiday song,” he said, “you know that?”

“No,” she said, “I didn't know. I thought it was like Blood, Sweat and Tears?”

“Originally, I mean. Like in the thirties or whenever.”

“Oh, really? So it's like really old, huh?”

“Yeah,” he said, and he looked off into the trees that weren't all that different from the trees at Drop City, or not that he could tell, anyway.

“What are those, mussels?”

“Yep. Pure protein, bounty of the sea. And wait'll you taste them with Pan's special lemon and butter sauce. You ever have mussels just steamed like clams or maybe dropped in a marinara sauce at the very last minute?”

She didn't know. And she was a vegetarian. But he watched her as the steam rose and butter melted in a pan and he sliced and squeezed the lemons, and she looked interested, definitely interested. “What about Jiminy,” he said, “where's he sleeping?”

When she shrugged, her breasts lifted and fell. “In the bus, I guess.”

He was thinking about Lydia, thinking about Star, about Marco and the way he'd put his arm around her and drawn her to him in the Studebaker. He'd gone to high school with her. They'd come all the way across the country together. “Sleep with me,” he said. “What's it been, like weeks?”

That was when Reba came out of the trees with an armload of firewood and a hermetically sealed face, Alfredo trailing in her wake. He had a hatchet in one hand, a half-rotted length of pine in the other. Reba's eyes locked on the pot. “What's that?” she said. “You cooking something, Ronnie?” Oh, and now she smiled, oh yes indeed. “For everybody?”

She was wearing moccasins she'd stitched and sewed herself and she'd stuck an iridescent blue-black raven's feather in her beaded headband-give her a couple of slashes of war paint and she could have been a squaw in a John Ford movie, and that was funny because Star kept saying that all the way across country, that the whole hip style was just like playing cowboys and Indians, from the boots and bell-bottoms that were like chaps right on up to the serapes and headbands and wide-brimmed hats. He'd denied it at the time, simply because he hadn't thought about it and the notion scuffed at his idea of himself, but she was right, and he saw it in that moment. Reba was playing at cowboys and Indians, and so was he, and everybody else.

“It's mussels,” he said. “Enough to feed the whole campground, heads and straights alike.”

Alfredo was standing there in his boots and denim shirt with a wondering look on his face, as if he'd just been cut down from the gibbet by his amigos in that very same western. “Mussels?” he echoed. “Where'd you get them?”

Pan was feeling good. Pan was feeling expansive and generous, feeling brotherly and sisterly. He gave them an elaborated version of his struggle against the sea two mornings ago.

And what was Alfredo's reaction? The reaction of the least-together, most tight-assed member of this whole peripatetic circus? How did he respond to Pan's selfless gesture and all the pride he took in it? He said, “You must be fucking crazy, man. Don't you realize they're quarantined this time of year?”

“Quarantined? What are you talking about?” If he was onto fishing licenses and seasons and all the rest of it, he might as well be talking to his shoes. “June doesn't have an _R__ in it-”

Alfredo set down the hatchet and lifted the top from the pot. The mussels roiled blackly in the churning water. “Jesus,” he said. “You could have poisoned all of us.”

Ronnie peered into the pot, then looked to Merry and Reba before settling on Alfredo. “Bullshit,” he said.

By now, some of the others had begun to gather round-Maya, Angela, Jiminy-and Ronnie had no choice but to hold his ground. “Bullshit,” he repeated. “So what if they're quarantined?”

“Toxic shellfish poisoning,” Alfredo said. “Something like four hundred people died of it one year in San Francisco at the turn of the century, I think it was. There's this dinoflagellate that will concentrate in huge numbers, like a red tide, when the water temperature gets above a certain level-in summer, only in summer-and the mussels, and clams and whatever, concentrate the toxin from them, and it doesn't bother the mussels at all, only us.”

“You know the CIA?” Jiminy put in. His face was a sunlit wedge of nose, cheekbone and bright burning eye chopped out of the frame of his hair. He was thrilled, overjoyed, never happier. “Their assassins use it on a needle and they just prick you in a crowd, a little stab you can barely feel, and then you're dead.”

“Paralyzed,” Reba said. “First your extremities go, then your limbs, until you're a vegetable and you can't move anything or feel anything-”

“Right,” Alfredo said, “-and then it shuts down the vital organs.”

There was an aroma on the air now, a sweet scintillating smell of mussels steamed in their own juices with butter and lemon, salt and pepper and maybe a hint of tarragon. Ronnie wasn't hovering over a picnic table at a two-dollar-a-night campground in Oregon, he was inside a cage at the zoo, and all these people-his friends, his compatriots, his brothers and sisters-were poking at him through the bars with sharpened sticks. “Bullshit,” he said for the third time. “I don't believe it.”

“Believe it,” Alfredo said, already turning to leave, and he was taking a whole raft of faces with him. Merry looked as if she'd been shoved over a cliff, and Jiminy was just waiting for the signal to get down on all fours and start barking like a dog.

Alfredo. Dinoflagellates. Quarantine. Ronnie was having none of it-it was nonsense was what it was, just another stab at him, as if it would kill Alfredo if he ever got any credit for anything. He stirred the pot, fished out a specimen and set it on the wooden plank of the table. It was perfect, tender-you can't cook them a heartbeat too long or you'll be chewing leather-the slick black shell peeking open to reveal the pink-orange meat within, and he was going to hold it up for Merry and run through his mussel routine, about how the lips and the flesh looked like a certain part of the female anatomy and how at medical schools the gynecology students had to study steamed mussels because the real thing was so hard to come by, but Merry was gone, her arm slipped through Jiminy's, bare feet in the dust, off to consume her ration of stale bread and peanut butter.

Only Angela, Verbie's narrow-eyed, lantern-jawed sister, stayed behind to watch as Ronnie forced open the two leaves of the shell-_bivalves,__ the term came hurtling back to him from Mr. Boscovich's Biology class, that's what they were, _bivalves,__ and all the tastier for it-removed the glistening pink morsel and tentatively laid it on his tongue. “You're not really going to eat that, are you?” she said, and he might as well have been the geek in the circus with his incisors bared over the trembling neck of the squirming chicken while the crowd held its collective breath. Of course he was going to eat it, of course he was.

It took him a long moment, his tongue rolling the bit of flesh round his mouth, before he brought his teeth into play. And what was wrong with that? The juices were released, butter, tarragon, the sea, and the taste was fine, great even-this was the best and freshest mussel he'd ever had, wasn't it? He chewed thoughtfully, lingeringly. And then he spat the discolored lump into his hand and flung it into the bushes.

19

Star had never stolen a thing in her life, even when she was twelve or thirteen and pushing the limits and there was a compact or tube of eyeliner she could have died for and nobody was looking because her friends had distracted the old lady at the counter and they'd all got something in their turn-a comb, a package of gum, M&M's-as if it were a badge of honor. It wasn't that she didn't have the nerve-it was just that she'd been brought up to respect private property, to do right and think right and be a moral upstanding good little Catholic girl. But here she was in a supermarket just outside Seattle, smoking a cigarette in front of the cheese display in the dairy section, the pockets she'd sewn into the lining of her coat heavy with fancy imported cheeses, with Gouda and smoked cheddar and Jarlsberg, and never mind that it was eighty-two degrees outside and nobody else in the world was wearing a coat or even a sweater.

Reba and Verbie were pushing a cart down the aisle across from her, moving slowly, prepared to trade food stamps for fresh produce, whole wheat bread and family-sized sacks of rice and pinto beans, all the while secreting cans of tuna, crabmeat and artichoke hearts in the purses that dangled so insouciantly from their shoulders. “It's a family thing,” Reba explained as they were coming across the macadam lot, “-feed the family, that's all that matters. This place, this whole chain, is just part of the establishment, them against us, a bunch of millionaires in some corporate headquarters somewhere, devoting their lives to screwing people over the price of lettuce. Don't shed any tears for them.” Ronnie, who'd driven the three of them over in the Studebaker, couldn't have agreed more. “Fucking fascists,” was his take on it.

Still, her heart was going as she drew on her cigarette and pretended to deliberate over the cardboard canister of Quaker Oats in her hand, her brow furrowed and her eyes drawn down to slits over the essential question of 100 % Natural Rolled Oats versus one dollar and sixty-nine cents. She didn't see the man in the pressed white shirt and regulation bow tie until he was on top of her. “Finding everything all right?” he asked.

She met his eyes-a washed-out gray in a pink face surmounted by Brylcreemed hair with the dead-white precision part that was as perfect as the ones you saw in the pictures in the barbers' windows. He was twenty-five, he'd knocked up his girlfriend and dropped out of high school, and he'd been working in this place since he was sixteen. Or something like that. He was a member of the straight world, and that was all that counted. He was the enemy. Star never flinched, though her heart was going like a drum solo. “No,” she said, “not really,” and she could see Reba and Verbie draw in their antennae at the far end of the aisle-she was in this on her own now. “I was just looking for like a really nutritious cereal for my daughter? I don't want her eating all that junk we had as kids, Sugar Pops and Frosted Flakes and whatnot. So I was thinking oats, maybe. Just plain oats. With milk.”

“How old?” He was smiling like all the world, the assiduous employee coming to grips with the discerning shopper.

“What?”

“Your daughter-how old is she?”

“Oh, her…” And to cover herself, she made up a name on the spot. “Jasmine? I named her Jasmine, isn't that a pretty name?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Very pretty.” He paused. “It does get cold in here, doesn't it?”

For a moment, she was at a loss. Cold? What was he talking about? She looked down at her coat, and then back up again, and her heart was in her mouth. “I'm very sensitive to it,” she said finally, trying to keep her voice under control. “I'm from down south, this little town in Arizona? Yuma? You ever hear of it?” He hadn't. “_Johnny__ Yuma?” she tried. Nothing. She shrugged. “It's just that you've got all these refrigerators going in here, the meat, the dairy-”

He just nodded, and she realized he could see right through her, knew damned well what she was doing, saw it ten times a day. Especially from the likes of her, from heads, hippies, bikers, renegades of every stripe, _chicks.__ “You know, I have three kids myself. The oldest one, Robert Jr.-Bobby-he's in the second grade already. And they all eat nothing but junk, the sugariest cereal, candy, pop-”

“Oh, well, Jasmine,” and it came to her that he wasn't going to say a thing, just so long as she played out the game with him, “she's only like one and a half or something, you know, and she's, uh, well, I don't want to get her into any bad habits, if you know what I mean.”

Oh, yes, he knew-she didn't have to tell him. And could he help with cereals? Cream of Wheat was good, if you cooked it with milk instead of water, and farina, of course. By the way, was she from around here, because he didn't remember-?

So that was it. He was hitting on her, just like any other _cat.__ Just in case. Just on the off chance.

“We just moved in,” she said. “My husband's in Aerospace.” And then she thanked him and found herself stuck at the checkout across from Reba and Verbie with the Quaker Oats still in hand. Her heart was doing paradiddles, but she laid a wrinkled bill on the counter and prised the change out of her pocket, and then she was out in the parking lot and heading for the Studebaker, the very Queen of Cheese.

They got a late start out of Seattle that night, because Norm had taken Harmony's Bug and gone to see his uncle and stayed through the afternoon and on into the evening while everybody else sat on the bus and wondered if they'd been deserted. Norm had pulled the bus off at the first exit he came to and found a spot to park in a patch of weed at the side of a two-lane blacktop road. It was an ugly spot, the trees nothing more than scrub, some sort of factory putting out smoke in the near distance and the ubiquitous ranch houses of suburban America clustered all round them. Some of the men gathered up twigs and refuse and got a fire going, and the best the women could do was throw together a kind of paella, thick with appropriated tuna and greens and whatever spices they could find that weren't already packed away.

Cars shot by like jet planes. The shouts of kids at play came to them as ambient noise. People ate hurriedly, guiltily even, because this wasn't what anybody expected. Even Che and Sunshine seemed lethargic, disoriented, and they barely touched their plates. Around eight, right in the middle of the meal, two men in sport shirts made their way across the street from a white ranch house with cream-colored trim and a new red car sitting in the driveway. “There's no camping here,” Star heard one of the men say to no one in particular, and heard the other one say, “And no fires.” After that, everybody climbed back on the bus and circled the block a couple of times, Lester and Ronnie in tow, till they wound up back where they'd started and just sat in the vehicles with nowhere to go and nothing to do, waiting for Norm as the darkness settled in. When he finally did appear and the caravan moved off again, they felt as if they'd all been rescued.

It was past midnight when Reba broke out the crabmeat and the smoked oysters and all the rest of it, and Star delivered up the cheeses. The bus was moving through the wall of the night. There was the green glow of the dash, a soft lateral rocking as if they were all inside a giant cradle. Norm was up front, his hands clenched round the wheel, Premstar squeezed into the cracked vinyl seat along with him. Ronnie was a pair of headlights somewhere behind them, Mendocino Bill and Verbie and her sister keeping him company, taking their turn, share and share alike. Marco, who'd gone along with Norm to visit the uncle-“To keep him company, and find out exactly where that mountain of gold is located, just in case we need some spare change”-was in the back of the bus with Alfredo and some of the others, playing cards under a light Bill had rigged up. The kids were asleep. So was practically everybody else.

And so it was Reba, Merry, Maya, Lydia and Star, the women, spread out across three seats, gossiping and feasting as the bus jostled down the road and the vague lights of single homes, gas stations and farmhouses flashed at the windows in an unreadable code. “You get tired of just plain fare all the time, you know?” Reba said. “Tofu paste. Tahini. Brown rice. Even though it's healthy. Even though I'm committed to it. But this”-and she laid a sardine across a thin slice of wheat bread, licking the oil from her fingers-“this isn't just a luxury, this is a _necessity,__ know what I mean?”

Appropriated crackers went round, more bread, a bottle of Liebfraumilch Reba had liberated from the liquor department. They all knew what she meant. And Star ate wedges of cheese and licked the oil from her own fingers-smoked oysters, that was her weakness-savoring the moment. In the inner fold of her backpack, the pouch between the frame and the main compartment, way down at the bottom and wrapped in a sock, were three one-hundred-dollar bills nobody knew about, not Marco, not Ronnie, not Merry or Maya. This was what she had left of her nest egg, the money she'd accumulated before she quit teaching, living dirt cheap at her parents' house when her only expenses were for records and clothes and maybe a Brandy Alexander or Black Russian at the Surf 'N' Turf, the nearest thing to a club Peterskill could offer; the rest had gone for gas and food coming across country, and everything since-food stamps, unemployment, whatever her mother managed to send c/o Drop City-had vanished into the communal pot. There was no way she was breaking those three bills, whether for luxury or necessity, and besides, Norm had guaranteed he'd float everybody through the first winter, at least as far as the basics were concerned.

Lydia, lounging in the seat across from Star, said “Paté,” as if she'd been thinking about it for weeks. “That's what turns me on. And those celery sticks with blue cheese inside. Swedish meatballs on a toothpick. Canapés and champagne. They used to have these parties at the place I used to work, and I'd just camp in front of the hors d'oeuvres tray and pig out.”

“Will this do?” Reba said, and she leaned forward in the flicker of passing headlights and handed Lydia a box of Ritz crackers and two cans of deviled ham.

“Lobster,” Merry said. “With drawn butter.”

“You haven't lived till you've had the Crab Louis at this place called Metzger's on Tomales Bay,” Maya put in. “I went there once, just after high school, with-”

“I know,” Reba said, “-this guy named Jack. With hair down to his ass and a Fu Manchu mustache.”

Star laughed. They all laughed.

Maya's voice went soft. “Actually, it was with my parents. They took me and my brother out west on a vacation. For my graduation present.”

No one had anything to say to that, and they were all silent a moment as the bus lurched through a series of broad sweeping turns, heading for the Canadian border. The engine propelled them forward with a steady _whoosh,__ as if there were a big vacuum cleaner under the hood. Wind beat at the windows, a spatter of rain. They could hear Norm's voice from up front, an unceasing buzz of fancy, opinion and incontestable fact fueled by Ronnie's speed and Premstar's lady-lotion skin, and who liked Premstar, who could even stand her? Nobody. On that, they were all in silent accord.

“Shrimp cocktail,” Reba said, feeding another sardine into her mouth. “For my money,” and she was chewing round her words, “a good shrimp cocktail, with big shrimp now, shrimp as long as your middle finger, with a spicy cocktail sauce and served on a little bed of ice, that's what I'd go for every time.”

Star said, “Pistachios. In the shell. And your fingers get all red. Has anybody in this world _ever__ had enough of those?”

“You know,” Merry said, and her voice was so drawn down and muted you could barely hear her, “I haven't seen my parents since I was sixteen. That's like five years. I can't believe it. And I don't hate them or anything either. It's just the way things worked out.”

“Where you from again?” Reba wanted to know.

Softly, as if it were a prayer, or the name of a prayer: “Cedar Rapids.”

“Cedar Rapids? Where's that?”

“It's in Iowa,” Lydia answered for her.

“Oh, _Iowa,__” Reba said, and she made it sound as unhip and lame as Peoria or New Jersey, and Star felt the mood start to slip away.

“There was this guy,” Merry began, her face lit suddenly by a pair of headlights, then sinking into shadow, “this cat, and he was twenty-three and he had his own car and money like I'd never seen before, like rolls of twenties and whatever. But that's not what did it-I wasn't like that. I'm not like that now. Money didn't mean anything to me, except that it could buy you freedom-and my parents, _Jesus,__ and my school. You know the story. Everybody does, right?”

No one rose to the bait. Star shifted in her seat. She could hear Lydia forcing her hand down into the box of crackers.

“His name was Tommy Derwin and he was from down south, Mobile, and his accent just killed me. The way he would say things, like 'Ahm just honahed that you would con-sent to be mah date tonight, Miss Merra Voight,' and then he'd take me to a bar in Iowa City where nobody ever got carded and then a motel, as man and wife, on the way back to Cedar Rapids. I never thought twice. He said let's go to San Francisco, that's where the scene is, and I went.”

Lydia was passing out crackers smeared with deviled ham, and Star took one, and so did Reba, but Maya and Merry passed-ham was meat, after all, pig, dead pig, no matter how you disguised it. “So what then?” Lydia said, and she wiped her lips with the back of her hand.

“We stayed a couple places. People he knew. We did drugs. I worked checkout at a Walgreens for a while, and when nobody was looking I'd shake pills out of bottles, you know, that sort of thing.” The cheese came round, and they all watched as Merry cut herself two thick slices and fitted them to crackers. “I don't know,” she said. “And then we joined this commune-Harrad House? It wasn't like this, not at all. More into sex. A group marriage kind of thing.”

“And how was that?” This was Lydia, the resident expert. “Did you have to sleep with everybody?”

“I'd hate that,” Star said. “I'd really hate that.”

“Sounds groovy to me,” Lydia said. “The more the merrier.”

Reba laughed out loud. She took a long swallow of the wine and passed the bottle to Lydia. “That's what you say now, but believe me-I mean, before I met Alfredo, I was pretty wild, like I was in heat all the time, like the only way I could relate to men was in bed, but that got old fast. Real fast. Right, Merry? You agree?”

“It stunk. There were way more guys than girls and Tommy was like a ghost or something-I hardly ever even saw him. I was on my back half the time, and if I refused some guy, one of the family members, I was the one who was uptight, I was the one spreading the bad vibes and poisoning the atmosphere, because that was the way it was. The bedroom down the hall. Take off your clothes. Five A.M., five P.M. Let's ball.” She paused, and her voice sank right down through the floorboards. “Everybody had jobs, like mop the floor, cook the pasta, go out and bring in a paycheck. My job was to fuck. Like a machine. Like a goat.”

“Where's Verbie when we need her-Women's Lib, right?” Reba said, missing the point. As usual.

Star could feel her heart going, and it was as if she were back in the supermarket again with fifteen dollars' worth of cheese shoved down her coat. “It's the Keristan Society all over again.”

“The who?”

But she was staring out the window now on a scene from another century, the sharpedged pines and a farmhouse framed in its own pale glow and the shadow of the barn beyond. They were asleep in there, the farmer and his wife, the kids, the dog. There would be an old oak table in the kitchen, heavy pink Fiesta ware set out for breakfast, a calendar on the wall. The refrigerator would clank on, it would hum, and then shut down, and no one would even notice, not even the dog.

“I don't know,” she said. “It's not important.”

They reached the border sometime after two. Star was asleep, curled up awkwardly in one of the bunks, and she felt the bus shift beneath her as if the whole world were in motion, then it shuddered and came to a halt, and she was awake. They were off on the side of the road, parked beneath a sign that said INTERNATIONAL BOUNDARY 2 MILES. Norm was coming down the aisle, rousing people from sleep. “It's the border, people, come on, wake up,” he was saying, his face a pale bulb hanging in the gloom, his shoulders hunched and arms dangling as if he'd lost the use of them. This was it. This was the big moment. If they couldn't get into Canada, then they couldn't get to Alaska, and Drop City was dead.

Marco was in the bunk beneath her, and he woke with a start. She reached a hand down to him, her hair trailing, and edged over the side of the bunk so she could see him. He was staring at nothing, the moistness of his eyes just catching enough light to show her they were open. “Hey,” she said, as gently as she could, “we're here. Time to wake up.”

“Shit,” he said, and he brushed her hand aside. “Already?” He pushed himself up and slid out of the bunk all in one motion, and then he was running his fingers through his hair and tucking in the tail of his shirt. People were shuffling around like zombies, bumping into one another, cursing softly. The dogs began to whine. Somebody sneezed. “Where's Ronnie?” he said, and there was an edge to his voice she didn't recognize. “Where's Pan? Is he here?”

For the past two days all he could talk about was the border, the border this and the border that, and how he ought to sneak across in the trunk of the Studebaker or find someplace out in the middle of nowhere where he could just step from one country to the other as easily as moving from the front of the bus to the back. Star had tried to talk him out of it, because if they opened the trunk-and why wouldn't they? — they'd nail him on the spot, but there were thirty people on the bus, not to mention two dogs and a cat, and the chances of their checking on everybody were slim. Especially in the middle of the night.

“You don't need Ronnie,” she said. “Just sit tight, that's all. Everything's going to be fine,” she said, and then she said it again, as if the words could make it so.

“All right,” Norm was saying, and his voice was up to its usual volume now, somewhere between a shout and a roar, “all right, everybody just listen. The border's two miles ahead, and we are just going to breeze right on through it, no hassles, no worries. You know what we are? All of us? We're a rock band.”

Weird George let out a groan.

“No, we are. And we've got big dates in Fairbanks and Anchorage, and where else? I don't know, Sitka. You people with guitars get 'em out, and a little strumming or even a group sing here would be nice, you know what I mean? Know what I'm saying?”

It was two-thirty in the morning. They were at the Canadian border. Nobody felt like singing.

“All right. Just let me do the talking. And you chicks-come on, you chicks, you Drop City Miracles-try to look sexy, right? You're the backup singers.”

That got a laugh, and you could feel the tension lift. People started chattering, the guy-_cat__-everybody called Deuce pulled out his harmonica and started a slow blues, and pretty soon Geoffrey joined him on guitar and two of the back-of-the-bus girls, Erika and Dunphy, let loose with a few random verses of “Love in Vain.” Norm took his hunched shoulders back up to the front of the bus, where Premstar was perched on the driver's seat like a present he'd forgotten to unwrap. Marco gave Star a look, and then followed him. “Norm,” he was saying, “listen, Norm-I need to talk to you a second.” She slid down from the bunk, afraid suddenly, and went after him.

Then the door of the bus wheezed open and the three of them-Norm, Marco and Star-were standing by the roadside with Ronnie and Mendocino Bill while the Studebaker idled behind its headlights in a pall of exhaust. A light rain spat down out of the sky and made the pavement glisten. Someone had broken a bottle here, and Star had to be careful where she put her feet. “So what do you want to do, then,” Norm said, “walk across? That wouldn't draw any attention or anything, would it?”

“If they catch me I go to jail.”

“Relax, man, nobody's going to catch you. It's Canada, that's all. Bunch of hicks, right, Pan? Am I right? Star?”

The Studebaker's headlights threw a cold lunar glare on Marco's face. He ducked his head as if the Mounties were already on him, snapping whips. “What about Pan's car? The trunk, I mean?”

Norm shook his head very slowly. His eyes jumped behind the lenses of his patched-up glasses. “We used to sneak into the drive-in like that. I think we got two cats and a chick in there one night, and then I couldn't get the trunk open.” He laughed. “That was pretty wild. That was one wild night, let me tell you.”

Ronnie said, “I don't think so. If they like open the trunk, then I'm the one in deep shit, right? I'm a smuggler, right?”

Nobody said anything. Star took hold of Marco's arm. “Come on,” she said. “Let's get back on the bus. Let's get it over with.”

“Plus, I've got all my dope back there-_our__ dope. Inside the spare tire. And that would be a major fuckup. I mean, if they found that.”

Lester's Lincoln pulled up then, and a moment later Dale Murray ratcheted in on his bike. Suddenly there was a whole lot of engine noise. And fumes. Lester rolled down the window. “So what now?” he said. “We go across, or what?”

“Fuck, I'm freezing,” Dale Murray said. He was wet through, his hair painted to both sides of his face. “We got to stop and camp or something or I think I'm going to fucking die.”

“We go across separately,” Norm said, “because we don't want to give them a whole hippie freak show all at once. Ronnie, you're first. Then you, Lester. And, Dale, you go through anytime you want, just make like you don't know us-nobody knows anybody, dig? — and when we're on the other side we'll see if maybe we can't get the bike aboard the bus somehow. How does that sound? Is it a plan?”

Star was the only one who said anything, and she could barely hear herself over the ratcheting of the bike. “Yeah,” she said. “It's a plan.”

Up ahead, the night bloomed with artificial light, trucks braking amidst the fading ghosts of cars, the Peace Arch aglow like an alien spaceship set down in a field of darkened wheat. There were gray metal booths bright with windows, figures in some kind of uniform moving like skaters across the shimmer of pavement. Ronnie's car swung out ahead of the bus, out in the left lane, and everybody pressed their faces to the windows. They watched as the Studebaker's taillights flashed red in a shroud of smoldering exhaust and a figure emerged from the near booth. The rain had quickened, beating with real authority now at the roof of the bus and driving pewter spikes into the roadway and the soft shrouded chassis of the cars. The figure leaned into Ronnie's window-fifteen seconds, that was all it took-then straightened up and waved him on. Star watched the Studebaker ease forward and fold itself back into the night.

Norm had pulled in behind a truck and the truck was taking its time. Nobody could see what the delay was because the back end of the truck was blocking their view, but the guitars kept strumming and half a dozen people were singing Beatles songs now-first “Rocky Raccoon,” and then “Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” the choice of which would have struck Star as nothing short of hilarious if it weren't for Marco. Poor Marco. He was huddled against the window in the seat beside her, sunk into the upturned collar of his denim jacket. His hair was like tarnished gold, like winter-killed weeds in a vacant lot. His eyes were drawn down to nothing. “I'm doing this for you,” he said. “I hope you know that.”

Then it was Lester's car, pulling up into the space vacated by Ronnie's. The same figure emerged from the booth, only the figure was wearing a rain slicker now and it-he-produced a flashlight and shined it in Lester's face. In the next moment, the truck was creeping forward, its blinkers flashing, and Norm was moving up to the booth even as the man with the flashlight waved Lester into the farthest lane over-the lane reserved for searches and seizures-and Lester, Franklin and Sky Dog all climbed out of the car and into the rain.

But before anybody could even think to worry about that, the bus lurched to a stop, the door folded back with a wheeze and a man in a yellow rain slicker came up the steps. “Greetings,” Norm shouted. “It's a bear out there, huh?”

The man nodded and said something in a low voice to Norm and Premstar. From where she was sitting, Star could see him only as a dull yellow glow, like something growing in the dirt of a cellar. Behind her, all the way in the back, people were singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

“American,” Norm said, and then Premstar, her voice floating back to Star like a fluff of dander on a sterile breeze, pulled her chin down and concurred: “American,” she said.

The man in the slicker said something else, and Star couldn't catch it.

“Just passing through,” Norm said in a ringing voice. “We're a rock band. Big dates in Alaska, they're just dying for us up there-not that we wouldn't want to perform for you Canadians too, but that'll have to wait till next time. We're booked, know what I mean?”

One by one, the people in the back stopped singing, aware now that something was going on up front. Star leaned forward. Marco shrank into the seat.

“What _band__?” Norm called out in disbelief. “You mean you don't recognize us?”

The man in the slicker shook his head from side to side. Star could see his face now-he was grinning. She saw the flash of his teeth in a face so red he might have been holding his breath all this time for all anyone knew.

“Oh, man, you're hurtin' me,” Norm said, and he shot a look down the length of the aisle, mugging now, “you're really hurtin' me. Give you a hint,” he said. “ 'Sugar Magnolia'? 'Truckin”? 'Friend of the Devil'? No? Oh, man, you're killin' me. All right, Premstar, you tell him-"

The tiny wisp of her voice: “The Grateful Dead.”

The man in the yellow slicker was grinning still, and so was Norm, as if it were some kind of contest. “You've heard of us, right?”

“Oh, yeah,” the man said, his voice muffled by the floppy yellow rain hat, “sure, yeah, I've heard of you.”

“I'll be happy to give you an autograph if you want, no problem, man,” Norm said, and he held out his hand and the man took it.

Then the man said something Star missed, and Norm swiveled around in the seat and looked down the length of the bus. “All right, people, just give this gentleman your attention a minute here now, because he just wants to ask everybody if they're a citizen, okay? Okay, now?”

Down the aisle the man in the slicker came, red-faced and grinning, and Star saw that he was older-gray hair in his sideburns-older even than Norm. He didn't want any trouble. He didn't want anything, except to be out of the bus and back in his booth. “American citizen?” he asked. “American citizen?” And everybody said yes, and then, just for variety, he asked, “Where were you born?” and people said Buffalo, San Diego, Charleston, Staten Island, Kansas City, Hornell. They watched his face as he came down the aisle, and they watched his shoulders as he made his way back up it. Che and Sunshine slept on. The dogs never even lifted their heads.

There was a smattering of nervous laughter when he descended the steps, and the laughter boiled up into a wild irrepressible storm of hoots and catcalls and whinnying shrieks as the door pulled shut and Norm put the bus in gear and headed off toward the lights of Canada. Star alone looked back. The last thing she saw was Lester, up against the rain-washed Lincoln, and a man in a yellow slicker patting him down.

20

Though they hammered it twenty-four hours a day up through Canada and over the infinite roaring dirt incline that was the Alaska Highway, stopping only for gas and the bodily needs of thirty-one tight-lipped claustrophobes, the bus held up. By Marco's count, it broke down three times, once just outside of Prince George, the second time at the crest of Muncho Pass, and then in a place that was no place at all, but Mendocino Bill and Tom Krishna were equal to the task and they were never stranded more than an hour or two. People played cards, read, slouched, strummed guitars. They made love under blankets, passed mugs of coffee, Coke and herbal tea from hand to hand and row to row, got stoned, dozed and woke and dozed again. Norm barely slept. And when he did sleep, crumpled across one of the seats as if he'd been deboned, Marco or Alfredo took over at the wheel, humping through country that made your eyes ache with the emptiness of it. Even Pan pitched in, turning the Studebaker over to Star and propelling the bus on through the dwindling hours of the night when nobody else could keep their eyes open. There were no Mounties, no speed traps, no cops of any kind anywhere. The scenery bared its claws. All anybody wanted was to get there, just that.

Vanderhoof, Smithers, Cranberry Junction, Johnson's Crossing, Whitehorse, Marsh Lake, Destruction Bay, Burwash Landing, so many ticks on a map, hello and goodbye. They saw a big rig folded up on itself in Wonowon, a dead moose stretched out in the dirt beside it and a calf the size of a quarter horse running wild with grief. There was a fire burning along the banks of the Donjek River, flames peeling off the tops of the trees and riding up into the night sky and not a human being in sight. They made a pit stop at Haines Junction and inadvertently left Jiminy behind, looping back nearly a hundred miles to find him standing in the rain by the gas pumps, his thumb outstretched and a look of cosmic incapacity bleeding out of his eyes. Out the window the rivers fled in gray streaks, the Takini, the Good-paster, the Tetsa, the Sikanni Chief, the Prophet, the Rabbit and the Blue.

When they reached Alaska intact, as improbable as that might have seemed when they set out, the bus still rolling over its ten wheels and the Studebaker and Bug flagging on behind, everybody singing, sandwich-fed and hopeful, they pulled off to the side of the road and sat in a circle, hands clasped, while Reba and Tom Krishna led them in a chant. This was in a place called Northway Junction, forty-two miles from the border and the customs agents who wore flannel shirts, sipped coffee out of styrofoam cups and waved everybody on through, good morning and welcome to the U. S. of A. Reba's kids strung up God's eyes they'd made of yarn and strips of wood and Alfredo drew a big mandala in the dirt with a crooked stick, working back and forth over the pattern like a dowser looking for water until it showed dark against the pale duff of the forest floor. People lit candles and incense and circulated one of Harmony's big ceramic bongs.

The air was heavy with the smell of rain-soaked vegetation, of berries run riot and a sun that soaked up the moisture and gave it back again, day after day. It was a smell that brought Marco back to his childhood on the east coast, and he realized that this wasn't the west anymore, this wasn't California or Oregon-this was the same sort of environment he'd grown up in, the rolling boreal forest of the northeast extended all the way out here as the globe narrowed toward the pole. He remembered reading Thoreau's _The Maine Woods__ in college and marveling over the fact that there had been caribou in Maine no more than a century ago, right out there amongst the spruce and hardwoods-and now here he was in a place where there were caribou still, the chain yet unbroken. Staggered by the thought, he wandered up the road a hundred yards, half-expecting to see a herd of them just off the shoulder, but there was nothing to see but the dust of the road flung up into the trees and ladled a quarter inch thick over the weeds. He ambled back to the sound of a truck straining up the grade and took his place in the circle.

He'd been there no more than a minute or two, accepting the bong from Maya, taking a dutiful hit and passing it on, when Star came out of the clearing behind them with an armful of wildflowers, flushed and smiling; he watched her dance round the group, dispensing flowers, and then she settled in beside him, a lavender spray of fireweed tucked behind each ear, and what was that song that made him grit his teeth every time he heard it-something about going to San Francisco with flowers in your hair? Whatever hack was responsible for that drivel should have seen Star in that moment and he might have learned something about flowers and hair.

She was in a blue-and-white granny dress that brought out the color of her eyes, and the material strained against her knees and the long smooth slope of her thighs as she eased herself down. He put his arm around her to pull her in close, and as he did-in that exact moment-there was a flurry overhead and a quick-beating outsized bird that might have been an emperor goose or maybe an eagle, shot low through the trees and vanished so quickly nobody could be sure they'd seen it, and maybe none of them had, since just about everybody had their eyes closed. He let out a low exclamation. “Did you see that?” he said.

She turned to him as if for a kiss, her hair soft against his face. “Yes!” she said. “Yes! Wasn't it amazing? What was it-a hawk?”

“I don't know, but it's a good omen, don't you think?”

Tom Krishna was leading a chant. Everybody clasped hands and she leaned away a moment to take hold of the person on her left-it was Weird George, with chicken bones knotted in his hair and a string of garlic cloves slung round his neck to ward off vampires-and then came back to him and intertwined her fingers with his. “I'm so happy,” she said. “I never knew I could be this happy, never even suspected it. Aren't you happy too? Couldn't you just die for it?”

He told her he was. And he could.

In Fairbanks, Norm pulled the bus up in front of a diner, and they all filed out, everybody, the whole family, including the dogs, while the goats bleated from their ramshackle pen and Che and Sunshine shot up and down the sidewalk like guided missiles. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. Cars stopped dead in the middle of the street. People came out of stores, the barbershop, town hall. And Drop City, arrayed in all its finery, went into the diner in shifts and ate them out of milk shakes, ice cream, grilled cheese, hamburgers, tuna salad, lettuce, lemon meringue pie and soup of the day, and all of it at triple the price they would have paid in California because every mouthful had to be shipped up from the lower forty-eight. Marco counted out his share and he paid for Star, too, but he sank into his denim jacket and pulled the collar up as if he could lose himself in it-he hadn't seen a salmon yet. Or a caribou. A bear. Even a rabbit.

“Don't worry about the money,” Star told him, tucking the shining ropes of her hair behind her ears. She hadn't washed it in a week. Nobody had washed, but for the odd splash under the faucet at a truck stop or gas station, and Norm refused to stop for a communal scrub-down or swim or anything else though they passed a thousand glittering streams and rivers and lakes so clear they weren't even lakes but a kind of subset of the air. Keep it rolling, twenty-four hours a day, that was Norm's motto.

“I'm not worried,” Marco said, but he was.

Star leaned across the table and took hold of his wrists. “This is America up here, that's the beauty of it. We can get food stamps, unemployment, welfare, just like anyplace else.” Behind her, outside on the street where the sun raked at their sloping brows and kinked their hair and brought the angles of their cheekbones and noses into unblunted relief, three squared-up middle-aged women in flower-print dresses gaped through the window as if they were at the zoo. If he were in a lighter mood, Marco would have waved to them or maybe skewed his tongue in the corner of his mouth and scratched at his armpits, _er-er-er.__ As it was, he just dropped his eyes. “Besides,” she said, lowering her voice, “I have a few bucks put away. For emergencies. And you're definitely an emergency, you know that?”

He didn't know what to say to this, and he was irritated, impatient, tired of the whole dog and pony show. Where were the trees to cut and peel and notch, where was the river, where were the postcard vistas, the fish, the game, nature red in tooth and claw and just crying out to be manipulated and subdued-and enjoyed? What about enjoyment? Where was that on the schedule? He was wrung-out. Depressed. His throat was sore. In his pocket there were sixteen dollars and eighty-seven cents, and when that was gone, there'd be a long precious wait for food stamps and welfare and whatever else the all-giving and Great Society wanted to dole out-and how would the checks even get to them out in the bush? Was there mail delivery up the Yukon? Parcel post? Carrier pigeon? “I'm not worried,” he repeated.

Across the room, too wrought up even to sit, Norm swayed over the Formica-topped tables, forking up the macaroni and cheese special with a side of Waldorf salad, his eyes sucked back into his head with fatigue, exhorting them to eat up, get with it, _mobilize.__ “A hundred sixty more miles,” he rasped, too depleted to shout. “An inch and a half on the map. That's all, people-we're already home. Can you smell it? Smell that river?”

Nobody could smell anything. Their jaws worked, their smiles glistened. It was a festive moment, presided over by a shell-shocked cook and a dazed waitress in a pleated skirt and a blouse with rodeo figures embroidered on the collar. And so what if Fairbanks was exactly like a half-mile strip torn out of any industrial city anywhere in America, like Detroit or Albany or Akron, like the very burgs they'd all escaped from in the first place? They were here. They were in Alaska. The end was in sight.

Norm handed his plate to the waitress and people began to move reluctantly from the counter, the tables, the oversubscribed rest room in back. “Drop City North, man,” he said, spreading his arms to address the room at large, which included an Indian woman of indeterminate age frozen behind a paperback book in the far corner and two red-eared locals hunkered over coffee mugs and staring fixedly at the wall behind the counter as if the secrets of the universe were written there in infinitesimally small letters. “Land of the Midnight Sun!” From where he was sitting with Star, Marco felt detached from the whole scene. There was Norm, the reluctant guru, waving his arms in exhortation, pale and flaccid Norm who never wanted to lead anybody, at the end of his tether in a greasy spoon diner in a place that made nowhere sound like a legitimate destination. Marco felt embarrassed for him, embarrassed for them all, and the flare of optimism that had lit him up at Northway Junction was just a cinder now. This was crazy, he was thinking, the whole quixotic business. If they lasted a month it would be a miracle.

Outside on the street he shared a cigarette with Star, everybody milling around as if this was what they'd come for, to squat in the sun on the dirty sidewalks of a flat-topped frontier town that managed to look both pre- and postindustrial at the same time, sagging log cabins giving way to Quonset huts and abused brick and the rusted-out prefab warehouses that were elbowing their way across the flats like wounded soldiers. Pan and Lydia sat perched on the hood of the Studebaker, the same Top 40 hits you could have heard in Tuscaloosa or Sioux City whining out of the radio in thin threads of recognition, while Verbie and her sister fought over something in a hissing whisper. People kept trooping in and out of the bathroom at the rear of the diner, going back for toothpicks, breath mints, gum-anything to delay getting back on the bus-and then Norm just took Premstar by the hand and mounted the worn steel steps and everybody followed suit. He did a quick head count, the engine turned over with a grating blast of spent diesel, and the bus jerked away from the curb in a black pall of exhaust.

They cranked through the bleak downtown streets, across the Chena River and out the Steese Highway, replete with overpriced diner food, with grease and sugar and phosphoric acid slithering through their veins like slow death. Cigarettes circulated from hand to hand, the odd joint, a bota bag of wine. Maya and Merry blew kisses and flashed the peace sign to the slumped Indians and stave-eyed drunks who seemed to be the only inhabitants of the place, pavement gave way to potholes and potholes to dirt, and then they were folded up in the country again, the world gone green on them and the final stretch of road lapping at the wheels like a gentle brown sea.

Up front, behind the wheel, Norm came back to life. It was amazing. One minute he was dead and buried and the next he couldn't stop bobbing his head, couldn't stop talking, and Marco wondered about that, about how much of the holy and rejuvenating pharmacopoeia Drop City had brought along in their private and communal stashes-ounces, pounds, bales? Norm drummed at the wheel, rotated his shoulders, tapped his feet. He was a tour guide now, leaning into the windshield and crowing out the names of every creek and culvert they passed, lecturing anybody within earshot on the history, geology and botany of the sub-Yukon and the lore of the skin-hunters and prospectors, or what passed for it. “See that?” he said, pointing to an expanse of bleached-out scrub crowded with the thin dark slashes of spruce trees tipped and scattered as if they'd been bulldozed.

Marco was tasting wine in the back of his throat. He passed the bota bag to Star and pressed his face to the window. Across from them, Premstar, her hair lank and unwashed, had a seat to herself. She was wearing shorts and her legs were tented on the cracked vinyl seat so you could see the crease between them, her knees knocking rhythmically, her bare ankles scalloped and white. She was reading a magazine with the picture of a glossy woman on the cover. Norm might as well have been talking to himself.

“See the way the trees are leaning all over the place-see those two right there, like crossed swords? That's what they call the drunken forest, as if the trees were all whacked out of their minds and couldn't stand up straight.” He swung round in the seat, squeezing the words out of the corner of his mouth. “Marco, you listening?”

Star answered for him. “We're listening,” she said. “What else have we got to listen to?”

“Premstar?”

Premstar didn't look up from the magazine.

Norm's head swung back round and he addressed his words to the windshield as the engine churned and the bus heaved over the ruts. “Permafrost, that's what does that. Two feet down it's like rock, frozen since the Ice Age, _before__ the Ice Age, like back in the time of the woolly mammoths and all that. Saber-toothed tigers. The dire wolf. Remember those mammoths, Prem, what a bitch they used to be? _Premstar.__ I'm talking to you. I said you remember what a bitch it used to be saddling up those mammoths?”

Her voice leaked out from behind the magazine, barely a whisper: “Yes, _Norm.__ A real bitch.”

“So what happens is the trees can't put down their roots more than maybe twenty-four inches or whatever and then the wind comes along and gives them a shove. And don't think there's anything wrong with them-it's not that at all. They're alive and thriving. It's just that they're never going to grow straight. Or much.”

Permafrost. The drunken forest. Now here was something, the kind of revelation that made all this concrete, that made these scrubby hills and swamps and miniature forests seem exotic, and they _were__ exotic, Marco kept reminding himself, because this was Alaska, appearances to the contrary. He'd begun to have his doubts. Where were the glaciers, the waterfalls, the snow-capped mountains and untrammeled forests? Not here, not in the interior, anyway. This looked more like Ohio, like Michigan or Wisconsin or a hundred other places. He strained his eyes looking for eagles, looking for wolves, but there was nothing out there but scrub and more scrub.

Norm was onto something else now, his mind peeling back memories layer by layer-he'd expected a wolf behind every bush the first time he'd come up here, salmon hanging from the trees, gold dust in his coffee grains-but Marco wasn't listening. He wasn't feeling all that steady. Everybody on the bus had been trading round the same cold for a week, one of the hazards of communal living, especially when you were cooped up like this, and now he had it too. His head ached. He was sniffling. And the wine scoured the back of his throat and sat hard on his stomach, a mistake, and he knew it was a mistake even before he'd passed the bag to Star and she'd passed it to Premstar and Premstar took a delicate white-throated sip and passed it to Mendocino Bill. The bus lurched, righted itself, lurched again, and he looked down at Star's hand entwined in his own as if he didn't know what it was. The next moment he was making his way down the aisle to the bathroom.

Though the sun was high and it couldn't have been past seven or so, most people were asleep, Reba with her head back and snoring, Jiminy and Merry camped under one of the faded Navajo blankets that had hung in the back room at Drop City in a time that seemed so distant now he could barely remember it. Mendocino Bill and Deuce were playing chess on a magnetic board, the dogs were curled up beneath the seats and Che and Sunshine, snot glistening on their upper lips, stared numbly up the aisle as if they were watching a home movie, of which Marco, suddenly sick to his stomach, was the star. The bus lurched again and he staggered against one of the seats, then he was through the kitchen and into the rear of the bus, rattling at the door of the makeshift bathroom. The smell didn't help. The whole bus reeked of unwashed bodies and festering feet, of the tribe that dabbed powdered hand soap under their arms and rinsed their hair in grimy truck stop rest rooms, but the chemical toilet was something else altogether-this was where the thin gruel of the road poured out of them, brothers and sisters alike. Marco forced himself inside and flipped the latch.

He was sweating, the hair pasted to his forehead under the red bandanna he hadn't unknotted since they'd left California. It was dark and close, the only light a peep-show flicker through the grate in the door. He needed to vomit, because if he vomited he'd feel better-or that was the theory, anyway-and so he crouched over the stainless steel seat and thrust two pinched fingers down his throat. He gagged, but nothing came up. The contents of the bowl sloshed and rotated and gave off an evil smell. He braced himself against the ringing metal wall and was about to try again, two wet fingers poised at his lips, when the floor suddenly skewed away from him and then came bucking back up to pitch him face-first into the door. Then they weren't moving anymore and everybody seemed to be shouting at once.

His nose wasn't broken, or at least he didn't think it was, but the blood had darkened his T-shirt and pretty well ruined the gold-and-black brocade vest Star had picked out for him at a thrift shop in Ukiah, and that was a shame-a drag, a real drag-because it had become part of his identity, his signature article of clothing, the essential garment that announced to the world who he was and what he intended to do about it. It was hip, quintessentially hip, and now it was ruined. But that was all right, he told himself. In six months he'd be wearing caribou hide, wearing wolf, bear, ermine-and what was an ermine, anyway? A kind of weasel, wasn't it?

The excess blood had dried in his mustache and at the corners of his mouth, and he sat by the side of the road alternately rubbing the flecks of it loose and swatting at mosquitoes while the rest of the tribe milled around watching Mendocino Bill and Tom Krishna trying to work the wheel with the shredded tire off the axle, and of course it had to be an inner wheel-what else would you expect? Truly, at this point he didn't care whether his nose was broken or not, didn't care about the blood or the throbbing dull pain in his sinuses and couldn't remember what he'd been doing in the steel cage of the bathroom in the first place, but like everyone else he was so frustrated he could cry. By Norm's calculation, they weren't more than three or four miles from Boynton, _walking__ distance, no less-and here was one more delay, one last impediment to keep the tents from going up and the trees from coming down. Just to sleep on the ground for a change, that was all anybody was asking. To get there. To arrive. To sit around an open fire and be a family again instead of a traveling circus.

Star had been sitting with him, the mosquitoes coming fast and furious, but she'd climbed back into the bus to change into a pair of long pants and a jacket, and he'd asked her to dig a bottle of bug repellant out of his backpack so he could get some relief himself. It was a wet country, boggy, the top two feet of the ground defrosting in summer but holding the water like a sink because it couldn't permeate the frozen layer beneath, and that was ideal for _Culex pipiens__ and their wriggling waterborne larvae. They'd swarmed through the summer nights in Connecticut when he was growing up, and he'd been south too, to Florida and Louisiana, but the mosquitoes here-his first introduction to Alaskan wildlife, how about that? — were something else altogether. He slapped at his arms and clapped a hand to the back of his neck, and when he sneezed a wad of disjointed insects blew out of his nostrils in bits and pieces. His nose pulsated like a freshly rung bell, and he was drinking Spañada out of the bota bag to compensate-Alfredo had gotten a deal on a case of half-gallon bottles in some outpost somewhere along the way-and with each sip he told himself to stay calm, be patient, go with the flow. At least he wasn't queasy anymore, at least he had that.

He watched Star climb down out of the bus with Merry, Maya and Jiminy in tow, all four of them looking conspiratorial. She'd changed into a pair of red corduroy bells and her denim shirt with the signs of the zodiac embroidered up and down the arms and across the plane of her shoulders-the archer, Sagittarius, flexing his bow back there as if to ward off any harm that might come to her. The four of them trooped across the road to him, their faces shining and triumphant under the high slant of the sun, and he could see from the way she cupped her right hand and held it close to her body that it was more than just insect repellent she was carrying. He watched her hips slice back and forth, watched her sandals compact the dust of the road. Her features were regular, her eyes luminous. She gave him a smile so serene she could have been a Renaissance Madonna-or maybe she was just stoned. Maybe that was it.

“Let me guess,” he said, “nobody could wait, right?”

They eased down in the weeds beside him, the homey familiar scent of marijuana clinging to their hair and clothing. There was a rustle of vegetation, wildflowers crushed and displaced-lupine, fireweed, what looked to be some sort of poppy-and Jiminy's knees cracking as he dropped down and inserted half a dozen joss sticks into the friable dirt at their feet. “That's right,” he said, leaning forward to touch a lighter to the tapering ends one by one, “and we're mosquito-proofing this holy shrine that surrounds you too, my good man. Be gone, bothersome insects. And for the rest, be merry and of good cheer.”

“Some of us were thinking of walking it,” Maya said, “just to see what the town's like-I mean, we're so close. But Norm didn't think so. He didn't think it would be cool.”

People were out in the road throwing Frisbees and shouting while the dogs irrigated the bushes and Norm rasped and gesticulated and tugged at his beard, and Pan-the back of his head with its thin wisps of hair visible just below the line of vegetation clinging to the far shoulder-flung a lure at the dark surface of the river that slid along the road here like the lining of a jacket. There was no traffic. There'd never been any traffic. They might as well have had a flat out on the Serengeti or the Kirghiz steppe.

“I'd walk it in a heartbeat,” Marco said.

“Me too,” Jiminy said without conviction. Smoke had begun to rise from the joss sticks, and the clear cool unalloyed air carried a freight of burnt punk.

“Just to see it, you know what I'm saying?” Marco persisted-he couldn't help himself. “I've seen it in my head to the point where I know I'm going to be disappointed. Or maybe not. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised. That happens, doesn't it? Don't you get pleasantly surprised once out of a hundred times?”

“Nothing's the way you picture it,” Star said. “The mind creates its own reality, and how could the real and actual thing ever match that? It's like a movie compared to a cartoon.” She was right there beside him, and in her palm the veined and speckled pill that looked like one of the color tablets you'd use to dye Easter eggs.

“Or a book,” Maya said. “A book compared to a movie.”

“I don't know, I think I'd listen to Norm,” Merry said, leaning back on the twin props of her elbows and stretching her legs out into the roadway as if she were sinking into an easy chair. Her pupils were dilated to the size of a cat's. She was wearing a serape over her jeans and a flop-brimmed vaquero's hat and her feet were bare and dirty and fringed with mosquitoes. Marco saw that she'd painted each of her toenails a different color, and though he wasn't stoned-not yet, anyway-he thought he'd never seen anything so beautiful, and why didn't all women paint their toenails like that? All men, for that matter? “I mean, what's the hurry?” she said. “Can't we just groove on this sky, the wildflowers, the river? I mean, look at it. Just look.”

Marco took it as an injunction and looked off down the sunstruck tunnel of the road, and there was the Studebaker and there the Bug, pulled up on the shoulder, but there was no Dale Murray on his motorcycle, and where was he when you needed him? It would be nothing to horse the thing into Boynton and back, see the river, ride right into it, snuff the breeze, all hail and hallelujah, Boynton or Bust. But Dale Murray had turned back the day after they'd crossed into Canada to see what had become of Lester and Franklin and Sky Dog, and he'd never reappeared. Marco didn't feel one way or the other about it, because when you came right down to it he hardly knew the guy and he certainly couldn't write any recommendations for the people he associated with. But Dale Murray had two legs and two arms and a pair of hands and they were going to need every pair of hands they could muster to put this thing together-it would be a long dark age before any runaways or weekend hippies found their way up here to swell their ranks, that was for sure.

There was some noise from the direction of the bus, a lively debate between Mendocino Bill and Norm as to the viability of the spare-“There's no doubt in my mind,” Norm was saying, “no doubt whatsoever, so go ahead, put it on”-and then Star was pressing the pill into his hand. He accepted it, accepted it in the way he'd been conditioned to-if somebody gave you drugs, you took them, no questions asked-and he even went so far as to bring his hand to his mouth and make the motions of swallowing. Burnt punk rose to his nostrils. The sun cupped a hand at the back of his neck. No one was watching him-their gazes were fixed across the road, on the bus, on Norm, on the black wheel laid out like a corpse in the dirt. They weren't there yet, that was what he was thinking, and he wasn't going to celebrate until they were. He slipped the pill into the bloodstained pocket of his ruined vest.

Star let out a laugh in response to something Jiminy had said, and then they were all laughing-even him, even Marco, though he had no idea what he was laughing about or for or whether laughing was the appropriate response to the situation. No matter. The smoke rose from the joss sticks, the Frisbee hung in the air like a brick in a wall and they were stretched out on the side of the road and laughing, just laughing, and you would have thought the cabins had already been built, the wood split for the stove, the gold panned, the furs stretched and the larder stocked, because nobody here had a care in the world. Merry handed a roach to Star and she held it to her lips till the stub of it glowed red and then she handed it to Marco, who pinched it from her fingers and held it to his own lips a moment, sucking in the sweet seep of smoke as he'd done a thousand times before. Everything seemed to slow down, as if the earth were transfixed on its axis and the fragment of sky overhead was all they would ever need. And then, out of the corner of his eye, the laziest, slowest movement in the world: the dogs were emerging from the strip of blue shadow beneath the bus and stirring themselves with a dainty flex and release of their rear paws. They both gazed intently up the road, and Freak, his hackles rising, let out a low woof of inquiry.

A dog had appeared round the far bend-or no, it was a wolf, with the rawboned legs that seemed to veer away from its body as if they'd been put on backward, a wolf trotting down a road in Alaska. Marco was on his feet. “Look,” he said, “look, it's a-” He caught himself. There were two figures coming round the bend now, a man and a woman striding along easily under the weight of their backpacks, and this was no wolf, or no wild wolf anyway. The Frisbee slid back down its arc, people eased to their feet. “Norm,” somebody said, “hey, Norm.”

The man was tall, hard-muscled, lean. He was wearing a weather-bleached flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of jeans so knee-sprung and tattered they made Marco's look new. His hair was short, thick, and it stood up straight from his head. He was walking as if walking were a competitive event, the steady pump of his legs and the clip of his boots reeling in the road before him, a man moving in silhouette against the bright splash of the day, and Marco couldn't tell what he was, a bum, a gas station attendant, the Scholar Gypsy himself. The woman-she was in her twenties, her blond hair tied back in a ponytail like a cheerleader's, her shorts showing off the muscles of her calves and the clean working lines of her buttocks and thighs-raised a hand to shade her eyes as if she couldn't quite decide whether the bus was a mirage or not. Up the road shot a yellow blur, paws gathering, muscles straining, and Freak and Frodo were on them, but the man never broke stride and his dog never wavered either-it just ducked its head and followed at his heels. For a moment the yellow dogs bobbed round them, dust rose, and then the gap closed to nothing and the man and woman were standing right there amongst them on the deserted road.

Tom Krishna had been busy with the axle, with the big ridged tire and the stubborn wheel that just that moment slid forward to kiss the spare. He looked up into the silence and saw the hikers standing there with their swollen backpacks and the dogs moiling around and the road dust rising. “Hey,” he said, coming up out of his crouch, “what's happening, brother,” and he reached out a greasy hand for the soul shake that never came.

The man just looked at them with an amused grin, looked at them all, while the sun glanced off Norm's glasses and Marco stood suspended at the side of the road and Merry and Maya exchanged a giggle. “You people aren't-” the man began, and then caught himself. There was flat incredulity in his tone. “You aren't _hippies,__ are you?”

Norm came forward, boxy in his overalls, rings glittering on his fingers. The bell tinkled at his neck. From the goats atop the bus, a forlorn bleat of disenchantment: they wanted down, they wanted out, they wanted to graze their way to Boynton. Norm bellowed out his name-“Norm Sender!”-and pumped the man's hand in a conventional handshake before turning to the woman and showing the gold in his rotting teeth. “We're Drop City, is what we are, avatars of peace, love and the _higher__ consciousness, come all the way up from California to reclaim my uncle Roy's place-Roy Sender's? — on the sweet, giving and ever-clear Thirtymile. And we're all of us pleased to meet you.”

The man scratched the back of his head and tossed his gaze like a beanbag from face to face. “I'll be damned,” he said. “You _are__ hippies.”

The girls giggled. The dogs danced. Mendocino Bill said, “That's right. And we're proud of it.”

And then the man in the worn flannel shirt seemed to think of something else altogether, some new concern that disarmed him totally, and Marco watched him shift his feet in the pale tan dirt of the road. Watched the brow furrow and the grin vanish. The man's gaze flitted around again and finally came back to Norm. “Did you say _Roy Sender__?”

21

That was what he'd said, _Roy Sender-Roy Sender's place__-and Sess tried to control his facial muscles, but his body betrayed him. He took a step back to disengage himself, ran a hand through his hair. This was crazy, purely crazy, a page torn out of one of the newsmagazines-“The Woodstock Nation,”

“Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll” or some such-torn out and given three dimensions and flesh, acres of flesh, because these hippie women sitting on the side of the road were the stuff of the wild hair's winter fantasies, and two of them, the little blonde and the brunette in the cowgirl hat with her legs stretched out in the road, could have made the pages of another kind of magazine altogether. He was thinking _Playboy,__ thinking _Dude,__ thinking _The Thirtymile? Did he say the Thirtymile?__ when the big greasy character with the gold-plated teeth-the nephew-loomed up on him with a whole string of questions: Who were they? Where were they headed? Had they ever been to Boynton? Did they know if the salmon were running yet, and what about the berries? Were the berries ripe out there?

Sess gave Pamela a glance. She'd stiffened up like some neophyte anthropologist set down amongst the wrong tribe-headhunters when she'd been expecting basket-weavers-and she wasn't giving them anything, not even a half a smile. And Lucius, Lucius wasn't giving in either-he just backed himself up against Sess's legs while the two yellow dogs pawed the dirt and poked their snouts at him. People were coming down off the bus now, a whole weird Halloween procession in mismatching colors, bells, beads, headbands, pants so wide you couldn't see their feet and hair like a river so you couldn't tell the men from the-oh, but you could, unless you were blind, and he guessed they must have all gone ahead and burned their brassieres.

Sess took hold of the nephew's hand for the second time, but this time on his own initiative, and of course he was half-lit, drinking all day and full of the hellfire exuberance of dunking Joe Bosky's car for him, and so he worked up a smile and introduced himself. “Sess Harder,” he heard himself say, and wasn't this a riot, wasn't it? “And this is my wife, Pamela. And my new dog, Lucius.” To this point he'd just answered with a grunt or a nod to the questions thrown at him, but he felt expansive suddenly and he told them that the kings were running and the berries ripening and that he'd been with Roy Sender the day he left the country. Helped him move, in fact.

“Really? Like no shit? You knew my uncle?”

He didn't tell him that Roy Sender was a father to him when he had no father of his own left breathing on this planet or that Roy Sender had taught him everything he knew or that Roy Sender was no hippie and never could be because he believed in making it on his own, in his own way, no matter how poor the odds, and that he was the kind of man who'd lie down and rot in his own skin before he'd take a government handout. He didn't tell him about the solace of the Thirtymile, the clarity of the air, the eternal breathless silence of forty below and the snow spread like a strangler's hand across the throat of the river. All he said was, “Yeah,” and Pamela, silent to this point, said, “Washo Unified? You're some kind of school group, is that what it is?”

A woman had got off the bus, dark hair in pigtails, a sharp decisive face, eyes that took you in and spat you back out again. She was thirty, thirty at least, wearing a faded denim shirt and some sort of improvised leggings that weren't exactly pants and weren't exactly a skirt either. Her feet were bare. And dirty. “We're a family,” she said, coming right up to Pamela and holding out both her hands. “Just a family, that's all.”

Pamela-and this made him smile because she was so good-natured and sweet, not a malicious bone in her body-took the woman's hands in her own a moment and held them till etiquette dictated she let go.

“See that man over there?” the woman said, and they all turned their heads to where a skinny shirtless dark-skinned man with a full oily patriarch's beard stood on the bank of the river skipping stones. “That's my husband. And over there”-she indicated a pair of half-naked children bobbing and weaving along the water's edge in two matching squalls of mosquitoes-“those are my kids. And these others, everybody else here? These are my brothers and sisters.”

The nephew could barely keep still during all this, jerking his head back and forth and doing a little dance in his sandaled feet. “Listen,” he said, “I don't know what your trip is or where you're going to camp tonight or like any of that, but what I mean is a friend of Uncle Roy's is a friend of mine, and you people are welcome, I mean more than welcome, to ride into town with us, and let me _extend__ an invitation right now to the first annual celebratory communal feast of the Drop City North pilgrims and fellow travelers, to be prepared on the banks of the mighty Yukon this very evening while the sun shines and the birds twitter and the hip and joyful music rides right on up into the _trees.__”

Pamela said she didn't think so. “We've got things to do,” she said. “And the walk's nothing, really, just a couple of miles.”

It was then that one of the hippie men, a guy in a bandanna with what looked to be blood on his shirt, handed Sess a wineskin and Sess threw back his head and took a long arcing swallow before passing it to Pamela. He looked round him. All the hippies were grinning. The nephew looked as if he'd been dipped in cream, the wildflowers jerked at their leashes, the river sang. Joe Bosky's car was flotsam now-or was it jetsam? Pamela's lips shone with sweet wine.

“Sure,” Sess said. “Sure, we'll take a ride with you.”

The Three Pup featured the usual human backdrop-Skid Denton mumbling French poetry into a shot glass, Lynette propped behind the bar with her arms locked across her breasts and no key in sight, Richie Oliver and his consolation prize drinking themselves into another dimension and grinding beer nuts between their teeth in a slow sure cud-like way. Iron Steve was bent over the pool table with a heavyset, sharp-beaked man who must have been a tourist because Sess didn't recognize him, and Tim Yule, the tip of his nose still bright with a dab of fresh mucus and the paper carnation he'd worn at the wedding still tucked into his button hole, stood there beside them, clinging to his cue stick as if it were bolted to the floor. The place smelled the way it always did, like an old boot stuffed with ground beef, fried onions and stove ash and left out in the sun to fester for a couple of days. The usual drone of mid-Appalachian self-pity spewed out of the jukebox and the usual embattled mosquitoes hung in the air.

Sess blew through the door like a hurricane, all clatter and gusto, and he had Pamela by one hand and the hippie wineskin by the other, feeling dense and lighter than air at the same time, and so what if the big greasy sack of a nephew was right on his heels and all the rest of them too? They were people, weren't they, just like anybody else? Dirtier, maybe. Lazier. They smoked drugs and screwed like dogs. But the world was changing-men had hair like women, women wore pants like men and let their tits hang loose, and who was going to argue with that? Wake up, Boynton, that was what he was thinking, wake up and join the modern world. But he wasn't really thinking too clearly and Pamela would never nag-one beer, that was all, one beer and they'd stay in the shack tonight and go upriver first thing in the morning and let Wetzel Setzler and the rest of the town fathers scratch their heads over a busload of hippies who wouldn't know a moose from a caribou. Or a hare from a parky squirrel, for that matter.

Tammy Wynette gave way to Roger Miller on the jukebox-“King of the Road,” a song Sess hated so utterly and intensely it made him want to punch things every time it came on and it came on perpetually-and in the brief hissing caesura between records everybody in the room, even Tim Yule, turned to the door. In came the nephew, roaring, and then the one with the blood on his shirt and the little blonde and then a bleached-out monster in a greasy pair of overalls and a whole spangled chittering parade that filled the room before Roger Miller could limp from one mind-numbing verse to the next. “Drinks for everybody in the house!” the nephew boomed, laying a bill on the bar. “The first round's on Roy Sender-the _legendary__ Roy Sender! Anybody here know Roy Sender?”

Nobody said a word. Nobody moved. They all concentrated on Roger Miller as if they were at Carnegie Hall listening to Oistrakh. Tim Yule cleared his throat. “These people friends of yours, Sess?”

In answer, Sess crossed the room to the jukebox and gave it a kick that sent the needle skidding across the record with a long protracted hiss of static. Then he dug out a quarter, inserted it, and hit B-9, “Mystic Eyes,” three times running. Lynette, who'd seen everything, or at least pretended she had, began cracking beers and lining them up on the bar, and by the time Van Morrison came in after the mouth harp with his black-hearted vocal everybody was talking at once.

It was a short song, no more than two minutes or so, but by the second run-through a couple of the hippies had begun to sway their shoulders and shuffle their feet; by the third time around they were dancing, throwing out their elbows and letting their arms writhe over their heads. The nephew had got hold of a thin blond girl in stacked-up shoes who looked like Twiggy's American twin, and a little five-foot girl with a missing tooth and a tie-dyed shirt grabbed Iron Steve by the hand and started pogoing around the room with him. Sess put another quarter in, hit the tune three more times. Skid Denton let out a groan, Richie Oliver put a finger to his temple and pulled an imaginary trigger, and still more hippies poured through the door and spilled back out into the parking lot where somebody cranked up the big speakers in the bus and a whole shimmering spangle of weird hippie guitar music drifted out into the muskeg. There'd been nothing like this here since the last alien visitation, and Sess was too young to remember that.

“Sess!” Skid Denton was shouting over the uproar, waving a full shot glass as if he were proposing a toast. “Where'd you find these freaks, anyway-the Ringling Brothers' circus?”

“And Barnum and Bailey,” Sess shouted back. He snaked his arm between a chinless character with a beard so sparse it was barely there and a big-shouldered girl-woman, Pamela's age at least-whose breasts were on full display in some sort of leotard thing, and said, “Excuse me,” as he reached for his second beer. But the woman reached for it simultaneously and got there first. She let the neck of the bottle sprout between her thumb and forefinger before bringing it to her lips for a long calculated swallow and then handing it to him. “Hi,” she said, and he could see the mascara caked on her eyelashes, definitely a downtown sort of girl and what was she doing in the Three Pup? “I'm Lydia,” she said. “And you're Norm's friend, right?”

Norm? Who the hell was Norm? He just smiled, and the guy with the nonexistent beard smiled, and she smiled too. “Yeah,” he heard himself say, “that's right.”

And now her face really lit up. “Well, I just wanted to thank you, that's all, on behalf of all of us, I mean, because we really didn't know how our whole trip was going to go down up here-I mean, we didn't know if it was going to be like _Easy Rider__ or _Joe__ or what.”

“Trepidatious, that's what we were,” the guy said, but he was a kid, really, twenty, twenty-one maybe, with a head that was too big and shoulders that were too narrow and a pair of eyes that were a vast delta of broken veins. He slipped his wrist inside Sess's and attempted some sort of secret hippie handshake, but the beer bottle got in his way, so he leaned back and made the victory sign with two fingers. “Peace, man,” he said, and then he started off on a monologue about how he'd always wanted to shoot a moose and skin it and a bear too and have a bear rug on the floor and maybe catch a king salmon and have it stuffed at the taxidermist's-for over the fireplace, you know what I mean? — and did he, Sess, have any idea where the moose were this time of year, like up in the hills or down by the river or what?

The thump of the bass was like friction: the floor was moving one way and Sess was going the other, even though he was standing stock still. He looked across the room to where Pamela sat at a table with the pigtailed woman, waving a beer and declaiming about something, and then the woman chimed in-it was all in pantomime over the intervening roar-and Pamela chattered right back at her. The hippies had caught on and kept feeding the jukebox quarters and the only song they played-the song of the night, the anthem-was “Mystic Eyes.” It was a joke. Hilarious. Fifteen times, twenty, twenty-five. They danced and pounded and threw back beers and shots of peppermint schnapps and whatever else they could lay their hands on. All was movement and noise and the swirling interleaved colors of the dancers' shirts and jackets and the flapping wind-propelled cuffs of their pants. _We went walkin' / Down by / The old graveyard / I looked at you-__

Sess was going to answer the kid-he was going to tell him that the season was fish, not meat, and that the average moose stood taller than any of the cabins along the river and just might be a tiny bit too much for a chinless, slack-armed, eye-bleeding, California hippie to take on before he got his feet wet and pulled his head up out of his ass-but he never got the chance, and Lynette was the deciding factor. She came out from behind the bar like the shadow of something swift-moving and vast and jerked the electric cord out of the socket beside the jukebox. The music died. Everybody froze.

“I want you out!” Lynette cried in a wild strained falsetto that made it sound as if she were trying to take the song to the next level and beyond. “All of you-out! Now! If you think I'm going to listen to that shitty rock and roll crap one more time you're out of your mind. Now get out! Everybody! This place is _closed.__”

From outside, in the mosquito-hung lot, there came the sound of the hippie guitars, more noticeable now in the absence of the jukebox. It was a mournful, contemplative music, each note plied out of a crevice to be held up and viewed from all angles before the next one allowed itself to be dug out and the next one after that. Sess stood immobilized amidst the throng, and then he felt himself moving toward the door and the sad sparkling wrung-out promise of the music. He drained his beer. He felt Pamela at his side. Then they were outside in the air that had a sweet riparian smell to it, the smell of the river recharging itself with meltwater, and the hippies were dancing like moonwalkers to the drugged-down testudineous beat. Lucius was there, nosing at his cupped hand, and he realized he hadn't fed him since he'd claimed him from the pound, and that was remiss, it was. “Come on, Sess,” Pamela was saying, tugging him toward the corner of the porch where they'd dropped their packs full of marshmallows and dill pickles and cheese graters and all the rest of the claptrap they just couldn't seem to live without. “Time to go. We've got a big day tomorrow. The garden, remember? All those logs that need to be peeled? The salmon?”

That was when he locked eyes with the woman who'd put her lips to his beer-Lydia-and she gave him a long slow re-evaluative look out of eyes the color of the lupines sprouting along the road, one thin slant of sun catching her face, and whoever made her, whoever pulled the genes up out of the parental hat, sure didn't stint, that was what he was thinking. But then the brunette in the cowgirl getup looped her arm through Lydia's and she turned her back and began a weaving in-and-out snakedance that was like dripping hot oil right down the front of his pants.

“Hello, Sess. Remember me, your wife?”

He blinked twice, grinned.

“Enjoying the scenery?”

“They sure don't waste a lot of money on underwear, do they?”

She slipped an arm round his waist. The notes fractured and burst like bubbles, bubbles of aluminum, of pewter, hard metallic bubbles made by a machine somewhere in hippie land and bursting through the hippie speakers secreted in the back of the hippie bus. What was it? What would they say? Mind-blowing. It was mind-blowing. Skid Denton came through the door then with a soft-faced girl on either side of him, talking French a mile a minute. “No,” Pamela said, leaning into him, and she was feeling pretty good herself, no offense taken and the night was young, still young, “no, I don't guess they do.”

And then it was Iron Steve, his shoulders hunched and head bowed low so as to better breathe in what the little gap-toothed girl was all about-“Oh, yeah,” he was saying, “yeah, it gets cold, _shit, yeah__”-and Sess discovered another beer in his hand even as he was helping Pamela duck into the straps of her pack.

The nephew was the agent of the beer, standing there with his crack-frame glasses and the color showing in his teeth, two more beers bunched between his knuckles, one of which he handed to Pamela; the other he kept to himself, giving it a good long suck till the foam flecked his beard. “You know something?” he said, pulling away from the bottle and grinning wide. “I like your taste in music.”

Sess gave him his grin back, then bent at the knee so Pamela could help him on with his pack. “Yeah, but Lynette-you've got to forgive her. She's new here. She's from Seattle. I guess she's just got a hair up her ass.”

“It was a gas,” the nephew said, rooting in his beard as if he'd lost something there. “What'd we play it-like fifty times? But listen, I was serious about the invitation-the chicks'll have something cooked up inside the hour, I guarantee it, and well, you know, it's been a long hard road and all that and we have just _got__ to get down and raise some pure celebratory hell tonight. Nothing fancy-lentil soup, rice and vegetables. And wine. Sweet red wine.” He took another pull at his beer and looked out into the backlit trees.

“You're camping out tonight?”

The nephew shrugged. His shoulders were bare under the straps of the coveralls, hairy, furred with mosquitoes. “Sure. Why not?”

“But Roy's place-” He faltered. How could he begin to convey the complexity of the arrangement, the untenanted cabin that might sleep five or six at most, the treachery of the Yukon with its load of silt that would pack your clothes and drag you down in a heartbeat should you give it a chance, the lack of basic comforts? What were all these people planning to eat? Where were they going to get their pink lipstick and face paint and their jugs of sweet wine and their uppers and their downers and their pot and all the rest of it? And did he really want neighbors, thirty and more of them set down on his river within shouting distance of his trapline?

“It's pretty far,” Pamela put in. “Three hours, at least, by canoe.”

The nephew lifted his beard and let it drop. His hand was like a big soft fluttering moth as he brought the beer to his lips. “Oh, I'm apprised, I'm apprised,” he said. “I know the place, though it's been something like-_Jesus__-twenty years? Oh, man, _twenty__ years, can you believe it?” He began to laugh to himself, the pale shoulders bunching and heaving beneath a layer of fat, and the strap of the coveralls slipped down his right shoulder to reveal a tattoo in three colors-a cartoon character, and which one was it? Disney. A cross-legged fawn with outsized eyes. An image rushed up out of Sess's childhood, his mother in a pink dress and his sister with her fist sunk deep in a box of extra-buttered popcorn: Bambi. The man had _Bambi__ tattooed on his shoulder. Sess had never seen anything like it. He'd seen anchors, daggers, death's heads, seen hearts transfixed with arrows and dripping blood, the cheap blue fading appellations of wives, sweethearts and ex-lovers, an eagle with a fish in its claws-but _Bambi?__

“I'm no greenhorn,” the nephew was saying, “and I can tell you I know at least a modicum of what I'm talking about when it comes to this country, because I lived three summers and the better part of two winters up here with my uncle when I was a kid-which is not to say I haven't got a lot to learn, man, you know? Because I do. But we got three canoes up on top of that bus”-Sess turned his head to contemplate the big yellow box on wheels and found himself staring into the boneheaded, slit-eyed faces of a pair of goats that could have been the templates for cartoon figures themselves-“and I made a deal with this bush pilot-Joe Bosky, you know him? — to ferry three loads of people and supplies upriver, including like tools and the _basics__ because all these people, all my brothers and sisters, need to like get their _heads__ together, you know what I mean? I mean, they think it's all going to be milk and honey, but I know better-”

The nephew went on for a while with his speech, and Sess and Pamela stood there as if they were in a lecture hall, except that they were swatting at mosquitoes and pulling at their beers while the shattered, tinkling music rained down on them and the skinny blonde with the pink lipstick came up and draped her arms over the nephew's back and held on as if he were a buoy in a swirl of darkening waters. “So what I was thinking,” the nephew said, in what seemed a valedictory sort of way, “was we'd just pull up someplace by the river and camp for tonight and the next couple of days maybe-”

Pull up where? Sess was going to ask, because there wasn't a square foot of property anywhere along the riverfront that wasn't already spoken for. You couldn't buy, beg or steal a lot in Boynton since the Feds started in with the Native Claims Settlement business, and if you set foot outside the town line you were on government property-and Wetzel Setzler, the local shill for the Forest Service, could get pretty squirrelly about that. Plus, a bus full of longhairs in mufti wasn't likely to provoke a warm response from whoever they chose to trespass on, and they were already tied up with Joe Bosky, the worst kind of river scum, and that was another strike against them-no matter how you sketched it, it wasn't a pretty picture.

The nephew sucked beer and grinned at him. He wore a halo of insects round the crown of thorns that was his greasy unbarbered hair and he looked so helpless he might have been newly hatched from the egg. “What do you say, brother?” he wanted to know. “You with us?”

Sess looked to Pamela. She was giving him the let's-go-home-and-pack-the-canoe look, and she was right: they had to get upriver, had to split and dry salmon if they were going to have fish come winter, had to tend the vegetables, haul wood, erect the new room and fit it out with a stove-and little tables, don't forget the little tables. Still, Sess reminded himself, this was Roy Sender's flesh and blood standing here in his sandals and beard like one of the lost prophets, and that had to mean something, if only for Roy's sake. Before he could think, and with his voice lubricated with all that beer and the sweet hippie wine that rode its own currents and seemed to settle flush in his ringing ears, Sess heard himself say, “Why don't you just camp at my place?”