Drop City

22

Jiminy was limping around with his arm in a dirty sling, looking as if a tree had fallen on him, but a tree hadn't fallen on him and the sling consisted of two strips of frayed cotton that used to be the sleeves of somebody's college sweatshirt, because who needed sleeves when the sun was shining twenty-four hours a day? Was it broken? No. You sure? Oh, yeah, man, yeah-I'd _know__ if it was broken. So what's the problem, then? A sprain, that's all, man. Just a sprain.

Not that Pan would accuse him of _shirking,__ what with every able-bodied cat within shouting distance taking down six thousand trees a day and Alfredo all over the place barking out orders like the ass-faced little prick of an assistant principal they'd all had to sweat in junior high, and Norm, laid-back Norm, erupting like a volcano every thirty-seven seconds. If he'd sprained his arm or shoulder or elbow or whatever it was and sported a purple bruise that was like a birthmark creeping out from under the ragged hem of his cutoff jeans, that was understandable. Especially since Ronnie had been there when it happened.

Everybody had just got done with the evening mush (brown rice with canned peas and the odd greasy chunk of Thirtymile salmon, and praise the lord for Spiracha hot sauce in the economy-sized bottle), and a bunch of people were fooling around with the aluminum boat Norm's uncle had left behind when he decamped for Seattle. (And that was strange beyond comprehension: he'd left _everything__ behind, from his boots and folded-up piss-stained old man's underwear to his pornography collection to the.30–30 Winchester lever-action rifle and Smith & Wesson pistol with the worn black leather leg holster hanging from a hook on the wall, though Norm swore he was an old man with cancer of the prostate and had no intention of coming back. Ever. He'd even left the stove all primed to go, with paper, kindling and matches ready to hand. Why would he do that? Why would he leave all this good and valuable stuff behind, including the two bowie knives that made Marco's Sears Roebuck version look like something the Boy Scouts handed out for whittling exercise? It was the way of the country, that was why-or so Norm claimed. “You leave the cabin stocked and ready to go for the next man through, not so much as a matter of courtesy, you understand, but as a matter of _survival.__ Plus, what does he need with a bowie knife in a nursing home anyway?” Okay. Yeah. Sure. Point taken.)

Jiminy wanted in the boat. So did Merry. Mendocino Bill, the whole big mush-warmed sack of him, sat in the stern, revving the outboard engine, Verbie, Angela and Maya were squeezed into the middle seat, and Weird George was in the bow. “Room for one more,” Bill announced, sucking back the thin blue exhaust of the engine. Everybody had humped it all day, taking down trees and whacking off the branches, kicking and stumbling through the brush in a blitzkrieg of mosquitoes and hard-earned sweat, and now they'd passed round the smokes and the pot and the last of the sticky red wine, the pale green half-gallon jugs already filled back up with Tom Krishna's gaseous home-brewed beer that looked like motor oil drippings and didn't taste a whole lot better. The dogs were yapping, the goats were bleating, people were perched on stumps with guitars and books and strings of electric blue beads that froze and shattered the light as they threaded them in a dance of sunlit fingers. Merry said, “Fuck you, Jiminy, I was here first,” and Jiminy said, “No, you go next-it's my turn,” and things just escalated from there.

For his part, Pan didn't much care who went for a boat ride and who didn't. He was feeling good, feeling beyond compare, with his head primed on a sliver of the chunk of blond Lebanese hash he'd sold to Alfredo for three times what he'd paid for it and the wine working its sweet slippery magic on the wad of mush in his gut. He was tanned like a macaroon. His muscles were hard from paddling, chopping, lifting, from hauling the net full of salmon out of the current and flinging the three-inch silver lure with the wire leader out into the deep cuts under the bank for pike-_great northerns.__ He couldn't believe it. Great northern pike. He'd caught something like twelve or thirteen of them in his spare time, no effort at all, just like in the _Field and Stream__ and _Outdoor Life__ articles he'd feasted on as a kid, and so what if they were ninety percent bone? The chicks made fish soup, fish stew, fish porridge and pike à la meunière. And for the meat eaters-and their party was growing by the day-he'd brought back ducks, geese, ptarmigans, even two lean black dripping muskrats, which nobody would eat but him and Norm, the meat dark and greasy, with a subtle aftertaste of dead insects and rotting twigs. As for the boat, he had priority there anytime he wanted it-_Dibs, Pan has dibs on it,__ that's what Alfredo said at one of the eternal meetings they seemed to have every other day now-because he was the designated fisher and hunter while Marco and Bill and Norm and the rest had become full-time architects and structural engineers, at least for the time being.

“Just give me this,” Merry's voice rose up, and she was ready to sob, the grief congesting her diction and dulling her consonants like a head cold, “that's all I ask, and you are one selfish little prick, you know that? Huh, Jiminy? You are. You don't care about me. You only care about yourself.”

Ronnie was sitting on the bank in a spray of brittle wildflowers and coarse-grained sand that held the heat of the sun and gave it back to his flanks and the hard bare work-worn soles of his feet. He was feeling very calm, feeling the peace that comes of getting stoned after a hard day's work outdoors and a double helping of salmon mush, and he watched Jiminy dance round Merry as if he were Zeus looking down from Olympus. The boat bobbed in the water. The current thrummed. The two of them jockeyed for position on the vagrant log the camp used as a kind of all-purpose pier and canoe-minder. Mendocino Bill's voice rose up over the suck and sputter of the engine: “Come on, already, for Christ's sake-you'd think you were six-year-olds, both of you.”

Then Jiminy shoved her and she shoved him back and suddenly he was waving his arms and looking small-faced and embarrassed and in the next moment he lost his footing and landed awkwardly in the bottom of the boat, spilling everybody into the Thirtymile. The chicks shot up out of the current as if they'd been launched-because it was _cold__ beyond anything anybody in California had ever even dreamed of-and Mendocino Bill choked and sputtered and came up cursing with his beard rinsed and his hair showing bald on top while Weird George churned up water like a human eggbeater and fought for purchase on the slick and whirling stones of the riverbed. Merry ducked away from the splash, her bare toes digging in like fingers as the log rose and fell, and then she turned her back, made a delicate little leap ashore and stalked away through the weeds. She didn't offer any apologies.

But Jiminy. He came out of the water dragging his arm, and after the initial shock he had to go find Reba and have her bind it up and tell him it probably wasn't broken. And that was a trial, because Reba didn't know her humerus from her femur, but she was Drop City's resident medical authority by virtue of the fact that she'd dropped out of nursing school midway through her first year and could toss around terms like _speculum__ and _tongue depressor__ with the best of them. She always broke out her little black leather medical kit when anybody came down with anything, a kit Pan had taken it upon himself to look into one day when she was downriver, in the hope of turning up something interesting that she might not miss-morphine, maybe. Or Demerol. But it was just the basics: a needle and thread for suturing, Mercurochrome, gauze, the handy rectal thermometer. So Jiminy wasn't shirking, not a bit. In fact, it wouldn't surprise anybody if his arm _was__ broken in about eighteen places after Reba had got done with it.

Actually, Ronnie was more concerned with the outboard engine, whether it would start with saturated spark plugs and water in the fuel line and what to do about it if it wouldn't. Jiminy would heal, but that Johnson outboard was the key to Drop City's existence, the mechanical mule that carried every little thing upriver on its back. Still, he didn't actually get up out of the sand till the boat was righted and everybody had cursed out the principals as thoroughly as they could under the circumstances, and when he did push himself up it wasn't to fuss over a bundle of wet wiring and a starter cord that produced nothing but a nagging cough while Bill bored him into an upright grave with reminiscences of other outboard motors he'd known and loved and Tom Krishna quoted something apposite from _The Bhagavad Gita.__ No, he found himself sauntering after Merry, with the idea of calming her down and maybe just _insinuating__ himself a little because Star was off on her own trip with Marco, living in a dome tent out on the slope beyond the half-finished cabin that was going to be Drop City's new meeting hall, and Lydia was back in Boynton with a couple of the others, sleeping in the bus and taking care of things on that end, and beyond that the pickings got pretty slim. Maya, no beauty to begin with, had bloated up on a steady diet of mush, and some sort of acne or scale was eating her face up (dishwater face, that was the clinical term for it, as if she'd been scrubbing the pots and pans with her cheekbones instead of her hands), Premstar was property of Norm, at least for the time being, and Verbie and her sister were strictly for emergencies only as far as Pan was concerned. And what was that song-“Make an Ugly Woman Your Wife”? Uh-uh. No way. Not in Pan's scheme of things.

(As for the other surviving Drop City chicks-Louise, Dunphy, Erika and Rain-they just weren't his type in any way, shape or form, members of the long-faced chant-before-breakfast-lunch-and-dinner school, hairy-legged, sour-smelling, secret as thieves unless the subject of women's lib came up, and then they were onto it like Verbie. Plus, they were all spoken for, and the only passable-looking one of the group-Erika-lived in a tent with two guys, Weird George and Geoffrey, and they all three balled one another in combinations Pan might have found fascinating in the abstract, but you could forget about getting up close with anything like that.)

He found Merry out behind the original cabin, the one Norm's uncle had built all on his own with an axe, a crosscut saw and two hard-knuckled hands. She was sitting in the dirt, her legs splayed, hair curtaining her face. The furor had died down, nothing lost, nobody hurt but Jiminy-and he had it coming anyway. The peeled yellow logs of the meeting hall shone in the sun, the goats bleated and strained at their tethers. He eased down beside her and put an arm round her shoulders. “Hey,” he murmured.

Fine hairs glistened on her shins. She smelled of woodsmoke, of mush, of the river. “Jiminy can be such a prick sometimes,” she said.

He wanted to agree-as in, _Yeah, he is a prick, so why not get it on with me instead?__-but held his peace. He pulled her in tighter, began to stroke her hair. “Come on,” he said, “it's no big deal-everybody's a little tense, that's all. Once we get the buildings up, once we get things together, I mean, and have time to catch our breath-” He was talking horseshit and he knew it, but horseshit was what was called for under the circumstances-what was he going to use, logic?

She swept the hair away from her face and gave him a sidelong look. “You don't seem so tense. In fact, I'd say just the opposite.”

And now the grin, aw shucks, and yep, you got me. “Blond Lebanese,” he said, “but I haven't got enough for the whole crew and you know how they're onto the _smell__ of it like hounds-Jiminy, in particular, and Tom Krishna…” He paused to let that sink in, incontrovertible reasoning, and then tucked the most copacetic suggestion in the world under the lid of the moment: “You want to maybe just slip into my tent a minute?”

The tent was Creamsicle orange, a one-man affair somebody had left in one of the overstuffed closets at Drop City. Pan had taken possession of it when they unloaded the bus because at the moment he didn't need anything more by way of space since he wasn't really sleeping with anybody-plus, it gave him a little privacy and a place to stash his own things. He'd pitched it two hundred yards away from the main cabin, on a sandbar upriver, and no, he wasn't worried about bears, grizzly or otherwise, because he slept with the Springfield rifle he'd shot the deer with back in California and the Winchester Norm's uncle had left behind, not to mention the.44 magnum pistol he kept strapped at his side at all times. Just let a bear poke his head in the tent. Just let him.

It was warm. Merry's hand was clamped in his. Half the tribe was mewed up in the cabin now, sitting around and picking their toes as people read chapters of _Slaughterhouse Five__ aloud, smoke drifting up and away from the stovepipe and the big pan heating water for the dishes. He and Merry caught a view of them as they drifted by the open door-heads and shoulders, slumped backs, cradled arms, splayed feet-and he saw that Marco was in there. And Star. Of course, that was nothing to him, and he'd already read the book twice-and he'd rather be fishing anyway. Or fucking. Ideally, that is.

He stole a glance at Merry. Her face was neutral, chin set, eyes squinted against the sun. Her hair swayed with each step, billowing and settling and billowing again. She kept her fingers entwined in his. He saw the dogs, two streaks of liquid fire wrestling over a bone in a spray of sun on the porch, and heard Reba's kids shrieking somewhere downriver while Mendocino Bill and Tom Krishna tried to make sense of the engine that whirred and shuddered but refused to come back to life. Nobody even glanced up as he led Merry along the bank to where the tent stood slack against the ragged line of the trees.

Inside, it was so close they had to sit yoga-style, their knees touching and their hands gone idle in their laps. But Pan, Pan got right to it, turning from the waist to dig out the pipe, the matches, the tinfoil, the hash and the razor blade, all of it kept close in a plastic baggie in the front pouch of his backpack. Merry said, “I love the sound of the river,” just to make conversation because conversation filled the void when people were preparing drugs for you, and Ronnie said something expected like, “Yeah, it's cool,” and he held the pipe out for her and lit a match. He watched her lips purse as she took in the smoke, watched the light settle in the rings on her fingers. They were in a cocoon, hidden away from the world, the skin of the tent lit up like the lens of a flashlight. Or a sausage. That's what it was. “I feel like we're inside a big orange Italian sausage, the hot kind,” he said, taking a hit and immediately feeding the pipe back to her because she was the one who needed to catch up- Her eyes watered. They swelled and fractured, and her cheeks distended with the effort to hold in the smoke that was always precious but never more so than out here under the bleached white sky of nowhere. Then she was coughing, hacking till her lungs were blistered and her lips flecked with spittle, and he was coughing too. “It never fails,” she gasped in a faltering little squeak of a voice that could have belonged to Maya, “because I think-it's my theory, anyway-that you get just as high from coughing as from the dope itself.”

Pan smiled. He agreed. Couldn't have agreed more. He hacked into his fist. After a moment he laid his hands on her thighs and began to work them back and forth with a soft tentative friction. “Music would be cool right now,” he said, just to say something, just to keep it going, and he thought of Lydia, back in the bus, cranking any record she felt like, and then he shook that thought right out of his head. “But you know, in some ways it's just as well that we don't have it, because we've got to _resensitize__ our ears to the environment, like the moose, the caribou, the wolves-you hear the _wolves__ last night?”

Her eyes were closed. She murmured something-yes, no, maybe-and then her eyes flashed open and she laid her hands atop his and guided them up her thighs. For a long moment they both looked down at their two pairs of hands working there against the hard lateral stitching of her jeans, pushing and kneading in concert, and then she leaned into him and kissed him. He heard the hiss of the river with his resensitized ears, felt the blood beating in his temples. And then he was pulling the T-shirt up over his head and fumbling with his belt and the black heavy load of the gun he kept strapped to his thigh like some TV gunslinger, like Matt Dillon or Johnny Yuma-he was a cowboy, how about that? — and she eased out her legs with an awkward rustle of the Creamsicle orange fabric of the tent and jerked her jeans and underpants down to her knees in a single motion. His hand went right to her and their mouths met again, and then- And then Jiminy was calling her name-“Merry! Merry?”-and his sodden Dingo boots were crunching in the gravel along the bank. “You out here? Merry?”

Pan froze. So did she. Jiminy couldn't see them, nobody could. The tent wasn't made of ultralightweight semitransparent Creamsicle-colored nylon-it was made of steel, steel lined with lead and with six inches of concrete on top of that. Pan was exploding. The buckle wouldn't give. He didn't dare move.

“Merry?”

The front flaps parted suddenly and the odd mosquito drifted in on the unfiltered glare of the night just as Jiminy's face hove into view, suspended there like a second sun. That was a moment, Pan caught with his fingers in the cookie jar, Merry's eyes anything but merry and Jiminy's face working itself through a whole catalogue of conflicting emotions, beginning with slap-faced shock and progressing through enlightenment to lust, grief and hate. The river coiled and uncoiled itself. The birds said nothing. And then, with the sound of a pebble dropped from on high into the deepest pool in the broad running length of the Yukon, Jiminy gave it one more try: “Merry?”

In the morning, Ronnie volunteered to take the boat downriver to pick up two of the bus people (they were working on the furlough system) and the eight hundred sixty-seven absolutely indispensable items of manufacture and trade without which Drop City North would cease to exist in short order-and that included building supplies, tools, candy, cigarettes, shampoo, sun lotion, potato chips and cheap paperbacks of any quality and on any subject, so long as they were in English. And the mail, don't forget the mail. Everybody gave him a list-Marco, Star, Reba, Bill and Premstar, even Jiminy (and that took some balls after what had come down last night). But that was all right. They were all brothers and sisters, no hard feelings, no grudges, Free Love in a free society. Pan collected money and wadded-up slips of paper and gave back assurances and disclaimers-“Sure, sure, if I can find it, sure, yeah.” He was the man of the hour and they all came to him, even Norm. (“Hard candy!” Norm roared, wading out into the river as he was about to shove off, and there wasn't a thing wrong with the engine a couple of dry spark plugs couldn't rectify, putt-putt-putt, _varoom.__ “The old-fashioned kind, with like butterscotch and cinnamon and whatnot. Get a big tin of it, ten pounds of it. Twenty. A hundred!”)

The only problem was Verbie. She was going with him, and no, he didn't need the company, didn't need anybody except maybe Lydia on the other end of the line with her legs spread wide, but Verbie's mother was in the hospital with some harrowing nightmare of a female cancer that was turning her insides to soup and Verbie had to phone home and lighten the load though she'd walked out the door three years ago and hadn't spoken to her mother since. There was no arguing with that. _Angela__ was staying. _Angela__ was going to give herself over to the needs of Drop City and stay behind to scrub pans, peel logs and whip up big cauldrons full of rice pap and mush three times a day, and she shared the same mother as Verbie-wasn't that sacrifice enough?

So at nine A.M., with the sound of sifting sand in his ears and the sun like a hot poker stabbed first in one eye and then the other-too much hash, too much of Tom Krishna's poisonous homebrew-Pan swung the bow of the skiff out into the current of the Thirtymile and headed downriver, Verbie perched in the middle of the seat in front of him for ballast. Unfortunately, she was _talking__ ballast, and before they even made Sess Harder's place she'd managed to change the subject six or eight times, moving without transition from the health benefits of ginseng to carpet bombing along the Ho Chi Minh Trail to mercury in tuna and the plight of the farm workers because the lettuce boycott just didn't go _far enough.__ Ronnie stared off past the sidewall of her face, the too-small eye, the sickle nose, the dark gap where the tooth was missing in front. She was talking over her shoulder like some sort of cockatoo, like a trained parrot that could twist its head round twice and never miss a beat. He wasn't listening. He was trying to focus on the country, on the joy of being here, the sun warm on his back and the breeze cool on his face, his eyes scanning the near shore for something to put a bullet through. Because that was his job, that was what he was doing here, no different from Sess Harder or Joe Bosky or any of the rest of them. And who was he? He was Pan, Pan of the North, and you could forget about Nanook.

Riding with the current, it was no more than fifteen minutes to Harder's place at the junction of the Thirtymile and the Yukon, and Ronnie spotted Sess and his old lady working a log into place where they were extending the cabin out along the flank of the river. He pulled the tiller-arm hard right and swung the boat in along the bank with the intention of asking Sess if he needed anything from town, common courtesy out here, the sort of thing anybody would do, but the fact was Ronnie used every excuse he could just to _talk__ to the man, to sit at his feet and pump him for information about pike holes and drift nets and the best way to smoke and press a duck.

“What do you think you're _doing?__” Verbie leaned into the turn, the breeze kicking up tufts of her chopped red hair. She tried to swing round to confront him, but the centrifugal force was too much for her.

Pan snuffed the breeze, exulting in the river smell and the speed that drove it to him. The skiff planed over the surface. He didn't bother to answer.

“We've got no time for this, Pan. _Ronnie.__ Come on. You know we've got to grub everything out of that little shitbird of a store owner, who like threw a fit over the food stamps last time, and get the mail and all that and be back by tomorrow night-and that's _if__ Lydia and Harmony ever went into Fairbanks for the window glass and the batteries and I don't know what else.”

“Hey, this is _Alaska,__ Verbs,” he said, and he cut the throttle and let the skiff coast into shore on its own steam. “These people are our neighbors. I mean, I just want to ask them if they need anything-don't you think they'd do the same for us?”

“No,” she said, “no they wouldn't. Not if their mother was dying and they had twenty-four people depending on them and three cabins and a meeting hall to put up before winter-”

So she was a pain in the ass. She was born a pain in the ass. Like Alfredo. Like Reba. Such were the joys of communal living. “Five minutes,” Pan said. “I swear.”

Sess hardly glanced up as the boat swung into shore. He and Pamela had just set the log in place, chest-high, and he was smoothing the upper surface of it with a drag knife, slivers of wood leaping away from his hands like insects in a field. He was wearing an old thermal shirt with the sleeves ripped out and his patched jeans and work boots and he'd sweated through the shirt so many times it looked as if it had been tie-dyed in eight progressively paler-and _ranker__-shades of yellow. The hair hung in his eyes, trailed down his neck and over his ears, almost long enough to qualify as hip. And from the look of him he wasn't exactly wearing out his razor either.

Ronnie tied up the boat and leapt ashore, Verbie clambering over the gunwale behind him and getting her feet wet in the process, and now the wife looked up and waved, and she was wearing dirty jeans and a plaid shirt three sizes too big for her, her hair tied back in a ponytail and her arms bare and smudged with what might have been grease or maybe mud. If Sess was the original dropout-_Sess Harder, mountain man__-then she was already halfway there, the prom queen shading to pioneer, to helpmeet, to fish skinner and plucker of goose and duck. And wasn't life beautiful?

The dogs were racketing, jerking at their chains and nosing at the sky, elevating dust. Behind them was the garden, probably a quarter acre of squash and peas and whatnot, tomatoes in a greenhouse made out of Visquine thrown over a willow frame, and to the right of that was the cache, a miniature cabin set up on timbers eight feet off the ground, where the meat was stored in winter. Sess had nailed flattened Blazo cans round each of the four posts, to discourage weasels and wolverines and anything else that might want to scramble up there and make off with tender frozen morsels of moose, duck and fish, and there was a crude ladder set to one side of the cache so humans could get at it. Then there were the drying racks. They were set out along the bank in the full blaze of the sun, and they were so congested with salmon split down the middle they were like walls of flesh-they _were__ walls of flesh-and all of it free from the river. And what did you do in the summer? You collected food for winter. You hunted, farmed and fished and sat up all night under the sun that never set with a beer in one hand and a smoke in the other. And they called this work.

Ronnie came up through the brittle weed and clinging wildflowers, grinning with the thought of it-Sess Harder was the _man,__ and didn't he have the world snowed? “Sess,” he was saying, “what's happening, man? And, Pamela. Hey, what's happening?”

“Nothing much,” was all Sess said. He went right on working, smoothing the log, blowing away the debris, even laying his head flat on the planed surface to sight along the length of it. The dogs took it up a notch as Verbie sloshed up the bank, and Pamela, holding her end of the log fast, gave her a smile with nothing but welcome in it. “You two want some tea?” she called. “I can put on the kettle.”

“Oh, don't bother about us,” Verbie said, kicking at the heels of her hiking boots as if that could even begin to dry them out. “We were just-”

“Sure,” Ronnie said. “That would be cool. You need a hand there, Sess? And by the way, we just stopped to ask if you might need anything from town because we've got a load of stuff to pick up and we were just wondering-I mean, it would be no problem, no problem at all…”

They drank the tea out of shiny new ceramic cups that looked as if they'd just been unpacked from the box, and this was no herbal _rinsewater__ but the real and actual stuff, brewed so strong it made your jaws ache, and they sat at the picnic table in the yard and took a break while Verbie chattered at Pamela and Pamela chattered right back and the dogs settled down around their chains. Pan was feeling uncluttered and _clean,__ just soaring on the wings of the day and the glimpse he was getting into Sess Harder's intimate life. He had a thousand questions for him, but Sess wasn't quite as lively as he'd been the last time Pan had run into him (at the Bastille Day Wildflower Festival and Salmon Feast Norm had proclaimed a week back), and the only answers he got came in the form of grunts and semaphore. Sess was looking from his woodpile to his garden to his dogs, purely distracted, and after ten minutes of tea-sipping, he pushed himself up from the table and said, “Okay, Pamela, let's get back to it.”

Verbie fell all over herself assuring them that it was no problem-she and Pan really had to get going, because of _x, y__ and _z__-and she thanked Pamela for the tea and Sess for the company and _blah-blah-blah.__ But Pan was soaring and he just had to do something for them, to express his awe and gratitude, and he kept saying, “It's no hassle at all, man, really, we'll be back like tomorrow night, I mean, store-bought bread, hamburger buns, a pint of scotch, whatever you want,” until finally Pamela reached into the pocket of her jeans and extracted a bleached-out five-dollar bill that looked as if it had been printed during the Roosevelt administration and said, “Some cigarettes, maybe-Marlboro's-and we could use, I don't know, some of those Hershey bars with almonds, maybe five or six, and that good coffee Wetzel has on special-the Maxwell House? In the five-gallon can?”

Then they were back on the river, skating out of the Thirtymile and into the roiling big freightyard of the Yukon, Verbie as entranced with talking to herself as she might have been delivering up her wit and wisdom to an audience of thousands, a sweet mist of spray in their faces, clouds whipping by overhead and Pan scanning both shores for movement. The only time he responded to anything she was saying was when she lit on the subject of Jiminy and Merry and how right for each other they were and then locked her pincers into what had gone down last night. Somebody said he'd been involved. Was that true? No, he said, shouting over the motor, it was just bullshit, that was all. And he wasn't lying, necessarily, or even fudging the truth. The way it turned out, he _wasn't__ involved, if involved meant getting his dick wet, because Merry snapped her legs shut, jerked her pants back up over her hips and crawled out of the tent to get all weepy and forgiving and apologetic with Jiminy, and up the river they went, his right arm in a sling and hers wrapped like a field dressing round his waist.

Half an hour slid by, the throttle open wide and the current pulling them by the nose, and he turned the volume all the way down on Verbie and listened to the way the outboard engine broadcast its news to the world. He'd just about given up on seeing anything substantial-like a moose up to its nose in a willow thicket or maybe an eagle with a fish in its claws-when something moving in the water up ahead caught his attention. It looked like a pillow off one of the sofas in his grandmother's den-or no, an ottoman, the whole ottoman, bobbing in the foam as if this were the East River instead of the Yukon. Still too far to make it out… but now, closing fast, he could see that it was moving against the current, and wait, wasn't that a pair of ears-and a snout?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

“Pan,” she said, “the mighty hunter.”

“Verbie the yapper,” he said.

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

Her face was clenched like a fist. She stepped out into six inches of water, and she was devastated, he could see that-imagine Verbie excluded from the Drop City pantheon-but then she recovered herself and shot him a look of pure and vibrant hatred. “I'm on the other side,” she said, “you want to bet on it? Or the back, look on the back.”

He wasn't looking anywhere. He really didn't give a rat's ass whether her portrait was plastered all over the bus inside and out or whether they'd raised a statue in honor of her or burned her in effigy-this was childish, that's what it was-and he crossed the yard to the bus and stuck his head in the open door.

It was deserted-you could see that at a glance. But he stepped up on the milk crate somebody had set there in the dirt to ease the transition to that first elevated step and gave a look down the aisle. Sun leaked through the curtains in thin regular bands and illuminated the dust motes hanging in the stagnant air. There was the usual clutter of clothes, books, record jackets and dirty plates, the odd smear of crushed flies and mosquitoes rubbed into the cracked vinyl seats, and a smell he couldn't quite place, something promiscuous, something _communal.__ “Anybody here?” he called.

No answer. And that was odd: Where could they all be in the middle of the day? In the shack? Up the bank of the river tossing daisies in the water? Tooling around in the Studebaker? But no, he could see the car out the window, sitting idle on the verge of the dirt road, and Harmony's Beetle humped there beside it under half a ton of dust. Verbie's voice came to him then, a little whoop of triumph from the far side of the bus: “Here I am! Look, I told you-I'm right here next to Angela and, and-this must be Jiminy!”

Pan backed out of the bus, his head as clear as it was ever going to be, since he hadn't had so much as a beer or a toke since he'd rolled out this morning, and no food either (breakfast, in its entirety, consisted of the honey-sweetened tea at Sess Harder's place and the handful of stale crackers Pamela had fanned out on the table like a deck of cards). Clear-headed? Light-headed was more like it. He was starving, that's what it was, wasting away like a mystic in the desert, and if he didn't get a burger and a couple beers in him pretty soon he was going to start speaking in tongues and spouting fire from his ears. For a long moment he stood there puzzling over the deserted bus, contemplating the pattern of footprints in the dust at his feet-the impress of bootheels, the elaborate punctuation of bare soles and the little necklaces of toeprints strung across the path that ran through the trampled weed to the road-and then he knew: they were at the bar, the saloon, the roadhouse, whatever they called it. The Three Pup. They were at the Three Pup, tipping back beers and maybe the odd shot of Everclear, getting a buzz on, salting fries, listening to the sizzle of burgers on the grill and the rattle of the jukebox as the record dropped and the stylus maneuvered into place. Pan was already making it up the road when Verbie came out from behind the bus. “Hey,” she said, her voice trailing away till it became no more noteworthy or troublesome than the routine buzz of the mosquitoes in his ears, “where is everybody?”

The clouds had closed out the sun by the time he turned the corner onto the Fairbanks Road. Somebody's dogs rose up from their chains and howled at him and somebody else's dogs took it up at the other end of town. The breeze had shifted to the north all of a sudden, as chilly as the air leaching out of the mouth of a cave, and you didn't have to be a meteorologist to know it was going to be raining like holy hell in about three minutes. He could hear Verbie panting behind him, but he never looked back. If her legs were shorter than his, that was her problem-an accident of birth, that was all, an evolutionary dead end, _survival of the fittest, baby,__ and get used to it. A faded blue pickup rolled by and he flashed the peace sign at the driver (nobody he recognized, unless maybe it was that scrawny chicken-necked old loser they called Herbert, or was it Howard?), and he ducked his head against the wind, thinking he really ought to go back to the boat for his denim jacket, but he dismissed the thought as soon as it crept into his head-going back would delay the cracking of the first beer and the sweet redolent slap of the first burger on the grill.

There was a handful of vehicles in the dirt lot out front of the Three Pup, including a tow truck with a Fairbanks logo painted on the driver's side door and what looked to be a Shelby Mustang jacked up behind it. Something was dripping from the back end of the Mustang and puddling in the dirt-water, it looked like, dirty water flecked with leaves and stripes of pond weed-and the wheels were packed like ball bearings in something that might have been grease, but wasn't. It was mud. Mud the color of shit, oozing out of the chassis and caking on the ground. Pan saw it, registered it, ignored it. In swung the screen door of the Three Pup and up rose the smell of the grill, of bourbon and scotch whiskey and beer spilled and wiped up and spilled again.

It was dark inside-why waste energy lighting up a sixty-watt bulb when you're running off a generator that runs off of gasoline hauled out the Fairbanks Road and it's light out day and night, anyway? — and at first he couldn't see whose shoulders and half-turned heads were crowded in at the bar. “Hey, Pan, what's happening?” somebody called out, and it was Harmony, Harmony there in the far corner with his rust-colored Fu Manchu and beaded headband and an arm round Alice, and then somebody else called out his name and the jukebox started up with a maddening skreel of country fiddles and where was Lydia, anyway?

But wait a minute-and this was something that really challenged his newly resensitized powers of perception-who was this looming like an apparition out of the cigarette haze with his wide-brimmed outlaw's hat cocked down over one eye and his high-heeled Beatle boots rapping at the worn floorboards like a medium's knuckles? It was Lester, that was who, Lester standing there grinning at him as if he'd just stepped out on the porch of the back house with a jug of wine in his hand and Marvin Gaye going at it on the stereo through the flung-wide door. Lester was holding a tumbler of whiskey in one hand and a joint in the other, Franklin's big head and Sky Dog's mustache framed behind him against a backdrop of astonished faces and Lynette's furiously compressed lips and bugging eyes. Dale Murray was at the end of the bar, his rings flashing, yellow-tooth necklace dangling, working on a burger and a beer and running Skid Denton as solid a line of bullshit as Denton was running him, the big tall ramrod of a guy they called Iron Steve perched up on a stool between them like a referee. “Pan, my _man,__” Lester puffed in his softest imitation of a human voice, shifting the joint to his lips so he could take Ronnie's awakening hand in his own for the soul shake that reaffirmed the identity of the tribe and plumbed the deepest pockets of brotherhood. And then he was turning to crow over his shoulder: “Hey, look who's here, the bad cat himself, Pan the child-raper, the hippest baddest cat north of what? — Fairbanks. Fairbanks, yeah.”

The sequel involved a whole riotous tornado of soul-shaking and back-thumping, and Pan was dazed, he had to admit it, because he'd forgotten these people even existed and it was a real adjustment in context to create them anew in the lost world of the Three Pup-and what had it been, a month? But the joint helped and the beer and a shot that went down on an empty stomach like flaming gasoline and pretty soon he was in close conference with all four of them, absorbing their tale of potholes, Nazis in the guise of the Canadian Mounted Police, blown tires and moose dancing down the highway like chorus girls.

“Shit, they busted Sky in some no-horse town in B. C.,” Dale Murray said, up from his stool now and waving his beer like a conductor's baton to a sudden crescendo of hilarity, Lester so far gone with it he had to set down his whiskey and brace himself against the bar.

“For what?” Ronnie wanted to know, even as the light went leaden and Verbie stumped through the door with a dumbstruck face and the first few random drops began to thump against the windows.

“He showed his big wicked thing-” Lester began, but he couldn't go on-it was too much.

“Scared them girls up there,” Franklin said, showing his teeth in a grin, and what did Pan feel? Left out. A pang of jealousy shot through him: they'd had the adventures and he'd been eating mush.

Sky Dog leaned back into the bar, lit a cigarette and managed to look rueful and put-upon at the same time. The country-inflected strains of one song faded away and another started up in its place. Everybody at the bar was looking at him, waiting for clarification. “Public indecency,” he said. “I was just-”

“He was pissing against a tree, that's what he was doing,” Lester said, panting between hoots of laughter. “Put a real fear into them girls, isn't that right, Franklin?”

“Whole town was terrified.”

A new round of laughter. Dale Murray joined in too, whinnying along with the rest of them. Sky Dog looked abashed. He ducked his head and shrugged. “It wasn't all that funny, man-it cost me a night in jail.”

“Right,” Lester said, “and this spade's twenty-five bucks, American. Which you still owe me, by the way.” Then he turned to Ronnie, took a long slow sip of the whiskey, and let his eyes drop to his boots and rise again. “And you, my friend,” he puffed, his voice so soft it was barely audible, “what are you dressed up to be-Wild Bill Hickok? Or maybe it's Buffalo Bill? One of them honky _Bills__ anyway, right?”

Lester was enjoying this. He had center stage now, as exotic in the Three Pup as a panther on a leash. They'd seen Indians up here, they'd seen Eskimos, Finns, Swedes and Frenchmen, but a _spade__ was something else altogether, and Pan could appreciate that, appreciate the strain it must have been on Lester to delve ever deeper into the redneck fastness of the last outpost of the forty-ninth state, but there were limits to what he could take. He'd let the child-raper comment pass, but now the man was mounting the balls to stand here and mock him for the way he was dressed? Well, fuck that. “I don't know what the fuck you're talking about,” he said.

“The heat,” Lester said, pointing to the holster. “And this-what's this?” and he had the knife out of its sheath before Pan could react, twisting the blade in the dull wash of light for the amusement of everyone at the bar. “Don't tell me you're a mule skinner now-or do you just use this thing for cleaning your nails?”

“Mule skinners don't skin anything,” Dale Murray put in. “Least of all mules.”

Verbie was there at his elbow, the pale muffin of her face, looking for someone to buy her a beer. “Twenty-Mule Team Borax,” was her comment.

Pan couldn't have said where the anger came from or how it rose up so quickly and luminously, but he took hold of Lester's upraised wrist-the wrist attached to the hand with the knife in it-and in the same instant snatched off his hat and sailed it across the room. Lester's eyes went cold. The hair was flattened to his head, linty, dirty, twisted into something like cornrows with a couple of sky blue rubber bands, and nobody had ever seen anything like that, not since Farina anyway. “And what are you dressed up to be? You're the one in the cowboy hat.”

Soft, so soft: “That's my Hendrix hat, man.” And Lester let him take the knife and fit it back into the sheath while Franklin crossed the room and bent to retrieve the hat. “Touchy, Pan, touchy,” Lester chided. “Don't you know I'm just goofin'? Don't you know that? Huh?”

That was when Lynette turned away from the grill, one hand at her hip, and informed them if they wanted to roughhouse they were going to have to do it over at the Nougat because any more of this sort of thing and they were out the door, all of them. “And I don't tolerate cussing in here either-you ought to know that, mister, and I'm talking to you, Ronnie. And you better inform your friends too.”

“Come on, man,” Sky Dog was saying, “come on, have a beer and forget it-you know Lester. He's just fucking with your head is all. It's a joke, man-can't you take a joke?”

And then it was all right and somebody found the only two rock and roll sides on the jukebox and the beers went round for everybody, even Verbie, who wound up sitting in Iron Steve's lap and drinking on his tab while he kneaded her breasts and licked the side of her face like a deer at a salt lick. Sky Dog produced another joint-“We brought a ton of the shit, man, and they almost nailed us at the border too if they were only smart enough to like look _inside__ the spare tire”-and the sky darkened another degree till it was like twilight. Pan didn't hold any grudges. He was glad to see them, glad to see them all, new faces, new stories-some _life,__ for shitsake-and he drank first to Lester, to put that to rest, and then to Franklin, Sky Dog and Dale. And Harmony, don't forget Harmony. And Alice too.

He had a wad of money in his pocket, and he hardly knew where it came from. It seemed to him he was a long way from home, any home, and as he contemplated his own sun-enlivened features in the mirror behind the bar he felt his life was only just beginning. Already it had taken him to strange destinations and there were stranger yet still to come. Tom Krishna was always talking about karma, and so was Norm, Verbie, Star-all of them were. What if it was true, what if he'd been a saint in some previous life and now he was set to reap the rewards? That was a thought. He smiled at his image in the mirror and tuned out what Sky Dog was saying to him about the Lincoln-they'd parked it around the corner, up in town, and hadn't he seen it? Great car. Tended to overheat and it burned oil like a hog, but… he liked the way his beard was filling in, and his hair-it was long enough to eat up the collar of his shirt. He was looking hip, absolutely, indubitably, but who was going to know about it up here? Who even cared?

The rain started to pick up and the tapping at the windows became more insistent. He lit one cigarette off another and lost count of how many shots, let alone beers, he'd had. The day seemed to concentrate itself. Verbie went off on a laughing jag, Lester sniggered, somebody slapped him on the back. And when the door swung open and Lydia walked in with her hair hanging wet and full of chaff and twigs and flecks of seed because she'd been on her back in a field somewhere, her soaked-through top layered over her tits and her hand clenched like a sixth grader's in Joe Bosky's, he hardly glanced up. It was nothing to him, nothing at all. He was liquid to the bones, he was deep down and pressurized through and through, every square inch of him, a whole new medium to swim through here, and look at the _colors__ of those fish. He fumbled in his pockets-“No, no, Joe, I do, I want to buy you a beer, I insist”-until he came up with a velvety worn five-dollar bill that looked as if it had been scooped out of the river and hung up to dry on a salmon rack. He held it a moment, working it in his fingers, and then laid it on the bar.

23

She was singing to herself, softly, tunelessly, a song she used to like by the Doors, the lyrics as elusive as the melody-_Break on through,__ she kept repeating-_break on through to the other side.__ That was it. That was all she could remember, and if she missed one thing, if there was one thing she could rub a magic lantern and wish for, it would be music. Alfredo and Geoffrey weren't half bad on the guitar, and the communal sing-alongs were great-_righteous,__ as Ronnie would say-but there was no comparison to flipping on the radio or putting a record on the turntable any time you felt like it and just letting yourself drift away into some other place altogether. She used to do that at her parents' house, shut up alone in her room while the TV droned in the vacuum below and her father shouted himself hoarse over some seven-foot basketball player and a tiny little hoop, or in the car with her mother nattering on about drapes or the price of veal and a single guitar suddenly emerging from the buzz of static on the radio in a moment of shimmering triumph. Music was like food, like water, like air-that necessary, that essential-and here she was in a break-on-through mood and nothing for it but her own stumbling version caught like lint on her tongue.

You couldn't have everything, she told herself. Nobody could.

Reba and Merry were working alongside her, in the garden they'd fertilized with goat pellets and fish heads, the garden Norm had told them to forget about because the growing season up here was maybe a hundred days max and thirty of those days were in June, already dead and gone. But what they thought-the women, all the women together-was why not give it a try? Maybe they'd get lucky. Maybe there'd be a late frost this year, maybe the round-the-clock sunlight would magically accelerate the whole process of sprouting, maturing, fruiting. They worked like lunatics to get a patch of ground cleared and planted by the tenth of July, concentrating on cool season vegetables-turnips, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts-but also laying in potatoes, sugar snap peas, zucchini and pumpkin. And pot, of course. The pot plants were already two feet high and rising up so fast you could almost see them growing, and even if they didn't have a chance to bud there'd at least be the leaves and stems.

What they were doing at the moment was unrolling the big sheets of black plastic Lydia and Harmony had gone into Fairbanks for and Ronnie had brought upriver in the speedboat. The stuff came in rolls a foot in diameter and two and a half feet long, and it was perforated every couple of feet so you could rip off a sheet and use it to line your trash can out in the garage of your split-level home on your quarter-acre plot in a tree-lined suburb. But they didn't have trash cans out here-or they did, but they were strictly for storing things like lentils, rice and oats out of reach of the mice that seemed to be everywhere-and they were using long carpets of the plastic to insulate the ground around their plants, a trick they'd picked up from Pamela Harder.

And that was something totally unexpected-Pamela. She and Star couldn't have been more different-she was older, born and raised in Alaska, she didn't do drugs, or not yet, anyway, and she'd never heard of The Band or Crosby, Stills and Nash, let alone Abbie Hoffman or Gloria Steinem, the Fillmore East, roach clips, mellow yellow, Keith Richards or Mick Jagger even-and yet when Star took a canoe downriver for a visit, she felt as if she were sitting with one of her own sisters, it was that relaxed. They settled in with a pot of tea at the picnic table out by the river while Sess split wood or fed the dogs or went off someplace with his gun, and they just talked, and that was nice, because Pamela was starved for the company, and for Star it was a break from the routine, from the same faces and the same little tics and grievances and the gossip and rumors she'd heard a hundred times already.

“I don't want you to get the impression that I'm not happy here,” Pamela told her the first time she'd taken the canoe out just to get a little breathing space and then seen the smoke and heard the dogs and thought she might just stop in and say hello, because why not, they were both women, weren't they? They'd already finished a cup of tea each, and Pamela, nudging a plate of homemade chocolate chip cookies across the table, paused to measure out two cups more. “Because I am. I'm the happiest woman in the world. It's just that Sess-well, he's used to being alone out here and sometimes he gets into a yes and no mode, and no matter what I say he just nods his head and gauges whether yes or no or sometimes maybe is what I want to hear. You know what I'm saying?”

The tea was like fuel, so sweet and strong it made your teeth ache. Star gazed off across the river to where the sun illuminated the trunks of the trees like slats in a fence, the dark shapes of birds swarming there like insects, everything placid but for the sharp intermittent rap of Sess's hammer from somewhere behind the cabin. “Sure,” Star said, coming back to her, to her tanned face and chipped nails and big work-hardened hands stroking the cup, to her eyes that were like rooms you could live in, “and that's what I mean about Drop City, about having your own brothers and sisters around all the time-especially sisters.”

“Never a dull moment, huh?”

Star opened up her million-kilowatt smile. “Oh, no, never.”

“You don't get on each other's nerves?”

“We do, of course we do. That's part of it. Norm says the biggest lesson is in just learning to think alike, to anticipate, to _give,__ you know what I mean? And the flow. That's important too. To feel the flow and know you're not just a me anymore.”

“Is that it, then? Is that what you're trying to accomplish-kill off your ego?”

The question had taken her by surprise. She'd never really thought in terms of a clear-cut goal you could reduce to a single phrase or really even explain to anybody-she was drifting, like anybody else, hoping to break on through if she was lucky. She set down the cup and spun a globe out of her hands. “It's the earth, I guess,” she said. “Nature. You know, rejecting material things and living close to nature so you can feel the heartbeat of God-or whatever you want to call that force, Gaia, the oneness of being, nirvana. And my brothers and sisters are part of it-they're my support group and I'm theirs. I mean, just look at me-I'm sitting here by this out-of-sight river in this amazing place having a cup of tea with you, and that's something I never would have been able to do on my own.”

“But the hair,” Pamela said. “What about the hair and the weird clothes and all that? And the drugs? What does that have to do with getting back to nature?” She paused to light a cigarette, store-bought, out of the shiny cardboard box. Star watched her shake out the match and drop it to the dirt under the table. “You know what getting back to nature to me is? Just this, living day to day, working hard and taking what the land gives you, and that has nothing to do with face paint or LSD or bell-bottom pants…”

Star shrugged. “I don't know, it's hard to explain. It's just hip, that's all.”

Pamela worked the cup between her hands, and it was her turn to gaze out over the river. She sighed. “It takes all kinds, I guess.”

Star was going to agree, but she wasn't sure if the comment was a not-so-subtle dig, as in _It takes all kinds and you people are a bunch of greasy freaks and dopeheads who ought to pack up your beads and your sandals and head back to California before the going gets rough.__ And then she was going to say, _And what kind are you?__ but in that moment it dawned on her that Pamela was just like them. She wasn't buying into the plastic society, she wasn't going to live the nine-to-five life in a little pink house in the suburbs and find her meat all wrapped up in plastic for her at the supermarket. She'd done that-worked in an office in downtown Anchorage-and she'd dropped out just as surely as anybody at Drop City had. She was pretty, she was smart, she knew what she wanted-she was confident, that's what she was, confident in a way Star had never been, and that was something to aim for. The thought came to her: What if there were no Marco, no Norm, no Drop City? Would she be able to go out into the world and survive? Or was she just another _chick__ newly hatched from the egg, all fluffy and warm and helpless?

But here she was out under the open sky nailing down strips of black plastic to feed the heat of the sun to the garden, working just as hard as any _cat__ on the place, and you could hardly call that helpless. And when she was done with that she was going to haul buckets of water up from the river and dump them at the base of each plant, and when that was finished she was going to milk the goats, whip up a batch of fried rice and teriyaki salmon for lunch and pick a bucket of highbush cranberries and put them up in wax-sealed jars with a scoop of white cane sugar out of the ten-pound bag and two jiggers of brandy each, and when _that__ was done, well, she'd see what the rest of the day would bring.

Merry was saying, “No way. Uh-uh.”

Reba drove a sliver of wood through the plastic to hold it in place. “Jiminy said you pushed him. Everybody said so-Bill, Verbie, even Weird George. And Pan. I hear Pan was involved too.”

“Well, if I did, I didn't mean to. I really like him, you know that. But sometimes he gets so fucking, I don't know, _stubborn,__ like he's six instead of nineteen, and as far as Ronnie's concerned, yes, I did go up to his tent. And we got high. That's all. Not that it's anybody's business.”

“What about Jiminy's? Isn't it his business? Didn't I hear you say you were going to try to make that work, no more sleeping around and da-da-da?”

Merry looked up from the other end of the sheet, disrupting the flow of it, and Star could see the light pooling like oil in the dark folds of plastic. At the far end of the garden was the original cabin, the one Norm's uncle had left behind, the logs gone gray with age, trees growing out of the sod of the roof. Beyond that was the new meeting hall, square all around and roofless still, the logs yellow as an animal's teeth where the bark had been stripped away, and a dozen people clambering all over it with saws, axes, hammers. Star could hear the muffled thump of metal on wood, the shriek of the chainsaw, the occasional curse. “I don't know,” Merry said, “I may be mistaken, but wasn't that you I saw coming out of the bushes with Deuce two nights ago? Upriver? Late? With a smile on your face?”

“We were looking for blueberries, that's all. Because if you think-”

Star could see she was lying, not that it made any difference. If Reba wanted to be a hypocrite, that was her business. And Alfredo's. She smoothed plastic. Hammered in a stake. She had a view of the hacked-over field behind them, stumps bleeding all the way down to the river, and she saw Che coming before she heard him, and they all three heard him at once, his voice raised in an unholy shriek. “Uh, Reba, I think Che needs you,” she was saying, and there he was, livid protoplasm, upright and outraged, coming across the field from the river holding one limp hand out before him and wailing, Sunshine trailing behind.

Between gasps he shouted out her name-“Reba! Reba!”-because even in his extremity, whatever it was, he knew enough not to call her _Mom__ like some mind-controlled zombie kid out of a suburban development. He was a brat, undernourished, unschooled, stoned before his time, but at least he knew that much. Reba got to her feet, her face gone stiff. She was wearing a beige-and-yellow western shirt with embroidered pockets, and she took a minute to dig her cigarettes out of one pocket and a lighter from the other, and even as Che came running to her to bury his screaming face in the _V__ of her conjoined thighs she was exhaling the first blue puff of smoke. “What is it now?” she demanded.

He couldn't tell her. He just stamped his feet till the plastic sagged and the stakes came up and she reached down and took him in her arms while Sunshine looked on with her hands on her hips and rehearsed her own version of events. Naked, browned, pocked with the angry red eruptions of a hundred bug bites, she was the original wild child, suckled by wolves, fed on honey-dew and the milk of paradise. Her hair was kinked, tangled, sun-bleached. Her eyes were watchful. “I did not,” she insisted as her brother whined his accusations into their mother's crotch. “He did. He was the one.”

There was a shout in the distance. Star ignored it. They were busy here, couldn't people see that? There was work to be done and she had no patience for screaming children or the catastrophe of the hour-and they were regular as clockwork, one per hour, on the hour-and couldn't somebody find the time to sit down and read these kids a _book?__ Was that too much to ask?

But the shouts were furious now, mounting-“Star!” they were calling, “Star!”-and she jerked her head round to see a knot of people running toward the goat pen with the two yellow dogs out front in a surge of kneading yellow muscle. Reba threw down her cigarette. Che's sobs died in his throat, an ache, a quiver, then nothing. Star rose to her feet at the same time Merry did, the black plastic rippling like a dark sea beneath them.

The goats were in a rudimentary pen made of eight-foot lengths of birch and cottonwood lashed to posts five feet high, a pen they planned to roof and convert to a barn for winter-and there'd been a whole storm of debate about that, because nobody really featured the goats stinking and bleating and dropping their pellets _inside__ the cabins, yet they didn't really want to put the work in when there were infinitely more important things to do, like erect cabins, install stoves and split a hundred cords of wood so they wouldn't _freeze their fucking asses off__ come winter. Star understood what the priorities were, but she didn't care. She'd gone ahead and built the pen herself, with a hatchet and a coil of old clothesline, and the tent she and Marco shared was pitched up against it so she could keep track of her charges in the gray wash of night.

The dogs were barking now, panting breathless gasps of assertion and rage that rang out over the river and rebounded again, and one of them-it was Frodo-was trying to clamber up into the pen. She dropped the hammer at her feet and took off running.

Everybody was shouting, crowding in against the rail as if they were at a rodeo, Frodo's hind end perched there statue-like for an instant and then disappearing even as Freak scrabbled at the crossbars and fell back. What it was, she couldn't see, the goats bleating-screaming, screaming in a key she'd never before heard or imagined-and a blur of motion visible through the gaps, now here, now there, torn from one side of the pen to the other. And when she was there, everything in an uproar, Jiminy bolting for Pan's tent to get a gun and Marco and Alfredo straddling the rail with clubs in their hands, she still couldn't apprehend what she was seeing, as if there were some essential gap between her eyes and the part of her brain that processed visual information. “It's a bear!” somebody shouted.

The white of the goats, the yellow of the dog, the wild shifting raging _brownness__ of this thing that didn't belong there in the pen, that didn't compute, that was no bear at all but something else entirely, claws, teeth and fur in a fury of grinding perpetual motion and a keening sharpedged growl that never faltered, and by the time Marco and Alfredo waded in on it with their clubs the goats were dead and gutted and Frodo was lying there in the dirt with his throat torn out and this thing, this emanation of the deepest hole in the blackest part of the last and wildest stronghold of the hills that bristled round her like breastworks, faced them down and in one leap was gone, a dark rumor in the high weed out beyond the silent pen. And later, even when she knew what it was-_Gulo luscus,__ the glutton, the wolverine, the big buffed-up weasel that was so blood-crazed it had been known to drive grizzlies off their kills, she still didn't understand. All she knew was that Ronnie had the guns downriver-all three of them-and that there would be no goats to tend, not anymore, and no milk, no yogurt, no cheese. There was a party, led by Weird George, Mendocino Bill and Norm himself, that wanted to butcher the goats and make use of the meat-the whole business regrettable, sure, a real bummer, but why let the meat go to waste, that was their thinking-but she came at them like that thing itself, raging, absolutely raging, and “Why not skin Frodo, then,” she said. “Why not eat him?”

She dug the holes herself. Marco stood off at a distance with a solemn face and two empty dangling hands, but she wouldn't let him help. The ground was like rock. The mosquitoes drained her. Sweating till her eyes stung and the ends of her hair clung like tentacles at her throat, she dragged the carcasses of the goats-of Amanda and Dewlap, and yes, she could tell them apart now, even at this late hour when it no longer mattered and their eyes were closed on the world-dragged them across the yard and buried them.

In the morning, when she went out there in the tall weed amidst the stumps to lay a few flowers on the raw earth and gather her strength and maybe think some consoling thoughts and tell herself it was all for the best, all part of the plan, the _flow,__ there was nothing to see but two empty holes and the naked long gashes that claws make in the dug-up dirt.

Ronnie and Verbie didn't come back on Thursday night as planned, and they didn't show up on Friday either. People began to wonder, and then they began to worry. This was a slippery place, wild, unbridled, full of surprises-and if they hadn't fully appreciated that because they were so wrapped up in themselves, so focused on their hands and feet and the planing of logs and scooping salmon from the river and berries from the hills, then that thing out of the woods had served them notice. This wasn't California. This wasn't Indiana or Texas or New Jersey. They were here in this country and they were going to stick it out, no question about it, and it was beautiful here, paradise almost, but it was a whole lot _dicier__ than any of them could have dreamed in their infancy back in California when there was nothing more to fret over than is there gas in the car and do they have cassava and artichokes down at the supermarket yet? They'd been lulled by the sun, by the breath of the river and the scent of the trees and the syrupy warm days that went on forever. But now there was an edge. Now they knew.

Star went out on Friday night and stared down the length of the river till her eyes felt the strain. She was worried for him, of course she was. Ronnie was the closest person in the world to her besides Marco, and she didn't know what she'd do if anything happened to him. He was her link-her only link-to all that past history, to Mr. Boscovich and the yearbook and her parents even, and though she'd never go back to that, though she'd hated it all then and hated it now, the farther she got from it the more important it became-it was as much a part of who she was as the atoms that composed her cells and the _blood material__ that flowed through her veins and she needed that. Everybody did. She talked about it with Marco all the time, and with Merry and Maya. To come here, to be part of this, to do what they were trying to do at Drop City, you had to sever the ties no matter how painful that might be-but that didn't mean you had to give up the past, erase it as if it had never existed. She'd been Paulette once. She'd gone to Catholic school. She'd baked cookies with her mother, piloted her bike through the blazing blacktop streets of the development and listened to the tires peel back the tar anew with each whirring revolution, developed crushes on boys and wrote in her diary and stayed up all night talking on the phone to Nancy Trowbridge and Linda Sloniker about the most important things in the world. That mattered. It did. And Ronnie was part of it.

But Friday came and went and he was nowhere to be found. It rained all day Saturday and people hunkered down in their tents and crowded into the one workable cabin, the original one, which was really just a single tiny room no bigger than the paneled den where Star's father and her brother Sam used to sink into the couch and watch football on Saturday afternoons. There was a chill in the air-it couldn't have been more than fifty degrees out-but still it was too hot in the cabin, too hot by far, what with the stove going in order to cook in shifts all day and the press of bodies strewn all over like human baggage, people playing cards, grousing about the weather, getting high and generally making a shithole of the place while Star and Merry tried to find room to conjure up a pot of beans and eight loaves of bread that were destined to be doughy and raw on the inside and burned black on the bottom, and what they wouldn't give for a couple of packages of La Estrella tortillas from the grocery back in Guerneville. Norm had taken possession of the only bunk in the place-the cabin _had__ belonged to his uncle, after all, and the communal spirit only went so far in a pinch-and he was in it now, propped up on one elbow beside Premstar. They were playing hearts, the only game she knew, and when she slipped the black queen to him she squealed as if she'd been named Miss Watsonville all over again.

Outside in the rain, Marco and Alfredo and some of the others-it looked like Deuce, Tom Krishna, Creamola and Foster-were setting the big support beams in place for the roof of the meeting house, and wouldn't that be nice, to have some space when the weather turned really nasty? Or just space in general. Because she might have been smiling-always smiling, two sweet chick lips pressed together in beatific hippie chick bliss-but what she really felt was that she was a heartbeat and a half from going out of her mind, and if she had to step over one more stinking sockless foot or scrub one more caked-on plate because some idiot had just flung it down in the yard without rinsing it first, she was going to start screaming and only a gag and a straitjacket were going to stop her.

She glanced up and saw them there in the intermediate distance, huddled scurrying figures in drab-colored ponchos, struggling against the mud, the pelt of the rain and the shifting uncontainable weight of the timbers, and she wanted to go out and pin medals to their chests. Everybody else had given up for the day-the ones who'd even bothered to crawl out of their sleeping bags in the first place, that is. Reba had certainly made herself scarce, but maybe that was a blessing in itself because at least the kids weren't howling in and out the door every thirty seconds. Mendocino Bill had been working with Marco and the others all afternoon, but nobody had a poncho big enough to fit him and now he was huddled under the eaves of the cabin, paging through a finger-worn copy of _Rolling Stone__ and shivering so hard you could hear the glass rattle in the windowframe, his overalls soaked through, his bare splayed feet like two deep corings of hard clay mud pulled up out of a drill shaft. Of course, he was _blocking the light,__ that was the important thing, but Star didn't have the heart to stick her head out the door and ask him to move. She swung round, two steps to the stove, and plunged a handful of dishes into the dishpan. Jiminy was right there underfoot, nursing his arm in a filthy sling and whittling little figurines out of alder-his voodoo dolls, he called them, and he had a whole collection already, one for each sister and brother in Drop City, though they were so crude only he could tell them apart. The hair curtained his face as he worked.

Star had a vision of the future then, of the winter, music-less, dull as paste, everybody crowded into a couple of half-finished cabins with no running water and no toilets and getting on each other's nerves while the snow fell and the ice thickened and the wind came in over the treetops like the end of everything. She held it a moment and then shook it out of her head.

“You know,” Norm said, raising his voice to be heard generally above the crackling of the stove and the steady drone of the rain, “somebody really ought to take a canoe on down to Boynton. I mean, to see what the deal is with Pan and Verbie, because I am hip to the fact that Verbs, at least, wouldn't want to cause anybody any hassles up here by _delaying__ delivery of the window glass and the new blades for the saws and the two-stroke oil and the drag knife and timber chisels and all the rest of the wares and objects we are all crying out with need for here… unless maybe her mother's thing might have been, I don't know, maybe _heavier__ than she thought”-and here he looked to Angela, who was wedged into the corner beside Jiminy, working a crossword puzzle in a book of crosswords that had already been deliberated over, filled in and erased by a dozen different hands. Angela never even lifted her head and you would have thought he was talking about somebody else's mother altogether. But then what could she do short of hopping in a canoe herself? Or sprouting wings?

Jiminy said, “They'll be all right. It's the weather, that's what it is.”

“But what about yesterday,” Star said. “And the day before.” She was at the table now, trying to make salsa from canned tomatoes and a cluster of yellow onions that had lost their texture and given up their skin to a film of black mold, and even to think of chilies or cilantro was a joke. They could have drowned. Easily. In fact it was a miracle that everybody had made it upriver in one piece the first time, even with the help of Joe Bosky, who must have made five or six round-trips with gear and people and supplies while the canoes crept up against the current and Norm peeled off the hundred-dollar bills to keep the propellers whirring and the floats skidding across the water through one long frantic afternoon and a night that never came.

Premstar was concentrating on her cards and the others were just staring out the open door, mesmerized by the rain. Norm folded his hand, then looked up at Star and gave his beard a meditative scratch. “I guess I better call a meeting,” he said finally, and Star followed his gaze out the door and into the dwindling perspective offered by the rain.

The next morning was clear, the sun already high and irradiating the thin blue nylon of the tent when she woke beside Marco, her mouth dry and sour and her shoulder stiff where the bedding-spruce cuttings, no longer fresh-had poked at her through the unpadded hide of the sleeping bag. Everything was damp and rank. She was glutinous with sweat because the sleeping bag was good for twenty below zero and she'd zipped it all the way up the night before, shivering so hard she could barely stand to shake her clothes off. It had been raining still when she went to bed nearly an hour after Marco had turned in, and it couldn't have been any colder than maybe forty-five degrees, but the tent felt like a meat locker, and that, more than anything, made her appreciate the concerted seven-days-a-week effort they were all putting in to get those cabins up. Teamwork. Brothers and sisters. Everybody pulling together, one for all and all for one.

Marco had told her there were old-timers up here who'd overwintered in a canvas tent with nothing more than a sheet-metal stove and some flattened cardboard boxes to keep the wind out, but she couldn't even begin to imagine it. A tent? In the snow? At fifty and sixty below? That was when you crossed the boundary from self-sufficiency to asceticism-to martyrdom-and she had no intention of suffering just for the sake of it. There was nothing wrong with comfort, with twelve-inch-thick walls and an extravagant fire and a pile of sleeping bags to wrap yourself up in and dream away the hours while the snow accumulated and the wind sang in the treetops. And why not sketch a cup of hot chocolate into the picture-and a good book too?

They'd already sited the cabins, walked them off in the dirt and sat there to admire the prospect of the river each of them would have, a little semicircle of neat foursquare peeled-log cabins like something out of a picture book, and as soon as the meeting hall was finished, they were going to start in on them. And the big question was how would they divide up the space? Who was going to live with who and would they switch midwinter if somebody really freaked out? She was thinking she and Marco would go in with Merry and Jiminy, for sure, and maybe Maya and one of the unattached guys-_cats__-but four would be nice and two even nicer.

She stretched, careful not to wake Marco. He was hunched away from her, wrapped up like a corpse in his battered Army surplus bag, exhausted from working nonstop all day in the rain. He'd been so burned out the previous night he'd skipped the meeting altogether, and at dinner he could barely lift a fork to his mouth, all the jokes and debates and crack-brained theories that made dinner so lively and communitarian every evening just flying right by him. She was thinking she'd slip down to the cabin and see what Dunphy and Erika were cooking up for breakfast (today it was their drill, and nine'd get you ten it was going to be flapjacks, with hand-carved slices of bacon on the side for the carnivores) and bring a plate of it to him here in the tent, breakfast in bed and hello and good morning and how are you this fine day, my love?

Sometime in the night she must have flung off the T-shirt she normally slept in, though she had no recollection of it, nor of having unzipped the bag either, and her thoughts were moving slowly, as if her brain were an unfilled kettle and each thought the thinnest reluctant drip of a leaky faucet. She'd smoked the night before-pot and a couple hits of the hash Alfredo was circulating after the meeting-and as she lay there now staring at the intense unearthly blue dome of the tent's roof, she felt dragged out and sluggish, as if one of Weird George's vampires had slipped in in the middle of the night, drained her blood and pumped sand into her veins in its place.

It seemed to take her forever just to sit up-was that coffee she smelled, drifting up the slope from the cabin? — and then it hit her that there would be no milk in the coffee today, unless it was powdered, unless it was canned and tasted of tin and some Elsie Borden factory tucked away somewhere in the very rusted-out epicenter of the military-industrial complex they'd all come up here to escape. The goats were dead, that was the fact of the matter. One minute they'd been pulling up brush and tender sprouts of this and that with those dainty little jerks of their heads and staring off into the slit-eyed distance in some sort of deep-dwelling goat trance, and the next they were lying there torn inside out like a pair of bloody socks. And Frodo. Everybody loved that dog. You could throw a Frisbee a hundred feet, two hundred, and he'd be there to catch it every time, magically, as if he rode on air-he'd even learned to smile, as some dogs do, the really special ones, wagging his head and lifting his upper lip to show his front teeth in a weird canine parody of the master species' favorite greeting. He was dead too. And Ronnie-what about Ronnie? And Verbie?

They'd all decided that if the two of them weren't back by noon today somebody would have to go downriver in a canoe and see what the deal was, whether it was just a delay in getting the windows and the building supplies because maybe the Studebaker had broken down or they were having a problem with the outboard engine, a leak in the bottom of the boat, choppy conditions on the river, whatever-or whether it was something darker, something nobody really wanted to think about. And who was going to go? They couldn't spare anybody, actually, because they were racing against time here and everybody, even one-armed Jiminy, was vital to the cause, but finally Angela had volunteered-it was her sister, her mother-and Bill said he'd go with her to make sure she didn't get lost, because after all she was just recently released from the penitentiary of a whole life lived in Pasadena and her notion of wilderness to this point hadn't extended much beyond the bounds of Griffith Park.

It _was__ coffee. No smell on earth like it. Star kicked her feet free of the sleeping bag and pulled on her underwear and a pair of shorts, both so damp you could have used them to wipe up the linoleum floor back at home, then she slipped a very grungy tie-dyed T-shirt that might have been Marco's-two sniffs; it _was__-over her head and bent forward to lace up her hiking boots. It was then that the nothing sounds-wind in the alders, the willows, the cottonwoods and spruce, the erratic complaints of the birds, the rustle of the river-began to feature something else, something _un__natural, man-made, the drilling, straight-ahead monotone of an internal combustion engine.

She stepped out of the tent in time to see the shot-silver streak of Joe Bosky's floatplane dip behind the curtain of trees along the river and then emerge to skate out across the water on two flashing parabolas of light. The engine revved and then died as the plane faced around and its forward motion carried it up on the gravel beach in front of the cabin. By the time she got there Ronnie was already out on shore, securing the plane with a line looped around the big minder log. There was a dead moment, and then the sun grabbed the door of the plane and let it go again, and Joe Bosky was there beside him, in camouflage fatigues and a black beret, the two of them bent close, laughing over something.

It was early yet-no later than seven or so-but other people had heard the engine too and were poking their heads out of their tents or just standing there looking dazed in their bare feet and underwear. Star was the first one down to the water, and she was still half asleep herself, the tall grass tickling at her calves, insects springing away from the tread of her feet in revolving cartwheels of color. From somewhere in the depths of the cabin, Freak let out a sharp introductory bark. “Ronnie,” she called, coming across the strip of gravel and reaching out her arms for him, and all at once she was lit up with joy, just beaming, she couldn't help herself, “we were worried about you.”

Ronnie didn't smile, didn't say anything. He just took hold of her-_Pan__-and he wasn't settling for any brotherly and sisterly squeeze either, not this time, wrapping her in his arms and pulling her tight to his body as if he wanted to break her down right there. And then, before she could react, he threw her head back and kissed her hard on the mouth, too hard, and held it too long, so that she wound up having to push away from him while Joe Bosky stood there grinning as if he were at a peep show or something. “Don't I rate a kiss too?” he said, and the taste of Ronnie was the taste of alcohol and cigarettes and how many nights without sleep? “Jesus,” Ronnie said, “you look like shit.”

She let a hand go to her temple and she shook her hair back and away from her face, vulnerable, always vulnerable. “What do you think? — I just got up. I haven't even brushed my hair yet or washed my face or anything-”

“She looks good to me,” Joe Bosky said. “Like something I could spread with butter and just eat all day long.” His grin was even, loopily steady, his eyes poked back in his head as if an internal whip were lashing out at them. He wore a pistol at his waist, strapped down like Ronnie's, and he'd rolled up the sleeves of his shirt to show off the cut meat of his biceps. He leered at her a moment, then clapped on a pair of silver reflective glasses that gave back nothing. He was stoned, that's what he was, up there in the air stoned out of his mind, and Ronnie was stoned too. She saw it all in a flash, the money on the bar, the dirty jokes and backslapping and the cigars and joints and one more round and hey, man, let's fly upriver and drop in on Drop City.

“So where's the boat?” she asked. “Where's Verbie?”

Ronnie gave her a look she knew from Kansas, from Denver, from Tucumcari, New Mexico, poor Ronnie, put-upon Ronnie, Ronnie the crucified and ever-suffering. “She's such a _cunt,__” he said. “And I'm sorry, but I just couldn't take it anymore.”

“Yes? And?”

Bosky shuffled from one foot to the other. His face was petrified, his arms rigid at his sides. She had the sense that he wasn't with them anymore, at least not in that moment. Ronnie started to say something, and then swallowed it. His eyes were hard little pins stuck to the corkboard of his face, _too much fuel, too much.__ He glanced away from her to where people were ambling down from their tents now, scratching at their morning heads and hiking up their jeans like farmers on the way to a dance. He shrugged. “I told her to go ahead and take the boat without me. She's on her way up now, with Harmony and Alice and some of the-with the windows, at least. We passed over them on our way up. Or at least I think that was them.”

The cabin door flew open on this last bit of clarification and Freak came tearing across the yard, trailing a string of high, mournful barks-and yes, animals can mourn, she believed that to her soul-and Norm's voice rose up in a bellow from behind the screen: “Well, knock me down with a Cannabis bud, here he is, folks, the prodigal son returned in time for breakfast!” And then Norm was out on the porch in his unstrung overalls, all chest hair and fat puckered nipples.

Ronnie gave him a wave and Joe Bosky lifted a dead hand in the air too, after which they both turned back to the plane and began to unload what little Ronnie had thought to bring back with him. First it was his rucksack, bulging seductively. Then the guns-the rifles that belonged to Norm and Norm's uncle respectively, and why did he have to take both of them when a single bullet could have stopped that thing that had got at the goats? — and then a laminated white box with two handle grips that said U. S. POSTAL SERVICE on the side of it, and at least he hadn't forgotten the mail, at least you had to give him credit for that. People were milling around now, eager looks, everybody waiting for the orders they'd put in, for the magazines and candy bars and eyeshadow and honey-herbal shampoo and all the rest of it, but Pan was done, Pan was turning away from the plane empty-handed, sorry, folks, come back tomorrow, all sold out. She watched him standing there fussing over his pack, the pistol strapped to one thigh, the big sheathed knife to the other, his genuine cowhide go-to-town blunt-nosed boots with the stacked-up heels dark with river water, his workshirt open to the fourth button and his three strings of beads swaying loose-two of which she'd personally strung for him in the long, glassed-in hours coming through the dead zone of the high plains-and she thought, It's over. He's done.

But he surprised her. Because he hefted his backpack, slung a rifle over each shoulder and turned to the nearest of his brothers and sisters-it was Tom Krishna, Tom with his head bowed out of shyness and his handcrafted aluminum foil mandala catching the light at his throat-and told him, so everybody could hear, that all the rest of the stuff was in the boat, no worries, and the plane could only hold so much, dig? “We brought the mail, though,” he said, and he gave the cardboard box a nudge with the wet toe of his boot.

The morning stretched and settled. Star brought a plate and a mug of coffee up to the tent and watched Marco eat in greedy gulps, the long spill of his naked torso plunging into the folds of the sleeping bag as if that was all that was left of him, and he cleaned the plate and lit a cigarette without shifting position. “That my shirt you're wearing?” he said, and she said, “Yeah,” and went down to get him seconds. Everybody was awake by now, pushing flapjacks around their plates, tanking up on creamless coffee and sorting through the box of mail Tom Krishna had set out on the picnic table. There was nothing for her-she'd already checked-and nothing for Marco, because they'd fallen off the edge of the world here and nobody, least of all their parents, knew where they were. She loaded up the plate, drowned the flapjacks in syrup, and told herself she was going to have to find the time to write people-her mother, Sam, JoJo, Suzie-because it would be nice to get a letter once in a while, to correspond, to reaffirm that there was a world out there beyond the cool drift of the river. As she went back up the hill with the laden plate the polar sun reached out and pinned her shadow to the ground.

By ten o'clock it was eighty-seven degrees, according to the communal thermometer Norm had nailed up outside the door of the cabin, and the whole community, even Jiminy in his sling, even Premstar, was gathered in the yard out under the sun, focused on the task at hand: roofing and chinking the meeting house. “Finishing touches!” Norm sang out, slathering mud. “The first and most significant building of Drop City North rising here before your unbelieving eyes, and what do you think of that, people?”

He didn't really expect an answer-Norm was talking just to hear himself, and that was his job, as guru and cheerleader-but people were feeling good, playful, celebratory even. The mud-heavy clay dug out of the bog behind the goat pen and mixed with water to consistency in a trough fashioned of old boards-was all over everybody, and there'd been at least two breaks for mud fights, but still the trowels kept going and the dead black slits between the logs gave way to handsome long horizontal stripes of ochre mud, hardening in the sun, and yes, Virginia, this was going to keep the _wind__ out all winter. The roof poles-a whole forest of them, white spruce stripped and glistening and as straight as nature and a little planing could make them-were handed up brigade-style to Marco and Tom Krishna and then set in place against the roof beams, no nails, no ligatures or sheet metal couplings needed, thank you very much, because the weight of the sod-big peaty chunks of it two feet thick and with every sort of grass, flower and weed sprouting like hair from the surface of it-would hold them in place. Or that was the theory, anyway.

Star helped Dunphy and Erika make up sixty peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a fruit salad-two kinds of berries, Del Monte peaches fresh from the can and apple wedges with the bruised skin still intact-and five gallons of cherry Kool-Aid, mildly laced with acid, just to give the occasion the right sort of send-off, and Tom Krishna saw to the music situation, setting up a little portable Sears Roebuck stereo to run off a car battery that had to be used _sparingly,__ people, because there was no way to charge it up again. The music-so unexpected, so disorienting, so immediate and all-absorbing-put them over the top. People broke free to link elbows and do-si-do a step or two and then went right back to slinging mud, and then they had a sandwich and a cup of Kool-Aid, and through it all the steady wet thump of the Grateful Dead slinging drumbeats and converting steel strings to a rain of broken glass, _A friend of the devil is a friend of mine.__ Star found herself hugging everybody, and she'd forgotten all about the goats, about Ronnie, who'd crawled off to crash in his tent, and she would have forgotten about Joe Bosky too-creep extraordinaire-if he wasn't right there in her face every time she turned around, helping himself to the Kool-Aid and sandwiches, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet as if he were balancing on a pole, blowing her kisses, juggling a hatchet and a pair of kitchen knives in a dumb show that just went on and on.

But nothing could dampen her spirit. This was like a barn raising, was what it was, like something out of the history books, and here they were living it, doing it, making it happen in modern times because it was never so modern you couldn't take a step back. “This is like an old-fashioned barn raising,” Star said aloud, to no one in particular, and she liked the notion of it so much she said it again, and then again, but nobody really paid any attention to her because by then they were all into their own trips, the chinking trip, the roofing trip, the take-two-steps-and-swing-your-partner trip, and the only one who responded was Joe Bosky, right there at her elbow, tossing his hatchet and his knives, and what he said was, “It sure is, sweetheart, and I'd raise a barn with you anytime.”

It was late in the afternoon, the meeting house chinked inside and out, the roof in place and buried in sod so that it looked as if a whole meadow had been transposed from the earth to the air, just floating there like a magic carpet strewn with flowers-and that was a trip, it was, everybody agreed-before anybody gave a thought to Verbie. Dinner was cooking-salmon fillets rubbed with dill and roasted over the open fire, with brown rice, stewed cranberries and a pot of communal mustard on the side-and all of Drop City was feeling relaxed and confident. They'd done it. They'd come all the way up here and built a place from scratch, with the materials at hand-free materials, provided by nature-and if they could do that they could build the cabins too, and why stop at three? Why not four or five or six of them? Why not make a whole camp of the place, like Camp Minewa, where there were four girls to a cabin, bunk beds up against the wall and plenty of space for everybody? Marco was talking about a smokehouse and Norm was pushing for a sauna and maybe even a hot tub, and at lunch he went into a long, acid-fueled oration on the Swedes and hot rocks and hotter water, on Chippewa sweathouses and purification rites, until he talked himself hoarse. Sure, people said. Yeah, sure, why not? Because there wasn't anything they couldn't do, and if anybody still doubted it, all they had to do was take a look at the meeting hall standing there tall and proud where before there'd been nothing but scrub and trees and a pile of dead gray rock. And so everybody was smiling, and it wasn't just the mellowing influence of the acid either. This was genuine. This was real. And Verbie? She was on her way upriver, wasn't she?

Star was outside, setting the big split-log picnic table for dinner, when the high sharp whine of an outboard engine broke free of the trees. Verbie, she thought. And Harmony and Alice and the shampoo, magazines and flashlight batteries she'd put in an order for, and chocolate-she could die for chocolate. She dropped what she was doing and let her feet carry her down to the river.

Half a dozen people were already there, the water giving back sheets of light as it paged through its boils and riffles, the sky striped with cloud till it looked like one of the paint-by-numbers scenes she'd never had the patience to finish as a child. Weird George was perched barefooted atop a rock out in the middle of the current, wet hair trailing down his back like a tangle of dark weed, Erika waist-deep in the water beside him. The dog was there too, Freak, in up to his chest and wagging the hacked-off stump of his tail, and it was warm still, very warm, no different from high summer on the Jersey Shore. And that was what she was flashing on-the Jersey Shore, she and Ronnie and Mike and JoJo and some of the others from the stone cottages and the weekend they'd spent camped on the beach there, all sunlight and the tug of the salt drying on your skin, bonfires at night, clams steamed in their own juice-as the boat drew closer and she began to realize that this wasn't Harmony at the tiller-arm, or Verbie or Alice either. That was Verbie, there, in the bow, the pale mask of her face riding up and jolting down again, but who was that in the middle seat, and who in the rear?

The engine droned. The boat came on. Star turned her head and gave an anxious look over her shoulder to where Marco and Alfredo were kneeling atop the roof of the meeting house, inspecting their work, and she wanted to call out to them-“Look, look who's coming!”-but she checked herself. A few of the others glanced up now, curious, because two arrivals in a single day was unprecedented, and she could see their faces lighting up-Jiminy and Merry at the door of the cabin, Mendocino Bill and Creamola pausing dumbstruck over a game of horseshoes, Premstar with her hair piled up on her head and a magazine in her hand lurching out of the hammock Norm had strung for her. A breeze came down the riverbed, rattling the willows along the shore. Freak began to bark.

She turned back round just as the boat slid behind the rock where Weird George was waving his arms and shouting something unintelligible over the noise of the engine, and for an instant he blocked her view. Then the boat shot forward and she saw who it was standing up now in the middle seat, and she couldn't have been more surprised if it was Richard M. Nixon himself. “Dale!” somebody shouted. “Hey, Dale!” And then, before she could think or even react, Sky Dog was gliding by, one hand on the tiller, the other flashing her the peace sign.

24

They were talking nonstop, really spinning it out, and if he didn't know better he would have thought they'd just been released from separate cages, one tap on the steel bars for yes, two for no. It was a kind of verbal diarrhea-a tag-team match-Sky Dog rushing in to fill the void when Dale Murray paused for breath, and vice versa. And the thing was, people wanted to hear it, every word of it, because this was the diversion, this was the entertainment for the evening. Nobody had left the table. A bottle of homebrew made the rounds, hand to hand and mouth to mouth. Norm produced a fresh pack of cigarettes, shook one out, and passed the pack on. Bones and salmon skin stuck fast to the plates, the leftover rice went hard in the pot, flies buzzed, mosquitoes hung like ornaments on the air. People's eyes were on fire. They laughed, chatted, laid communal hands on one another's shoulders, and it was just like Leonardo's reprise of the Last Supper, except the Christ figure was two Christs, Dale Murray and Sky Dog.

“And that was a trip, the whole bike thing, because in-where was it at, Dale?”

“Dawson.”

“In Dawson, they'd never even _seen__ a Honda before, especially a beast like that, seven hundred fifty cc's, Windjammer fairing, I mean, _chrome__ everything, and the first guy out the door of the saloon offered him twenty-two hundred for it-_Canadian__-and Dale, I'll tell you, Dale never looked back.”

“That's right, man. Bet your ass.”

Marco shifted his weight from one buttock to the other on the hard split plank of the seat, thinking he could do without the heroic exploits and the thick paste of smirks, nods and asides that seemed to have everybody glued to their seats, thinking the two of them should have stayed in Dawson or Whitehorse or wherever they'd blown in from, anywhere but here. They'd shown up like conquering heroes when the worst part of the work was already finished, that was what he was thinking, and what had Dale Murray-or Sky Dog, for that matter-ever done for Drop City? He exchanged a look with Alfredo, elbow-propped across the table and two places up, but Alfredo was keeping his own counsel. And hadn't they banished Sky Dog once already? Or was he dreaming?

Up at the head of the table, seated at the right hand of Norm, Premstar was giggling, and the pot-Sky Dog's pot, Dale Murray's pot, Lester's and Franklin's pot-kept circulating. When the communal joint came Marco's way he took it like anybody else, a pinch of the thumb and index fingers, Joe Bosky's compressed fingertips giving way to Star's and Star's to his own. The Kool-Aid was gone, and he thought he felt a mild residual buzz from it-it hadn't been intended as anything intense, but just something to focus behind, and he'd had maybe two cups of it hours ago-and now Reba and Merry were hovering over the table with a big blackened pot of hot chocolate and people were dipping their cups into it and the steam lifted off the pot in a transparent crown. Freak had stopped begging-glutted finally-and he lay at Star's feet, grunting softly as he plumbed his balls and nosed under his tail for fleas. Jiminy got up and held his lighter to the pile of brush and lopped-off pine branches he'd raked together for a fire, and before long the smoke was chasing round the table at the whim of the breeze, a nuisance surely, but at least it discouraged the mosquitoes.

Dale Murray said, “Kicked his ass for him, what do you think?”

Norm said, “Public _what__? Indecency? You got to be kidding.”

Marco exhaled and passed the joint on to Dunphy, her fingers cold, spidery, bitten, thin, the briefest fleeting touch of skin to skin, and she gave him a blank-eyed look and half a smile and put the roach to her lips and sucked. He glanced down at his own fingers, at his hands laid out on the chewed plank of the table. The fingernails were chipped, the cuticles torn, dirt worked into every crack and abrasion in a tracery of dead black seams. These were the hands of a working man, a man putting in twelve- and thirteen-hour days, the hands of a man who was building something permanent. Pride came up in him in a sudden flush. And joy. That too.

“Tired?” Star murmured, leaning into him.

For answer, he pressed his palms together in prayer, then tilted them and made a pillow to lay his head on.

“And Lester,” Sky Dog was saying, “you should have seen Lester-man, they wanted to lock him up so bad, just on general principles, you know? But he gave them the old shuck and jive and smiled so hard at this one guy-I don't know what he was, a Mountie, a sheriff, something-I thought he was going to melt right down into his boots like a big stick of rancid butter. Oh, and, shit, the moose-did I tell you about the moose?”

Alfredo cut in. He wanted to know where Lester was-was he planning on coming upriver? Because if he was, it was going to be sticky, real sticky, after what went down in California, and he didn't want to sound prejudiced or anything, because prejudice had nothing to do with it- “He stayed behind at the bus,” Verbie said, picking at a crescent of white bone. “With Franklin. They're panning for gold.”

Joe Bosky let out a hoot. “Fucking greenhorns,” he said. “Cheechakos.”

“All's I know,” Sky Dog put in, “is they got this vial half-filled with gold flakes already, and all they been doing is just catching what comes out of that creek up north of town-”

“Last Chance Creek,” Bosky said, folding his arms. The pale white ridge of a scar crept out of his aviator's mustache and curled into the flesh of his upper lip. You could see where every hair of his head was rooted. “They should've called it No Chance Creek. Nothing in there but sewage leaching out of people's septic tanks.”

“Sorry, man, but I saw it, I'm telling you-that was _gold__ in there.”

“Iron pyrites,” Verbie said, and then Norm weighed in. “Could be gold, who knows? You want to talk gold country, this is it, and I fully intend to get out there and rinse a couple pans myself, me and Premstar. Once the cabins are up. Because why not? It's _money__ in the bank, people, and it's out there for the picking, just like the berries and the fat silver salmon coming up the river, and do I have to _remind__ anybody what we're doing up here in the first place?”

Jiminy said he could feature some gold-maybe Harmony could figure out a way to melt it down and make ornaments and figurines and the like-or maybe they could just sell it and use the money for things like a new generator so they could have a little music more than once a week. And lights, what about lights. Wouldn't lights be nice?

People ran that around the table a while, the gold flecks that would invariably prove to be iron pyrites growing exponentially in each Drop City head till the creek across the river ran yellow and the trees on the hills gave up their roots and toppled because it wasn't earth they were growing in, but solid gold nuggets. Marco tuned them out. He'd never been so tired in his life. And if it wasn't for the elation he was riding on-the meeting house was up, the walls chinked and the roof in place, and who would have believed it a month ago? — he'd have crawled into his sleeping bag by now. But he held on, stroking Star's bare arm with the tip of one very relaxed finger and letting the marijuana turn the blood to syrup in his veins.

They'd made the meeting house two stories, with the beams laid inside for a loft where people could sleep if the need arose, and that was good thinking, a happy result of sitting down with a sheet of paper and a pencil and talking it all out beforehand with Tom, Alfredo and Norm. Norm knew what he was doing, for the most part, at least, and Sess Harder, fifteen minutes down the river, was like an encyclopedia-he was the one who told them to lay flattened cardboard over the roof poles so none of the loose sod would leach through the cracks-and the uncle had left behind a pristine copy of _The Complete Log Home,__ copyright 1910, which they could consult as needed, but really, Marco couldn't help marveling over how _basic__ it all was. You cut and peeled the timber, notched the ends of the logs till they were no different, except in scale maybe, from the Lincoln Logs every ten-year-old in America constructed his forts and stockades with, dug down two feet to permafrost at the four corners and stacked up rock to lay the first square across and built on up from there. Then you laid the floor-with planks carved out of spruce with a chainsaw ripper-cut holes for the windows and a six-inch slot for the stovepipe, and you had it. Basically, that was it. And if they could all pitch in and build something like this-two stories high, twenty feet long and eighteen across-then the cabins would be nothing more than a reflex.

“What about Harmony and Alice?” This was Norm, leaning into the table and giving Sky Dog and Dale Murray a look over the top of his glasses. “And Lydia, what about her?”

“You know Harmony,” Sky Dog said. “He's got a kiln set up outside the bus and he says he's experimenting with some things and he's not ready to come upriver yet, at least that's what he told me and Dale. Plus the Bug is broken down.”

“He ordered a new fuel pump for it,” Verbie put in. “From this place in Anchorage.”

Norm dug his fingers into his beard, slid the glasses back up his nose. “And Lydia?”

To this point, Joe Bosky had been subdued, his dig at the gold situation the only thing out of his mouth all evening. He'd been locked behind the wrap of his silver shades since morning, stoned on a whole variety of things. When the hot chocolate went round he'd shuffled unsteadily to the plane and came back with a bottle of Hudson Bay rum and set it on the table, and a couple of people followed his example and spiked their chocolate with it. He cleared his throat in response to Norm's question and leaned over to spit in the dirt before bringing the solidity of his face back to the table. “She's in Fairbanks,” he said.

“Fairbanks?”

A murmur went round the table. If it was true, this was disturbing news, evidence of their first defection, the first betrayal of the ideal. People eyed one another up and down the table-who was next? Where would it end? Was the whole thing going to come tumbling down now? Was that what this meant? Marco slouched over his plate. For the moment, at least, he was too tired to care.

“What do you mean, Fairbanks?”

Joe Bosky's voice was thick in his throat. “I got her a job at this place I know. A saloon. She's going to be a dancer.”

And now Verbie: “Only till winter, though, is what she told me. To get some money together, for all of us-she's doing it for all of us-and then she's going to come back to the fold. That's a promise, she said-tell them that's a promise.”

“And if any of you other girls are interested,” Bosky said, and here he turned to Star and fixed his null gaze on her, “I can arrange it, because Christ knows they are starved for women up here. And Lydia. I mean, she's a natural, with that body she's got on her-”

“You mean topless, right?” Maya said.

“Right down to her G-string, honey, because full frontal nudity is still against the law in this state, but I tell you she's going to take in more tips a night than you people'll get in a month out of welfare or food stamps or whatever it is you're on.”

Everyone looked to Norm, whether they were conscious of it or not. And Norm, at the head of the table, hair dangling from the cincture of his headband, the cowbell like a cheese grater hung round his neck, set down his cup of chocolate and licked his mustache till all the sweet residuum was gone. “All right,” he said finally. “Cool. I mean, we can live with that, right, people? Lydia's going to show off what she was born with and make a little cash for Drop City in the bargain, and where's the problem with that?”

Verbie's voice came back at him like a whipcrack. “It's exploitation.”

“Exploitation of what?”

“Of the female body. It's sexist. I mean, I don't see any of you men up there dancing in your jockstraps or whatever-”

“Only because they didn't ask,” Norm said, and people were laughing now, avowals going up and down the table, and then Sky Dog said he'd do it in a heartbeat.

“Oh, yeah,” Verbie shot back. “Then why don't you do it now? Why not get up on the table and give us something to look at, come on, let's see what you got, big boy, come on-”

Sky Dog rose unsteadily from his seat and began undoing the buttons of his shirt while the catcalls rang out, but once he got his shirt off, he seemed to lose track of what he was doing-gone into the wild blue yonder-and he sat back down again.

“Chicken,” Merry said.

“See, what'd I tell you?” Verbie said.

And then Premstar, propped up beside Norm like a painted mannequin, Premstar the beauty queen who was more worried about her nails and her lipstick and her eyeliner than about anything that could possibly go down at Drop City, past or present, entered the conversation for the first time all night. “What about our treats?” she demanded. “All the things we ordered from Pan, I mean. Did everybody forget, or what?”

That was the unfortunate moment Ronnie chose to come bobbing across the field from his tent, the sun firing the threads of his hair, his torso riding over his hips as if he were walking a treadmill, and the table fell momentarily silent to watch his progress. Everyone was thinking the same thing. Pan had been crashed in his tent all this time, out of sight, out of mind, but the boat had come in with Verbie and Sky Dog and Dale, strange cargo indeed, and the windows for the meeting house and the three prospective cabins were there, uncracked and true, and the cans of kerosene and the bar oil and blades for the saws, but nothing else. No candy bars. No underarm deodorant. No books or magazines or tubes of suntan lotion. And if they weren't in the plane and they weren't in the boat, then where were they?

“Hey, Dale,” Sky Dog said, trying to get it going again, “remember that shit they tried to palm off on us in, where was it, Carmacks, in that roadhouse? _Moose__burger they called it?” But nobody was listening. All eyes were on Pan as he shuffled up to the table, tucking in his shirt and swatting absently at mosquitoes. Even Freak lifted his head from the dirt to give him a look of appraisal. The smoke drifted. The moment held.

“Hey, what's happening,” Ronnie said, leaning over Marco's shoulder to peer into the depths of the nearest pot. “Am I too late for dinner?”

At first, he tried to deny everything, squeezing himself in on the bench between Star and Joe Bosky and scraping what he could out of the bottom of the pot, all the while mounding it up on the first plate that came to hand, and never mind that it had already been used, he wasn't fussy. He was wearing his glad-to-be-here look, all smiles and dancing eyes, and he'd put a little effort into his clothes too, his denim shirt clean and maybe even pressed and what looked to be a new bandanna wrapped round his head. He found a fork, wiped it on his jeans, and began to feed the hardened dregs of rice into his mouth, too busy eating to address the issue of Drop City's trust and the two-column shopping list he'd wrapped round the wad of bills everybody had thrust on him five days ago. Marco studied the side of his head, the sparse thread of his sideburns tapering down into the sparser beard, the wad of muscle working in his jaw, but Ronnie was making eye contact with no one, least of all Premstar, who'd just looked directly at him and said, “So where's our stuff?”

Now she repeated herself, and Reba, the hunt in her eyes, said, “Yeah, _Pan,__ what's the deal? Are you going tell me you forgot, or what?”

If Ronnie was hoping it would blow by him, he was going to be disappointed, Marco could see that. He hadn't given him any money himself-he'd been too busy to think of needing or wanting anything-but Star had, and that was enough to involve him right there, more than enough. To this point, Pan had been fairly innocuous, shying away from the construction or anything that smacked of real work, maybe, but taking charge of the boat and the drift net Norm's uncle had left behind and assiduously drilling holes in anything that moved out along the river, and that was meat nobody else was going to go and get, at least not till the cabins were up anyway. He's doing his own thing, that's what Star said whenever his name came up in relation to the work details Alfredo was forever trying to organize-the latrine crew, the bark-stripping crew, the wood-splitters and sod-cutters-and the way she defended him was an irritant, certainly, but Marco wasn't jealous of him, or not that he would admit. _Of course I love him,__ Star had insisted, _but like a brother, like my brother Sam, and no, we never really slept together, or not in any way that really meant anything-__

“Is that booze I see here on the table? Distilled spirits? _Al__-co-holic beverage?” Ronnie lifted his head and darted a glance at the sun-drenched bottle of rum rising up out of the wooden slab at Bosky's elbow. “What are we mixing it with?”

“The stuff, Ronnie, the stuff,” Reba said. “We were talking about the stuff we all gave you money for-where is it? Huh?”

He reached for the bottle, found a cup, poured. Everybody at the table watched him as if they'd never before seen a man lift a cup to his lips, and they watched him sip and swallow and make a face. “I thought it was-didn't we bring it in the plane, Joe? I mean, this morning?”

But Joe Bosky was no help. He sat there frozen behind his glazed lenses, not even bothering to swat at the mosquitoes clustered on the back of his neck. A dense spew of smoke raked across the table and then dissipated. No one said a word.

“Jesus,” Ronnie said, slapping at his forehead. “Don't tell me I left all that shit back at the bus-”

“Oh, cut the crap, already. You didn't leave anything anywhere, did you, man?” Mendocino Bill rose massively at the far end of the table. He'd put in an order for Dr. Scholl's medicated foot powder, because he had a semipermanent case of athlete's foot and the itching was driving him up a wall. “You fucked up, didn't you?”

Ronnie looked wildly round the table, his mouth set, eyes jumping from one face to another. He was calculating, Marco could see that, dipping deep in the well, way down in the deepest hole, fishing for a lie plausible enough to save his neck. Marco had no sympathy for him, none at all, and in that moment he realized how expendable he was, whether Star needed him as confessor or not-or no, especially because she needed him. Or thought she did. The shadows deepened. A hawk screeched from a tree at the edge of the woods. “What about it, Pan?” he heard himself say.

“Talk about the third degree,” Ronnie said, and he was looking down at the table now, toying with his fork. Suddenly he let out a laugh-a high sharp bark of a laugh that startled the dog out of his digestive trance-and he raised his head and gave Marco a sidelong look. “All right,” he said, “all right, you got me. I fucked up. Had one too many drinks, you know, and I just… I don't know, I just, I guess it slipped my mind-”

He must not have found much comfort in the look Marco was giving him, because he ducked his head again and murmured, to no one in particular, “So go ahead and hang me.”

A moment ticked by, everybody staring at the spool of his bowed head, the rings flashing on the fingers of his right hand-a ring on every finger, even the thumb-as he fed congealed rice pap into his mouth with the slow, trembling incertitude of a penitent. Freak got up from under the table, stretched, yawned and stared off at something across the field and into the line of the trees. Star sat there rigid. Her face was white, bloodless, drawn down to nothing. She was giving Ronnie a look Marco couldn't fathom-was she afraid for him, was that it? Or was she ashamed? Ashamed and disgusted? He was almost surprised when her voice broke the silence: “So you'll be giving everybody their money back now, right?”

Ronnie took another pull at the mug, again made a face. He looked like a cat scratching around in a litter box. “Christ, has anybody got a Coke? Or a Pepsi? I'd settle for Royal Crown, even-this shit is _harsh.__” He shot a glance at Star, then looked down at his plate. “Well, not exactly,” he said, and an angry murmur burned from one end of the table to the other. “Because, you've got to understand, I saw this opportunity-pot, I mean, the pot Lester and Franklin smuggled in, because where else do you expect to find weed in Alaska? Beyond what we brought, I mean. So I figured what do we need most of all, the single biggest thing? And what are we going to need to get us through those long dark nights that are going to be coming before you know it? Right? Weed. So I made an investment for all of us.”

“You're a real altruist, Pan,” Reba said.

Bill hadn't sat down yet. He was still hovering there at the far end of the table, the fat firming to muscle in his shoulders and arms, the long slant of the sun crystallizing the strands of grease in his river-washed hair. He looked pained. Looked as if someone had just poked him with a sharp stick. “Yeah, right,” he said, and he growled it, his voice hoarse and raw with suppressed rage, “you mean the pot you tried to sell me this morning for thirty bucks a lid?”

“Fuck you,” Ronnie said, and he was on his feet now too, trying to untangle his legs from the table, trying to get serious, get angry. “I mean, fuck you, you fat sack of shit.”

And of course Bill rose to the bait, coming round the end of the table in the swelled-up shell of himself, coming at Ronnie like a moving mountain, and Marco thinking two or three punches and they're separated and Ronnie can go off in a huff to his tent, put-upon and abused, after which there would be an offering of pot, not all of it, maybe, and certainly not anywhere near the value of it, and by the end of the night the blame would be meliorated and the sinner redeemed. But he was wrong. Because before any of it could play out, Joe Bosky entered the mix. Somehow he managed to lurch up and kick himself free of the bench in time to intercept Bill before he could get to Ronnie, who was only then bracing himself to meet the first rush. Everybody else sprang up simultaneously from the table, Reba cursing, Che and Sunshine looking lost and bewildered, Alfredo shouting, “No, no, no!”

Bosky never hesitated. He dropped his shoulder and slammed into Bill as if they were out on a football field, helmet to breastbone, and Bill's feet got tangled and he went down heavily in the dirt. Almost immediately he pushed himself up, his face transfigured with rage, but before anyone could intervene, Bosky hit him with two quick white fists-two uppercuts delivered as he was blundering to his feet-and Bill went down again. That was when Alfredo and Deuce made a move to wrap Bosky up in their arms, but Bosky swatted them away as if they were nothing and swung round to face off the whole camp. “Nobody fucks with Pan like that,” he snapped. “You understand? It's not right, because I want to tell you”-and here his voice got sluggish and he staggered back and caught himself-“I want tell you Pan is Joe Bosky's buddy and nobody fucks with Joe Bosky.”

Marco was just standing there with the rest of them, hands at his sides. It wasn't his fight. Then he saw Bill scrabbling in the dirt with a split lip and a film of blood enlivening his teeth and Bosky standing over him in his paramilitary getup, and began to grope toward the re-alization that maybe it was his fight after all. What was Bosky doing here, even? And what was this business with Star-he'd been coming on to her all day and Marco had let it pass. Maybe, he was thinking now, he shouldn't have.

But here was Jiminy, all hundred and thirty-five pounds of him, pushing his way through the crowd. “Who the hell are you?” he said, throwing it back at Bosky. “You're not part of this-you don't even belong here.”

“That's right,” somebody said, and then Reba was there, her face a mask of war, doing what nobody had yet thought to do-namely, help Bill up out of the dirt.

Bill was heaving. There was blood on his coveralls. Reba stood there beside him with her honed eyes, propping him up. She looked first to Ronnie, then to Bosky. “We don't need this kind of shit here,” she hissed. “You want to have your drunken brawls, take it someplace else. We've got kids here.”

And there they were, Che and Sunshine, backed up against the slashed crossbars of the cabin porch, hair in their faces, their eyes reduced to twin nubs of malleable black rubber, and anybody could mold those eyes, Marco thought, make them laugh, make them cry. He felt nothing but sad. “I'm with Reba,” he said.

“All right,” Joe Bosky spat, “I know when I'm not wanted, don't let the door hit you on the way out, right?” and he started off toward the plane, unsteady on his feet. He hadn't gone five yards before he turned round and focused the glare of his silver shades on Pan, on Ronnie. “You coming,” he said, “or what?”

Ten minutes later, while people milled and debated and groused and Bill pressed a cold wet towel to his face, they heard the plane's engine start up with a sucking roar, as if someone were out there vacuuming off the surface of the river. Then the accelerating whine of the propeller came to them and they looked up to see Joe Bosky's floatplane glide out from shore, catch the current and taxi into the mouth of the trees only to rise a moment later and flare off into the night sky with a single reflective flash of the declining sun. Marco stood there watching it a moment, then took Star by the hand and walked her down through the field of foot-worn flowers and trampled weed to a place where they could look out over the ripples and braids of the current. He eased himself down, and she sat in the gravel beside him. “There goes Ronnie,” he said.

Star drew her knees up and knotted her arms round them. For a moment she said nothing, just seesawed back and forth, her white compact feet beating time to the motion of her body. “He'll be back,” she said.

“You really think so?”

She looked off across the river. It was late, midnight or thereabout. The colors went up in layers, from the scoured tin of the river to the dense black-green of the trees to the pink band of the sun-brushed hills. A sickle moon, pale as ice, sketched itself in over the trees. She cursed and slapped a mosquito on her ankle, then another on the back of her arm. “Really?” she said finally, turning to hold his eyes. “Truly?”

He shrugged, as if it didn't matter one way or the other.

“No,” she said. “I don't think so. I think he's-” There was a catch in her voice and he wanted to rock her in his arms but that catch made him hesitate, made him angry and hateful and jealous. “I think he's gone,” she said. “For good.”

That was when they heard the motor out on the river and they looked up unbelieving, because this had been a day of arrivals and departures, an unprecedented day, nothing like it yet in the brief history of Drop City North-first Bosky and Ronnie, then Verbie, Sky Dog and Dale Murray-and now who was this slashing up against the dark run of the current? They watched as the boat-it was a skiff, flat-bottomed, snub-nosed, like any dozen of them up and down the river-took on color and shape and finally emerged from the dark screen of the littoral and swung into shore fifty feet from them. A stooping, raw-boned figure clambered over the seat from stern to bow, flinging something ashore, a sleek bundle that fell formless to the gravel, and then a pair of scissoring legs splashed ashore and there he was. “Hey, hello there,” he said, stooping to the bundle and pulling himself up out of the fade of light. “Isn't that-?” Star began, and they were both on their feet now, but she couldn't supply the name.

Marco gave back the greeting and the man came toward them, the stripped bones of his face under the long-billed cap, the awkward challenging height of him, and then he knew: it was the one from the bar, from the Three Pup, the one they called Iron Steve.

Iron Steve was in gum boots and a plaid flannel shirt and his hair was slicked tight to his head, and his every step was like a leap, as if the ground were cratered beneath his feet. “Hey, I sure hope I'm not bothering you people this late, but I was, uh, well-I was looking for Verbie. She around?”

Star said sure, she thought so, if she hadn't gone to bed yet, and there was an unspoken question tagged on to the end of it.

Iron Steve raised his right arm and the bundle came with it, stiffened feet and limp naked ears, the sleek jackets of fur-rabbits, he was holding up a string of rabbits on a twisted coil of wire, and all Marco could think of was fish, dark dangling strips of flesh strung through the gills. “I brought these for her,” Iron Steve was saying. “I thought I might surprise her. You know which tent is hers?”

Star gave Marco a look and they were both thinking the same thing, thinking dead meat for a vegetarian? And rabbits-_bunnies__-no less? But then Marco saw the beauty of the equation: Ronnie was gone, gone no more than half an hour, and here was his successor. Subtract one Pan, add one Iron Steve.

“I also brought her this,” Steve said, and he held out his palm to show them a coil of wire and a medicine bottle with what looked to be matches packed inside.

“What is it?” Star asked. It was twilight now, the sun edged down beyond the ridge, the sickle moon brightening. She stood with her legs apart, hands on her hips, and the mosquitoes meant nothing to her though they danced and swarmed and played their thin music over the backbeat of the river.

“This? Oh, this is just a little something I thought she ought to have-in case she gets lost.”

“Gets lost?” Star said.

Iron Steve pulled back his hand, ducked his head. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “everybody gets lost up here, whether it's your plane going down or your tracks getting obliterated in a whiteout or you're just out there chasing after something and you turn around and can't tell one tree from the other.”

“So what is it,” Marco said, “some kind of compass?”

“Oh, hell, no,” Steve said, grinning, and out came the hand again, the palm supinated to display the wire and the thick brown glass of the medicine bottle. “Long's you have wire, you can snare rabbits,” he explained, “and the matches, I dipped them in paraffin myself and sealed them up tight. Because if you keep your matches dry you got yourself a fire to kick back the cold and roast your rabbits-”

Star gave him a blank look. Marco couldn't help but smile.

“You know,” Steve said, “for emergencies.” He kicked a foot in the fan of gravel and studied the slow rotation of the toe of his boot as if it were a divining rod. Then he looked up, grinning still. “Up here we call it living off the land.”

25

It was the first really brisk day, August tapering off into September, high summer giving way to low fall, and Pamela was alone in the cabin, baking bread in the woodstove in the front room. The recipe was her mother's-3 cups white flour; 1 cup whole wheat flour; 3 tablespoons sugar; 1 teaspoon salt; 2 cups sourdough sponge; 2 to 3 tablespoons melted bear fat (she was using canned butter because as far as she knew the bears were all still alive and well and judiciously carrying their own fat around with them)-and she'd modified it a bit through the ten or twelve times she'd baked here on the Thirtymile, but still, if the stove was hot enough and she had the patience to let the dough rise for two hours or more, she usually got a rich heavy glistening loaf that had Sess pulling the superlatives out of his slow-grinding jaws. Outside, a sky the color of soapstone hung low over the hills. The wind was blowing down out of the northwest, tearing leaves from the trees along the river, fanning the cabbage and lashing at the stiff canes of the Brussels sprouts in the garden. Every once in a while a gust would rattle the windows.

Sess was out in the yard with Iron Steve, who'd stopped by on his way down from the hippie camp. The two of them were splitting wood (Steve as a down payment on the dinner he knew to expect), drinking beer out of Mason jars and keeping an eye on the weather. It looked like rain-or sleet-and if the wind settled there would be frost for sure. Sess had his woodpiles heaped up at the four corners of the garden, ready to generate some heat through the night, because like every tiller of the earth he wanted to extend the growing season as long as possible, and you never knew, you could have a killing frost tonight and then a week or two of Indian summer to follow. He'd grown some champion tomatoes in the greenhouse, Early Girls and Beefsteaks both, and the cherries had run riot till he had to lift a panel off and let them creep out into the world. They'd had butternut squash till it was coming out their ears, and there was plenty more of it ballooning on the vine, and pumpkins too. She'd been canning day and night, stewing beans and tomatoes and zucchini in the big pot on the stove, peas, broccoli, anything that came up out of the ground in the crazy abundance of light. Her herb garden was a jungle in itself, and the root cellar was stacked high with carrots, onions, potatoes, turnips.

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

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

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

“Uh-uh.”

“Frost?”

“Oh, yeah. No doubt.”

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

“Not much. Rabbits got most of it.”

“Plus they started late.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dale.”

“Right, Dale-since they left.”

“What did they, go back to California?”

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

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

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

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

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

Then she was out in the yard in a pair of shorts and a sweatshirt, seven forty-eight by the clock she insisted on over Sess's objections, and the morning warming toward the low forties. She watched him make a turn at the edge of the woods, then tear up along the bank of the river, turn again and come straight for her with the dogs digging at their harnesses and a whole world of dust and threshed weed gone up into the air. He did manage to stop them more or less in the yard, throwing the brake (a sort of anchor that flailed and leapt and finally dug a furrow a hundred feet long), and wearing out the heels of his boots while he roared commands and the two wheel dogs went for each other's throats in one of those ill-tempered canine disputes that seemed to erupt every five minutes throughout the day. He let go the handles and got in between the dogs, kicking and cursing, until they finally got over whatever it was and sat panting in their traces. Sess was powdered with dust and weed, his shirt was torn and both his forearms were drooling blood where the dogs had bitten him. “Hey, baby,” he smiled, “want to go for a ride? I'll take you round the world-you know what that means?”

“Don't get dirty on me, Sess.”

Then he was holding on to her, rocking her gently back and forth. “You know I wouldn't do that,” he said, breathing into her ear.

The dogs turned to look at them, ten wolfish eyes fixated on Sess's back, Lucius, in the lead, looking as if he could go out and run a hundred miles without even breathing hard. Sess had them hooked up to his training rig, a heavy narrow box of dense wet wood with three-inch aspen poles for runners and two pairs of wheels he must have scavenged from defunct wheelbarrows-or maybe children's tricycles-at the four corners. The wheels were useless. The rig weighed a ton. He just wanted to work the dogs, he told her, train them to work as a team, and to pull weight.

“I've been thinking I might take them up the trapline today,” he said, “just a little ways, to give them the sight and smell of it and to maybe cut back some of the brush and branches and whatnot. I'll be back tonight. Late, though. Real late.”

She was amazed. “With that? The whole thing'll fall apart before you go two miles.”

He didn't try to deny it. “The wheels'll have to come off, I guess-when we get into the muskeg, anyway. I'm just going to let them skid the thing till they poop out. And by the way, really boil the hell out of that piece of bear for the stew-they're worse for trichina than pigs even.”

She knew that, knew it from twenty years ago, but she didn't say anything. The bear was quartered and hanging from the poles at the bottom of the cache, they'd had the liver fried with onions for last night's dinner, and the big yellow-white chunks of its summer-laid fat were already rendered and put up in coffee cans to cool and harden.

“And you might,” he added, and it was the last thing he said to her, “you might want to keep after that hide, scrape it good and then stretch it and hang it out where it can dry.”

Later, after she'd made herself a sandwich with the leftover bread and drunk enough coffee to get her nerve ends firing, she dragged the bear's hide out to the picnic table and sat in the sun working the flesh off it with the _ulu__ Sess had given her for a birthday present. The _ulu__ was an Inuit tool, a bone handle attached to a crescent-shaped blade, and it was ideal for scraping hides, a task she guessed she would be performing pretty regularly as the winter months came on and her husband brought her the stiffened corpses of whatever he'd managed to kill out there in the secret recesses of the country. And how did she feel about that-how did she feel about this, about this stinking, flea-and-tick-ridden hide under the knife right here and now in a hurricane of flies and the blood and grease worked up under her nails and into every least crease and line of her hands so that she'd never get the smell out? She felt content. Or no: she felt irritated. This was the first time he'd left her since they'd been married, the first of a hundred times to come and a hundred times beyond that, and all he expected of her was to sit and wait for him and be damned sure the stew was simmering and the hide was scraped clean. She slapped a mosquito on her upper arm and the imprint of her hand was painted there in bear's blood. She flicked flies out of her face. Was this really what she wanted?

The _ulu__ scraped, the flies rose and settled. There wasn't a sound in the world. She worked the hide out of inertia, for lack of anything better to do, worked it in a trance, and only when the canoe appeared on the horizon did she snap out of it. She watched it coming from half a mile away, because she could only study the stippled red meat and white sinew of the hide for so long before staring off into the immensity and just dreaming, and here was this slab of aluminum riding the current in a bolt of light, two people-two women-digging at the paddles. She stood, wiped her hands on a scrap of filthy rag, tried to do something with her hair. It was Star-she could see that now-Star and Merry, dressed alike in serapes and big-brimmed rawhide hats, maneuvering the battered silver canoe as if they'd been doing it all their lives. She watched them angle toward shore and then she waved and went down to meet them.

Star sang out her name as the canoe crunched gravel and Merry sprang out to secure it. “We thought we'd come over and make your day-how does that sound?” Star called, clambering out of the canoe and hefting a half gallon of red wine like a trophy. “Girls' day out!”

Sess was gone. The bear hide was a stinking collapsed filthy welter of raw meat and insects and the cabin reeked like a slaughterhouse. Winter was waiting in the wings-it was fifty-five degrees in the sun-and already she'd begun to feel sorry for herself, begun to feel resentful and left out, and here were her friends come to rescue her. She took the jug from Star's hand, screwed off the cap and held it to her lips and let the taste of it sweeten her mouth and scour her veins. Up the hill they went, arm-in-arm-in-arm. “I can't tell you how glad I am to see you,” Pamela said.

When they got to the picnic table, Merry pulled up short. “God, what is that?” she said. “Is that a bear? A grizzly bear?” Merry was the spacey one, more than a little Gracie Allen in her-Say goodnight, Gracie-as lost and out of place in the country as anybody Pamela could conceive of. Every coot, sourdough and weekend nimrod in the Three Pup had fed her the usual horror stories about grizzlies-the way they smelled out sexual lubricants and menstruation, their power and fearlessness and the trail of dismembered corpses they left in their wake-and she backed away from the table as if the hide could come back to life and wrap her in its killing arms.

“It's a black bear. A sow. Sess shot it in the garden last night.”

“Wow. Far out. So what are you going to do, make a bear rug?”

“Of course, what do you think?” Star said, and she tipped back the jug of wine now herself, and both Pamela and Merry watched her drink, the excess running down her arm in blood-red braids. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and held the jug out to Pamela. “Maybe we should get some cups and try to be a little more ladylike,” she said, and they all three burst into laughter.

“A bear rug,” Merry said, after the laughter had trailed off. “That's cool, I guess, I mean, especially up here-but what about the rest of it, the whole animal that was living out there in the woods yesterday and doing nobody any harm. What about that?”

“They eat it,” Star said.

“Don't,” Merry said, and her eyes jumped from Star to Pamela and back again.

“Right, Pamela?”

She just nodded, because she was trying to maneuver the big jug of wine up to her lips again, and to hell with it, to hell with everything, really, that was the way she was feeling.

The flies had settled thick on the raw meat of the hide, but they'd be dead soon too, winter-killed any day now, and the mosquitoes that went for blood every minute of every day and night, they'd be gone along with them. Merry rocked back on her heels, reached up to pull down the brim of her hat and remove the oversized pink discs of her sunglasses, the better to focus her blunted brown eyes on Pamela. “You mean it's true? You actually-I mean, people-actually eat _bear?__ Bear as in Winnie-the-Pooh? Yogi Bear? Smokey Bear? Only you can prevent forest fires?” She giggled. “You're goofing on me. Come on, tell me you're goofing.”

She could feel the wine singing in her veins. She didn't want this, didn't need it-she just wanted to let go. She shrugged. “Listen,” she said, “let me get some cups,” but she didn't move. The two girls stood transfixed, looking at her. “All right, yes,” she sighed. “We eat bear and anything else we can get our hands on up here, moose, rabbit, duck, fish, lynx-better than veal, Sess tells me-even porcupine and muskrat, and I can testify to that, because you wouldn't think it but muskrat can be as sweet and tender as any meat you can name-”

Merry was giving her a look of undistilled horror. “But to kill another creature, another living soul, a soul progressing through all the karmic stages to nirvana”-she paused to slap a mosquito on the back of her wrist with a neat slash of her hand-“that's something I just couldn't do.”

“You just did.”

“What? Oh, that. All right, I agree with you, I shouldn't have, and I wish I didn't have to-I can't wait till it's winter and the earth mother lays them all to rest, really-but a bug is one thing-and I know, I know, the Jains wouldn't think so-and like a _bear__ is something else. They're almost human, aren't they?”

Pamela had to think about that for a minute, standing there in the yard with the flies thrumming, the meat hanging in the shade and the thick yellow-white fat hardening in the cans on the shelves. She had to think about the traps and the foxes and brush wolves that chewed through their own flesh and bone and tendons to escape the steel teeth and about the cub Sess had orphaned, the cub that was too young to dig a den and destined to die of inanition and cold when the long night came down. “Yes,” she said finally, “yes, they are.”

And then it was all right. She bundled up the half-flensed hide and flung it over the salmon rack like a beach towel gone stiff with crud, scooted the flies from the table and brought out three cups and a bottle of Sess's rum. “Iron Steve,” she said, setting the bottle down and easing in beside Star. “He was here last night for dinner, and guess who he talked about nonstop?” And _there__ was a topic. The wine sank in the bottle, shots went round, and the hounds of gossip went barking up every tree.

It was late afternoon by the time Merry and Star stumbled down to the river, bouncing off trees like pinballs caroming from one cushion to another in a pinball game as big as the world, and Pamela said, “It's a good thing you don't have to drive anywhere,” and they all laughed about that, all three of them, until their heads began to ache and they felt they'd laughed enough, at least for one day. She watched them shove off, the canoe uncertain in the current until they balanced out their weight and the paddles caught them and the bow swung upstream. “Be careful!” she called, and she wouldn't let herself think about the canoe overturning and the cold swift rush of that water. She waved, and Star, backpaddling to keep the nose straight, lifted a hurried hand from her grip on the paddle, and then they moved off and got smaller and kept dwindling till the country ate them up.

Then there was the silence again. She stood there on the bank for a long while, staring at nothing, at the trees that were all alike, at the water that jumped and settled and sought the same channels over and over, and she felt something she'd never felt before. An immanence. A force that took her mind away and drew her down to nothing. She wasn't Pamela Harder standing on the banks of the Thirtymile. She wasn't a newlywed newly deserted. She wasn't anything. The sky rose up out of the hills and shot over her head with a whoosh that was like the closing of an air lock and then the clouds came up and blotted the sun and still she stood there. She'd never used drugs in her life, had believed everything she'd heard and read about the evils of addiction, about people taking LSD and staring into the sun until their retinas burned out, mutilating themselves, jumping off buildings because they thought they could fly, but when Star had laid out the two thin white sticks of rolled-up marijuana on the picnic table, she said to herself, Why not? If Star could do it, if Merry could, then why not? There is no knowledge worth the name that doesn't come from experience.

She might have stayed there forever, stock-still and feeling the way the loose ends of things came together in one mighty bundle, might have turned to stone like in the folk tales, but a pair of gulls, yellow beak, steady eye, brought her out of it. They swooped in low to investigate her, to smell the death on her and see it ground into the lines of her hands and worked up under her fingernails, then reeled off screeching in alarm. She looked down at her hands hanging out of the frayed sleeves of her sweatshirt. They were cold. Simply that: cold. A wind rustled the leaves and she shivered and looked over her shoulder to where the cabin sat the hillside. It seemed to take her forever to make her way up the slope, stepping through invisible hoops and trapezoids that kept appearing and vanishing, moving in slow motion past the table with its litter of bread crusts and cups and the empty wine bottle and the ashtray with the inch-long stub of a marijuana cigarette laid across it like a sentence of doom, but then she was at the door of the cabin and the sky snapped back again and the clouds began to rumble.

Inside, everything was familiar, and it was all right. There was a routine here, a routine to follow, and it had nothing to do with scraping hides or hippie drugs or the sky coming unhinged. She stoked the fire. Lit a cigarette. Added water to the cooked-down meat and chopped vegetables at the cutting board. Outside, the thunder detonated over the hills, lightning lit the room and the rain came with a hiss, sweeping out of the woods and stabbing at the dirt of the yard in swift violent pinpricks of motion. Star had lit the marijuana as casually as she might have lit a cigarette and passed it to Merry, who drew in the thin pale smoke that smelled of incense, of myrrh, and what was it? — frankincense-and then Merry passed it to her. She put it to her lips, inhaled, and it was no different from a Marlboro, except there was no taste to it. “You want to know something?” Star said. “You don't know what making love is till you've done it with this. Really. It's like every neuron is firing at once, and your skin, your skin just _burns__ for the touch of a man.”

At some point she went out in the rain and brought in the rum and the cups and the ashtray with the wet stick of marijuana in it, and at some point she laid the marijuana on the stove to dry and dipped herself a bowl of bear stew. She was hungry, hungrier than she'd ever been before. She had a second bowl. A third. She wiped up the gravy with bread, poured herself a cup of coffee. The rain held steady and she put wood on the fire and let the faintest hint of worry over Sess run in and out of her head-he could take care of himself; this was nothing, nothing but rain. Later, she stared at a magazine for what seemed hours, and still later, she went to the stove, picked up the dried-out stub of the marijuana cigarette and smoked it down to nothing, to two thin strips of saliva-yellowed paper which she tossed into the fire by way of hiding the evidence. It was dark when Sess came in, and though he stank of dog and the wet of the woods, though the cabin reeked of boiled bear and bear fat and the first death of a multitude to come, she stripped his clothes off him, piece by piece, and pulled him down and let herself melt beneath the living weight of him.

26

He would never admit it, least of all to himself, but Sess Harder's hands were cold, and if his hands were cold, Pamela's must have been freezing. They were both wearing thermals, sweaters and the matching flannel shirts with the red and black checkerboard pattern Pamela's sister had given them as a wedding present, but their gloves were tucked away in their breast pockets, high and dry. He didn't know what time it was-never did-but he figured it couldn't have been much later than nine A.M., the temperature stuck in the high teens despite the early influence of the sun, and with every dip of the paddle the river took a nip out of his hand. He'd stroke twenty times, then switch sides, but now the rising hand, still wet, was exposed to the wind raking upriver from the southwest, and that went numb on him. Patches of ice floated the water like gray scabs and both shores were crusted with it. Each breath came in a cloud. Up front, Pamela leaned into her paddle, switched sides with a quick flick of her wrists, and never uttered a word of complaint.

Mid-October, the alder, willow and birch gone into a blaze of dead red and streaky yellow, a hard freeze every night, and the swing of the season felt good, as if the whole country were undergoing a blood transfusion, and Sess Harder himself had never felt better. He'd got his meat-the lucky bear and an even luckier moose, a big bull in rut that had drunk so much water Sess had heard the sloshing of it in his gut from a hundred yards away-and he'd netted maybe a hundred washtubs full of whitefish and suckers on their annual migration to the deep holes of the river where freeze-up wouldn't affect them. And rabbits. The newborn of the year, crazy for anything green to put on winter fat, and as easy to snare as the air itself. The cache was full, the berries picked and the vegetables canned, and this was his wife, his sweet-cream wife, sitting the seat in front of him with the long arch of her athlete's back rising up out of the anchor of her hips and flank, working the paddle with her squared-up shoulders and tailored arms, and not so much as a peep out of her.

They were on their way to Boynton and thence to Fairbanks in Richard Schrader's truck, if Richard Schrader's truck was available, and he had no doubt it would be, unless maybe the rear end had fallen out of it, which, come to think of it, it was threatening to do last time he'd driven the thing. Pamela had wanted a break for a few days, and so had he, bright lights, big city, one more dose before winter set in. They were both of them hankering to spend a little of the money that had come their way in the form of much-handled bills wrinkled up in plain envelopes or stuffed inside wedding cards, and there were things they needed, obviously, to fill up the new room of the cabin and top off their store of dried beans, rice, tea, coffee, cigarettes, pasta and the like. And toothpaste, never forget toothpaste. He'd spent one whole winter brushing his teeth with his forefinger and another using a mixture of baking soda and salt that ate the bristles out of the brush. Soon the river would be impassable, and then they'd have to wait till freeze-up to come downriver with the dogs, and their destination would have to be Boynton, unless they wanted to mortgage the farm and fly to a place where the sun was more than just a rumor.

So here they were, out on the river. With cold hands. But there would be warmth in spades at the Nougat and the Three Pup, and by the time they hit the Fairbanks Road the sun would be well up and the temperature peaking in the forties or maybe even fifties. A wedge of noisy scoters shot past overhead, moving south, intelligent birds, get out while the going is good. His paddle shifted ice. “How you doing up there, Pamela?” he asked. “Hands cold?”

She looked over her shoulder, smiling wide, the dimple bored into her near cheek and those neat white teeth and little girl's gums on display. “Super,” she said, in answer to the first question. And, “A little, I guess,” in answer to the second.

He loved her. Loved her more than anything he could ever conceive of. “Hang in there,” he said, proud of her toughness, glowing with it. “When we get to the Three Pup,” he said, digging at the paddle, “the first shot's on me.”

“Big spender,” she said, and her laugh trailed out over the river, hit the bank and came rebounding back again.

They'd both removed their sweaters and their hands were fully recharged by the time the big sweeping bend that gave onto Boynton came into view. It had warmed more than he'd expected-into the sixties, he guessed-and with both shores lit with fall color the last few miles were nothing but pleasure. His eyes were roving ahead-always roving, a hunter's eyes-when something moving in the shallows at the head of Last Chance Creek caught his attention. He held the paddle down on the last stroke and angled them in on a line for the creek, puzzled, because this was no moose or bear or congress of beaver, no half-submerged sweeper bobbing in the current and no boat either-it was something unexpected, out of place, one of those aberrations of nature that made life so damned interesting out here in the wastelands, because just when you thought you'd seen it all- “Who is that out there wading in the creek?” Pamela said, and her eyes were keener than his, how about that? And then it-they-came into focus for him. He saw the two figures grow together and then separate like shards of glass in a kaleidoscope, the canoe slicing closer now, the two of them bending to the water and coming back up again, standard-issue hip waders, glossy shirts, the flash of light from the linked silver band that looped the crown of a flat-brimmed hat. He was dumbfounded, absolutely dumbfounded. There were two black men-two Negroes, _hippie__ Negroes-out in the sun-spangled wash of Last Chance Creek, panning for gold.

“Hello,” he called as the canoe drifted up on them, “how you doing?”

Neither man said a word. They gave him looks, though, fixed dark eyes bristling with distrust and hostility. The current surged at their thighs, at the sagging skin of their waders. They regarded the canoe for a long solemn moment, as if it had appeared there spontaneously as some sort of compound of the water and air, and they looked first to Pamela, and then Sess, before turning back to their work, rinsing scoop after scoop of sand in the dull gleam of their pans till all the false clinging grains of silica were washed free.

“Showing any color?” Sess asked, because he had to say something.

The smaller one looked up out of a face like a tobacco pouch worn smooth with secret indulgence. His voice was soft, a whisper. “Naw, ain't nothin' here, isn't that right, Franklin?”

The other one glanced up now, one wild eye and a look that invited nothing. “Naw,” he seconded, “nothin'.”

Then the first one: “Place isn't worth shit. Right, Franklin?”

“Right.”

Sess said he guessed he'd be seeing them later, then, and Pamela said good luck, and they both dug at their paddles, eager to work their way out of earshot and run this episode through the grinder. They'd gone three or four hundred yards, when Pamela lifted her paddle on the glide and turned her head to him. “What was that all about?”

“Beats me,” he said. “But they wouldn't find half an ounce of gold in that creek if they panned it for a hundred years.”

“They sure don't act that way. They act like those wild hairs in _The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,__ like Humphrey Bogart and I don't who-”

“Walter Huston,” he said.

“Right, Walter Huston.”

The canoe drifted. The sun cut diamonds out of the water. “They were black men, Pamela. Negroes. Where in god's name do you find Negroes up here?”

Boynton had come into view now and she arched her back and dipped her paddle. “Jesus, Sess,” she said, throwing the words over her shoulder, “black men, red men, Chinese, what difference does it make? You sound like you've never seen a black man before.”

He was going to say, “I haven't,” but just then a new feature, as strange in its way as the two figures in the creek, leapt out of the shoreline at him in an explosion of color. It wasn't a house exactly, more like a Quonset hut, wedged in between Richard Schrader's weathered gray clapboard box and the shack, and the presence of it there stymied him a minute, but then he knew what it was and knew the answer to his question all in a single flash of intuition: Where do you find Negroes up here? In a hippie bus, that's where.

If he expected warmth and conviviality at the Three Pup, he was mistaken. Lynette was laying for him, and so was Skid Denton. The minute he ushered Pamela in the door, Lynette backed away from the bar and said, “Whoa, here he is, the hippie king himself. Or should I say, hippie landlord?”

Skid Denton was welded to his seat at the end of the bar, as usual, a plate of home fries at his elbow and a glass of beer sizzling in his hand. He leaned forward from the waist to put in his two cents: “It's a bonfire every night and that hippie music never stops. I hear they're screwing themselves raw upriver, screwing everything but the dog, and smoking drugs all day long. They really get a cabin built?”

“That one with the bones in his hair,” Lynette said.

“And the niggers.” Richie Oliver looked up red-eyed from his scotch and water as if he'd been dog-paddling in a sea of it for the past three days. “Don't forget the niggers.”

Eight people were gathered at the bar and there wasn't a single genuine smile for him-or for Pamela either. And that hurt, because what did she have to do with it? No more than he did. Or less, a whole lot less. He tried his best to ignore Lynette and Skid Denton, who was a first-class jerk, anyway, greeted everybody by name and pulled out a chair for Pamela at the table by the window, thinking ham and eggs, or bacon, or maybe a burger, and a beer and a bump to go with it, because he'd be goddamned if they were going to chase him out of his own chosen roadhouse and bar. Pamela gave him a thin smile and took his hand across the table. “Lynette,” he called, and maybe he did raise his voice just a hair more than was called for, “can we have a little goddamn service over here?”

They drank. They ate. And they took their sweet time about it. People pulled up chairs and plopped down to butt in, one after another, two at time, three, and all the news and all the burning gossip started with the hippies and ended with them too. Lynette sat right at the table with him and Pamela and watched them cut their meat and lift the forks to their mouths as if they might need instruction, and she never stopped talking, not even to draw breath. “The one with the bones in his hair and the garlic strung round his neck? Mr. Vampire, that's what I call him. He come in here and ordered a pitcher of beer and wanted to know if he could get it on credit and when I said nobody gets credit here he went around the bar and asked if anybody had any change to spare.”

But Richard Schrader-the best friend Sess had on the river, the _best man__ at his wedding-Richard Schrader took the cake. He hadn't been home when they came up from the canoe, and they'd skirted the tarted-up bus and the hippie out there hovering over his kiln and the shining glazed line of bowls and plates and ashtrays he'd arranged on a split log as if he was going into business in Sess's weedpatch, and now he-Richard-pulled the truck into the lot and came through the mosquitoless door and the first thing out of his mouth was “Sess, these people have got to go, they're making a three-ring circus out of my yard and I don't think I've had more than two hours sleep a night since they got here with their whooping and screaming and that unholy racket of guitars and tambourines and whatnot and did you know they took the speakers out of the bus and mounted them up on the roof so they could blast that shit out over the river and everyplace else? And I've tried to reason with them, I have, but it's Peace, brother, and fuck you-”

Sess had another beer. He took his time. Wiped his plate with a slice of spongy store-bought bread. Asked about dessert. Forwent a second shot. On the exterior, he might have appeared calm, but he was boiling up inside, and he laid some money on the table, took the keys from Richard and told Pamela he wouldn't be a minute. He hadn't gone two feet out the door before Lynette was right there after him, grabbing at his arm. “And, Sess,” she said, the striations of age puckered up around her lips and digging disapproving trenches at the flanges of her nose and the corners of her shrunk-down eyes till she looked like one of those dried and frozen corpses they found in the Andes, “whatever did you go and do to Joe Bosky?” She looked down at the flap of her sidearm and back up again. “I tell you, watch out for that one-”

So he drove the truck the half mile to town and eased it high up over the ruts and half-buried rocks and into the yard out front of the shack. The dust followed him in. He slammed the transmission up into park, let the engine keen a minute, then cut the ignition. What he heard then was the music, a bull-roaring voice over the guitars, drums and electrified piano, driven at such a volume the speakers couldn't contain it. The vocal settled, went slack with distortion, then settled again. Off to the right were the two cars, the VW and the Studebaker, looking as if they hadn't been moved in a month. The kiln was set in the lee of the bus, the heat of it radiating out of the seams and corrugating his view of the shack, which was in need of paint. The bus, though, that didn't need any paint. They'd been busy with that, and if there was a color they'd neglected to lay on he couldn't name it.

The air was clean, the sun going about its business. It was warmer than it had a right to be. He stepped out of the truck to the assault of the music and went up to the door of the bus and knocked at the panel of painted-over glass there. He knocked again. After a while he started to hammer at it with his fist, and it was a good thing-a good thing for them-he hadn't had that second shot. “Open up!” he shouted. “Whoever's in there, open up!”

He felt the bus give ever so slightly on its springs, and then the door cranked open and the one they called Weird George was standing there on the top step, wrapped in a dirty green blanket. He was barefoot. His hair was like a second blanket, or no, it was like the stuff Jill used to make plant holders with in her apartment, some kind of jute, roughedged and matted, and he had half a dozen bleached-out animal bones dangling from the ragged ends of it. “Oh,” Weird George said, trying to place him. “Oh, hey.”

“Listen,” and Sess could feel it coming up in him now, an anger pulled up out of nowhere, out of a sunny day, and heavily disproportionate to the crime, “you people are going to have to get out of here. All of you. And take all of your fucking crap with you.”

Weird George made a vague gesture. He didn't look as if his legs would hold him upright another thirty seconds. “Oh, man,” he said after a moment, and Sess could barely hear him for the bawling of the speakers, “you want Harmony, Harmony's the cat to talk to-”

Everybody's luck held, because at that moment Harmony came round the front of the bus, his hands dripping clay. As best Sess could figure, the man was about his age, and though he wore his dense blond hair layered like a woman's he had a fierce reddish Fu Manchu mustache to counteract the effect, and in Sess's limited dealings with the tribe he seemed the most reasonable of any of them-and a whole lot easier to communicate with than the nephew, who tended to talk in paragraphs, as if he were getting paid by the word. Harmony looked surprised. He wiped his hands on his jeans, cocked his head and gave Sess a look out of the corner of his wire-frame glasses. He was about to say “What's happening?”-Sess would have bet the farm on it-but before he could open his mouth Sess launched into a lecture of his own, enumerating the hippie infractions and the way the town felt about them and telling him in no uncertain terms that he was going to have to pack everybody up and find another place to throw his pots and blast his music and smoke his marijuana and LSD.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I left them in the truck. Didn't I?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bosky came at them too fast. He'd been expecting to find them upriver still, lagging in the current, and the roar gathered itself up and the naked pontoons rocketed past them before he could lean out and fire again, but Sess was ready and Sess let the boat swing out lateral to the current while Pamela fought for control up front and he got off three shots, three hard copper-jacketed thank-you notes hurtled up into the cauldron of the sky that probably caught nothing but air. He couldn't say. He didn't know. He was too lathered with adrenaline even to feel anger yet and outrage. He laid down the rifle and took up the paddle and a moment later they hit the shore ice and broke through it to the cover of the trees.

Everything was silent. A hard, pelting, wind-driven snow began to rush down out of the sky as if awaiting release. He heard the river then, the ice on the river slipping and squealing like two wet hands rubbed together, and he heard Pamela. She was hunched over her shoulders, a shadow amongst the deeper shadows, and she was crying so softly he thought at first it was the whisper of the hard white pellets finding their way between the last, lingering blades of grass. The bottom of the canoe had shipped two inches of water, two inches at least, and their feet-they were wearing hiking boots, ankle-high suede, the best shoes they owned for a jaunt in the city-their feet were wet. They had no sleeping bags, no ground cloth, no tent, and who needed a tent in the Williwaw Motor Inn? “It's okay, Pamela,” he said, the words stuck in his throat, “it's all right, everything's going to be fine.”

The first thing was a fire, but he was afraid of a fire because Bosky might see it and come back for them, so he concentrated on hauling the canoe up out of the water, unloading the wet groceries and the wet clothes and the tools and equipment and all the rest of the things they just couldn't live without, and then propping the hull up as a windbreak. Pamela worked beside him, and they didn't have to talk, didn't have to say a word, working in consonance to unload everything and cut spruce boughs to lay down under the canoe and collect driftwood to mound up for the fire if there was going to be a fire, and they would have to wait and see about that. In the meanwhile, the snow stiffened, rattling off their hoods and sleeves in pellets and granules, sifting to the ground with the soft shush of rice spilled from a sack, and soon the dark vacancy of the riverbank began to fill in with the pale glowing substance of it. “He's not coming back, is he, Sess?” Pamela said out of the void.

He looked to her, the ghostly stoop and movement of her as she mounded wood and let the phrases escape her mouth in quick snatched drifts of windblown vapor. “No,” he said, “not in this, and I hope to god the son of a bitch crashes and burns till there's nothing recognizable left of him. Can you believe it? Can you believe he actually shot at us? I told you, Pamela. I told you from the beginning, and you wouldn't listen.”

They waited half an hour, shivering, and then he held a match to a twist of birch bark and the fire took. They dried their shoes, their socks, their feet. Pamela dug a damp box of crackers out of a shredded grocery bag and they shared them with slices of Cracker Barrel cheddar and let their internal engines wind down a bit. What this looked like was the first big storm of the year-it had all the earmarks, what with the wind and the snow formed into pellets and temperatures in the twenties, and he had no doubt it would settle in colder and the snow turn to powder-and they had a very narrow window of opportunity here if they were going to get the canoe and all their precious stuff back to the Thirtymile before next spring. After a while, he got up and fished around through the baggage till he found a pair of his new guaranteed-to-keep-your-toes-warm-at-forty-below Outdoorsman-brand thermal socks and worked one of them through the bullethole in the bottom of the canoe till he had a plug he thought would hold. Then they loaded up again and went out on the river in the full blow of the storm, their forearms and shoulders fighting the resistance, their hands molded to the paddles as if they'd been sculpted of ice.

It must have been past midnight when they skirted Woodchopper Creek, veering far out from shore on the off chance Joe Bosky was out there somewhere laying for them, and neither of them dared even to think of what might have happened upriver, at the cabin, when Joe Bosky knew they were away from home and had the means and the motive to do them real and irreparable harm. The snow flew in their faces. A thin crust of ice formed over the baggage where the leavings of Pamela's paddle flew back on the wind and settled, and a layer of snow formed atop that. The night was a dense and private thing, working through the motions of its own unknowable rhythms, and they had no right to be out in it. Sess Harder didn't care. He was glad to be here, now, equal to the challenge, glad to be alive, glad for every furious driven bite the wooden paddle took out of the refrigerated river. And when they rounded the Thirtymile and the dogs sang out with the apprehension of their coming, he was the gladdest man in the world.