If the River Was Whiskey

THE HAT

THEY SENT a hit squad after the bear. Three guys in white parkas with National Forestry Service patches on the shoulders. It was late Friday afternoon, about a week before Christmas, the snow was coming down so fast it seemed as if the sky and earth were glued together, and Jill had just opened up the lodge for drinks and dinner when they stamped in through the door. The tall one — he ordered shots of Jim Beam and beers for all of them — could have been a bear himself, hunched under the weight of his shoulders in the big quilted parka, his face lost in a bristle of black beard, something feral and challenging in the clash of his blue eyes. “Hello, pretty lady,” he said, looking Jill full in the face as he swung a leg over the barstool and pressed his forearms to the gleaming copper rail. “I hear you got a bear problem.”

I was sitting in the shadows at the end of the bar, nursing a beer and watching the snow. Jill hadn’t turned up the lights yet and I was glad — the place had a soothing underwater look to it, snow like a sheet stretched tight over the window, the fire in the corner gentle as a backrub. I was alive and moving — lighting a cigarette, lifting the glass to my lips — but I felt so peaceful I could have been dozing.

“That’s right,” Jill said, still flushing from the “pretty lady” remark. Two weeks earlier, in bed, she’d told me she hadn’t felt pretty in years. What are you talking about? I’d said. She dropped her lower lip and looked away. I gained twenty pounds, she said. I reached out to touch her, smiling, as if to say twenty pounds — what’s twenty pounds? Little Ball of Suet, I said, referring to one of the Maupassant stories in the book she’d given me. It’s not funny, she said, but then she’d rolled over and touched me back.

“Name’s Boo,” the big man said, pausing to throw back his bourbon and take a sip of beer. “This is Scott,” nodding at the guy on his left, also in beard and watchcap, “and Josh.” Josh, who couldn’t have been more than nineteen, appeared on his right like a jack-in-the-box. Boo unzipped the parka to expose a thermal shirt the color of dried blood.

“Is this all together?” Jill asked.

Boo nodded, and I noticed the scar along the ridge of his cheekbone, thinking of churchkey openers, paring knives, the long hooked ivory claws of bears. Then he turned to me. “What you drinking, friend?”

I’d begun to hear sounds from the kitchen — the faint kiss of cup and saucer, the rattle of cutlery — and my stomach suddenly dropped like an elevator out of control. I hadn’t eaten all day. It was the middle of the month, I’d read all the paperbacks in the house, listened to all the records, and I was waiting for my check to come. There was no mail service up here of course — the road was closed half the time in winter anyway — but Marshall, the lodgeowner and unofficial kingpin of the community, had gone down the mountain to lay in provisions against the holiday onslaught of tourists, ski-mobilers and the like, and he’d promised to pick it up for me. If it was there. If it was, and he made it back through the storm, I was going to have three or four shots of Wild Turkey, then check out the family dinner and sip coffee and Kahlua till Jill got off work. “Beer,” I said.

“Would you get this man a beer, pretty lady?” said Boo in his backwoods basso, and when she’d opened me one and come back for his money, he started in on the bear. Had she seen him? How much damage had he done? What about his tracks — anything unusual? His scat? He was reddish in color, right? Almost cinnamon? And with one folded ear?

She’d seen him. But not when he’d battered his way into the back storeroom, punctured a case of twelve-and-a-half-ounce cans of tuna, lapped up a couple of gallons of mountain red burgundy and shards of glass, and left a bloody trail that wound off through the ponderosa pines like a pink ribbon. Not then. No, she’d seen him under more intimate circumstances — in her own bedroom, in fact. She’d been asleep in the rear bedroom with her eight-year-old son, Adrian (they slept in the same room to conserve heat, shutting down the thermostat and tossing a handful of coal into the stove in the corner), when suddenly the back window went to pieces. The air came in at them like a spearthrust, there was the dull booming thump of the bear’s big body against the outer wall, and an explosion of bottles, cans, and whatnot as he tore into the garbage on the back porch. She and Adrian had jolted awake in time to see the bear’s puzzled shaggy face appear in the empty windowframe, and then they were up like Goldilocks and out the front door, where they locked themselves in the car. They came to me in their pajamas, trembling like refugees. By the time I got there with my Weatherby, the bear was gone.

“I’ve seen him,” Jill said. “He broke the damn window out of my back bedroom and now I’ve got it all boarded up.” Josh, the younger guy, seemed to find this funny, and he began a low snickering suck and blow of air like an old dog with something caught in his throat.

“Hell,” Jill said, lighting-up, centerstage, “I was in my nightie and barefoot too and I didn’t hesitate a second — zoom, I grabbed my son by the hand and out the door we went.”

“Your nightie, huh?” Boo said, a big appreciative grin transforming his face so that for a minute, in the dim light, he could have been a leering, hairy-hocked satyr come in from the cold.

“Maybe it wasn’t just the leftovers he wanted,” I offered, and everyone cracked up. Just then Marshall stepped through the door, arms laden, stamping the snow from his boots. I got up to help him, and when he began fumbling in his breast pocket, I felt a surge of relief: he’d remembered my check. I was on my way out the door to help with the supplies when I heard Boo’s rumbling bass like distant thunder: “Don’t you worry, pretty lady,” he was saying, “we’ll get him.”

Regina showed up three days later. For the past few years she’d rented a room up here over the holidays, ostensibly for her health, the cross-country skiing, and the change of scene, but actually so she could display her backend in stretch pants to the sex-crazed hermits who lived year-round amidst the big pines and sequoias. She was from Los Angeles, where she worked as a dental hygienist. Her teeth were perfect, she smiled nonstop and with the serenity of the Mona Lisa, and she wore the kind of bra that was popular in the fifties — the kind that thrust the breasts out of her ski sweater like nuclear warheads. She’s been known to give the tumble to the occasional tourist or one of the lucky locals when the mood took her, but she really had it for Marshall. For two weeks every Christmas and another week at Easter, she became a fixture at the bar, as much a part of the decor as the moosehead or the stuffed bear, perched on a barstool in Norwegian sweater, red ski pants, and mukluks, sipping a champagne cocktail and waiting for him to get off work. Sometimes she couldn’t hold out and someone else would walk off with her while Marshall scowled from behind the grill, but usually she just waited there for him like a flower about to drop its petals.

She came into the white world that afternoon like a foretaste of the good times to come — city women, weekend cowboys, grandmas, children, dogs, and lawyers were on their way, trees and decorations going up, the big festival of the goose-eating Christians about to commence — rolling into the snowbound parking lot in her Honda with the neat little chain-wrapped tires that always remind me of Tonka toys. It was about 4:00 P.M., the sky was a sorrowful gray, and a loose flurry was dusting the huge logs piled up on the veranda. In she came, stamping and shaking, the knit cap pulled down to her eyebrows, already on the lookout for Marshall.

I was sitting in my usual place, working on my fifth beer, a third of the way through the check Marshall had brought me three days previous and calculating gloomily that I’d be out of money by Christmas at this rate. Scooter was bartending, and his daughter-in-law Mae-Mae, who happened to be a widow, was hunched morosely over a Tom Collins three stools up from me. Mae-Mae had lost her husband to the mountain two years earlier (or, rather, to the tortuous road that connected us to civilization and snaked up 7300 feet from the floor of the San Joaquin Valley in a mere twenty-six miles, treacherous as a goat trail in the Himalayas), and hadn’t spoken or smiled since. She was a Thai. Scooter’s son, a Vietnam hero, had brought her back from Southeast Asia with him. When Jill was off, or the holiday crowd bearing down on the place, Scooter would drive up the mountain from his cabin at Little Creek, elevation 5500 feet, hang his ski parka on a hook in back, and shake, stir, and blend cocktails. He brought Mae-Mae with him to get her out of the house.

Scooter and I had been discussing some of the finer points of the prevent defense with respect to the coming pro-football playoffs when Regina’s Honda rolled into the lot, and now we gave it up to gape at her as she shook herself like a go-go dancer, opened her jacket to expose the jutting armaments of her breasts, and slid onto a barstool. Scooter slicked back his white hair and gave her a big grin. “Well,” he said, fumbling for her name, “um, uh, good to see you again.”

She flashed him her fluoridated smile, glanced past the absorbed Mae-Mae to where I sat grinning like an overworked dog, then turned back to him. “Marshall around?”

Scooter informed her that Marshall had gone down the mountain on a supply run and should be back by dinnertime. And what would she like?

She sighed, crossed her legs, lit a cigarette. The hat she was wearing was part of a set — hand-knit, imported from Scandinavia, woven from ram’s whiskers by the trolls themselves, two hundred bucks at I. Magnin. Or something like that. It was gray, like her eyes. She swept it from her head with a flourish, fluffed out her short black hair and ordered a champagne cocktail. I looked at my watch.

I’d read somewhere that nine out of ten adults in Alaska had a drinking problem. I could believe it. Snow, ice, sleet, wind, the dark night of the soul: what else were you supposed to do? It was the same way up on the mountain. Big Timber was a collection of maybe a hundred widely scattered cabins atop a broad-beamed peak in the southern Sierras. The cabins belonged to summer people from L.A. and San Diego, to cross-country skiers, gynecologists, talent agents, ad men, drunks, and nature lovers, for the most part, and to twenty-seven hard-core antisocial types who called the place home year-round. I was one of this latter group. So was Jill. Of the remaining twenty-five xenophobes and rustics, three were women, and two of them were married and post-menopausal to boot. The sole remaining female was an alcoholic poet with a walleye who lived in her parents’ cabin on the outer verge of the development and hated men. TV reception was spotty, radio nonexistent, and the nearest library a one-room affair at the base of the mountain that boasted three copies of the The Thorn Birds and the complete works of Irving Wallace.

And so we drank.

Social Life, such as it was, revolved around Marshall’s lodge, which dispensed all the amenities in a single huge room, from burgers and chili omelets to antacid pills, cold remedies, cans of pickled beets, and toilet paper, as well as spirits, human fraternity, and a chance to fight off alien invaders at the controls of the video game in the corner. Marshall organized his Friday-night family dinners, did a turkey thing on Thanksgiving and Christmas, threw a New Year’s party, and kept the bar open on weekends through the long solitary winter, thinking not so much of profit, but of our sanity. The lodge also boasted eight woodsy hotel rooms, usually empty, but now — with the arrival of Boo and his fellow hit men, Regina, and a couple other tourists — beginning to fill up.

On the day Regina rolled in, Jill had taken advantage of the break in the weather to schuss down the mountain in her station wagon and do some Christmas shopping. I was supposed to have gone with her, but we’d had a fight. Over Boo. I’d come in the night before from my late-afternoon stroll to see Jill half spread across the bar with a blank bovine look on her face while Boo mumbled his baritone blandishments into her eyes from about six inches away. I saw that, and then I saw that she’d locked fingers with him, as if they’d been arm wrestling or something. Marshall was out in the kitchen, Josh was sticking it to the video game, and Scott must have been up in his room. “Hey,” Boo said, casually turning his head, “what’s happening?” Jill gave me a defiant look before extricating herself and turning her back to fool around with the cash register. I stood there in the doorway, saying nothing. Bishzz, bishzz, went the video game, zoot-zoot-zoot. Marshall dropped something out in the kitchen. “Buy this man a drink, honey,” Boo said. I turned and walked out the door.

“Christ, I can’t believe you,” Jill had said when I came round to pick her up after work. “It’s my job, you know? What am I supposed to do, hang a sign around my neck that says ‘Property of M. Koerner’?”

I told her I thought that was a pretty good idea.

“Forget the ride,” she said. “I’m walking.”

“And what about the bear?” I said, knowing how the specter of it terrified her, knowing that she dreaded walking those dark snowlit roads for fear of chancing across him — knowing it and wanting for her to admit it, to tell me she needed me.

But all she said was “Screw the bear,” and then she was gone.

Now I ordered another beer, sauntered along the bar, and sat down one stool up from Regina. “Hi,” I said, “remember me? Michael Koerner? I live up back of Malloy’s place?”

She narrowed her eyes and gave me a smile I could feel all the way down in the remotest nodes of my reproductive tract. She no more knew me than she would have known a Chinese peasant plucked at random from the faceless hordes. “Sure,” she said.

We made small talk. How slippery the roads were — worse than last year. A renegade bear? Really? Marshall grew a beard?

I’d bought her two champagne cocktails and was working on yet another beer, when Jill catapulted through the door, arms festooned with foil-wrapped packages and eyes ablaze with goodwill and holiday cheer; Adrian tagged along at her side, looking as if he’d just sprung down from the back of a flying reindeer. If Jill felt put out by the spectacle of Regina — or more particularly by my proximity to and involvement in that spectacle — she didn’t miss a beat. The packages hit the bar with a thump, Scooter and Mae-Mae were treated to joyous salutatory squeals, Regina was embraced and I was ignored. Adrian went straight for the video game, pausing only to scoop up the six quarters I held out to him like an offering. Jill ordered herself a cocktail and started in on Regina, bantering away about hairstyles, nails, shoes, blouses, and the like as if she were glad to see her. “I just love that hat!” she shouted at one point, reaching out to finger the material. I swung round on my stool and stared out the window.

It was then that Boo came into sight. Distant, snow-softened, trudging across the barren white expanse of the lot as if in a dream. He was wearing his white parka, hood up, a rifle was slung over his shoulder, and he was dragging something behind him. Something heavy and dark, a long low-slung form that raveled out from his heels like a shadow. When he paused to straighten up and catch his streaming breath, I saw with a shock that the carcass of an animal lay at his feet, red and raw like a gash in the snow. “Hey!” I shouted. “Boo got the bear!” And the next minute we were all out in the windblown parking lot, hemmed in by the forbidding ranks of the trees and the belly of the gray deflated sky, as Boo looked up puzzled from the carcass of a gutted deer. “What happened, the bar catch fire?” he said, his sharp blue eyes parrying briefly with mine, swooping past Scooter, Adrian, and Mae-Mae to pause a moment over Jill and finally lock on Regina’s wide-eyed stare. He was grinning.

The deer’s black lip was pulled back from ratty yellowed teeth; its eyes were opaque in death. Boo had slit it from chest to crotch, and a half-frozen bulb of grayish intestine poked from the lower end of the ragged incision. I felt foolish.

“Bait,” Boo said in explanation, his eyes roving over us again. “I’m leaving a blood smear you could follow with your eyes closed and your nose stopped up. Then I’m going to hang the meat up a tree and wait for Mr. Bear.”

Jill turned away, a bit theatrically I thought, and made small noises of protest and disgust on the order of “the poor animal,” then took Adrian by the hand and pulled him back in the direction of the lodge. Mae-Mae stared through us all, this carnage like that other that had claimed her husband’s life, end over end in the bubble of their car, blood on the slope. Regina looked at Boo. He stood over the fallen buck, grinning like a troglodyte with his prey, then bent to catch the thing by its antlers and drag it off across the lot as if it were an old rug for the church rummage sale.

That night the lodge was hopping. Tourists had begun to trickle in and there were ten or twelve fresh faces at the bar. I ate a chicken pot pie and a can of cold beets in the solitude of may cabin, wrapped a tacky black-and-gold scarf round my neck, and ambled through the dark featureless forest to the lodge. As I stepped through the door I smelled perfume, sweet drinks, body heat, and caught the sensuous click of the poolballs as they punctuated the swell of riotous voices churning up around me. Holiday cheer, oh, yes, indeed.

Jill was tending bar. Everyone in the development was there, including the old wives and the walleyed poetess. An array of roaring strangers and those recognized vaguely from previous seasons stood, slouched, and stamped round the bar or huddled over steaks in the booths to the rear. Marshall was behind the grill. I eased up to the bar between a bearded stranger in a gray felt cowboy hat and a familiar-looking character who shot me a glance of mortal dislike and then turned away. I was absently wondering what I could possibly have done to offend this guy (winter people — I could hardly remember what I’d said and done last week, let alone last year), when I spotted Regina. And Boo. They were sitting at a booth, the table before them littered with empty glasses and beer bottles. Good, I thought to myself, an insidious little smile of satisfaction creeping across my lips, and I glanced toward Jill.

I could see that she was watching them out of the corner of her eye, though an impartial observer might have guessed she was giving her full attention to Alf Cornwall, the old gas bag who sat across the bar from her and toyed with a glass of peppermint schnapps while he went on ad nauseam about the only subject dear to him — i.e., the lamentable state of his health. “Jill,” I barked with malicious joy, “how about some service down here?”

She gave me a look that would have corroded metal, then heaved back from the bar and poured me a long slow shot of Wild Turkey and an even slower glass of beer. I winked at her as she set the drinks down and scraped my money from the bar. “Not tonight, Michael,” she said, “I don’t feel up to it,” and her tone was so dragged down and lugubrious she could have been a professional mourner. It was then that I began to realize just how much Boo had affected her (and by extension, how little I had), and I glanced over my shoulder to focus a quick look of jealous hatred on him. When Jill set down my change I grabbed her wrist. “What the hell do you mean ‘not tonight,’” I hissed. “Now I can’t even talk to you, or what?”

She looked at me like a martyr, like a twenty-eight-year-old woman deserted by her husband in the backend of nowhere and saddled with an unhappy kid and a deadbeat sometime beau to whom the prospect of marriage was about as appealing as a lobotomy, she looked at me like a woman who’s give up on romance. Then she jerked her arm away and slouched off to hear all the fascinating circumstances attending Alf Cornwall’s most recent bowel movement.

The crowd began to thin out about eleven, and Marshall came out from behind the grill to saunter up to the bar for a Remy Martin. He too seemed preternaturally interested in Alf Cornwall’s digestive tract, and sniffed meditatively at his cognac for five minutes or so before he picked up the glass and strolled over to join Boo and Regina. He slid in next to Regina, nodding and smiling, but he didn’t look too pleased.

Like Boo, Marshall was big. Big-headed, big-bellied, with grizzled hair and a beard flecked with white. He was in his mid-forties, twice divorced, and he had a casual folksy way about him that women found appealing, or unique — or whatever. Women who came up the mountain, that is. Jill had had a thing with him the year before I moved in, he was one of the chief reasons the walleyed poetess hated men, and any number of cross-country ski bunnies, doctors’ wives, and day trippers had taken some extracurricular exercise in the oak-framed waterbed that dominated his room in the back of the lodge. Boo didn’t stand a chance. Ten minutes after Marshall had sat down Boo was back up at the bar, a little unsteady from all he’d had to drink, and looking Jill up and down like he had one thing on his mind.

I was on my third shot and fifth beer, the lights were low, the fire going strong, and the twenty-foot Christmas tree lit up like a satellite. Alf Cornwall had taken his bullshit home with him; the poetess, the wives, and two-thirds of the new people had cleared out. I was discussing beach erosion with the guy in the cowboy hat, who as it turned out was from San Diego, and keeping an eye on Boo and Jill at the far end of the bar. “Well, Christ,” San Diego roared as if I was half a mile away, “you put up them godforsaken useless damn seawalls and what have you got, I ask you? Huh?”

I wasn’t listening. Boo was stroking Jill’s hand like a glove salesman, Marshall and Regina were grappling in the booth, and I was feeling sore and hurt and left out. A log burned through and tumbled into the coals with a thud. Marshall got up to poke it, and all of a sudden I was seething. Turning my back on San Diego, I pushed off of my stool and strode to the end of the bar.

Jill saw the look on my face and drew back. I put my hand on Boo’s shoulder and watched him turn to me in slow motion, his face huge, the scar glistening over his eyebrow. “You can’t do that,” I said.

He just looked at me.

“Michael,” Jill said.

“Huh?” he said. “Do what?” Then he turned his head to look at Jill, and when he swung back round he knew.

I shoved him, hard, as he was coming up off the barstool, and he went down on one knee before he caught himself and lunged at me. He would have destroyed me if Marshall hadn’t caught hold of him, but I didn’t care. As it was, he gave me one terrific shot to the breastbone that flattened me against the bar and sent a couple of glasses flying. Bang, bang, they shattered on the flagstone floor like lightbulbs dropped from a ladder.

“Goddamnit,” Marshall was roaring, “that’s about enough.” His face was red to the roots of his whiskers. “Michael,” he said — or blared, I should say — and then he waved his hand in disgust. Boo stood behind him, giving me a bad look. “I think you’ve had enough, Michael,” Marshall said. “Go on home.”

I wanted to throw it right back in his face, wanted to shout obscenities, take them both on, break up the furniture, and set the tree afire, but I didn’t. I wasn’t sixteen: I was thirty-one years old and I was reasonable. The lodge was the only bar in twenty-six miles and I’d be mighty thirsty and mighty lonely both if I was banished for good. “All right,” I said. “All right.” And then, as I shrugged into my jacket: “Sorry.”

Boo was grinning, Jill looked like she had the night the bear broke in. Regina was studying me with either interest or amusement — I couldn’t tell which — Scooter looked like he had to go to the bathroom, and San Diego just stepped aside. I pulled the door closed behind me. Softly.

Outside, it was snowing. Big, warm, healing flakes. It was the kind of snow my father used to hold his hands out to, murmuring, God must be up there plucking chickens. I wrapped the scarf round my throat and was about to start off across the lot when I saw something moving through the blur of falling flakes. The first thing I thought of was some late arrival from down below, some part-timer come to claim his cabin. The second thing I thought of was the bear.

I was wrong on both counts. The snow drove down against the dark branchless pillars of the treetrunks, chalk strokes on a blackboard, I counted off three breaths, and then Mae-Mae emerged from the gloom. “Michael?” she said, coming up to me.

I could see her face in the yellow light that seeped through the windows of the lodge and lay like a fungus on the surface of the snow. She gave me a rare smile, and then her face changed as she touched a finger to the corner of my mouth. “What happen you?” she said, and her finger glistened with blood.

I licked my lip. “Nothing. Bit my lip, I guess.” The snow caught like confetti in the feathery puff of her hair and her eyes tugged at me from the darkness. “Hey,” I said, surprised by inspiration, “you want to maybe come up to my place for a drink?”

Next day, at dusk, I was out in the woods with my axe. The temperature was about ten degrees above zero, I had a pint of Presidente to keep me warm, and I was looking for a nice round-bottomed silver fir about five feet tall. I listened to the snow groan under my boots, watched my breath hang in the air; I looked around me and saw ten thousand little green trees beneath the canopy of the giants, none of them right. By the time I found what I was looking for, the snow had drunk up the light and the trees had become shadows.

As I bent to clear the snow from the base of the tree I’d selected, something made me glance over my shoulder. Failing light, logs under the snow, branches, hummocks. At first I couldn’t make him out, but I knew he was there. Sixth sense. But then, before the shaggy silhouette separated itself from the gloom, a more prosaic sense took over: I could smell him. Shit, piss, sweat, and hair, dead meat, bad breath, the primal stink. There he was, a shadow among shadows, big around as a fallen tree, the bear, watching me.

Nothing happened. I didn’t grin him down, fling the axe at him, or climb a tree, and he didn’t lumber off in a panic, throw himself on me with a bloody roar, or climb a tree either. Frozen like an ice sculpture, not even daring to come out of my crouch for fear of shattering the moment, I watched the bear. Communed with him. He was a renegade, a solitary, airlifted in a groggy stupor from Yellowstone, where he’d become too familiar with people. Now he was familiar with me. I wondered if he’d studied my tracks as I’d studied his, wondered what he was doing out in the harsh snowbound woods instead of curled cozily in his den. Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. The woods went dark. I stood up. He was gone.

Christmas was a pretty sad affair. Talk of post-holiday depression, I had it before, during, and after. I was broke, Jill and I were on the outs, I’d begun to loathe the sight of three-hundred-foot trees and snow-capped mountains, and I liked the rest of humanity about as much as Gulliver liked the Yahoos. I did stop by Jill’s place around six to share a miserable, tight-lipped meal with her and Adrian and exchange presents. I gave Adrian a two-foot-high neon-orange plastic dragon from Taiwan that spewed up puddles of reddish stuff that looked like vomit, and I gave Jill a cheap knit hat with a pink pompon on top. She gave me a pair of gloves. I didn’t stay for coffee.

New Year’s was different.

I gave a party, for one thing. For another, I’d passed from simple misanthropy to nihilism, death of the spirit, and beyond. It was 2:00 A.M., everybody in the lodge was wearing party hats, I’d kissed half the women in the place — including a reluctant Jill, pliant Regina, and sour-breathed poetess — and I felt empty and full, giddy, expansive, hopeful, despondent, drunk. “Party at my place,” I shouted as Marshall announced last call and turned up the lights. “Everybody’s invited.”

Thirty bon vivants tramped through the snowy streets, blowing party horns and flicking paper ticklers at one another, fired up snowmobiles, Jeeps, and pickups, carried open bottles out of the bar, and hooted at the stars. They filled my little place like fish in a net, squirming against one another, grinning and shouting, making out in the loft, vomiting in the toilet, sniggering around the fireplace. Boo was there, water under the bridge. Jill too. Marshall, Regina, Scooter, Mae-Mae, Josh and Scott, the poetess, San Diego, and anybody else who happened to be standing under the moosehead in a glossy duncecap when I made my announcement. Somebody put on a reggae album that sent seismic shudders through the floor, and people began to dance. I was out in the kitchen fumbling with the ice-cube tray when Regina banged through the door with a bar glass in her hand. She gave me a crooked smile and held it out to me. “What’re you drinking?” she asked.

“Pink Boys,” I said. “Vodka, crushed ice, and pink lemonade, slushed in the blender.”

“Pink Boys,” Regina said, or tried to say. She was wearing her knit hat and matching sweater, the hat pulled down to her eyebrows, the sweater unbuttoned halfway to her navel. I took the glass from her and she moved into me, caught hold of my biceps, and stuck her tongue in my mouth. A minute later I had her pinned up against the stove, exploring her exemplary dentition with the tip of my own tongue and dipping my hand into that fabulous sweater as if into the mother lode itself.

I had no problems with any of this. I gave no thought to motives, mores, fidelity, or tomorrow: I was a creature of nature, responding to natural needs. Besides which, Jill was locked in an embrace with Marshall in the front room, the old satyr and king of the mountain reestablishing a prior claim, Boo was hunched over the fire with Mae-Mae, giving her the full flash of his eyes and murmuring about bear scat in a voice so deep it would have made Johnny Cash turn pale, and Josh and the poetess were joyfully deflating Edna St. Vincent Millay while swaying their bodies awkwardly to Bob Marley’s voodoo backbeat. New Year’s Eve. It was like something out of La Ronde.

By three-thirty, I’d been rejected by Regina, who’d obviously been using me as a decoy, Marshall and Jill had disappeared and rematerialized twice, Regina had tried unsuccessfully to lure Boo away from Mae-Mae (who was now secreted with him in the bedroom), San Diego had fallen and smashed my coffee table to splinters, one half-gallon of vodka was gone and we were well into the second, and Josh and the poetess had exchanged addresses. Auld lang syne, I thought, surveying the wreckage and moodily crunching taco chips while a drunken San Diego raved in my ear about dune buggies, outboard engines, and tuna rigs. Marshall and Jill were holding hands. Regina sat across the room, looking dangerous. She’d had four or five Pink Boys, on top of what she’d consumed at the lodge, but who was counting? Suddenly she stood — or, rather, jumped to her feet like a marine assaulting a beachhead — and began to gather her things.

What happened next still isn’t clear. Somehow her hat had disappeared — that was the start of it. At first she just bustled round the place, overturning piles of scarves and down jackets, poking under the furniture, scooting people from the couch and easy chair, but then she turned frantic. The hat was a keepsake, an heirloom. Brought over from Flekkefjord by her great-grandmother, who’d knitted it as a memento of Olaf the Third’s coronation, or something like that. Anyway, it was irreplaceable. More precious than the Magna Carta, the Shroud of Turin, and the Hope Diamond combined. She grew shrill.

Someone cut the stereo. People began to shuffle their feet. One clown — a total stranger — made a show of looking behind the framed photograph of Dry Gulch, Wyoming, that hangs beside the fireplace. “It’ll turn up,” I said.

Regina had scattered a heap of newspapers over the floor and was frantically riffling through the box of kindling in the corner. She turned on me with a savage look. “The hell it will,” she snarled. “Somebody stole it.”

“Stole it?” I echoed.

“That’s right,” she said, the words coming fast now. She was looking at Jill. “Some bitch. Some fat-assed jealous bitch that just can’t stand the idea of somebody showing her up. Some, some—”

She didn’t get a chance to finish. Jill was up off the couch like something coming out of the gate at Pamplona and suddenly the two of them were locked in combat, pulling hair and raking at one another like Harpies. Regina was cursing and screeching at the same time; Jill went for the vitals. I didn’t know what to do. San Diego made the mistake of trying to separate them, and got his cheek raked for the effort. Finally, when they careened into the pole lamp and sent it crashing to the floor with a climactic shriek of broken glass, Marshall took hold of Regina from behind and wrestled her out the door, while I did my best to restrain Jill.

The door slammed. Jill shrugged loose, heaving for breath, and turned her back on me. There were twenty pale astonished faces strung round the room like Japanese lanterns. A few of the men looked sheepish, as if they’d stolen a glimpse of something they shouldn’t have. No one said a word. Just then Boo emerged from the bedroom, Mae-Mae in tow. “What’s all the commotion?” he said.

I glanced around the room. All of a sudden I felt indescribably weary. “Party’s over,” I said.

I woke at noon with a hangover. I drank from the tap, threw some water in my face, and shambled down to the lodge for breakfast. Marshall was there, behind the grill, looking as if he was made of mashed potatoes. He barely noticed as I shuffled in and took a window seat among a throng of chipper, alert, and well-fed tourists.

I was leafing through the Chronicle and puffing away at my third cup of coffee when I saw Regina’s car sail past the window, negotiate the turn at the end of the lot, and swing onto the road that led down the mountain. I couldn’t be sure — it was a gloomy day, the sky like smoke — but as near as I could tell she was hatless. No more queen of the mountain for her, I thought. No more champagne cocktails and the tight thrilling clasp of spandex across the bottom — from here on out it was stinking mouths and receding gums. I turned back to the newspaper.

When I looked up again, Boo, Josh, and Scott were stepping out of a Jeep Cherokee, a knot of gawkers and Sunday skiers gathered round them. Draped over the hood of the thing, still red at the edges with raw meat and blood, was a bearskin, head intact. The fur was reddish, almost cinnamon-colored, and one ear was folded down. I watched as Boo ambled up to the door, stepped aside for a pair of sixteen-year-old ski bunnies with layered hair, and then pushed his way into the lodge.

He took off his shades and stood there a moment in the doorway, carefully wiping them on his parka before slipping them into his breast pocket. Then he started toward the cash register, already easing back to reach for his wallet. “Hey,” he said when he saw me, and he stopped to lean over the table for a moment. “We got him,” he said, scraping bottom with his baritone and indicating the truck beyond the window with a jerk of his head. There was a discoloration across the breast of his white parka, a brownish spatter. I swiveled my head to glance out the window, then turned back to him, feeling as if I’d had the wind punched out of me. “Yeah,” I said.

There was a silence. He looked at me, I looked at him. “Well,” he said after a moment, “you take care,” and then he strode up to the cash register to pay his bill and check out.

Jill came in about one. She was wearing shades too, and when she slipped behind the bar and removed them, I saw the black-and-blue crescent under her right eye. As for Marshall, she didn’t even give him a glance. Later, after I’d been through the paper twice and figured it was time for a Bloody Mary or two and some Bowl games, I took a seat at the bar. “Hi, Michael,” she said, “what’ll you have?” and her tone was so soft, so contrite, so sweet and friendly and conciliatory, that I could actually feel the great big heaving plates of the world shifting back into alignment beneath my feet.

Oh, yes, the hat. A week later, when the soot and dust and woodchips around the cabin got too much for me, I dragged out the vacuum cleaner for my semiannual sweep around the place. I scooted over the rug, raked the drapes, and got the cobwebs in the corners. When I turned over the cushions on the couch, the wand still probing, I found the hat. There was a label inside. J.C. Penney, it read, $7.95. For a long moment I just stood there, turning the thing over in my hand. Then I tossed it in the fire.