Drop City

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

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

  “A drag. Your cigarette.”

  “You? But you don’t smoke.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Went to bed?”

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

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

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

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

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

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