Drop City

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “I know,” Star whispered. “I know.”

  Later, after they’d finished a second pot of tea and the moose steak sandwiches with sliced onions and horseradish sauce Pamela fixed for them, Star asked her if she’d mind if she spent the night—the whole trip, the whole scene upriver was getting to be too much for her and she just couldn’t face it, not tonight. Would that be all right? Would it be too much trouble? Of course not, Pamela told her, no trouble at all—she’d fix her up right here, in Sess’s old bed, and could she believe he’d slept here alone, on this narrow little pallet, all last winter?

  She gave her one of her flannel nightgowns and wrapped her up in Sess’s parky-squirrel sleeping bag and her pick of the furs—they had a whole fur emporium to choose from, and what all those slinky high-heeled women in New York and Chicago wouldn’t have given for even a peek in the door—and it was nice, it took her back. It was like being a child again, with Pris at her side and the tent arching over them and the comfort of their mother snoring lightly from the cot in the corner. Or having one of the neighborhood girls for a sleepover when you didn’t sleep at all, not till dawn. It was past midnight when she turned out the lamp and went to her own bed in the add-on room, feeling relaxed and peaceful, and tired, gratefully tired, thinking of the neat symmetry of the arrangement—the girls were here, bedded down under one roof, and the men were out there, huddled side by side in the cold clenched fist of the night.

  In the morning, they lingered over coffee, fresh-baked bread and powdered eggs in a scramble of ham, peppers and tomatoes, watching the light come up in a gradual displacement of shadow until it settled into the pale wash that served for dawn, dusk and high noon at this time of year. They listened to the radio together—Tundra Topics on KFAR and Trapline Chatter on KJNP, and learned that Olive Swisstack sent all her love to Tommy, in Barrow, and Ivor Johnson’s ex-mother-in-law needed him to call her, urgently, and that Jim Drudge was radioing in from Fort Yukon to say that he was drawing breath like anybody else on the planet and very pleased about it too—and then they lit their first cigarettes of the day and played a very lax game of chess.

  “You know, Star,” she said, after she’d pinned down the king and announced checkmate in a soft, matter-of-fact way, “there’s something I wanted to tell you all last night, but, well—it never came up, I guess.”

  Star glanced up from the board, where she’d been idly fingering the king’s bishop that wouldn’t be much use to her now. The half-empty cup stood at her elbow. A cigarette—was it Star’s or her own?—smoldered in the ashtray.

  This was good, this was very good, the glow of the light through the window, the gentle respiration of the stove, the silence. A calm descended on her. She might have been asleep still or stretched out on a towel at some resort in the tropics, nodding over the glossy novel propped up on her chest. “I’m pregnant,” she said. “Or I think I am. I haven’t told Sess yet.”

  She looked past Star to the window and beyond the window to the hills and then back again, right into her friend’s face, into her eyes. “So I guess that means you’re the first to know.”

  31

  What passed for light these days was just a fading gleam on the horizon, light in name only, a sorry pale tuned-down glow in the southern sky that was there to remind you of what you were missing. It was sunny in Miami Beach, dazzling in San Diego, and you couldn’t put the light out in Patagonia or McMurdo Sound even if you wanted to—it was as if the whole globe had been tipped upside down and all you could shake out of it was a few shadows falling away into the grudging night of the universe. That was what Pan was thinking as the engine snarled out its dull, repetitive message—all’s well, all’s well, all’s well—and the wingtips caught a glint from somewhere and the running lights pulsed out of sync till he was as tranced as he might have been in some dance club with the strobe going and the music so loud he couldn’t have said what his own name was.

  He was cold. Freezing to death, actually. Outside, on the ground, it was approaching forty below, and here they were up at six thousand feet where the air was thinner—and colder. Joe had the heater going full blast, but it barely registered against the wind howling in through the cracks in the doorframe and around the window, and why couldn’t they make these things airtight? Why couldn’t they insulate them or rig up a heater that actually made some kind of difference? He couldn’t feel his toes. Under his shirt, the beads were like separate little pellets of ice. A cold clear fluid dripped from his nostrils and dampened the backs of his gloves. In desperation, he wrapped his arms round his shoulders, shivering so hard he thought his fillings were going to come loose.

  Beside him, Joe was a rock. His shoulders filled the cockpit, the bulk of him made bulkier still with the puffed-up eiderdown lining of his parka. He kept a gloved finger on the yoke, stared off through the windscreen or gazed idly out one side or the other, no more concerned with the howling Arctic blast in his face than a polar bear curled up on an ice floe. He hadn’t spoken—or shouted—a word for the past fifteen minutes, but then Pan didn’t expect conversation, since you couldn’t hear anything over the clamor of the engine anyway. So he suffered in silence, thinking only of the cabin now, of the gentle shush of the skis on the snowbound ice—of touching down and scrambling out of this torture box—and of the fire he was going to crank up in the stove. He let a long shiver work its way through him, then reached for his day pack in the backseat and extracted the silver flask.

  The flask was filled with Hudson Bay rum, the same shit basically as the Bacardi 151 they used to use for flambés at the Surf ’N’ Turf—tasted godawful, like kerosene, but it got the job done. Warmed you. Burned you right on down from your palate to your rectum, and he still remembered Mr. Boscovich at the board diagramming the human digestive tract—Nine meters long, he called out as if he were singing, and can anybody tell me how many feet that is? Pan gave a little laugh at the memory, then unscrewed the cap. He held the flask to his lips as the plane jarred and settled, a little spillage soaking into his beard and pinning dark beads of moisture to the thighs of his jeans, but it did the trick—it burned till he had to pound his breastbone to keep from spewing it back up—and then he tapped Joe’s arm and offered up the flask in pantomime. “You want a hit?” he shouted.

  Joe gave him a long, slow look, as if he were trying to place him, as if they hadn’t lived in the same cabin for the past three and a half months and been airborne together for the better part of the day, and then he shook his head slowly and let a sad smile fill up the hole in the middle of his beard. “Not while I’m flying,” he shouted back.

  “Not even a nip?”

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  They were on their way back from Ambler, on the Kobuk River, where they’d taxied up to a shack on an island just west of town and unloaded eight cases of bourbon, rum and vodka purchased three days ago in Fairbanks. The shack was listing to the left on the uncertain prop of its stilts, sad and abandoned-looking, but there were wall-to-wall people inside, having a party, and that was a surprise. They looked at him out of their retreating eyes—all of them, men and women, trading around the same face, the face Genghis Khan must have worn after he’d got done conquering an out-of-the-way village and raping all the women and eating the dogs and sucking down the last drop of distilled rice liquor in the district. But it was cool, because they wore their hair long and spent their time getting as high as they possibly could on whatever they got their hands on and they’d never even heard of nine-to-five, neckties, Wall Street and Mr. Jones. They still hunted caribou when the herds crossed the river in the fall, though the hunt was reduced now to just coasting up to the animals in a flat-bottomed boat when they were helpless in the water and shooting them point-blank with a pistol, and they all had snow machines and outboard motors and bought their clothes out of a catalogue. But they ate caribou tongue and Eskimo ice cream (caribou fat whipped into a confection with half a ton of sugar and a scattering of sour berries; Pan tasted it—“I
ce cream, brother, it’s ice cream,” Joe Bosky told him, egging him on, but he spat it right back out into the palm of his hand and the whole room went down in flames, laughing their asses off, funniest thing in the world, white man). They also ate Cheerios and Fritos and Ho-Ho’s and Hellmann’s Mayonnaise sandwiches on Wonder Bread, all of it flown in to the Eskimo store by the bush pilots who represented the world.

  Joe told him that the coast Eskimos—the igloo dwellers, like Nanook—used to all piss in a trough and save it to wash in, to cut the grease on their skin and maybe discourage the lice too, but these people—the little sawed-off Genghis Khans with their nubby teeth and faraway eyes—didn’t carry things quite that far, or not that Pan could see, anyway. They stank, though—good Christ, they stank, body, breath and hair. And their dogs were the rattiest-looking things he’d ever seen, ten or twelve of them staked out in every yard, no doghouses, no nothing. Rangy, ugly, yowling things chewing on caribou heads and moose hooves and the kind of fish remains Sylvester the Cat used to pull up out of the bottom of the trash cans in the cartoons. In a word, pathetic.

  They stayed an hour, maybe. Pan sold a half-ounce baggie of grass to an Eskimo cat he vaguely recognized from the last whiskey run, and he had a couple rum cokes and breathed the stink of the room and joined in the general sniggering laughter, and then it was back in the plane, the dual controls—yoke on the instrument panel, rudder pedals on the floor—moving in and out on his side as if an invisible presence were sitting in his lap. They shot up off the snowbound river, the shack, the village, the naked stripped willows and soft-edged firs receding and dwindling beneath them, and then there was the horizon and the promise of light to the south.

  Pan had made enough runs with Joe to recognize the markers along the route home, and he checked off the white suckhole of Norutak Lake, Indian Mountain sticking up out of the hills at forty-two hundred feet like an inverted Dairy Queen cone, the Koyukuk River a mad scrawl across the face of the deepening night, and finally the lights of Stevens Village and the broad pan of the Yukon. The river flowed west here, but hooked around at Fort Yukon, where it flowed north pretty much all the way from the Canadian border, so to follow it at this point would have been a waste of time. Joe crossed the river at Stevens Village and cut inland to pick it up again at Boynton, and Pan wasn’t alarmed when the river fell behind them and the dark hills loomed up again—it was the direct route, the quickest ticket to the stove and the sleeping bag and the mooseburger on a defrosted bun with fried potatoes and coleslaw on the side. In two days, he and Joe would fly into Boynton for his send-off party at the Nougat, and then he was going home, back to Peterskill in time for Christmas, and that was going to be something, the stories he could tell, and the weather would be nothing—he’d go around in a T-shirt, a tank top and shorts (“What, you call this cold, bro?”). And the concerts, the Fillmore, that new place in Portchester, John Mayall, B. B. King, Taj Mahal. Fuck Star. Fuck Drop City. Fuck them all. He was in a zone, shivering, dreaming. He took another quick nip from the flask—just for the comfort of it.

  But then, gradually, he began to realize that they weren’t going directly home—they passed over Woodchopper, or what he was pretty sure was Woodchopper, and came in low over the morass of creeks and cleft hills of the Thirtymile watershed. The moon had propped itself up in the sky by now, fat, cold and full, and the snow gave back the light of it till it was brighter than it had been all day. You could see everything against the snow, clearings, bogs, even a line of animal tracks. Joe banked and came in lower still, no more than three hundred feet above the ground, his eyes trained on the shapes and shadows there as if he was looking for something.

  “Hey, Joe,” Ronnie shouted. “Hey, man, what’s up? Aren’t we going home?”

  Joe rotated the heavy ball of his head to give him a look, then turned back to the window. “Hand me the rifle, will you?” he said.

  Despite himself, despite the cold and the misery and his essential needs, Pan found himself smiling. “You going to tag a couple wolves?”

  The engine pulled them through the night, past the swoop of the trees and the leaping hills and falling declivities. “Check the bolt on that thing for me,” Joe shouted.

  No complaints, Ronnie was thinking. He was thinking, All right, why not? The wolves were there, money on the hoof, or the paw, actually, greenback dollars gifted up by nature, as Joe put it. They’d been out three days ago, on the way back from Fairbanks with the booze—they’d meant to fly directly up to Ambler but Joe saw wolf sign below and got distracted. It was a kill, a moose laid out in the snow in a Rorschach blot of blood-reddened loops and spiraling paw prints. The wolves were on it, six or seven of them, soapstone gray quickening to black, their eyes feasting, heads twisted round to assess this ratcheting threat from the sky, and then suddenly they were running and Joe buzzed them and banked to come at them again. Once he’d leveled the plane and angled in behind the straining dark forms below, he shouted, “Take the yoke,” and Pan held them steady as he hung out the window and took aim.

  The snow leapt where he missed, white blooms flowering in a bed of shadow, and Pan could see it all though he was concentrating everything he had on keeping them level. Crack! Crack! Crack! The wolves flowed like water. A long minute, and they fell away beneath them till Joe took the controls, came round again and again had Pan take the yoke. This time, when he leaned out, sighted through the scope and fired, one of the dark streaks suddenly compressed as if it had been ground down by an iron heel, and it was a streak no longer, but a wolf, writhing. They chased on after the pack and shot a second one a mile away, then circled back and found a place to land. The snow was knee-deep. The first wolf’s spine had been broken. It lay there in the snow, staring up at them in incomprehension, bred and whelped in hidden places, fed on moose, on rabbit and vole and caribou, helpless now, and staring. “Go ahead,” Joe said, “but don’t mark the fur. Aim for the eye.”

  Now Pan strained to see what Joe had picked out below even as he lifted the rifle out of the back, bought new out of the display case at Big Ray’s Sporting Goods in Fairbanks with Eskimo dollars—a .375 Holland & Holland with a 4X Weaver scope—pulled back the bolt and handed it to him. There were tracks in the snow below them, he saw that now, a beaten trail that might have been made by a full-on congress of wolves, and it looped in and out of the clumps of trees, disappeared for whole seconds at a time and then reappeared heading south along the banks of the river. The moon had never been brighter, never in all Pan’s experience, and he’d seen it hanging in the sky too many times to count, in the back alleys behind the clubs, through the windshield of his car, big and luminous and enhanced by the full range of the pharmacopoeia that lit his perceiving eyes. Tonight, though, tonight it ran back at them, everything silvered with it, Joe’s parka, his face, the hands on the controls, but where were the wolves?

  And then suddenly, out from under the trees, there they were, a pack running in formation, and Joe was hollering “Take the yoke, take it!” The air inside the cockpit went from frigid to terminal as Joe pushed open the window and the flash-frozen breeze hit them. Pan had the yoke, the plane in a bank left, Joe aiming, but wait—these weren’t wolves, were they? No, no, they weren’t—they were dogs, and that was a sled, and two figures separating themselves from the flowing script of the page below, people, men, and what was Joe thinking, had he gone blind or what? “Joe!” Ronnie shouted. “Joe, those aren’t wolves!”

  No matter. Because Ronnie was holding the plane in a steep bank and Joe was firing, once, twice, three times, the bank steepening, Joe cursing—“Fuck! Fuck and goddamnit to hell!”—and neither one of them noticing just how close to vertical the wingtips had become until Joe dropped the gun and pulled them out of the spin and just cleared the bank of trees ahead of them. The engine screamed and there was a jolt, a sickly amplified wet hard slap as of skin on skin and the tip of the right wing had a crease in it suddenly and the whole plane was shuddering as if it were about to fall apar
t.

  Joe fought it. Joe knew his stuff. Joe wasn’t about to crash an airplane that cost him twenty-five thousand dollars just because the tip of the aluminum wing was folded in on itself like a crushed beer can, oh, no, not Joe. They must have gone two or three miles, struggling back toward the river, and where was the altitude here, why didn’t he pull back on the yoke and get them up out of the treetops? before Ronnie understood that they were going down. There was something ahead, not the river, just a break in the trees, muskeg, hummocks of dead snow-crowned grass like so many fists thrust up out of the ground, and then they were down, the landing gear buckling under them and the whole fuselage pitching mercilessly to the left and into the looming impervious bark-clad shins of the trees.

  Nobody much liked Joe Bosky—he was respected, feared, maybe—but he wasn’t the sort of cat people would praise for his gentleness and his niceness and his manners. Ronnie dug him, though. Ronnie had a sort of younger brother–older brother bond with him, and if you said one thing for Joe you had to admit he had his shit together, and if you looked and listened and paid attention you could learn everything there was to know about the country. About guns. About flying. He’d already given Pan half a dozen lessons and let him take the controls sometimes when they were just cruising from point A to point B, and that was something to be grateful for. Pan thought maybe someday he could come back up into the country—some summer, next summer even—and make a go of it as a bush pilot, guiding hunters and fishermen, beating the weather, riding the breeze, going in and out as he pleased. Another thing about Bosky was that while he might have been part of the war machine at one point, a Marine, no less, he had a pretty loose attitude about things—he wasn’t a flag waver or any kind of fascist at all and he never ran off at the mouth about Claymore mines and gooks and all the rest of it. What was his goal in life? Pan had asked him one night as they sat at the table with Sky and Dale, picking sweet dark ptarmigan meat from the bone. To have a good time. To get drunk, get laid, raise some hell and answer to nobody. “So you’re a hedonist, then?” Dale had put in. “Bet your ass I am,” Joe said.