by T. C. Boyle
She set the sandwich down as if it weighed a quarter of a ton, gave a smile that barely wrinkled her lip and took a drag of her cigarette. She only worked here. She’d only just started. She was trading free rent on a shack out back for zero wages and zero tips and all she could eat and drink when Wetzel Setzler, who owned the place, was away. As he was now. “That so?” she said, glancing from one of them to the other.
Sess looked away. He was impatient. Time to go, oh yes indeed, and he could already picture the wide familiar planed dirt road rolling under his tires, and then the first pavement he’d have seen in eight or nine months stretched out as smooth as black ice coming into the city, and then the stores and the houses and the saloons. He drained his beer, shrugged.
“Going to get him a wife, isn’t that right, Sess?”
He remembered in that moment why he didn’t like the man—he talked like a tourist’s idea of a sourdough, though he’d been raised in Los Angeles and had a degree in French literature. “You know, pick up some flour, eggs, milk, a new wife, that sort of thing—”
Lynette was wearing a faded flannel shirt buttoned up to her throat, blue jeans and boots. Her hair was cut short as a man’s, she’d driven up from Seattle in a brand-new Pontiac station wagon and nobody knew whether she was married, divorced, a spinster or an ex-nun. She wore a pistol in a snug leather holster that looped over her belt, and to Sess’s mind that marked her as a particularly dangerous brand of oddball, the kind who come into the country to play out their Technicolor fantasies of the Wild West. “What you wearing that gun for?” he’d asked when he ordered the second beer. She gave him a defiant look. “Protection,” she said. “Protection?” he’d echoed. “From what?” The stony look now, the look of a thousand bars and dancehalls and another thousand nights alone staring into the black hole of the TV. “It’s not bears,” she said. “Or moose or wolves either. It’s the two-legged beast worries me.”
Now she said, “New wife? I didn’t even know you had an old one.”
Could he dignify the question with a response? Was it worth the time and effort? Did he want to act inappropriately, act out, tell her to go fuck herself and then maybe bounce Skid Denton’s head up and down off the bar as if he were dribbling a basketball downcourt through a swarming defense? No. No, he didn’t. The fact was that he’d never had a wife of any kind, new or old, because the last woman—Jill—who’d spent a lush summer and a sere and broken-hearted winter in his twelve-by-twelve log cabin with all the appointments, or at least necessities, had embarrassed him. People still talked about it. People still shook their heads, as if it were some kind of joke, some kind of routine he’d gone through—and Jill had gone through—just for their amusement. A soap opera. A TV show.
He scraped his change up off the bar, having a little trouble with the dimes because he’d chopped off the tips of his fingernails with a penknife just this morning as part of a general effort to spruce up his image. He tucked in his shirt, wheeled and headed for the door. Where he paused, the door open a crack so that the outside mosquitoes and the inside mosquitoes could change places, the agenda they seemed most intent on throughout the duration of their brief bloodsucking lives. “If I get lucky,” he said. “Real lucky. So wish me luck.”
He let his mind drift during the long drive in, watching in an abstracted way for game, rolling down the window so he could smell the country and the chill coming up off the Chatanika River. A handful of cars passed him going the other way, a camper or two, but this wasn’t a busy road, even in the best of times—like now. In winter, once it snowed, the road was closed, drifted in, iced up, landslid and buckled, and Boynton was like a ship at sea with no land in sight. If you wanted out, you flew. In a bush plane that had no paint on it because paint added an unnecessary thirteen pounds to the total load. You flew, that is, unless the temperature had dropped past forty below, the range at which fuel lines tended to freeze, and if you didn’t have fuel to the engine you came down out of the sky like a big winged rock. But that was life in the bush, and to his mind, it was a small price to pay for what you got in return.
When he reached Fairbanks he was amazed at the traffic, two cars to the left of him, three lined up at a light, pickups pulling in and out of gravel lots as if they were coming out of the gate at the Indianapolis Speedway, women, children, bicyclists, dogs. He had to remind himself to be careful, because he wasn’t used to driving and didn’t much like it—in fact, he was more than a little suspicious of people who did.
Plus he was drunk, or residually inebriated, though most of the effects of what he’d downed at the roadhouse had dissipated during the drive and the long slow gnawing at the ham-and-cheese sandwich Lynette had made for him with all the care of a veteran hash-slinger. The city clawed at him. The traffic lights made him frantic with impatience. But he knew right where he was going, and nothing—absolutely nothing—had changed since he’d been here last, in September of the previous year.
She was waiting for him at a table out on the deck of a restaurant on the riverfront, the nicest place in town, and it was nice for people to be able to sit outside and take advantage of the sun and the views. He saw her before she saw him, and he held back a moment so he could compose himself. In profile, against the river and the broad slap of the sun on the water, she was like a figure in a dream. Her bare legs and arms gleamed, her hair shone. She was wearing khaki shorts and hiking boots with thick gray socks rolled down over the tops and a pink T-shirt three sizes too small that pulled tight across her chest. Her name was Pamela, and he’d met her twice before, but that didn’t make him any less nervous. He tucked in his shirt all the way round, slicked down his hair with two saliva-dampened fingers, and walked out onto the deck.
At that moment, the very moment his boots hit the planks, she turned to slap a mosquito on her upper arm and saw him. A quick burn of puzzlement went through her face, as if she hadn’t been expecting him or had forgotten all about him, what he looked like even, but then she was on her feet and he was there and they went through that awkward man-woman greeting business with a restrained hug and a touch of her cheek to his as she stood up on her tiptoes and pulled him down to her. “Sit down,” she said, showing off her perfect white teeth, the teeth of a dental hygienist or a stripper, teeth that said hello and watch out at the same time. “Sit down and join me, Sess, and don’t be so bashful. God,” she said, and she let out a laugh, “you’re like a little lost boy on the playground.”
He fumbled into the chair across the table from her and murmured something like “Nice to see you, Pam,” but before the words were out she’d already corrected him: “Pamela,” she said, smiling still, smiling so hard, so persistently, so radiantly, that he began to feel a little afraid of her despite himself. Was there something wrong with this picture? Or was she as nervous as he was? He gave an inward shrug—either way, she was beautiful. God, she was beautiful. And what cabin in the bush couldn’t use an ornament like that, perfect teeth and all?
The waitress saved him. She was there, short skirt, two breasts and a face, hovering over him. She wanted to know if she could get him something to drink. And was he going to have lunch today?
Pamela was drinking iced tea. The menu lay facedown beside her plate.
“I think I’ll have a beer,” he said, “an Oly,” and for some reason he was looking at Pam instead of the waitress, as if he were asking permission or trying to calibrate her response. “And—I’m sorry, did you order yet?”
“No,” she said, “but go ahead. You know what you want?”
He had a cheeseburger, medium rare, with everything on it, fries, and a salad with ranch dressing. She glanced up at the waitress without even lifting the menu from the table. “I’ll have the same,” she said, with a grin. “And a beer sounds good.”
“Oly?” the waitress wanted to know.
“Yeah,” Pamela breathed, and she was looking at him now, at Sess, looking right into his eyes, “Oly.” As soon as the waitress was out of earshot, s
he said, “So, are you prepared to turn right around and drive back this afternoon, because I’m all packed and ready and there’s no sense in wasting any time—you know, another night in the city when we could be out in the bush, in your cabin, I mean. You’re on the Thirtymile, right?”
He just stared. Things were moving way too fast—but wasn’t that the way he’d envisioned it in his fantasies, she lying naked on the bed beneath his window, her skin as white as Ivory soap against the deep pile of his furs, her limbs spread wide in invitation? “I was going to pick up a few things at the hardware and the grocery, and I was supposed to . . .” He drifted off a moment and gave her a strained smile. “For Richard, Richard Schrader. You know, because he let me borrow his truck—”
The waitress arrived with their beers and there was a moment of silence as they watched her go through the ritual of tipping and pouring. Someone let out a bark of laughter from the next table over. A pair of silver canoes slid by on the far side of the river.
“I know Richard,” Pamela said, and his heart froze inside him.
“You don’t mean—was he one of the ones?”
“No,” she said, as abruptly as if she were taking a bite out of something, and she shook her head emphatically. “Not Richard, no way. Remember, I’m a practical girl here and the whole point of this is I want somebody to love me, sure, but somebody who can take care of me, know what I mean? In the bush. Somebody—like you—who knows his way around, who has the survival skills, who’s a real woodsman and not just some townie wanna-be.”
Was he blushing? The compliment went right to him. He lifted the beer to his lips, took a sip and watched her eyes as if they were fish under the surface of the ice or ptarmigans in a clump of willow, something he was hunting, a brace of geese or old squaws. Suddenly he was Mr. Confidence. Suddenly he wanted to get up from the table and lift the whole deck, the whole restaurant, right up on his shoulders, just to show her what he was. “Is it fair to ask who I’m up against then? And what seed I am in this tournament?”
The smile drew down to nothing. “Richie Oliver and Howard Walpole,” she said. “Just them. And you. And you know what, Sess?” Her hand was on the table now, lying there, palm up, like a double-spring Victor trap with the snow blown bare of it. And what did he want? He wanted to be caught, he did, he was praying for it every day and night of his life, and he reached out and slipped his fingers through hers. “No, what?” he said.
“You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
He didn’t remember much of the ride back, just a sensation of floating over the road as if he were in an airplane instead of a car, Pamela in the lotus position on the seat beside him, her bare legs glistening in the sun through the window. They were both feeling good, convivial and full of high spirits, and just about everything he said made her laugh and show her teeth. The country unfurled before them like a camouflage jacket, gray and green and brown, and they saw goshawks and Brewer’s blackbirds wheeling overhead. At one point, just before the turnoff for Boynton Hot Springs, they stopped to watch a fox hunting in the bush alongside the road and he had to fight down the impulse to shoot it with the .22 Richard kept under the seat for just such an opportunity as this—the fur was worthless this time of year, but it would have been fresh meat for the pot, and he was on trial here, after all.
“Look at the way he pounces,” she said, leaning out the window so far he thought she was going to fall. “Just like a dog playing with a ball.”
“What he’s doing,” Sess said, and he slid across the seat to look over her shoulder, so close now he could smell the soap she used on her skin, “he’s trying to scare up whatever might be hiding under the bushes, you know, voles, grasshoppers, maybe a fat juicy wood frog or two—”
She turned to him now, and she was right there, her face inches from his, and he had to back off, he had to, and she could chalk that up in the credit column under his name. Let her make the first move. Sure. Let her. “Sounds appetizing,” she said, smiling wide.
Reddening, he slid back across the seat and put the truck in gear. “You hungry?” he asked. “Not for frog legs, I mean, but something like a steak or a sandwich, maybe a couple more beers to celebrate? Because by the time we get to the cabin, I mean, and unload all this stuff, feed the dogs and see what the garden looks like, I don’t know if we’re going to have time to—” He trailed off. With her here, actually here, living and breathing and watching him out of her eyes that were like two guided missiles homing in on his, he couldn’t really get much past the picture of walking her in the door of the cabin. After that, the screen went blank.
But she said sure, sure she was hungry, and twenty minutes later he was escorting her up the bleached wooden steps of the Three Pup, as proud as if he’d made her out of clay and breathed the life into her himself.
It was eight o’clock in the evening and the sun was right there with them, showing all its teeth. The trees were staked to their shadows, the guest cottages that hadn’t housed a guest in ten years sank quietly into the muskeg, birds flitted over the decaying snow machines scattered across the yard. There was the rattle of the generator, and beneath it, the whine of the mosquitoes—they were there, of course, always there, ubiquitous, but by now the daytime crew had gone home to sleep off the effects of breakfast, lunch and dinner, and the night shift had taken over. He swatted half a dozen on his forearm and flapped a protective hand round the crown of Pamela’s head as they pushed through the screen door and the perpetual gloom of the place rose up to envelop them.
Half the town was gathered at the bar, including Richard Schrader and Skid Denton, who must have gone home in the interval because even he couldn’t manage to drink straight through for nine and a half hours—or could he? As soon as they walked in, a general roar went up, people showing off their wit with comments like “Look what the cat dragged in,” and a couple of the guys whistled at the sight of Pamela. Who whirled round, her hands outstretched, and did a little pirouette for them. Reticence was not one of her drawbacks, that was for sure.
They had a beer at the bar, and he luxuriated in the sweet proximity of her, in the blond bundle of her hair all coiled up in a no-nonsense braid, in the grip and complexity of the muscles of her legs, in her smile. He bought her Beer Nuts, Slim Jims, pickled eggs, and they each had a shot to go with their beers while Lynette fried up a pair of steaks for them, the holster riding her hip like an excess flap of skin. It was a moment, all right—so glorious and pure he never wanted to let go of it.
Over their steaks, which they ate at a table in the corner, she told him what he already knew or suspected or had heard elsewhere. She’d been born and raised in Anchorage, but every summer of her childhood her father had taken the family—her and her sister and mother—to live out of a tent in the Endicott Mountains of the Brooks Range while he prospected unnamed creeks in nameless canyons and reappeared every third day or so with something for the pot. They’d contract with a bush pilot to drop them off just after breakup, and the pilot would come back and pick them up again at the end of September, and so what if they missed a whole month of school? She and her sister, Priscilla, would fish and roam and scare up birds, listen to the wolves at night and have face-to-face encounters with just about every creature that made its living north of the Arctic Circle. And now, now that she was a college graduate and twenty-seven years old and sick to death of working nine-to-five in a city of concrete and steel, she wanted to go back to the bush, and not just for a vacation, not as a tourist or part-timer, but forever. That was it. That was the deal.
He’d begun to feel the effects of the long day—the two-way drive, the alcohol, the excitement that burned in the back of his throat like a shot of Canadian on a subzero night—when he looked up from her eyes and saw Joe Bosky across the room. “Shit,” he said. “We got to go.”
“Already? Aren’t you going to ask me to dance? At least once—one dance?”
The jukebox was going—“Mystic Eyes,” one of his favorite songs, b
ut hardly the sort of thing you could dance to. “Next time,” he said.
She let out a laugh then. “You’re just like all the rest of them, afraid of their own two feet. How about if we wait for a slow one?”
And now he was hedging. “But I wouldn’t want you to have to spend your first night in my shack in town, and you wouldn’t want that either, would you? Because don’t forget, we’ve got a three-hour paddle, upstream, to get to the cabin—”
She told him he was cute. Told him she liked the way the two parallel lines creased his brow when he worked himself up. And she smirked and stretched out her legs so he and everybody else in the place could admire the full shimmering length of them, and agreed with him. “You’re right,” she said. “I do want to see the cabin, I mean, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Or half of it, or part of it, anyway. It’s just that I was really enjoying this.”
That was when Joe Bosky butted in.
He was hovering over their table like a waiter, stinking of something—fish, vomit, B.O.—and he was grinning like some sort of trapped animal from the deeps of his beard. He was wearing a fatigue shirt that had U.S.M.C. stenciled across the pocket and a khaki cap with the brim worked flat. His jeans looked as if they’d been salvaged from a corpse. And smelled like it too. “Hey,” he said, leaning into the table and ignoring Sess, “I hear you’re the lady that’s looking for a man, is that right?”
Pamela didn’t know him from Adam, and she was the kind of person who had a smile for everybody, so she gave him his grin back and said, “That’s right. But I didn’t realize I was so famous.”
Sess was up out the chair. “We got to go,” he repeated.
“I was just wondering if I could get in on the action,” Joe Bosky was saying, ignoring him still. “You know, I’m a pretty good man in the bush myself—and I’m building a cabin up Woodchopper Creek even as we speak—and I was just wondering if, you know, there might be any free tryouts?”