by T. C. Boyle
On the afternoon of the second day, after breakfast and the embrace that became a clinch and then a kiss that went on till the blood was singing in her ears, Sess walked her around the place, showing it off. He demonstrated the clarity of the Thirtymile where it crashed into the opaque Yukon, which ran heavy with its freight of glacial debris, showed her where he planned to build a sauna and a workshop, lectured her on the garden that was already showing green against the black plastic he’d laid down for heat retention. He was growing cabbage, cauliflower, turnips, kohlrabi and Brussels sprouts, potatoes, onions, peas, lettuce, Early Girl tomatoes, basil, cucumbers, squash. “Everything has to be in the ground by the first of June,” he was saying, “though you risk a frost, which is why I keep that wood stacked up over there, just as a precaution, because we get a growing season out here of maybe a hundred five or so days, what with the influence of the river keeping things a tad less frigid, and every day counts, believe me, and round about February you’d kill to have a little pickled cabbage or stewed tomatoes with your six thousandth serving of moose—”
She was listening, because this was the information she needed, this was the knowledge that was proof against anything, but most of what he said drifted right through her—it was his voice she was listening to, not the words. His voice mesmerized her in a way Fred Stines’s never could. It spoke to her in a tone that was like a current flowing through her, like the electric charge in a wall socket or the balky lamp she’d clumsily rewired when she was in college. He talked—and he wasn’t shy anymore, not shy a bit—and she listened. “So,” he said finally, and they were down at the river staring into the canoe, “should we maybe go upstream a bit and see what we can scare up for dinner? You like duck, maybe? Duck with scallions and a super-extra-special Sess Harder spicy homemade barbecue sauce?”
The canoe rode the river as if it were floating on air, the strewn rock of its bed transformed into puffed and emboldened clouds, the fish like the black silhouettes of birds flitting past. She was on the river with Sess Harder, in the wilderness with Sess Harder, and she was in love with everything. They paddled hard, upriver, into a breeze. She could feel the weight of him behind her, the canoe a seesaw on the playground of the water, and she could feel the thrust of his paddle as they dodged rocks and downed trees and cut across the riffles where the current boiled around them. This was silent work, and for the first time since he’d stepped out onto the deck of the restaurant yesterday afternoon, neither of them felt compelled to talk. It was only when they swept round a bend and she was startled to see a building standing high atop the far bank that she broke the silence. “Good God, Sess,” she said, turning to look back at him, “what is that—a cabin? Way out here?”
Yes, it was a cabin. Obviously a cabin. Notched logs, the flash of window glass, sun on the skin of an overturned aluminum skiff laid in tight against the near side. It had a sod roof, and there were trees eight or ten feet tall sprouting from it as if it were the picture of a troll’s den in a children’s book. Sess kept paddling, the steadiest stroke in the world. “That’s right,” he said.
“But you didn’t tell me I was going to have to live in a subdivision.” She tried to inject a note of humorous disparagement, but she was shocked, genuinely shocked, because what was the sense of it all if there was a cabin around every bend?
“Don’t you let it worry you, Pamela,” he said, the cabin already drifting out to the margins of her peripheral vision, “—nobody lives there. Nobody’s lived there for over a year now.”
The paddle worked and she could feel it in her shoulders, feel herself toughening already. “But who—?” she said.
“An old guy, one of the old-timers, a real authentic cranky tattered river bachelor who stank of the goose wings soaked in beaver castor he used to bait lynx, the kind of guy who only bathed when he fell in the river, which was about twice a year.” He paused, but the paddle kept working. “The kind of guy—or coot—I’d become if it wasn’t for, well, if it wasn’t for you.”
She let the hopefulness of that sink in a minute, and then she said, “So where is he now—I mean, did he die?”
“Oh, no, no—he was way too cranky to die. He retired. Hung up his snowshoes and rinsed his gold pans for the final time and went on down to Seattle to live with his brother in a rooming house someplace. You know: central heating, color TV, washer and dryer. A little strip of macadam to park your pickup on.”
“That’s horrible,” she said.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, and she looked back to see him grinning at her. “Nothing worse.”
Then they were beaching the canoe on a strip of gravel and hiking through a sweating dense tangle of birch, aspen and cottonwood that was held fast by the sheer mass of the mosquitoes that swarmed through it in all their regiments and brigades. She was wearing long sleeves and jeans and she’d rubbed herself like a leg of lamb in 6-12, but the mosquitoes got her in the one place she’d missed—the tip of her nose—and the swatting of them became automatic. “Five minutes more,” Sess whispered, a shotgun in one hand, a .22 slung over his shoulder. “I’m taking you to this series of little lakes where there’s more ducks than mosquitoes even, if you can believe it.” And then he went on to tell her that the natives didn’t call the season late spring or early summer, but just that—Ducks—because there were so many of them flown up from the south to nest and raise their young. It was like an open-air meat market. You couldn’t miss.
But then they got there and he did miss, three times, and the lake that was once a stretch of the river in years gone by—an oxbow, they called it—was first a pandemonium of squawking and flapping ducks, and then it was duckless, a flat black expanse of duckless water. Sess took it hard. He made apologies—but no excuses, because that wasn’t the way he was. “Wait here,” he said, and she waited the better part of an hour while he slipped off into the undergrowth as quietly as a breeze and the mosquitoes swarmed and the silence finally ruptured with the distant thump of three more shots, and when he came back to her he was still duckless and looking frustrated and angry. He gave her a tense smile. “Don’t you worry,” he said, “we just—well, I hate to say it, but we just have to be patient. Can you appreciate that, Pamela? Can you?”
She was going to say that she could appreciate it, of course she could, and that he didn’t have to worry on her account because anything he wanted to cook was just fine with her, when the dark water at her feet began to move as if it had come to life, trailing an even darker V across the flat surface, and he grinned and unslung the .22, and a moment later he was wading out of the muck with a dripping naked-tailed black thing depending from one hand, and she said, “What is it, a beaver?” and he said, “It’s a rat.”
For dinner that night, and she was hungry, ravenous, all her cells crying out for fuel, he cooked her a fricassee of muskrat in a sauce of stewed tomatoes from the can with rice and greens and a sweetish yellow dollop of the prime fat the guest of honor wears under his coat while enacting his murky rituals in the ponds and sloughs of the backcountry. To wash it down, they each had two bottles of homemade beer so strong it was like the depth charges she used to drink in college. It was the best meal she’d ever had. And she told Sess that as she sat on the bed and grinned while he washed the dishes at the stove—“I insist,” he said, “because you did them this morning, and that’s only fair”—and then he pulled out a harmonica and serenaded her and they wound up harmonizing on three separate run-throughs of “Oh Susannah,” “You Are My Sunshine” and “She Loves You” (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah).
It was past midnight and they were both giddy with the singing, the beer and the company that just kept lighting them up and lighting them up again, when she said, “So tell me about Jill.”
That stopped things right there. He was tipping a beer to his lips, having just concluded a story about the night last winter when the thermometer showed sixty-two below and he went out to dump the dishwater and it froze before it hit the ground with a sound of marbles spilling out of a bag
, and now he pulled the beer back and looked past her to the little window and beyond. “You don’t want to hear about that,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, “I do.”
“It’s nothing much. Nothing like you must have heard.”
“I haven’t heard anything,” she said, and then, to be truthful, because she had heard at least three versions of the story, the most disturbing and unfavorable of which had dripped like acid from the prejudicial lips of Howard Walpole, she added, “or hardly anything.”
“She was nothing like you,” he sighed. He got up from the table, took the lamp down from its hook and lit it. All his muscle seemed to have migrated to his neck, hard and attenuated, stripped away from the flesh. His face was heavy.
“Go ahead,” she said. “I want to hear it.”
Jill was young, just twenty-one, and he was young too—twenty-eight, at the time, and this was three years ago. He met her in Fairbanks, when he was tending bar in the winter after working a summer in the bush as a firefighter. He was drinking too much, sleeping late, living in a town that was like any other town and hardly even getting out to the Chena or the Nenana for fishing. He didn’t know what he wanted. Jill was a college girl, or had been before she met him and dropped out of the University of Alaska, and they spent the winter sleeping together and talking about the country, about getting away from everything and just living free.
She came with him, just after breakup, to the very cabin they were in now, helped him build it, in fact. Neither of them knew what they were doing, but they learned by their mistakes and they had a cache of store-bought food to get them through the winter of the first year, until they could fish and garden and hunt on their own—sixty-pound sacks of rice, lentils and cornmeal, butter in one-gallon cans, smoked fish, that sort of thing. And it was good for a while. But Jill just wasn’t built for the country—psychologically, that is. Once winter set in and the sun winked out she started to climb the walls, and anybody would have thought she was in prison, tried and condemned and held against her will. “I’m in for life,” she’d say in a voice that was dead and cremated to ash, “I’m a lifer. I’m a San Quentin drudge.” He was out, even in the coldest weather, stalking the woods for ptarmigan, porcupine, lynx, anything for the pot, but she just sat there by the stove, staring into the glow, reading the same books over and over—she must have read Silas Marner twenty times, and that would put anybody round the bend. She played solitaire till the cards wore out and fell to dust. And then she started carving the days into the wall, four vertical lines and a slash, just like a prisoner.
Pamela let him go on. It was therapeutic, she could see that, and the air had to be cleared, because if things worked out, she was going to take this girl’s place, and it would have been intolerable not knowing. Still, when he told her about the marks on the wall, he got up and leaned over her to run his finger across the bulge of the log she’d been resting her head against, and there they were, like cicatrices in a savage skin, the etchings of despair. The best she could do was throw out a question like a lifeline and cling to it: “So she was clinically depressed?”
“Cabin fever,” he said, sinking into the furs beside her, “a fatal case.” She offered her hand, but he wouldn’t take it. “It happens to a lot of people in the bush. Women especially. Women seem to need the company of other women more than men need other men—we’re more solitary. Like hermits or something. But you—you need to gossip and whatnot, right?”
She shrugged. “I suppose.”
“Of course, the men get pretty squirrelly out here too. You ever hear the one about the two trappers living in the high country outside of Eagle? Two coots, the kind that talk to themselves even when you see them in town for their semiannual visit? No? Well, anyway, it was February of a bitter winter and the one was half-mad for company, so he harnessed up his dogs and mushed thirty miles to where the other one was and the other man came to the door of his cabin and nodded at him in an inviting way and left the door open a crack. Well, the first man saw to his dogs and then came in without a word, shook out his parka and sat in a chair by the fire and just looked into the other man’s face for an hour or so until the other man put a pot of moose stew on to boil and they ate in silence. Then they sat and smoked their pipes and when it was time for bed the first man unrolled his sleeping bag on the floor and conked out. In the morning they had breakfast together—more moose stew, biscuits and coffee—and then the first man went out, harnessed his dogs and waved goodbye while the other man stood at the door of the cabin. And you know what? Neither one of them spoke a word the whole time, not hello or goodbye or mighty tasty stew or I hate the sight of your grizzled ugly face, you son of a bitch.”
“Instructive story,” she said. “Are you trying to scare me?”
Sess looked surprised. “No, not at all. Why would I want to do that?”
“So Jill,” she said, after a moment. “She got out?”
The stove creaked and sighed. The last of the sun laminated the back wall with the faintest, rinsed-out ribbon of pink. “What have you heard?” The voice was harsh in his throat. “That I’m some kind of Bluebeard or something?”
She trusted him. She liked him. She could even love him—she did love him, loved him already. “No,” she said in a voice so soft she could barely hear it herself.
“You know where I showed you the garden?”
She nodded.
“Jill went out there where we’d cleared all the trees and she stomped these huge letters in the snow, I mean letters ten feet high and five feet across. You know what they read—from the air, that is? JILL WANTS OUT. Jill wants out. You know how that humiliated me?” He went to the stove to pour another cup of coffee, and he even got so far as to lift the pot to his cup before he set it down again. “A week later this Cessna 180 equipped with skis lands on the frozen-up river and it’s Joe Bosky. He comes to the door. ‘You people having any trouble here?’ he says.”
“And that was the end of Jill.”
His voice had gone soft now, all the harshness washed out of it. “I never laid eyes on her again.”
The sun faded from the wall. From outside, thin with distance, came the cry of a wolf that died out in a feverish glissando until the dogs took it up. She could see them beyond the window, erect at their chains, noses pointed to the sky, and the sound they made was inharmonious and raw, expressive of some deep unquenchable sorrow, the sorrow of the stake and the chain and the harness. Sess said something then, and she didn’t hear the words, only the sound, till he repeated himself: “Do you really have to go?”
“I promised,” she said.
“The hell with your promise,” he said, and the dogs sent up a howl so plaintive it must have had the wolf smirking from his mountaintop.
“Howard Walpole,” she began, but Sess cut her off.
“Howard Walpole is shit,” he said, “and you know it and I know it. I’m the one. Tell me I’m the one.”
“It’s only three days,” she said. He wouldn’t look at her. He looked at the coffeepot, looked at the wall. The dogs howled. “Three days, Sess. Then I’ll know for sure.”
9
Framed against the high dun bank and the random aggregation of shacks and cabins that composed the riparian view of Boynton, Howard Walpole stood rooted in the mud in a pair of gum boots and grease-slick chino pants. He was waiting for them as they came round the broad bend of the river that gave onto town, and from the look of him, Sess figured he’d been waiting for hours, though the agreed-upon time was twelve noon and it couldn’t have been more than eleven-fifteen or eleven-thirty yet. It was an ugly day, overcast and close. The river was the color of the sky and the sky was the color of the primer you saw on pickups and wagons awaiting the benediction of paint. It was drizzling. The air smelled tainted, as if everything in the water, the woods and the sky had fallen down dead and gone to rot.
All the way down in the canoe Pamela kept chirping away about this or that—a moose in the shallows, an exp
losion of ducks, her mother’s bad feet and her sister’s reprobate of a boyfriend—but if he’d given her six words back it would have surprised him. He was feeling sour, sour and hateful, and he didn’t care if she knew it. He dug savagely at his paddle, sprinting the last two hundred yards as if he couldn’t wait to get rid of her, and in one compartment of his mind he was thinking he ought to take Howard Walpole aside and tell him what a pain in the ass she was, what a complete and utter screwup and bitch, but he knew it wouldn’t work. Howard—he was thirty-eight years old, with a head that was almost perfectly flat in the back as if he’d been hit with a board the moment he popped out of the womb—Howard was the sort of man who never threw anything away and never took anybody’s word for anything.
The canoe scraped gravel and Pamela hopped out, then let him sit as she lifted the bow up on shore. Howard was grinning, yellow teeth in a grizzled beard, and he’d shoved his begrimed engineer’s cap up off his eyebrows so you could see the pale band of flesh to his hairline where the sun never touched. “Howdy, Pamela,” he crowed, “enjoy your stay at the Harder palace?”
She said she had and he said, “Howdy, Sess,” and then he took Pamela’s backpack from her, tossed it onto the front seat of his big flat-bottomed boat with the twin Evinrude engines and held out a hand to help her aboard. “No sense in standing here in the rain,” he added, “when there’s a whole world out there to show you, and I don’t know what you got used to up there at the Harder palace, but my place is like a four-star hotel in comparison, so don’t you worry about a thing.”
Then he shoved off, the engines roared to life, and Pamela was a receding speck of color on the broad gray back of the river.
He knew he shouldn’t start drinking, knew he should turn around and paddle back upriver to his cabin, go out and clear brush along his trapline for the next three days, fish pike in the oxbows, put away some duck, but he found himself ambling past his shack and the various cabins of various people he knew and liked or disliked or was indifferent to, on up the main street, past the frame post office and the Nougat and the general store, in the direction of the Three Pup. He brought a whole new nation of mosquitoes with him, and while they sorted things out with the indigenous population, he ducked inside. Lynette was behind the bar, her eyes squinted against the smoke of the cigarette clenched between her teeth, and she was dealing cards to Richard Schrader as if dealing cards were the chief activity of the human species on this planet and why hurry to the end of the deck when you’d just have to deal them all over again? “Hey,” Richard said, without looking up. And then Skid Denton, who was in his usual seat at the end of the rectangular bar that doubled as a luncheonette counter, said, “Satisfaction Guaranteed or Your Money Back. Get your satisfaction there, Sess? Or you looking for a refund?”