by T. C. Boyle
Howard Walpole was different. The three days with him were part of the compact, the program she’d set herself, and though she knew Sess was the one, knew it even before she climbed into the canoe with him and felt his weight there behind her like the perfect counterpoise to her own, she had to go through with it, because that was the kind of woman she was. You make a promise, you keep it. That was how she felt. That was who she was. But Howard—Howard was stiff as a board. He shook her hand when she got in the boat, as if they were signatories to a solemn truce between two warring factions, and he never thought of brushing his cheek to hers or clasping her shoulders in a welcoming hug. He just gave her his hand, took a minute to taunt Sess and then cranked the throttle on his twin outboard engines.
The day was biting and sharp, flecks of foam riding the wavelets, a spatter of windblown rain in her face. She was up front and Howard Walpole was in back. The fiberglass hull slapped at the water, over and over again, slap, slap, slap, and the noise of the engines made conversation a chore. She held on, thinking how much nicer the canoe had been, the pace of it, the silent liquid progress that was no intrusion on the day, the river, the hovering birds and furtive mammals. “Nice boat!” she shouted back over her shoulder, just to be polite, just to say something, and Howard, a plug of tobacco distending one cheek and his smudged cap pulled down tight against the wind so that his head looked as if it had been preshrunk to fit it, just nodded. The trip took an hour. She didn’t say another word the whole way and neither did he.
When they got there, though, when the bow of the boat slid up the bank beneath his house and the dogs stammered out their elaborate greeting, Howard had a whole speech prepared. It was equal parts disclosure, pep talk and closer’s spiel, and he never looked her in the face the whole time he was delivering it, and he went on delivering it for the better part of the three days and two nights she was to spend in his company. He told her about his boat and his airplane and his house, about his gold claims and how he’d lay a moosehide in the sluice box so the hairs could pick up the finest particles, showed her a mayonnaise jar with thirty-two thousand dollars’ worth of gold flecks in it and asked her to lift it from the table and laughed to see her strain to do it. He talked through the dinner of black bear stewed in a mash of dried apples and prunes with a side dish of kippered salmon and pan-fried potatoes, talked till she yawned on the couch and kept talking as he laid a blanket over her and her eyes fell closed.
In the morning he woke her with talking, talk about his ailments—he’d broken his leg in three places just two years back, did she know that?—and talk about his dogs, the individual quirks and dietary predilections of each one, though he didn’t really mush dogs anymore like Sess Harder and some of the other throwbacks because the snow machine was a real hoot, didn’t she think so? Over breakfast it was his mother in Minneapolis; automobiles he’d owned; the evil, meretricious ways of his ex-wife, Irene; the insurance business—two years of his life down the drain with that laughable fraud of a con man’s scheme, and could she ever see anybody taking out term life and betting against their own death?—and an hour-long tirade against the United States government and the land grab they were about to perpetrate on all Alaskans in the name of the black gold at Prudhoe Bay.
He was a bore. A windy, ignorant, opinionated, half-cracked bore with real staying power and the lungs of a packhorse. And he was unattractive too, now that she got a good long look at him, with his dodging red-flecked eyes, the wispy hair poking out from beneath the cap and his hands laid out on the table like slabs of boiled meat. All right, she was resigned to it, resigned to three days and two nights of boredom, and by the second hour of the first day she’d begun to see it as a kind of purifying ritual, a mortification of the flesh and the spirit to make herself worthy of Sess Harder, who was before her now like a shining promise. She ate the food Howard Walpole gave her. She looked at his dogs, his snow machines, his floatplane, his boat, his cache, his smokehouse. She answered when he paused at the end of a paragraph to put a rhetorical question to her and she fought off his advances. “Sex,” he said to her after dinner on the first night, and to the best of her recollection they’d been talking about two-stroke engines to this point, “you like sex? Because I do. And that’s the thing I miss out here most of all—just that, sex.” He paused a moment, his eyes charging round the room like scattershot. “And I’m very sex-u-al, if you know what I mean.”
On the last day, no more than an hour before they were scheduled to plow back up the river so she could get on with the rest of her life, he appeared in the doorway of the main room where she was sunk into the easy chair reading a back issue of Argosy for the second time in as many days and enjoying the briefest respite from the sound of his voice. “Pamela,” he said in a low glottal wheeze, “Pamela, look at me.” She glanced up, and she saw that he was naked but for his socks and the greasy cap, naked and erect and pulling at himself like a dairy farmer working at the long maculated teat of a cow. It took her a minute, the shock of it settling into her legs like a burden of the blood, and then she was up out of the chair and reaching for the fire poker. All she said was, “Put that thing away,” and in the next instant Howard was ducking out of sight, the bulb of his hand blooming with the waxy sheen of the stuff he’d dredged up out of himself as if it were gold dredged from the tailings of an abandoned claim.
And why was she thinking about that now? Because now it was appropriate, now was the time. She was a married woman and that man with the rigid back and the neck like a fireplug fooling with something in the other room was her husband and she could indulge her wildest fantasies, do anything she wanted—stroke him, suck him—and not feel dirty. This was her wedding night. This was the consummation of all those groping, panting hours and the rigor of self-control that was fiercer than any desire. “Sess,” she said, and she unfastened the brassiere and dropped it to the floor too, “Sess, look at me.”
He turned round then, her husband, and in his hand the thing he was fumbling with, shiny foil, the skin-like droop of plastic. “I was just—” he said, and she watched his face, watched his eyes, as he warmed to this new vision of her standing there in nothing but the thinnest pearly evanescent flap of Oswalt’s silk. “I couldn’t—I mean, I tore the thing getting it out of the package . . .”
She wanted to laugh. “You don’t need that thing,” she said, spreading her arms wide, “you’ll never need it, ever again. Don’t you realize? I’m your wife.”
They were up early, both of them, bags packed, the canoe loaded to the gunwales with wedding gifts, and they breakfasted on whatever came to hand (Sess had a ham, Swiss and caribou-tongue sandwich on half a loaf of the French bread her sister had brought with her from Anchorage; she had a plate of leftover three-bean salad, marinated artichoke hearts, a wedge of iceberg lettuce and a scoop of potato salad to round it off). She hadn’t slept—or she had, off and on, but in a way that was more like a waking dream than any sleep she’d ever experienced, and she couldn’t stop reaching out for him, running a hand down the slope of his arm or over the mysterious topography of the shoulder that lay pressed to hers. She was an explorer, that was what she was, learning the lay of the land, creating it anew all over again, and then again.
He’d made love to her twice under the influence of the tireless copper sun that refused to set on her wedding day, the sun that irradiated the squared-off edges of the shades and painted the foot of the bed as if it existed for them alone, and he was nothing like Fred Stines or Eric Kresten or the straining intent hot-faced college boys whose idea of love was a purely mechanical thing, a kind of exercise, like squat thrusts or push-ups. No. He was patient. Loving. Grateful. He made her feel more than just wanted—he made her feel as if she were the center of the universe. She watched him sleep as the sun dipped behind the hills and the shades went gray with the dusk that wanted to be night, and then she woke him when it came back up and he made love to her again.
But now it was seven A.M. and they straighten
ed up the cabin, made the bed, stowed the leftovers in Richard’s icebox and went out hand in hand to the canoe. The sun flooded the trees, the river was a cauldron of light. Birds nattered. A pair of geese shot up off the water and Sess pointed to the black burr of a porcupine caught in the crown of a birch up the shore. And then they were paddling, in concert, the easy rhythmic accommodation of man and wife, paddling as if they’d been a team forever.
Everything looked new to her, every leaf, every turning, the river that resisted her paddle and re-created itself moment by moment. Her brain was flooded with endorphins. She was lighter than air. They talked in a hush, their soft, unhurried voices carrying out over the water, and they talked of practical things, of building a fish wheel, expanding the cabin, putting up a greenhouse for the tomatoes, of scattering seed for zinnias, marigolds, pansies and snapdragons. And the dogs. “The first thing I’m going to do is teach you to mush,” he told her, “so you can run the trapline with me, be my partner. You always wanted to be my partner, didn’t you? Right from the start?”
Her answer was a smile, delivered over her right shoulder as the paddle slid back from the stroke. Sure she was his partner—she’d chosen him, hadn’t she? Wasn’t that what this was all about? She’d feed the dogs, she’d mush them, she’d stretch and tan hides, repair the rags of his clothes, feed him, keep him warm at night, and he’d hold her and take care of her in turn. That was her life, spinning out into the future, and it was as fixed and certain as anything on this earth ever can be.
After a time the churning milk of the Yukon gave way to the pellucid Thirtymile, and the cabin—their home—came into view like the last outpost of civilization in a world gone over to nature. The canoe cut across the current and the cabin loomed larger. Everything was still. Still and lush. She wanted to feel the silence, wanted to relax into it, but suddenly Sess was digging at the paddle in a kind of frenzy, out of sync with her for the first time, fighting it, ramming the canoe forward as if the river had caught fire. “The dogs,” he said.
And then it came to her: the dogs were silent. Two days at their stakes and no one home—they should have had their noses to the sky, expressing their impatience and their joy. But they were silent. Worse: they were lying still in the weeds, the chains like nooses at their throats. And when she and Sess got there, when they’d beached the canoe and sprinted up the bank with no breath left in them, the carcasses were already stiffening round the ragged dark openings where the bullets had gone to shelter.
PART THREE
DRUID DAY
One pill makes you larger, And one pill makes you small. And the ones that mother gives you Don’t do anything at all.
—Grace Slick, “White Rabbit”
11
Star didn’t have a mantra on this particular morning, no nonsense syllables or song lyrics ricocheting around her head while the sun sang in the windows over the sink and thirty-two fresh-cracked and beaten eggs fluffed in the pan. Or pans. Four of them, cast-iron, black as char—four pans, four burners, all balky. Posters climbed the walls, four Beatles, three Youngbloods, five Rolling Stones. Basil, rosemary, tarragon and lemongrass. Clay pots. A big spill of green. She was crumbling goat cheese over each of the pans, the fragrance rising, the spatula working, fold and stir, fold and stir. At her elbow, the chopping block, and this morning it had a wet sheen to it, the residue of the tomatoes, peppers and onions she and Merry had diced while Lydia squeezed oranges and Maya pulled biscuits from the oven. On the table, the tin plates were stacked high and the silverware awaited the rush in two big plastic tubs that had once held Blue Bonnet margarine. For napkins, there was a roll of paper towels, just like at Camp Minewa.
Numbers were important this morning, that’s what it was—she was into numbers, two dogs stretched out on the floor, four women in the kitchen (and she wasn’t going to call them chicks, because that was just stupid, that was demeaning and belittling, no matter what Ronnie said), two goats under the tree, forty-three people lined up for breakfast and one sun, fat and glowing, making a magical thing of the flat black grid of the screen door. She scrambled the eggs, one pan, two pans, three pans, four, the scent of the onions competing with the biscuits until the whole room was dense with it and Jiminy stuck his head in the door. “Ready yet?” he wanted to know. “One more minute,” she said, and she loved this, this place and this moment, more than she’d loved anything in her life, “sixty short tiny little expiring seconds—you can start counting them off on your fingers.”
To Merry, at her shoulder, she said, “Cats and chicks, whoever invented that—I mean, those terms? Isn’t it stupid? I mean cats are predatory, they’re tough and—”
“Unreliable?” Merry said, leaning in with a smile and the crudely rolled, fat-in-the-middle joint they’d been sharing. She held it to Star’s lips while Star plied the spatula and finessed the pans. “Always catting around? Spraying the furniture? Sharpening their claws?”
“Right, that’s what I mean. They name sports teams after cats, the Tigers, the Nittany Lions, but what are chicks? Little fluffy helpless things that come out of eggs.”
“But cute, right?”
“I don’t want to be cute.”
Merry was cutting bread into inch-thick slices. Her hair was involved with her hands, the cutting board, and she whipped it back with a flick of her neck. “What do you want to be, then—tough?”
The eggs tumbled out of the pans and into a matching pair of big fluted ceramic bowls lovingly fabricated by Harmony and Alice, Drop City’s resident potters. Star shifted her face away from the swirl of steam and called out, “It’s ready!” then tuned back in. “Yeah, sure—I’ll settle for tough. It’s a whole lot better than helpless. Or predatory, maybe. Predatory’s even better.”
“Like a cat?”
But that was too much, and they were both giggling and rubbing at their eyes and the suddenly itching tips of their noses as they served up eggs, first to Jiminy, and then to all the rest of their brothers and sisters, as Drop City and special guests filed by, tin plates in hand. Jiminy was almost always first in line because he was the hungriest, skinny as a concentration camp survivor but he could out-eat anybody Star had ever seen, including her brother Sam, who played left tackle on the high school football team and wore size fourteen shoes. Two total strangers were next in line, and then it was Reba and Alfredo and the kids, Reba looking hard and old in the morning light, her hair like dried weeds, her eyes blunted and lifeless. When she smiled—and she wasn’t smiling now, because her lips were two dead things pressed one atop the other—a whole deep rutted floodplain of lines and gouges swallowed her eyes, as if she’d already used up her quotient of joy and from now on out every laugh was going to cost her. “Che doesn’t like eggs,” she announced, “—I think he’s allergic to albumin. Maybe just give me some toast and I’ll smear it with honey or something.”
Che stood there beside her, looking numbed-out, dirty T-shirt, dirty feet, a frizz of wild sun-bleached hair and two eyes that were like blips on a radar screen. “That what you want, baby,” Reba said, bending to him, “—honey and toast?”
“I want honey,” Sunshine said in a voice that was like the scratching of a scab, rough and low, with no real expectation of relief. She was three years old. She stood just behind her brother, close enough so that the bulge of her bare abdomen brushed the hem of his shirt. Her eyes were soft, brimming, hopeless. Star tried to give her a smile, because that was what you were supposed to do when you came across a kid—And isn’t she cute, or is it a he? Or an it?—but children made her feel awkward and uneasy, unnatural even. How could she, a woman, tell anybody she didn’t want children, didn’t relate to them, didn’t even really like them? Children were nothing but dead weight as far as she was concerned, red-faced yowling little aliens that sucked the life right out of you, and if you ever had any dreams of living for yourself, you could forget them when you had kids, because from then and forever you were just somebody’s mother. And what was wrong with bi
rth control? The Pill? Ball all you want, but just don’t forget to take your pill every morning. Star didn’t get it. She really didn’t.
At any rate, she tried for a smile, and Reba gave her an exasperated look before swinging round on her daughter and plucking at her arm with two fingers molded into pincers, just like Star’s mother, just like everybody’s mother, and that brought her back, way back, as if she were trapped in a home movie. “You eat your eggs and don’t you dare start in because I’m in no mood this morning,” Reba hissed, “let me tell you—”
The girl, the kid, Sunshine—there she stood, not in the least moved by the unstated threat. Her brother fell into himself, utterly deranged by the hour, the place, life on this bewildering turned-on planet, and she looked at him as if she didn’t recognize him. In her tiny hopeless scratch of a voice, she said: “I want juice.”
“Milk,” Reba responded automatically. People at the back of the line were drifting along in their own planetary orbits, bells, beards, beads, morning jokes, easy soothing rhythms, but even they began to look up to see what the delay was.
The tiny voice: “Juice.”
And now Star intervened, because the juice—well, this was Druid Day, a celebration for the summer solstice, and the juice, fresh-squeezed by Lydia and as pure and sweet and organically salutary as anything you could ever hope to find anywhere in the whole golden sun-struck state of California, was laced with acid, LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide, because everybody at Drop City was going to commune with their inner selves today, all of them, in a concerted effort to raise the consciousness of the planet by one tiny fraction of a degree. “But honey, the juice isn’t good today, you won’t like it—”