Drop City

by T. C. Boyle

  His irritation flashed up again. “What are you talking about?”

  “The dogs. We can buy dogs. Go back to Boynton. Fairbanks. Wherever.”

  “What, and put an ad in the paper? ‘Wanted, trained sled dogs for trapline’? I’d be the joke of the town. I’d never live it down, never. Besides, nobody traps anymore, nobody hardly even mushes.”

  She gave him a look he hadn’t seen before, hard lips, a dual crease come to rest between her perfect eyes. “Everybody has dogs,” she insisted, “and everybody has litters. You ever been to Kiana or Noorvik or any of the Eskimo villages? Because there’s five dogs to every man, woman and child up there.”

  “Okay, so let me get this straight—we’re supposed to fly to some Eskimo village and buy dogs and fly them back in a four-seater Cessna?”

  “I’m not saying that. I’m saying we could ask around Boynton. Or Fairbanks.”

  Every sort of emotion was at war inside him, love, hate, sorrow, grief. “Look,” he said, “look, let’s just drop it.”

  And so what did he do? He drank too much. On her first night as his wife in his hand-hewn cabin in the middle of nowhere, when she must have been as confused and disoriented and as full of second-guesses and doubts as any bride who’d ever leapt without looking and found herself in a strange place with a man who was revealing himself to be stranger and stranger by the minute, he finished off the bottle of wedding wine and two pitchers of beer and insisted on digging out his quart bottle of Hudson Bay rum, 150 proof, and throwing back flaming shots till the sun fell down in back of the hills. At first she matched him, cup for cup, shot for shot—she was a good drinker, Pamela, with real endurance, strong in every way—but finally her eyes lost their focus and he was the only one talking.

  “You want to know about trapping?” he was saying, lecturing now, whether she wanted to hear it or not. “I’ll tell you about trapping.”

  And he told her. Told her about the work Roy Sender had put into clearing forty-some-odd miles of paths through the trackless waste, all the way up one side of the Thirtymile and each of its attendant tributaries, and then down the other, a nine-day loop tramped in weather so bitter it would have killed anybody who was less than superhuman, and Roy Sender working the line till he was seventy-one years old. Roy had taken him under his wing, taught him how to make his sets for every kind of animal, to build a sled of birch eight feet long and no wider than his own shoulders, to skin out lynx and fox and ermine and make baits that were little atom bombs of stink designed to prick the nose and perk the ears of every predator in the country. He was a bachelor—a coot—cranky as a Ford with two cylinders missing, chewing him out and cursing him every step of the way, a man no woman had ever wanted to waste her time on, and he lived like a coot, denned up all winter in his cabin where he spent his time rearranging his things and making his living space as comfortable and squared-away as the picture of some low-slung and wood-gleaming saloon in a sailing ship. Sess sat at the feet of the coot of all coots, glad to be in his crusty company, and after the months sailed off over the horizon and they began to talk in seasons, seasons stretching to years, the old man warmed to him.

  “Why don’t you build down at the mouth of the river there?” he said one spring night with the snow coming down like ticker tape and Sess camped in a canvas tent out back of the cabin. “Plenty of country for you here and the snowshoes coming up on their ten-year boom so there’ll be plenty of fur for everybody, if anybody even wants it anymore. Hell, I don’t have to tell you I’m not the man I used to be, you follow me? I got my knee, my back, my lungs for shitsake that make me feel like I’m drowning all the time—all of that, the price of getting old. And I get thinking about all the hard work I’ve put into this country and thinking it’s all going to waste.”

  That was Roy Sender, that was his blessing. And to think of it now, out here in the cabin that had materialized out of the hopeful solicitation of that night—out here with his wife, with Pamela—was enough to stop him up with an emotion so transcendent he could barely draw his next breath. Suddenly he was sentimental, the glass of him half-filled with sorrow and half with joy. Suddenly, he was drunk.

  Pamela was two feet from him, sitting there at the table with her chin propped up on two fists, and her eyes were slipping south. Something rustled in the bush out back of the garden, and it wasn’t the dogs—the dogs wouldn’t be rustling anymore. He poured another shot of rum, struck a match and watched the blue flame flicker atop it before throwing it back. The night was mild, still mild, and the mosquitoes hadn’t come on yet. Maybe they were observing a nuptial truce, maybe that was it, he thought. Damn decent of them too. He’d have to remember that next time he crushed half a dozen of them on his forearm or temple—live and let live, right? “Pamela,” he said, and her eyes flashed open.

  “I’m drunk, Sess,” she said. “I’m afraid I’ve gone and got drunk here.” And she smiled, a slow, weary, sanctified smile. “It’s all your fault. Bringing a girl out here, getting her drunk. I’ll bet you think I’m easy, don’t you, huh?”

  He gave her the smile back, reached out for her hand and closed it in his own. He didn’t want to talk anymore, all that fuel was gone from him now, didn’t want to tell her how it felt the first time he walked the trapline and found a wolf like a big dog caught by one half-gnawed foot in a double-spring Newhouse trap intended for fox and how it just sat there staring at him out of its yellow eyes as if it couldn’t comprehend the way the country had turned on it in this cold evil unnatural way and how he’d felt when he shot it and missed killing it and shot it again and again till the pelt was ruined and a hundred and ten pounds of raw wilderness lay spouting arterial blood at his feet, or how Roy Sender had taught him to rap a trapped fisher or ermine across the snout with a stick and then jerk at its heartstrings till the heart came loose from its moorings and the animal went limp without spoiling the fur. He didn’t tell her he was just one more predator, one more killer, as useless as the wind through the trees, taking life to feed his own. He didn’t tell her any of that. “You want to go to bed now,” is what he said, “I can see that. You want your man in your arms. You want to be naked.”

  She moved in close, threw an arm over his shoulder and pressed her forehead to his so that he couldn’t see anything of her but her eyes, huge eyes, pale as water. “I’ll tell you a secret,” she whispered, and the s-sound went slushy on her. “I am easy. For you. Only for you, Sess Harder.”

  He was very drunk. Profoundly drunk, but what did that mean, anyway? Profoundly drunk? That he was ready to go deep, get deep, be deep? Her breath, fecund with wine, with smoked and processed ham, with his beer and what lay at the very essence of her, was a thing that stirred him. He was instantly hard. His breath mingled with hers. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Everything,” she said.

  In the morning it was all right. He hadn’t got this far without adversity, hadn’t felled the trees for his own cabin and trapped two winters and sold the furs and refused unemployment and food stamps and any kind of institutional handout or government tit without things going radically wrong at one time or another. Adversity hardened him, annealed him. It made him rise to the challenge and beat it back till he knew in his own mind that there was no man like him in all the country, nobody tougher, more resourceful, more independent. The dogs were dead. He would get new ones. And when the time came, when he had the leisure and the inclination, he would settle his scores.

  But now it was morning and the cabin was lit by a thick wedge of sun that held the window over the bed in its grip and set fire to the jars of honey on the shelf behind the stove. He lay there a minute, a long minute, Pamela’s sweet palpable form pressed to his till they were like two spoons in a drawer, and watched the sun on the wall as if he’d been locked in a closet all his life and never seen anything like it before. They’d slept late, but that was the way it was in summer—you stayed up half the night with the sun looping overhead and then slept in till the next da
y took hold of you. He had a hangover—and the half-formed feeling of shame and unworthiness that goes with it—but he wasn’t going to let it affect him, not one iota. Today was going to be Pamela’s day, all day, a day that would make up for yesterday, and if she wanted to just sit naked in the sun and weave slips of forget-me-nots or bluebells into her pubic hair like Lady Chatterley (another of his enduring fantasies), then that was all right with him. Of course, just thinking about it got him hard and he woke her to the slow gentle propulsion of his lovemaking.

  And what did she want to do after he served her a plate of eggs, bacon and potatoes fried in four tablespoons of semi-rancid lard whose origins even he suspected? She wanted to do, to make, to get going on the rest of their lives, setting one brick atop another—or log, as the case may be. “Show me where the add-on goes,” she said, and she was already out the door, in the knee-high weed, pacing off a room she could see in her mind, a cleaner, airier space that would more than double what they had and give them a proper bedroom with a real and actual freestanding bed in it. And shelves, miles of shelves, and built-in drawers maybe. Bentwood rockers. Little tables. She had that little-table look in her eye, he could see it, could see the way she was calculating.

  “You want to catch the sun,” he said.

  She shaded her eyes with the slab of her hand and grinned at him. Wildflowers rose to her shins. Her skin glistened like buttered toast. He thought he’d never seen a picture so ready for framing. “So we build out to the east, then?”

  “Depends on whether you like morning sun or afternoon. Of course, in the winter, we’re talking moonlight. You ever been out here in winter—away from town, I mean?” He was thinking of Jill now, Jill wants out. Everybody wanted out when the night set in, the night that never let up, when the cabin walls seemed to shrink till you felt like you were in one of those Flash Gordon serials where the walls came together like a vise to squeeze the pulp out of you. Flash always managed to escape, though. So did the better part of the women who came into the country, which was why there were three bush-crazy bachelors for every female in Boynton. The night took inner resources, and most people, women especially, didn’t have anything more than outer resources to keep them going—shopping, gossip and restaurants with sconces on the walls, to be specific.

  “I’ve been to Boynton,” she said. “I’m from Anchorage.”

  He wanted to explain to her that that wasn’t enough, that was nothing, because in a town or a city you could always go to the bar or to a movie or watch TV, and sure, you wanted to see some sunshine, and maybe you flew to Hawaii, if you had the wherewithal, but the fact that it was dark day and night outside your gas-heated apartment’s double-paned windows was no more than an afterthought. He wanted to tell her about the couple Jill had known who thought they’d try pioneering in an old miner’s cabin up along the Porcupine River drainage and nearly fucked themselves to death out of sheer boredom, four, five, six times a day, till they were both rubbed to the consistency of flank steak and came out of there in spring looking like survivors of a concentration camp. After which they got divorced and probably went off to work in the doughnut industry. He held his peace, though, because she was too pretty and too pleased with herself and this wasn’t the time or the place. This was the time for optimism, for love—for beginnings, not endings.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “I guess morning sun. What about you?”

  “Afternoon sun’s my ticket, which is why I put that little window to the west over there, but then your weather’s coming down out of the northwest, and you can never get the window caulked up tight enough, not when the wind starts blowing.”

  She wasn’t listening. She’d balanced herself on one sylphine leg, a bare foot braced against her knee in the pose of a wading bird. She was looking off to the south, where a stand of black spruce clawed at the sky a hundred soggy yards off. “Is that what we’re going to cut, that stand over there?” she said.

  He came up to her then, took hold of her, rocked her in his arms. The trees were two hundred years old, at least, though they were no taller and no bigger around than fifteen-year plantation pines in the lower forty-eight. “I don’t know,” he said, “those trees are awful pretty to look at. I thought we’d go upriver, maybe float some logs down like they did in the lumberjack days.”

  “You’ve done that?”

  No, he hadn’t. He’d taken the wood for the present cabin from what was at hand, but he justified that to himself on the grounds that a cabin needed a clearing to stand in, and there were the stumps out there in the circumvallate yard, buried in fireweed, monkshood and yarrow. But it seemed like an idea, and he could see the two of them working side by side across the river from Roy’s old place, maybe, he felling the trees and she knocking back the branches, and then just rolling them into the river and guiding them down with the canoe and some rope and maybe the gaff or a notched pole. It would be more work, especially down at this end, because the logs would take on water weight and they’d be a bitch to drag uphill, but then they’d need to dry out and season anyway. “Sure,” he said, “sure. It’s no big deal. Especially now I have a royally tough bushwoman to do it all for me.”

  For the next two weeks, he forgot all about his dead dogs, or at least he tried to. He and Pamela went up the Thirtymile each day and took white spruce off the riverbank for the roof poles, and black spruce that was maybe ten inches in diameter (and growing from seed when George Washington wasn’t even born yet) from the hills stacked up in back of it. They packed a lunch and sometimes a supper too, and twice they camped under the stars in a steady drizzle of mosquitoes. The trees went down like cardboard and Pamela hacked tirelessly at the branches with a hatchet, the little-table look in her eyes day and night. They both felt the work, in their arms and shoulders and the rawness of their hands that pussed up, blistered over and toughened, and though they were exhausted by the time they quit for the night—sometimes as late as eight or nine—they found time to make love, in a sleeping bag or right out there on the sandy bank of the river, as if they’d invented the whole idea of sex and had to keep trying it out to make sure they’d got it right.

  At the end of those two weeks they had a pretty fair collection of logs hauled up on the bar that fronted the cabin, and they were feeling pretty good about themselves, or at least that was the way Sess saw it. Pamela seemed to be enjoying herself, and never mind that she was a city girl and had her degree and could have been tanning herself at some resort on the Côte d’Or. She worked like a man, like two men, and she never stinted and never said quit until he did. And when the logs hung up on rocks or sleepers, as they invariably did, she was as likely as he to plunge chest-deep into the scour of forty-five-degree water to free them.

  They were sitting there atop their log pile at the end of the last evening’s run, forking up squares of the cold macaroni, tuna and cheese she’d made in the glare of morning, and looking up to the cabin where these logs would fit right into place, the worst part of the work behind them, when Pamela, in her khaki shorts and too-tight T-shirt, with her lumberman’s hands and her hair pulled back tight, paused between bites and said it was time to go into town.

  He gave her a look. The logs had to be peeled with an adze, hauled up the hill and stacked to dry, then notched and set in place. Then chinked. Then the roof had to go up and they’d both of them bust a double hernia working the center pole into place, if women got hernias, that is. “What for?” he said.

  “And I don’t just mean Boynton.”

  “You want to go all the way into Fairbanks?”

  She just nodded.

  “Okay,” he said, and he would have driven her to Topeka and back if that was what she wanted, “I’ll give it another try. What for? Shopping?”

  “Oh, that’s part of it,” she said, setting her plate aside. She perched atop the pile of river-run logs like a genie, as if all she’d had to do was snap her fingers to make them appear. “I do want some things to feminize that coot’s den
of yours, and stock up on groceries too—we might be eating moose all winter, but I see nothing wrong with some stewed vegetables, rice, condiments, pickles and all the rest to go with it. Lasagna. Spaghetti. Hershey bars. Saltwater taffy. Marshmallows.”

  He pushed himself up, stretched his legs—he’d been sitting in one place too long and he felt the stiffness radiate from his backside and down both his thighs. “So that’s it, marshmallows. The cat’s out of the bag. Me and my wife are going to the big city for marshmallows.”

  She gave him a grin that made him feel all over again what he already suspected—that he was no longer in charge of his own life and never again would be. “That’s right,” she said, and paused to watch a cloud shaped like a wedding ring—or maybe a noose—blow over. “We’re going to town for marshmallows.” Then her voice dropped and the grin disappeared. “And dogs. Don’t you think it’s time?”

  They left for Boynton at six the next morning, and by eight-thirty they were beaching the canoe and striding hand in hand up the hill to the shack. And that was an odd feeling for both of them—a sentimental feeling, nostalgic already. The vegetation was trampled in a wide oval where the dancing had gone on, and the odd bottle or spangle of confetti caught the sun from clumps of fireweed along the margins, artifacts of the ritual they’d enacted there two weeks ago. You could see where the birds had been at the flung rice, filling their crops to bursting, and there was a crescent-shaped depression where the barbecue pit had been. It was filled with cold white ash, through which scraps of charred bone protruded like the trunks of miniature trees in a burned-over forest, and the ash was crisscrossed with the tracks of weasel and ground squirrel. All the rest was gone, like a gypsy circus, like a magic act. “It was one hell of a party,” Sess said, “and I bet nobody’s going to forget it.”

  “Right,” she said, giving him a sidelong look. “Till the next one.”