Drop City

by T. C. Boyle

  They poked aimlessly around the shack for a few minutes, silently taking inventory and setting aside things—tools, mainly—they might want to haul back up to the cabin, and then they leaned into the screen door at Richard Schrader’s place and chorused his name until it became apparent that he was either dead and stuffed or out somewhere on business. His pickup stood in the front yard—the pickup that was essential to the expedition under way since Pamela’s Gremlin now belonged to the short-order cook at the Northern Lights Diner on C Street in downtown Anchorage and Sess hadn’t owned a car in three years—and so they reasoned he hadn’t gone far. They further reasoned that they deserved a drink after a beerless run down the river under a spitting sky, and Pamela wanted to call her mother to make sure she’d got home safe and to reassure her that all the tricky business of love had worked out to her satisfaction. And Sess was fine with that. He was fine with everything. The rain would be good for the garden, they’d just put in two weeks’ work that was like no honeymoon anybody ever spent, there were some faces at the Three Pup and the Nougat he wouldn’t mind reacquainting himself with in the afterglow of the wedding, and though he wouldn’t breathe a word of it to anybody, he was going to need to acquire some dogs, and Fairbanks was the place to do it, where nobody would be asking any questions.

  He dropped Pamela at the general store, where Wetzel Setzler had a ham radio set up to patch into the phone lines Bell Telephone so generously provided for everybody but the renegades, anarchists, xenophobes and wild hairs who chose to live at the dead and final end of the last road in the country, and then he ambled over to the Nougat, just to stick his head in the door. He had no expectation of running into Joe Bosky, because Joe Bosky was a coward and a backstabber and he wouldn’t show his face after what he’d done, but Sess wouldn’t mind scaring up Richard to see what the chances of borrowing the pickup were.

  The Nougat featured the same setup as the Three Pup, only it was half the size, didn’t have a kitchen and limited its offerings to booze and potato chips out of the eight-ounce bag, with cellophane-wrapped beer nuts and stale pretzels for the connoisseurs. A pair of mounted caribou heads stood watch over the bar and a moose with soot-blackened jowls presided over the woodstove. Clarence Ford, who owned the establishment, had meant to call it “The Nugget,” but orthography wasn’t his strong suit.

  When Sess stepped into the early-morning gloom of the place, there was nobody there but Iron Steve and an Indian he didn’t recognize, both of them passed out at the bar. Wetzel Setzler’s youngest, Solly, was in the back room, rattling bottles around in their slit-top cardboard boxes and making notations on a steno pad. Six hundred billion flies—at least—rumbled against the windowpanes and made a collective noise like a cello at mid-range. Iron Steve’s breathing was slow and stertorous, every second breath catching on the horns of a snore. The whole place smelled of extinguished cigarettes—old extinguished cigarettes—and it was a sad smell, a reminder of all the traffic that had gone down here, the elbows propped, the glasses drained, the arguments, the bullshit, the women won and women lost. At quarter past nine in the morning, to a dogless man with his lungs full of sweet river air, it was almost depressing.

  “Hey, Solly,” Sess called in an exaggerated whisper, lest he should wake anybody prematurely, “can a man get a beer out here? Or is this the place people come to die of thirst?”

  Solly Setzler was twenty-four years old, with his father’s ski-slope shoulders, milky eyes and colorless eyebrows, and nobody really thought it odd that he worked for the competition because it was a kind of miracle that anybody at all would want to stand behind the bar of a roadhouse this time of year. His hair was a miracle in itself, the exact color of fiberglass insulation, and his eyes lacked a human sheen. He’d been home-schooled, and he was as misinformed, brooding and ignorant as anybody Sess had ever met, especially anybody that young. Now he looked up with a wrung-out neck, like a bird in the nest craning for a grub in the parental beak. “Sess,” he said, looking lost in the bar he’d been working for three years, as if he’d awakened there out of a dream, “I thought you went upriver.”

  He didn’t know where Richard Schrader was, but he located an Oly and cracked it and never thought to offer up a celebratory shot for the newlywed, which Sess would have declined in any case because it was early yet and he had a drive ahead of him and all the responsibilities of a married man who couldn’t just come into town and go on a bender like some talk-starved bush crazy with ingrown toenails and hair coming out his ears and nostrils.

  At the Three Pup, he ran into Skid Denton, who seemed to have changed his allegiance from the Nougat, at least since Lynette had come to town. Skid Denton was having a breakfast of steak and eggs drowned in Tabasco and chopped onion, along with home fries, toast and a mug of beer with a shot of tomato juice in it—“Bloody beer,” he called it, whenever anybody bothered to ask, “—it’s how I get my vitamin C.” He looked up from his plate to inform Sess that Richard Schrader had gone downriver to his fish camp in the expectation that the kings would be running any day now. Lynette, slouching over the bar so that her sidearm rode up her skinny hip, confirmed the intelligence. “Some tourist,” she said, as if she’d lived here fifty years, “caught a thirty-two pounder right off the gravel bar out there not two days ago. Or was it three?”

  He had another Oly, just to balance out the one he’d thrown down at the Nougat—spread the trade around, that was his motto—and nobody offered to buy him a celebratory shot here either, and that was just fine, as per his resolution, so he went back up the road into town to check on Pamela at the general store. He wanted to tell her the bad news—no truck available—and let her stock up on what she would, because if they weren’t going to Fairbanks where there was free and open competition, they’d have to pay Wetzel Setzler’s captive prices, at least for now. Of course, in the winter they wouldn’t have any choice, and if they didn’t have dogs they wouldn’t be sledding down the river to Boynton in any case, so there would be no picking up the odd forty-ounce can of Greek olives that you could expire for the want of or socializing at the roadhouse or at Richard’s or anyplace else.

  But then, two beers sitting pleasantly on his stomach, a light breeze off the river ruffling his hair as he put one foot in front of the other and the near shacks of the paint-blistered town rose up to greet him like so many old friends and boon companions, he had a thought involving a prime 1965 fastback Mustang he just happened to know about. It was a criminal thought, but then one good criminal act deserved another, didn’t it?

  17

  To Pamela’s mind, the inside of the general store was a perfect example of order in chaos. She’d always believed in the kind of probity that comes of sparseness and the ascetic lifestyle, and she’d kept her Anchorage apartment free of the clutter and kitsch that dominated her friends’ places—the soapstone and walrus tusk carvings, the polished caribou racks, taxidermy displays and native scenes in birchbark frames, not to mention the stereos and Crock-Pots and closets full of shoes, handbags, cableknit sweaters and beaded mukluks. Things oppressed her. Man-made things, trinkets and gizmos and the newest and the latest, all the incalculable piles of junk every good red-blooded American needed to survive. She wasn’t buying into it, and she never had. What she admired was the kind of self-sufficiency of the early prospectors who thought nothing of going out for a month at a time with little more than a gun, a length of fishing line, a sack of rice, six ounces of salt and some loose tea in a tin. Strip it down to the basics. Live off what the land gives you.

  Still, she had to admire what Wetzel Setzler had done with the two low-slung rooms of the big blackened overblown log structure that dominated the main street—the only street, really—of Boynton. Sess had told her the place was a remnant from the time at the turn of the century when Boynton boasted twelve hundred people, an opera house and twenty-eight saloons and the sourdoughs’ pans were still showing color along the Kandik and the Charley, a time when the Northern Navigation Co
mpany ran thirty-two stern-wheel steamboats up and down the river to accommodate the traffic, and that made her wonder all the more what these hordes of people were thinking when they came swarming into a territory they didn’t know the first thing about. But then she already knew the answer: rape and plunder, that was what they were thinking, and nothing beyond. Take the gold out of the country, take the meat, take the furs, and then fold up your tents and vanish to Cleveland, to Sacramento, to Montpelier and Miami Beach.

  Wetzel Setzler probably had three thousand items on display, from spark plugs, cartridges, fishing lures, beaver traps and crescent wrenches to maraschino cherries, insulated socks, overalls, canned wax beans, hard liquor and sixteen different varieties of candy and gum, and every one of them in its separate bin and clearly marked with a price in hand-printed block letters so uniform they might have been stamped on by the manufacturer. There was a stove in the middle of the place with a couple of chairs set round it, a dangle of things trailing from hooks nailed into the overhead beams and a glass-front cooler with soft drinks, canned beer and even milk, butter and whipping cream brought in once a week from a supermarket in Fairbanks and sold at three times the price. If it weren’t for the cooler the place could have jumped right out of the pages of a book of old-time photos or maybe even daguerreotypes, the kind of thing her mother always had out on the coffee table for guests to thumb through, How Our Forefathers Lived or Country Stores of the Old West.

  When Pamela stepped in the door, there was nobody in the place, though it was ten o’clock in the morning and people were moving up and down the street outside like bloodclots working their slow way through the veins of the town. A bell over the door announced her presence, but no one—not Wetzel Setzler or a shopboy, if the breed existed this far out—appeared from the back room to acknowledge her. It was preternaturally still, as if the place existed outside of time; the only light was what spilled in through the windows. The thought came into her head that she could rob them blind, take anything she wanted, take all she could carry and set up a rival store across the street, and they wouldn’t be any the wiser. “Hello?” she called. “Anybody here?”

  She found herself staring into the jaws of what must have been a bear trap dangling from a chain overhead, a huge dark wedge of blue-black steel, faintly glistening in the morning light. Here was a trap that meant business, lethal and unyielding, and she imagined it artfully buried next to a carcass or along a game trail like the discharge of a bad dream, and for just a moment, looking into its teeth, she felt the cruelty of it, and was this what Sess had been trying to tell her the night they’d got drunk? It was a trap. A necessary accoutrement to the wild life. You trapped things and then you killed them, skinned them and fed them to the dogs, and the money from the skins bought you sugar, coffee, cartridges, more traps. That was what she was buying into, and it was a matter of choice, of her own pleasure and inclination, as much as it was about survival—all those little lives would feed her own, as if she were some god on high demanding sacrifice.

  Next to the trap, nailed to the swell of the shellacked beam as if to make light of the whole business, was an old-fashioned bicycle horn with its tarnished brass tube and black rubber bulb. Before she could think, she was reaching up to squeeze the bulb and a low flatulent wheeze of a sound announced her presence. “Hello?” she called again.

  No response.

  But maybe they weren’t open yet, maybe that was it. Maybe they were all so trusting they just left their doors unlocked up and down the street and people could come and go as they pleased, pick out what they wanted and pay on the honor system. There was a door at the rear of the place marked OFFICE in the same meticulous block letters that set out the prices on the bins, and she went to it and tried the handle. She rapped formally with the knuckles of her left hand even as she pushed the door open and found herself on the threshold of a windowless den with a desk, a filing cabinet and cardboard boxes of liquor stacked floor to ceiling against the walls. There was a smell of burnt wax or lantern oil, something chemical, at any rate, mingled with the scents of Pine-Sol and the mold it was meant to defeat.

  As she leaned into the doorway, the floorboards groaned beneath her feet and she stopped where she was, embarrassed suddenly. She had no business in the lair of a man she barely knew, his socks and yellowed T-shirt laid over the back of the chair to dry as if he’d done his washing one piece at a time, his tooth-worried pipes laid out in a row atop the filing cabinet beside a framed photo of his younger self and a woman twice his size in a print dress, both of them glaring into the sun as if they’d just emerged from a cave. There was a pair of boots in the corner, pipe cleaners in a jar, a dismantled fishing reel laid out on a piece of newspaper. She saw the radio then, right there on the desk with a set of headphones and a mike attached to it, and that impressed her in the way of the bear trap—this was a different world out here, a different life, and it was going to take some getting used to. Of course it was. And her mother could wait, she decided, thinking it would be cheaper to call from a real phone in Fairbanks, anyway—if they could dig up Richard Schrader, and if his truck was available—and she backed out of the office and eased the door shut behind her.

  She called out once more—“Hello? Is anybody here?”—and then she drifted down the aisles, lost amidst the galvanized buckets and Blazo cans, the deck screws, pickaxes, fishing lures and cellophane-wrapped loaves of six-day-old bread. Just for an instant, she felt a pang. She did want to talk to her mother—it was vital—and not so much to reassure her as to let her know that she could succeed where her mother had failed, that she knew what she was doing and it was all turning out right, better than right. She was happy. Ecstatic. And her mother ought to know that.

  Her mother had seemed to approve of Sess in a general way, but she’d been leery from the start about the whole idea of living in the bush. “I had enough of that when your father was prospecting all those summers when you were little,” she said, and it was like a litany, like a catechism Pamela could have repeated word for word. “Oh, it might have been a lark for you two girls, but for me it was just another cross to bear, trying to cook for four over an open fire, staying up half the night swatting mosquitoes and wondering if he was ever going to come back, if he’d broken a leg or been attacked by a bear or drowned fording a creek, and that was the worst of it, to think of him floating out there like some waterlogged piece of yesterday’s meat, food for the ravens, for the ants—”

  Pamela had been young then, just eight the first year they went into the backcountry, and her only memories of that time were happy ones. She remembered the three of them—she and her mother and Pris—sprawled in the big canvas tent while the rain made a whole Latin rhythm section out of the walls, her mother dealing out the cards for pinochle, poker, hearts or euchre while the smell of ginger-marinated rabbit or squirrel stew ruminated in the corners. There were oatmeal cookies baked to sweet density in a camp oven, brownies, even cakes. She read all of Nancy Drew, the Brontë sisters, Sherlock Holmes. They swam, fished, canoed, and for the month of June and half of September, her mother led her and Pris through their arithmetic, their spelling, their essays on Andrew “Old Hickory” Jackson and Thomas Paine. It was a kind of dream. And, as in a dream, the memories came back to her in fragments of color and emotion, one moment blurred into the next in a montage that spanned all those six summers till her father wandered off and never came back again.

  She didn’t know how long she drifted through the store in a fog, fingering one object after another as if she’d never before in her life seen hinges or threepenny nails, but the soft, almost apologetic toot of a horn from beyond the front window brought her out of it. There was a car out on the street—white, with blue stripes, some sort of racing car that was totally out of place in a town where vehicles were worked like dogs and if you didn’t have a pickup you had a wagon. At first she thought the man behind the wheel must have been a tourist come up from Anchorage or even the lower forty-eight, but he
seemed to be gesturing to her through the intervening lens of the windshield and there was that toot again, insinuating, persistent, familiar even. It took her a moment, and then she had to laugh to think she didn’t even recognize her own husband, because there he was, leaning out the window now and calling her to him with an urgent rippling curl of the fingers of both hands. All right. But here she was in front of the precisely labeled bin of Hershey bars, no shopkeeper in sight and a long ride ahead of her. She took two without thinking and had almost made it to the door when she caught herself. And though Sess tapped twice more at the horn, she turned away, tripped down the aisle to where the cash register sat untended on the back counter and laid two quarters beside it.

  Outside, in the light of day, the car looked even stranger, as if it had been set down here in the heart of the country by some demented pit crew with access to one of those big Huey transport helicopters you saw in the TV coverage of the war. It just did not compute—a race car in Boynton, one hundred and sixty miles from the nearest paved road? She slid into the seat beside Sess and handed him a Hershey bar, even as he put the thing in gear and tore a patch of gravel out of the road. “Nice car,” she said, her shoulders pinned to the seat. “Where’d you get it?”

  He was tearing open the candy with his teeth, racing the engine in first gear and using his left hand and right elbow to steer the car through a series of ruts and bottomless puddles and out onto the Fairbanks Road. He hit second gear then and the chassis shivered over a stretch of washboard ridges, mud flying, stones beating at the fenders like machine-gun fire, and they shot past the Three Pup before she could even begin to think he might be evading the question. “Make your phone call?” he shouted over the roar.

  “There was nobody there,” she said, and the tension of the springs over the unforgiving surface keyed her words to a shaky vibrato. He hadn’t slowed down yet, the speedometer jumping at eighty on a road that was barely safe at half that, and what was he up to, her husband with the big hands and pelt of hair and the grin etched in profile as he gnawed at the chocolate out of one corner of his mouth? Was he trying to impress her like some teenager out on a date in his father’s souped-up street machine? Was he turning adolescent on her, was that it, or was he just shot full of high spirits? Whatever the cause, he was going to tear the car apart if he didn’t slow down—or maybe kill them both. She took his arm. “Sess,” she said, “Sess, slow down, will you?”