by T. C. Boyle
It was warm. Merry’s hand was clamped in his. Half the tribe was mewed up in the cabin now, sitting around and picking their toes as people read chapters of Slaughterhouse Five aloud, smoke drifting up and away from the stovepipe and the big pan heating water for the dishes. He and Merry caught a view of them as they drifted by the open door—heads and shoulders, slumped backs, cradled arms, splayed feet—and he saw that Marco was in there. And Star. Of course, that was nothing to him, and he’d already read the book twice—and he’d rather be fishing anyway. Or fucking. Ideally, that is.
He stole a glance at Merry. Her face was neutral, chin set, eyes squinted against the sun. Her hair swayed with each step, billowing and settling and billowing again. She kept her fingers entwined in his. He saw the dogs, two streaks of liquid fire wrestling over a bone in a spray of sun on the porch, and heard Reba’s kids shrieking somewhere downriver while Mendocino Bill and Tom Krishna tried to make sense of the engine that whirred and shuddered but refused to come back to life. Nobody even glanced up as he led Merry along the bank to where the tent stood slack against the ragged line of the trees.
Inside, it was so close they had to sit yoga-style, their knees touching and their hands gone idle in their laps. But Pan, Pan got right to it, turning from the waist to dig out the pipe, the matches, the tinfoil, the hash and the razor blade, all of it kept close in a plastic baggie in the front pouch of his backpack. Merry said, “I love the sound of the river,” just to make conversation because conversation filled the void when people were preparing drugs for you, and Ronnie said something expected like, “Yeah, it’s cool,” and he held the pipe out for her and lit a match. He watched her lips purse as she took in the smoke, watched the light settle in the rings on her fingers. They were in a cocoon, hidden away from the world, the skin of the tent lit up like the lens of a flashlight. Or a sausage. That’s what it was. “I feel like we’re inside a big orange Italian sausage, the hot kind,” he said, taking a hit and immediately feeding the pipe back to her because she was the one who needed to catch up—
Her eyes watered. They swelled and fractured, and her cheeks distended with the effort to hold in the smoke that was always precious but never more so than out here under the bleached white sky of nowhere. Then she was coughing, hacking till her lungs were blistered and her lips flecked with spittle, and he was coughing too. “It never fails,” she gasped in a faltering little squeak of a voice that could have belonged to Maya, “because I think—it’s my theory, anyway—that you get just as high from coughing as from the dope itself.”
Pan smiled. He agreed. Couldn’t have agreed more. He hacked into his fist. After a moment he laid his hands on her thighs and began to work them back and forth with a soft tentative friction. “Music would be cool right now,” he said, just to say something, just to keep it going, and he thought of Lydia, back in the bus, cranking any record she felt like, and then he shook that thought right out of his head. “But you know, in some ways it’s just as well that we don’t have it, because we’ve got to resensitize our ears to the environment, like the moose, the caribou, the wolves—you hear the wolves last night?”
Her eyes were closed. She murmured something—yes, no, maybe—and then her eyes flashed open and she laid her hands atop his and guided them up her thighs. For a long moment they both looked down at their two pairs of hands working there against the hard lateral stitching of her jeans, pushing and kneading in concert, and then she leaned into him and kissed him. He heard the hiss of the river with his resensitized ears, felt the blood beating in his temples. And then he was pulling the T-shirt up over his head and fumbling with his belt and the black heavy load of the gun he kept strapped to his thigh like some TV gunslinger, like Matt Dillon or Johnny Yuma—he was a cowboy, how about that?—and she eased out her legs with an awkward rustle of the Creamsicle orange fabric of the tent and jerked her jeans and underpants down to her knees in a single motion. His hand went right to her and their mouths met again, and then—
And then Jiminy was calling her name—“Merry! Merry?”—and his sodden Dingo boots were crunching in the gravel along the bank. “You out here? Merry?”
Pan froze. So did she. Jiminy couldn’t see them, nobody could. The tent wasn’t made of ultralightweight semitransparent Creamsicle-colored nylon—it was made of steel, steel lined with lead and with six inches of concrete on top of that. Pan was exploding. The buckle wouldn’t give. He didn’t dare move.
“Merry?”
The front flaps parted suddenly and the odd mosquito drifted in on the unfiltered glare of the night just as Jiminy’s face hove into view, suspended there like a second sun. That was a moment, Pan caught with his fingers in the cookie jar, Merry’s eyes anything but merry and Jiminy’s face working itself through a whole catalogue of conflicting emotions, beginning with slap-faced shock and progressing through enlightenment to lust, grief and hate. The river coiled and uncoiled itself. The birds said nothing. And then, with the sound of a pebble dropped from on high into the deepest pool in the broad running length of the Yukon, Jiminy gave it one more try: “Merry?”
In the morning, Ronnie volunteered to take the boat downriver to pick up two of the bus people (they were working on the furlough system) and the eight hundred sixty-seven absolutely indispensable items of manufacture and trade without which Drop City North would cease to exist in short order—and that included building supplies, tools, candy, cigarettes, shampoo, sun lotion, potato chips and cheap paperbacks of any quality and on any subject, so long as they were in English. And the mail, don’t forget the mail. Everybody gave him a list—Marco, Star, Reba, Bill and Premstar, even Jiminy (and that took some balls after what had come down last night). But that was all right. They were all brothers and sisters, no hard feelings, no grudges, Free Love in a free society. Pan collected money and wadded-up slips of paper and gave back assurances and disclaimers—“Sure, sure, if I can find it, sure, yeah.” He was the man of the hour and they all came to him, even Norm. (“Hard candy!” Norm roared, wading out into the river as he was about to shove off, and there wasn’t a thing wrong with the engine a couple of dry spark plugs couldn’t rectify, putt-putt-putt, varoom. “The old-fashioned kind, with like butterscotch and cinnamon and whatnot. Get a big tin of it, ten pounds of it. Twenty. A hundred!”)
The only problem was Verbie. She was going with him, and no, he didn’t need the company, didn’t need anybody except maybe Lydia on the other end of the line with her legs spread wide, but Verbie’s mother was in the hospital with some harrowing nightmare of a female cancer that was turning her insides to soup and Verbie had to phone home and lighten the load though she’d walked out the door three years ago and hadn’t spoken to her mother since. There was no arguing with that. Angela was staying. Angela was going to give herself over to the needs of Drop City and stay behind to scrub pans, peel logs and whip up big cauldrons full of rice pap and mush three times a day, and she shared the same mother as Verbie—wasn’t that sacrifice enough?
So at nine A.M., with the sound of sifting sand in his ears and the sun like a hot poker stabbed first in one eye and then the other—too much hash, too much of Tom Krishna’s poisonous homebrew—Pan swung the bow of the skiff out into the current of the Thirtymile and headed downriver, Verbie perched in the middle of the seat in front of him for ballast. Unfortunately, she was talking ballast, and before they even made Sess Harder’s place she’d managed to change the subject six or eight times, moving without transition from the health benefits of ginseng to carpet bombing along the Ho Chi Minh Trail to mercury in tuna and the plight of the farm workers because the lettuce boycott just didn’t go far enough. Ronnie stared off past the sidewall of her face, the too-small eye, the sickle nose, the dark gap where the tooth was missing in front. She was talking over her shoulder like some sort of cockatoo, like a trained parrot that could twist its head round twice and never miss a beat. He wasn’t listening. He was trying to focus on the country, on the joy of being here, the sun warm on his
back and the breeze cool on his face, his eyes scanning the near shore for something to put a bullet through. Because that was his job, that was what he was doing here, no different from Sess Harder or Joe Bosky or any of the rest of them. And who was he? He was Pan, Pan of the North, and you could forget about Nanook.
Riding with the current, it was no more than fifteen minutes to Harder’s place at the junction of the Thirtymile and the Yukon, and Ronnie spotted Sess and his old lady working a log into place where they were extending the cabin out along the flank of the river. He pulled the tiller-arm hard right and swung the boat in along the bank with the intention of asking Sess if he needed anything from town, common courtesy out here, the sort of thing anybody would do, but the fact was Ronnie used every excuse he could just to talk to the man, to sit at his feet and pump him for information about pike holes and drift nets and the best way to smoke and press a duck.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Verbie leaned into the turn, the breeze kicking up tufts of her chopped red hair. She tried to swing round to confront him, but the centrifugal force was too much for her.
Pan snuffed the breeze, exulting in the river smell and the speed that drove it to him. The skiff planed over the surface. He didn’t bother to answer.
“We’ve got no time for this, Pan. Ronnie. Come on. You know we’ve got to grub everything out of that little shitbird of a store owner, who like threw a fit over the food stamps last time, and get the mail and all that and be back by tomorrow night—and that’s if Lydia and Harmony ever went into Fairbanks for the window glass and the batteries and I don’t know what else.”
“Hey, this is Alaska, Verbs,” he said, and he cut the throttle and let the skiff coast into shore on its own steam. “These people are our neighbors. I mean, I just want to ask them if they need anything—don’t you think they’d do the same for us?”
“No,” she said, “no they wouldn’t. Not if their mother was dying and they had twenty-four people depending on them and three cabins and a meeting hall to put up before winter—”
So she was a pain in the ass. She was born a pain in the ass. Like Alfredo. Like Reba. Such were the joys of communal living. “Five minutes,” Pan said. “I swear.”
Sess hardly glanced up as the boat swung into shore. He and Pamela had just set the log in place, chest-high, and he was smoothing the upper surface of it with a drag knife, slivers of wood leaping away from his hands like insects in a field. He was wearing an old thermal shirt with the sleeves ripped out and his patched jeans and work boots and he’d sweated through the shirt so many times it looked as if it had been tie-dyed in eight progressively paler—and ranker—shades of yellow. The hair hung in his eyes, trailed down his neck and over his ears, almost long enough to qualify as hip. And from the look of him he wasn’t exactly wearing out his razor either.
Ronnie tied up the boat and leapt ashore, Verbie clambering over the gunwale behind him and getting her feet wet in the process, and now the wife looked up and waved, and she was wearing dirty jeans and a plaid shirt three sizes too big for her, her hair tied back in a ponytail and her arms bare and smudged with what might have been grease or maybe mud. If Sess was the original dropout—Sess Harder, mountain man—then she was already halfway there, the prom queen shading to pioneer, to helpmeet, to fish skinner and plucker of goose and duck. And wasn’t life beautiful?
The dogs were racketing, jerking at their chains and nosing at the sky, elevating dust. Behind them was the garden, probably a quarter acre of squash and peas and whatnot, tomatoes in a greenhouse made out of Visquine thrown over a willow frame, and to the right of that was the cache, a miniature cabin set up on timbers eight feet off the ground, where the meat was stored in winter. Sess had nailed flattened Blazo cans round each of the four posts, to discourage weasels and wolverines and anything else that might want to scramble up there and make off with tender frozen morsels of moose, duck and fish, and there was a crude ladder set to one side of the cache so humans could get at it. Then there were the drying racks. They were set out along the bank in the full blaze of the sun, and they were so congested with salmon split down the middle they were like walls of flesh—they were walls of flesh—and all of it free from the river. And what did you do in the summer? You collected food for winter. You hunted, farmed and fished and sat up all night under the sun that never set with a beer in one hand and a smoke in the other. And they called this work.
Ronnie came up through the brittle weed and clinging wildflowers, grinning with the thought of it—Sess Harder was the man, and didn’t he have the world snowed? “Sess,” he was saying, “what’s happening, man? And, Pamela. Hey, what’s happening?”
“Nothing much,” was all Sess said. He went right on working, smoothing the log, blowing away the debris, even laying his head flat on the planed surface to sight along the length of it. The dogs took it up a notch as Verbie sloshed up the bank, and Pamela, holding her end of the log fast, gave her a smile with nothing but welcome in it. “You two want some tea?” she called. “I can put on the kettle.”
“Oh, don’t bother about us,” Verbie said, kicking at the heels of her hiking boots as if that could even begin to dry them out. “We were just—”
“Sure,” Ronnie said. “That would be cool. You need a hand there, Sess? And by the way, we just stopped to ask if you might need anything from town because we’ve got a load of stuff to pick up and we were just wondering—I mean, it would be no problem, no problem at all . . .”
They drank the tea out of shiny new ceramic cups that looked as if they’d just been unpacked from the box, and this was no herbal rinsewater but the real and actual stuff, brewed so strong it made your jaws ache, and they sat at the picnic table in the yard and took a break while Verbie chattered at Pamela and Pamela chattered right back and the dogs settled down around their chains. Pan was feeling uncluttered and clean, just soaring on the wings of the day and the glimpse he was getting into Sess Harder’s intimate life. He had a thousand questions for him, but Sess wasn’t quite as lively as he’d been the last time Pan had run into him (at the Bastille Day Wildflower Festival and Salmon Feast Norm had proclaimed a week back), and the only answers he got came in the form of grunts and semaphore. Sess was looking from his woodpile to his garden to his dogs, purely distracted, and after ten minutes of tea-sipping, he pushed himself up from the table and said, “Okay, Pamela, let’s get back to it.”
Verbie fell all over herself assuring them that it was no problem—she and Pan really had to get going, because of x, y and z—and she thanked Pamela for the tea and Sess for the company and blah-blah-blah. But Pan was soaring and he just had to do something for them, to express his awe and gratitude, and he kept saying, “It’s no hassle at all, man, really, we’ll be back like tomorrow night, I mean, store-bought bread, hamburger buns, a pint of scotch, whatever you want,” until finally Pamela reached into the pocket of her jeans and extracted a bleached-out five-dollar bill that looked as if it had been printed during the Roosevelt administration and said, “Some cigarettes, maybe—Marlboro’s—and we could use, I don’t know, some of those Hershey bars with almonds, maybe five or six, and that good coffee Wetzel has on special—the Maxwell House? In the five-gallon can?”
Then they were back on the river, skating out of the Thirtymile and into the roiling big freightyard of the Yukon, Verbie as entranced with talking to herself as she might have been delivering up her wit and wisdom to an audience of thousands, a sweet mist of spray in their faces, clouds whipping by overhead and Pan scanning both shores for movement. The only time he responded to anything she was saying was when she lit on the subject of Jiminy and Merry and how right for each other they were and then locked her pincers into what had gone down last night. Somebody said he’d been involved. Was that true? No, he said, shouting over the motor, it was just bullshit, that was all. And he wasn’t lying, necessarily, or even fudging the truth. The way it turned out, he wasn’t involved, if involved meant getting his dick wet, because Me
rry snapped her legs shut, jerked her pants back up over her hips and crawled out of the tent to get all weepy and forgiving and apologetic with Jiminy, and up the river they went, his right arm in a sling and hers wrapped like a field dressing round his waist.
Half an hour slid by, the throttle open wide and the current pulling them by the nose, and he turned the volume all the way down on Verbie and listened to the way the outboard engine broadcast its news to the world. He’d just about given up on seeing anything substantial—like a moose up to its nose in a willow thicket or maybe an eagle with a fish in its claws—when something moving in the water up ahead caught his attention. It looked like a pillow off one of the sofas in his grandmother’s den—or no, an ottoman, the whole ottoman, bobbing in the foam as if this were the East River instead of the Yukon. Still too far to make it out . . . but now, closing fast, he could see that it was moving against the current, and wait, wasn’t that a pair of ears—and a snout?
Verbie shut down her monologue long enough to shout, “Hey, are you crazy or what?” even as the skiff veered sharply to the left and the ottoman was transformed into the head of a bear, a grizzly, with its scooped-out face and the silver hump of its back spiking out of the glacial milk of the river like a paradigm of power. Pan was electrified. A grizzly. His first grizzly. And here it was, all but helpless, caught out in the middle of the river, swimming. He wasn’t thinking of the meat or even the hide as he eased back on the throttle and reached for the rifle. It was the claws he wanted. He’d seen an Indian shooting pool one night at the Three Pup and when the guy leaned over to line up a shot you could see the necklace dangling free of his shirt, five grizzly claws strung out on a piece of rawhide, each of them as long and thick and wickedly curved as a man’s fingers—a big man’s fingers. Ronnie had wanted that necklace badly enough to ask the Indian to name his price, but the Indian just gave him a blunt-eyed look and bent forward to line up his next shot. And he’d understood: you didn’t buy a necklace like that; you went out to where the bear dictated the terms and you tracked him down and took it.