by T. C. Boyle
He cut the throttle with his left hand and shoved back the tiller so the boat looped in on the big floating head and the rippling shadow of the hulk that trailed behind it, all the while clicking off the safety on the rifle and trying to keep his hands from trembling with the sheer excitement of it all, and this had to be the ultimate trip, right here and now—nobody was going to believe this, least of all his Hush-Puppied, slope-shouldered, lame-ass father entombed in his Barcalounger with a gin and tonic clenched in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The rifle was at his shoulder, the boat was pitching, the big head swiveled to take him in, and there were eyes in that head, eyes that locked on his with a look of mortal surprise and maybe terror, because what was this floating piece of jetsam bearing down on him with people in it, people and guns—
“Ronnie!” Verbie was shouting. “Don’t, don’t, Ronnie—Pan, no!” And before he could register this new threat on the horizon she’d swung round in the seat and swiped at the gun, and that threw off his aim because he flinched at the crucial moment and felt the stock kick back at his shoulder as if the bullet were coming out the wrong end and simultaneously saw the bear’s head shy away in a pink puff of spray. He’d hit it—or no, he’d grazed it, and the thing only had one ear now and there was blood, grizzly blood, streaking the water in long raking fingers of color.
Verbie was on him, her balled-up fists exploding on his forearms and her still-wet hiking boots lashing out at his knees, his thighs, his crotch, the boat pitching and yawing and the engine caught in the waking dream of neutral even as the stern dipped to the right and the first bucket of water sloshed in. “You asshole! You fucking asshole! What do you think you’re doing? Did that animal ever do anything to you, huh? What is it with you? Big man, right? You’ve got to be the big man all the time!”
That was when the engine died. That was when, fighting her for the gun, Pan realized that the bear’s big humped ottoman head had a mouth full of teeth in it and that the bear wasn’t heading for shore anymore. No, the bear was coming for them now, plowing through the weave of the current like a torpedo in one of those grainy old Victory at Sea reruns his father couldn’t get enough of. He snatched a look at Verbie and saw that she’d reconsidered her position—Verbie, the den mother, the Buddha, the hack-haired chick who was never wrong. Who never faltered. Who knew it all and was ready to tell you about it twenty-four hours a day. That was her thing, that was her trip, that was why she’d been christened Verbie in the first place. But now a look came over her face that fomented as much real terror in him as he’d ever known, a look that said she’d miscalculated, she’d interfered, she’d opened her big downer mouth at the wrong time and was going to pay for it with her life. And his.
Ronnie shoved her down, hard. The big head was surging across the water, no more than twenty yards away. This was a crisis. The first real crisis of his life. Nothing like this had ever happened to him, nothing, and his heart clenched and unclenched even as he tugged at the starter cord and heard the engine cough and die, cough and die. He never even thought of the gun. It was lying in the bottom of the boat where he’d dropped it, lying there inert in three inches of water. Nor did he think of the .44 strapped to his right thigh or the bowie knife strapped to his left. The oars, that’s what he thought. And in a pure rocketing frenzy of panic he snatched them up, jammed them into the oarlocks and began digging for all he was worth. Which, admittedly, wasn’t much, because he hadn’t actually had a pair of oars in his hands—hadn’t actually rowed a boat—since he was twelve or thirteen. The oars slipped and missed, chopping at the water. Back they came, and missed again. But then they caught and held and the boat swung its nose into the current and the seething monumental toothy head of the bear—which had been so close, ten feet away, ten feet or less—began to fall back, inch by inch, foot by foot, till he couldn’t hear the roar of its breathing anymore, till he couldn’t hear anything but the creak of the oarlocks and the deep punishing hiss of the river.
Boynton wasn’t much—a collection of unpainted shacks and log cabins the color of dirt, explosions of weed, clots of trash, stumps, rusted-out pickups, eight or ten powerboats pulled up on the gravel bar or drifting back from their painters like streamers on a kid’s bike—and it would have been easy to miss if it wasn’t for the bus. The bus was right there, fifty feet from the gliding dark surface of the river, planted amidst the debris outside Sess Harder’s shack—or his pied-à-terre, as Skid Denton liked to call it. Pan focused on the bus as he swung the skiff round the final bend east of town—and yes, the engine was working just fine, thank you, after he’d got done performing fellatio on the fuel line and pulling the starter cord so many times it felt as if his arm was coming out of the socket—but the bus wasn’t yellow anymore, or not strictly yellow. He saw that Lydia and the other truants had been at it with their paints, an exercise in boredom at base camp, playtime, free time—recess, for Christ’s sake—while everybody else had been humping logs and eating mush out of the ten-gallon pot. But how could he complain? This was art, the fruit and expression of civilization, and the strictly functional schoolbus yellow had given way to fluorescent purple and cherry-apple red, to doppelgänger green, Day-Glo orange and shattered pink. Freaks should be freaky, shouldn’t they?
“Wow,” Verbie said, and it was the first syllable out of her mouth since the bear incident, “wow, do you dig that?”
“What?”
“The bus. It’s all done up in faces, in what do you call them—caricatures. Cartoons, I mean. Look, that’s Norm, right there by the door? And Reba. And look, it’s you, Pan, down there by the tailpipe, with a fish in your hand—”
He skated the boat in, watching for obstructions, but when it was safe, when he’d tipped the propeller up out of the water and let the thing ride, he took a closer look, and there he was, at the far end of the bus, with a head like a lightbulb and a tiny dwindling little anemic body and two fish—two minnows—dangling from the stringer in his hand.
“Pan,” she said, “the mighty hunter.”
“Verbie the yapper,” he said.
He was climbing out of the boat now and he’d just about had it with her shit—they’d almost died out there, didn’t she realize that? “I don’t see you up there,” he added, just to stick it to her.
Her face was clenched like a fist. She stepped out into six inches of water, and she was devastated, he could see that—imagine Verbie excluded from the Drop City pantheon—but then she recovered herself and shot him a look of pure and vibrant hatred. “I’m on the other side,” she said, “you want to bet on it? Or the back, look on the back.”
He wasn’t looking anywhere. He really didn’t give a rat’s ass whether her portrait was plastered all over the bus inside and out or whether they’d raised a statue in honor of her or burned her in effigy—this was childish, that’s what it was—and he crossed the yard to the bus and stuck his head in the open door.
It was deserted—you could see that at a glance. But he stepped up on the milk crate somebody had set there in the dirt to ease the transition to that first elevated step and gave a look down the aisle. Sun leaked through the curtains in thin regular bands and illuminated the dust motes hanging in the stagnant air. There was the usual clutter of clothes, books, record jackets and dirty plates, the odd smear of crushed flies and mosquitoes rubbed into the cracked vinyl seats, and a smell he couldn’t quite place, something promiscuous, something communal. “Anybody here?” he called.
No answer. And that was odd: Where could they all be in the middle of the day? In the shack? Up the bank of the river tossing daisies in the water? Tooling around in the Studebaker? But no, he could see the car out the window, sitting idle on the verge of the dirt road, and Harmony’s Beetle humped there beside it under half a ton of dust. Verbie’s voice came to him then, a little whoop of triumph from the far side of the bus: “Here I am! Look, I told you—I’m right here next to Angela and, and—this must be Jiminy!”
Pan backed out of the bus
, his head as clear as it was ever going to be, since he hadn’t had so much as a beer or a toke since he’d rolled out this morning, and no food either (breakfast, in its entirety, consisted of the honey-sweetened tea at Sess Harder’s place and the handful of stale crackers Pamela had fanned out on the table like a deck of cards). Clear-headed? Light-headed was more like it. He was starving, that’s what it was, wasting away like a mystic in the desert, and if he didn’t get a burger and a couple beers in him pretty soon he was going to start speaking in tongues and spouting fire from his ears. For a long moment he stood there puzzling over the deserted bus, contemplating the pattern of footprints in the dust at his feet—the impress of bootheels, the elaborate punctuation of bare soles and the little necklaces of toeprints strung across the path that ran through the trampled weed to the road—and then he knew: they were at the bar, the saloon, the roadhouse, whatever they called it. The Three Pup. They were at the Three Pup, tipping back beers and maybe the odd shot of Everclear, getting a buzz on, salting fries, listening to the sizzle of burgers on the grill and the rattle of the jukebox as the record dropped and the stylus maneuvered into place. Pan was already making it up the road when Verbie came out from behind the bus. “Hey,” she said, her voice trailing away till it became no more noteworthy or troublesome than the routine buzz of the mosquitoes in his ears, “where is everybody?”
The clouds had closed out the sun by the time he turned the corner onto the Fairbanks Road. Somebody’s dogs rose up from their chains and howled at him and somebody else’s dogs took it up at the other end of town. The breeze had shifted to the north all of a sudden, as chilly as the air leaching out of the mouth of a cave, and you didn’t have to be a meteorologist to know it was going to be raining like holy hell in about three minutes. He could hear Verbie panting behind him, but he never looked back. If her legs were shorter than his, that was her problem—an accident of birth, that was all, an evolutionary dead end, survival of the fittest, baby, and get used to it. A faded blue pickup rolled by and he flashed the peace sign at the driver (nobody he recognized, unless maybe it was that scrawny chicken-necked old loser they called Herbert, or was it Howard?), and he ducked his head against the wind, thinking he really ought to go back to the boat for his denim jacket, but he dismissed the thought as soon as it crept into his head—going back would delay the cracking of the first beer and the sweet redolent slap of the first burger on the grill.
There was a handful of vehicles in the dirt lot out front of the Three Pup, including a tow truck with a Fairbanks logo painted on the driver’s side door and what looked to be a Shelby Mustang jacked up behind it. Something was dripping from the back end of the Mustang and puddling in the dirt—water, it looked like, dirty water flecked with leaves and stripes of pond weed—and the wheels were packed like ball bearings in something that might have been grease, but wasn’t. It was mud. Mud the color of shit, oozing out of the chassis and caking on the ground. Pan saw it, registered it, ignored it. In swung the screen door of the Three Pup and up rose the smell of the grill, of bourbon and scotch whiskey and beer spilled and wiped up and spilled again.
It was dark inside—why waste energy lighting up a sixty-watt bulb when you’re running off a generator that runs off of gasoline hauled out the Fairbanks Road and it’s light out day and night, anyway?—and at first he couldn’t see whose shoulders and half-turned heads were crowded in at the bar. “Hey, Pan, what’s happening?” somebody called out, and it was Harmony, Harmony there in the far corner with his rust-colored Fu Manchu and beaded headband and an arm round Alice, and then somebody else called out his name and the jukebox started up with a maddening skreel of country fiddles and where was Lydia, anyway?
But wait a minute—and this was something that really challenged his newly resensitized powers of perception—who was this looming like an apparition out of the cigarette haze with his wide-brimmed outlaw’s hat cocked down over one eye and his high-heeled Beatle boots rapping at the worn floorboards like a medium’s knuckles? It was Lester, that was who, Lester standing there grinning at him as if he’d just stepped out on the porch of the back house with a jug of wine in his hand and Marvin Gaye going at it on the stereo through the flung-wide door. Lester was holding a tumbler of whiskey in one hand and a joint in the other, Franklin’s big head and Sky Dog’s mustache framed behind him against a backdrop of astonished faces and Lynette’s furiously compressed lips and bugging eyes. Dale Murray was at the end of the bar, his rings flashing, yellow-tooth necklace dangling, working on a burger and a beer and running Skid Denton as solid a line of bullshit as Denton was running him, the big tall ramrod of a guy they called Iron Steve perched up on a stool between them like a referee. “Pan, my man,” Lester puffed in his softest imitation of a human voice, shifting the joint to his lips so he could take Ronnie’s awakening hand in his own for the soul shake that reaffirmed the identity of the tribe and plumbed the deepest pockets of brotherhood. And then he was turning to crow over his shoulder: “Hey, look who’s here, the bad cat himself, Pan the child-raper, the hippest baddest cat north of what?—Fairbanks. Fairbanks, yeah.”
The sequel involved a whole riotous tornado of soul-shaking and back-thumping, and Pan was dazed, he had to admit it, because he’d forgotten these people even existed and it was a real adjustment in context to create them anew in the lost world of the Three Pup—and what had it been, a month? But the joint helped and the beer and a shot that went down on an empty stomach like flaming gasoline and pretty soon he was in close conference with all four of them, absorbing their tale of potholes, Nazis in the guise of the Canadian Mounted Police, blown tires and moose dancing down the highway like chorus girls.
“Shit, they busted Sky in some no-horse town in B.C.,” Dale Murray said, up from his stool now and waving his beer like a conductor’s baton to a sudden crescendo of hilarity, Lester so far gone with it he had to set down his whiskey and brace himself against the bar.
“For what?” Ronnie wanted to know, even as the light went leaden and Verbie stumped through the door with a dumbstruck face and the first few random drops began to thump against the windows.
“He showed his big wicked thing—” Lester began, but he couldn’t go on—it was too much.
“Scared them girls up there,” Franklin said, showing his teeth in a grin, and what did Pan feel? Left out. A pang of jealousy shot through him: they’d had the adventures and he’d been eating mush.
Sky Dog leaned back into the bar, lit a cigarette and managed to look rueful and put-upon at the same time. The country-inflected strains of one song faded away and another started up in its place. Everybody at the bar was looking at him, waiting for clarification. “Public indecency,” he said. “I was just—”
“He was pissing against a tree, that’s what he was doing,” Lester said, panting between hoots of laughter. “Put a real fear into them girls, isn’t that right, Franklin?”
“Whole town was terrified.”
A new round of laughter. Dale Murray joined in too, whinnying along with the rest of them. Sky Dog looked abashed. He ducked his head and shrugged. “It wasn’t all that funny, man—it cost me a night in jail.”
“Right,” Lester said, “and this spade’s twenty-five bucks, American. Which you still owe me, by the way.” Then he turned to Ronnie, took a long slow sip of the whiskey, and let his eyes drop to his boots and rise again. “And you, my friend,” he puffed, his voice so soft it was barely audible, “what are you dressed up to be—Wild Bill Hickok? Or maybe it’s Buffalo Bill? One of them honky Bills anyway, right?”
Lester was enjoying this. He had center stage now, as exotic in the Three Pup as a panther on a leash. They’d seen Indians up here, they’d seen Eskimos, Finns, Swedes and Frenchmen, but a spade was something else altogether, and Pan could appreciate that, appreciate the strain it must have been on Lester to delve ever deeper into the redneck fastness of the last outpost of the forty-ninth state, but there were limits to what he could take. He’d let the child-rap
er comment pass, but now the man was mounting the balls to stand here and mock him for the way he was dressed? Well, fuck that. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” he said.
“The heat,” Lester said, pointing to the holster. “And this—what’s this?” and he had the knife out of its sheath before Pan could react, twisting the blade in the dull wash of light for the amusement of everyone at the bar. “Don’t tell me you’re a mule skinner now—or do you just use this thing for cleaning your nails?”
“Mule skinners don’t skin anything,” Dale Murray put in. “Least of all mules.”
Verbie was there at his elbow, the pale muffin of her face, looking for someone to buy her a beer. “Twenty-Mule Team Borax,” was her comment.
Pan couldn’t have said where the anger came from or how it rose up so quickly and luminously, but he took hold of Lester’s upraised wrist—the wrist attached to the hand with the knife in it—and in the same instant snatched off his hat and sailed it across the room. Lester’s eyes went cold. The hair was flattened to his head, linty, dirty, twisted into something like cornrows with a couple of sky blue rubber bands, and nobody had ever seen anything like that, not since Farina anyway. “And what are you dressed up to be? You’re the one in the cowboy hat.”
Soft, so soft: “That’s my Hendrix hat, man.” And Lester let him take the knife and fit it back into the sheath while Franklin crossed the room and bent to retrieve the hat. “Touchy, Pan, touchy,” Lester chided. “Don’t you know I’m just goofin’? Don’t you know that? Huh?”