Drop City

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  The wind was fiercer now, really cutting up, and they had to stick in close to shore to stay out of the main thrust of it, but that was a problem too because the ice was forming there and keeping them at arm’s length. Twilight came down. They dug at the paddles in silence. He was thinking nothing, working on autopilot, stroke and stroke again, when the sound of the plane came to him. He heard it—they both heard it—before they saw it, and when it came into view, materializing out of the blow, it couldn’t have been more than two hundred feet off the river and heading in the same direction they were. The noise exploded on them as the plane passed directly overhead and then made a wide loop out front of the canoe and came back at them, and Sess was thinking It’s Howard Walpole or Charlie Jimmy out of the Indian village at Eagle, circling back to see if we’re okay—

  But it wasn’t Howard Walpole and it wasn’t Charlie Jimmy either. The plane was running three lights, but the one under the left wing was out of sync with the pulse of the other two—faulty wiring, a loose bulb—and as it drew nearer, swooping on them now, he saw the pontoons naked of paint and glinting dully in the erratic blue flash of light. He knew those pontoons, pontoons that would give way to skis by morning if the weather kept up, and he didn’t have to see the paintless fuselage or the fading black stencil of the N-number to know whose plane it was. It was coming at them, low over the ice-flecked water, low in the dusk and urged on by the wind. He didn’t have time to think, didn’t have time to jam the paddle down and jerk the bow out of plumb or run for the cover of the trees, because the Cessna was right there in his face, in Pamela’s face, and even as they ducked their heads and the pontoons lifted he felt the shock of the concussion and a hippie fruit bowl burst to fragments and there was water—Yukon water, cold as death—roiling in through the invisible tear in the hull.

  Now he acted. He hit the water, hard, and held the paddle down till the canoe swung round a hundred eighty degrees like the needle of a compass and they were suddenly running downriver with the current and the wind. There was a dark clump of trees projecting out into the river five hundred yards ahead of them on the near bank and he shouted to Pamela to run for them even as he fumbled for the rifle amidst the strapped-down clutter of cans and boxes and hippie pottery, thinking This is it, this is war, thinking Make one more pass, you son of a bitch, one more.

  The flashing blue lights faded to nothing downriver, then sparked back to life as the plane banked and reversed direction. “Dig!” Sess shouted, working a bullet into the chamber and laying the rifle across the thwarts so he could lean into the paddle and keep the stern from swinging out. Pamela’s face came to him in profile, a faint pale emanation against the obscure band of the shore. “He was—” she stammered. “He didn’t—?” They could hear the plane whining for power, see the lights sharpening as the distance closed. “You better fucking believe he did!” Sess roared, driving the paddle with the piston of his shoulder, and they were no more than two hundred yards from where the shore ice was forming under the cover of the trees.

  Bosky came at them too fast. He’d been expecting to find them upriver still, lagging in the current, and the roar gathered itself up and the naked pontoons rocketed past them before he could lean out and fire again, but Sess was ready and Sess let the boat swing out lateral to the current while Pamela fought for control up front and he got off three shots, three hard copper-jacketed thank-you notes hurtled up into the cauldron of the sky that probably caught nothing but air. He couldn’t say. He didn’t know. He was too lathered with adrenaline even to feel anger yet and outrage. He laid down the rifle and took up the paddle and a moment later they hit the shore ice and broke through it to the cover of the trees.

  Everything was silent. A hard, pelting, wind-driven snow began to rush down out of the sky as if awaiting release. He heard the river then, the ice on the river slipping and squealing like two wet hands rubbed together, and he heard Pamela. She was hunched over her shoulders, a shadow amongst the deeper shadows, and she was crying so softly he thought at first it was the whisper of the hard white pellets finding their way between the last, lingering blades of grass. The bottom of the canoe had shipped two inches of water, two inches at least, and their feet—they were wearing hiking boots, ankle-high suede, the best shoes they owned for a jaunt in the city—their feet were wet. They had no sleeping bags, no ground cloth, no tent, and who needed a tent in the Williwaw Motor Inn? “It’s okay, Pamela,” he said, the words stuck in his throat, “it’s all right, everything’s going to be fine.”

  The first thing was a fire, but he was afraid of a fire because Bosky might see it and come back for them, so he concentrated on hauling the canoe up out of the water, unloading the wet groceries and the wet clothes and the tools and equipment and all the rest of the things they just couldn’t live without, and then propping the hull up as a windbreak. Pamela worked beside him, and they didn’t have to talk, didn’t have to say a word, working in consonance to unload everything and cut spruce boughs to lay down under the canoe and collect driftwood to mound up for the fire if there was going to be a fire, and they would have to wait and see about that. In the meanwhile, the snow stiffened, rattling off their hoods and sleeves in pellets and granules, sifting to the ground with the soft shush of rice spilled from a sack, and soon the dark vacancy of the riverbank began to fill in with the pale glowing substance of it. “He’s not coming back, is he, Sess?” Pamela said out of the void.

  He looked to her, the ghostly stoop and movement of her as she mounded wood and let the phrases escape her mouth in quick snatched drifts of windblown vapor. “No,” he said, “not in this, and I hope to god the son of a bitch crashes and burns till there’s nothing recognizable left of him. Can you believe it? Can you believe he actually shot at us? I told you, Pamela. I told you from the beginning, and you wouldn’t listen.”

  They waited half an hour, shivering, and then he held a match to a twist of birch bark and the fire took. They dried their shoes, their socks, their feet. Pamela dug a damp box of crackers out of a shredded grocery bag and they shared them with slices of Cracker Barrel cheddar and let their internal engines wind down a bit. What this looked like was the first big storm of the year—it had all the earmarks, what with the wind and the snow formed into pellets and temperatures in the twenties, and he had no doubt it would settle in colder and the snow turn to powder—and they had a very narrow window of opportunity here if they were going to get the canoe and all their precious stuff back to the Thirtymile before next spring. After a while, he got up and fished around through the baggage till he found a pair of his new guaranteed-to-keep-your-toes-warm-at-forty-below Outdoorsman-brand thermal socks and worked one of them through the bullethole in the bottom of the canoe till he had a plug he thought would hold. Then they loaded up again and went out on the river in the full blow of the storm, their forearms and shoulders fighting the resistance, their hands molded to the paddles as if they’d been sculpted of ice.

  It must have been past midnight when they skirted Woodchopper Creek, veering far out from shore on the off chance Joe Bosky was out there somewhere laying for them, and neither of them dared even to think of what might have happened upriver, at the cabin, when Joe Bosky knew they were away from home and had the means and the motive to do them real and irreparable harm. The snow flew in their faces. A thin crust of ice formed over the baggage where the leavings of Pamela’s paddle flew back on the wind and settled, and a layer of snow formed atop that. The night was a dense and private thing, working through the motions of its own unknowable rhythms, and they had no right to be out in it. Sess Harder didn’t care. He was glad to be here, now, equal to the challenge, glad to be alive, glad for every furious driven bite the wooden paddle took out of the refrigerated river. And when they rounded the Thirtymile and the dogs sang out with the apprehension of their coming, he was the gladdest man in the world.

  PART SIX

  OLD NIGHT

  This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos
and Old Night.

  —Henry David Thoreau, “Ktaadn”

  27

  It was Halloween, October thirty-first, Pan’s favorite day of the year, and what did he have to show for it? Nothing—no black cats, no skeletons, not even a jack-o’-lantern. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, black dark, and the river, the big roiling silver playground chock-full of fish and game he’d cavorted on all summer, was locked up tight in a tomb of ice. Freeze-up, that’s what they called it, and Pan had shuffled off down the frozen highway of Woodchopper Creek in the declining light of day to see that the last open channel had sealed up overnight. It was twenty below zero. There was a wind. He’d stood there shivering on the rock-hard bank and listening to the silence—it was mind-blowing, all that noise of buckling ice and angry water, all that life, smoothed out to nothing, not a whimper, not so much as a pop or burble—and then he’d hiked back up the creek to the cabin and stooped outside the door to fill his arms with firewood.

  Nobody blinked. He came in through the dogtrot, slammed the outer door to, then squeezed through the heavy cabin door like a contortionist and slammed that behind him, his nose dripping, fingers numb, the sawed-off lengths of pine tucked under his arm like a stack of unreadable books. A garment of cold-thinned air came with him, and the smell of the cold, almost a chemical smell, and what was it going to be like when the temperature dropped another twenty degrees? Another forty? He crossed the room, poked the coals and laid on the wood, and nobody said Hey, man, what’s it like out there? or Did it lock up? or We thought maybe you were frozen to a stump or something. They said, “Raise and call.” They said, “Two pairs.” They said, “Three jacks, pair of nines.”

  Joe was cramped in at the table with Sky Dog and Dale, shuffling cards. They’d been playing poker for the past twelve hours at least—since they got back from the Three Pup on the snow machines, anyway—and they showed no sign of letting up. They kept a joint circulating. They were drinking beer out of the quart bottle and they threw back reds and Dexamils according to need, and he’d sat in himself for a while and made sure to look after his own pharmaceutical well-being, but he’d got to the end of that and what he wanted now was some action, some fun, some Halloween, for shitsake.

  Joe had the generator going because money meant nothing to him and he could fly in gasoline anytime he wanted, and so the lights were on, and that was a pure and beneficial thing in one way—at least you could read to fight back the boredom that was already closing in like a smotherer’s hand—but it was a curse too. It was curse and a royal pain in the ass to the degree that Pan, pacifist and flower child though he might have been, was considering triple homicide and maybe suicide into the bargain, because electricity meant music and for Joe Bosky music meant show tunes and country—“Oklahoma,” “The Sound of Music,” Kitty Wells, Roy Acuff, Flatt and Scruggs, Eddy Arnold, Gene Autry. Gene Autry, for Christ’s sake. Ronnie couldn’t let himself think about it, and he stuffed his ears with toilet paper to try to blot it out, but the corny booming voices and twanging strings and country yodeling seeped through nonetheless, polluted his consciousness till he actually found himself humming the shit. The hills are alive—if he heard the hills are alive one more time he wouldn’t be responsible for his actions, he wouldn’t.

  Of course, the irony, sad and piss-poor as it was, was that the hills were dead and so was everything else. Joe kept talking about trapping, about the excitement of running a line and seeing what was there for you gifted up from nature, but he never did anything but talk. He was through with trapping, that was the reality. He was making his money flying booze in to the Eskimos in the dry villages along the Kobuk River, selling cases of Fleischmann’s gin and Three Feathers whiskey and Everclear for ten times what he paid for them in Fairbanks. Ronnie had gone with him, twice, just to see what it was like, and it was the end of the world, that was what it was. Windowless shacks, chained-up dogs, dirt streets and garbage blowing in the wind, no roads in and no roads out—Boynton was midtown Manhattan in comparison. He’d made a buck or two himself, selling the odd lid of pot out of the stash he’d taken with him from Drop City—and he’d tried to give the shit away to Norm and Marco and Verbie and he didn’t know who else and still everybody treated him like a leper, and that wasn’t right, even though when he looked at it in the light of day he could see where he’d fucked up, fucked up big time, and he re-gretted that, he did. But the Eskimos—little half-sized scaled-down comical cats with hair like walking grease who wouldn’t look you in the eye if you set their shirts on fire—the Eskimos wanted it, oh yes indeed.

  “Wolves,” Joe was saying over the thin toilet-paper-muted buzz of the stereo, “that’s where the money’s at. For a pilot.”

  Ronnie had been reading one of the nineteen paperbacks in the cabin—all by Louis L’Amour and all dull as silt—and he rested the book facedown on his chest and took a sip from the silver flask he’d won from some cat at the Three Pup two weeks ago, eight ball, and he couldn’t miss, and looked to the table.

  Dale Murray was wearing his sheepskin coat and a fur hat he’d bought off the head of some Indian woman at the Nougat for the price of three Brandy Alexanders—that was all she would drink, Brandy Alexanders, though the cream for them came from a can of Borden’s evaporated milk and the brandy was grain alcohol filtered through a leftover tea bag. He and Sky Dog had about had their fill of the snowy north and for the past week or so they’d been trying to talk Joe into flying them to Fairbanks, because, as Dale kept saying over and over until it was about to stick to the walls, California is where it’s happening. Fuck this shit. I mean, fuck it. And Joe kept saying, Tomorrow, man. When it clears. Now Dale glanced up from his hand and said, “What do you mean, wolves?”

  Sky Dog, his eyes drawn down to blood-flecked slits, tugged at the collar of the once-white wool sweater one of the Drop City chicks had knitted for him in happier days. “You mean those big friendly dogs out there howling in the hills every night, morning and afternoon?”

  “I mean bounty money, that’s what I mean. You pick them out against the snow, they’ve got nowhere to hide. It’s like swatting flies.”

  “I thought you were a trapper, man? What happened to trapping?”

  Joe gave a shrug. It must have been about forty degrees in the cabin, but he was stripped down to a thermal T-shirt and the tattoos that twisted round his forearms like battle scars—or maybe destination scars would be more accurate (Got this one in the Philippines, this one in Saigon, and this one, this one I got in a place so bad you don’t want to even know the name of it). “You have any idea the kind of work it takes to run a trapline? It’s nuts. Crazy. You have to be some kind of caveman like Cecil B. Hardon to want to do that, some kind of terminal loser with his head about fifty feet up his ass. I just said fuck it and left my traps out there last winter, bones in them now, I guess, and they can just rust away to shit for all I care. No, I got smart. Took to the air. I mean, what’s the sense of investing in your personal aircraft if you’re not going to use it, right? Sixty-three wolves, in every shade of color from pure black to pure white, that’s what I took out of the country last winter, and every one of them run right into the ground—at thirty-five bucks, per, for the bounty, that is, plus what the pelts’ll bring. Who needs to pan for gold when it’s out there running on four paws?”

  Sky Dog snapped his head back as if he’d been slapped. “That isn’t right, man, that is just not right, I don’t care. If you shoot all the wolves, you’ve got no predators, and if you’ve got no predators the whole ecology is out of whack. I mean the moose and the caribou and whatnot, the rabbits, they’ll eat up the forest till there’s nothing left. I’m out, by the way.” He folded his hand and shoved it into the middle of the table.

  “Hah. That’s what you say now—that’s what you say when you get back to your hippie reservation in Malibu where all you have to worry about is does she have to wear that many clothes or not, but if you had to live up here you’d change your tune pretty quick.
” Joe leaned back in the chair and the chair creaked at the joints. He took up the quart of beer and then set it down again, leaned forward and poured himself a shot from the bottle of vodka he kept on the floor where it would chill, because if it was forty degrees at seat level it was probably about ten below down on the floor. “Wolves are nothing but trash. They’ll tear the anus out of a moose and lap up its guts while it’s still standing there, they’ll kill anything in sight, whether they’re hungry or not—just for the pure pleasure of it. No,” he said, pausing to throw back the vodka, “I’d kill the last pregnant wolf right here on the cabin floor in front of the governor and his cabinet if I had the chance, and you know what, the governor’d probably give me a medal.”

  “Who is the governor, anyway?” Dale Murray wondered aloud. Sky Dog scratched at his collar, then reached across the table for the bottle, helped himself to a shot. One minute, one of a million—a billion—ticked by.

  “Fuck if I know,” Joe said.

  Pan, from the bed by the stove, the book spread across his chest: “Hey, people, I hate to interrupt, but do you know what day today is? It’s Halloween.”

  All three of them just stared. The stove heaved and sucked air. It was as dry in that cabin as it must have been out in the middle of the Atacama Desert. Finally, Joe Bosky leaned over to spit on the floor. “So what do you want me to do,” he said, “put on a wig and dress up like a hippie? Or maybe a woman—would that work?”