Drop City

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  They stood there, looking down at the set, the dogs curled tail to nose in their traces, the faintest breeze agitating the treetops. “Even Joe Bosky?” Marco asked. “Even Pan?”

  Sess didn’t bother to answer—the question was too irritating, Marco saw that immediately and wished he could take it back. To this point, he and Sess had been getting on heroically, of one mind, and as Sess saw that he could keep up, that he was hard-driven and no tourist at all, he’d given him a larger share of the responsibilities, harnessing and feeding the dogs, mushing them, building up the coffee fire at lunch.

  Sess was staring down at the scatter of tracks, hands at his hips, his parka so patched-over you couldn’t tell its original color, and his face was set, engraved with suppressed emotion like a wood carving of Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé. The wolverine lining his hood took the breeze, and Marco watched the long dark hairs move and gather there, and suddenly he was thinking of the goats and the powerlessness he’d felt in the face of that implacable presence thrust up out of the woods. And what would they do if they encountered one today—or a bear? All they had with them was a .22, because Sess wouldn’t let him bring the big rifle—too late for moose, and it was just unnecessary weight. But the bears would be hibernating by now. Not the wolves, though. And what about the legendary cauchemar of the north, the winter bear, the grizzly that went into hibernation too soon and awakens desperate for the meat and fat it has to have to survive? What would a .22 do against that?

  It was getting dark when they came round a switchback in the trail and the dogs slowed and began to throw quick darting looks back over their shoulders. There was a set up ahead, but something wasn’t right. Something was caught there, something too big to be a marten or a fisher, and it wasn’t dead and frozen like the sleeve of a fur coat hanging limp in cold storage, but alive and yellow-eyed and jerking spasmodically at the straining dun leash of its right rear leg. It was a wolf, that was what Marco thought at first, but Sess let out a low curse—it wasn’t a wolf, but a coyote, all but worthless for its fur because no wrapped-up pampered matron on Park Avenue or Lake Shore Drive wanted to walk into a restaurant in a thing like that.

  The dogs were crazy. They smelled the kill and they let out a furious, frustrated, caterwauling racket, jerking at their leads in a tangle of ratcheting jaws and misplaced feet. Sess tied the sled off to a tree a hundred feet away and the two of them came up to where the animal lunged and snapped at them from the radius of its trapped hind leg. There was blood in the snow. The coyote had tried to gnaw through its own fur and hide and gristle and bone to free itself, but it was too late now because there were dogs there and men and one of them had a gun and the other a stick. “Shit, I’d just as soon wade in there and knock him out and free him if I could,” Sess said, “but he’s got too much pep in him yet. I don’t want to risk it.”

  The animal was pinned there, crippled, nothing but solaceless terror in its eyes, though it jerked and growled and threatened, and where was the peace and love in this, where the pacifism and the vegetarian ideal? It was the color of a German shepherd, smaller maybe, but with the same deep dun color and the black-tipped guard hairs. Marco felt his stomach clench. Could you live in the country without this? Could you live on fish alone? On what you made in the summer on a fire-fighting crew? On welfare, unemployment, on tuna casserole and macaroni and cheese? His breath smoked in the air. Sess handed him the .22. “Go ahead,” he said. “Put him out of his misery.”

  It went dark then, or it seemed to. The coyote had stopped struggling. It crouched, panting, head hung low, the fire gone from its eyes. Marco never even brought the gun to his shoulder. “I can’t,” he said, and handed it back to Sess. He turned away to go see to the dogs and a moment later the hovering silence discharged itself with a single crack of the rifle.

  Later, when the clouds had cleared and the moon swung up over the horizon, they found themselves in an open meadow along the river, no more than fifteen minutes from the cabin on No Name Creek that was their destination for the night. The coyote, frozen through and stiff-legged now, was strapped to the top of the sled like so much excess baggage. (“Skin it out and take it home to your girlfriend,” Sess had said. “Nail it to the wall, make a rug out of it. Call it your first kill,” he said.) The dogs were lagging now, especially the two in front of Lester and Franklin. They jerked forward, then held back, hips twitching, legs kicking out arrhythmically. Marco was riding the runners, Sess jogging alongside him. That was when they heard the plane, a thin buzz of mechanical clatter on the air that was too cold to resonate.

  They kept going. There was a cabin awaiting them, a fire, another pot of moose stew—or maybe it was potage of moose or moose fried in lard with defrosted potatoes and onions and maybe dried carrots on the side—and an airplane was nothing to them. It was probably somebody out of Eagle, headed to Boynton or maybe Fairbanks or Delta. Marco let the buzz fade away in his head. He was in a dream state almost, all his senses heightened as if he’d dropped acid, alive to every shading of the path ahead, to the taste and smell of the compacted air, to the swift whispering rush of the dogs’ paws in the snow, to the great and marvelous engine of his own breathing and the unconquerable beat of his rock-steady heart. This was his moment, this was his connection, and he felt it in every cell of his body. He wasn’t even cold. Not in the least.

  But that thin unobtrusive buzz that might have been the drone of a mosquito in a sleeper’s ear on a restless summer night became something greater, louder, a looming clattering presence, until he couldn’t ignore it any longer. He looked to the straining backs of the dogs, to the dark line of the trees in the distance, and then he looked to Sess just as the plane broke out of the treetops behind them, no more than two hundred feet above the ground, buzzing them. Sess never stopped running. He shouted to the dogs, urging them on. And then to Marco, everything rushing in a fluid stream of night and snow and the wind they were generating in their flight—and that was what this was, flight—he shouted one word, “Bosky!”

  They both watched the aircraft make the far end of the meadow, bank and come back at them, and there was nothing they could do about it, no time to wonder over the hate and recalcitrance that had brought them to this, no time for reason or even speech. They ran. And Bosky came at them. There was gunfire—of that Marco was sure, the snow leaping beside him and one of the dogs crying out and stumbling in the traces and the others carrying it along in a dark tide of necessity—and then there was the sharp explosive sound of something moving at high speed contacting a stationary object, a single dead whack, and they were in the trees and the plane was gone.

  The first thing Sess did was halt the dogs under cover of the trees and tie up the sled. Then he pulled the .22 from the sheath he’d made for it just under the left handlebar and fired two useless shots into the night. “Fucking son of a bitch!” he shouted. “Fucking madman! Scumbag! I’ll kill you!”

  Suddenly it was cold. Intensely cold. The kind of cold that ran through you no matter how many layers of clothes you had on. Marco was numb, numb all over. He barely knew what had happened, gone from one dream right into the shroud of another, but he had the presence of mind to remember the dog. It was hurt. He could hear it whining, the thinnest paring of sound, like a violin careening to the top of the register. “Sess,” he said into the stiffening shroud of silence, “I think one of the dogs is hurt.”

  It was a foot or a leg—Marco couldn’t see for sure in the play of moonlight and shadow. He stood there, helpless, as Sess bent over the dog, removed it from the traces and lifted it up in his arms and carried it to the sled. He watched Sess set the dog in the body of the sled, beside the stiff-legged carcass of the coyote, and watched as Sess rearranged the dogs, the breath of dog and man alike hanging dense in the air. There came a distant sound at some point during this ordering of events—Marco couldn’t have said when, exactly, whether it was a matter of seconds or minutes—and there was a flare of light some two or three miles off. “Goo
d,” Sess muttered, working in the cold, every pause and syllable an engine puffing in the night, “good, the son of a bitch. Good. I hope he’s burned up and dead.”

  They reached the cabin in minutes, and minutes later they were going through the same ritual as the night before—unharnessing, staking, lighting the fire, settling the kettle and the big blackened pot on the stove—but they hardly spoke. They were like relief workers, methodical, bloodless, following the logic and the dictates of the moment. Sess brought the dog in—it was Sky, one staring blue eye, one deep unhurried brown—and set him on the floor under the light of the lantern. The dog whined softly and Marco saw that its right front foot was gone, or the toes anyway. Sess stalked across the room and came back with a bleached-thin flannel shirt and tore it into strips. “Can I do anything?” Marco asked and Sess said he could go out and feed the dogs, that would be a help.

  Only after they’d eaten did the shock of what had happened let go of them to the point where they could begin to talk about it. Everything was quiet. The dog was back outside, its foot swollen with the knotted bandage it had no doubt already chewed off, the cabin—cruder and older than the one they’d inhabited last night, built by Roy Sender himself in a time before airplanes came to rule the country—had begun finally to hold the heat of the stove, the kettle was sending up steam and they were both staring into the residuum of coffee grounds in the bottom of their cups. Marco got up, warmed his hands at the stove. “You think they went down, don’t you?” he said.

  Sess looked up at him. “Yeah,” was all he said.

  “Think they’re dead?”

  “I hope so. I pray to god they are. Because if they’re not, I’m going to have to kill them.”

  “I’m saying they,” Marco said, and he had to use one of his mittens to lift the kettle off the stove and pour scalding coffee into his cup, “but it could have been just Bosky, right?”

  Sess held out his cup for a refill. “You can’t fly and shoot at the same time.”

  “So it was Ronnie? You think it was Ronnie too?”

  “Son of a bitch,” Sess said. “Son of a hippie bitch. I want him dead too.”

  Eventually, without really discussing it or pausing to think it through, they both began to shrug back into their clothes, the two shirts, the sweater, the parka, the scarf Star had knitted, and Marco laced up his boots while Sess pulled on his mukluks, and then they were back out in the night, minus forty-four and dropping. The dogs stirred, and one or another of them let out a low interrogatory woof before they settled down again. Sess had the .22 in his hand. The snow shifted beneath their feet.

  They retraced the trail to the meadow and then turned inland in the direction the plane had taken, walking at a good pace, the moon slanting through the trees to light the way. The country was dense here, off the broken trail, but they were anxious and they pushed through it as if they were passing down a long corridor in a hotel with one double door after another. Marco let his mind wander, thinking about Star, about Christmas coming and what he ought to get her, given his limited resources. Maybe he could make her something, he was thinking. Something for her hair—a barrette carved of wood or bone, or maybe bone earrings, something like that. And then he was thinking of Ronnie. Pan. If Pan was in that plane, and he had to have been, then Pan was dead, the first casualty of Drop City, the first postmortem. Norm would be back. Maybe even Weird George, Verbie and some of the others. But Pan wouldn’t. The thought chilled him. Or he was already chilled—it depressed him, brought home the strangeness of all this, of walking the remotest hills anybody could hope to find on this earth beside a man with a gun in the deepest night he’d ever known. And where was his father now? And the Draft Board and General Hershey?

  “Up there,” Sess said, and it was as if his voice were disembodied, as if the country itself were throwing its voice, the ventriloquism of the night. “See it—see that glow?”

  They climbed a ridge and looked down on the light that seemed so wrong out here, a fire, a bonfire, snapping briskly at its tether on the numinous ground, color in a colorless place. There were two figures stretched out by the fire, one on the snow, the other propped against a tree in a bed of spruce cuttings, and beyond them, the settled shape of the burned-out plane. Nothing moved but the wheel of the fire, rising up and dying back, spitting embers into the sky, wavering and flaring again.

  Marco came down the slope at a run, slamming through drifts, shattering tree limbs and the grasping fingers of dwarf willow, alder, birch and black currant, heedless, in the grip of something he couldn’t name, even as Sess Harder stalked behind him, gun in hand. He went to Ronnie first, to Pan, and tried to turn him over, but Pan was stuck fast to the ground in a spill of frozen blood and mucus, and he was inflexible, dead, dead for sure, as stiff and dead and frozen as the coyote strapped to the sled. He didn’t like Pan. He’d never liked him. But he didn’t wish him this.

  He looked up at the sound Sess Harder’s hand-stitched mooseskin mukluks made in the snow, the soft susurrus of his walking. Sess was standing over Joe Bosky now, and Joe Bosky’s eyes were open and he was trying to say something. There was no blood on him, not a spot, his white parka as pure and unblemished as the snow caught fast to the shell of the earth. His eyes shone in the firelight and he wanted to move, you could see that, to get up, to stand and accept the challenge, but he couldn’t. A term came into Marco’s head then, something out of the newspaper, out of the obituaries: internal injuries.

  External injuries were bad enough out here, but internal injuries, what you couldn’t see, didn’t really offer up much hope. They would have to go back for the sled, load him into it, mush past Drop City, Sess’s cabin, Woodchopper, and on into Boynton, and somebody would have to fly out of Boynton and take him to the hospital in Fairbanks, and all of that with internal injuries, the ruptured organs, the severed spinal cord, the slow seep of secret blood. But Sess had the gun in his face, had the muzzle of it resting right on the bridge of his nose, the cold kiss of the barrel marking the place where his black bushed eyebrows met, and Joe Bosky was struggling to say something, final words, and what he said, even as Sess Harder lifted the gun out and away from him and rested it over one solid moon-white shoulder, what he said was, “Fuck you.”

  33

  At first she didn’t know what to say, thinking of Che and Sunshine, their squalling faces and stamping inconsolable feet, the noise of them, the dirt—always dirty, born dirty—and she looked away, trying to compose herself. She ran a finger round the rim of the coffee mug and plugged in her million-kilowatt smile, and though she wanted to say No, oh, no, as she would have responded to news of cancer, heartbreak or any run of sorrow or affliction, she managed finally to murmur something appropriate, or at least compliant. And then, before she could think: “Do you—I mean, did you—?”

  Pamela took one look at her and burst out laughing—she had to set down her cup because she was laughing so hard, her eyes squeezed down to semicircular slits, her hands gone to her temples as if to keep her head anchored on her shoulders. “You’d think I’d just announced that the roof was on fire or something from the look of you—really, Star, you should see herself.” She let out another laugh, slapped a hand flat on the resounding plane of the table. “God, you’re funny.”

  Star laughed too, easing into it—sure, all right, she’d let herself in for it—but even as she laughed, as the two of them laughed, she was thinking of herself, of what she would do if it was her. She’d stocked up on birth control pills—they all had, Reba’s idea, her obsession, actually—but she’d come to the end of them weeks ago. When she and Marco made love it was cautious love now, restrained love, with the threat of repercussions hanging over the act, and he always pulled out of her at the crucial moment—coitus interruptus—as if that could forestall the inevitable, and how many of the girls she’d gone to Catholic school with were on their second or third child already? She’d kill herself. She’d have an abortion. But where? How? Somebody told her the Ind
ian women knew of a way, some root they boiled into a tea, or maybe they made it into a poultice that drew out the fetus like pus from an infection—

  “You know, you’re supposed to congratulate me. You’re supposed to squeal and jump around—we’re both supposed to squeal and jump around. I’m going to have a baby. You’re the first person I’ve told and you look as if you just found me floating in the river in a sack.”

  She wanted a cigarette. She’d already had her first of the day and she was trying to cut back, not only because of the expense and the fact that your brothers and sisters were constantly bumming them off you day and night, but because they were a habit, and she didn’t want to develop any habits except love and kindness. Pamela’s pack of Marlboro’s lay on the table between them. Star eased a cigarette from the pack, lit it, exhaled. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that I can’t imagine—personally, I mean. I mean, I’ve got so much to live for—” But that sounded wrong—it was wrong. She tried to recover herself, because Pamela—her friend, her sister—wasn’t laughing anymore. “You want a boy or a girl?” she said finally.

  Pamela went off then, everything copacetic, pleased with herself, lit up with it. She wanted a girl, couldn’t imagine anything else, but when she and Sess had talked about it—theoretically, that is—he’d leaned toward a boy, which was only natural. He was quiet about it, but he wanted to see a new generation in the country, of course he did, and with a boy he could teach him everything he knew about living off the land and respecting it. “He’d want a boy,” she said, and she slipped a cigarette out of the pack now too. “But so did my father.”