Drop City

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “And he got two girls.”

  “That’s right.”

  And then they were laughing again.

  They smoked their cigarettes and thought their private thoughts, drank coffee, played a second game of chess—which Star won—and then the rubber match, which went to Pamela. Together they made lunch, a thick cooked-down broth with egg noodles and put-up vegetables from the Harder larder, and then they settled in to read by the stove. Though they hadn’t discussed it, the unspoken arrangement they’d arrived at telepathically at some point the previous night was that Star was going to stay on till their men returned from the trail. Star had washed and dried the dishes—she insisted on it—and let Pamela sit there by the window as she put everything back on the shelves in proper order. She took pride in that—she knew the place as well as she knew her own. And the pans glistened when she was done with them.

  After a while she moved from the chair to the bed, pulled a fur over her legs. She could feel the nicotine and caffeine ricocheting off the walls of her blood vessels, but she wasn’t nervous or coffeed-out, just steady and calm and alert. The book she had with her was by Richard Fariña, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, the hippest thing going, recommended by everybody and dog-eared and chewed-over so many times it had to be the sorriest volume in the Drop City library. It was all right. Funny, wild. But the scene it described—college, dope, thumbing your nose at the straight world—just seemed alien to her now. Or remote—that was a better word. Before long, she was asleep.

  She woke to lamplight, a smell of baking. Pamela was there at the stove, her hair coiled atop her head and shining with the soft flickering pulse of the lamp’s wick. The windows were black. A distant voice, thin and disconnected, carried down out of the hills, and then it was answered by another and another. “What time is it?” she said, pushing herself up from the pillow. She felt as if she’d been asleep forever.

  “It’s early yet. Four-fifteen.”

  “I’ll never get used to this.”

  Pamela was taking something out of the oven—a cake in a circular pan—and she paused, the hot pan held out before her, the sweet all-embracing scent filling the room even to the farthest corners, to give Star a look over her shoulder. “You’ll get used to it,” she said. “Believe me.”

  They were eating cake—angel food, barely cooled, with chocolate fudge icing—when they became aware of a subtle change in the tenor of the night, the faintest chink of the clip on a dog’s harness, a sound as of the earth breathing in and out again, and then they were up from the table and standing at the open door of the dogtrot, peering out into the moonlit yard. The men were there—Marco and Sess—and the patient line of the dogs, sitting in their harnesses, waiting to be freed and staked and fed. Pamela turned back into the room to put the kettle on and Star followed her to get her parka, and in a moment the two of them were out in the moonlight, the shock of the supercooled air searing the nicotine from their lungs.

  A quick hug, one man, one woman, and Pamela was down amongst the dogs, unclipping them individually from the gangline and leading them to their separate houses and their separate stakes. Star stood there in the cold, shifting from foot to foot, wanting to help, but she didn’t know the dogs or what to do with them and so she drew back and waited. One of the dogs, she saw that much, was injured and riding up atop the sled, the frame of which seemed overburdened, piled up beyond sense or reason, and where were the furs? She’d looked forward to the furs in the way a prospector’s wife might have looked forward to the jar of gold flakes brought down to her out of the hidden seams of the hills—absent the killing of the animals and the mechanics of their suffering, that is, because she didn’t want to think about that, didn’t want to know or even imagine it. The furs, the furs alone were what interested her. The beauty and richness of them, mink, otter, fox, delivered up from nowhere, magically, like the salmon that gorged the streams and the ducks crowding the skies. But where were they? And what was this protruding from the frame—boots? A spare pair of boots?

  She was about to say something when Marco loomed up out of the blue glitter of the snow, took her by the arm and led her through the dogtrot and into the cabin. His beard was ice. His eyes were cracked and broken. The tip of his nose was the wrong color. “Something happened,” he said.

  There were sounds from outside, Sess’s voice, Pamela’s, the dogs yapping and clamoring for their food. “What?” she wanted to know, straining to read his face even as he turned away from her and held his hands out to the stove. She felt sick suddenly. There was a shadow sweeping over the ground, over the cabin, over Drop City. “What? What is it?”

  “Ronnie,” he said.

  “Ronnie?” She didn’t understand him. What could Ronnie possibly have to do with a hurt dog and three days out on the ridges and down in the ravines in forty-below-zero weather? Ronnie the thief? Ronnie the irrelevance? Who cared about him? Who cared about him, really? He’d gone to high school with her. He’d been her lover. He’d stolen her money.

  Marco wouldn’t look her in the face, and that scared her.

  “What?” she demanded. “What happened?”

  “He—they tried to, him and Bosky, in the plane. He died. He’s dead.”

  Still she didn’t understand. “Who? You mean Joe Bosky?”

  “Both of them. It was a plane crash.”

  She had to sit down then, and Pamela was in the room now and Sess right behind her, the door slamming to, the last breath of the cold trapped and dissipating inside the furnace of the four walls, the shrinking space of the cabin crowded suddenly, shoulders, faces, limbs, three people in parkas stalking around and recoiling from one another as if they were trying to make their way through Grand Central at rush hour: Ronnie? Dead?

  Eventually—it must have been an hour, an hour or more—she went out into the yard, her hand clasped in Marco’s, to look at him there in the sled, because she still didn’t believe it, didn’t believe really that anybody could die—the old maybe, maybe them—but nobody she knew, nobody like Ronnie. Like Pan. They’d come across country together. He’d made her laugh. He’d pressed himself to her in the hush of her room, on the seat of the car, in the starched sterile drum-tight beds of motels in anonymous towns, he’d read to her, sung to her, praised her and loved her. And now he was lying there frozen in the sled, a shadow, a dead lump of nothing pressed in death to the dead lump of Joe Bosky—and those were his boots, Bosky’s, sticking out of the bottom of the sled on his dead frozen feet. For a long moment she stood there looking down at the dark hummock of the sled, Sess and Pamela immured in the cabin, Marco beside her. She was trying to cry, but there was nothing there. “I want to see him,” she said, and her voice betrayed her.

  Marco’s breath trailed away from his lips, silvered and alive. “You don’t want to see him. Really, you don’t. Come on, let’s go inside. We’ll spend the night and decide what to do in the morning. Okay?”

  It wasn’t okay. She stepped forward, the dogs rustling at their chains, the stars riding up and away from her till the whole night seemed to plead for intercession, and then she pulled back the blanket and the moon showed her what was there.

  “That’s not Pan,” she said.

  And it wasn’t. It was something twisted to impossibility, nothing natural, nothing she could identify, no face even, because it was turned from her in its frozen cowl, just the slant of a face, that was all, and it could have been anybody. “Come on, Star,” Marco whispered. She saw the hair then, spilling off the spool of his head, grown out finally to its maximum length, hip, very hip, as hip as anybody could ever have wished or dreamed, and she slipped the glove from her hand for just an instant to feel it move beneath the pressure of her five bare fingers.

  On Christmas Eve, just after the light faded from the sky, it began to snow. Marco and Jiminy had cut a tree and set it up in the back corner of the meeting hall, and everybody gathered over eggnog (rum and evaporated milk, whipped with nutmeg, sugar and powdered egg)
to decorate it with God’s eyes made of yarn, scraps of silver foil, strings of glass beads and paper chains. The twelve-volt battery, newly charged in Boynton and retrieved on the back of Iron Steve’s snowmobile, was hooked up to the stereo in the loft, and so there was music, people shuffling through the albums to find their favorite cuts, nothing religious, really, no hymns or carols, but mystical stuff, Ravi Shankar, Mahavishnu John McLaughlin, Coltrane, Rollins, Dylan.

  There were four stoves at Drop City, one in each of three finished cabins, and the ancient Great Majestic range they’d brought upriver in the boat to do the communal cooking in the meeting hall, and all four were in use. They were roasting two turkeys and a goose delivered frozen from the general store in Boynton by Sess Harder, and a pair of spruce hens Marco had managed to shoot under a tree somewhere, with potatoes, stuffing and gravy, and for the vegetarians there was a broccoli and cheese casserole, meatless lasagna and mashed turnips. And cookies. A thousand cookies.

  Star was in the midst of it all, juggling pots on the range, slicing, chopping, whipping, the music getting up inside her till it was like a whole new circulatory system working in symbiosis with the original one, the one she was born with, and when somebody handed her a joint, she took it and held it to her lips a moment and passed it back again. She sang to herself, hummed, made up lyrics for the tunes that didn’t have any. The gravy thickened, the snow faltered. Lydia was dancing with Tom Krishna and Deuce, and Jiminy was dancing by himself, Harmony and Alice handed out personalized ceramic mugs to every one of Drop City’s eighteen remaining residents—each one with a reasonably faithful representation of the recipient’s face molded into it—and Marco came up and surprised her with a pair of earrings—peace symbols—he’d carved out of a scrap of caribou antler. And just when she thought it couldn’t get any better, Pamela appeared at the door with two bricks of fruit cake and a bottle of brandy tucked under her arm.

  There was a jabber of greeting, dishes already set out on the sheet of plywood they’d extended the table with, steam rising, the dog—Freak—looking hopeful, and then Star took Pamela’s coat and flung it up to Mendocino Bill in the loft, because that’s where the coats were going, no room anywhere else. Pamela stood there, giving off energy, and then she was hugging people, one after the other. She was looking good—healthy, pretty—her face colored by the wind, her hair parted in the middle and trailing down over her sweater till the reindeer dancing across her chest were hidden in a spill of honey-blond hair, and she was wearing the beaded headband Star had given her. “You know what you look like?” Star said, handing her the joint that had just appeared magically in her hand.

  “No, what?”

  “Like a hippie.”

  “You mean a hippie chick?”

  It took her a minute. “Are you playing with my head?”

  “Who me? Never.”

  She watched Pamela make a pretense of inhaling, then took the joint back from her. “So where’s Sess?” she asked.

  A shrug. “Out on the trail. But he’ll be here. He’d better be.” She shook out her hair with an abrupt flip of her neck. “It’s our first Christmas together. I’ll kill him if he doesn’t make it.”

  The notion struck her as funny, because why wouldn’t he make it? Was it that compelling out there? As far as Star could see there was nothing beyond the windows but the night and the cold and the hills that folded back into another set of hills and another set beyond that. This was where the life was, the only life within miles. There was food, music, beer, wine. There was eggnog, there were cookies. Laughter and conviviality. There were people here. Brothers and sisters. “Oh, he’ll make it,” she said. “I’m sure he will.”

  Later, after they’d eaten, Verbie and Iron Steve showed up, extending the party all the way out from Boynton, and they danced, everybody, all of Drop City, even Che and Sunshine, and there was nothing lame about it and nobody to sulk and lie and exaggerate and cheat and steal and pronounce it lame, nobody. At midnight, Bill dropped down out of the loft, got up as Santa Claus with a cotton-puff beard and every strip of red clothing Drop City owned draped round the bulk of him, and announced he had a present for everybody, right outside the door. People stirred, exchanged glances. Outside? There were groans, catcalls. “Is he for real?” Merry said.

  “Believe me,” Bill coaxed, “you’re going to like it.”

  Star was drifting, nestled in beside Marco and Pamela on the bunk closest to the stove, sated, warm, letting the music infest her. She hadn’t said a word in an hour. She felt bad for Pamela, because Sess hadn’t showed, and that was the one damper on the evening—the bummer, the downer—the one thing that hadn’t worked out. Pamela was worried, she could see that, and as the hours slipped by she’d said all the conventional things till there was nothing more to say, and then a joint went round, and a jug of wine, and she leaned back into Marco and let herself drift. But now, now Bill was in the middle of the room and people were coming back to life—it was Christmas, there was a surprise, a present. For everybody, he said.

  It took a while, people fumbling into their jackets and boots, searching for gloves and scarves in the tangle of clothes in the loft, but then they were filing out the door into the cold. Bill led them. He was in the yard out front of the meeting hall, Santa with his freak’s flag of hair and cotton-puff beard, his arms spread wide. It was clear now and cold to the teeth of the stars. “Here it is!” he shouted, and they lifted their eyes to the sky and saw the light pulsing there, cosmic light, yellow-green, blue, a tracery of red, indefatigable light, light that soared up out of the black shell of the horizon and burst and shattered and renewed itself all over again.

  34

  He was moving as fast as he could, the storm blown out now and the quarter moon slicing through the cloud tatters to illumine his way. The wind was in his face, the cold rode his shoulders like a hitchhiker. There was no sound but for the whisper of the sled’s runners in the fresh powder and the faint, wind-scoured chiming of the cold steel clips on the dogs’ harnesses. He was late, very late, ten or twelve miles out, thinking of Pamela waiting for him at the hippie camp, of Christmas and the present he’d kept hidden in the back doghouse since before she was his wife and just a hope flickering on the horizon. It was in the sled now—he’d snuck it in there, all wrapped in a spangle of colored paper that featured candles and bells and holly and suchlike, three mornings ago, early, when she was still in her slippers and the light hadn’t yet come into the sky. He’d harnessed the dogs then, kissed her at the door and moved out across the yard and into the trees with a promise, three days, Christmas, the hippie camp.

  The dogs knew they were heading home, six dogs now because Sky would never run again, and they ran as a team, as smooth and efficient as the conjoined wheels of a locomotive, streaming through the night, barely aware that he was there with them. They were going a good flat-out ten miles an hour, he guessed, and so he’d be there before long—by midnight anyway, judging from the stars. The present was nothing he’d made or bought, nothing you could mail-order or find in a store. It was a gift of nature, like the furs, the salmon, the moose, like gold. He’d found it projecting from the bank of the river after breakup had torn the earth away to leave it exposed, a bone-yellowed gleam against the flat alluvial gray of the gravel bank. He knew right away what it was—Charlie Jimmy, of the Indian Village at Eagle, had showed him one once—the curving dense-grained tusk of a mastodon, intact, earth-stained maybe, but a magical thing, a blessing, a totem to take away your fears and sharpen your prowess till you were one with the frost and the melt and the cycle of lives gone down and sprung up again.

  He squinted into the wind and pictured the animal itself, the pillars of its legs, the rich red pelt stretched over a mile of hide, the tumbling sluggish winter life of the shadowy herds emerging like phantoms from the impacted ridges and wind-blown plains and then vanishing again as if they’d never been there in the first place. But would she like it? He didn’t have a clue. It could be carv
ed, certainly, made into jewelry, bric-a-brac, chess pieces, but to his mind that would be a sort of desecration. She could take it to bed with her, make use of it as a fertility charm, but she didn’t need any charms, not Pamela. He smiled at the thought and the ice cracked at the corners of his mouth.

  He was late because he’d had an accident, one of those things that happen once or twice a winter, no matter how careful you are. He’d been leaving the cabin on No Name Creek with the new furs he’d taken and the ones he’d had to leave behind the previous week in order to accommodate the mortal remains of Bosky and Pan, two dead men, frozen and dead, and he’d miscalculated along a stretch of the creek thick with overflow ice. It had warmed for a few days and then dropped back down to zero and the stream had bubbled up through the ice and then frozen in layers beneath it, and both his feet plunged in up to his calves before he could get back up onto the runners of the sled. He wasn’t wet all the way through—the three pairs of socks and the two felt liners saved him there—but there was still nothing else for it but to stop, tie up the sled, make a fire in the lee of a rock ledge and dry everything out.

  It wasn’t a crisis. Just one of those things. And he’d taken advantage of the time to check the dogs’ feet for ice and any scrapes or open cuts and rub them with ointment, and then there was a period where he just lay there under his tarp and watched the fire as the snow sifted down out of the branches of the trees and erased the sky overhead. It gave him time to think, because the last week had been chaotic, questions from the sheriff and the sheriff’s deputy, a round of drinks at the Three Pup in memory of the dead men, more questions, papers to fill out, the life of the town, the funeral. Bosky had frozen to death, and so had Pan—after doing something so unthinking and senseless not even the wild hairs could believe it. Or maybe they could. Same thing had happened to a soldier on maneuvers out of Fort Wainwright once, oh, three, four winters ago, thought he’d eschew the regulations and bring himself a little comfort out there on sentry duty in the dead cold heart of the night. It was a shame. It was a pity. But up here planes crashed and people froze. That was the way it was.