Drop City (38 page)

“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 Merry 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.

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—

“Ron
nie
!” 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.”