Drop City (48 page)

Sess had another beer. He took his time. Wiped his plate with a slice of spongy store-bought bread. Asked about dessert. Forwent a second shot. On the exterior, he might have appeared calm, but he was boiling up inside, and he laid some money on the table, took the keys from Richard and told Pamela he wouldn't be a minute. He hadn't gone two feet out the door before Lynette was right there after him, grabbing at his arm. “And, Sess,” she said, the striations of age puckered up around her lips and digging disapproving trenches at the flanges of her nose and the corners of her shrunk-down eyes till she looked like one of those dried and frozen corpses they found in the Andes, “whatever did you go and do to Joe Bosky?” She looked down at the flap of her sidearm and back up again. “I tell you, watch out for that one—”

So he drove the truck the half mile to town and eased it high up over the ruts and half-buried rocks and into the yard out front of the shack. The dust followed him in. He slammed the transmission up into park, let the engine keen a minute, then cut the ignition. What he heard then was the music, a bull-roaring voice over the guitars, drums and electrified piano, driven at such a volume the speakers couldn't contain it. The vocal settled, went slack with distortion, then settled again. Off to the right were the two cars, the VW and the Studebaker, looking as if they hadn't been moved in a month. The kiln was set in the lee of the bus, the heat of it radiating out of the seams and corrugating his view of the shack, which was in need of paint. The bus, though, that didn't need any paint. They'd been busy with that, and if there was a color they'd neglected to lay on he couldn't name it.

The air was clean, the sun going about its business. It was warmer than it had a right to be. He stepped out of the truck to the assault of the music and went up to the door of the bus and knocked at the
panel of painted-over glass there. He knocked again. After a while he started to hammer at it with his fist, and it was a good thing—a good thing for them—he hadn't had that second shot. “Open up!” he shouted. “Whoever's in there, open up!”

He felt the bus give ever so slightly on its springs, and then the door cranked open and the one they called Weird George was standing there on the top step, wrapped in a dirty green blanket. He was barefoot. His hair was like a second blanket, or no, it was like the stuff Jill used to make plant holders with in her apartment, some kind of jute, rough-edged and matted, and he had half a dozen bleached-out animal bones dangling from the ragged ends of it. “Oh,” Weird George said, trying to place him. “Oh, hey.”

“Listen,” and Sess could feel it coming up in him now, an anger pulled up out of nowhere, out of a sunny day, and heavily disproportionate to the crime, “you people are going to have to get out of here. All of you. And take all of your fucking crap with you.”

Weird George made a vague gesture. He didn't look as if his legs would hold him upright another thirty seconds. “Oh, man,” he said after a moment, and Sess could barely hear him for the bawling of the speakers, “you want Harmony, Harmony's the cat to talk to—”

Everybody's luck held, because at that moment Harmony came round the front of the bus, his hands dripping clay. As best Sess could figure, the man was about his age, and though he wore his dense blond hair layered like a woman's he had a fierce reddish Fu Manchu mustache to counteract the effect, and in Sess's limited dealings with the tribe he seemed the most reasonable of any of them—and a whole lot easier to communicate with than the nephew, who tended to talk in paragraphs, as if he were getting paid by the word. Harmony looked surprised. He wiped his hands on his jeans, cocked his head and gave Sess a look out of the corner of his wire-frame glasses. He was about to say “What's happening?”—Sess would have bet the farm on it—but before he could open his mouth Sess launched into a lecture of his own, enumerating the hippie infractions and the way the town felt about them and telling him in no uncertain terms that
he was going to have to pack everybody up and find another place to throw his pots and blast his music and smoke his marijuana and LSD.

Sess didn't know how long he went on, but after a while Harmony was joined by his wife or girlfriend or whoever she was, a thin raggedy little woman with a serene smile and the usual hair and a pair of breasts that should have been matched to somebody twice her size, and the two of them just stood there and listened to him as if they were SRO in a lecture hall. When he was done, when he'd talked himself out and begun to think of getting back in the truck, picking up Pamela and heading into Fairbanks to celebrate life and the season and the cache that was full to bursting with dressed-out meat, the record he'd been subconsciously screaming over came to a superamplified halt, and Harmony said, “I hear you, man.” He put an arm round the woman's shoulders and drew her to him. “You've been like supercool, and we all appreciate that, even Weird George. And listen, we've been maybe a little remiss in this, but Alice and I have been wanting to like show our appreciation. Here,” he said, gesturing toward the long tottering line of misshapen ashtrays and bongs and fluted drinking cups set out on the naked board and gracing the tree stumps of the field, “you just take your pick—”

Three days later, when they got back from Fairbanks, the bus was still there. Of course it was—what did he expect them to do, paint it over with vanishing ink? The thing probably wouldn't even start. Why fool himself?—it was there for the duration. Maybe when the next glacial age hit in another ten thousand years the big mile-high wall of ice would creep across the tundra and grind it to dust, but for now, Sess figured, he might as well get used to it because it wasn't going anywhere. And at this point—three days on—he couldn't really get himself worked up about it. He and Pamela had had a matchless time, their second honeymoon—or first, actually—lazing in bed at the Williwaw Motor Inn, smoking cigarettes and drinking rum and Coke out of plastic disposable cups and watching the mystical flicker
of the world caught and sealed in the little box everybody called by the diminutive just to express their sodality with it. They bought things. Made the rounds of the bars. And though he was disappointed to find that the dog pound had nothing with four legs and a tail that weighed more than maybe fifteen pounds—the Chihuahua meets the toy poodle meets the bichon frise in the dumped-down hills of Fairbanks—he was satisfied. He was going upriver with his wife and all the necessities and luxuries they could carry and hippie pottery too, and he didn't give a blue damn for how things sorted out in Boynton.

They got in from Fairbanks in the late afternoon, and it was blowing up cold. Sess went right on by the Three Pup, pulled the pickup into Richard's drive and backed it down to the river. “Is there anything we need out of the shack?” he wondered aloud as Pamela handed him boxes of groceries, cans of Blazo gas and two-stroke oil, a bag of brand-new socks and underwear and felt linings for his mukluks. He was leaning forward, distributing the weight in the bottom of the canoe. The wind took his hair and gave it a yank.

“Nothing I can think of,” she said, straightening up and looking out over the anvil of the river. The sky was dark. Whole armadas of ice had come down to do war with the open water.

“All right, then,” he said, “because I don't like the looks of that sky, not one bit.”

Pamela was wearing her parka and she'd put the hood up the minute she got out of the truck. Her hands were thin gray flaps of skin working out of her sleeves, her shoulders were hunched against the wind and the tip of her nose and her cheeks were already drawing color. When she took the paddle up out of the thwarts, he saw that her knuckles showed white against the dark oiled grain of the wood. She gave him a tired smile and settled herself in the bow and he couldn't help thinking of the contrast between this and the first time they'd gone upriver together, all the way back in the fullness of June, but then a little discomfort was what the country offered everybody without prejudice, and soon enough he'd have her back in
the cabin, the fire stoked and a cup of something hot in her hands. As they shoved off, the canoe shattered the spider ice that clung to the shore. No one had to tell him this would be the last canoe trip of the year.

They hadn't gone more than half a mile, the wind in their faces, when Pamela turned to him. “The keys,” she said. “What about the keys?”

“I left them in the truck. Didn't I?”

“Check your pockets, Sess—you remember what happened last time.”

His hand was so numb he could barely work it into his pocket, and what did he feel there taking shape under his fingers? A pack of matches, his pocketknife, the money clip—and the keys to Richard Schrader's truck. So they turned around and went back and he climbed up the bank past the battened and silent hippie bus—they must have all gone upriver, that's what he figured—slipped the keys into the truck's ignition and came back down the bank at a jog and shoved off again.

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.