Drop City (52 page)

For a long time now—since he'd left Drop City, anyway—he'd been thinking about getting out, bailing, just turning his back on the whole thing and getting reacquainted with a little
civilization
for a change, and he'd written his parents three times begging for money, a one-way ticket, traveler's checks, anything, but he might as well have been dead for all they cared. So Star's backpack. There it was, hanging from the nail next to Lydia's purse. And he knew something about that backpack that Star wasn't aware of, and she should have been, because how could she ever have expected him to travel with her through all those nights on the road, in tents and motels and diners and fast-food outlets, at gas stations—Where'd you say the ladies' rest room was?—without his knowing the contents of that backpack as well as he knew his own. And it wasn't like he was stealing, not exactly, because that three hundred dollars wrapped up in a sock in the bottom of the innermost pouch was three hundred dollars she'd kept back from him, and how many times had he bought breakfast, cold drinks, cigarettes, how many times had he sprung for the motel or the campground fee? Momentarily, he felt bad about it—this was Star, after all, Star whom he loved and had always loved, at least for the past year, and these three bills were her fail-safe, her ticket out, and now she was going to be hung out to dry. But she'd hung
him
out to dry, hadn't she? She'd gone for Marco. Big mistake. And she'd set this little thing up with Lydia tonight, right in front of everybody, and if that wasn't a kiss-off, then what was?

He found the door, found the night. The smoke rose against the moon, the lights in the windows of Drop City North cut their indentations out of the shadows. There was no one out in the yard, no sound but for the crunch of his boots against the plaintively yielding snow. Pan reached in under his parka to adjust the crotch of his pants—but not to itch, not yet—and then he started off across the frozen plain of the river.

28

The air was crisp, burned immaculate with the cold, and it did him good to be out in it, breathing deep and moving purposefully across the landscape as if he belonged here, as vital as the wolf, the hare, the moose, and it was good too to escape the numbing togetherness of Drop City for a few hours at least. Most of the others were content to sit around with a deck of cards, a sketchpad, a guitar, the hours falling away like so much sloughed skin, and what's the hurry, man, be cool, but Marco was a different animal altogether. He couldn't relax. He felt bored, stifled. He needed to get out, explore the country, open up his senses,
learn
something. The washed-out faces of Drop City looked up at him in surprise, the wind in the trees, the fire stoked, Rice Carolina simmering in the pot, even the dog too lazy to lift his head from the floor. You really going
out
there? In this?

Six people were writing novels, or maybe it was seven, depending on whether the thin unspooled script crowding the pages of Alfredo's notebooks turned out to be fiction or a tract on the joys of communal living—Alfredo wasn't sure yet, but there was going to be plenty of time to work it out one way or the other once the curtain fell on the daylight, and that was coming soon, November twenty-first, according to Sess Harder. There was a lot of knitting going on. Scrabble, checkers, chess. And of course people found time to toboggan down the hill, organize skating parties on the river with the three pairs of skates in Drop City's possession, build snowfreaks with willow roots for hair and somebody's worn-out bandanna and maybe an
iridescent green shirt or spangled vest thrown into the bargain. Fun and games. It was all fun and games.

The sky hung low. Through the morning the temperature had risen into the single digits, creeping up the ladder of the thermometer in a grudging, slow, hand-over-hand ascent. There might have been snow in the air, if he knew enough to feel it, to smell it in the way Sess Harder could, or Iron Steve or old Tim Yule, who sat outside on the porch of his frame house in Boynton no matter what the weather. Marco could feel the tug of Drop City loosening as he made his way downriver, and he did look back, two or three times, just to admire the way the buildings defied the vacancy of the land, to watch the conjoined swirl of the smoke from four separate stoves twist up into the sky and listen to the fading shouts of Che and Sunshine, their figures drawn down to nothing as they hammered across the yard in their homemade snowsuits and red rubber boots.

He'd given Ronnie a week, and a week was more than he had to spare. Joe Bosky and Pan the wood sprite might have gotten their meat, and Sess Harder certainly had his and probably everybody in Boynton had theirs too and half the weekend hunters from Fairbanks, Anchorage and points south, but Drop City had nothing. And that was a concern, a real concern, because pretty soon it would be too late, the moose gone stringy and tough from the rut, and despite the protests of the vegetarians, they were going to need meat to get them through till spring—either that or they'd be trapping mice under the floorboards and boiling up their shoes like Charlie Chaplin. It was frustrating too. At the end of October, just before Halloween, he and Star had been awakened by a sound that was like the rumble of fifty-five-gallon fuel drums rolling down the hill out of the trees, a deep thump and boom that resounded through the cabin and shook him out of bed and right on out the door in his stocking feet. Two moose—bulls—were going at each other on the gravel bar, great big quaking truckloads of meat suspended on the ridiculous poles of their delicate moose legs, no thought in the world but for each other and the cow just visible in the stripped yellow crown of willow
behind them, and Marco standing there with empty hands like some Stone Age hunter's apprentice, and what was he going to do, throw rocks at them? Jump on their backs and cut their throats severally while the tribe looked on wringing their hands? Ronnie had taken the rifles as if they were his alone, and Ronnie was going to give them back. It wasn't a question of ownership or even of right and wrong. It was a matter of survival, just that.

There was no sign of life at Sess's place—smoke rising from the chimney, but nothing moving in the yard—and that was all right, because he didn't intend to stop in till he was on the way back,
with
the rifles slung over his shoulder. Sess was his advisor, his mentor, the man who was going to instruct him in all the recondite ways of the country, and he'd already had to endure the humiliation of admitting to him that they had no rifle worth the name with which to go out and get their meat—Deuce had a .22 for potting rabbits and ground-hogs, and that was about it—and he was damned if he was going to appear weak in front of him again. So he walked on by the Harder cabin, and though the dogs raised a noise, no one came to the door and no face appeared at the window.

There wasn't much snow—just enough to whiten the ground—and Sess had told him not to expect Santa's Workshop or whatever the people down below tried to make Alaska out to be. This wasn't a postcard. It wasn't the Cascades or the Sierra Nevada. The country around here, in the interior, was about the driest in Alaska, and if they got twelve or fourteen inches of precipitation a year, that was about it. The thing was, the precipitation
stayed.
There was no meltoff in winter, and in summer, the rains just pooled over the permafrost, which in turn created a vision of paradise for the mosquitoes—and the midges and no-see-ums and all the rest of the winged and fanged world. Marco kept on, studying the snow for sign, trying to read the country the way Sess would. It was warm now, up into the teens, at least, and he unzipped his parka and let the ends of his scarf dangle free. After a while he found himself whistling, a shrill, between-the-teeth rendition of “I Am a Child,” and where had that come
from? He'd been fooling around with the guitar again lately—Geoffrey's guitar—and this just might be a tune to pick up on, he was thinking, nothing too complex, a sweet lilting melody floating over the chords, but then the vocal—the vocal might be a stretch. He'd just have to take it down a key or two, that's all.

His mood changed abruptly as he rounded the bend onto Woodchopper Creek. He wasn't whistling now, and he wasn't thinking about guitars either. He'd never been to Bosky's place and didn't know what to expect—beyond trouble, recalcitrance and a shitstorm of lies, excuses and backpedaling from Pan, that is. He pictured him—Pan, Ronnie—with the little lost drawn-up bow of his lips and the tumbling chin and the eyes that always managed to look hurt and put-upon but never stopped assessing you, as if he were rating his own performance moment to moment, Ronnie the thief, Ronnie the backstabber. He steeled himself. Gulped air till his lungs were on fire. And he wasn't walking anymore, but marching, marching like a soldier going into battle, right on up the creek, across the yard and onto the porch, and he was so wrought-up he didn't even notice that Joe Bosky's ski-equipped Cessna 180 with the stripped fuselage and the crudely stenciled
N
-number was nowhere to be seen.

He knocked, and that was ridiculous in itself, because nobody came calling out here, no Mormons or newspaper boys or Avon ladies or neighbors borrowing a cup of sugar. Nobody had ever knocked on this door. Nobody would ever knock on it again, not if the cabin stood a hundred years. A wind settled in the branches overhead, cooled the sweat of his face. “Ronnie!” he called. “Ronnie, you in there?” Nothing. Or was that the sound of movement, of voices? “Ronnie, it's me. It's Marco.”

He was about to push his way in—nobody home, and wouldn't that be a miracle—when the door swung back and Pan, in bare feet and thermals, was standing there gaping at him like a fish on the end of a hook. Pan had been asleep, that was it, a yellow crust beading his eyelashes, hair flattened to one side of his head, advantage Marco. “Oh, hey, man,” he mumbled. “Hey, good to see you.”

From inside, sleep-wearied, the voice of Sky Dog, of
Bruce:
“Shut the fucking door, will you? What the fuck you doing, Pan?”

Ronnie slouched back into the room, talking over his shoulder. “You want coffee? I was just going to make coffee.”

Marco ducked under the lintel and entered the cabin, shutting the door behind him. It was dark, his pupils clenched round the glare of the snow and the reflective ice of the creek, and for a minute he couldn't see a thing. He could smell, though, and what he smelled was a curious mélange of overcooked meat, bodily stinks, unwashed clothes and soap—the soap and lye Joe Bosky used for tanning his wolf pelts, and there was that smell too, the smell of the skin and the dead stripped-off fur of animals. Ronnie was a ghost at the stove, then the door of the stove swung open and there was the sudden incandescence of the coals and the silhouette of a thin-wristed hand framed there laying fuel on the fire.

“No,” Marco said, “I don't want any coffee. I don't want anything from you except the guns you stole.”

“Hey, Ronnie, man—who is that? Is somebody here? Joe? Joe, is that you?”

“Fuck you, Sky!” Ronnie shouted suddenly, with real vehemence. “Go back to sleep, all right? Shit,” he cursed, slamming the coffeepot down in the direction of the stove, “there's no peace around here, not for a fucking minute!”

Marco stood just inside the door. He wasn't moving. If this was going to get nasty, then let it. He was ready. He'd been ready for a long time now, since that day in the ditch back in California, since
Bruce
had trashed his things and Ronnie had laid his hands on Star. “The guns,” he repeated.

Ronnie came into focus now, round-shouldered, big-headed, the dirty white thermal underwear clinging to him like a mummy's wrap, the depth and clutter of the cabin stirring to life behind him in a storm of dust motes and dander and two beds materializing suddenly against the back wall, one of which contained a human form: Sky Dog, the mystery resolved. “What do you mean
steal
?” he said. “I
didn't steal anything. Norm gave me those guns because I was the only one that wasn't too lame to use them, and you know it as well as I do,
man,
” and he snarled out the final locution as if it were a curse. “So screw you with your
steal.
” The pot rattled on the stove. The dust motes settled. And then, as if they'd been having a minor philological disagreement, a matter of semantics and not substance, all over now, open, shut and closed, he added, “You sure you don't want a cup of coffee?”

Marco saw the two rifles then, a simple scan of the room and there they were, suspended from nails driven into the wall above the unoccupied bed, but what he didn't see was Ronnie reaching into the pocket of the parka hanging from the clothesline over the stove.
Enough,
he was thinking, angry, on fire with it, and he crossed the room in three strides and hooked down the top rifle, the .30-06 Springfield, and he was reaching for the Winchester when Sky Dog sat up in the bed opposite and muttered, “Hey, man, what do you think you're doing?” and Ronnie pulled Norm's uncle's long-nosed slab of a pistol from the inside pocket of the coat and said, “Put it down, man. Put it down and get the fuck out of here before you get hurt, and I'm telling you, don't push me, Marco, don't push me, man.”

But he was beyond all that, beyond threats, beyond Ronnie and Bruce and the minuscule and rapidly dwindling toehold they had in his life, and he strapped the Springfield over his shoulder as calmly as if he were getting dressed in the privacy of his own bedroom, then took down the Winchester and pulled that over his shoulder too. He gave Ronnie a long look, Ronnie at the stove in his underwear with the pistol he'd worn strapped to his thigh all summer extended now in the quaking grip of his light-shattering hand with its rings glinting and fingers curled. “Don't push me,” Ronnie repeated, and without knowing what he was doing, he let his other hand descend to the crotch of his thermals and he began to scratch himself, his fingers working in deep, digging hard, moving unconsciously to another imperative altogether.

And suddenly the whole thing was hilarious, a joke, as comical as any ten pratfalls, and could anyone have given a more inspired performance? Ronnie was holding a gun and Ronnie was scratching. Ronnie was in his underwear, with sleep in his eyes and his hair flattened to one side of his head, snarling
Don't push me,
and Ronnie was scratching. Marco crossed the room, shifting his shoulders to accommodate the heft of the rifles, swung open the door on daylight and paused there a moment. “Take care, Pan,” he said, and it was all he could do to keep from laughing aloud. “And you too, Bruce,” he called, “goodbye, man. And thanks for everything.”