Drop City (28 page)

She gave him the grin back, gave his wrist a squeeze where it rested on the gearshift as the wheels beat at the road and the road beat back. “Sure, it's nice. But there's no backseat or anything, so how are we going to—”

“Dogs, you mean? Hell, we'll strap them to the roof.” He goosed the accelerator and the car shot forward with a jerk and then fell back again as he let up. He hadn't stopped grinning yet, and she was going to repeat her question—
Where'd you get the car?
—when she noticed that there was no key in the ignition, just a shining empty slot staring at her like a blind eye. And below it, below the steering column, there was some sort of plug hanging loose in a bundle of dangling wires.

A moment slipped by, scrub on either side of them, trees flapping like banners in a stiff breeze. Then he was fishing under the seat for something, his head cocked to keep one eye on the road. “Here,” he said, straightening up and handing her a can of Oly, “I already got a head start on you and didn't we say we'd reward ourselves with a couple beers this morning?” He stuck a second can between his thighs and worked the punch top while the car fishtailed across the road and righted itself again.

She accepted the beer, popped it open, took a sip. “You're drunk, is that it? Is that why you're acting like this?”

The grin had faded while he was rummaging under the seat, but now it came back, tighter than ever. “Hell, no, Pamela—I mean, two beers and a chocolate bar on a mostly empty stomach? Just feeling good, that's all. Super. On top of the world.”

She cradled her beer, studying him. “Where'd you get the car, Sess?”

He looked straight ahead, the grin frozen on his lips. He shrugged, but didn't shift his eyes to her. “Around.”

“Oh, yeah?” she said, and this wasn't cute, not anymore. This was criminal, that was what it was. Irresponsible. Wrong. “Then why are there no keys in it? And what's that mess of wires down there?”

Another shrug. He put the beer to his lips and gunned the engine again. “I borrowed it.”

“Borrowed it? From who?”

“You want to see if we can scare up anything on the radio?”

“From who, Sess?”

Now he looked at her and the grin was gone. Something—a tawny streak—darted across the roadway in front of them. “Joe Bosky.”

“Joe Bosky?” she repeated, as if she hadn't heard him right, and maybe she hadn't—maybe the roar of the engine and the wind through the open window was playing tricks with her ears.

He didn't say anything, just stared at the broad brown tongue of the road before them.

“You mean Joe Bosky who you were ready to kill a couple weeks ago? That Joe Bosky?”

She studied him in profile a moment and there was no give in him at all. “You're talking grand theft auto here, Sess. You're talking jail time. Is it worth it? Is it really worth it just to, to what—show off? Be the big man? Is that what you're doing? Showing off for me?”

“Tit for tat. You hurt me, I hurt you. It's the law of the jungle out here, Pamela, and you better get used to it.”

“Don't give me that crap,” she said, “don't even think about it,” but they drove on, going too fast, and the stones flew up to nick the paint and corrupt the body of Joe Bosky's 1965 Shelby Mustang
GT350, which he'd bought the day he set foot in San Diego after his second tour in Vietnam with the money his dead mother left him, and which he'd shipped up to Anchorage and driven at twenty-five miles an hour out the Fairbanks Road to store in the only garage in Boynton, courtesy of Wetzel Setzler and a ten-dollar-a-month rental fee. She didn't know what to say. She was furious. All this was so childish, two overgrown boys bullying each other, and what did Sess hope to gain? His dogs were dead and he was taking it out on Joe Bosky's car. But what if Joe Bosky got wind of it because Sess had been right out there in the main street honking the horn for all the world to see? What if he got Wetzel Setzler to call the sheriff on his ham radio? Then what?

“Stop the car, Sess,” she said. “Stop the car. I'm not going to be party to this.”

His hands choked the wheel. He stared straight ahead. “You already are.”

There was a patrol car sitting alongside the Steese Highway when they came into Fairbanks, a long, low, ominous-looking sedan with the sun glancing off the windshield so you couldn't see inside. Just the sight of it made her heart skip, but Sess eased off the accelerator, stuck an arm out the window and gave the invisible cop a hearty wave. She didn't dare turn her head, but she watched the patrol car in the side mirror as if she could fix it there by force of will, all the while expecting it to spring to life in a fierce tumult of light and noise. Nothing happened. The police car receded in the mirror, lifeless as a pile of stone. A pickup truck passed them. They went round a bend. Sess put both hands on the wheel and drove like an egg farmer on his way to market.

They had lunch out on the deck at the Pumphouse, her favorite place in Fairbanks, and the sun on her face and the breeze and the two beers she tipped back went a long way toward calming her. She got a copy of the paper and they scanned the classifieds under “Pets,”
but none of the dogs sounded promising to Sess—he was being difficult now, all the gaiety gone out of him—and they could both see that the day was going to be a waste. He kept saying they ought to be back at home, setting out their gill nets, but then he'd tip back his beer and drain his shot glass and rumble that there was no point in worrying about salmon or anything else if you didn't have dogs because if you didn't have dogs you were doomed to failure anyway and the whole idea of living in the wild was just a pipe dream, a joke. It depressed her to see him like this—worse, it scared her. He was her rock and foundation, the dominant male she'd chosen out of a whole pack of lesser males, the man she'd been waiting for all her life to lead her into the wilderness, and if he was defeated, she was defeated too. The waitress was hovering, and she could see in his eyes that he was about to order another round, so she said, “Listen, what about the pound?”

“I don't even know where it is,” he said, throwing up obstacles.

“Oh, you mean the
dog
pound?” the waitress put in, reaching for the bottles on the table and giving each an exploratory shake. “I can tell you where that is, because my boyfriend and me just found the cutest little toy poodle there—Mitzi. That's what we call her. Wait. You want to see a picture?”

The pound was behind some sort of factory or warehouse on a piece of flat foot-worn ground devoid of trees or even shrubs, a squat prefabricated building in front of which a single battered panel truck was parked at a skewed angle, as if the driver had run off and abandoned it. The railroad tracks ran within a hundred feet of the back end of the place and the boxcars sat there humped up to the horizon like dominoes. Sess didn't even want to get out of the car, but she prodded him, and a moment later they were standing there in the lot, gravel crunching under their feet, and she was thinking this was about as far from the Thirtymile as you could get and still be in the state of Alaska. An ammoniac smell hit them then, carried on a light
breeze with a handful of mosquitoes in it. There was a feeble anguished sound of yipping and whining, and it seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. “What can we lose?” she said, trying to mollify him as he gave her a glum look over the roof of the ridiculous car.

Inside, the smell was concentrated, and she thought of the only big-city zoo she'd ever been to, in San Francisco, where the ratty animals lay festering in concrete troughs and the multiplied stink of them—a stink so intense it made her panicky—was the only lasting impression she had of the place, of the whole city, in fact. The floor was concrete, the light inadequate. A blocky woman with pouffed-up hair and teardrop glasses grinned at them from behind a plywood counter with a Formica top. “You here for an adoption?” she asked over the racket of the dogs, which had gone up a notch since they'd stepped in the door. “Or just thinking about it maybe?”

Then they were walking down a cement corridor between rows of mesh cages, dogs of every size and description leaping at the wire, yodeling, yapping, whining, their paws like windmills, their eyes alive with eagerness and hope. The woman stooped to one or another of them, cooing, and they poked their shining noses through the mesh to worship her fingers and the back of her hand. There was a terrific scrabbling of nails as the dogs fought for purchase on the wet concrete. One of them, a beagle mix with flapping ears and deep, liquid eyes, clambered up on the backs of three others to stick its snout through the gap where the cage door had pulled back from its hinges, and Pamela slid her hand in against the wall to feel the dog's appreciation, its pink tongue extracting every molecule of flavor from her skin. She wanted to adopt them all.

“Now, Buster,” the woman was saying, pressing her hand to the mesh where a white-faced retriever crouched over its bad hips, “Buster's the sweetest thing you'd ever want to see. He'd make a perfect house dog. And he loves kids. You two have kids?”

Sess was right there with her, but he didn't seem to hear her. He
was focused on a dog in the back of the cage, a lean big-headed thing with paws like griddles that couldn't have been more than eight or ten months old. “That one,” he said, “can I see that one?”

The woman looked dubious. “You mean Peaches? That's Peaches,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at Pamela. “He's not a house dog, but if you live in the country and you've got some space, well, I guess he'd be fine. He's shy, that's all.”

“That's because he's got wolf in him,” Sess said, and his mood had lifted—she could hear it in his voice. “You see the angularity of those back legs, Pamela? And the snout? The pointy snout means he's got longer vertebrae so his chest muscles fan out and he can really cover ground. That's a fast dog there. And he'll pull too.” And then he was in the cage, three or four dogs swarming at his hands, tails whacking. The wolf dog shrank back in the corner and Sess went down into a crouch, squatting over his knees and extending his right hand. “Peaches,” he said, his voice burnished and low, “what kind of a name is that for a dog? Come here, boy, come on.” It took a minute, Pamela and the woman watching from outside the cage, and then the dog came to him, five feet across the cement floor, in the submissive posture of a wolf, creeping on its elbows and dragging its belly. Sess smoothed back its ears, ran a hand over its snout. “I'll take this one,” he said.