Drop City Read online

  And Joe would know what to do in the present situation, except that Joe wasn’t talking. He’d said one thing only after Pan had cut the seat belt with his hunting knife and dragged him out of the crumpled cockpit an hour and more ago, and that was, “Build a fire.” That problem had taken care of itself, though, because when they veered into the trees the left wing folded back against the fuselage and the gas tank let loose and they were lucky even to have gotten out before the whole thing went up. Which it did. No sooner had Pan dragged Joe out into the snow than there was a flash and a thump and their ride home became a bonfire. Now it was nothing but a smell on the air and the cold was seeping back, and Joe was beyond giving advice.

  Ronnie could feel his heart shifting gears in his chest. They were in trouble here and no doubt about it, but he wasn’t thinking too clearly because he’d hit his head a couple times on the control panel—it just seemed to go after him, as if it had suddenly come to life with the sole purpose of beating his brains out—and that crust of frozen liquid that kept splintering every time he involuntarily grimaced over the red blur of pain that had settled in his left shoulder and made his arm trail away from him as if it didn’t want to belong to him anymore, that was blood. Joe was unconscious. Not dead—he was breathing still, though Ronnie was no doctor, and even if he was it wouldn’t do him much good out here with no drugs or instruments or tools beyond his knife and the dead weight of the pistol strapped to his thigh. What he did do was cut a couple dozen spruce branches and mound them up so Joe wouldn’t have the exposed ground leaching the vital heat from him, and he was in the process of trying to get a fire going. He’d collected some of the dead and yellowed inside branches and snapped them across his knee to make a whole tottering pyramid of kindling, and he’d dragged a few bigger sticks out of the snowheaps as well, and he did have matches and even a few odd scraps of paper in the bottom of his backpack—the only item of survival gear he’d managed to drag out of the plane before it went up.

  The moon was a terrifically heavy thing as he crouched there beneath it, baring his wooden hands for just an instant to strike a match on the uncooperative slab of the limp cardboard book—unsupportable, that moon, crushing—but though his hands were like catchers’ mitts he was going to survive not only this but anything else the evil forces out there might throw his way because the match caught and the wind held its breath and the cluster of desiccated pine needles began to glower and crackle and get greedier and greedier still. He pulled on his gloves. Tore at the branches round him and built the fire till it leapt up and took over on its own. “Joe,” he said, “Joe, we got a fire here,” but Joe was unresponsive, Joe was cold, Joe was out for the count.

  Pan crouched by the fire, beat his hands together. No one was going to come to their rescue out here. Whoever it was in the sled couldn’t have been far, but why would they bother? It was Sess Harder and his old lady, had to be, unless Joe had gone completely psychotic on him, and Sess would have paid admission, premium seats, to see Bosky dead. So it was up to him, up to Pan. What he would do was wait for morning, for the half-light and the glow painted round the hills to the south—that would give him direction, and he’d work his way east to the river and then go north for Drop City. He could do it. He was tough. He was young. He knew these hills, he knew the river. He’d have to build up the fire for Joe, build the bonfire of all bonfires, and leave a mountain of wood there too so when Joe came out of it, if he came out of it, he could stay alive till Alfredo and Bill and the rest of them—Reba—could get to him.

  That was the plan. It was a lonely plan, a hard plan, but everything was going to be all right. The fire beat back the night. The cold began to slink away and back off into the shadows and though he couldn’t feel his feet, his fingers had begun to tingle, and that was a good sign. When your core temperature dropped, the blood fed your organs to keep the machine going and the extremities were sacrificed, just another adaptation for survival, and where was that bear he’d shot the ear off of now? Hibernating, like all the moles and rodents in Drop City, and that was another way to survive. But he could feel his fingers and that meant there was no damage done, or nothing bad, anyway—he’d rather be dead than go around like Billy Bartro from high school with the two cauterized stumps on one hand and three fingers on the other because he was trying to make a pipe bomb in the basement and had to live the rest of his life wearing a pair of dove gray golf gloves like some kind of butler out of an English novel. No, he was all right. Everything was cool.

  It was then that he thought of the flask. He’d left the backpack up against a tree well outside the circle of the fire—didn’t want to see that burn—and now he pushed himself up and went back to retrieve it. A hit or two, that’s what he needed. To warm him. Calm his nerves. He wasn’t going anyplace, not till tomorrow morning, anyway, and it was going to be a long cold unendurable night—might as well get a buzz on. He fetched the pack, settled in again by the fire. He thought of Joe momentarily—maybe he should try forcing a little down his throat, like in the movies, see if that would bring him out of it—but he needed to tend to himself first. He’d really done something to his left arm, torn a muscle or something, and the pain of it shot all the way up into his shoulder socket and back down again when he tried to pin the flask to his chest so he could unscrew the top. The whole business was awkward, especially with his gloves on, but he managed—he had to, he had to get his head clear here—and in the next moment he was holding the cold worked-metal aperture with the silver inlay to his lips and taking a good long hit.

  It was a mistake. And he knew it was a mistake in that instant. His throat seized and he doubled over, his whole body jolted with the shock of it. He was all ice inside, the liquid supercooled in that flask beneath the trees till it was a new kind of death he was pouring down his throat, and he only wanted it out of him. It wouldn’t come. He was on his hands and knees, gagging—gagging and coughing and retching—the fire laughing in his face, Joe Bosky slumped silent on a throne of spruce cuttings, and he kept gagging till all that cellular material that constituted the lining of his pharynx and esophagus sloughed loose and the tensed muscles of his limbs just couldn’t keep him off the ground any longer.

  32

  The first night on the trail they camped in a cabin that seemed to have been generated out of the earth itself, no different qualitatively from a cluster of boulders or a stand of trees. It had a shed roof, one sharp slope from the high end to the low, and the battens of ancient sod that composed it had sprouted birch and aspen and a looping tangle of stripped canes and leafless branches. There was a cache in the foreground, from which a hindquarter of moose wrapped in burlap hung rigid on a strand of wire, and in the flux of the moonlight it could have been something else altogether, something grimmer, darker, and Marco had to look twice before he was convinced. The dogs had no qualms, though—they made a dash for the place and then sat impatiently in their traces out front of the cabin while the moon flashed pictures of their breath rising over the dark hunched shapes of them.

  He could see the doghouses now, strung out beneath the trees, crude boxes knocked together from notched logs and roofed with symmetrical mounds of snow-covered straw. There was a hill behind the cabin, soft with reflected light, a creek in front of it. Everything was still. If you didn’t know the cabin was there you could have passed within a hundred feet of it and never seen a thing, except maybe for a glint of sunlight off the panes of the single window—in the right season, that is, and at the right time of day.

  They’d taken turns riding the runners and jogging beside the sled, and he’d jogged the last mile or so and was sweating inside his parka, a bad thing, a dangerous thing, because the sweat would chill you to a fatal point if you didn’t get yourself in front of a fire as soon as was reasonably convenient. “What do you think the temperature is?” he’d asked Sess half an hour earlier as they tossed the last of the five stiff-frozen martens they’d caught into the sled and rebaited the trap, and Sess had grinned
and knocked the ice out of his mustache with a mittened hand. “I guess about minus forty,” he said.

  There was a thermometer nailed over the doorframe of the cabin, and after he’d helped Sess stake out the dogs and toss them each a plank of dried salmon, he consulted it in the pale lunar light. The mercury was fixed in the null space between the hash marks for minus forty and minus forty-two. “Good guess,” he said, as they pushed their way into the dark vacancy of the cabin, its smells—rancid bait, lamp oil, spruce, fish, the intestinal secrets of lynx, marten, fox—stilled by the hand of the untenanted cold.

  “Hell,” Sess said, “it just dropped an extra degree in the meantime—but let’s get a fire going and get comfortable, what do you say?”

  “Sounds good. What can I do to help?”

  They were standing in darkness, in the chill, and then Sess had the lamp lit and the cramped clutter of the place took on definition. “Nothing,” he said. “Just sit and make yourself comfortable.” Marco sat, shivering now, and watched as the kindling in the sheet-metal stove took the light from the match and the frozen kettle appeared atop it and Sess bent to retrieve a blackened pot from the earthen floor and swing its weight to the stove in a single easy motion that culminated with the sharp resistant clank of metal on metal. “Keep it simple,” Sess said, “that’s my motto.”

  They both moved in close to the stove as the fire caught and rose in a roar of sucked air and the room came to life with a slow tick and release. Smells came back. The kettle jolted and rattled, seeking equilibrium. “What’s in the pot?” Marco wanted to know, and he’d never been hungrier in his life, in need of sugar, of fat, lard, sticks of butter, the basic grease of life, and no wonder the Eskimos subsisted on seal blubber—you really had to readjust your carburetor up here.

  “Moose stew.” Sess was fumbling around on the shelf behind the stove, looking for bowls, spoons, cups. “Made it last time through. What you do is you hack off a healthy chunk of that moose flank outside, fry it in bear fat with some flour and onions, salt, pepper, a little Tabasco, whatever vegetables you’ve got on hand—it was dried peas and lentils in this case—then fill it to the top with liquid, boil it down and toss your rice in. And voilà, Moose Stew à la Harder. And the beauty of it is, you just set the pot down on the floor when you close the place up and it’s frozen like a rock inside of the hour.” He rubbed his palms together and held them out over the stove. “Roy taught me that.”

  “And now you’re teaching me.”

  “That’s right. Now I’m teaching you.”

  If he’d had his doubts—camping, siwashing, in forty-below weather—the stew drove them down till he could begin to envision himself in Sess’s place, at home out here no matter what the conditions, taking what the land gives you, living small and a million light-years from the suburbs and the compulsively trimmed bushes and the rolling lawns and ornamental trees, because whoever landscaped this place outside the window did one hell of a job and no denying it. The stew was delicious. He had three bowls and polished the bowl when he was done with the pilot bread Sess kept sealed in a glass jar on the shelf. There was coffee, with sugar and evaporated milk, half-thawed blueberries in thick syrup for dessert and three shots of E&J brandy each. They sat cramped in at the little table by the window and fingered their cups and watched the way the moon dodged and shifted and went about its business amongst the trees. They talked trapping, talked snares and baits, talked Drop City, talked women.

  “I’m not surprised, truthfully, to hear the nephew sprouted wings,” Sess said, “considering that girlfriend of his, because she’s a downtown girl if I ever saw one.”

  “He’ll be back,” Marco said, and even as he said it, out here with nothing but a makeshift stove and a half-rotten spruce wall to keep him from becoming another casualty of the country, the mortal punctuation to yet another cautionary tale, he doubted himself. When Norm had pulled out, all of Drop City went into a panic, and after the panic, they went into mourning. Norm was their rock, their founder, their guru—he’d brought them all out here into the wilderness with the irreducible power of his vision, his money, his energy—and now he’d deserted them. Star sobbed till Marco thought her ribs were going to crack. Reba ate Seconal by the fistful. Jiminy wanted to shoot the skis off Bosky’s plane, handcuff Norm if necessary, anything, kidnap Premstar. Bill roared in Norm’s face for a whole day and a half, and you could hear his voice starting up like a chainsaw every few minutes and falling off again till it was the defining sound of Drop City, available even to the last cabin out. And then the plane came and Norm and Premstar were gone, peace, brothers and sisters, and screw you all—

  “Yeah,” Sess said, “I’m sure he will. If he gets another girlfriend.”

  Marco shrugged. They’d put out the lantern to save fuel and to give them a better view of the night beyond the window. “I don’t know,” he said, “maybe we don’t need him. Maybe it’s all part of the greater plan.”

  “The greater plan? You’re not getting mystical on me, are you? Here, have another shot of brandy. It’s good for you.”

  “I mean, some people are serious about this and some aren’t—Alaska, let’s all go to Alaska, kids, and we’ll dance to the light of the moon. You know what I’m saying? We’ll see how it shakes out now that we’re on our own.”

  “Lydia,” Sess said. “She’s the one. If I had my pick, she’d be the one I’d go for. But don’t tell Pamela.” He looked down into his cup. “By the way, just out of curiosity, did you ever—?”

  Marco shook his head. “Not my type. But I guess you heard she brought us a little present from Fairbanks, right?”

  “Present?”

  “Yeah,” Marco said, holding his eyes. “Crabs.”

  Sess leaned into the table. He was grinning. “You don’t mean Alaskan king, do you?”

  “I don’t have them,” Marco said. “And neither does Star. So that says something right there.”

  “Oh, you’re hooked, brother, you’re hooked. Your wandering days are over, all she wrote.” He lifted the cup to his lips, set it down again. “But seriously, you need a woman up here. If you’re serious about the country, I mean. If it wasn’t for Pamela, I’d be climbing a tree right now, I’d be picking fights at the Three Pup, passed out on the floor, too sick to run my traps and club that lynx today out of its misery. Which, by the way, I ought to drag in here and skin.” There was a silence. “Stay tuned,” Sess said after a while, “that’s my advice. But listen, we’ve got a long day tomorrow, up to the next camp on No Name Creek, and I’ve about had it, how about you?”

  They were up with the first light, which came just after nine A.M. in a gradual dull accretion of form and shadow beyond the window. Breakfast was moose stew. The dogs had dried salmon, choked down in a fury of wild-eyed snarling and jockeying for position. The sky was low and ironclad. The temperature was minus thirty-eight and rising.

  He helped Sess put the cabin in order—moose stew on the floor, water in the kettle, kindling and stove-cut lengths of birch and poplar stacked up in a crude box in the corner—and then they harnessed the dogs. To Marco’s eye, the dogs weren’t much—savage-tempered, erratically colored and furred, with long angular stick legs, narrow waists and big shoulders. Back home, in Connecticut, they would have languished in the dog pound for the required two weeks, unlovable, inelegant, unadoptable, and then they would have been put down one by one, a gentle stroking of the ears and then the quick sure jab of the needle. The two close in to the sled—the wheel dogs—were called Lester and Franklin, a Sess Harder reference (and homage, or so he claimed) to the Drop City dropouts he’d seen panning for water in a goldless creek one glorious summer day, and the one just behind Lucius, the lead dog, was called Sky, just to extend the joke. “Let’s not make this a shaggy dog story,” Marco told him when the introductions went round out front of the cabin on the Thirtymile, and Sess liked that. “I guess I should’ve called one Norm,” he said.

  But now it was thirty-eight degr
ees below zero and there was no time for joking. The dogs were in a frenzy to get into the traces and get going—you could hardly slow them down for the first hour or so—and Marco was bitten twice, right down through his gloves and into the flesh, as he tried to clip Sky into the gangline, and if that wasn’t bad karma he didn’t know what was. “Jesus,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the din of the dogs, “are they always like this?”

  Sess had just waded into the middle of a three-dog fight, rearranging ribs with his moccasins and hammering the big furred heads with his balled-up fist. “You want dogs with spirit,” he said, and then they were off.

  That was a rush, pure exhilaration, the air so cold it burned, your lungs on fire with it, arms pumping like a marathoner’s, now on the runners, now off, feeling the surge of uncontainable power that ran like an electric jolt through the spines and churning legs of the wolf-dogs and right into the sizzling core of you. Marco had never experienced anything like it. They hurtled along the trail, too energized to feel the cold, until they came to the first set and the dogs sensed it, smelled it, and pulled up short.

  The bait was gone, the trap sprung, and there were lynx tracks like mortal punctuation in the snow. Sess showed him how to reset the trap, sprinkle a couple handfuls of snow over it for concealment, then nail a rotted goose wing soaked in beaver castor three feet up the trunk of a tree just behind it. And what made the best bait? Whatever stank the most. For marten, Sess used the guts and roe of the salmon he’d caught last summer—after they’d been properly fermented in a mason jar set out in the sun for a couple weeks. “No big deal,” he said. “Little tricks. Anybody could learn them.”