Pamela’s smile faded.
“I mean, I’ve got a sleeping bag out in the car if you’ve got maybe fifteen minutes to spare—”
Sess hit him—or attempted to hit him—square in the side of the head, but Bosky had been watching him out of the corner of his eye and had time to get his forearm up and deflect the blow. In the next instant, they were at each other, flailing across the floor, and there was some small damage done to the glassware and one of the rickety dried-out chairs before they were separated. Bosky made some ugly comments—shouted them, raging in the grip of three men, threats, accusations and promises, and there was no law up here unless you got the sheriff to fly in from Fairbanks to inspect the corpse—and Sess threw them back at him. He hadn’t meant to, hadn’t meant to show that side of himself in front of Pamela—cursing and the like—but of all the men on earth Joe Bosky was the one who could make him boil over till the lid rattled against the pan.
Out in the lot, as the mosquitoes dive-bombed them and they slammed back into the truck for the half-mile drive down to the shack on the river and the canoe that awaited them, Pamela looked shaken, and he felt sorry for that, he did. “What was that all about?” she said. “That guy—I mean, I’ve seen some bush crazies in my time, but that guy was scary.”
In the front seat now, the truck rumbling to life beneath him, Sess just stared out the window a moment. Joe Bosky was what was wrong with the world. Joe Bosky was what people came into the country to escape. And Joe Bosky, hammered, polished and delivered up by the U.S. Marine Corps, was right here at the very end of the very last road in the continental United States, going one on one with the world. Sess was breathing hard, upset despite himself. “You don’t know the half of it,” he said.
And then they were on the Yukon, the big nineteen-foot Grumman freighter loaded down to the gunwales, the ten o’clock sun picking its way through the rolling black shadows of the debris on the surface, and he was calm again, in his element, off the road, out of the bar and into the embrace of the country. He watched Pamela’s shoulders dig at the paddle, studied the heavy braid of her hair, the beautiful locus of her back muscles and the sweet place where she sat the seat. The birds were there, the spruce marshaled along the banks and climbing up into the hills like an emperor’s army, naked bluffs, a million cords of driftwood flung up against the shore waiting for the river to decide what to do with them. A breeze came up and took the mosquitoes away. They saw moose in the shallows, a black bear with two cubs hurtling up the far bank as if she’d been shot out of a cannon. They spoke in low tones. They were silent, and the country spoke for them. And then she said something, and he said something, and it was as natural to him as if he were speaking to himself.
It must have been around midnight, the sun hovering on the horizon, when they swung into the mouth of the Thirtymile River and the cabin came into view. Already the five dogs were up and yammering, dust rising round their feet in a distant cloud, the proto-barks drifting off into wolfish howls of greeting. “Hear that?” Sess said, digging into the paddle. “That’s your welcoming committee.”
She turned to look over her shoulder. “Oh, really? And what are they saying?”
“ ‘Pam-e-la, we looooooove youuuu!’ ”
And she laughed, even as a pair of loons went racketing up off the water. “You sure they’re not saying, ‘Here we are, now feeeeeeeeed us’?”
“Well, Pamela,” he said, and he winked at her because he was feeling so light in his bones and his organs he might have been a bird that could sail right up out of the canoe and across the flux of the water in a single wild rush of feathers, “to be truthful with you—and I’m going to be truthful with you, always, whether this lasts the weekend or till you’re a hunched-over old lady and I’m an old man—I think you do have a point there.” He let the paddle trail an instant and cupped a hand to his ear. “Yep. Now that I concentrate, I think I can detect maybe just a trace of hunger in that chorus—but that’s Bobo, that sharp contralto in there, and he’s always hungry. So don’t blame him for spoiling the surprise.”
Then it was dusk and the canoe was up on the gravel bar, the dogs straining at their chains, and he and Pamela were walking hand in hand up the path that beat through the weeds to the cabin. He wished he could show her something grander—the rambling spread of outbuildings, the smokehouse, sauna and enclosed dog runs he planned to put up once he found the time and the money, not to mention a more spacious cabin—but he was proud of what he’d already accomplished, and he could feel the pride beating at his rib cage as he took down the bear-proof shutters and unlatched the door for her. The door faced south, of course, as did the two double-paned windows set on either side of it, but before they were in the cabin proper they had to go through the five-by-five dogtrot—or mud room, as somebody who lived in town might call it. “This,” he said, breathing hard in the dimness and taking in the familiar smells of oil, gasoline, ancient bait and bloodied traps and mold and whatever else had awakened out of the dirt, “this is the mud room.”
She was right there, a good eight or ten inches shorter than him, her pale hair and white arms ghostly in the half-light, and she wasn’t saying anything, just staring wide-eyed, like a girl on a school trip. He guided her through the inner door and into the cabin itself, dodging round her to put a match to the lantern he kept on a hook just inside the door. “And this,” he said, his voice almost strangled in his throat with the sheer tension of the moment, “this is what I call home.”
She stood in the middle of the room and she didn’t say a word. Her hair was luminous, her shoulders squared. He wanted to say something, wanted to ask her if she liked it, but he couldn’t find his voice. After a moment she drifted toward the shelves on the near wall and idly fingered the things there, his few grease-slick books (Tanning: From A to Z; How to Stay Alive in the Woods; Arctic Wilderness; The Home Brewer), a bottle of Pepto Bismol set beside a string of dried habanero chiles, Three-In-One oil in a rusted can, a candle six inches around he’d made from the wax of the bees he’d mail-ordered last summer, the odd tool. Still, she didn’t say anything.
How long she stood there, picking up one thing after another and gently setting it down again, he couldn’t say—no more than a minute or two, certainly, but it was the longest minute or two of his life. Was she in shock, was that it? For all her talk, she was a city woman, and maybe she had a whole different idea of what a cabin in the woods really was, a whole unspooling romantic fantasy of a big Ponderosa TV cabin with forest green shutters and a wide veranda and a kitchen with a tile floor and a hand pump for water. His heart was hammering. He couldn’t seem to swallow. Outside, the dogs howled. And never had the place seemed so close, so dingy and confining, so much like a cell, like a bum’s palace, like the meanest, crackbrained idea of a tumbledown shack in the world. The floor was caked with dirt. It was cold as a grave. He wanted to get down on his knees and sob. What had he been thinking? What in God’s name had he been thinking?
“I’m going to put a coat of varnish on the floor,” he said. “That’s the next thing. The very next thing.”
And then she turned to him, and the tears were in her eyes. “Oh, Sess,” she said, “it’s so, so beautiful.”
Together they fed the dogs—pots of cornmeal mush with dried chum salmon and the odd greenish scrap of last fall’s moose stirred in—and then he got the stove going and made her coffee with evaporated milk and so much sugar the spoon stood upright in it. Down came the table and the bed, both of which folded up against the wall when they weren’t in use and rested on dowels of white spruce when they were—“Space management,” he told her, “nothing to get in your way and trip over.” She perched on the bed, on the thin single mattress he’d hauled upriver in the canoe two years ago, and on the sleeping bag he’d sewn from the hides of a hundred ground squirrels. Within minutes the stove had driven the chill from the place and conquered the lingering odor of dampness and mold.
He sat on the far edge of the bed fr
om her, cradling his cup in his hands. “It’s a tight cabin,” he said, selling its virtues. “Even at sixty below. You’d be surprised. I mean, you would.”
She’d taken off her jacket now, and she stretched and leaned back into the pile of furs—lynx, fox, wolf—he’d heaped up around her. Her eyes were feasting. “That’s nice to know,” she said. “But with all these furs, and this beautiful sleeping bag—very neat stitchwork, Sess, by the way; I’m impressed—with all of this you’d be warm without the stove.”
He was thinking he’d be even warmer if he had somebody inside it with him, and before he could stop himself, he’d said as much. He said it, and then he looked away.
Her first response was a laugh, musical and ringing, a laugh that made the place swell till it was like a concert hall. He brought the coffee mug to his lips so he could steal a look at her. Her face grew serious. She shifted herself closer to him and reached out her hand for his. “That’d be nice,” she said, her voice gone raw in her throat. “But I don’t want you to get the wrong idea here, because it would be easy to, I suppose, you know, with me advertising for a man and all—”
He held her hand across the expanse of the bed, flesh to flesh, his every cell on fire. He didn’t know what to say.
“Because I’m not that kind of girl, not the kind you hear about—or read about in the magazines. I’m old-fashioned, Sess, and I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. I’ve waited twenty-seven years for the right man and I guess I can wait a few weeks longer. Till I’m married. Can you understand that? Can you?”
He was thinking about Jill, her hair cut short with a pair of shears till it stood out from her head like a clown’s, her legs hard-muscled and short, the heavy gravitational pull of her breasts as she swung into the sleeping bag naked, always naked, even on the coldest nights. Jill. He was thinking about Jill. “Yes,” he said. “Sure.”
And finally, when they thought of sleep with the sun propped back up in the sky and the night as still as a dead man’s dream, he was the one who gave up the bed and went out into the pale drizzle of light to pitch his tent amongst the dogs.
8
At eleven-thirty the next morning she was sitting on the edge of the bed, combing out her hair and watching the way the muscles rearranged themselves in his shoulders as he leaned into the stove and cooked her breakfast. He was wearing patched jeans and a sun-faded workshirt that might once have been blue or maybe green. His hair, movie-star black and thick as a wolf pelt, stood up off his head as if he’d been hanging by it all night long in a closet someplace. He was barefoot. The sleeve of his shirt was gutted under the left arm and both cuffs were furred with dangling threads. “Moose sausage,” he said, giving her a look over his shoulder, “and your extra-super-special Sess Harder flapjacks with last year’s sugared blueberries. What do you think of that?”
Through the two windows came a soft white layered light and both doors stood open to the sun and the sunstruck haze beyond. She could see his bees moving in golden flecks among the birch and aspen in the yard and she could smell the new-made scent of the Thirtymile where it joined with the Yukon and drew wet sparks from the rocks. Her hair was a travail, especially when she was out in the bush, and she’d meant to leave it braided—but when she woke and saw him there at the stove, laying on wood, fussing with the draft, she thought she’d comb it out and let it hang like a flag of surrender. Or enticement. Because she was on trial too, and she wanted to show him what she had, and not only mentally, not only verbally, but physically as well.
“That,” she said, giving him a smile, “sounds like just the thing. Because, I mean, anybody could have offered me eggs Benedict, caviar and truffles and the like, but if I’m going to paddle three hours for breakfast, the least I could expect is the super-special flapjacks. With, what did you say, moose sausage?”
He didn’t answer, because he was executing some sort of arcane maneuver with a cast-iron skillet so black it might have been unearthed from a tomb. There was the sound of hot grease snapping in the pan, and suddenly the cabin was dense with the smell of it, and with smoke too. He stabbed the sausages with a long-handled fork, danced round the coffeepot, flipped the leaden dark cakes with a rolling snap of his wrist. “I ought to get you a toque,” she said, and he said, “What’s a toque?”
They ate outside in the sun at a picnic table he’d fashioned from black spruce and varnished till it was the color of old leather, and they made use of his entire complement of dishware in the process: two tin plates and two tin mugs. In the center of the table, set in a can, was a sprig of wildflowers he’d gathered while she slept, and that touched her, the effort he’d put out and the essential sweetness it implied. He poured coffee, spooned up blueberries. “You know what I bet the best thing about living out here must be,” she said, mopping up her plate. “Aside from the beauty, I mean?”
He shrugged and grinned, tried not to look too pleased with himself. “Tell me,” he said.
“Safety. You’ve got to feel safe here, don’t you?”
“Sure, as long as I don’t have to perform any emergency appendectomies. On myself, that is. Or you.”
“The auto-appendectomy,” she said, and they both laughed.
“Or dental work. Imagine trying to pull your own tooth?”
They were silent a minute, contemplating the horror of that particular image, and then she said, “I’ll pull yours if you pull mine,” and they were laughing again. It was laughter that took a while to subside, and when he got up, still chuckling, to scrape the plates and wash up, she told him to sit down and let her do it, because she’d seen enough—enough, already. What did he think, he had to wait on her hand and foot? “What I meant,” she said, sliding the dishes into the tub of water he’d heated on the stove, “was the kind of safety you could never feel in the city, or at least I couldn’t. It got so I didn’t want to go out at night, not alone.”
He’d followed her back inside and was sitting on the edge of the bed now, rolling a cigarette and watching her as she moved amongst his things. “Okay,” he said, “sure, I’ll grant you that. As a woman you’ve got to be especially careful—”
“As a man too. The whole society’s breaking down, assassinations, drugs in the schools, hippies—I know this guy from my office who used to like to walk his dog before he went to bed . . . just that, walk his dog. And you know what happened?”
Sess lit the cigarette. “Somebody jumped him?”
“You bet they did. Two guys with a knife, longhairs, and they weren’t content to just take his wallet—they stuck the knife right up his nose and slit his nostril, and you should see it, it’s like a permanent disfiguration, like a tattoo or something. And the dog. It was this sweet little thing, a cockapoo—Berenice, he called her—and she tried to protect him and they just turned on the dog and kicked her and kicked her till there wasn’t hardly anything left of her. That’s what I mean. That’s what society’s coming to.”
He’d risen from the bed and was standing beside her now, and she was aware of him in a way that made her skin prickle, the breadth of him, the smell of the tobacco, a tentative hand on her shoulder and his voice pitched deep: “You don’t have to worry about any of that out here. Bears, maybe. Wolverines. But we know how to discourage them. Believe me.”
Her hands were in the water and it was as hot as she could stand it. The scrub pad moved mechanically against the crust of the blackened pan. “That’s what I mean,” she said. “You have freedom out here, and not just freedom to do what you want, but freedom from that kind of crap—he was just walking his dog, for God’s sake.” For some reason she couldn’t name, she was on the verge of tears, and she wondered about that, about how she could let herself get so wrought up when this was what she’d wanted all her life, this place, and maybe this person, and the rest of the world, with its nose-slitters and dog-kickers, could sink into the ocean for all it mattered.
“Pamela,” he was saying, “come on, Pamela,” and she felt him lifting her arms o
ut of the sudsing water till she was open to him and he pulled her close. “You’re never going to have to think about any of that ever again, not for the rest of your life.”
People said she was crazy, wanting to live out in the hind end of nowhere, ten or twenty miles from the nearest store, church, roadhouse or post office, and another hundred sixty from anything even approximating civilization, if you could call Fairbanks civilized. And they said she was crazier still for willingly putting herself in the hands of some grizzled, twisted, sex-starved fur trapper with suet-clogged arteries and guns decorating his walls—in fact, that was exactly, word for word, the way Fred Stines, the man she’d been seeing in Anchorage, had put it—but she begged to differ. What they didn’t understand—what Fred couldn’t begin to imagine—was that everything they knew, the whole teetering violent war-crazed society, was about to collapse. On that score, she hadn’t the slightest doubt. And the riots in the streets were just a prelude to what was to come, because if nobody worked and they all just sat around using drugs and having promiscuous sex all day, then who was going to grow the food? And if nobody grew the food, then what would they eat? To her, the answer was obvious: they’d eat your food, and when they were done with that, they’d eat you, just like in that science fiction book where all the dead and dying were made into potted meat. Sure. But you could work in an office building every day and go to the store in your new shiny car and then come home to your gas heater and your woodstove, and never think twice about it, and that was where the Fred Stineses of the world would be when it all came crashing down. Not her, though, not Pamela. She was going to live in the bush, and she was going to be one hundred percent self-sufficient. Anything less, to her mind, was a form of suicide.