Drop City

uniform they might have been stamped on by the manufacturer. There was a stove in the middle of the place with a couple of chairs set round it, a dangle of things trailing from hooks nailed into the overhead beams and a glass-front cooler with soft drinks, canned beer and even milk, butter and whipping cream brought in once a week from a supermarket in Fairbanks and sold at three times the price. If it weren't for the cooler the place could have jumped right out of the pages of a book of old-time photos or maybe even daguerreotypes, the kind of thing her mother always had out on the coffee table for guests to thumb through, _How Our Forefathers Lived__ or _Country Stores of the Old West.__
    When Pamela stepped in the door, there was nobody in the place, though it was ten o'clock in the morning and people were moving up and down the street outside like bloodclots working their slow way through the veins of the town. A bell over the door announced her presence, but no one--not Wetzel Setzler or a shopboy, if the breed existed this far out--appeared from the back room to acknowledge her. It was preternaturally still, as if the place existed outside of time; the only light was what spilled in through the windows. The thought came into her head that she could rob them blind, take anything she wanted, take all she could carry and set up a rival store across the street, and they wouldn't be any the wiser. “Hello?” she called. “Anybody here?”
    She found herself staring into the jaws of what must have been a bear trap dangling from a chain overhead, a huge dark wedge of blue-black steel, faintly glistening in the morning light. Here was a trap that meant business, lethal and unyielding, and she imagined it artfully buried next to a carcass or along a game trail like the discharge of a bad dream, and for just a moment, looking into its teeth, she felt the cruelty of it, and was this what Sess had been trying to tell her the night they'd got drunk? It was a trap. A necessary accoutrement to the wild life. You trapped things and then you killed them, skinned them and fed them to the dogs, and the money from the skins bought you sugar, coffee, cartridges, more traps. That was what she was buying into, and it was a matter of choice, of her own pleasure and inclination, as much as it was about survival--all those little lives would feed her own, as if she were some god on high demanding sacrifice.
    Next to the trap, nailed to the swell of the shellacked beam as if to make light of the whole business, was an old-fashioned bicycle horn with its tarnished brass tube and black rubber bulb. Before she could think, she was reaching up to squeeze the bulb and a low flatulent wheeze of a sound announced her presence. “Hello?” she called again.
    No response.
    But maybe they weren't open yet, maybe that was it. Maybe they were all so trusting they just left their doors unlocked up and down the street and people could come and go as they pleased, pick out what they wanted and pay on the honor system. There was a door at the rear of the place marked OFFICE in the same meticulous block letters that set out the prices on the bins, and she went to it and tried the handle. She rapped formally with the knuckles of her left hand even as she pushed the door open and found herself on the threshold of a windowless den with a desk, a filing cabinet and cardboard boxes of liquor stacked floor to ceiling against the walls. There was a smell of burnt wax or lantern oil, something chemical, at any rate, mingled with the scents of Pine-Sol and the mold it was meant to defeat.
    As she leaned into the doorway, the floorboards groaned beneath her feet and she stopped where she was, embarrassed suddenly. She had no business in the lair of a man she barely knew, his socks and yellowed T-shirt laid over the back of the chair to dry as if he'd done his washing one piece at a time, his tooth-worried pipes laid out in a row atop the filing cabinet beside a framed photo of his younger self and a woman twice his size in a print dress, both of them glaring into the sun as if they'd just emerged from a cave. There was a pair of boots in the corner, pipe cleaners in a jar, a dismantled fishing reel laid out on a piece of newspaper. She saw the radio then, right there on the desk with a set of headphones and a mike attached to it, and that impressed her in the way of the bear trap--this was a different world out here, a different life, and it was going to take