Drop City

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