Drop City

over the motor, it was just bullshit, that was all. And he wasn't lying, necessarily, or even fudging the truth. The way it turned out, he _wasn't__ involved, if involved meant getting his dick wet, because Merry snapped her legs shut, jerked her pants back up over her hips and crawled out of the tent to get all weepy and forgiving and apologetic with Jiminy, and up the river they went, his right arm in a sling and hers wrapped like a field dressing round his waist.
    Half an hour slid by, the throttle open wide and the current pulling them by the nose, and he turned the volume all the way down on Verbie and listened to the way the outboard engine broadcast its news to the world. He'd just about given up on seeing anything substantial--like a moose up to its nose in a willow thicket or maybe an eagle with a fish in its claws--when something moving in the water up ahead caught his attention. It looked like a pillow off one of the sofas in his grandmother's den--or no, an ottoman, the whole ottoman, bobbing in the foam as if this were the East River instead of the Yukon. Still too far to make it out . . . but now, closing fast, he could see that it was moving against the current, and wait, wasn't that a pair of ears--and a snout?
    Verbie shut down her monologue long enough to shout, “Hey, are you crazy or what?” even as the skiff veered sharply to the left and the ottoman was transformed into the head of a bear, a grizzly, with its scooped-out face and the silver hump of its back spiking out of the glacial milk of the river like a paradigm of power. Pan was electrified. _A grizzly. His first grizzly.__ And here it was, all but helpless, caught out in the middle of the river, swimming. He wasn't thinking of the meat or even the hide as he eased back on the throttle and reached for the rifle. It was the claws he wanted. He'd seen an Indian shooting pool one night at the Three Pup and when the guy leaned over to line up a shot you could see the necklace dangling free of his shirt, five grizzly claws strung out on a piece of rawhide, each of them as long and thick and wickedly curved as a man's fingers--a big man's fingers. Ronnie had wanted that necklace badly enough to ask the Indian to name his price, but the Indian just gave him a blunt-eyed look and bent forward to line up his next shot. And he'd understood: you didn't buy a necklace like that; you went out to where the bear dictated the terms and you tracked him down and took it.
    He cut the throttle with his left hand and shoved back the tiller so the boat looped in on the big floating head and the rippling shadow of the hulk that trailed behind it, all the while clicking off the safety on the rifle and trying to keep his hands from trembling with the sheer _excitement__ of it all, and this had to be the ultimate trip, right here and now--nobody was going to believe this, least of all his Hush-Puppied, slope-shouldered, lame-ass father entombed in his Barcalounger with a gin and tonic clenched in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The rifle was at his shoulder, the boat was pitching, the big head swiveled to take him in, and there were eyes in that head, eyes that locked on his with a look of mortal surprise and maybe terror, because what was this floating piece of jetsam _bearing__ down on him with people in it, people and _guns--__
    “Ron_nie__!” Verbie was shouting. “Don't, don't, _Ronnie__--Pan, no!” And before he could register this new threat on the horizon she'd swung round in the seat and swiped at the gun, and that threw off his aim because he flinched at the crucial moment and felt the stock kick back at his shoulder as if the bullet were coming out the wrong end and simultaneously saw the bear's head shy away in a pink puff of spray. He'd hit it--or no, he'd grazed it, and the thing only had one ear now and there was blood, grizzly blood, streaking the water in long raking fingers of color.
    Verbie was on him, her balled-up fists exploding on his forearms and her still-wet hiking boots lashing out at his knees, his thighs, his crotch, the boat pitching and yawing and the engine caught in the waking dream of neutral even as the stern dipped to the right and the first bucket of water sloshed in. “You asshole! You fucking asshole! What do you think you're doing? Did that animal ever do anything to you, huh? What is it with you? Big man, right? You've got to be the big man all the time!”
    That was when the engine died. That was when,