Drop City

brought her the stiffened corpses of whatever he'd managed to kill out there in the secret recesses of the country. And how did she feel about that--how did she feel about this, about this stinking, flea-and-tick-ridden hide under the knife right here and now in a hurricane of flies and the blood and grease worked up under her nails and into every least crease and line of her hands so that she'd never get the smell out? She felt content. Or no: she felt irritated. This was the first time he'd left her since they'd been married, the first of a hundred times to come and a hundred times beyond that, and all he expected of her was to sit and wait for him and be damned sure the stew was simmering and the hide was scraped clean. She slapped a mosquito on her upper arm and the imprint of her hand was painted there in bear's blood. She flicked flies out of her face. Was this really what she wanted?
    The _ulu__ scraped, the flies rose and settled. There wasn't a sound in the world. She worked the hide out of inertia, for lack of anything better to do, worked it in a trance, and only when the canoe appeared on the horizon did she snap out of it. She watched it coming from half a mile away, because she could only study the stippled red meat and white sinew of the hide for so long before staring off into the immensity and just dreaming, and here was this slab of aluminum riding the current in a bolt of light, two people--two women--digging at the paddles. She stood, wiped her hands on a scrap of filthy rag, tried to do something with her hair. It was Star--she could see that now--Star and Merry, dressed alike in serapes and big-brimmed rawhide hats, maneuvering the battered silver canoe as if they'd been doing it all their lives. She watched them angle toward shore and then she waved and went down to meet them.
    Star sang out her name as the canoe crunched gravel and Merry sprang out to secure it. “We thought we'd come over and make your day--how does that sound?” Star called, clambering out of the canoe and hefting a half gallon of red wine like a trophy. “Girls' day out!”
    Sess was gone. The bear hide was a stinking collapsed filthy welter of raw meat and insects and the cabin reeked like a slaughterhouse. Winter was waiting in the wings--it was fifty-five degrees in the sun--and already she'd begun to feel sorry for herself, begun to feel resentful and left out, and here were her friends come to rescue her. She took the jug from Star's hand, screwed off the cap and held it to her lips and let the taste of it sweeten her mouth and scour her veins. Up the hill they went, arm-in-arm-in-arm. “I can't tell you how glad I am to see you,” Pamela said.
    When they got to the picnic table, Merry pulled up short. “God, what is that?” she said. “Is that a bear? A grizzly bear?” Merry was the spacey one, more than a little Gracie Allen in her--Say goodnight, Gracie--as lost and out of place in the country as anybody Pamela could conceive of. Every coot, sourdough and weekend nimrod in the Three Pup had fed her the usual horror stories about grizzlies--the way they smelled out sexual lubricants and menstruation, their power and fearlessness and the trail of dismembered corpses they left in their wake--and she backed away from the table as if the hide could come back to life and wrap her in its killing arms.
    “It's a black bear. A sow. Sess shot it in the garden last night.”
    “Wow. Far out. So what are you going to do, make a bear rug?”
    “Of course, what do you think?” Star said, and she tipped back the jug of wine now herself, and both Pamela and Merry watched her drink, the excess running down her arm in blood-red braids. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and held the jug out to Pamela. “Maybe we should get some cups and try to be a little more ladylike,” she said, and they all three burst into laughter.
    “A bear rug,” Merry said, after the laughter had trailed off. “That's cool, I guess, I mean, especially up here--but what about the rest of it, the whole animal that was living out there in the woods yesterday and doing nobody any harm. What about that?”
    “They eat it,” Star said.
    “Don't,” Merry said, and her eyes jumped from Star to Pamela and back again.
    “Right, Pamela?”
    She just nodded, because she was trying to maneuver the big jug of wine up to her lips again, and to hell with it, to hell with everything, really, that was the way she was feeling.
    The flies had