Drop City

everything she'd heard and read about the evils of addiction, about people taking LSD and staring into the sun until their retinas burned out, mutilating themselves, jumping off buildings because they thought they could fly, but when Star had laid out the two thin white sticks of rolled-up marijuana on the picnic table, she said to herself, Why not? If Star could do it, if Merry could, then why not? There is no knowledge worth the name that doesn't come from experience.
    She might have stayed there forever, stock-still and feeling the way the loose ends of things came together in one mighty bundle, might have turned to stone like in the folk tales, but a pair of gulls, yellow beak, steady eye, brought her out of it. They swooped in low to investigate her, to smell the death on her and see it ground into the lines of her hands and worked up under her fingernails, then reeled off screeching in alarm. She looked down at her hands hanging out of the frayed sleeves of her sweatshirt. They were cold. Simply that: cold. A wind rustled the leaves and she shivered and looked over her shoulder to where the cabin sat the hillside. It seemed to take her forever to make her way up the slope, stepping through invisible hoops and trapezoids that kept appearing and vanishing, moving in slow motion past the table with its litter of bread crusts and cups and the empty wine bottle and the ashtray with the inch-long stub of a marijuana cigarette laid across it like a sentence of doom, but then she was at the door of the cabin and the sky snapped back again and the clouds began to rumble.
    Inside, everything was familiar, and it was all right. There was a routine here, a routine to follow, and it had nothing to do with scraping hides or hippie drugs or the sky coming unhinged. She stoked the fire. Lit a cigarette. Added water to the cooked-down meat and chopped vegetables at the cutting board. Outside, the thunder detonated over the hills, lightning lit the room and the rain came with a hiss, sweeping out of the woods and stabbing at the dirt of the yard in swift violent pinpricks of motion. Star had lit the marijuana as casually as she might have lit a cigarette and passed it to Merry, who drew in the thin pale smoke that smelled of incense, of myrrh, and what was it?--frankincense--and then Merry passed it to her. She put it to her lips, inhaled, and it was no different from a Marlboro, except there was no taste to it. “You want to know something?” Star said. “You don't know what making love is till you've done it with this. Really. It's like every neuron is firing at once, and your skin, your skin just _burns__ for the touch of a man.”
    At some point she went out in the rain and brought in the rum and the cups and the ashtray with the wet stick of marijuana in it, and at some point she laid the marijuana on the stove to dry and dipped herself a bowl of bear stew. She was hungry, hungrier than she'd ever been before. She had a second bowl. A third. She wiped up the gravy with bread, poured herself a cup of coffee. The rain held steady and she put wood on the fire and let the faintest hint of worry over Sess run in and out of her head--he could take care of himself; this was nothing, nothing but rain. Later, she stared at a magazine for what seemed hours, and still later, she went to the stove, picked up the dried-out stub of the marijuana cigarette and smoked it down to nothing, to two thin strips of saliva-yellowed paper which she tossed into the fire by way of hiding the evidence. It was dark when Sess came in, and though he stank of dog and the wet of the woods, though the cabin reeked of boiled bear and bear fat and the first death of a multitude to come, she stripped his clothes off him, piece by piece, and pulled him down and let herself melt beneath the living weight of him.

Drop City
    26
    He would never admit it, least of all to himself, but Sess Harder's hands were cold, and if his hands were cold, Pamela's must have been freezing. They were both wearing thermals, sweaters and the matching flannel shirts with the red and black checkerboard pattern Pamela's sister had given them as a wedding present, but their gloves were tucked away in their breast pockets, high and dry. He didn't know what time it was--never did--but he figured it couldn't have been much later than nine A.M., the temperature stuck in the high teens despite the early influence of the sun, and with every dip of the paddle the river took a nip out of