Drop City

little box everybody called by the diminutive just to express their sodality with it. They bought things. Made the rounds of the bars. And though he was disappointed to find that the dog pound had nothing with four legs and a tail that weighed more than maybe fifteen pounds--the Chihuahua meets the toy poodle meets the bichon frise in the dumped-down hills of Fairbanks--he was satisfied. He was going upriver with his wife and all the necessities and luxuries they could carry and hippie pottery too, and he didn't give a blue damn for how things sorted out in Boynton.
    They got in from Fairbanks in the late afternoon, and it was blowing up cold. Sess went right on by the Three Pup, pulled the pickup into Richard's drive and backed it down to the river. “Is there anything we need out of the shack?” he wondered aloud as Pamela handed him boxes of groceries, cans of Blazo gas and two-stroke oil, a bag of brand-new socks and underwear and felt linings for his mukluks. He was leaning forward, distributing the weight in the bottom of the canoe. The wind took his hair and gave it a yank.
    “Nothing I can think of,” she said, straightening up and looking out over the anvil of the river. The sky was dark. Whole armadas of ice had come down to do war with the open water.
    “All right, then,” he said, “because I don't like the looks of that sky, not one bit.”
    Pamela was wearing her parka and she'd put the hood up the minute she got out of the truck. Her hands were thin gray flaps of skin working out of her sleeves, her shoulders were hunched against the wind and the tip of her nose and her cheeks were already drawing color. When she took the paddle up out of the thwarts, he saw that her knuckles showed white against the dark oiled grain of the wood. She gave him a tired smile and settled herself in the bow and he couldn't help thinking of the contrast between this and the first time they'd gone upriver together, all the way back in the fullness of June, but then a little discomfort was what the country offered everybody without prejudice, and soon enough he'd have her back in the cabin, the fire stoked and a cup of something hot in her hands. As they shoved off, the canoe shattered the spider ice that clung to the shore. No one had to tell him this would be the last canoe trip of the year.
    They hadn't gone more than half a mile, the wind in their faces, when Pamela turned to him. “The keys,” she said. “What about the keys?”
    “I left them in the truck. Didn't I?”
    “Check your pockets, Sess--you remember what happened last time.”
    His hand was so numb he could barely work it into his pocket, and what did he feel there taking shape under his fingers? A pack of matches, his pocketknife, the money clip--and the keys to Richard Schrader's truck. So they turned around and went back and he climbed up the bank past the battened and silent hippie bus--they must have all gone upriver, that's what he figured--slipped the keys into the truck's ignition and came back down the bank at a jog and shoved off again.
    The wind was fiercer now, really cutting up, and they had to stick in close to shore to stay out of the main thrust of it, but that was a problem too because the ice was forming there and keeping them at arm's length. Twilight came down. They dug at the paddles in silence. He was thinking nothing, working on autopilot, stroke and stroke again, when the sound of the plane came to him. He heard it--they both heard it--before they saw it, and when it came into view, materializing out of the blow, it couldn't have been more than two hundred feet off the river and heading in the same direction they were. The noise exploded on them as the plane passed directly overhead and then made a wide loop out front of the canoe and came back at them, and Sess was thinking _It's Howard Walpole or Charlie Jimmy out of the Indian village at Eagle, circling back to see if we're okay--__
    But it wasn't Howard Walpole and it wasn't Charlie Jimmy either. The plane was running three lights, but the one under the left wing was out of sync with the pulse of the other two--faulty wiring, a loose bulb--and as it drew nearer, swooping on them now, he saw the pontoons naked of paint and glinting dully in the erratic blue flash of light. He knew those pontoons, pontoons that would give way to skis by morning if the weather kept up, and he didn't have to see the paintless fuselage or the fading black stencil of the _N__-number to know