Drop City
out of the void.
He looked to her, the ghostly stoop and movement of her as she mounded wood and let the phrases escape her mouth in quick snatched drifts of windblown vapor. “No,” he said, “not in this, and I hope to god the son of a bitch crashes and burns till there's nothing recognizable left of him. Can you believe it? Can you believe he actually shot at us? I told you, Pamela. I told you from the beginning, and you wouldn't listen.”
They waited half an hour, shivering, and then he held a match to a twist of birch bark and the fire took. They dried their shoes, their socks, their feet. Pamela dug a damp box of crackers out of a shredded grocery bag and they shared them with slices of Cracker Barrel cheddar and let their internal engines wind down a bit. What this looked like was the first big storm of the year--it had all the earmarks, what with the wind and the snow formed into pellets and temperatures in the twenties, and he had no doubt it would settle in colder and the snow turn to powder--and they had a very narrow window of opportunity here if they were going to get the canoe and all their precious stuff back to the Thirtymile before next spring. After a while, he got up and fished around through the baggage till he found a pair of his new guaranteed-to-keep-your-toes-warm-at-forty-below Outdoorsman-brand thermal socks and worked one of them through the bullethole in the bottom of the canoe till he had a plug he thought would hold. Then they loaded up again and went out on the river in the full blow of the storm, their forearms and shoulders fighting the resistance, their hands molded to the paddles as if they'd been sculpted of ice.
It must have been past midnight when they skirted Woodchopper Creek, veering far out from shore on the off chance Joe Bosky was out there somewhere laying for them, and neither of them dared even to think of what might have happened upriver, at the cabin, when Joe Bosky knew they were away from home and had the means and the motive to do them real and irreparable harm. The snow flew in their faces. A thin crust of ice formed over the baggage where the leavings of Pamela's paddle flew back on the wind and settled, and a layer of snow formed atop that. The night was a dense and private thing, working through the motions of its own unknowable rhythms, and they had no right to be out in it. Sess Harder didn't care. He was glad to be here, now, equal to the challenge, glad to be alive, glad for every furious driven bite the wooden paddle took out of the refrigerated river. And when they rounded the Thirtymile and the dogs sang out with the apprehension of their coming, he was the gladdest man in the world.
Drop City
PART SIX
OLD NIGHT
This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night.
--Henry David Thoreau, “Ktaadn”
Drop City
27
It was Halloween, October thirty-first, Pan's favorite day of the year, and what did he have to show for it? Nothing--no black cats, no skeletons, not even a jack-o'-lantern. It was four o'clock in the afternoon, black dark, and the river, the big roiling silver playground chock-full of fish and game he'd cavorted on all summer, was locked up tight in a tomb of ice. Freeze-up, that's what they called it, and Pan had shuffled off down the frozen highway of Woodchopper Creek in the declining light of day to see that the last open channel had sealed up overnight. It was twenty below zero. There was a wind. He'd stood there shivering on the rock-hard bank and listening to the silence--it was mind-blowing, all that noise of buckling ice and angry water, all that _life,__ smoothed out to nothing, not a whimper, not so much as a pop or burble--and then he'd hiked back up the creek to the cabin and stooped outside the door to fill his arms with firewood.
Nobody blinked. He came in through the dogtrot, slammed the outer door to, then squeezed through the heavy cabin door like a contortionist and slammed that behind him, his nose dripping, fingers numb, the sawed-off lengths of pine tucked under his arm like a stack of unreadable books. A garment of cold-thinned air came with him, and the _smell__ of the cold, almost a chemical smell, and what was it going to be like when the temperature dropped another twenty degrees? Another forty? He crossed the room, poked the coals and laid on the wood, and nobody said _Hey, man, what's it like out there?__ or _Did it lock up?__ or _We thought maybe you were frozen to a stump or
Weitere Kostenlose Bücher