Drop City

was in Alaska, in a log cabin in the middle of nowhere, snow on the ground and the temperature hovering at twenty below, and all he could think about was lemonade thick with ice in a tall cool glass, or a vodka and bitter lemon, gin and tonic, anything cold, the colder the better.
    Lydia took the lantern down from its hook and blew out the flame, a thin wisp of greenish smoke rising from the aperture and an evidentiary whiff of kerosene hanging on the air. She left the candles burning. He watched her move round the room, weaving through the clutter till she found her purse hanging from a nail beside Star's navy blue High Sierra backpack, the one she'd kept in the trunk of the Studebaker all the way across country, and how about that, Pan was thinking, Star's backpack. Lydia dug another stick of incense out of her purse and came to the table to light it off the candle guttering at Ronnie's elbow. She set the incense in its holder--cloves, that was what it was, cloves and maybe peppermint--and then produced a joint from the pocket of the fox coat. She gave him a wide-lipped smile, lit it and handed it to him. Then she dropped the coat to the floor, pulled her sweater and brassiere up over her head in a single fluid motion and shook out her hair. “You want me to dance for you?” she said. “Seeing as how you missed me up onstage at the Wildcat?”
    “Yeah,” he said, “that would be nice.”
    She began a slow bump and grind, spinning an invisible hula hoop round her midsection while the big hips rotated and rotated again, and then she stepped out of her jeans and dropped them to the floor too. “What do you think, Pan, Pan the satyr, you want me now?”
    She watched him from the lower bunk as he fought off his clothes, so many layers, the two shirts, the sweater, the long johns--he felt like a six-year-old undressing for his mother after a day in the snow, but Lydia wasn't his mother, uh-uh, no way in hell, and that was a good thing too, because there was nothing going to stop him now. The boots. He tore at the laces, kicked at the heels. “Come on, Ronnie,” she murmured, spread out for him there, waiting, “you don't want me to get bored here, do you?”
    He came for her as if he'd been shot out of a bow, and there was the usual sucking and licking and wrestling for position on the narrow slat of the bed, all good and well, all part of the agenda, love, Free Love, but she seemed to be wearing her panties still and he was pushing into her and tugging at them all at the same time, and what was this, some kind of tease? “No,” she whispered, pulling away from him, “no, we can't.”
    “What do you mean _we can't__? What are you talking about?” He was right there, right on top of her, his hands making the circuit of her. “You didn't take your pill? Is that it? Because I don't care, I'll be careful--”
    The purple eyes, the tease of a voice. “No,” she said, “that's not it.”
    “Jesus,” he said, and he might have been praying--he _was__ praying. “So what, then?”
    “Didn't anybody tell you? Because they've been treating me like the dregs around here, Reba especially, the bitch--she's the one that got found out. By Alfredo, I mean.”
    “What? What is it?”
    She shrugged and the bed quailed beneath her. “Crabs,” she said.
    “Crabs?”
    “I don't know where I got them, I really don't. And I don't think it was Arnold.”
    “Arnold? Who's Arnold?”
    “You don't know him,” she said. “He like owns this sporting goods store? He drove me back here. On his Ski-Doo. All the way out from Fairbanks, with a three-hour pit stop at the Nougat. He was sweet. He really was.”
    Pan felt himself shrinking.
    “Nobody's got any of that ointment,” she said. “That's the problem. It's not like there's a drugstore around the corner, know what I mean?”
    “So big deal,” he said. “It's not like VD or anything”--and it was all in the mind, wasn't it, because he came back strong now, ready to burst with it--“I mean, we could still do it, couldn't we?”
    She went right to sleep afterward, down and out for the count, and by the time he pulled out of her and rubbed himself as best he could with a dry bar of soap and a towel he found hanging by the door, she was snoring. Head back, breasts flattened across her chest, all that _hair__--she snatched in the air and blew it out again, hitting all the high notes as if she were playing a trumpet voluntary without the trumpet. That was all right.