Drop City

eighteenth, nineteen hundred and seventy, Anno Domini, and that the thermometer had stood at thirty-two degrees below zero when she last looked--and she might just get up again and step out the door and see how far it had dropped in the interim. She might. And she might keep a diary too, just simple things, just facts--the day, the time, the temperature, what they were eating, what was in the sky, in the trees, on the ground. That was her business, her _thing,__ as Star would say, and who could deny her that? Not Sess. Certainly not Sess. So let him wake in the night to the ticking of the clock. It wouldn't kill him.
    She was about to get up and do just that--check the temperature--when she saw an upright shadow isolate itself from the trees and move on up the bank toward the cabin with the slow disconnected movement of a figure in a dream. She held the nub of the cigarette to her lips, smoking it right down to the filter, and watched. The figure moved closer, huddled, kicking through the snow on limbs that separated and joined and separated again, and she felt her whole being leap up inside her: it was Star, coming to relieve her of the burden of contemplation. What was it--what would Star say? It was far out. It was party time.
    She was at the door before Star could knock, afraid that she might see the darkened windows and think no one was home and turn back for the hippie camp. “Well, hello, hello,” she said, sweeping her into the room, “what a surprise, what a nice surprise, and Merry Christmas, have I wished you a Merry Christmas?”
    Star accepted a cup of tea, the expensive Darjeeling blend Pamela kept in a sealed tin for visitors, and Pamela found herself rocketing around the room in a high state of excitement, stoking the fire, lighting lamps, setting out a plate of crackers and cheese, bread, butter, two-berry jam, and spoons and a knife--where was the knife?--all the while talking nonstop, talking as if she'd been the prisoner of a tribe of deaf-mutes on a desert shore. She talked so much, so steadily and without remit, that it must have taken a quarter of an hour to realize that Star wasn't right there with her. Star wasn't saying anything, or hardly anything--just answering yes or no to the flock of questions she was throwing at her, nodding or grunting or chiming in with an _Uh-huh__ or _I know what you mean__ in a kind of call and response. Finally Pamela got hold of herself. She bit her tongue. Forced herself to take a long sip of the tea that was already going cold on the table before her. “Right,” she said, “right,” as if she'd just solved an equation that had been baffling a whole team of mathematicians for weeks, “why don't you tell me about it?”
    She lit another cigarette. Star joined her. They held the taste of tobacco on their tongues a moment, looking into each other's eyes, then exhaled simultaneously. “Is it Marco?” she asked in a long trailing sigh of recycled smoke. “Is that it? Are you worried about him?”
    Star shrugged. She was tiny--petite, a size four--and she'd never looked more lost and childlike than she did now, the hair pulled back neatly from the central parting and tucked behind her ears as if a mother had fussed over it, her shoulders thin and slumped, her eyes gone lifeless with a child's renewable grief. Marco was out on the trapline with Sess--he'd wanted to learn by doing, he said, and Sess had taken him under his wing--and they were siwashing, camping out on the trail, in temperatures that would certainly drop to minus forty or lower overnight. Or they weren't siwashing exactly--Roy Sender had built two crude timber-and-sod cabins at strategic junctures along the forty-odd miles of the trapline, and though they had dirt floors and none of the amenities of a year-round cabin, barely even a window between them, they did have sheet-metal stoves that Sess always kept in good repair, with an armload of kindling and neat lengths of stovewood ready to hand. Plus, Sess had gotten the two extra dogs he'd wanted--Howard Walpole's dogs, actually, sour as vinegar but good pullers. (Howard didn't need work dogs anymore because he was trading up for speed so he could try his hand at racing, just for the kick of it, he said--and had she heard the rumors about the Iditarod starting up again, with real prize money?--but everyone knew he'd never get off the seat of his snow machine long enough to get the dogs in harness.) And so Sess would be able to cover ground a