Drop City

whole lot faster and more efficiently than he would have a year ago.
    “Because if that's what worrying you, honey, you can just put your fears aside--Sess knows what he's doing. He's the most capable man in the country, just ask anybody.” She gave a little laugh, picturing him out there in the patched-up parka she'd trimmed with wolverine for him, best fur in the world because it wouldn't ice up with the tailings of your breath, standing tall on the back runners, his eyes squinted against the wind, the sinew pulling and muscle jumping in his arms. “That's why I picked him, you know that. And listen, thirty-five, forty below isn't critical, not really. At sixty I'd worry.” She laughed again. “But only just a little. Sess is smart. He could weather anything out there. But what about Marco--he come through that frostbite okay? When was that, anyway--about a month ago now?”
    It was cold at the table. The wind always seemed to find the smallest cracks and slivers, as if exposing a cabin's flaws was its whole purpose and function. She thought of getting up to fine-tune the draught of the stove, maybe lay on more wood, but something kept her rooted in the chair, something just beginning to unravel like a ball of yarn, comfortable, newsy, the news of people and their complaints.
    Star just shrugged, as if that were the only gesture she knew. “I guess,” she said. “But, yeah, he's okay. He's got these two white lines, they look like scars or something, over his cheekbones--but you've seen that, right?--and his toes are okay, like the two that turned black, his little toe and the one next to it on his right foot?” She stared off across the room, her brow wrinkled, thin white fingers tugging at the ends of her hair, summoning the picture. There was no sound but for the faint rattle and sigh of the stove sucking air.
    “Reba said they were going to have to go and Norm said but wouldn't they just rot and fall off and Reba said you're thinking of toe_nails,__ this is toes we're talking about. But they recovered. Miraculously. They're not exactly beautiful, and he did lose both nails, but there's no infection and I was like mortified because he wanted me to cut them off of him with the hatchet, I mean, can you believe it? Me? With a hatchet?”
    So they laughed over the horror of that and puffed at their cigarettes and Pamela fed some wood to the fire and they both went over and sat on the bed and curled their feet under them in sympathy. After a while Star said, “That's not why I'm depressed. I know he'll be cool with Sess--”
    “Cold, honey, he'll be cold.”
    Star gave her a weak smile. “It's Drop City,” she said. “It's like the whole thing's just falling apart--did you hear Weird George, Erika and Geoffrey just walked out with the clothes on their backs?”
    She hadn't heard. She knew the nephew was gone, and the little pie-face with the false eyelashes, and a handful of them kept pestering Sess--they'd pay him anything, whatever he wanted--to mush them and their guitars and she didn't know what else on into Boynton. And he was willing, why not, cash was cash, but the trapline came first because once you set those traps you were obligated by every moral force there was in the universe to tend them, if only to curtail the mortal suffering of the living beings that gave you your sustenance, because you didn't waste, you never wasted--waste was worse than a sin; it was death.
    “That's terrible,” she said, and she meant it. She'd got used to having neighbors, Star, Merry, Maya, Reba, people she could talk to, women, other women. Last winter she'd been in an apartment, in a city, working in an office full of people. There were movies, shops, bars, restaurants. Now there were furs, now there was Sess. She was happy--she was, she knew she was, happier than she'd ever been--but the ineradicable nights were already stacking up, the stir-crazy nights, the nights when Sess wasn't enough, when nobody could be enough. And there was something else too, something bigger than all of that, her news, her secret, and if she didn't have Star to tell it to she'd go mad with keeping it in.
    Star's face floated there beside her in the soft light of the lamp, sweetly pretty, unblemished, no more a hippie face than her own. “People are eating by themselves now,” she said. “And the food, they're fighting over the food.”
    “But I thought you said there was plenty, more than enough--didn't you tell me Norm laid