Drop City

in six months' worth of the basics? He spent hundreds of dollars you told me--”
    “We're not running out. It's more like hoarding, I guess you would call it. People are raiding the pantry, just taking anything they want, almonds, raisins--all the dried fruit disappeared. You can forget the powdered milk too. And the chocolate.” She made a face, lifted her hands and let them drop. “The flour's all full of these little black specks--I thought it was pepper at first, that somebody'd maybe dropped the pepper shaker in there when they were battering fish--but actually they were mouse turds, millions of them. And Reba--she seems to think she's in charge since Norm split, and she's always calling these meetings, her and Alfredo, to quote 'address the food situation,' but nobody comes.”
    “It's not even Christmas yet,” Pamela said. She didn't know why she said it--she didn't want to be negative--but these people, these _hippies,__ had to understand what they'd gotten themselves into here. It was like that fable her mother used to read to her and Pris when they were little, Aesop, she thought it was, about the ant and the grasshopper.
    “I know,” Star whispered. “I know.”
    Later, after they'd finished a second pot of tea and the moose steak sandwiches with sliced onions and horseradish sauce Pamela fixed for them, Star asked her if she'd mind if she spent the night--the whole trip, the whole _scene__ upriver was getting to be too much for her and she just couldn't face it, not tonight. Would that be all right? Would it be too much trouble? Of course not, Pamela told her, no trouble at all--she'd fix her up right here, in Sess's old bed, and could she believe he'd slept here alone, on this narrow little pallet, all last winter?
    She gave her one of her flannel nightgowns and wrapped her up in Sess's parky-squirrel sleeping bag and her pick of the furs--they had a whole fur emporium to choose from, and what all those slinky high-heeled women in New York and Chicago wouldn't have given for even a peek in the door--and it was nice, it took her back. It was like being a child again, with Pris at her side and the tent arching over them and the comfort of their mother snoring lightly from the cot in the corner. Or having one of the neighborhood girls for a sleepover when you didn't sleep at all, not till dawn. It was past midnight when she turned out the lamp and went to her own bed in the add-on room, feeling relaxed and peaceful, and tired, gratefully tired, thinking of the neat symmetry of the arrangement--the girls were here, bedded down under one roof, and the men were out there, huddled side by side in the cold clenched fist of the night.
    In the morning, they lingered over coffee, fresh-baked bread and powdered eggs in a scramble of ham, peppers and tomatoes, watching the light come up in a gradual displacement of shadow until it settled into the pale wash that served for dawn, dusk and high noon at this time of year. They listened to the radio together--_Tundra Topics__ on KFAR and _Trapline Chatter__ on KJNP, and learned that Olive Swisstack sent all her love to Tommy, in Barrow, and Ivor Johnson's ex-mother-in-law needed him to call her, urgently, and that Jim Drudge was radioing in from Fort Yukon to say that he was drawing breath like anybody else on the planet and very pleased about it too--and then they lit their first cigarettes of the day and played a very lax game of chess.
    “You know, Star,” she said, after she'd pinned down the king and announced checkmate in a soft, matter-of-fact way, “there's something I wanted to tell you all last night, but, well--it never came up, I guess.”
    Star glanced up from the board, where she'd been idly fingering the king's bishop that wouldn't be much use to her now. The half-empty cup stood at her elbow. A cigarette--was it Star's or her own?--smoldered in the ashtray.
    This was good, this was very good, the glow of the light through the window, the gentle respiration of the stove, the silence. A calm descended on her. She might have been asleep still or stretched out on a towel at some resort in the tropics, nodding over the glossy novel propped up on her chest. “I'm pregnant,” she said. “Or I think I am. I haven't told Sess yet.”
    She looked past Star to the window and beyond the window to the hills and then back again, right into her friend's face, into her eyes. “So I guess that means you're the first to know.”

Drop City
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