Drop City

three times, the bank steepening, Joe cursing--“Fuck! Fuck and goddamnit to hell!”--and neither one of them noticing just how close to vertical the wingtips had become until Joe dropped the gun and pulled them out of the spin and just cleared the bank of trees ahead of them. The engine screamed and there was a jolt, a sickly amplified wet hard slap as of skin on skin and the tip of the right wing had a crease in it suddenly and the whole plane was shuddering as if it were about to fall apart.
    Joe fought it. Joe knew his stuff. Joe wasn't about to crash an airplane that cost him twenty-five thousand dollars just because the tip of the aluminum wing was folded in on itself like a crushed beer can, oh, no, not Joe. They must have gone two or three miles, struggling back toward the river, and where was the altitude here, why didn't he pull back on the yoke and get them up out of the treetops? before Ronnie understood that they were going down. There was something ahead, not the river, just a break in the trees, muskeg, hummocks of dead snow-crowned grass like so many fists thrust up out of the ground, and then they were down, the landing gear buckling under them and the whole fuselage pitching mercilessly to the left and into the looming impervious bark-clad shins of the trees.
    Nobody much liked Joe Bosky--he was respected, feared, maybe--but he wasn't the sort of cat people would praise for his gentleness and his niceness and his manners. Ronnie dug him, though. Ronnie had a sort of younger brother–older brother bond with him, and if you said one thing for Joe you had to admit he had his shit together, and if you looked and listened and paid attention you could learn everything there was to know about the country. About guns. About flying. He'd already given Pan half a dozen lessons and let him take the controls sometimes when they were just cruising from point A to point B, and that was something to be grateful for. Pan thought maybe someday he could come back up into the country--some summer, next summer even--and make a go of it as a bush pilot, guiding hunters and fishermen, beating the weather, riding the breeze, going in and out as he pleased. Another thing about Bosky was that while he might have been part of the war machine at one point, a Marine, no less, he had a pretty loose attitude about things--he wasn't a flag waver or any kind of fascist at all and he never ran off at the mouth about Claymore mines and gooks and all the rest of it. What was his goal in life? Pan had asked him one night as they sat at the table with Sky and Dale, picking sweet dark ptarmigan meat from the bone. To have a good time. To get drunk, get laid, raise some hell and answer to nobody. “So you're a hedonist, then?” Dale had put in. “Bet your ass I am,” Joe said.
    And Joe would know what to do in the present situation, except that Joe wasn't talking. He'd said one thing only after Pan had cut the seat belt with his hunting knife and dragged him out of the crumpled cockpit an hour and more ago, and that was, “Build a fire.” That problem had taken care of itself, though, because when they veered into the trees the left wing folded back against the fuselage and the gas tank let loose and they were lucky even to have gotten out before the whole thing went up. Which it did. No sooner had Pan dragged Joe out into the snow than there was a flash and a thump and their ride home became a bonfire. Now it was nothing but a smell on the air and the cold was seeping back, and Joe was beyond giving advice.
    Ronnie could feel his heart shifting gears in his chest. They were in trouble here and no doubt about it, but he wasn't thinking too clearly because he'd hit his head a couple times on the control panel--it just seemed to go after him, as if it had suddenly come to life with the sole purpose of beating his brains out--and that crust of frozen liquid that kept splintering every time he involuntarily grimaced over the red blur of pain that had settled in his left shoulder and made his arm trail away from him as if it didn't want to belong to him anymore, that was blood. Joe was unconscious. Not dead--he was breathing still, though Ronnie was no doctor, and even if he was it wouldn't do him much good out here with no drugs or instruments or tools beyond his knife and the dead weight of the pistol strapped to his thigh. What he did do was cut a couple dozen spruce branches and mound them up so Joe wouldn't have the exposed