Drop City

spot, his white parka as pure and unblemished as the snow caught fast to the shell of the earth. His eyes shone in the firelight and he wanted to move, you could see that, to get up, to stand and accept the challenge, but he couldn't. A term came into Marco's head then, something out of the newspaper, out of the obituaries: _internal injuries.__
    External injuries were bad enough out here, but internal injuries, what you couldn't see, didn't really offer up much hope. They would have to go back for the sled, load him into it, mush past Drop City, Sess's cabin, Woodchopper, and on into Boynton, and somebody would have to fly out of Boynton and take him to the hospital in Fairbanks, and all of that with internal injuries, the ruptured organs, the severed spinal cord, the slow seep of secret blood. But Sess had the gun in his face, had the muzzle of it resting right on the bridge of his nose, the cold kiss of the barrel marking the place where his black bushed eyebrows met, and Joe Bosky was struggling to say something, final words, and what he said, even as Sess Harder lifted the gun out and away from him and rested it over one solid moon-white shoulder, what he said was, “Fuck you.”

Drop City
    33
    At first she didn't know what to say, thinking of Che and Sunshine, their squalling faces and stamping inconsolable feet, the noise of them, the dirt--always dirty, born dirty--and she looked away, trying to compose herself. She ran a finger round the rim of the coffee mug and plugged in her million-kilowatt smile, and though she wanted to say _No, oh, no,__ as she would have responded to news of cancer, heartbreak or any run of sorrow or affliction, she managed finally to murmur something appropriate, or at least compliant. And then, before she could think: “Do you--I mean, did you--?”
    Pamela took one look at her and burst out laughing--she had to set down her cup because she was laughing so hard, her eyes squeezed down to semicircular slits, her hands gone to her temples as if to keep her head anchored on her shoulders. “You'd think I'd just announced that the roof was on fire or something from the look of you--really, Star, you should see herself.” She let out another laugh, slapped a hand flat on the resounding plane of the table. “God, you're funny.”
    Star laughed too, easing into it--sure, all right, she'd let herself in for it--but even as she laughed, as the two of them laughed, she was thinking of herself, of what she would do if it was her. She'd stocked up on birth control pills--they all had, Reba's idea, her obsession, actually--but she'd come to the end of them weeks ago. When she and Marco made love it was cautious love now, restrained love, with the threat of repercussions hanging over the act, and he always pulled out of her at the crucial moment--_coitus interruptus__--as if that could forestall the inevitable, and how many of the girls she'd gone to Catholic school with were on their second or third child already? She'd kill herself. She'd have an abortion. But where? How? Somebody told her the Indian women knew of a way, some root they boiled into a tea, or maybe they made it into a poultice that drew out the fetus like pus from an infection-- “You know, you're supposed to congratulate me. You're supposed to squeal and jump around--we're both supposed to squeal and jump around. I'm going to have a baby. You're the first person I've told and you look as if you just found me floating in the river in a sack.”
    She wanted a cigarette. She'd already had her first of the day and she was trying to cut back, not only because of the expense and the fact that your brothers and sisters were constantly bumming them off you day and night, but because they were a habit, and she didn't want to develop any habits except love and kindness. Pamela's pack of Marlboro's lay on the table between them. Star eased a cigarette from the pack, lit it, exhaled. “I'm sorry,” she said. “It's just that I can't imagine--personally, I mean. I mean, I've got so much to live for--” But that sounded wrong--it was wrong. She tried to recover herself, because Pamela--her friend, her sister--wasn't laughing anymore. “You want a boy or a girl?” she said finally.
    Pamela went off then, everything copacetic, pleased with herself, lit up with it. She wanted a girl, couldn't imagine anything else, but when she and Sess had talked about it--theoretically, that is--he'd leaned toward a boy, which was only natural.