Drop City

skies. But where were they? And what was this protruding from the frame--boots? A spare pair of boots?
    She was about to say something when Marco loomed up out of the blue glitter of the snow, took her by the arm and led her through the dogtrot and into the cabin. His beard was ice. His eyes were cracked and broken. The tip of his nose was the wrong color. “Something happened,” he said.
    There were sounds from outside, Sess's voice, Pamela's, the dogs yapping and clamoring for their food. “What?” she wanted to know, straining to read his face even as he turned away from her and held his hands out to the stove. She felt sick suddenly. There was a shadow sweeping over the ground, over the cabin, over Drop City. “What? What is it?”
    “Ronnie,” he said.
    “Ronnie?” She didn't understand him. What could Ronnie possibly have to do with a hurt dog and three days out on the ridges and down in the ravines in forty-below-zero weather? Ronnie the thief? Ronnie the irrelevance? Who cared about him? Who cared about him, really? He'd gone to high school with her. He'd been her lover. He'd stolen her money.
    Marco wouldn't look her in the face, and that scared her.
    “What?” she demanded. “What happened?”
    “He--they tried to, him and Bosky, in the plane. He died. He's dead.”
    Still she didn't understand. “Who? You mean Joe Bosky?”
    “Both of them. It was a plane crash.”
    She had to sit down then, and Pamela was in the room now and Sess right behind her, the door slamming to, the last breath of the cold trapped and dissipating inside the furnace of the four walls, the shrinking space of the cabin crowded suddenly, shoulders, faces, limbs, three people in parkas stalking around and recoiling from one another as if they were trying to make their way through Grand Central at rush hour: _Ronnie? Dead?__
    Eventually--it must have been an hour, an hour or more--she went out into the yard, her hand clasped in Marco's, to look at him there in the sled, because she still didn't believe it, didn't believe really that anybody could die--the old maybe, maybe them--but nobody she knew, nobody like Ronnie. Like _Pan.__ They'd come across country together. He'd made her laugh. He'd pressed himself to her in the hush of her room, on the seat of the car, in the starched sterile drum-tight beds of motels in anonymous towns, he'd read to her, sung to her, praised her and loved her. And now he was lying there frozen in the sled, a shadow, a dead lump of nothing pressed in death to the dead lump of Joe Bosky--and those were his boots, Bosky's, sticking out of the bottom of the sled on his dead frozen feet. For a long moment she stood there looking down at the dark hummock of the sled, Sess and Pamela immured in the cabin, Marco beside her. She was trying to cry, but there was nothing there. “I want to see him,” she said, and her voice betrayed her.
    Marco's breath trailed away from his lips, silvered and alive. “You don't want to see him. Really, you don't. Come on, let's go inside. We'll spend the night and decide what to do in the morning. Okay?”
    It wasn't okay. She stepped forward, the dogs rustling at their chains, the stars riding up and away from her till the whole night seemed to plead for intercession, and then she pulled back the blanket and the moon showed her what was there.
    “That's not Pan,” she said.
    And it wasn't. It was something twisted to impossibility, nothing natural, nothing she could identify, no face even, because it was turned from her in its frozen cowl, just the slant of a face, that was all, and it could have been anybody. “Come on, Star,” Marco whispered. She saw the hair then, spilling off the spool of his head, grown out finally to its maximum length, hip, very hip, as hip as anybody could ever have wished or dreamed, and she slipped the glove from her hand for just an instant to feel it move beneath the pressure of her five bare fingers.
    On Christmas Eve, just after the light faded from the sky, it began to snow. Marco and Jiminy had cut a tree and set it up in the back corner of the meeting hall, and everybody gathered over eggnog (rum and evaporated milk, whipped with nutmeg, sugar and powdered egg) to decorate it with God's eyes made of yarn, scraps of silver foil, strings of glass beads and paper chains. The twelve-volt battery, newly charged in Boynton and retrieved on the back of Iron Steve's snowmobile, was hooked up to the stereo in the loft, and so there was