Drop City

truck in gear. “You hungry?” he asked. “Not for frog legs, I mean, but something like a steak or a sandwich, maybe a couple more beers to celebrate? Because by the time we get to the cabin, I mean, and unload all this stuff, feed the dogs and see what the garden looks like, I don't know if we're going to have time to--” He trailed off. With her here, actually here, living and breathing and watching him out of her eyes that were like two guided missiles homing in on his, he couldn't really get much past the picture of walking her in the door of the cabin. After that, the screen went blank.
    But she said sure, sure she was hungry, and twenty minutes later he was escorting her up the bleached wooden steps of the Three Pup, as proud as if he'd made her out of clay and breathed the life into her himself.
    It was eight o'clock in the evening and the sun was right there with them, showing all its teeth. The trees were staked to their shadows, the guest cottages that hadn't housed a guest in ten years sank quietly into the muskeg, birds flitted over the decaying snow machines scattered across the yard. There was the rattle of the generator, and beneath it, the whine of the mosquitoes--they were there, of course, always there, ubiquitous, but by now the daytime crew had gone home to sleep off the effects of breakfast, lunch and dinner, and the night shift had taken over. He swatted half a dozen on his forearm and flapped a protective hand round the crown of Pamela's head as they pushed through the screen door and the perpetual gloom of the place rose up to envelop them.
    Half the town was gathered at the bar, including Richard Schrader and Skid Denton, who must have gone home in the interval because even he couldn't manage to drink straight through for nine and a half hours--or could he? As soon as they walked in, a general roar went up, people showing off their wit with comments like “Look what the cat dragged in,” and a couple of the guys whistled at the sight of Pamela. Who whirled round, her hands outstretched, and did a little pirouette for them. Reticence was not one of her drawbacks, that was for sure.
    They had a beer at the bar, and he luxuriated in the sweet proximity of her, in the blond bundle of her hair all coiled up in a no-nonsense braid, in the grip and complexity of the muscles of her legs, in her smile. He bought her Beer Nuts, Slim Jims, pickled eggs, and they each had a shot to go with their beers while Lynette fried up a pair of steaks for them, the holster riding her hip like an excess flap of skin. It was a moment, all right--so glorious and pure he never wanted to let go of it.
    Over their steaks, which they ate at a table in the corner, she told him what he already knew or suspected or had heard elsewhere. She'd been born and raised in Anchorage, but every summer of her childhood her father had taken the family--her and her sister and mother--to live out of a tent in the Endicott Mountains of the Brooks Range while he prospected unnamed creeks in nameless canyons and reappeared every third day or so with something for the pot. They'd contract with a bush pilot to drop them off just after breakup, and the pilot would come back and pick them up again at the end of September, and so what if they missed a whole month of school? She and her sister, Priscilla, would fish and roam and scare up birds, listen to the wolves at night and have face-to-face encounters with just about every creature that made its living north of the Arctic Circle. And now, now that she was a college graduate and twenty-seven years old and sick to death of working nine-to-five in a city of concrete and steel, she wanted to go back to the bush, and not just for a vacation, not as a tourist or part-timer, but forever. That was it. That was the deal.
    He'd begun to feel the effects of the long day--the two-way drive, the alcohol, the excitement that burned in the back of his throat like a shot of Canadian on a subzero night--when he looked up from her eyes and saw Joe Bosky across the room. “Shit,” he said. “We got to go.”
    “Already? Aren't you going to ask me to dance? At least once--one dance?”
    The jukebox was going--“Mystic Eyes,” one of his favorite songs, but hardly the sort of thing you could dance to. “Next time,” he said.
    She let out a laugh then. “You're just like all the rest of them, afraid of their own two feet. How about if we wait for a slow one?”
    And now he was hedging. “But I