Drop City

wouldn't want you to have to spend your first night in my shack in town, and you wouldn't want that either, would you? Because don't forget, we've got a three-hour paddle, upstream, to get to the cabin--”
    She told him he was cute. Told him she liked the way the two parallel lines creased his brow when he worked himself up. And she smirked and stretched out her legs so he and everybody else in the place could admire the full shimmering length of them, and agreed with him. “You're right,” she said. “I do want to see the cabin, I mean, that's the whole point, isn't it? Or half of it, or part of it, anyway. It's just that I was really enjoying this.”
    That was when Joe Bosky butted in.
    He was hovering over their table like a waiter, stinking of something--fish, vomit, B. O. --and he was grinning like some sort of trapped animal from the deeps of his beard. He was wearing a fatigue shirt that had U. S. M. C. stenciled across the pocket and a khaki cap with the brim worked flat. His jeans looked as if they'd been salvaged from a corpse. And smelled like it too. “Hey,” he said, leaning into the table and ignoring Sess, “I hear you're the lady that's looking for a man, is that right?”
    Pamela didn't know him from Adam, and she was the kind of person who had a smile for everybody, so she gave him his grin back and said, “That's right. But I didn't realize I was so famous.”
    Sess was up out the chair. “We got to go,” he repeated.
    “I was just wondering if I could get in on the action,” Joe Bosky was saying, ignoring him still. “You know, I'm a pretty good man in the bush myself--and I'm building a cabin up Woodchopper Creek even as we speak--and I was just wondering if, you know, there might be any free tryouts?”
    Pamela's smile faded.
    “I mean, I've got a sleeping bag out in the car if you've got maybe fifteen minutes to spare--”
    Sess hit him--or attempted to hit him--square in the side of the head, but Bosky had been watching him out of the corner of his eye and had time to get his forearm up and deflect the blow. In the next instant, they were at each other, flailing across the floor, and there was some small damage done to the glassware and one of the rickety dried-out chairs before they were separated. Bosky made some ugly comments--shouted them, raging in the grip of three men, threats, accusations and promises, and there was no law up here unless you got the sheriff to fly in from Fairbanks to inspect the corpse--and Sess threw them back at him. He hadn't meant to, hadn't meant to show that side of himself in front of Pamela--cursing and the like--but of all the men on earth Joe Bosky was the one who could make him boil over till the lid rattled against the pan.
    Out in the lot, as the mosquitoes dive-bombed them and they slammed back into the truck for the half-mile drive down to the shack on the river and the canoe that awaited them, Pamela looked shaken, and he felt sorry for that, he did. “What was that all about?” she said. “That guy--I mean, I've seen some bush crazies in my time, but that guy was scary.”
    In the front seat now, the truck rumbling to life beneath him, Sess just stared out the window a moment. Joe Bosky was what was wrong with the world. Joe Bosky was what people came into the country to escape. And Joe Bosky, hammered, polished and delivered up by the U. S. Marine Corps, was right here at the very end of the very last road in the continental United States, going one on one with the world. Sess was breathing hard, upset despite himself. “You don't know the half of it,” he said.
    And then they were on the Yukon, the big nineteen-foot Grumman freighter loaded down to the gunwales, the ten o'clock sun picking its way through the rolling black shadows of the debris on the surface, and he was calm again, in his element, off the road, out of the bar and into the embrace of the country. He watched Pamela's shoulders dig at the paddle, studied the heavy braid of her hair, the beautiful locus of her back muscles and the sweet place where she sat the seat. The birds were there, the spruce marshaled along the banks and climbing up into the hills like an emperor's army, naked bluffs, a million cords of driftwood flung up against the shore waiting for the river to decide what to do with them. A breeze came up and took the mosquitoes away. They saw moose in the shallows, a black bear with two cubs hurtling up the far bank as if she'd been shot out of a cannon.