Drop City

They spoke in low tones. They were silent, and the country spoke for them. And then she said something, and he said something, and it was as natural to him as if he were speaking to himself.
    It must have been around midnight, the sun hovering on the horizon, when they swung into the mouth of the Thirtymile River and the cabin came into view. Already the five dogs were up and yammering, dust rising round their feet in a distant cloud, the proto-barks drifting off into wolfish howls of greeting. “Hear that?” Sess said, digging into the paddle. “That's your welcoming committee.”
    She turned to look over her shoulder. “Oh, really? And what are they saying?”
    “ 'Pam-e-la, we looooooove youuuu!' ”
    And she laughed, even as a pair of loons went racketing up off the water. “You sure they're not saying, 'Here we are, now feeeeeeeeed us'?”
    “Well, Pamela,” he said, and he winked at her because he was feeling so light in his bones and his organs he might have been a bird that could sail right up out of the canoe and across the flux of the water in a single wild rush of feathers, “to be truthful with you--and I'm going to be truthful with you, always, whether this lasts the weekend or till you're a hunched-over old lady and I'm an old man--I think you do have a point there.” He let the paddle trail an instant and cupped a hand to his ear. “Yep. Now that I concentrate, I think I _can__ detect maybe just a trace of hunger in that chorus--but that's Bobo, that sharp contralto in there, and he's always hungry. So don't blame him for spoiling the surprise.”
    Then it was dusk and the canoe was up on the gravel bar, the dogs straining at their chains, and he and Pamela were walking hand in hand up the path that beat through the weeds to the cabin. He wished he could show her something grander--the rambling spread of outbuildings, the smokehouse, sauna and enclosed dog runs he planned to put up once he found the time and the money, not to mention a more spacious cabin--but he was proud of what he'd already accomplished, and he could feel the pride beating at his rib cage as he took down the bear-proof shutters and unlatched the door for her. The door faced south, of course, as did the two double-paned windows set on either side of it, but before they were in the cabin proper they had to go through the five-by-five dogtrot--or mud room, as somebody who lived in town might call it. “This,” he said, breathing hard in the dimness and taking in the familiar smells of oil, gasoline, ancient bait and bloodied traps and mold and whatever else had awakened out of the dirt, “this is the mud room.”
    She was right there, a good eight or ten inches shorter than him, her pale hair and white arms ghostly in the half-light, and she wasn't saying anything, just staring wide-eyed, like a girl on a school trip. He guided her through the inner door and into the cabin itself, dodging round her to put a match to the lantern he kept on a hook just inside the door. “And this,” he said, his voice almost strangled in his throat with the sheer tension of the moment, “this is what I call home.”
    She stood in the middle of the room and she didn't say a word. Her hair was luminous, her shoulders squared. He wanted to say something, wanted to ask her if she liked it, but he couldn't find his voice. After a moment she drifted toward the shelves on the near wall and idly fingered the things there, his few grease-slick books _(Tanning: From A to Z; How to Stay Alive in the Woods; Arctic Wilderness; The Home Brewer),__ a bottle of Pepto Bismol set beside a string of dried habanero chiles, Three-In-One oil in a rusted can, a candle six inches around he'd made from the wax of the bees he'd mail-ordered last summer, the odd tool. Still, she didn't say anything.
    How long she stood there, picking up one thing after another and gently setting it down again, he couldn't say--no more than a minute or two, certainly, but it was the longest minute or two of his life. Was she in shock, was that it? For all her talk, she was a city woman, and maybe she had a whole different idea of what a cabin in the woods really was, a whole unspooling romantic fantasy of a big Ponderosa TV cabin with forest green shutters and a wide veranda and a kitchen with a tile floor and a hand pump for water. His heart was hammering. He couldn't seem to swallow. Outside, the dogs howled. And never had the place seemed so close, so dingy and confining, so