Drop City

a breeze and the mosquitoes swarmed and the silence finally ruptured with the distant thump of three more shots, and when he came back to her he was still duckless and looking frustrated and angry. He gave her a tense smile. “Don't you worry,” he said, “we just--well, I hate to say it, but we just have to be patient. Can you appreciate that, Pamela? Can you?”
    She was going to say that she _could__ appreciate it, of course she could, and that he didn't have to worry on her account because anything he wanted to cook was just fine with her, when the dark water at her feet began to move as if it had come to life, trailing an even darker _V__ across the flat surface, and he grinned and unslung the .22, and a moment later he was wading out of the muck with a dripping naked-tailed black thing depending from one hand, and she said, “What is it, a beaver?” and he said, “It's a rat.”
    For dinner that night, and she was hungry, ravenous, all her cells crying out for fuel, he cooked her a fricassee of muskrat in a sauce of stewed tomatoes from the can with rice and greens and a sweetish yellow dollop of the prime fat the guest of honor wears under his coat while enacting his murky rituals in the ponds and sloughs of the backcountry. To wash it down, they each had two bottles of homemade beer so strong it was like the depth charges she used to drink in college. It was the best meal she'd ever had. And she told Sess that as she sat on the bed and grinned while he washed the dishes at the stove--“I insist,” he said, “because you did them this morning, and that's only fair”--and then he pulled out a harmonica and serenaded her and they wound up harmonizing on three separate run-throughs of “Oh Susannah,”
    “You Are My Sunshine” and “She Loves You” (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah).
    It was past midnight and they were both giddy with the singing, the beer and the company that just kept lighting them up and lighting them up again, when she said, “So tell me about Jill.”
    That stopped things right there. He was tipping a beer to his lips, having just concluded a story about the night last winter when the thermometer showed sixty-two below and he went out to dump the dishwater and it froze before it hit the ground with a sound of marbles spilling out of a bag, and now he pulled the beer back and looked past her to the little window and beyond. “You don't want to hear about that,” he said.
    “Yes,” she said, “I do.”
    “It's nothing much. Nothing like you must have heard.”
    “I haven't heard anything,” she said, and then, to be truthful, because she _had__ heard at least three versions of the story, the most disturbing and unfavorable of which had dripped like acid from the prejudicial lips of Howard Walpole, she added, “or hardly anything.”
    “She was nothing like you,” he sighed. He got up from the table, took the lamp down from its hook and lit it. All his muscle seemed to have migrated to his neck, hard and attenuated, stripped away from the flesh. His face was heavy.
    “Go ahead,” she said. “I want to hear it.”
    Jill was young, just twenty-one, and he was young too--twenty-eight, at the time, and this was three years ago. He met her in Fairbanks, when he was tending bar in the winter after working a summer in the bush as a firefighter. He was drinking too much, sleeping late, living in a town that was like any other town and hardly even getting out to the Chena or the Nenana for fishing. He didn't know what he wanted. Jill was a college girl, or had been before she met him and dropped out of the University of Alaska, and they spent the winter sleeping together and talking about the country, about getting away from everything and just living free.
    She came with him, just after breakup, to the very cabin they were in now, helped him build it, in fact. Neither of them knew what they were doing, but they learned by their mistakes and they had a cache of store-bought food to get them through the winter of the first year, until they could fish and garden and hunt on their own--sixty-pound sacks of rice, lentils and cornmeal, butter in one-gallon cans, smoked fish, that sort of thing. And it was good for a while. But Jill just wasn't built for the country--psychologically, that is. Once winter set in and the sun winked out she started to climb the walls, and anybody would have thought she was in prison, tried and condemned and held against her will. “I'm in for life,” she'd say