Drop City

in a voice that was dead and cremated to ash, “I'm a lifer. I'm a San Quentin drudge.” He was out, even in the coldest weather, stalking the woods for ptarmigan, porcupine, lynx, anything for the pot, but she just sat there by the stove, staring into the glow, reading the same books over and over--she must have read _Silas Marner__ twenty times, and that would put anybody round the bend. She played solitaire till the cards wore out and fell to dust. And then she started carving the days into the wall, four vertical lines and a slash, just like a prisoner.
    Pamela let him go on. It was therapeutic, she could see that, and the air had to be cleared, because if things worked out, she was going to take this girl's place, and it would have been intolerable not knowing. Still, when he told her about the marks on the wall, he got up and leaned over her to run his finger across the bulge of the log she'd been resting her head against, and there they were, like cicatrices in a savage skin, the etchings of despair. The best she could do was throw out a question like a lifeline and cling to it: “So she was clinically depressed?”
    “Cabin fever,” he said, sinking into the furs beside her, “a fatal case.” She offered her hand, but he wouldn't take it. “It happens to a lot of people in the bush. Women especially. Women seem to need the company of other women more than men need other men--we're more solitary. Like hermits or something. But you--you need to gossip and whatnot, right?”
    She shrugged. “I suppose.”
    “Of course, the men get pretty squirrelly out here too. You ever hear the one about the two trappers living in the high country outside of Eagle? Two coots, the kind that talk to themselves even when you see them in town for their semiannual visit? No? Well, anyway, it was February of a bitter winter and the one was half-mad for company, so he harnessed up his dogs and mushed thirty miles to where the other one was and the other man came to the door of his cabin and nodded at him in an inviting way and left the door open a crack. Well, the first man saw to his dogs and then came in without a word, shook out his parka and sat in a chair by the fire and just looked into the other man's face for an hour or so until the other man put a pot of moose stew on to boil and they ate in silence. Then they sat and smoked their pipes and when it was time for bed the first man unrolled his sleeping bag on the floor and conked out. In the morning they had breakfast together--more moose stew, biscuits and coffee--and then the first man went out, harnessed his dogs and waved goodbye while the other man stood at the door of the cabin. And you know what? Neither one of them spoke a word the whole time, not hello or goodbye or mighty tasty stew or I hate the sight of your grizzled ugly face, you son of a bitch.”
    “Instructive story,” she said. “Are you trying to scare me?”
    Sess looked surprised. “No, not at all. Why would I want to do that?”
    “So Jill,” she said, after a moment. “She got out?”
    The stove creaked and sighed. The last of the sun laminated the back wall with the faintest, rinsed-out ribbon of pink. “What have you heard?” The voice was harsh in his throat. “That I'm some kind of Bluebeard or something?”
    She trusted him. She liked him. She could even love him--she did love him, loved him already. “No,” she said in a voice so soft she could barely hear it herself.
    “You know where I showed you the garden?”
    She nodded.
    “Jill went out there where we'd cleared all the trees and she stomped these huge letters in the snow, I mean letters ten feet high and five feet across. You know what they read--from the air, that is? JILL WANTS OUT__. Jill wants out. You know how that humiliated me?” He went to the stove to pour another cup of coffee, and he even got so far as to lift the pot to his cup before he set it down again. “A week later this Cessna 180 equipped with skis lands on the frozen-up river and it's Joe Bosky. He comes to the door. 'You people having any trouble here?' he says.”
    “And that was the end of Jill.”
    His voice had gone soft now, all the harshness washed out of it. “I never laid eyes on her again.”
    The sun faded from the wall. From outside, thin with distance, came the cry of a wolf that died out in a feverish glissando until the dogs took it up. She could see them beyond the window, erect at their chains, noses pointed to the sky, and the