Drop City

sound they made was inharmonious and raw, expressive of some deep unquenchable sorrow, the sorrow of the stake and the chain and the harness. Sess said something then, and she didn't hear the words, only the sound, till he repeated himself: “Do you really have to go?”
    “I promised,” she said.
    “The hell with your promise,” he said, and the dogs sent up a howl so plaintive it must have had the wolf smirking from his mountaintop.
    “Howard Walpole,” she began, but Sess cut her off.
    “Howard Walpole is shit,” he said, “and you know it and I know it. I'm the one. Tell me I'm the one.”
    “It's only three days,” she said. He wouldn't look at her. He looked at the coffeepot, looked at the wall. The dogs howled. “Three days, Sess. Then I'll know for sure.”

Drop City
    9
    Framed against the high dun bank and the random aggregation of shacks and cabins that composed the riparian view of Boynton, Howard Walpole stood rooted in the mud in a pair of gum boots and grease-slick chino pants. He was waiting for them as they came round the broad bend of the river that gave onto town, and from the look of him, Sess figured he'd been waiting for hours, though the agreed-upon time was twelve noon and it couldn't have been more than eleven-fifteen or eleven-thirty yet. It was an ugly day, overcast and close. The river was the color of the sky and the sky was the color of the primer you saw on pickups and wagons awaiting the benediction of paint. It was drizzling. The air smelled tainted, as if everything in the water, the woods and the sky had fallen down dead and gone to rot.
    All the way down in the canoe Pamela kept chirping away about this or that--a moose in the shallows, an explosion of ducks, her mother's bad feet and her sister's reprobate of a boyfriend--but if he'd given her six words back it would have surprised him. He was feeling sour, sour and hateful, and he didn't care if she knew it. He dug savagely at his paddle, sprinting the last two hundred yards as if he couldn't wait to get rid of her, and in one compartment of his mind he was thinking he ought to take Howard Walpole aside and tell him what a pain in the ass she was, what a complete and utter screwup and bitch, but he knew it wouldn't work. Howard--he was thirty-eight years old, with a head that was almost perfectly flat in the back as if he'd been hit with a board the moment he popped out of the womb--Howard was the sort of man who never threw anything away and never took anybody's word for anything.
    The canoe scraped gravel and Pamela hopped out, then let him sit as she lifted the bow up on shore. Howard was grinning, yellow teeth in a grizzled beard, and he'd shoved his begrimed engineer's cap up off his eyebrows so you could see the pale band of flesh to his hairline where the sun never touched. “Howdy, Pamela,” he crowed, “enjoy your stay at the Harder palace?”
    She said she had and he said, “Howdy, Sess,” and then he took Pamela's backpack from her, tossed it onto the front seat of his big flat-bottomed boat with the twin Evinrude engines and held out a hand to help her aboard. “No sense in standing here in the rain,” he added, “when there's a whole world out there to show you, and I don't know what you got used to up there at the Harder palace, but my place is like a four-star hotel in comparison, so don't you worry about a thing.”
    Then he shoved off, the engines roared to life, and Pamela was a receding speck of color on the broad gray back of the river.
    He knew he shouldn't start drinking, knew he should turn around and paddle back upriver to his cabin, go out and clear brush along his trapline for the next three days, fish pike in the oxbows, put away some duck, but he found himself ambling past his shack and the various cabins of various people he knew and liked or disliked or was indifferent to, on up the main street, past the frame post office and the Nougat and the general store, in the direction of the Three Pup. He brought a whole new nation of mosquitoes with him, and while they sorted things out with the indigenous population, he ducked inside. Lynette was behind the bar, her eyes squinted against the smoke of the cigarette clenched between her teeth, and she was dealing cards to Richard Schrader as if dealing cards were the chief activity of the human species on this planet and why hurry to the end of the deck when you'd just have to deal them all over again? “Hey,” Richard said, without