Drop City

looking up. And then Skid Denton, who was in his usual seat at the end of the rectangular bar that doubled as a luncheonette counter, said, “Satisfaction Guaranteed or Your Money Back. Get your satisfaction there, Sess? Or you looking for a refund?”
    Sess told him to shut the fuck up and the tone of it was warning enough to everybody in the place--this was no laughing matter, no subject for lickerish grins and elbow prodding and the kind of behind-your-back laughter he'd had to endure over the Jill situation. Everybody, at that hour, included Richie Oliver, who was sitting at a corner table with a woman nobody had ever seen before, and Richie Oliver wasn't going to say anything because he'd already had his three-day trial with Pamela, and they were both in the same boat. Besides which, the woman he was with was no beauty, and no girl either, and there was only one thing Richie Oliver or anybody else could have wanted out of that relationship. Sess put a quarter in the jukebox and played “Mystic Eyes” three times running and he ordered a shot and a beer and when he was done with it he ordered another and sat at the window studying a two-year-old copy of _Time__ magazine he'd already read cover to cover at least six times.
    People came and went. Two middle-aged tourists in a white station wagon with three inches of grit plastered to it chatted him up a while and he told them some creative lies about the country and what they could expect from it. (“Moose? Really? You mean they'll actually charge the car?”) Around six he had Lynette make him a tuna sandwich and a plate of fries for ballast, and then he moved over to the Nougat to see who was around and maybe shoot a couple games of pool, and there were two Hungwitchin Indians there he knew from upriver, beyond Eagle, and he drank with them for an hour or two until one of them vomited on the table and Clarence Ford, who was bartending, asked them to leave. The Indians stumbled into their pickup, fired it up and waved a clumsy goodbye, but wait a minute, could they give him a lift up the road to the Three Pup because his legs didn't seem to want to work right? And sure, sure they could.
    That was where things got hazy. Joe Bosky was there, that much was certain, and he got into it with him all over again, and who said what to whom or who started it was beyond irrelevance. He did seem to recall Lynette unholstering her pistol and maybe even firing it once or twice in the lot outside, but the upshot of it was that he was eighty-sixed while Joe Bosky stood tall at the bar with ten or twelve people and drank in dignity the rest of the night. But what Joe Bosky hadn't figured on, or anybody else, for that matter, was the fact that Joe Bosky's car, his white fastback Mustang with the blue racing stripe he rented a special garage for and only drove in the summertime, was parked right there amongst the weeds of the lot. Right there, like a steel-and-glass wall, for Sess to stumble into. And it was nothing, a matter of a few fleeting drunken minutes, to pop the hood and relieve himself on the black shining stump of the distributor cap and then wander off toward the river with the vague idea of settling in for the night.
    To say he woke with a headache was to say nothing. He was crushed, poleaxed, transfixed on a stake of hurt and regret and the simple dull physical enervation of alcoholic excess. He hadn't quite made it to his shack, and he woke to the sun in his eyes and the gentle prodding of the toe of Richard Schrader's boot. “Sess,” Richard was saying, and his face was a shining planetoid orbiting the sky, and there was a moon there beside it, and the moon was the too-white face of the woman Richie Oliver had been with the night before--or maybe a clone of her. He sat up. He was fifteen feet from the door of his shack, nestled in a heap of tires and rusting machine parts just off the south end of Richard's porch. The river humped by behind him. Everything was wet and cold. “Jesus,” the woman said, “look at you.”
    He was a monk. He was a penitent. He refused coffee, Band-Aids, calamine lotion for the damage the mosquitoes had inflicted on him, and he got in his canoe--no fresh supplies, nothing, not even a bottle of water--and headed upriver. He dipped water and drank as he went, and he found a couple of slivers of caribou jerky in his day pack and chewed them in shame and abnegation as he stabbed at the current with the knife of his paddle. It was