Drop City

drizzling still, and he shivered, then pulled over in a quiet eddy against the far bank to beach the canoe and start a fire to warm up, though it was probably sixty-five degrees out--when you're wet and you've got a breeze in your face, it wouldn't matter if it was eighty-five.
    The fire was a small, good thing. He had his spinning rod with him, always had his spinning rod, and he figured he'd make lunch simple. Three casts with an orange Mepps spinner and he had a grayling to toast on a stick, and that was so good he switched to a heavier rig and a silver spoon with a bit of green glitter in the center of it to represent the eye of some half-formed oblivious creature of the shallows, and flung it out in the hope of pike for dinner back at the cabin. Out it went with a hiss and a distant splash, and it came back with a whisper, over and over, and all he could think about was Pamela, Pamela in Howard Walpole's three-room cabin with the blond grizzly rug in front of the stone fireplace he used to supplement his stove because he liked the aesthetics of an open fire for all his grease and the raw-boned stink of him. But Pamela would never choose a man like that, skinny, flat-headed, dumb as tar, no matter how much he'd made on a lucky placer strike two years back or how many conveniences he built into his cabin, would she?
    It was a question that tormented him all the dilatory, headachy way back up the river, and it tormented him even after he got a pike as long as a Louisville Slugger to rise up out of a hole under a cutbank and take the silver lure in its spiky dentition and leap clear of the water half a dozen times. Maybe he forgot about it--about her--for the space of five minutes there as he worked the canoe into shore and wrestled the thing up out of the shallows like one long whipcrack of muscle, but he thought of her again when he slipped the knife from the sheath and inserted it between the pike's eyes and drove it in till the muscle went slack.
    That night he nursed two beers, fed the dogs and set snares for rabbit where there was sign along the far verge of the garden. It was warm, and he didn't bother with a fire. For dinner, it was cold beans and petrified biscuits the mice had gnawed around the edges--he didn't feel up to the smell of fish frying in a pan. He woke once in the middle of the night to a frenzy of barking and stepped out on the porch with his rifle in the pale half-light of three A.M. to see a bewildered moose--an old cow, something under eight hundred pounds and fallow, from the look of her--planted in the center of the garden, her legs like saplings growing out of the sea of black plastic. His first impulse was to shoot her, but he resisted. You didn't shoot moose during Ducks, didn't shoot moose until fall, when the meat would keep. Not to mention that it was out of season and the country was just beginning to set the table for the big summer-long banquet of ducks and geese and salmon and berries. So what did he do? He wasted a bullet and scared the thing off in the fond hope that she would avoid this place like the plague. Until fall, anyway.
    In the morning he fired up the stove and made himself coffee and two pike fillets rolled in flour and bread crumbs and fried in an inch of snapping Crisco, and sat in the doorway of the cabin slapping mosquitoes and watching the rain clouds gather and swell over the river. He didn't feel right, and it had nothing to do with the tear he'd been on the other night either. What it had to do with was Pamela. He could smell her, a lingering female aura that was caught in the furs of the bed, in the ambient odors of the place, and if he looked over his shoulder to where she'd been sitting two mornings ago, he could almost see her there too. Pamela. She was his, no doubt about it. _You've got nothing to worry about, Sess,__ isn't that what she'd said? But then Howard Walpole's grinning fleshless face rose up before him, superimposed over Richie Oliver's solemn bearded gaze: What if she'd been lying to him? Mollifying him? What if she was just being polite?
    Before he knew what he was doing, he was back on the river, moving with the current, moving fast, the near bank racing along beside him and the wind rushing at his face. Howard Walpole's place was below town, near the mouth of Junebug Creek, and it was set back on a bluff that commanded a hundred-and-eighty-degree sweep of the river. Worse, it featured double-insulated windows shipped all the way up from