Drop City

return, and one after another people came up to them, lit with hilarity and goodwill, but it wasn't the same after Joe Bosky had put in his appearance. This was her wedding day, her wedding _night,__ and her husband was as distant and impenetrable as some alien out of a spaceship in one of those corny B movies she'd watched as a kid. _Wake up, Sess,__ she wanted to say. _Wake up and snap out of it, your bride's here--remember me?__
    It must have been around ten when the party began to wind down, people gone off in pairs, migrating to the Nougat and the Three Pup, falling unconscious in the gravel on the bank of the river. Tim Yule was seated on an overturned bucket in a stripe of sun, stirring a plastic cup of Everclear with a big-knuckled finger and holding a sotto voce conversation with himself. Howard Walpole and Richie Oliver had long since drifted off, shoulders slumped in mutual commiseration. Pamela's mother was in the back of Pris's station wagon--“A little catnap, that's all I need, don't worry about me”--and Pris was holding court for the benefit of three drunken bush crazies who would have stripped the flesh from their bones for just a touch of her, while the band had been reduced to a single fiddle sawing away at the melancholy traces of a classical education. The hour had come. She pressed her husband's hand and felt the blood start in her veins. “Sess,” she said, her voice echoing oddly in her ears over the strains of the violin--saddest thing she'd ever heard, and what was it, Borodin? Shostakovich? Something like that. “Sess,” she said, “don't you think it's time the bride and groom went in and--”
    “Went to bed?”
    They were on the back porch of the house Richard Schrader had magnanimously vacated for the night. Mosquitoes sailed into their faces, softly rebounded from their lips, their eyelashes. She'd changed into a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved hooded sweatshirt, but she was conscious of the underthings she'd picked out in Anchorage with Pris, lacy satin panties and a brassiere that clung to her like a man's spread fingers. He leaned in close and they kissed, easeful and sweet, all the rage and the woodenness gone out of him finally, finally, and she murmured, “Yes, to bed.”
    The drone of an outboard came to her then, to both of them, a speedboat planing up the river in the slanting sun of ten o'clock at night, droning closer, a glint of churned water trailing away from the stern and the bearded face of Joe Bosky, black-crowned, at the helm. Joe Bosky, back for one final thrust. Sess rose up off the porch even as the bow leapt out of the current and careened for shore. “Hey, Sess Harder, fuck you!” Bosky roared over the engine, dancing at the throttle. “Fuck you and your dog-faced woman too!” And then the bow cut back and the boat shot past and was gone.
    Richard had left them a pair of vanilla-scented candles, one on each side of the bed, tapering pale phallic things rising up out of matching ceramic dishes his ex-wife had shaped and fired herself. The cabin was four rooms, two of which Richard closed off in winter, and it featured a kitchen sink with a hand-pump for water and a bathroom replete with a flush toilet that generally worked, at least in warm weather. As in most of the cabins and frame houses in Boynton, aesthetic considerations had been sacrificed to practicality, and all four rooms were lined floor-to-ceiling with flattened cardboard boxes--Birds Eye Peas, Rainier Pale Ale, Charmin Toilet Tissue--to provide a last line of defense against the winds screaming down out of the polar barrens in the dead of winter. The bedroom was constructed as a kind of loft, four steps up from the main room and the top-of-the-line Ashley stove Richard's ex had insisted on. There was no need of the stove tonight. It was as warm inside as a cabana on a white crescent beach in the Bahamas.
    She was sitting on the bed, taking her hair down. She'd lit the candles and set aside the plastic cup of lukewarm champagne--the taste had gone saccharine in the back of her throat, and she didn't need any more. The cabin was still. The sun held. She could hear the sound of her own breathing, the tick and whirr of the blood coursing through her veins. After a moment she got up and pulled the shades over the two slits of the windows.
    Sess was busy in the main room, fooling with something, his shoulders so squared-up and rigid you would have thought the vertebrae had fused in his neck.