Drop City

a free country.”

Drop City
    PART FOUR
    THE DRUNKEN FOREST
    Life is here equally in sunlight and frost, in the thriving blood and sap of things, in their decay and sudden death.
    --John Haines, _The Stars, the Snow, the Fire__

Drop City
    16
    The honeymoon was over before it began, and that was a shame, worse than a shame--it was a crime. A crime committed by a man with a gun, a Remington semi-automatic .22-caliber Nylon 66, judging from the flattened pieces of lead Cecil Harder dug out of the corpses of Bobo, Hippie, Girl, Loon and Saucy. Of course, the slugs could have come from any .22 rifle, but Joe Bosky had a Nylon 66--he favored it, as many did, for the lightness of its plastic stock--and Joe Bosky was the only man on this green earth who would even so much as think of shooting somebody's dogs. You didn't shoot dogs, and you didn't burn down people's cabins or rape their wives or put a bullet between their shoulder blades as they were gliding past in their canoe. Sess Harder was trying to live off the land, and everybody knew that. The better part of his income came from furs, and without dogs to run the looping forty-odd miles of trapline he'd inherited from Roy Sender--and improved and extended on his own--he was out of luck. Everybody knew that. A child knew that.
    So instead of a homecoming, instead of lifting his bride in his arms and carrying her through the dogtrot and across the threshold, instead of sorting out the wedding gifts and stocking the larder and maybe lying out nude with her on a blanket in the sun--one of his enduring sexual fantasies--he had to dig five holes while his heart clenched with hate and regret and his head rang with the bloody whoop of revenge. Pamela tried to comfort him, but it did no good. She was in shock herself, and that was the worst of it--that just compounded the crime right there. Bad enough that the psychopathic son of a bitch of a sneaking gutless leatherneck reject had done the deed, but to expose Pamela to this kind of thing, and on the day after her wedding, no less? He was going to kill Joe Bosky, as soon as he could, and there were no two ways about it. Joe Bosky had made his declaration. Joe Bosky was asking to be killed. He was begging for it.
    “You can't, Sess, so don't even think about it. You'll go to jail--it's murder. There are laws up here too, you know--”
    He was down in a hole, breaking through permafrost, flinging dirt. He'd been back an hour, with his bride, and he hadn't unloaded the canoe, looked to the garden, settled her in the house or even so much as pecked a kiss to her cheek. “What do you know about it?” he said, and he didn't just say the words, he snarled them.
    She was right there beside him, in her shorts, with her magnificent legs on display, her hands on her hips. Her mouth was set. This was their first argument, one day married, a night in heaven, and now this. “I'm not going to talk to you like you're a child, Sess, and I'm not going to remind you that I'm part of this now too . . . We'll go to the law, like civilized people, put the law on him--”
    “The law doesn't come for dogs.”
    “For murder? Does the law come for murder? You think I married you so I could visit you three hours a week in some prison someplace?”
    He drove his pick at the frozen earth, all his rage concentrated in his shoulders and arms and the iron-clad muscles of his chest. “I see him,” he grunted, and the pick dropped again, “I'll kill him.”
    “All right. Fine. I can see you're upset, so I'll leave you to do what you have to do here and I'll start bringing the things in. Does that sound like a plan?”
    _Upset?__ he was going to say. _You think this is upset? Wait till I get my hands on a gun, then you'll see upset--wait till I pin that son of a bitch to the wall and make him cry like a woman.__ He didn't have the opportunity, though, because she'd already turned on her heels and headed down the slope, through the sun-bright glitter of bluebells and lupines and avens and saxifrage, to where the canoe shone against the everlasting gleam of the water.
    She made supper that night, things left over from the wedding feast, salads and cold cuts and whatnot that wouldn't keep, and they ate at the picnic table in seventy-five-degree sunshine while the silence of the world closed in around them. He was in a T-shirt and patched jeans; she wore a top that bared her midriff and she'd combed her hair out so it draped her shoulders like a