Drop City

the heart came loose from its moorings and the animal went limp without spoiling the fur. He didn't tell her he was just one more predator, one more killer, as useless as the wind through the trees, taking life to feed his own. He didn't tell her any of that. “You want to go to bed now,” is what he said, “I can see that. You want your man in your arms. You want to be naked.”
    She moved in close, threw an arm over his shoulder and pressed her forehead to his so that he couldn't see anything of her but her eyes, huge eyes, pale as water. “I'll tell you a secret,” she whispered, and the _s__-sound went slushy on her. “I am easy. For you. Only for you, Sess Harder.”
    He was very drunk. Profoundly drunk, but what did that mean, anyway? Profoundly drunk? That he was ready to go deep, get deep, be deep? Her breath, fecund with wine, with smoked and processed ham, with his beer and what lay at the very essence of her, was a thing that stirred him. He was instantly hard. His breath mingled with hers. “What do you want me to do?”
    “Everything,” she said.
    In the morning it was all right. He hadn't got this far without adversity, hadn't felled the trees for his own cabin and trapped two winters and sold the furs and refused unemployment and food stamps and any kind of institutional handout or government tit without things going radically wrong at one time or another. Adversity hardened him, annealed him. It made him rise to the challenge and beat it back till he knew in his own mind that there was no man like him in all the country, nobody tougher, more resourceful, more independent. The dogs were dead. He would get new ones. And when the time came, when he had the leisure and the inclination, he would settle his scores.
    But now it was morning and the cabin was lit by a thick wedge of sun that held the window over the bed in its grip and set fire to the jars of honey on the shelf behind the stove. He lay there a minute, a long minute, Pamela's sweet palpable form pressed to his till they were like two spoons in a drawer, and watched the sun on the wall as if he'd been locked in a closet all his life and never seen anything like it before. They'd slept late, but that was the way it was in summer--you stayed up half the night with the sun looping overhead and then slept in till the next day took hold of you. He had a hangover--and the half-formed feeling of shame and unworthiness that goes with it--but he wasn't going to let it affect him, not one iota. Today was going to be Pamela's day, all day, a day that would make up for yesterday, and if she wanted to just sit naked in the sun and weave slips of forget-me-nots or bluebells into her pubic hair like Lady Chatterley (another of his enduring fantasies), then that was all right with him. Of course, just thinking about it got him hard and he woke her to the slow gentle propulsion of his lovemaking.
    And what did she want to do after he served her a plate of eggs, bacon and potatoes fried in four tablespoons of semi-rancid lard whose origins even he suspected? She wanted to do, to make, to get going on the rest of their lives, setting one brick atop another--or log, as the case may be. “Show me where the add-on goes,” she said, and she was already out the door, in the knee-high weed, pacing off a room she could see in her mind, a cleaner, airier space that would more than double what they had and give them a proper bedroom with a real and actual freestanding bed in it. And shelves, miles of shelves, and built-in drawers maybe. Bentwood rockers. Little tables. She had that little-table look in her eye, he could see it, could see the way she was calculating.
    “You want to catch the sun,” he said.
    She shaded her eyes with the slab of her hand and grinned at him. Wildflowers rose to her shins. Her skin glistened like buttered toast. He thought he'd never seen a picture so ready for framing. “So we build out to the east, then?”
    “Depends on whether you like morning sun or afternoon. Of course, in the winter, we're talking moonlight. You ever been out here in winter--away from town, I mean?” He was thinking of Jill now, _Jill wants out.__ Everybody wanted out when the night set in, the night that never let up, when the cabin walls seemed to shrink till you felt like you were in one of those Flash Gordon serials where the walls came together like a vise to squeeze the pulp out of you. Flash always managed to escape, though. So did the better part