“Crabs?”
“I don't know where I got them, I really don't. And I don't think it was Arnold.”
“Arnold? Who's Arnold?”
“You don't know him,” she said. “He like owns this sporting goods store? He drove me back here. On his Ski-Doo. All the way out from Fairbanks, with a three-hour pit stop at the Nougat. He was sweet. He really was.”
Pan felt himself shrinking.
“Nobody's got any of that ointment,” she said. “That's the problem. It's not like there's a drugstore around the corner, know what I mean?”
“So big deal,” he said. “It's not like VD or anything”-and it was all in the mind, wasn't it, because he came back strong now, ready to burst with it-“I mean, we could still do it, couldn't we?”
She went right to sleep afterward, down and out for the count, and by the time he pulled out of her and rubbed himself as best he could with a dry bar of soap and a towel he found hanging by the door, she was snoring. Head back, breasts flattened across her chest, all that _hair__-she snatched in the air and blew it out again, hitting all the high notes as if she were playing a trumpet voluntary without the trumpet. That was all right. He forgave her that. Lydia, his treat _and__ his trick. He pulled on his long johns, but then peeled them down again and took a good long look at himself and ran the towel over his loins one more time, no problem, nothing there as far as he could see, and then he dressed in a hurry because there were four long cold miles to traverse before he could start snoring himself. He shrugged into his parka, hot, sweating, and he was about to push out into the night, relishing the idea of the cold, when Star's backpack caught his eye.
For a long time now-since he'd left Drop City, anyway-he'd been thinking about getting out, bailing, just turning his back on the whole thing and getting reacquainted with a little _civilization__ for a change, and he'd written his parents three times begging for money, a one-way ticket, traveler's checks, anything, but he might as well have been dead for all they cared. So Star's backpack. There it was, hanging from the nail next to Lydia's purse. And he knew something about that backpack that Star wasn't aware of, and she should have been, because how could she ever have expected him to travel with her through all those nights on the road, in tents and motels and diners and fast-food outlets, at gas stations-Where'd you say the ladies' rest room was? — without his knowing the contents of that backpack as well as he knew his own. And it wasn't like he was stealing, not exactly, because that three hundred dollars wrapped up in a sock in the bottom of the innermost pouch was three hundred dollars she'd kept back from him, and how many times had he bought breakfast, cold drinks, cigarettes, how many times had he sprung for the motel or the campground fee? Momentarily, he felt bad about it-this was Star, after all, Star whom he loved and had always loved, at least for the past year, and these three bills were her fail-safe, her ticket out, and now she was going to be hung out to dry. But she'd hung _him__ out to dry, hadn't she? She'd gone for Marco. Big mistake. And she'd set this little thing up with Lydia tonight, right in front of everybody, and if that wasn't a kiss-off, then what was?
He found the door, found the night. The smoke rose against the moon, the lights in the windows of Drop City North cut their indentations out of the shadows. There was no one out in the yard, no sound but for the crunch of his boots against the plaintively yielding snow. Pan reached in under his parka to adjust the crotch of his pants-but not to itch, not yet-and then he started off across the frozen plain of the river.
28
The air was crisp, burned immaculate with the cold, and it did him good to be out in it, breathing deep and moving purposefully across the landscape as if he belonged here, as vital as the wolf, the hare, the moose, and it was good too to escape the numbing togetherness of Drop City for a few hours at least. Most of the others were content to sit around with a deck of cards, a sketchpad, a guitar, the hours falling away like so much sloughed skin, and what's the hurry, man, be cool, but Marco was a different animal altogether. He couldn't relax. He felt bored, stifled. He needed to get out, explore the country, open up his senses, _learn__ something. The washed-out faces of Drop City looked up at him in surprise, the wind in the trees, the fire stoked, Rice Carolina simmering in the pot, even the dog too lazy to lift his head from the floor. You really going _out__ there? In this?
Six people were writing novels, or maybe it was seven, depending on whether the thin unspooled script crowding the pages of Alfredo's notebooks turned out to be fiction or a tract on the joys of communal living-Alfredo wasn't sure yet, but there was going to be plenty of time to work it out one way or the other once the curtain fell on the daylight, and that was coming soon, November twenty-first, according to Sess Harder. There was a lot of knitting going on. Scrabble, checkers, chess. And of course people found time to toboggan down the hill, organize skating parties on the river with the three pairs of skates in Drop City's possession, build snowfreaks with willow roots for hair and somebody's worn-out bandanna and maybe an iridescent green shirt or spangled vest thrown into the bargain. Fun and games. It was all fun and games.
The sky hung low. Through the morning the temperature had risen into the single digits, creeping up the ladder of the thermometer in a grudging, slow, hand-over-hand ascent. There might have been snow in the air, if he knew enough to feel it, to smell it in the way Sess Harder could, or Iron Steve or old Tim Yule, who sat outside on the porch of his frame house in Boynton no matter what the weather. Marco could feel the tug of Drop City loosening as he made his way downriver, and he did look back, two or three times, just to admire the way the buildings defied the vacancy of the land, to watch the conjoined swirl of the smoke from four separate stoves twist up into the sky and listen to the fading shouts of Che and Sunshine, their figures drawn down to nothing as they hammered across the yard in their homemade snowsuits and red rubber boots.
He'd given Ronnie a week, and a week was more than he had to spare. Joe Bosky and Pan the wood sprite might have gotten their meat, and Sess Harder certainly had his and probably everybody in Boynton had theirs too and half the weekend hunters from Fairbanks, Anchorage and points south, but Drop City had nothing. And that was a concern, a real concern, because pretty soon it would be too late, the moose gone stringy and tough from the rut, and despite the protests of the vegetarians, they were going to need meat to get them through till spring-either that or they'd be trapping mice under the floorboards and boiling up their shoes like Charlie Chaplin. It was frustrating too. At the end of October, just before Halloween, he and Star had been awakened by a sound that was like the rumble of fifty-five-gallon fuel drums rolling down the hill out of the trees, a deep thump and boom that resounded through the cabin and shook him out of bed and right on out the door in his stocking feet. Two moose-bulls-were going at each other on the gravel bar, great big quaking truckloads of meat suspended on the ridiculous poles of their delicate moose legs, no thought in the world but for each other and the cow just visible in the stripped yellow crown of willow behind them, and Marco standing there with empty hands like some Stone Age hunter's apprentice, and what was he going to do, throw rocks at them? Jump on their backs and cut their throats severally while the tribe looked on wringing their hands? Ronnie had taken the rifles as if they were his alone, and Ronnie was going to give them back. It wasn't a question of ownership or even of right and wrong. It was a matter of survival, just that.
There was no sign of life at Sess's place-smoke rising from the chimney, but nothing moving in the yard-and that was all right, because he didn't intend to stop in till he was on the way back, _with__ the rifles slung over his shoulder. Sess was his advisor, his mentor, the man who was going to instruct him in all the recondite ways of the country, and he'd already had to endure the humiliation of admitting to him that they had no rifle worth the name with which to go out and get their meat-Deuce had a.22 for potting rabbits and ground-hogs, and that was about it-and he was damned if he was going to appear weak in front of him again. So he walked on by the Harder cabin, and though the dogs raised a noise, no one came to the door and no face appeared at the window.