Then she was in her cabin, laying wood on the fire. She had the place to herself, at least for the moment, because everybody else was in the meeting hall, debating, shouting, glutting themselves on the bad vibes and negativity, and the people who hadn't been there for dinner were there now-she'd seen the hurrying dark forms huddled against the snow, panic time, oh yes indeed. She tried to steady herself. Tried to talk herself down from the ledge she'd stepped out on here. What she needed most of all was to be calm, to think things through in a slow, orderly fashion. Marco was lost. Norm was bailing. _Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.__ She saw herself a Drop City widow, sidling up to Geoffrey or Weird George, peeling potatoes, hauling frozen buckets of human waste out to the refuse heap, living day by day through the slow deterioration of everything she cared about, everything she'd built and fought for, and maybe she'd pile up stones in memory of Marco, the way the Indians did, and cry over the stones and her battered hands and the whole impossible naive idealistic hippie trip she'd been on ever since she left home. What a fool, she thought. What a fool she'd been.
She thought of the money then. The three pale stiff silvery green notes wrapped up in the sock in the inside flap of her backpack, her insurance policy, cab fare, bus fare, air fare, the means to get out. Ronnie had got out, Sky Dog and Dale Murray, Rain, Lester and Franklin-and Norm was on his way. Verbie was living in town with Iron Steve in a rental with electricity and running water. Lydia was only parked here, the most temporary of arrangements, everybody knew that. And so why should she suffer? Why should she wear herself down in the thankless role of _chick__ and scullery maid? She got up from the bed and went to her pack.
She dug through her summer tops, her cutoffs, sandals, a bundle of letters she'd meant to send, camping gear, books, suntan oil, three, four, five pairs of clean socks, her poncho, but when she reached into the inside pocket, deep down, at the bottom, there was nothing. It had to be a mistake. She upended the pack on the bed, went through every pouch, pocket and fold of clothing and laid everything out where she could see it, thinking she would hike the twelve miles to town all on her own, just follow the river like a highway, walk into the Three Pup and offer to pay one of the bush pilots to fly her out, Howard, maybe-he would do it, no problem. She'd offer fifty and keep the rest for a one-way ticket home-not to Florida, not to Hawaii, but home-and she saw herself sitting back in the reclining seat, eating a hot meal off the tray, prepackaged food, civilized food, and her mother standing there at the gate at Kennedy with Sam and the dog, and her father, if he could get off work. She started to cry then. She couldn't help herself.
For a long while she just sat there, staring down at the pattern of her things spread out over the bed. Then she went through everything again, sobbing deep in her chest, rubbing at her nose and eyes with the back of her sleeve. Then she got up and searched round the cabin, peering down the length of the shelves, fanning through the paperbacks, though she knew she hadn't moved that money-not unless she was losing her mind, not unless she'd been sleepwalking or dreaming herself into another dimension. She retraced her steps. Searched through the empty pack again and yet again and finally used her penknife to take the lining out of the pocket, but what she clenched in her hand was only nylon, navy blue nylon, manufactured in Taiwan.
The money hadn't vanished into thin air. It hadn't grown legs and run off. Someone had stolen it, that was the only conclusion, some thief, somebody who'd had the nerve, and the leisure, to go through her things behind her back-Merry, Maya, Jiminy, Marco. But no. She couldn't believe it of any of them, and besides, no one had known the money was there-it was her secret, her secret stash. She was desolated. This was the end of brother- and sisterhood, this was the way it played out. In betrayal. Selfishness. Meanness. In thievery. Where was the flow in that? Where was the breakthrough? It came to her that everybody must have had a secret stash, something they were holding out on for their own selfish little reasons, even Marco, even Merry, and so it was only logical that they would suspect each other and rifle-that was the word, wasn't it? — rifle each other's possessions.
Once more she went through everything, desperate now, flinging wrung-out socks and unfurled sweaters and spine-sprung paperbacks over her shoulder, and she was looking at the door and listening for footsteps as if she could hear them through the screen of the storm, a heartbeat away from _rifling__ Jiminy's things, Merry's, Marco's, when she thought of Ronnie. He'd been alone here, with Lydia, and if anyone knew her secrets Ronnie did, if anyone would have gone through her things, if anyone would even have thought of stealing from her, lying to her, cheating and two-timing and offering her up to teepee cats like a prostitute and playing the unwitting victim all the while, it was Ronnie. Ronnie had her money. Ronnie.
She looked up into the devastation of the room. It was like a pit, like a cage. Smoky, stinking, everything a jumble and nowhere to escape to. The joints of the stovepipe didn't fit right, the gusts ran right through the chinking in a hundred places, the door was like a wind tunnel no matter how many layers of rags and paper they stuffed into the gaps round the frame. It was hopeless, everything was hopeless, and she couldn't seem to stop crying. Time passed-minutes, hours, she didn't know. The wood of the stove burned to coals and then ash. She was shivering. Sitting there and shivering, with no will to feed the stove or even wrap herself in a blanket. And then the door rattled on its hinges and she looked up and Marco was there.
Marco. He was a sheet of white, white everywhere, layered with it, his mustache frozen over his lips, his lips white, the flesh of his cheekbones gone the color and texture of dripped wax. He didn't unwrap his scarf, didn't remove his hat or tug at the straps of the guns slung over his shoulder-he just moved into the room on stiff shuffling feet and caught her in the deadfall of his arms.
30
Pamela was sitting at the window of the darkened cabin, lighting one cigarette off another and staring out into the moonlit yard. This was her favorite form of recreation, once the cooking was done and the dishes washed and she'd worked the furs as long as she could stand the tedium of it and patched Sess's clothes and patched them again till his pants and shirts could have stood up and paraded around the room like walking quilts-once that was over, once the wood had been hauled in and the stove tended and tomorrow's bread set to rise in the pan, she sat and watched. The weather had been clear and cold for the past week, and the moon had become her sun, omnipresent, unimpeded, lighting up the snow of the hills like a stage set. She'd been out earlier (at five P.M. by the windup clock Sess had made his obsession; the ticking drove him to distraction, he claimed, and over and over again he wondered aloud how she could possibly care what time it was anyway), and she'd watched the pulse and stagger of the northern lights going green and yellow-green and shading to purple, to red, until she'd felt the cold and come back inside. Sitting here, at the window, was better than reading a novel or laying out a hand of solitaire or doing crosswords. It was her downtime, her contemplative time, and she stared into the landscape in the way other people might have stared into a picture or a television screen. A fox in winter coat came through the yard every day, twice a day. Owls sat the trees. Ravens stirred like black rags thrown down out of the night. Twice she'd felt some inexpressible shift in the current of things and looked up to see a train of wolves clipping through the crusted snow on the proscenium of the riverbank.