“Reba said they were going to have to go and Norm said but wouldn't they just rot and fall off and Reba said you're thinking of toe_nails,__ this is toes we're talking about. But they recovered. Miraculously. They're not exactly beautiful, and he did lose both nails, but there's no infection and I was like mortified because he wanted me to cut them off of him with the hatchet, I mean, can you believe it? Me? With a hatchet?”
So they laughed over the horror of that and puffed at their cigarettes and Pamela fed some wood to the fire and they both went over and sat on the bed and curled their feet under them in sympathy. After a while Star said, “That's not why I'm depressed. I know he'll be cool with Sess-”
“Cold, honey, he'll be cold.”
Star gave her a weak smile. “It's Drop City,” she said. “It's like the whole thing's just falling apart-did you hear Weird George, Erika and Geoffrey just walked out with the clothes on their backs?”
She hadn't heard. She knew the nephew was gone, and the little pie-face with the false eyelashes, and a handful of them kept pestering Sess-they'd pay him anything, whatever he wanted-to mush them and their guitars and she didn't know what else on into Boynton. And he was willing, why not, cash was cash, but the trapline came first because once you set those traps you were obligated by every moral force there was in the universe to tend them, if only to curtail the mortal suffering of the living beings that gave you your sustenance, because you didn't waste, you never wasted-waste was worse than a sin; it was death.
“That's terrible,” she said, and she meant it. She'd got used to having neighbors, Star, Merry, Maya, Reba, people she could talk to, women, other women. Last winter she'd been in an apartment, in a city, working in an office full of people. There were movies, shops, bars, restaurants. Now there were furs, now there was Sess. She was happy-she was, she knew she was, happier than she'd ever been-but the ineradicable nights were already stacking up, the stir-crazy nights, the nights when Sess wasn't enough, when nobody could be enough. And there was something else too, something bigger than all of that, her news, her secret, and if she didn't have Star to tell it to she'd go mad with keeping it in.
Star's face floated there beside her in the soft light of the lamp, sweetly pretty, unblemished, no more a hippie face than her own. “People are eating by themselves now,” she said. “And the food, they're fighting over the food.”
“But I thought you said there was plenty, more than enough-didn't you tell me Norm laid in six months' worth of the basics? He spent hundreds of dollars you told me-”
“We're not running out. It's more like hoarding, I guess you would call it. People are raiding the pantry, just taking anything they want, almonds, raisins-all the dried fruit disappeared. You can forget the powdered milk too. And the chocolate.” She made a face, lifted her hands and let them drop. “The flour's all full of these little black specks-I thought it was pepper at first, that somebody'd maybe dropped the pepper shaker in there when they were battering fish-but actually they were mouse turds, millions of them. And Reba-she seems to think she's in charge since Norm split, and she's always calling these meetings, her and Alfredo, to quote 'address the food situation,' but nobody comes.”
“It's not even Christmas yet,” Pamela said. She didn't know why she said it-she didn't want to be negative-but these people, these _hippies,__ had to understand what they'd gotten themselves into here. It was like that fable her mother used to read to her and Pris when they were little, Aesop, she thought it was, about the ant and the grasshopper.
“I know,” Star whispered. “I know.”
Later, after they'd finished a second pot of tea and the moose steak sandwiches with sliced onions and horseradish sauce Pamela fixed for them, Star asked her if she'd mind if she spent the night-the whole trip, the whole _scene__ upriver was getting to be too much for her and she just couldn't face it, not tonight. Would that be all right? Would it be too much trouble? Of course not, Pamela told her, no trouble at all-she'd fix her up right here, in Sess's old bed, and could she believe he'd slept here alone, on this narrow little pallet, all last winter?
She gave her one of her flannel nightgowns and wrapped her up in Sess's parky-squirrel sleeping bag and her pick of the furs-they had a whole fur emporium to choose from, and what all those slinky high-heeled women in New York and Chicago wouldn't have given for even a peek in the door-and it was nice, it took her back. It was like being a child again, with Pris at her side and the tent arching over them and the comfort of their mother snoring lightly from the cot in the corner. Or having one of the neighborhood girls for a sleepover when you didn't sleep at all, not till dawn. It was past midnight when she turned out the lamp and went to her own bed in the add-on room, feeling relaxed and peaceful, and tired, gratefully tired, thinking of the neat symmetry of the arrangement-the girls were here, bedded down under one roof, and the men were out there, huddled side by side in the cold clenched fist of the night.
In the morning, they lingered over coffee, fresh-baked bread and powdered eggs in a scramble of ham, peppers and tomatoes, watching the light come up in a gradual displacement of shadow until it settled into the pale wash that served for dawn, dusk and high noon at this time of year. They listened to the radio together-_Tundra Topics__ on KFAR and _Trapline Chatter__ on KJNP, and learned that Olive Swisstack sent all her love to Tommy, in Barrow, and Ivor Johnson's ex-mother-in-law needed him to call her, urgently, and that Jim Drudge was radioing in from Fort Yukon to say that he was drawing breath like anybody else on the planet and very pleased about it too-and then they lit their first cigarettes of the day and played a very lax game of chess.
“You know, Star,” she said, after she'd pinned down the king and announced checkmate in a soft, matter-of-fact way, “there's something I wanted to tell you all last night, but, well-it never came up, I guess.”
Star glanced up from the board, where she'd been idly fingering the king's bishop that wouldn't be much use to her now. The half-empty cup stood at her elbow. A cigarette-was it Star's or her own? — smoldered in the ashtray.
This was good, this was very good, the glow of the light through the window, the gentle respiration of the stove, the silence. A calm descended on her. She might have been asleep still or stretched out on a towel at some resort in the tropics, nodding over the glossy novel propped up on her chest. “I'm pregnant,” she said. “Or I think I am. I haven't told Sess yet.”
She looked past Star to the window and beyond the window to the hills and then back again, right into her friend's face, into her eyes. “So I guess that means you're the first to know.”
31
What passed for light these days was just a fading gleam on the horizon, light in name only, a sorry pale tuned-down glow in the southern sky that was there to remind you of what you were missing. It was sunny in Miami Beach, dazzling in San Diego, and you couldn't put the light out in Patagonia or McMurdo Sound even if you wanted to-it was as if the whole globe had been tipped upside down and all you could shake out of it was a few shadows falling away into the grudging night of the universe. That was what Pan was thinking as the engine snarled out its dull, repetitive message-_all's well, all's well, all's well__-and the wingtips caught a glint from somewhere and the running lights pulsed out of sync till he was as tranced as he might have been in some dance club with the strobe going and the music so loud he couldn't have said what his own name was.
He was cold. Freezing to death, actually. Outside, on the ground, it was approaching forty below, and here they were up at six thousand feet where the air was thinner-and colder. Joe had the heater going full blast, but it barely registered against the wind howling in through the cracks in the doorframe and around the window, and why couldn't they make these things airtight? Why couldn't they insulate them or rig up a heater that actually made some kind of difference? He couldn't feel his toes. Under his shirt, the beads were like separate little pellets of ice. A cold clear fluid dripped from his nostrils and dampened the backs of his gloves. In desperation, he wrapped his arms round his shoulders, shivering so hard he thought his fillings were going to come loose.