8
At eleven-thirty the next morning she was sitting on the edge of the bed, combing out her hair and watching the way the muscles rearranged themselves in his shoulders as he leaned into the stove and cooked her breakfast. He was wearing patched jeans and a sun-faded workshirt that might once have been blue or maybe green. His hair, movie-star black and thick as a wolf pelt, stood up off his head as if he'd been hanging by it all night long in a closet someplace. He was barefoot. The sleeve of his shirt was gutted under the left arm and both cuffs were furred with dangling threads. “Moose sausage,” he said, giving her a look over his shoulder, “and your extra-super-special Sess Harder flapjacks with last year's sugared blueberries. What do you think of that?”
Through the two windows came a soft white layered light and both doors stood open to the sun and the sunstruck haze beyond. She could see his bees moving in golden flecks among the birch and aspen in the yard and she could smell the new-made scent of the Thirtymile where it joined with the Yukon and drew wet sparks from the rocks. Her hair was a travail, especially when she was out in the bush, and she'd meant to leave it braided-but when she woke and saw him there at the stove, laying on wood, fussing with the draft, she thought she'd comb it out and let it hang like a flag of surrender. Or enticement. Because she was on trial too, and she wanted to show him what she had, and not only mentally, not only verbally, but physically as well.
“That,” she said, giving him a smile, “sounds like just the thing. Because, I mean, anybody could have offered me eggs Benedict, caviar and truffles and the like, but if I'm going to paddle three hours for breakfast, the least I could expect is the super-special flapjacks. With, what did you say, _moose__ sausage?”
He didn't answer, because he was executing some sort of arcane maneuver with a cast-iron skillet so black it might have been unearthed from a tomb. There was the sound of hot grease snapping in the pan, and suddenly the cabin was dense with the smell of it, and with smoke too. He stabbed the sausages with a long-handled fork, danced round the coffeepot, flipped the leaden dark cakes with a rolling snap of his wrist. “I ought to get you a toque,” she said, and he said, “What's a toque?”
They ate outside in the sun at a picnic table he'd fashioned from black spruce and varnished till it was the color of old leather, and they made use of his entire complement of dishware in the process: two tin plates and two tin mugs. In the center of the table, set in a can, was a sprig of wildflowers he'd gathered while she slept, and that touched her, the effort he'd put out and the essential sweetness it implied. He poured coffee, spooned up blueberries. “You know what I bet the best thing about living out here must be,” she said, mopping up her plate. “Aside from the beauty, I mean?”
He shrugged and grinned, tried not to look too pleased with himself. “Tell me,” he said.
“Safety. You've got to feel safe here, don't you?”
“Sure, as long as I don't have to perform any emergency appendectomies. On myself, that is. Or you.”
“The auto-appendectomy,” she said, and they both laughed.
“Or dental work. Imagine trying to pull your own tooth?”
They were silent a minute, contemplating the horror of that particular image, and then she said, “I'll pull yours if you pull mine,” and they were laughing again. It was laughter that took a while to subside, and when he got up, still chuckling, to scrape the plates and wash up, she told him to sit down and let her do it, because she'd seen enough-enough, already. What did he think, he had to wait on her hand and foot? “What I meant,” she said, sliding the dishes into the tub of water he'd heated on the stove, “was the kind of safety you could never feel in the city, or at least I couldn't. It got so I didn't want to go out at night, not alone.”
He'd followed her back inside and was sitting on the edge of the bed now, rolling a cigarette and watching her as she moved amongst his things. “Okay,” he said, “sure, I'll grant you that. As a woman you've got to be especially careful-”
“As a man too. The whole society's breaking down, assassinations, drugs in the schools, hippies-I know this guy from my office who used to like to walk his dog before he went to bed… just that, walk his dog. And you know what happened?”
Sess lit the cigarette. “Somebody jumped him?”
“You bet they did. Two guys with a knife, longhairs, and they weren't content to just take his wallet-they stuck the knife right up his nose and slit his nostril, and you should see it, it's like a permanent disfiguration, like a tattoo or something. And the dog. It was this sweet little thing, a cockapoo-Berenice, he called her-and she tried to protect him and they just turned on the dog and kicked her and kicked her till there wasn't hardly anything left of her. That's what I mean. That's what society's coming to.”
He'd risen from the bed and was standing beside her now, and she was aware of him in a way that made her skin prickle, the breadth of him, the smell of the tobacco, a tentative hand on her shoulder and his voice pitched deep: “You don't have to worry about any of that out here. Bears, maybe. Wolverines. But we know how to discourage them. Believe me.”
Her hands were in the water and it was as hot as she could stand it. The scrub pad moved mechanically against the crust of the blackened pan. “That's what I mean,” she said. “You have freedom out here, and not just freedom to do what you want, but freedom from that kind of crap-he was just walking his dog, for God's sake.” For some reason she couldn't name, she was on the verge of tears, and she wondered about that, about how she could let herself get so wrought up when this was what she'd wanted all her life, this place, and maybe this person, and the rest of the world, with its nose-slitters and dog-kickers, could sink into the ocean for all it mattered.
“Pamela,” he was saying, “come on, Pamela,” and she felt him lifting her arms out of the sudsing water till she was open to him and he pulled her close. “You're never going to have to think about any of that ever again, not for the rest of your life.”
People said she was crazy, wanting to live out in the hind end of nowhere, ten or twenty miles from the nearest store, church, roadhouse or post office, and another hundred sixty from anything even approximating civilization, if you could call Fairbanks civilized. And they said she was crazier still for willingly putting herself in the hands of some grizzled, twisted, sex-starved fur trapper with suet-clogged arteries and guns decorating his walls-in fact, that was exactly, word for word, the way Fred Stines, the man she'd been seeing in Anchorage, had put it-but she begged to differ. What they didn't understand-what Fred couldn't begin to imagine-was that everything they knew, the whole teetering violent war-crazed society, was about to collapse. On that score, she hadn't the slightest doubt. And the riots in the streets were just a prelude to what was to come, because if nobody worked and they all just sat around using drugs and having promiscuous sex all day, then who was going to grow the food? And if nobody grew the food, then what would they eat? To her, the answer was obvious: they'd eat your food, and when they were done with that, they'd eat you, just like in that science fiction book where all the dead and dying were made into potted meat. Sure. But you could work in an office building every day and go to the store in your new shiny car and then come home to your gas heater and your woodstove, and never think twice about it, and that was where the Fred Stineses of the world would be when it all came crashing down. Not her, though, not Pamela. She was going to live in the bush, and she was going to be one hundred percent self-sufficient. Anything less, to her mind, was a form of suicide.
On the afternoon of the second day, after breakfast and the embrace that became a clinch and then a kiss that went on till the blood was singing in her ears, Sess walked her around the place, showing it off. He demonstrated the clarity of the Thirtymile where it crashed into the opaque Yukon, which ran heavy with its freight of glacial debris, showed her where he planned to build a sauna and a workshop, lectured her on the garden that was already showing green against the black plastic he'd laid down for heat retention. He was growing cabbage, cauliflower, turnips, kohlrabi and Brussels sprouts, potatoes, onions, peas, lettuce, Early Girl tomatoes, basil, cucumbers, squash. “Everything has to be in the ground by the first of June,” he was saying, “though you risk a frost, which is why I keep that wood stacked up over there, just as a precaution, because we get a growing season out here of maybe a hundred five or so days, what with the influence of the river keeping things a tad less frigid, and every day counts, believe me, and round about February you'd kill to have a little pickled cabbage or stewed tomatoes with your six thousandth serving of moose-”