She was listening, because this was the information she needed, this was the knowledge that was proof against anything, but most of what he said drifted right through her-it was his voice she was listening to, not the words. His voice mesmerized her in a way Fred Stines's never could. It spoke to her in a tone that was like a current flowing through her, like the electric charge in a wall socket or the balky lamp she'd clumsily rewired when she was in college. He talked-and he wasn't shy anymore, not shy a bit-and she listened. “So,” he said finally, and they were down at the river staring into the canoe, “should we maybe go upstream a bit and see what we can scare up for dinner? You like duck, maybe? Duck with scallions and a super-extra-special Sess Harder spicy homemade barbecue sauce?”
The canoe rode the river as if it were floating on air, the strewn rock of its bed transformed into puffed and emboldened clouds, the fish like the black silhouettes of birds flitting past. She was on the river with Sess Harder, in the wilderness with Sess Harder, and she was in love with everything. They paddled hard, upriver, into a breeze. She could feel the weight of him behind her, the canoe a seesaw on the playground of the water, and she could feel the thrust of his paddle as they dodged rocks and downed trees and cut across the riffles where the current boiled around them. This was silent work, and for the first time since he'd stepped out onto the deck of the restaurant yesterday afternoon, neither of them felt compelled to talk. It was only when they swept round a bend and she was startled to see a building standing high atop the far bank that she broke the silence. “Good God, Sess,” she said, turning to look back at him, “what is that-a cabin? Way out here?”
Yes, it was a cabin. Obviously a cabin. Notched logs, the flash of window glass, sun on the skin of an overturned aluminum skiff laid in tight against the near side. It had a sod roof, and there were trees eight or ten feet tall sprouting from it as if it were the picture of a troll's den in a children's book. Sess kept paddling, the steadiest stroke in the world. “That's right,” he said.
“But you didn't tell me I was going to have to live in a subdivision.” She tried to inject a note of humorous disparagement, but she was shocked, genuinely shocked, because what was the sense of it all if there was a cabin around every bend?
“Don't you let it worry you, Pamela,” he said, the cabin already drifting out to the margins of her peripheral vision, “-nobody lives there. Nobody's lived there for over a year now.”
The paddle worked and she could feel it in her shoulders, feel herself toughening already. “But who-?” she said.
“An old guy, one of the old-timers, a real authentic cranky tattered river bachelor who stank of the goose wings soaked in beaver castor he used to bait lynx, the kind of guy who only bathed when he fell in the river, which was about twice a year.” He paused, but the paddle kept working. “The kind of guy-or coot-I'd become if it wasn't for, well, if it wasn't for you.”
She let the hopefulness of that sink in a minute, and then she said, “So where is he now-I mean, did he die?”
“Oh, no, no-he was way too cranky to die. He retired. Hung up his snowshoes and rinsed his gold pans for the final time and went on down to Seattle to live with his brother in a rooming house someplace. You know: central heating, color TV, washer and dryer. A little strip of macadam to park your pickup on.”
“That's horrible,” she said.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, and she looked back to see him grinning at her. “Nothing worse.”
Then they were beaching the canoe on a strip of gravel and hiking through a sweating dense tangle of birch, aspen and cottonwood that was held fast by the sheer mass of the mosquitoes that swarmed through it in all their regiments and brigades. She was wearing long sleeves and jeans and she'd rubbed herself like a leg of lamb in 6-12, but the mosquitoes got her in the one place she'd missed-the tip of her nose-and the swatting of them became automatic. “Five minutes more,” Sess whispered, a shotgun in one hand, a.22 slung over his shoulder. “I'm taking you to this series of little lakes where there's more ducks than mosquitoes even, if you can believe it.” And then he went on to tell her that the natives didn't call the season late spring or early summer, but just that-Ducks-because there were so many of them flown up from the south to nest and raise their young. It was like an open-air meat market. You couldn't miss.
But then they got there and he did miss, three times, and the lake that was once a stretch of the river in years gone by-an oxbow, they called it-was first a pandemonium of squawking and flapping ducks, and then it was duckless, a flat black expanse of duckless water. Sess took it hard. He made apologies-but no excuses, because that wasn't the way he was. “Wait here,” he said, and she waited the better part of an hour while he slipped off into the undergrowth as quietly as a breeze and the mosquitoes swarmed and the silence finally ruptured with the distant thump of three more shots, and when he came back to her he was still duckless and looking frustrated and angry. He gave her a tense smile. “Don't you worry,” he said, “we just-well, I hate to say it, but we just have to be patient. Can you appreciate that, Pamela? Can you?”
She was going to say that she _could__ appreciate it, of course she could, and that he didn't have to worry on her account because anything he wanted to cook was just fine with her, when the dark water at her feet began to move as if it had come to life, trailing an even darker _V__ across the flat surface, and he grinned and unslung the.22, and a moment later he was wading out of the muck with a dripping naked-tailed black thing depending from one hand, and she said, “What is it, a beaver?” and he said, “It's a rat.”
For dinner that night, and she was hungry, ravenous, all her cells crying out for fuel, he cooked her a fricassee of muskrat in a sauce of stewed tomatoes from the can with rice and greens and a sweetish yellow dollop of the prime fat the guest of honor wears under his coat while enacting his murky rituals in the ponds and sloughs of the backcountry. To wash it down, they each had two bottles of homemade beer so strong it was like the depth charges she used to drink in college. It was the best meal she'd ever had. And she told Sess that as she sat on the bed and grinned while he washed the dishes at the stove-“I insist,” he said, “because you did them this morning, and that's only fair”-and then he pulled out a harmonica and serenaded her and they wound up harmonizing on three separate run-throughs of “Oh Susannah,”
“You Are My Sunshine” and “She Loves You” (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah).
It was past midnight and they were both giddy with the singing, the beer and the company that just kept lighting them up and lighting them up again, when she said, “So tell me about Jill.”