The only problem was, there was no one home. Or at least that was the way it appeared. From the angle he'd chosen, he could see up and in through the eastern window of the main room, across an inconvenient slice of vacant space, and out the southern windows. All was still, but for the sizzle of the rain. The dogs were huddled at the ends of their chains, deep in the miniature log houses Howard had built for them. Sess watched the windows, and then he watched the doghouses, the dark drawn-down faces of the dogs themselves, a squirrel, a robin, and he studied the way the rain dripped from the eaves in a long gray linkage of individual beads.
Where could they be? There was no smoke either from the stovepipe or the chimney, no movement, no sound. Howard's boat was there, tugging at its painter, and his floatplane too. Could they be out for a hike? Asleep? In bed? That was a possibility he didn't want to entertain-it made his digestive tract broil just to imagine it-but it was a possibility that grew into an inevitability as the day wore on. They were in bed. Fucking. That's what they were doing. They were fucking and she'd lied to him and Howard Walpole was the chosen one all along because Howard Walpole had money and credibility and Sess Harder had neither, and right now, right now as he crouched here shivering and wet in the bushes like some heartworn adolescent, Howard was trying out his new toy, his squeeze box, his jelly roll. Isn't that what they called it in the old blues tunes, _jelly roll?__
Suddenly he was in a rage. It was all he could do to keep himself from just opening up on the place, blowing out the windows, making meat of the dogs as they came yowling and bewildered out of their houses, cutting down Howard Walpole in his greasy long johns and worn-out carpet slippers. How had he ever gotten himself into this mess? What had he been thinking? A woman-a good-looking woman, a stunner, with strong hands and a stronger back-advertises for a man? What kind of world was that? And how could he ever have expected anything other than heartbreak and humiliation out of the whole mess?
He was standing then, standing up to his full height and damn the subterfuge-he was going to march up to that cabin and bang on the door till it opened and demand an answer of her, right then and there: _Is it me or him? Me or him!__ But when he came up out of the bush he detected the faintest shadow of movement through the front room window, and before he could think or act the dogs were rushing at their chains in a froth of champing teeth and bitter startled yips and howls. Was there a face in the window? Was it her? Was it Howard? He fell to his hands in the liquefying mud and began a mad scrambling retreat even as he heard the door swing open on rusted hinges and Howard's voice ringing out, “Who's there?” and her voice answering, “It's probably a moose, that's all,” and Howard saying, apropos of what, Sess could only wonder, “Didn't I tell you? Didn't I?”
Two days later, at twelve noon on the dot, Howard Walpole's flat-bottomed boat planed round the gravel bar off the Boynton beach and drifted in on the crest of its own wake. Sess was standing there in the mud in his boots, just like Howard before him. He hadn't slept. He hadn't eaten. He was as hopeless and ragged and pie-eyed as a beggar on the streets of Calcutta. When the boat touched shore with a scrape of gravel and a single sharp cry from one of the gulls overhead, Pamela-she was wearing shorts and a T-shirt under a cotton jacket and a wide-brimmed floppy hat that masked her eyes so he couldn't gauge a thing-sprang out so lightly and gracefully it was as if a breeze had propelled her. He hung his head. Sucked in his breath. “Well?” he said.
She gave him a smile, she gave him that. “I've got to go back to Anchorage for a few days,” she said, and there was Howard, behind her, dragging the painter up the shore with the intention of looping it round any convenient boulder or tree stump.
Sess just looked at her. “Why?”
She stopped there, right in front of him, and she never flinched or looked away. “Why? To get my wedding dress, what do you think? And my sister, who's going to be my lone bridesmaid, and my mother-she's going to have to fly up from Arizona. I always did want to be a June bride.”
Still nothing. Still it wasn't sinking in. He was dangling in the wind, no more able or sentient than a river-run salmon split down the middle and hung out to dry.
A long moment ticked by, the longest moment of his life, and then she said, “How about the twenty-first, Sess? Will that work?”
10
Pris brought the cake all the way up from Anchorage in the back of her station wagon, and it was a cake the likes of which Boynton had never seen, at least not since the days of the gold rush, when all sorts of excess had bled in and out of the country: five tiers, alternating layers of pink and white glacé royal frosting, princess white cake inside and the plastic figurine of a veiled bride on top standing arm-in-arm with a bearded trapper in a plaid shirt. Pamela's mother arrived by bush plane, two hops and a jump out of the Fairbanks airport, no weather to speak of, her smile uncrimped and blazing like a second sun on everybody in town, even the bush crazies and the Indians. And Pamela herself, established with Pris in the back room of Richard Schrader's cabin to get into her makeup and the white satin gown trimmed with Brussels lace her mother had worn on a similarly momentous occasion two weeks after the Japanese let loose on Pearl Harbor, couldn't seem to stop smiling either and didn't want to. “Give me a drag on that,” she said, fixed before the mirror and gesturing at the mirror image of the pale white tube of a Lark that jutted from her sister's lower lip.
“What?” Pris said, feathering her hair with a tortoiseshell comb, both her arms lifted and bare.
“A drag. Your cigarette.”
“You? But you don't smoke.”
She was smiling past herself, her eyes in the mirror fastening on her sister's, and it was like being ten years old all over again. “Today I do. Today I'm going to do everything.”
And then they were gathering in the communal yard that wedded Richard's cabin to Sess's shack, most of the errant junk-the worn-out tires, rusted machine parts, discarded antlers, crates, fuel drums and liquor bottles, fishnets, tubs, traps, derelict Ski-Doos and staved-in boats-having been hauled around the far side of the buildings, out of sight for the time being. Sess was in a herringbone jacket he'd borrowed for the occasion and a tie so thin it was like a strip of ribbon, and the white of his shirt could have been whiter and the sleeves of the jacket longer, but this was no fashion show and the photographers from _Vogue__ seemed to have stayed home on what was turning out to be a fine, sunshiny afternoon. The bride and her sister had shared the better part of a pint of crème de menthe as well as half a dozen Larks, and Pamela was feeling no pain as she picked her way down the weather-blasted steps at the back of Richard Schrader's cabin and into the void left by her peripatetic father.
Since there was nobody to give the bride away, Sess had asked Tim Yule, the oldest man in town, to serve in that capacity, and now Tim looped his arm through hers and they started across the yard to the strains of “Here Comes the Bride” as rendered on Skid Denton's harmonica. Tinny, wheezy, flat, the music insinuated itself into the texture of the day, riding the refrigerated breeze coming up off the river, orchestrating the rhythm of the gently rocking trees. Tim smelled of bourbon and aftershave, and his boots shone with gobs of wet black polish. Stooped and white-haired, with a dripping nose and cheeks aflame with drink, he led her at a pace so stately it was practically a crawl. There was a murmur from the crowd. All her senses were alive. She didn't feel faint or nervous or sad, but just eager-eager and vigorous, ready to get on with the rest of her life. She'd waited twenty-seven years and there was no going back now.