Norm handed his plate to the waitress and people began to move reluctantly from the counter, the tables, the oversubscribed rest room in back. “Drop City North, man,” he said, spreading his arms to address the room at large, which included an Indian woman of indeterminate age frozen behind a paperback book in the far corner and two red-eared locals hunkered over coffee mugs and staring fixedly at the wall behind the counter as if the secrets of the universe were written there in infinitesimally small letters. “Land of the Midnight Sun!” From where he was sitting with Star, Marco felt detached from the whole scene. There was Norm, the reluctant guru, waving his arms in exhortation, pale and flaccid Norm who never wanted to lead anybody, at the end of his tether in a greasy spoon diner in a place that made nowhere sound like a legitimate destination. Marco felt embarrassed for him, embarrassed for them all, and the flare of optimism that had lit him up at Northway Junction was just a cinder now. This was crazy, he was thinking, the whole quixotic business. If they lasted a month it would be a miracle.
Outside on the street he shared a cigarette with Star, everybody milling around as if this was what they'd come for, to squat in the sun on the dirty sidewalks of a flat-topped frontier town that managed to look both pre- and postindustrial at the same time, sagging log cabins giving way to Quonset huts and abused brick and the rusted-out prefab warehouses that were elbowing their way across the flats like wounded soldiers. Pan and Lydia sat perched on the hood of the Studebaker, the same Top 40 hits you could have heard in Tuscaloosa or Sioux City whining out of the radio in thin threads of recognition, while Verbie and her sister fought over something in a hissing whisper. People kept trooping in and out of the bathroom at the rear of the diner, going back for toothpicks, breath mints, gum-anything to delay getting back on the bus-and then Norm just took Premstar by the hand and mounted the worn steel steps and everybody followed suit. He did a quick head count, the engine turned over with a grating blast of spent diesel, and the bus jerked away from the curb in a black pall of exhaust.
They cranked through the bleak downtown streets, across the Chena River and out the Steese Highway, replete with overpriced diner food, with grease and sugar and phosphoric acid slithering through their veins like slow death. Cigarettes circulated from hand to hand, the odd joint, a bota bag of wine. Maya and Merry blew kisses and flashed the peace sign to the slumped Indians and stave-eyed drunks who seemed to be the only inhabitants of the place, pavement gave way to potholes and potholes to dirt, and then they were folded up in the country again, the world gone green on them and the final stretch of road lapping at the wheels like a gentle brown sea.
Up front, behind the wheel, Norm came back to life. It was amazing. One minute he was dead and buried and the next he couldn't stop bobbing his head, couldn't stop talking, and Marco wondered about that, about how much of the holy and rejuvenating pharmacopoeia Drop City had brought along in their private and communal stashes-ounces, pounds, bales? Norm drummed at the wheel, rotated his shoulders, tapped his feet. He was a tour guide now, leaning into the windshield and crowing out the names of every creek and culvert they passed, lecturing anybody within earshot on the history, geology and botany of the sub-Yukon and the lore of the skin-hunters and prospectors, or what passed for it. “See that?” he said, pointing to an expanse of bleached-out scrub crowded with the thin dark slashes of spruce trees tipped and scattered as if they'd been bulldozed.
Marco was tasting wine in the back of his throat. He passed the bota bag to Star and pressed his face to the window. Across from them, Premstar, her hair lank and unwashed, had a seat to herself. She was wearing shorts and her legs were tented on the cracked vinyl seat so you could see the crease between them, her knees knocking rhythmically, her bare ankles scalloped and white. She was reading a magazine with the picture of a glossy woman on the cover. Norm might as well have been talking to himself.
“See the way the trees are leaning all over the place-see those two right there, like crossed swords? That's what they call the drunken forest, as if the trees were all whacked out of their minds and couldn't stand up straight.” He swung round in the seat, squeezing the words out of the corner of his mouth. “Marco, you listening?”
Star answered for him. “We're listening,” she said. “What else have we got to listen to?”
“Premstar?”
Premstar didn't look up from the magazine.
Norm's head swung back round and he addressed his words to the windshield as the engine churned and the bus heaved over the ruts. “Permafrost, that's what does that. Two feet down it's like rock, frozen since the Ice Age, _before__ the Ice Age, like back in the time of the woolly mammoths and all that. Saber-toothed tigers. The dire wolf. Remember those mammoths, Prem, what a bitch they used to be? _Premstar.__ I'm talking to you. I said you remember what a bitch it used to be saddling up those mammoths?”
Her voice leaked out from behind the magazine, barely a whisper: “Yes, _Norm.__ A real bitch.”
“So what happens is the trees can't put down their roots more than maybe twenty-four inches or whatever and then the wind comes along and gives them a shove. And don't think there's anything wrong with them-it's not that at all. They're alive and thriving. It's just that they're never going to grow straight. Or much.”
Permafrost. The drunken forest. Now here was something, the kind of revelation that made all this concrete, that made these scrubby hills and swamps and miniature forests seem exotic, and they _were__ exotic, Marco kept reminding himself, because this was Alaska, appearances to the contrary. He'd begun to have his doubts. Where were the glaciers, the waterfalls, the snow-capped mountains and untrammeled forests? Not here, not in the interior, anyway. This looked more like Ohio, like Michigan or Wisconsin or a hundred other places. He strained his eyes looking for eagles, looking for wolves, but there was nothing out there but scrub and more scrub.
Norm was onto something else now, his mind peeling back memories layer by layer-he'd expected a wolf behind every bush the first time he'd come up here, salmon hanging from the trees, gold dust in his coffee grains-but Marco wasn't listening. He wasn't feeling all that steady. Everybody on the bus had been trading round the same cold for a week, one of the hazards of communal living, especially when you were cooped up like this, and now he had it too. His head ached. He was sniffling. And the wine scoured the back of his throat and sat hard on his stomach, a mistake, and he knew it was a mistake even before he'd passed the bag to Star and she'd passed it to Premstar and Premstar took a delicate white-throated sip and passed it to Mendocino Bill. The bus lurched, righted itself, lurched again, and he looked down at Star's hand entwined in his own as if he didn't know what it was. The next moment he was making his way down the aisle to the bathroom.
Though the sun was high and it couldn't have been past seven or so, most people were asleep, Reba with her head back and snoring, Jiminy and Merry camped under one of the faded Navajo blankets that had hung in the back room at Drop City in a time that seemed so distant now he could barely remember it. Mendocino Bill and Deuce were playing chess on a magnetic board, the dogs were curled up beneath the seats and Che and Sunshine, snot glistening on their upper lips, stared numbly up the aisle as if they were watching a home movie, of which Marco, suddenly sick to his stomach, was the star. The bus lurched again and he staggered against one of the seats, then he was through the kitchen and into the rear of the bus, rattling at the door of the makeshift bathroom. The smell didn't help. The whole bus reeked of unwashed bodies and festering feet, of the tribe that dabbed powdered hand soap under their arms and rinsed their hair in grimy truck stop rest rooms, but the chemical toilet was something else altogether-this was where the thin gruel of the road poured out of them, brothers and sisters alike. Marco forced himself inside and flipped the latch.