Sess gave Pamela a glance. She'd stiffened up like some neophyte anthropologist set down amongst the wrong tribe-headhunters when she'd been expecting basket-weavers-and she wasn't giving them anything, not even a half a smile. And Lucius, Lucius wasn't giving in either-he just backed himself up against Sess's legs while the two yellow dogs pawed the dirt and poked their snouts at him. People were coming down off the bus now, a whole weird Halloween procession in mismatching colors, bells, beads, headbands, pants so wide you couldn't see their feet and hair like a river so you couldn't tell the men from the-oh, but you could, unless you were blind, and he guessed they must have all gone ahead and burned their brassieres.
Sess took hold of the nephew's hand for the second time, but this time on his own initiative, and of course he was half-lit, drinking all day and full of the hellfire exuberance of dunking Joe Bosky's car for him, and so he worked up a smile and introduced himself. “Sess Harder,” he heard himself say, and wasn't this a riot, wasn't it? “And this is my wife, Pamela. And my new dog, Lucius.” To this point he'd just answered with a grunt or a nod to the questions thrown at him, but he felt expansive suddenly and he told them that the kings were running and the berries ripening and that he'd been with Roy Sender the day he left the country. Helped him move, in fact.
“Really? Like no shit? You knew my uncle?”
He didn't tell him that Roy Sender was a father to him when he had no father of his own left breathing on this planet or that Roy Sender had taught him everything he knew or that Roy Sender was no hippie and never could be because he believed in making it on his own, in his own way, no matter how poor the odds, and that he was the kind of man who'd lie down and rot in his own skin before he'd take a government handout. He didn't tell him about the solace of the Thirtymile, the clarity of the air, the eternal breathless silence of forty below and the snow spread like a strangler's hand across the throat of the river. All he said was, “Yeah,” and Pamela, silent to this point, said, “Washo Unified? You're some kind of school group, is that what it is?”
A woman had got off the bus, dark hair in pigtails, a sharp decisive face, eyes that took you in and spat you back out again. She was thirty, thirty at least, wearing a faded denim shirt and some sort of improvised leggings that weren't exactly pants and weren't exactly a skirt either. Her feet were bare. And dirty. “We're a family,” she said, coming right up to Pamela and holding out both her hands. “Just a family, that's all.”
Pamela-and this made him smile because she was so good-natured and sweet, not a malicious bone in her body-took the woman's hands in her own a moment and held them till etiquette dictated she let go.
“See that man over there?” the woman said, and they all turned their heads to where a skinny shirtless dark-skinned man with a full oily patriarch's beard stood on the bank of the river skipping stones. “That's my husband. And over there”-she indicated a pair of half-naked children bobbing and weaving along the water's edge in two matching squalls of mosquitoes-“those are my kids. And these others, everybody else here? These are my brothers and sisters.”
The nephew could barely keep still during all this, jerking his head back and forth and doing a little dance in his sandaled feet. “Listen,” he said, “I don't know what your trip is or where you're going to camp tonight or like any of that, but what I mean is a friend of Uncle Roy's is a friend of mine, and you people are welcome, I mean more than welcome, to ride into town with us, and let me _extend__ an invitation right now to the first annual celebratory communal feast of the Drop City North pilgrims and fellow travelers, to be prepared on the banks of the mighty Yukon this very evening while the sun shines and the birds twitter and the hip and joyful music rides right on up into the _trees.__”
Pamela said she didn't think so. “We've got things to do,” she said. “And the walk's nothing, really, just a couple of miles.”
It was then that one of the hippie men, a guy in a bandanna with what looked to be blood on his shirt, handed Sess a wineskin and Sess threw back his head and took a long arcing swallow before passing it to Pamela. He looked round him. All the hippies were grinning. The nephew looked as if he'd been dipped in cream, the wildflowers jerked at their leashes, the river sang. Joe Bosky's car was flotsam now-or was it jetsam? Pamela's lips shone with sweet wine.
“Sure,” Sess said. “Sure, we'll take a ride with you.”
The Three Pup featured the usual human backdrop-Skid Denton mumbling French poetry into a shot glass, Lynette propped behind the bar with her arms locked across her breasts and no key in sight, Richie Oliver and his consolation prize drinking themselves into another dimension and grinding beer nuts between their teeth in a slow sure cud-like way. Iron Steve was bent over the pool table with a heavyset, sharp-beaked man who must have been a tourist because Sess didn't recognize him, and Tim Yule, the tip of his nose still bright with a dab of fresh mucus and the paper carnation he'd worn at the wedding still tucked into his button hole, stood there beside them, clinging to his cue stick as if it were bolted to the floor. The place smelled the way it always did, like an old boot stuffed with ground beef, fried onions and stove ash and left out in the sun to fester for a couple of days. The usual drone of mid-Appalachian self-pity spewed out of the jukebox and the usual embattled mosquitoes hung in the air.
Sess blew through the door like a hurricane, all clatter and gusto, and he had Pamela by one hand and the hippie wineskin by the other, feeling dense and lighter than air at the same time, and so what if the big greasy sack of a nephew was right on his heels and all the rest of them too? They were people, weren't they, just like anybody else? Dirtier, maybe. Lazier. They smoked drugs and screwed like dogs. But the world was changing-men had hair like women, women wore pants like men and let their tits hang loose, and who was going to argue with that? Wake up, Boynton, that was what he was thinking, wake up and join the modern world. But he wasn't really thinking too clearly and Pamela would never nag-one beer, that was all, one beer and they'd stay in the shack tonight and go upriver first thing in the morning and let Wetzel Setzler and the rest of the town fathers scratch their heads over a busload of hippies who wouldn't know a moose from a caribou. Or a hare from a parky squirrel, for that matter.
Tammy Wynette gave way to Roger Miller on the jukebox-“King of the Road,” a song Sess hated so utterly and intensely it made him want to punch things every time it came on and it came on perpetually-and in the brief hissing caesura between records everybody in the room, even Tim Yule, turned to the door. In came the nephew, roaring, and then the one with the blood on his shirt and the little blonde and then a bleached-out monster in a greasy pair of overalls and a whole spangled chittering parade that filled the room before Roger Miller could limp from one mind-numbing verse to the next. “Drinks for everybody in the house!” the nephew boomed, laying a bill on the bar. “The first round's on Roy Sender-the _legendary__ Roy Sender! Anybody here know Roy Sender?”
Nobody said a word. Nobody moved. They all concentrated on Roger Miller as if they were at Carnegie Hall listening to Oistrakh. Tim Yule cleared his throat. “These people friends of yours, Sess?”
In answer, Sess crossed the room to the jukebox and gave it a kick that sent the needle skidding across the record with a long protracted hiss of static. Then he dug out a quarter, inserted it, and hit B-9, “Mystic Eyes,” three times running. Lynette, who'd seen everything, or at least pretended she had, began cracking beers and lining them up on the bar, and by the time Van Morrison came in after the mouth harp with his black-hearted vocal everybody was talking at once.