The nephew was the agent of the beer, standing there with his crack-frame glasses and the color showing in his teeth, two more beers bunched between his knuckles, one of which he handed to Pamela; the other he kept to himself, giving it a good long suck till the foam flecked his beard. “You know something?” he said, pulling away from the bottle and grinning wide. “I like your taste in music.”
Sess gave him his grin back, then bent at the knee so Pamela could help him on with his pack. “Yeah, but Lynette-you've got to forgive her. She's new here. She's from Seattle. I guess she's just got a hair up her ass.”
“It was a gas,” the nephew said, rooting in his beard as if he'd lost something there. “What'd we play it-like fifty times? But listen, I was serious about the invitation-the chicks'll have something cooked up inside the hour, I guarantee it, and well, you know, it's been a long hard road and all that and we have just _got__ to get down and raise some pure celebratory hell tonight. Nothing fancy-lentil soup, rice and vegetables. And wine. Sweet red wine.” He took another pull at his beer and looked out into the backlit trees.
“You're camping out tonight?”
The nephew shrugged. His shoulders were bare under the straps of the coveralls, hairy, furred with mosquitoes. “Sure. Why not?”
“But Roy's place-” He faltered. How could he begin to convey the complexity of the arrangement, the untenanted cabin that might sleep five or six at most, the treachery of the Yukon with its load of silt that would pack your clothes and drag you down in a heartbeat should you give it a chance, the lack of basic comforts? What were all these people planning to eat? Where were they going to get their pink lipstick and face paint and their jugs of sweet wine and their uppers and their downers and their pot and all the rest of it? And did he really want neighbors, thirty and more of them set down on his river within shouting distance of his trapline?
“It's pretty far,” Pamela put in. “Three hours, at least, by canoe.”
The nephew lifted his beard and let it drop. His hand was like a big soft fluttering moth as he brought the beer to his lips. “Oh, I'm apprised, I'm apprised,” he said. “I know the place, though it's been something like-_Jesus__-twenty years? Oh, man, _twenty__ years, can you believe it?” He began to laugh to himself, the pale shoulders bunching and heaving beneath a layer of fat, and the strap of the coveralls slipped down his right shoulder to reveal a tattoo in three colors-a cartoon character, and which one was it? Disney. A cross-legged fawn with outsized eyes. An image rushed up out of Sess's childhood, his mother in a pink dress and his sister with her fist sunk deep in a box of extra-buttered popcorn: Bambi. The man had _Bambi__ tattooed on his shoulder. Sess had never seen anything like it. He'd seen anchors, daggers, death's heads, seen hearts transfixed with arrows and dripping blood, the cheap blue fading appellations of wives, sweethearts and ex-lovers, an eagle with a fish in its claws-but _Bambi?__
“I'm no greenhorn,” the nephew was saying, “and I can tell you I know at least a modicum of what I'm talking about when it comes to this country, because I lived three summers and the better part of two winters up here with my uncle when I was a kid-which is not to say I haven't got a lot to learn, man, you know? Because I do. But we got three canoes up on top of that bus”-Sess turned his head to contemplate the big yellow box on wheels and found himself staring into the boneheaded, slit-eyed faces of a pair of goats that could have been the templates for cartoon figures themselves-“and I made a deal with this bush pilot-Joe Bosky, you know him? — to ferry three loads of people and supplies upriver, including like tools and the _basics__ because all these people, all my brothers and sisters, need to like get their _heads__ together, you know what I mean? I mean, they think it's all going to be milk and honey, but I know better-”
The nephew went on for a while with his speech, and Sess and Pamela stood there as if they were in a lecture hall, except that they were swatting at mosquitoes and pulling at their beers while the shattered, tinkling music rained down on them and the skinny blonde with the pink lipstick came up and draped her arms over the nephew's back and held on as if he were a buoy in a swirl of darkening waters. “So what I was thinking,” the nephew said, in what seemed a valedictory sort of way, “was we'd just pull up someplace by the river and camp for tonight and the next couple of days maybe-”
Pull up where? Sess was going to ask, because there wasn't a square foot of property anywhere along the riverfront that wasn't already spoken for. You couldn't buy, beg or steal a lot in Boynton since the Feds started in with the Native Claims Settlement business, and if you set foot outside the town line you were on government property-and Wetzel Setzler, the local shill for the Forest Service, could get pretty squirrelly about that. Plus, a bus full of longhairs in mufti wasn't likely to provoke a warm response from whoever they chose to trespass on, and they were already tied up with Joe Bosky, the worst kind of river scum, and that was another strike against them-no matter how you sketched it, it wasn't a pretty picture.
The nephew sucked beer and grinned at him. He wore a halo of insects round the crown of thorns that was his greasy unbarbered hair and he looked so helpless he might have been newly hatched from the egg. “What do you say, brother?” he wanted to know. “You with us?”
Sess looked to Pamela. She was giving him the let's-go-home-and-pack-the-canoe look, and she was right: they had to get upriver, had to split and dry salmon if they were going to have fish come winter, had to tend the vegetables, haul wood, erect the new room and fit it out with a stove-and little tables, don't forget the little tables. Still, Sess reminded himself, this was Roy Sender's flesh and blood standing here in his sandals and beard like one of the lost prophets, and that had to mean something, if only for Roy's sake. Before he could think, and with his voice lubricated with all that beer and the sweet hippie wine that rode its own currents and seemed to settle flush in his ringing ears, Sess heard himself say, “Why don't you just camp at my place?”
PART FIVE. DROP CITY NORTH
Hey, Bungalow Bill,
What did you kill?
22
Jiminy was limping around with his arm in a dirty sling, looking as if a tree had fallen on him, but a tree hadn't fallen on him and the sling consisted of two strips of frayed cotton that used to be the sleeves of somebody's college sweatshirt, because who needed sleeves when the sun was shining twenty-four hours a day? Was it broken? No. You sure? Oh, yeah, man, yeah-I'd _know__ if it was broken. So what's the problem, then? A sprain, that's all, man. Just a sprain.
Not that Pan would accuse him of _shirking,__ what with every able-bodied cat within shouting distance taking down six thousand trees a day and Alfredo all over the place barking out orders like the ass-faced little prick of an assistant principal they'd all had to sweat in junior high, and Norm, laid-back Norm, erupting like a volcano every thirty-seven seconds. If he'd sprained his arm or shoulder or elbow or whatever it was and sported a purple bruise that was like a birthmark creeping out from under the ragged hem of his cutoff jeans, that was understandable. Especially since Ronnie had been there when it happened.
Everybody had just got done with the evening mush (brown rice with canned peas and the odd greasy chunk of Thirtymile salmon, and praise the lord for Spiracha hot sauce in the economy-sized bottle), and a bunch of people were fooling around with the aluminum boat Norm's uncle had left behind when he decamped for Seattle. (And that was strange beyond comprehension: he'd left _everything__ behind, from his boots and folded-up piss-stained old man's underwear to his pornography collection to the.30–30 Winchester lever-action rifle and Smith & Wesson pistol with the worn black leather leg holster hanging from a hook on the wall, though Norm swore he was an old man with cancer of the prostate and had no intention of coming back. Ever. He'd even left the stove all primed to go, with paper, kindling and matches ready to hand. Why would he do that? Why would he leave all this good and valuable stuff behind, including the two bowie knives that made Marco's Sears Roebuck version look like something the Boy Scouts handed out for whittling exercise? It was the way of the country, that was why-or so Norm claimed. “You leave the cabin stocked and ready to go for the next man through, not so much as a matter of courtesy, you understand, but as a matter of _survival.__ Plus, what does he need with a bowie knife in a nursing home anyway?” Okay. Yeah. Sure. Point taken.)