Marco gave back the greeting and the man came toward them, the stripped bones of his face under the long-billed cap, the awkward challenging height of him, and then he knew: it was the one from the bar, from the Three Pup, the one they called Iron Steve.
Iron Steve was in gum boots and a plaid flannel shirt and his hair was slicked tight to his head, and his every step was like a leap, as if the ground were cratered beneath his feet. “Hey, I sure hope I'm not bothering you people this late, but I was, uh, well-I was looking for Verbie. She around?”
Star said sure, she thought so, if she hadn't gone to bed yet, and there was an unspoken question tagged on to the end of it.
Iron Steve raised his right arm and the bundle came with it, stiffened feet and limp naked ears, the sleek jackets of fur-rabbits, he was holding up a string of rabbits on a twisted coil of wire, and all Marco could think of was fish, dark dangling strips of flesh strung through the gills. “I brought these for her,” Iron Steve was saying. “I thought I might surprise her. You know which tent is hers?”
Star gave Marco a look and they were both thinking the same thing, thinking dead meat for a vegetarian? And rabbits-_bunnies__-no less? But then Marco saw the beauty of the equation: Ronnie was gone, gone no more than half an hour, and here was his successor. Subtract one Pan, add one Iron Steve.
“I also brought her this,” Steve said, and he held out his palm to show them a coil of wire and a medicine bottle with what looked to be matches packed inside.
“What is it?” Star asked. It was twilight now, the sun edged down beyond the ridge, the sickle moon brightening. She stood with her legs apart, hands on her hips, and the mosquitoes meant nothing to her though they danced and swarmed and played their thin music over the backbeat of the river.
“This? Oh, this is just a little something I thought she ought to have-in case she gets lost.”
“Gets lost?” Star said.
Iron Steve pulled back his hand, ducked his head. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “everybody gets lost up here, whether it's your plane going down or your tracks getting obliterated in a whiteout or you're just out there chasing after something and you turn around and can't tell one tree from the other.”
“So what is it,” Marco said, “some kind of compass?”
“Oh, hell, no,” Steve said, grinning, and out came the hand again, the palm supinated to display the wire and the thick brown glass of the medicine bottle. “Long's you have wire, you can snare rabbits,” he explained, “and the matches, I dipped them in paraffin myself and sealed them up tight. Because if you keep your matches dry you got yourself a fire to kick back the cold and roast your rabbits-”
Star gave him a blank look. Marco couldn't help but smile.
“You know,” Steve said, “for emergencies.” He kicked a foot in the fan of gravel and studied the slow rotation of the toe of his boot as if it were a divining rod. Then he looked up, grinning still. “Up here we call it living off the land.”
25
It was the first really brisk day, August tapering off into September, high summer giving way to low fall, and Pamela was alone in the cabin, baking bread in the woodstove in the front room. The recipe was her mother's-3 cups white flour; 1 cup whole wheat flour; 3 tablespoons sugar; 1 teaspoon salt; 2 cups sourdough sponge; 2 to 3 tablespoons melted bear fat (she was using canned butter because as far as she knew the bears were all still alive and well and judiciously carrying their own fat around with them)-and she'd modified it a bit through the ten or twelve times she'd baked here on the Thirtymile, but still, if the stove was hot enough and she had the patience to let the dough rise for two hours or more, she usually got a rich heavy glistening loaf that had Sess pulling the superlatives out of his slow-grinding jaws. Outside, a sky the color of soapstone hung low over the hills. The wind was blowing down out of the northwest, tearing leaves from the trees along the river, fanning the cabbage and lashing at the stiff canes of the Brussels sprouts in the garden. Every once in a while a gust would rattle the windows.
Sess was out in the yard with Iron Steve, who'd stopped by on his way down from the hippie camp. The two of them were splitting wood (Steve as a down payment on the dinner he knew to expect), drinking beer out of Mason jars and keeping an eye on the weather. It looked like rain-or sleet-and if the wind settled there would be frost for sure. Sess had his woodpiles heaped up at the four corners of the garden, ready to generate some heat through the night, because like every tiller of the earth he wanted to extend the growing season as long as possible, and you never knew, you could have a killing frost tonight and then a week or two of Indian summer to follow. He'd grown some champion tomatoes in the greenhouse, Early Girls and Beefsteaks both, and the cherries had run riot till he had to lift a panel off and let them creep out into the world. They'd had butternut squash till it was coming out their ears, and there was plenty more of it ballooning on the vine, and pumpkins too. She'd been canning day and night, stewing beans and tomatoes and zucchini in the big pot on the stove, peas, broccoli, anything that came up out of the ground in the crazy abundance of light. Her herb garden was a jungle in itself, and the root cellar was stacked high with carrots, onions, potatoes, turnips.
She'd just put the bread in the oven when there was a tap at the door and Iron Steve shifted into the room. He was bent nearly double to avoid cracking his head on the doorframe, which he'd already managed to do twice in the course of the afternoon and too many times to count in the past. Pamela didn't know how tall he was exactly-six-six, six-seven-but he towered over everybody in Boynton like an old-growth tree, and with his long-billed cap cocked at an angle on his head he grazed the ceiling of the cabin and had to work his way through a gauntlet of lanterns, kettles, tools, spatulas and fry pans hanging from the rafters just to get to the table to sit down. Pamela had no problem with that. She liked him. He might have been tight-lipped and more than his share of odd, not yet thirty and already a proto-coot, drunk more often than he was sober, but for all the raw-boned mass of him and the hard Slavic architecture of his face, he was gentle and good at heart. Before he'd got his hat and gloves off she handed him a cup of coffee, a can of evaporated milk and the sugar bowl.
“Bakin', huh?” he said, blowing steam off the cup.
“That's right,” she said. “What else is a young housewife to do-especially on a day like this. Think it'll snow?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Frost?”
“Oh, yeah. No doubt.”
There was a pause. She laid a few more sticks on the fire-the trick was to keep a consistent temperature for the hour or so till the bread was done. “Those hippies ever get anything out of their garden?”
“Not much. Rabbits got most of it.”
“Plus they started late.”
Steve just nodded. He drank off an inch of coffee, poured half the sugar jar into the cup and then filled it back up with evaporated milk.
“They know enough to light smudge fires tonight?” She couldn't help worrying for them-for Star, especially, and Merry, she liked Merry too and wanted to see her make it through all this without suffering, or suffering more than she could bear. It was amazing-they were all so naive, so starry-eyed and simplistic, filled right up to the eyeballs with crack-brained notions about everything from the origins of the universe to the brotherhood of man and how to live the vegetarian ideal. They were like children, utterly confident and utterly ignorant-even Norm Sender, and he must have been forty years on this planet. They should have known better. All of them.