They were on their way to Boynton and thence to Fairbanks in Richard Schrader's truck, if Richard Schrader's truck was available, and he had no doubt it would be, unless maybe the rear end had fallen out of it, which, come to think of it, it was threatening to do last time he'd driven the thing. Pamela had wanted a break for a few days, and so had he, bright lights, big city, one more dose before winter set in. They were both of them hankering to spend a little of the money that had come their way in the form of much-handled bills wrinkled up in plain envelopes or stuffed inside wedding cards, and there were things they needed, obviously, to fill up the new room of the cabin and top off their store of dried beans, rice, tea, coffee, cigarettes, pasta and the like. And toothpaste, never forget toothpaste. He'd spent one whole winter brushing his teeth with his forefinger and another using a mixture of baking soda and salt that ate the bristles out of the brush. Soon the river would be impassable, and then they'd have to wait till freeze-up to come downriver with the dogs, and their destination would have to be Boynton, unless they wanted to mortgage the farm and fly to a place where the sun was more than just a rumor.
So here they were, out on the river. With cold hands. But there would be warmth in spades at the Nougat and the Three Pup, and by the time they hit the Fairbanks Road the sun would be well up and the temperature peaking in the forties or maybe even fifties. A wedge of noisy scoters shot past overhead, moving south, intelligent birds, get out while the going is good. His paddle shifted ice. “How you doing up there, Pamela?” he asked. “Hands cold?”
She looked over her shoulder, smiling wide, the dimple bored into her near cheek and those neat white teeth and little girl's gums on display. “Super,” she said, in answer to the first question. And, “A little, I guess,” in answer to the second.
He loved her. Loved her more than anything he could ever conceive of. “Hang in there,” he said, proud of her toughness, glowing with it. “When we get to the Three Pup,” he said, digging at the paddle, “the first shot's on me.”
“Big spender,” she said, and her laugh trailed out over the river, hit the bank and came rebounding back again.
They'd both removed their sweaters and their hands were fully recharged by the time the big sweeping bend that gave onto Boynton came into view. It had warmed more than he'd expected-into the sixties, he guessed-and with both shores lit with fall color the last few miles were nothing but pleasure. His eyes were roving ahead-always roving, a hunter's eyes-when something moving in the shallows at the head of Last Chance Creek caught his attention. He held the paddle down on the last stroke and angled them in on a line for the creek, puzzled, because this was no moose or bear or congress of beaver, no half-submerged sweeper bobbing in the current and no boat either-it was something unexpected, out of place, one of those aberrations of nature that made life so damned interesting out here in the wastelands, because just when you thought you'd seen it all- “Who is that out there wading in the creek?” Pamela said, and her eyes were keener than his, how about that? And then it-they-came into focus for him. He saw the two figures grow together and then separate like shards of glass in a kaleidoscope, the canoe slicing closer now, the two of them bending to the water and coming back up again, standard-issue hip waders, glossy shirts, the flash of light from the linked silver band that looped the crown of a flat-brimmed hat. He was dumbfounded, absolutely dumbfounded. There were two black men-two Negroes, _hippie__ Negroes-out in the sun-spangled wash of Last Chance Creek, panning for gold.
“Hello,” he called as the canoe drifted up on them, “how you doing?”
Neither man said a word. They gave him looks, though, fixed dark eyes bristling with distrust and hostility. The current surged at their thighs, at the sagging skin of their waders. They regarded the canoe for a long solemn moment, as if it had appeared there spontaneously as some sort of compound of the water and air, and they looked first to Pamela, and then Sess, before turning back to their work, rinsing scoop after scoop of sand in the dull gleam of their pans till all the false clinging grains of silica were washed free.
“Showing any color?” Sess asked, because he had to say something.
The smaller one looked up out of a face like a tobacco pouch worn smooth with secret indulgence. His voice was soft, a whisper. “Naw, ain't nothin' here, isn't that right, Franklin?”
The other one glanced up now, one wild eye and a look that invited nothing. “Naw,” he seconded, “nothin'.”
Then the first one: “Place isn't worth shit. Right, Franklin?”
“Right.”
Sess said he guessed he'd be seeing them later, then, and Pamela said good luck, and they both dug at their paddles, eager to work their way out of earshot and run this episode through the grinder. They'd gone three or four hundred yards, when Pamela lifted her paddle on the glide and turned her head to him. “What was that all about?”
“Beats me,” he said. “But they wouldn't find half an ounce of gold in that creek if they panned it for a hundred years.”
“They sure don't act that way. They act like those wild hairs in _The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,__ like Humphrey Bogart and I don't who-”
“Walter Huston,” he said.
“Right, Walter Huston.”
The canoe drifted. The sun cut diamonds out of the water. “They were black men, Pamela. Negroes. Where in god's name do you find Negroes up here?”
Boynton had come into view now and she arched her back and dipped her paddle. “Jesus, Sess,” she said, throwing the words over her shoulder, “black men, red men, Chinese, what difference does it make? You sound like you've never seen a black man before.”
He was going to say, “I haven't,” but just then a new feature, as strange in its way as the two figures in the creek, leapt out of the shoreline at him in an explosion of color. It wasn't a house exactly, more like a Quonset hut, wedged in between Richard Schrader's weathered gray clapboard box and the shack, and the presence of it there stymied him a minute, but then he knew what it was and knew the answer to his question all in a single flash of intuition: Where do you find Negroes up here? In a hippie bus, that's where.
If he expected warmth and conviviality at the Three Pup, he was mistaken. Lynette was laying for him, and so was Skid Denton. The minute he ushered Pamela in the door, Lynette backed away from the bar and said, “Whoa, here he is, the hippie king himself. Or should I say, hippie landlord?”
Skid Denton was welded to his seat at the end of the bar, as usual, a plate of home fries at his elbow and a glass of beer sizzling in his hand. He leaned forward from the waist to put in his two cents: “It's a bonfire every night and that hippie music never stops. I hear they're screwing themselves raw upriver, screwing everything but the dog, and smoking drugs all day long. They really get a cabin built?”
“That one with the bones in his hair,” Lynette said.