“Where you going, man?” Sky Dog wanted to know. “Trick or treating?”
It was eight miles to Boynton, walkable now on the highway of the river, and four to Drop City. Two times four equals eight, that was what he was thinking, and out in the dark, in the cold, his breath going like a steam engine, Pan turned to his right when he hit the river, heading north and east, thinking of Star. They'd be celebrating at Drop City tonight, no doubt about it-Halloween, the feast of the freaks, was in the air. Norm would do it up. If anybody would, Norm would. He heard the cold rush and snap of his footsteps as he compacted the thin layer of snow over the ice, one foot in front of the other, four miles no more than a stroll in the park and he didn't feel cold at all, not in the least.
Sess Harder had once unraveled the mystery of the distances for him, in the days when he could show his face around Sess's cabin, that is-which he no longer could since he'd burned Pamela for the five bucks, but hey, _tant pis,__ as the French say. His boots crunched snow. The wind fell away and the moon was there. What he couldn't understand was why the river was called the Thirtymile-shouldn't it have been thirty miles from Boynton then and not less than half of that? Sess had been busy, always busy, mending the gangline for his dogteam, and Pan had hung over him with a neighborly beer in one hand and a smoke in the other while the mathematics played out in Sess's deep, unhurried tones. “The distance is measured from Dawson, in the Yukon Territory,” he told him. “Originally, what happened was people floated downriver from there, and so you've got your Fortymile River south and east of Eagle and your Seventymile just north of it, and what happened, I guess, is somebody didn't want to call a river the Hundredmile-too daunting a number-so they just called this one the Thirtymile, because it's thirty miles, give or take, down from the Seventymile. Does that make sense?”
No, it didn't. It hadn't. They should have named it the Clothesline or the Dinosaur or the Punctured Pineapple, or maybe they should rename it after Jimi Hendrix's mother-sure, and he'd have to get up a petition as soon as he got back to civilization. He went on that way, a string of increasingly ridiculous names running through his head, the silence and the vastness of the river and the hills spiked with shadow and the moon, the _moon,__ gone down deep in him-Halloween, how about that? — and he'd never felt so _connected__ in his life. He bore right again at the mouth of the Thirtymile, no more concerned than he would have been turning the corner from MacDougal onto Bleecker, and when he came to Sess's cabin, to the glow of it floating against the backdrop of the trees and the smell of the woodsmoke drifting on the air like a promise, he kept on walking.
By some miracle, Sess's dogs didn't sound the alarm. If he concentrated on distinguishing one shadow from another, he could make out the line of doghouses thrust back against the ankles of the trees, but there was no movement there, no faint rustle of steel-link chain or whisper of ruffled fur, no sound at all but for the rush of the wind in his ears. The dogs were asleep, curled up tail to nose, breathing easy in the fastness of the night. They dwelled here, they belonged, and so did he, so did Pan. He kept on walking, and maybe his toes were a bit numb-his boots weren't the best-but it was nothing he hadn't experienced before, back in New York. Colder, maybe, but not by much. He could remember five and ten below when he was a kid, ice forming in a grid of overlapping crystalline stars on the inside panes, his father kicking in the driver's side door of the Studebaker because it wouldn't start no matter how he goosed it and the sweet metallic smell of the ether he sprayed down the carburetor in the vain hope it would come to life. His father. The image of him held for just the fraction of a second, then slipped away, a fading reel in the projector of his mind. He was walking. He walked the immensity. Thought nothing. The moon-the harvest moon, the Halloween moon-lit the way.
Drop City came to him first as the scent of smoke infusing the night air, then as a cluster of lights so pale and inadequate he couldn't be sure he was seeing them, not until he mounted the bank and came up the rise to where the five cabins described a crescent above the river. Four of them were roofed and lit from within, sailing high on the sea of the night, but the fifth was just a collection of notched logs, waist-high at best, and he thought of Mendocino Bill and Alfredo and their big hyped-up plans, make way and look out, here comes the city on the hill, the metropolis, Chichén Itzá and Taj Mahal all rolled into one. Lift that plank, man, push that saw. Still, he had to admit they'd got farther than he'd expected, because those were stovepipes projecting out from under the roofs, and that was real, honest, actual smoke trailing away on the wind, and where there was smoke there was fire and where there was fire there was warmth. He was right there in the yard-Ronnie, Pan, come back to say hello on a night like no other-and he hesitated.
He hadn't been near the place since the end of August, and though he'd run into a couple of the brothers and sisters at the Three Pup and the Nougat and Setzler's store, he really didn't know how people felt about the whole thing, whether he'd be welcome or not, forgive and forget and let's move on. Especially Norm. Norm he did not want to see, or Alfredo either. He was standing there in the cold of the moon, half-decided to slink away back to Woodchopper, and fuck Drop City, if they didn't want him he didn't want them, when something in the atmosphere shifted and he heard laughter, conviviality, somebody's voice raised over somebody else's and then a cascade of hoots and catcalls washing over both of them. He held his breath. Concentrated. And then he heard the music. There was music coming from the meeting hall, the thin attenuated whine of steel strings and the repetitive thump of drums. He crossed the yard, put his head down, and pushed through the door.
It wasn't what he'd expected. People were gathered there, all right, eight, ten, eleven faces staring up at him from the gloom of candlelight, but nobody was dancing or even talking, and nobody was laughing now. It was Buffalo Springfield on the stereo, Neil Young's stretched-wire voice working through “I Am a Child” in a way that made it seem like a dirge, the whole close stuffed-up pot-reeking room gone sad with it till Ronnie wanted to take hold of somebody by the arm and say, _Who died?__ Star wasn't there, Marco wasn't there, Norm either. Or Merry. But Freak was there, and Freak at least had a greeting for him, whacking the stump of his tail and inserting a cold nose into the cup of Pan's ungloved hand, and didn't anybody recognize him, didn't anybody give a shit one way or the other? “Hey, man,” he said, as faces picked themselves out of the shadows, “what's happening?”
Mendocino Bill broke the spell. He rose up off a crude bench by the stove, mountainous in a cableknit sweater his mother or his ex — old lady must have sent him, lifting his feet with the exaggerated care of a deep-sea diver wending his way between the killer octopus and the giant man-eating clam. “Holy shit,” he said, “look who it is. Hey, people,” rotating his head to take in the loft and the thermal-socked feet aggregated there like some sort of fungal excrescence, “it's Pan.”