T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

The first woman went for seventy-five dollars. She was about forty or so, and she looked like a nurse or dental technician, somebody who really knew her way around a bedpan or saliva sucker. The rest of us stood around and watched while three men exercised their index fingers and the auctioneer (who else but Peter?) went back and forth between them with all sorts of comic asides until they’d reached their limit. “Going once, going twice,” he chimed, milking the moment for all it was worth, “sold to the man in the red hat.” I watched the guy, nobody I knew, an Anchorage type, as he mounted the three steps to the stage they’d set up by the sandpit, and I felt something stir inside me when this dental technician of forty smiled like all the world was melting and gave him a kiss right out of the last scene of a movie and the two of them went off hand in hand. My heart was hammering like a broken piston. I couldn’t see Bud in the crowd, but I knew what his intentions were, and as I said, a hundred twenty-five was my limit. There was no way I was going past that, no matter what.

Jordy came up ninth. Two or three of the women that preceded her were really something to look at, secretaries probably or cocktail waitresses, but Jordy easily outclassed them. It wasn’t only that she was educated, it was the way she held herself, the way she stepped up to the platform with a private little smile and let those unquenchable eyes roam over the crowd till they settled on me. I stood a head taller than anyone else there, so I guess it wasn’t so hard to pick me out. I gave her a little wave, and then immediately regretted it because I’d tipped my hand.

The first bid was a hundred dollars from some clown in a lumberjack shirt who looked as if he’d just been dragged out from under a bush somewhere. I swear there was lint in his hair. Or worse. Peter had said, “Who’ll start us off here, do I hear an opening bid?” and this guy stuck up his hand and said, “A hundred,” just like that. I was stunned. Bud I was prepared for, but this was something else altogether. What was this guy thinking? A lumberjack shirt and he was bidding on Jordy? It was all I could do to keep myself from striding through the crowd and jerking the guy out of his boots like some weed along the roadside, but then another hand popped up just in front of me, and this guy must have been sixty if he was a day, the back of his neck all rutted and seamed and piss-yellow hairs growing out of his ears, and he spoke up just as casually as if he was ordering a drink at the bar: “One twenty.” I was in a panic, beset on all sides, and I felt my tongue thickening in my throat as I threw up my arm. “One—” I gasped. “One twenty-five!”

Then it was Bud’s turn. I heard him before I saw him slouching there in the second row, right up near the stage. He didn’t even bother raising his hand. “One fifty,” he said, and right away the old bird in front of me croaked out, “One seventy-five.” I was in a sweat, wringing my hands till I thought the left would crush the right and vice versa, the sport coat digging into me like a hair-shirt, like a straitjacket, too small under the arms and across the shoulders. One twenty-five was my limit, absolutely and unconditionally, and even then I’d be straining to pay for the date itself, but I felt my arm jerking up as if it was attached to a wire. “One seventy-six!” I shouted, and everybody in the room turned around to stare at me.

I heard a laugh from the front, a dirty sniggering little stab of a laugh that shot hot lava through my veins, Bud’s laugh, Bud’s mocking hateful naysaying laugh, and then Bud’s voice crashed through the wall of wonder surrounding my bid and pronounced my doom. “Two hundred and fifty dollars,” he said, and I stood there stupefied as Peter called out, “Going once, going twice,” and slammed down the gavel.

I don’t remember what happened next, but I turned away before Bud could shuffle up to the stage and take Jordy in his arms and receive the public kiss that was meant for me, turned away, and staggered toward the bar like a gutshot deer. I try to control my temper, I really do — I know it’s a failing of mine — but I guess I must have gotten a little rough with these two L. L. Bean types that were blocking my access to the scotch. Nothing outrageous, nothing more than letting them know in no uncertain terms that they were in my path and that if they liked the way their arms still fit in their sockets, they’d dance on out of there like the sugarplum fairy and her court, but still, I regretted it. Nothing else that night rings too clear, not after Jordy went to Bud for the sake of mere money, but I kept thinking, over and over, as if a splinter was implanted in my brain, How in Christ’s name did that unemployed son of a bitch come up with two hundred and fifty bucks?

—

I rang Jordy’s room first thing in the morning (yes, there was that, at least: she’d given me her room number too, but now I wondered if she wasn’t just playing mind games). There was no answer, and that told me something I didn’t want to know. I inquired at the desk and the clerk said she’d checked out the night before, and I must have had a look on my face because he volunteered that he didn’t know where she’d gone. It was then that the invisible woman from the cocktail party materialized out of nowhere, visible suddenly in a puke-green running suit, with greasy hair and a face all pitted and naked without a hint of makeup. “You looking for Jordy?” she said, and maybe she recognized me.

The drumming in my chest suddenly slowed. I felt ashamed of myself. Felt awkward and out of place, my head windy and cavernous from all that sorrowful scotch. “Yes,” I admitted.

She took pity on me then and told me the truth. “She went to some little town with that guy from the auction last night. Said she’d be back for the plane Monday.”

Ten minutes later I was in my Chevy half-ton, tooling up the highway for Fairbanks and the gravel road to Boynton. I felt an urgency bordering on the manic and my foot was like a cement block on the accelerator, because once Bud got to Boynton I knew what he was going to do. He’d ditch the car, which I wouldn’t doubt he’d borrowed without the legitimate owner’s consent, whoever that might be, and then he’d load up his canoe with supplies and Jordy and run down the river for his trespasser’s cabin. And if that happened, Jordy wouldn’t be making any plane. Not on Monday. Maybe not ever.

I tried to think about Jordy and how I was going to rescue her from all that and how grateful she’d be once she realized what kind of person she was dealing with in Bud and what his designs were, but every time I summoned her face, Bud’s rose up out of some dark hole in my consciousness to blot it out. I saw him sitting at the bar that night he lost his feet, sitting there drinking steadily though I’d eighty-sixed him three times over the course of the past year and three times relented. He was on a tear, drinking with Chiz Peltz and this Indian I’d never laid eyes on before who claimed to be a full-blooded Flathead from Montana. It was January, a few days after New Year’s, and it was maybe two o’clock in the afternoon and dark beyond the windows. I was drinking too — tending bar, but helping myself to the scotch — because it was one of those days when time has no meaning and your life drags like it has brakes on it. There were maybe eight other people in the place: Ronnie Perrault and his wife, Louise, Roy Treadwell, who services snow machines and sells cordwood, Richie Oliver and some others — I don’t know where J.J. was that day, playing solitaire in his cabin, I guess, staring at the walls, who knows?

Anyway, Bud was on his tear and he started using language I don’t tolerate in the bar, not anytime, and especially not when ladies are present, and I told him to can it and things got nasty. The upshot was that I had to pin the Indian to the back wall by his throat and rip Bud’s parka half off him before I convinced the three of them to finish up their drinking over at The Nougat, which is where they went, looking ugly. Clarence Ford put up with them till around seven or so, and then he kicked them out and barred the door and they sat in Chiz Peltz’s car with the engine running and the heater on full, passing a bottle back and forth till I don’t know what hour. Of course, the car eventually ran out of gas with the three of them passed out like zombies and the overnight temperature went down to something like minus sixty, and as I said, Chiz didn’t make it, and how he wound up outside my place I’ll never know. We helicoptered Bud to the hospital in Fairbanks, but they couldn’t save his feet. The Indian — I’ve never seen him since — just seemed to shake it off with the aid of a dozen cups of coffee laced with free bourbon at The Nougat.