T. Boyle: T.C. Boyle Stories II: Volume II

Bud never forgave me or Clarence or anybody else in town. He was a sorehead and griper of the first degree, the sort of person who blames all his miseries on everybody but himself, and now he had Jordy, this sweet dreamy English teacher who probably thought Alaska was all Northern Exposure and charmingly eccentric people saying witty things to each other. I knew Bud. I knew how he would have portrayed that ratty illegal tumbledown cabin to her and how he would have told her it was just a hop, skip and jump down the river and not the twelve miles it actually was — and what was she going to do when she found out? Catch a cab?

These were my thoughts as I passed through Fairbanks, headed southeast on the Alaska Highway, and finally turned north for Boynton. It was late in the afternoon and I still had a hundred and eighty miles of gravel road to traverse before I even hit Boynton, let alone caught up with Bud — I could only hope he’d stopped off at The Nougat for his usual fix of vodka, but the chances of that were slim because he’d want to hustle Jordy down the river before she got a good idea of who he was and what was going on. And that was another thing: I just didn’t understand her. Just didn’t. He’d put in the highest bid and she was a good sport, okay — but to drive all night with that slime? To put up with his bullshit for all those crippling hours, maybe even fall for it? Poor Jordy. Poor, poor Jordy.

I pulled into Boynton in record time, foot to the floor all the way, and skidded to a halt in the gravel lot out front of my store. There were only three other cars there, each as familiar as my own, and Ronnie Perrault, who I’d asked to help out for the weekend, was presiding over a very quiet bar (half the men in town had gone to Anchorage for the big event, thanks to Peter and his unflagging salesmanship). “Ronnie,” I said, coming into the bar to the strains of Lyle Lovett singing “Mack the Knife” like he was half dead, “you seen Bud?”

Ronnie was hunched lovingly over a cigarette and a Meyers and Coke, holding hands with Louise. He was wearing a Seattle Mariners cap backwards on his head, and his eyes were distant, the eyes of a man in rum nirvana. Howard Walpole, seventy years old and with a bad back and runny eyes, was at the far end of the bar, and Roy Treadwell and Richie Oliver were playing cards at the table by the stove. Ronnie was slow, barely flowing, like the grenadine in the back pantry that hardly gets any heat. “I thought,” he said, chewing over the words, “I thought you wasn’t going to be back till Tuesday?”

“Hey, Neddy,” Doug shouted, squeezing out the diminutive until it was like a screech, “how many you bring back?”

“Bud,” I repeated, addressing the room at large. “Anybody seen Bud?”

Well, they had to think about that. They were all pretty hazy, while the cat’s away the mice will play, but it was Howard who came out of it first. “Sure,” he said, “I seen him,” and he leaned so far forward over his drink I thought he was going to fall into it, “early this morning, in a brand-new Toyota Land Cruiser, which I don’t know where he got, and he had a woman with him.” And then, as if remembering some distant bit of trivia: “How was that flesh bazaar anyway? You married yet?”

Louise snickered, Ronnie guffawed, but I was in no mood. “Where’d he go?” I said, hopeful, always hopeful, but I already knew the answer.

Howard did something with his leg, a twitch he’d developed to ease the pain in his back. “I didn’t talk to him,” he said. “But I think he was going downriver.”

—

The river wasn’t too rough this time of year, but it was still moving at a pretty good clip, and I have to admit I’m not exactly an ace with the canoe. I’m too big for anything that small — give me a runabout with an Evinrude engine any day — and I always feel awkward and top-heavy. But there I was, moving along with the current, thinking one thing and one thing only: Jordy. It would be a bitch coming back up, but there’d be two of us paddling, and I kept focusing on how grateful she was going to be for getting her out of there, more grateful than if I’d bid a thousand dollars for her and took her out for steak three nights in a row. But then the strangest thing happened: the sky went gray and it began to snow.

It just doesn’t snow that early in the year, not ever, or hardly ever. But there it was. The wind came up the channel of the river and threw these dry little pellets of ice in my face and I realized how stupid I’d been. I was already a couple miles downriver from town, and though I had a light parka and mittens with me, a chunk of cheese, loaf of bread, couple Cokes, that sort of thing, I really hadn’t planned on any weather. It was a surprise, a real surprise. Of course, at that point I was sure it was only a squall, something to whiten the ground for a day and then melt off, but I still felt stupid out there on the river without any real protection, and I began to wonder how Jordy would see it, the way she was worried about all the names for snow and how sick at heart she must have been just about then with Bud’s shithole of a cabin and no escape and the snow coming down like a life sentence, and I leaned into the paddle.

It was after dark when I came round the bend and saw the lights of the cabin off through the scrim of snow. I was wearing my parka and mittens now, and I must have looked like a snowman propped up in the white envelope of the canoe and I could feel the ice forming in my beard where the breath froze coming out of my nostrils. I smelled woodsmoke and watched the soft tumbling sky. Was I angry? Not really. Not yet. I’d hardly thought about what I was doing up to this point — it all just seemed so obvious. The son of a bitch had gotten her, whether it was under false pretenses or not, and Jordy, sweet Jordy with Emily Brontë tucked under her arm, couldn’t have imagined in her wildest dreams what she was getting into. No one would have blamed me. For all intents and purposes, Bud had abducted her. He had.

Still, when I actually got there, when I could smell the smoke and see the lamps burning, I felt shy suddenly. I couldn’t just burst in and announce that I’d come to rescue her, could I? And I could hardly pretend I just happened to be in the neighborhood… plus, that was Bud in there, and he was as purely nasty as a rattlesnake with a hand clamped round the back of its head. There was no way he was going to like this, no matter how you looked at it.

So what I did was pull the canoe up on the bank about a hundred yards from the cabin, the scrape of the gravel masked by the snow, and creep up on the place, as stealthy as a big man can be — I didn’t want to alert Bud’s dog and blow the whole thing. But that was just it, I realized, tiptoeing through the snow like an ice statue come to life — what thing would I blow? I didn’t have a plan. Not even a clue.

In the end, I did the obvious: snuck up to the window and peered in. I couldn’t see much at first, the window all smeared with grime, but I gingerly rubbed the pane with the wet heel of my mitten, and things came into focus. The stove in the corner was going, a mouth of flame with the door flung open wide for the fireplace effect. Next to the stove was a table with a bottle of wine on it and two glasses, one of them half full, and I saw the dog then — a malamute-looking thing — asleep underneath it. There was some homemade furniture — a sort of couch with an old single mattress thrown over it, a couple of crude chairs of bent aspen with the bark still on it. Four or five white plastic buckets of water were lined up against the wall, which was festooned with the usual backcountry junk: snowshoes, traps, hides, the mangy stuffed head of a caribou Bud must have picked up at a fire sale someplace. But I didn’t see Bud. Or Jordy. And then I realized they must be in the back room — the bedroom — and that made me feel strange, choked up in the pit of my throat as if somebody was trying to strangle me.