T. Boyle: After the Plague

I was worried she might be one of those animal liberation nuts that want to protect every last rat, tick and flea, but she didn’t look bothered at all. In fact, her eyes seemed to get distant for a minute, then she bent over to dish up a healthy portion of the king crab and straightened up with a smile. “Just like the pioneers,” she said.

That was when Bud sniffed us out. He butted right in line, put a hand round Jordy’s waist and drew her to him for a kiss, full plate and all, which she had to hold out awkwardly away from her body or there would have been king crab and avocado salad all down the front of that silky black dress she was wearing. “Sorry I’m late, babe,” Bud said, and he picked up a plate and began mounding it high with cold cuts and smoked salmon.

Jordy turned to me then, and I couldn’t read her face, not at all, but of course I knew in that instant that Bud had got to her and though the chances were a hundred and seven to one against it, she was the one who’d given him her room number. I was dazed by the realization, and after I got over being dazed, I felt the anger coming up in me like the foam in a loose can of beer. “Ned,” she murmured, “do you know Bud?”

Bud gave me an ugly look, halfway between a “fuck you” and a leer of triumph. I tried to keep my cool, for Jordy’s sake. “Yeah,” was all I said.

She led us to a table in back, right near the band — one of those long banquet-type tables — and Bud and I sat down on either side of her, jockeying for position. “Bud,” she said, as soon as we were settled, “and Ned”—turning to me and then back to him again—“I’m sure you can both help me with this, and I really want to know the truth of it because it’s part and parcel of my whole romance with Alaska and now I’ve read somewhere that it isn’t true.” She had to raise her voice to be heard over the strains of “Little Deuce Coupe”—this was the Malibu Beach party, after all, replete with the pile of sand in the corner and a twenty-foot-high poster of Gidget in a bikini — and we both leaned in to hear her better. “What I want to know is, do you really have seventy-two different words for snow — in the Eskimo language, I mean?”

Bud didn’t even give me a glance, just started in with his patented line of bullshit, how he’d spent two years with the Inuit up around Point Barrow, chewing walrus hides with the old ladies and dodging polar bears, and how he felt that seventy-two was probably a low estimate. Then he fell into some dialect he must have invented on the spot, all the while giving Jordy this big moony smile that made me want to puke, till I took her elbow and she turned to me and the faux Eskimo caught like a bone in his throat. “We call it termination dust,” I said.

She lifted her eyebrows. Bud was on the other side of her, looked bored and greedy, shoveling up his food like a hyperphagic bear. It was the first moment he’d shut his mouth since he’d butted in. “It’s because of the road,” I explained. “We’re at the far end of it, a two-lane gravel road that runs north from the Alaska Highway and dead-ends in Boynton, the last place on the continent you can drive to.”

She was still waiting. The band fumbled through the end of the song and the room suddenly came alive with the buzz of a hundred conversations. Bud glanced up from his food to shoot me a look of unadulterated hate. “Go on,” she said.

I shrugged, toyed with my fork. “That’s it,” I said. “The first snow, the first good one, and it’s all over till spring, the end, it’s all she wrote. If you’re in Boynton, you’re going to stay there—”

“And if you’re not?” she asked, something satirical in her eyes as she tucked away a piece of crab with a tiny two-pronged fork.

Bud answered for me. “You’re not going to make it.”

The auction was for charity, all proceeds to be divided equally among the Fur Trappers’ Retirement Home, the AIDS Hospice and the Greater Anchorage Foodbank. I had no objection to that — I was happy to do my part — but as I said, I was afraid somebody would outbid me for a date with Jordy. Not that the date was anything more than just that — a date — but it was a chance to spend the better part of the next day with the woman of your choice, and when you only had two and a half days, that was a big chunk of it. I’d talked to J.J. and some of the others, and they were all planning to bid on this woman or that and to take them out on a fishing boat or up in a Super Cub to see the glaciers east of town or even out into the bush to look over their cabins and their prospects. Nobody talked about sex — that would demean the spirit of the thing — but it was there, under the surface, like a burning promise.

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,” hechimed, 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.