After the Plague: And Other Stories Read online

  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.

  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 urge
ncy 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.

  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 gott
en 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 crept 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.