After the Plague

Termination Dust

There were a hundred and seven of them, of all ages, shapes and sizes, from twenty-five- and thirty-year-olds in dresses that looked like they were made of Saran Wrap to a couple of big-beamed older types in pantsuits who could have been somebody’s mother — and I mean somebody grown, with a goatee beard and a job at McDonald’s. I was there to meet them when they came off the plane from Los Angeles, I and Peter Merchant, whose travel agency had arranged the whole weekend in partnership with a Beverly Hills concern, and there were a couple other guys there too, eager beavers like J. J. Hotel, and the bad element, by which I mean Bud Withers specifically, who didn’t want to cough up the hundred fifty bucks for the buffet, the Malibu Beach party and the auction afterward. They were hoping for maybe a sniff of something gratis, but I was there to act as a sort of buffer and make sure that didn’t happen.

Peter was all smiles as we came up to the first of the ladies, Susan Abrams, by her nametag, and started handing out corsages, one to a lady, and chimed out in chorus, “Welcome to Anchorage, Land of the Grizzly and the True-Hearted Man!” Well, it was pretty corny — it was Peter’s idea, not mine — and I felt a little foolish with the first few (hard-looking women, divorcées for sure, maybe even legal secretaries or lawyers into the bargain), but when I saw this little one with eyes the color of glacial melt about six deep in the line, I really began to perk up. Her nametag was done in calligraphy, hand-lettered instead of computer-generated like the rest of them, and that really tugged at me, the care that went into it, and I gave her hand a squeeze and said, “Hi, Jordy, welcome to Alaska,” when I gave her the corsage.

She seemed a little dazed, and I chalked it up to the flight and the drinks and the general party atmosphere that must certainly have prevailed on that plane, one hundred and seven single women on their way for the Labor Day weekend in a state that boasted two eligible bachelors for every woman, but that wasn’t it at all. She’d hardly had a glass of chablis, as it turned out — what I took to be confusion, lethargy, whatever, was just wonderment. As I was later to learn, she’d been drawn to the country all her life, had read and dreamed about it since she was a girl growing up in Altadena, California, within sight of the Rose Bowl. She was bookish — an English teacher, in fact — and she had a new worked-leather high-grade edition of Wuthering Heights wedged under the arm that held her suitcase and traveling bag. I guessed her to be maybe late twenties, early thirties.

“Thank you,” she said, in this whispery little voice that made me feel about thirteen years old all over again, and then she squinted those snowmelt eyes to take in my face and the spread of me (I should say I’m a big man, one of the biggest in the bush around Boynton, six-five and two-forty-two and not much of that gone yet to fat), and then she read my name off my nametag and added, in a deep-diving puff of a little floating wisp of a voice, “Ned.”

Then she was gone, and it was the next woman in line (with a face like a topographic map and the grip of a lumberjack), and then the next, and the next, and all the while I’m wondering how much Jordy’s going to go for at the auction, and if a hundred and twenty-five, which is about all I’m prepared to spend, is going to be enough.

The girls — women, ladies, whatever — rested up at their hotel for a while and did their ablutions and ironed their outfits and put on their makeup, while Peter and Susan Abrams fluttered around making sure all the little details of the evening had been worked out. I sat at the bar drinking Mexican beer to get in the mood. I’d barely finished my first when I looked up and who did I see but J.J. and Bud with maybe half a dozen local types in tow, all of them looking as lean and hungry as a winter cat. Bud ignored me and started chatting up the Anchorage boys with his eternal line of bullshit about living off the land in his cabin in the bush outside Boynton — which was absolutely the purest undiluted nonsense, as anybody who’d known him for more than half a minute could testify — but J.J. settled in beside me with a combination yodel and sigh and offered to buy me a drink, which I accepted. “Got one picked out?” he said, and he had this mocking grin on his face, as if the whole business of the Los Angeles contingent was a bad joke, though I knew it was all an act and he was as eager and sweetly optimistic as I was myself.

The image of a hundred and seven women in their underwear suddenly flashed through my mind, and then I pictured Jordy in a black brassiere and matching panties, and I blushed and ducked my head and tried on an awkward little smile. “Yeah,” I admitted.

“I’ll be damned if Mr. Confidence down there”—a gesture for Bud, who was neck-deep in guano with the weekend outdoorsmen in their L. L. Bean outfits—“doesn’t have one too. Says he’s got her room number already and told her he’d bid whatever it takes for a date with her, even if he had to dip into the family fortune.”

My laugh was a bitter, strangled thing. Bud was just out of jail, where he’d done six months on a criminal mischief charge for shooting out the windows in three cabins and the sunny side of my store on the main street — the only street — in downtown Boynton, population 170. He didn’t have a pot to piss in, except what he got from the VA or welfare or whatever it was — it was hard to say, judging from the way he seemed to confuse fact and fiction. That and the rattrap cabin he’d built on federal land along the Yukon River, and that was condemned. I didn’t even know what he’d done with his kid after Linda left him, and I didn’t want to guess. “How’d he even get here?” I said.

J.J. was a little man with a bald pate and a full snow-white beard, a widower and a musician who cooked as mean a moose tritip with garlic and white gravy as any man who’d come into the country in the past ten years. He shrugged, set his beer mug down on the bar. “Same as you and me.”

I was incredulous. “You mean he drove? Where’d he get the car?”

“All I know’s he told me last week he had this buddy was going to lend him a brand-new Toyota Land Cruiser for the weekend and that furthermore, he was planning on going home to Boynton with the second Mrs. Withers, even if he did have to break down and shell out the one fifty for the party and all. It’s an investment, he says, as if any woman’d be crazy enough to go anyplace with him, let alone a cabin out in the hind end of nowhere.”

I guess I was probably stultified with amazement at this point, and I couldn’t really manage a response. I was just looking over the top of my beer at the back of Bud’s head and his elbow resting on the bar and then the necks of his boots as if I could catch a glimpse of the plastic feet he’s got stuffed in there. I’d seen them once, those feet, when he first got back from the hospital and he came round the store for a pint of something, already half drunk and wearing a pair of shorts under his coat though it was minus thirty out. “Hey, Ned,” he said to me in this really nasty, accusatory voice, “you see what you and the rest of them done to me?” and he flipped open the coat to show his ankles and the straps and the plastic feet that were exactly like the pink molded feet of a mannequin in a department store window.

I was worried. I didn’t want to let on to J.J., but I knew Bud, I knew how smooth he was — especially if you weren’t forewarned — and I knew women found him attractive. I kept thinking, What if it’s Jordy he’s after? but then I told myself the chances were pretty remote, what with a hundred and seven eager women to choose from, and even if it was — even if it was—there were still a hundred and six others and one of them had to be for me.

Statistics:

There were thirty-two women out of a population of 170 in Boynton, all of them married and all of them invisible, even when they were sitting around the bar I run in the back room of the store. Average winter temperature was minus twelve, and there was a period of nearly two months when we hardly saw the sun. Add to that the fact that seven out of ten adults in Alaska have a drinking problem, and you can imagine what life was like on the bad days.

I was no exception to the rule. The winter was long, the nights were lonely, and booze was a way to take the edge off the loneliness and the boredom that just slowed you down and slowed you down till you felt like you were barely alive. I was no drunk, don’t get me wrong — nothing like Bud Withers, not even close — and I tried to keep a check on myself, going without even so much as a whiff of the stuff every other day at least and trying my best to keep a hopeful outlook. Which is why I left the bar after two beers to go back to Peter’s place and douse myself with aftershave, solidify the hair round my bald spot with a blast of hair spray and slip into the sport coat I’d last worn at Chiz Peltz’s funeral (he froze to death the same night Bud lost his feet, and I was the one who had to pry him away from the back door of the barroom in the morning; he was like a bronze statue, huddled over the bottle with his parka pulled up over his head, and that was how we had to bury him, bottle and all). Then I made my way back through the roaring streets to the hotel and the ballroom that could have contained all of Boynton and everybody in it, feeling like an overawed freshman pressed up against the wall at the weekly social. But I wasn’t a freshman anymore, and this was no social. I was thirty-four years old and I was tired of living like a monk. I needed someone to talk to — a companion, a helpmeet, a wife — and this was my best chance of finding one.

As soon as I saw Jordy standing there by the hors d’oeuvres table, the other hundred and six women vanished from sight, and I knew I’d been fooling myself back there at the bar. She was the one, the only one, and the longing for her was a continuous ache that never let up from that moment on. She was with another woman, and they had their heads together, talking, but I couldn’t have honestly told you whether this other woman was tall or short, blond, brunette, or redhead: I saw Jordy, and nothing more. “Hi,” I said, the sport coat gouging at my underarms and clinging to my back like a living thing, “remember me?”

She sure did. And she reached up to take hold of my hand and peck a little kiss into the outer fringe of my beard. The other woman — the invisible one — faded away into the background before she could be introduced.

I found myself at a loss for what to say next. My hands felt big and cumbersome, as if they’d just been stapled on as I came through the door, and the sport coat flapped its wings and dug its talons into my neck. I wanted a drink. Badly.

“Would you like a drink?” Jordy whispered, fracturing the words into tiny little nuggets of meaning. She was holding a glass of white wine in one hand and she was wearing a pair of big glittery dangling earrings that hung all the way down to the sculpted bones of her bare shoulders.

I let her lead me up to the long folding table with the four bartenders hustling around on one side and all the women pressed up against the other while the rawboned bush crazies did their best to talk them to death, and then I had a double scotch in my hand and felt better. “It’s beautiful country,” I said, toasting her, it, the ballroom and everything beyond with a clink of our glasses, “especially out my way, in Boynton. Peaceful,” I said, “you know?”

“Oh, I know,” she said, and for the first time I noticed a hint of something barely contained bubbling just below the surface of that smoky voice, “or at least I can imagine. I mean, from what I’ve read. That’s in the Yukon watershed, isn’t it — Boynton?”

This was my cue, and I was grateful for it. I went into a rambling five-minute oration on the geographic and geological high points of the bush around Boynton, with sidelights on the local flora, fauna and human curiosities, tactfully avoiding any reference to the sobering statistics that made me question what I was doing there myself. It was a speech, all right, one that would have done any town booster proud. When I was through with it, I saw that my glass was empty and that Jordy was squirming in her boots to get a word in edgewise. “Sorry,” I said, dipping my head in apology, “I didn’t mean to talk your ear off. It’s just that”—and here I got ahead of myself, my tongue loosened by the seeping burn of the scotch—“we don’t get to talk much to anybody new, unless we make the trek into Fairbanks, and that’s pretty rare — and especially not to someone as good-looking, I mean, as attractive, as you.”

Jordy managed to flush prettily at the compliment, and then she was off on a speech of her own, decrying the lack of the human dimension in city life, the constant fuss and hurry and hassle, the bad air, the polluted beaches, and — this really got my attention — the lack of men with old-fashioned values, backbone and grit. When she delivered this last line — I don’t know if that’s how she phrased it exactly, but that was the gist of it — she leveled those glaciated eyes on me and I felt like I could walk on water.

We were standing in line at the buffet table when Bud Withers shuffled in. It was surprising how well he managed to do on those plastic feet — if you didn’t know what was wrong with him, you’d never guess. You could see something wasn’t quite right — every step he took looked like a recovery, as if he’d just been shoved from behind — but as I say, it wasn’t all that abnormal. Anyway, I maneuvered myself in between Jordy and his line of sight, hunkering over her like an eagle masking its kill, and went on with our conversation. She was curious about life in Boynton, really obsessing over the smallest details, and I’d been telling her how much freedom you have out in the bush, how you can live your life the way you want, in tune with nature instead of shut up in some stucco box next to a shopping mall. “But what about you?” she said. “Aren’t you stuck in your store?”

“I get antsy, I just close the place down for a couple days.”

She looked shocked, or maybe skeptical is a better word. “What about your customers?”

I shrugged to show her how casual everything was. “It’s not like I run the store for the public welfare,” I said, “and they do have The Nougat to drink at, Clarence Ford’s place.” (Actually, Clarence meant to call it The Nugget, but he’s a terrible speller, and I always go out of my way to give it a literal pronunciation just to irritate him.) “So anytime I want, dead of winter, whatever, I’ll just hang out the Gone Trappin’ sign, dig out my snowshoes, and go off and run my trapline.”

Jordy seemed to consider this, the hair round her temples frizzing up with the steam from the serving trays. “And what are you after—” she said finally, “mink?”

“Marten, lynx, fox, wolf.” The food was good (it ought to have been for what we were paying), and I heaped up my plate, but not so much as to make her think I was a hog or anything. There was a silence. I became aware of the music then, a Beach Boys song rendered live by a band from Juneau at the far end of the room. “With a fox,” I said, and I didn’t know whether she wanted to hear this or not, “you come up on him and he’s caught by the foot and maybe he’s tried to gnaw that foot off, and he’s snarling like a chainsaw … well, what you do is you just rap him across the snout with a stick, like this”—gesturing with my free hand—“and it knocks him right out. Like magic. Then you just put a little pressure on his throat till he stops breathing and you get a nice clean fur, you know what I mean?”

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.

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.

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 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.

It was snowing pretty steadily, six inches on the ground at least, and it muffled my footsteps as I worked my way around the cabin to the back window. The night was absolute, the sky so close it was breathing for me, in and out, in and out, and the snow held everything in the grip of silence. A candle was burning in the back window — I could tell it was a candle from the way the light wavered even before I got there — and I heard the music then, violins all playing in unison, the sort of thing I wouldn’t have expected from a lowlife like Bud, and voices, a low, intimate murmur of voices. That almost stopped me right there, that whispery blur of Jordy’s voice and the deeper resonance of Bud’s, and for a moment everything hung in the balance. A part of me wanted to back away from that window, creep back to the canoe, and forget all about it. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I’d seen her first — I’d squeezed her hand and given her the corsage and admired the hand-lettered nametag — and it wasn’t right. The murmur of those voices rose up in my head like a scream, and there was nothing more to think about.

My shoulder hit the back door just above the latch and blew the thing off the hinges like it was a toy, and there I was, breathing hard and white to the eyebrows. I saw them in the bed together and heard this little birdlike cry from Jordy and a curse from Bud, and then the dog came hurtling in from the front room as if he’d been launched from a cannon. (And I should say here that I like dogs and that I’ve never lifted a finger to hurt any dog I’ve ever owned, but I had to put this one down. I didn’t have any choice.) I caught him as he left the floor and slammed him into the wall behind me till he collapsed in a heap. Jordy was screaming now, actually screaming, and you would have thought that I was the bad guy, but I tried to calm her, her arms bare and the comforter pulled up over her breasts and Bud’s plastic feet set there like slippers on the floor, telling her a mile a minute that I’d protect her, it was all right, and I’d see that Bud was prosecuted to the fullest extent, the fullest extent, but then Bud was fumbling under the mattress for something like the snake he was, and I took hold of his puny slip of a wrist with the blue-black.38 Special in it and just squeezed till his other hand came up and I caught that one and squeezed it too.

Jordy made a bolt for the other room and I could see she was naked, and I knew right then he must have raped her because there was no way she’d ever consent to anything with a slime like that, not Jordy, not my Jordy, and the thought of what Bud had done to her made me angry. The gun was on the floor now and I kicked it under the bed and let go of Bud’s wrists and shut up his stream of curses and vile foul language with a quick stab to the bridge of his nose, and it was almost like a reflex. He went limp under the force of that blow and I was upset, I admit it, I was furious over what he’d done to that girl, and it just seemed like the most natural thing in the world to reach out and put a little pressure on his throat till the raw-looking stumps of his legs lay still on the blanket.

That was when I became aware of the music again, the violins swelling up and out of a black plastic boombox on the shelf till they filled the room and the wind blew through the doorway and the splintered door groaned on its broken latch. Jordy, I was thinking, Jordy needs me, needs me to get her out of this, and I went into the front room to tell her about the snow and how it was coming down out of season and what that meant. She was crouched in the corner across from the stove and her face was wet and she was shivering. Her sweater was clutched up around her neck, and she’d got one leg of her jeans on, but the other leg was bare, sculpted bare and white all the way from her little painted toenails to the curve of her thigh and beyond. It was a hard moment. And I tried to explain to her, I did. “Look outside,” I said. “Look out there into the night. You see that?”

She lifted her chin then and looked, out beyond the doorway to the back room, beyond Bud on his bed and the dog on the floor and into the gaping hole where the door had been. And there it was, coming down like the end of everything, snow, and there was only one name for it now. I tried to tell her that. Because we weren’t going anywhere.