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?”