“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.”