After the Plague Read Free Page A

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—”
    â€œAnd 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