After the Plague Read Free Page B

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