by T. C. Boyle
AFTER THE PLAGUE
T.C. BOYLE
For Paul Slovak and Bettina Schrewe
Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat our tunes to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.
—Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Contents
Termination Dust
She Wasn’t Soft
Killing Babies
Captured by the Indians
Achates McNeil
Mexico
The Love of My Life
Rust
Peep Hall
Going Down
Friendly Skies
The Black and White Sisters
Death of the Cool
My Widow
The Underground Gardens
After the Plague
A Note on the Author
Also available by T. C. Boyle
By the Same Author
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 ank
les 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 k
now 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?”
