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, divorcees 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.

* * *