Looking for Alaska (45 page)

The eighth-grade teacher, the cute one from New York, walked out to whistles. I would not have been surprised if he'd brought this tux with him from a past life. But he stalled at $45.

The weatherman, a fine auctioneer, pointed out to the ladies, “Listen, now, this guy is worth more than forty-five dollars. I don't know for sure, I'm just guessing.”

Two women, on either side of the hall, the one in the red sequins and one of the three in the tight black dresses, bid him up to $69, where he stalled again. But this guy was the type who always has something planned. He opened the shirt on his tux to reveal a T-shirt underneath that said, “I like hot…” I couldn't see the last word.

The woman in red sequins bid $75.

The next guy was young and obviously strong, able to handle any wilderness moment.

The weatherman shouted, “Look, ladies, at this strapping lad. He can haul your wood. He can haul you all winter.”

He brought a few whistles and $50. I'd been hearing since we'd moved to Alaska that the economy was slow. Based on these prices, I guess it was true.

Something was going to have to happen to raise the prices. The something did—call it chest hair. Some guy revealed a thick crop on his muscular chest. A gray-haired lady bid him up to $200. Someone said she was a doctor from Anchorage.

Daryl, back in clothes, his foxtail not even stuffed in his pants, sold for only $40 to the young Wilderness Woman contestant from San Francisco.

“Look here,” said the auctioneer, “this guy's a master mechanic on the North Slope, he makes all kinds of money! Bid high for him, he just bought a new Ford truck!” He went for $35, cheap, especially considering the new Ford.

The rowdy, all-powerful women were calling out the names of men they wanted to bid on. None of the real rugged, older guys, the ones who probably needed the attention most, were being summoned.

One of the other young guys was brought out. He was only twenty-nine and was the one who answered “What do you do for a living?” with “as little as possible.”

The bidding did not even begin before the lady who was running the show stepped up to the microphone.

“Listen now, see this guy. This summer we were having trouble with birds flying into windows all over town. I saw Doug, here, pick up a pretty little songbird that was knocked out and give it mouth-to-mouth. He brought it back to life. Now, ladies, come on! He must be worth at least twenty dollars.”

He went for under $50.

Then came a guy named Mark. I recognized him from bingo. He appeared nervous, almost ready to run. This apparent fear, or something about him, I couldn't tell, seemed to excite some of the bidders; he shot up to $115.

The auctioneer, sensing some possible competition, put his hand on Mark's shoulder and yelled out, “This is USDA Choice!”

Mark then unbuttoned three buttons on his shirt and began making his ample chest muscles move. A woman twice his age came out of her chair and bid $150.

Someone whispered, “She lives in Hawaii and Alaska. She's loaded.”

She then walked up to Mark and took off his shirt. The place went wild.

“If he will take off more, I will up my bid to three hundred dollars.”

Mark, now so bold he might have been a dancer sometime, looked as if the fearful look was only for effect. He took off his shoes. He then stepped behind the podium, bent over, and off came his jeans. Nothing was really visible but his head and neck above the podium. She put her arm around him, back there. He smiled a contented smile and then looked tired, as if he needed a nap.

The auctioneer asked if there was anyone else the ladies wanted to bid on.

“Come on, ladies, there are many more big-time men back there just waiting for you to want them. Who will it be?”

There is a stillness, a waning of interest; it must have been a sad silence for the bachelors in waiting. The auction appeared to be over.

Then someone says, “What about bachelor number thirteen?” I quickly opened my catalog. Number thirteen was Grog. His birth name is Robert Petersen, born in Milwaukee. He's forty-four. How do you get the name Grog?

His hair flowed to his ears, obviously specially washed and combed out for tonight, his nineteenth year on the auction block. His dress-up moose-hide, pullover shirt and pants had no stains. He looked as if he could snowshoe for fifty miles without stopping. But there was something about his eyes; they seemed closed, almost swollen shut.

As he walked to the stage, he began to talk. “I've been livin' around here twenty-two years.… I'm nervous, this is late in the show, are there a couple shekels left for the Grog?”

He walked up onstage, where the log walls are covered with a deep blue fabric and hand-cut snowflakes. Sparkly little Christmas lights blink.

The bachelors in the tuxedos seemed able to come to this Alaskan world, yet step right back into the other, more detached outside world. Grog probably couldn't go back there anymore, or wouldn't.

The auction was all supposed to be funny, ha, ha, yet it was sad that Grog had to auction himself off. He'd been doing this for almost twenty years.

What was he looking for in a woman? “Someone that wants to live remote for more than one night.” Obviously, for all the partying and beer and bars, his love was living in the bush and he wanted someone to share that with. Now, he was hoping that someone would bid something, anything. And too, there were all his old-time friends, the guys with the longest beards, the men considered real Alaskans, who would not even get bid on.

Maybe the bachelors who waited expectantly and would not be bid on were now joking about getting too old for this, that their gut was too big. This rejection had to hurt. And besides, the several women here their age were bidding on the younger men.

The auctioneer was working hard to get a bid on Grog. Whoever called Grog's number was either mistaken or upon seeing him in person had decided not to bid.

“Look at this Alaskan man. Just look at him. He is everything any woman could want.”

No one said anything. Grog hung his head, then regained his pride and just stared out at all of us.

“Remember the great cause your money goes for here, ladies. All that you've got to do is buy this man a drink, and if you want, a dance. Come on, who will give me twenty dollars? Twenty dollars.”

I'd seen great Tennessee auctioneers keep a silent audience going until you thought your brain would explode, but then the bidding would begin, with ferocity, for something like an old woodstove. But how long could he stretch this out for a man? There was nothing tongue-in-cheek about this. It was painful. In those brief moments I relived the times I had been chosen last for some sports team, or not chosen at all when the girls could choose a dancing partner.

I yelled out, “Fifty dollars.”

Grog jerked his head up at the sound of my voice and head-butted the wall.

The whole place was stunned. There was a bulging silence, then a roar of whispering. What had I done? Surely no one thought I was bidding on Grog because I was gay. But then again, no one knew me here. Who cares, anyway? I've got $75, I'll get it started, and the women will take over.

The whispering and the stares to the back of my head intensified. Grog walked back and forth, shaking his head, his long hair flying. “Oh, man what the…”

An almost overly polite little female voice said, “Sixty dollars.”

I looked back; she was a slight woman in the row behind me. She looked as if she ran marathons.

“Oh,
great,
we have sixty dollars,” the hard-to-stun weatherman said.

Stop now, I told myself, that's enough. But it quieted again. I'll give all my cash to the cause and stop, I decided.

“Seventy-five dollars,” I yelled. Grog stared at me and kind of smiled. Uh-oh, what's he thinking?

The little lady behind me immediately countered, “Eighty-five dollars!”

The weatherman looked at me and shrugged, as if to say, it's a free world. I shrugged back; I had no money left. Then someone tapped me on the back and handed me $20.

I looked back and the generous lady directly behind me gave me a thumbs-up sign.

“Ninety-five dollars!” I said, loud and clear.

I looked back to my competition, winked, and smiled a you-ain't-gonna-out-bid-me grin.

She was talking to the woman behind her, counting her money now.

“One hundred and fifty dollars!”

There was a gasp from the audience; she was trying to smash me into submission.

Suddenly, hands filled with five- and ten- and twenty-dollar bills came at me from all over; one of the tall beauties in the short black dresses actually stood up and came across the aisle with a twenty for my next bid. The last guy who brought that much had had to take off his clothes. So far, Grog had not removed any of his moose hide. I counted the money; I had $75 more.

“Two hundred and twenty-five dollars,” I said.

“We have two hundred and twenty-five dollars from the gentle—uh, man in the third row,” said the weatherman.

My competition shot back almost instantly, “Two hundred and fifty dollars.”

More hands reached out with more money. I told them to keep it, let's let the little lady get Grog. And she did.

I stood up and saw the reporter, Donna, from the
Anchorage Daily News
jotting down words as fast as she could write. Oh, man, what if this somehow makes it into the paper, which we subscribed to, and Rita read it before I got home.

“Ah, Donna, I'm a happily married man, okay?”

“Sure.” What did she mean by that inflection?

“You understand, right?”

“Sure, I do.”

I walked over to my competing bidder and thanked her. Then I tracked down Grog, who was surrounded by bewildered friends and curious women.

“Hey, Grog, you don't know me but, ah, I didn't mean to embarrass you or anything, hope you understand.”

“Yeah, when it first happened, I was shocked, look at my head.” There was a scrape where he had head-butted the wall. “But after a minute when the shock wore off, I looked you over and you looked like you were all right, no problem.”

The story and some flashy pictures did make the paper. I called Rita and alerted her to what I'd done, which was accurately reported in the Anchorage paper the next morning before I got home. One of the main pictures in the piece was of Grog. Rita knows I love auctions and I sometimes get so carried away I buy things I would never use.

14

On the Way to Coldfoot

It was one of those superdark winter nights in Seward. The seeping darkness had a power over the people because it stayed so long this time of year. I was reading
Fifty Years Below Zero,
a book about an early white man who lived among the Eskimo. I felt someone near me and noticed Julianne standing behind the borrowed chair that I had claimed and now sat in. The chair rocked.

“Daddy, where are we going?” she asked.

The sweet and completely trusting tone of her voice made me want to change my answer. Should we really be going where I'd planned? Maybe I should take this risk without them? Rita had told Julianne when she got home from school that afternoon that we were going to spend her spring break in the wilderness of the Brooks Range. I'd certainly heard of this place, but until I'd looked at a map, I had had no idea how far it was from here. Julianne liked to plan and pack days in advance, just like her mother. Did I really want to take her, even Rita, to live with some eccentric family I didn't even know, sixty miles off the nearest road in one of the most isolated, coldest places on earth?

“Juge, we're supposed to drive north about eight hundred and twenty-five miles from here to a bunch of mountains called the Brooks Range,” I answered.

She'd driven a couple thousand miles before—she'd driven from Miramar Naval Base in southern California to Tennessee after visiting her brother Aaron. The females of the family did that trip, Rita, Brooke, Rebekah, and Julianne. But driving from California to Tennessee in the summer and driving from Seward to above the Arctic Circle on the last day of winter might be a bit different sort of road trip.

The Weather Channel was on; as usual they showed nothing about Alaska. We had weather here that we considered just a “fun winter storm” that would have made headlines and specials on the Weather Channel, CNN, and all the networks for days if it were happening somewhere else. A few days ago the Weather Channel had one of their traveling reporters standing beside an interstate in the middle of a nor'easter that had fizzled and dropped only an inch and a half of snow.

“Why the Brooks Range, Dad?” Julianne asked.

“Oh, because it's good”—I gave her the thumbs-up sign—“and because a man named Eric Jayne invited me, you, and your mother to visit them there.”

Julianne and I had a little thing going because every time I asked her how school was or how her first attempt at skiing went, she would just say, “Good.” When I started teasing her about using the word
good
too much, she would just give me a thumbs-up sign.

Her naturally calm disposition was piqued with curiosity. She was not a child to ask many questions, but today she was about to ask several.

“Why would we want to go there? We've been studying Alaska in school—isn't above the Arctic Circle some of the coldest places in Alaska?”

Julianne loved the cold, she had another plan.

“Yes, I think it is. Where they live is supposed to be beautiful. They live on a big lake that is frozen now. We'll take a long snow-machine trip to get to their house. That'll be fun!” I said, trying to sell her.

“Do they have any daughters?” Julianne had made several good friends here in the neighborhood and at school, Leah, Danielle, Nicole, and others. Julianne has the gift of friendship.

“They do have a daughter. I think she's twelve, maybe thirteen. I haven't met her, only one of their sons.”