After work each day, Amy Raye would pick up fresh groceries or cook something on a camper’s stove in the shed. She kept her costs down and was able to save up most of what she made, which was a dollar more than minimum wage, plus the shed. She was trying to live sober, and she thought living in Alaska was giving her the space to do that. She hadn’t been back to the Golden Saloon. Hadn’t slept with a man since leaving Farrell. Instead, when she had a day off, or finished her work early, she’d hike with Saddle or find something to read. She liked her lean body, was eating well. She even thought about finding work for the winter and staying on. She was living cleaner, and imagined living that way for the rest of her life.
But then one afternoon she walked the mile and a half to the Center Store, as she did most every day. She was almost to the store, taking her time along the dirt road. A breeze tousled the branches of the birch, stirred the rich scent of the black and white spruce. And then she saw him, along the edge of the trees, his body halfway hidden by the tall grasses. She had never seen a grizzly before. And when she stopped, the bear lifted his head over his left shoulder and looked at her. He appeared deliberate and calm. He was magnificent really, his size larger than what she might have imagined, and hefty, as if he could move boulders. And for a moment she just stood there, mesmerized by that magnificence, until he moved, took a few steps toward her, his head and shoulders now facing her, and she tried to remember what she was supposed to do when she encountered a bear. She walked backward, looking at him straight on. “I’m going to the store now,” she told him, her voice as steady as she could manage it. She thought about singing. She’d read stories of people who sang when they hiked, to keep bear away, and others who wore bells on their shoes. She continued to walk backward. She continued to talk to the bear until he lifted his head, let out a gruff sound, and turned away.
She walked the rest of the way to the store. She wanted to tell someone about the bear. She wanted to tell Farrell. She needed to make it real.
She had just picked up some hamburger and pasta to cook on her stove. When she paid for her purchase, she saw a man ahead of her. He carried a bottle of water in his left hand and a small pack over his right shoulder. Maybe it was because of the man’s stocky build, or the color of his hair—sandy like Farrell’s—or the glint in his blue eyes. Maybe it was because the man looked at her for a second as if he recognized her, because in that moment she felt the gnawing ache of a hunger so deep, she knew it in her bones. As she left the store, she saw the man walk down to the Golden Saloon, so she and Saddle followed him there.
She entered the Saloon, leaving Saddle outside on the porch. He was the kind of dog who would stay wherever she told him to and wait for her to return. She saw the man right away; he was sitting at the small bar with a woman and several men around him. Amy Raye approached the bar and stood a few feet to the right of the man. She ordered a beer, and while she waited for it, she observed the man and listened to the conversation he was having with two others. The man would be heading out in the morning on a five-day trek in the Wrangells. He began talking about different entry points and trails into the mountains, running his plans by the other two men who were also backpackers. “Did you run into any more bear?” asked the man who looked like Farrell, so much so that Amy Raye wouldn’t have been surprised at all if he had reached behind the bar and picked up a guitar and started playing and singing something by Greg Brown or Neil Young.
Amy Raye paid for her beer and moved to a table. She set her shopping bag next to her feet. She wondered how long she could stay at the saloon before the meat went bad. She gave herself a few hours. She would have a couple of beers, maybe a bowl of soup or a salad, because she could not pull herself away from the man who looked like Farrell, who was sitting next to a woman who looked Spanish, with Russian skin. The woman had full lips, large almond-shaped eyes as black as a crow’s, but her skin was milky and pink and smooth. The woman draped her arm over the man’s shoulders, said something in his ear, and then stood and walked over to a microphone at the front of the room. Amy Raye’s heart pounded loudly in her ears, and she felt that hunger that reminded her of too many times she’d fed herself from men on the streets, and in cars, and in alleys, and of other bars and other places.
Amy Raye ordered soup and crackers and another beer, listened to the woman whom other people in the saloon cheered for. The saloon had become packed with warm bodies clustered around the bar, around the tables, making it hard for Amy Raye to spot the man. The soup turned lukewarm and then cold. Amy Raye dunked the crackers, sipped the beer. The woman was now singing “Can’t Let Go” by Lucinda Williams. The tempo was hard and fast, and the woman’s voice raspy.
A man wanted to buy Amy Raye a drink, the waitress said. Amy Raye looked up at the group of men at the bar, but she could not find the man who looked like Farrell, and she began to panic.
“Would you like another beer?” the young, blond waitress asked.
“I’ll have a whiskey. Maker’s Mark or Jim Beam.”
But it wasn’t the waitress who returned with the whiskey. Instead a tall man with a long, grizzly beard and mysterious blue eyes slid the double whiskey in front of her. “Mind if I join you?” he said. The man pulled out a chair and sat beside her, set his beer on the table. “I’ve seen you before,” he said.