The Seal Wife (11 page)

Four turns and she hasn’t made a move, she’s good enough at what she does that she must feel the suspicion in his body, the way he’s pulled taut with attention, boxstepping a little too neatly. It isn’t until he half closes his eyes and lets his head loll toward hers that her left hand drops down his side, a twitch, nothing more; he misses his chance to catch her. One pocket left, and it’s a trick to be vigilant while seeming to fall asleep. She jostles him into another couple, a strategy—she’s too accomplished a dancer to stumble. He shoves his hand in after hers, catches it, hot and squirming.

Bigelow drags the girl’s fingers from his pocket and up to his mouth and—this isn’t what he intended, he’s as shocked as she—bites them, the first and the middle. Bites them hard. With a jolt she stops dancing, she snatches back the hand, wipes her fingers thoroughly on her skirt. Then she spits at him.

The scene draws an audience, amused laughter and stares. Couples dance over and stop, forming a circle around Bigelow and the girl. “Aw, Mary,” someone says. “What’d he do to you?”

“Bit me,” she answers, “Goddamn crazy son of a mother-fucking bitch,” speaking plain English and holding up the fingers, visibly dented. Several dancers lean toward her to see how the purple arcs left by his incisors interrupt the creases of her knuckles.

“I . . .”
I didn’t,
he was going to say, except that obviously he had. “She’s . . .”
a thief, a pickpocket.
But she hasn’t taken anything from him, not this time. Bigelow feels himself sweating, suddenly drunk. A Russian the size of a walrus steps forward and grabs his shirt.

“That’s my wife,” he says, and he snatches up the girl’s hand, holds her fingers under Bigelow’s nose. “You bit my wife.”

“I . . .” Bigelow tries. “Your . . .”

But what’s the point? He holds his hands up in surrender. All right, he thinks, everyone gets beaten up sometime in his life. And I’m drunk, he thinks gratefully. Thank God I’m drunk.

“My—” the big Russian says.

“Shut up, Alexi!” The girl cuts him off. She twists out of his grasp, reaches up and slaps the man on the side of his head, a stinging blow that reddens his ear. She spits again, at Bigelow and at the Russian, who spits back, and then she turns on her shiny heel and walks off, dancers parting before she has a chance to shove them aside.

“Stupid,” the Russian says, rubbing his ear. He stares at Bigelow, who stares back, both of them clearly wondering what’s coming next.

“Buy you a drink,” Bigelow tries. The Russian nods slowly, still holding the side of his head.

“
Is
she your wife?” Bigelow asks, forty cents later, the two of them sitting on stumps just beyond the dance floor, watching the girl, snug in a fat man’s grasp—but not too snug, her hands are busy.

“Uh,” the Russian says, nodding. “Uh-huh.”

Bigelow laughs, and the Russian laughs, too.

“She make a living that way?” Bigelow asks.

“Yuh.” The Russian nods, laughing hard enough now that his eyes water. Bigelow can’t stop, either. His sides ache, he can hardly breathe; and the two of them go on. Gasping, they topple from the stumps.

“I . . .” Bigelow says, on the ground. He tries again. “I . . .”

“What?” the Russian says.

But Bigelow just shakes his head.

“What?”

“I danced inside . . .” He doesn’t finish.
Her,
he was going to say before he realized that he couldn’t make him—her husband— understand.

Lying on his back, the Russian nods gravely. “No place in Alaska,” he says, “for indoor dances.” And he sighs, his big chest rises and falls. “They’ll build one someday,” he offers, his accent thickened by drink.
Zumday.
“A ballroom.”

Sobered by the idea, they lie there on their backs, silent, looking at sky between treetops.

When the band finally packs it in, the two of them are sleeping, the girl long gone, the bootlegger gone, too. All around them are bodies, faceup, facedown, snoring, hiccuping.

“Hey,” someone says, nudging Bigelow with his boot, and Bigelow gets to his feet. He walks stiffly down the hill.

The boat goes back, pitching, Bigelow cold and hungry, looking for light on the water.

^“
LOOK.” Getz reaches into the till and slaps two nickels down on the counter. “Here you are. The price of two shows. The price of admission to two moving pictures without accompaniment. Without the accompaniment that ain’t part of the price of admission but never mind take the damn money and get the hell out. I’m sick of you.” He picks the coins up and then slaps them down again, and Bigelow pushes them back.

“I don’t want that,” he says.

“What do you want then? What. Do. You. Want.”

“I want,” Bigelow says, shaking his head as if trying to dislodge what won’t come out of his mouth. “I want.”

Of all the men in Anchorage, of all the two thousand railroad workers, the hundreds of prospectors, the countless trappers, the mushers, the bakers, the crooked lawyers and half-trained doctors, the stevedores and the stationers, the barbers, the undertakers, the two telegraph operators, how can it be that the father of the voice is the same pinched and leering shopkeeper who watched Bigelow watch the Aleut woman? Who made, each time Bigelow came into his store for kerosene or a box of stale biscuits, a pungently salacious crack about sealskin bloomers or tattooed titties. But there you are. Getz owns the tent, he pays the projectionist, he orders the pictures and picks up the reels from the post office, and he owns the singer. He is the singer’s father.

“I want,” Bigelow says again.

He’s been in the store three times, he’s bought a peach of rude proportion, so ripe that its skin split under his lip and juice ran down his wrist and into his sleeve. He chatted solicitously with Getz as he handed him the penny, and then left without asking the question he’s rehearsed. But he did talk about weather. “You heard,” Bigelow said, “what happened last week? The zeppelins?” A fleet of thirteen blown off course by winds the Germans didn’t anticipate, navigators blinded by fog, they were shot down over France.

Getz raised his eyebrows, daring him to continue. “There’s no modern war without forecasting,” Bigelow said, and he told Getz about the thirsty foot soldiers of Marcus Aurelius saved by a thunderstorm that terrorized the German tribes, securing Roman victory. About the sinking of the armada, not by the British but by storms off the coast of Scotland. Napoléon’s death march across Russia. England’s doomed attempt on the Dardanelles. Bigelow has a whole lecture on weather and military strategy and couldn’t prevent himself from giving it to Getz.

Between visits, he walked up and down Front Street, how many times he couldn’t say, too distracted to pretend an errand. And now he’s come back in and can’t say a thing.

“You want what?” Getz says.

“I want to know, is the, was the wom—the singer in the tent . . .”

He never uses the word
daughter,
never acknowledges what he’s checked and rechecked with other sources—barber, postmaster, dentist—that the singer is in fact Getz’s only child, the child of the wife that left him.

“Is she, is she coming back?”

“I told you no.”

“Then is she here?”

“Here?”

“Is she here in Anchorage?”

“What for?”

“Is she—does she sing here?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Well. I do.”

“In that case, no.”

“But,” Bigelow says, “what if it was someone else who wanted to know?”

“She still wouldn’t be.”

Bigelow steps away from the counter and then back toward it, like a dog trying to clear a fence. “Can I see her?” he says.

“Can you what?”

“Can I see the—can I see your . . .?”

“See?”

“Could I talk with her?”

“She don’t talk.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that. What I said. She. Don’t. Talk.”

“She sings.”

“Yes. But that’s all.”

Bigelow nods. “Would you, can I ask her name?” (Because no one knows it. “She doesn’t receive mail, so how would I?” the postmaster said.)

“You can ask,” Getz says.

“Would you tell me it?”

Getz looks at him. “What do you want it for?”

“To know. I want to know it, that’s all.”

“To write her a letter?”

“Yes!” Bigelow seizes the idea.

“No.”

“Listen,” Bigelow tries again. “I have something for her. She might—a thing she might enjoy.”

Getz smiles nastily. “What’s that?” he says.

“A gramophone. And some recordings. Of singing. Opera singing.”

“You want to give her a gramophone?”

“Yes. Well, no. Loan it to her.”

“She has one.” Getz smiles a small, triumphant, checkmate smile.

“Well, then the recordings. They’re—they’re quite good. You can’t get them here. Caruso.”

Getz snorts. “Caruso? Everyone’s got Caruso.”

“Well, then, Ruffo. Scotti. Eugenia Burzio.”

Getz shakes his head. “Get out,” he says. “I know what you’re after.”

THE KITE’S NOT EVEN a mile out when the reel malfunctions; the wire slips off the drum and tangles between two cogs. Bigelow sets the brake and considers the situation. It’s blowing hard, twenty-five or thirty miles an hour the way it’s pulling, the line angle no more than forty degrees, the kite suspended over the inlet, looking deceptively solid and terrestrial, motionless, a house built in midair. He tries stepping on the wire, just a few feet from where it comes off the reel, but it pulls out from under his boot and snaps straight up between his legs, making him jump and grab for his balls. Another inch, and that would have been that. Bigelow examines the place on his caribou work pants; the fur gone, the hide nearly cut through.

Aeolus. Favonius. Caurus. Once he knew all their names. Now he can remember only these three. The wind gods are laughing. Bigelow can hear them, gleeful and malicious.

With a double layer of gloves—rubber-lined, in case the wire has picked up atmospheric electricity—he tries to disengage the reel, but he doesn’t have the strength. He can’t readjust the wire on the drum without relieving the tension, and he can’t pull the kite back in without getting the line back on the drum. So he’ll have to cut the wire and then splice and crimp it after the reel is fixed, just what he wants to avoid, because it will never be as strong again. But what choice does he have?

His eyes watering from the wind, Bigelow tries to pull the kite in a few feet. He hangs on the wire, using gravity, his weight rather than his muscles, but the tension on the line is too high, he can’t get any purchase on its slippery metal surface, and he can’t wrap a loop around his gloved hand—one gust and he’d lose that hand. He’ll have to attach an auxiliary line to the launch platform, through an O-ring mounted there for just this sort of mishap. Then he’ll splice and crimp it to the kite wire before cutting the kite free from the reel. He turns to watch the way it sits, unmoving, in the air. The wind might slacken by nightfall, but what if it doesn’t? He can’t let it fly unsupervised, he can’t leave the bluff until he’s reeled it back in.

There are tools in the shed—a hatchet and a rasp, a hammer, spools of wire, nails, a saw and crimping pliers. Bigelow retrieves the shears and a length of wire, attaches the wire to the O-ring, and then goes to work on the kite line. To the eye, the line appears still. Even when Bigelow stares at it, he can’t see what his hands feel: a singing against his palms. With all his strength, he closes the handles of the crimping pliers, willing the wires to fuse. He holds the splice, making a fist around it as he bends to cut the line free from the reel, and the vibration hums through two layers of gloves.

The new line pulls taut with an audible crack, and Bigelow winces. But the splice holds. And the O-ring is fine, made of forged steel that can withstand thousands of pounds of stress. What’s wrong is the platform, the plank to which the ring is mounted. All those bent nails he hammered straight. One end comes up, and Bigelow grabs his crimping pliers to hammer it back down, but before he’s finished, the other end comes up. So Bigelow steps on it while continuing to pound the other, but what he has isn’t a hammer, and the head of the pliers glances off the nails without really striking them.

Before he can figure what to do next, the plank comes free and knocks Bigelow off balance. He lunges after the board before it’s out of reach. Bristling with rusted nails, it claws his cheek, his neck, but he gets one arm over it and doesn’t let go, hanging on as it pulls him off the platform and onto the slope, trying to dig his heels in. But stopping is impossible; all he can do is run, ski, skid. His feet barely contact the ground; mostly he feels just a slither of dry grass and shale.

He’s praying he has the strength to hold on, until, as he approaches the end of the bluff, he begins a new prayer—that he can let go, unhook himself from the nails that have worked their way right through the fabric of his tightly buttoned jacket.

Wrestling to escape his clothes, his sleeves now nailed to a board attached to a kite wire pulling him off the edge of the world, Bigelow has his head inside his collar, he can’t see how many more yards—feet?—are left, when he comes to an abrupt, scratching, splintering stop. His chest thuds into what must be the trunk of one of the twisted, straggling spruce trees on the wind-whipped edge of the bluff. Whatever it is, he’s got his legs around it. Coughing and gasping, the air knocked out of his lungs, he hangs on with his knees bent tight while trying to get his head and arms free.

Only minutes go by, but it seems a very long time before Bigelow has caught his breath and worked himself out of the jacket, wedged the plank securely in the crotch of the tree he hit. He’s cold without the extra layer of clothing—even in summer it’s windy and raw on the bluff—but he can’t risk loosening the plank, so he leaves the jacket where it is, caught between the plank and the tree. He lowers himself onto the ground, sits scratched and bruised, bleeding, and, he guesses, nowhere near as sore as he’ll be the next day.

The kite is still in the air, five thousand feet out, over the water, pulling so hard that the plank creaks against the tree limbs. Bigelow has to shade his eyes to see it. From his new perspective on the bluff, the kite is backlit, suddenly black instead of white, silhouetted against a lowered sun.