The Seal Wife (17 page)

There must be some calculus to apply to a loss of this proportion. But Bigelow does not know what it is.

IN TOWN, he stands outside Getz’s store, considering the splintered signboard and smashed windows before going inside to look at the emptied shelves. He runs his hand over the counter, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. Someone—who?— has broken the electric bulbs overhead, dumped flour and cornmeal and something brown and sticky on the floor, scrawled over the writing on the wall, the cost of eggs, lard, kerosene. Big, black charcoal letters spell out a different word:
Pimp.

Upstairs, the parlor has been stripped—no horsehide sofa, no piano or mirror or rug. Bigelow passes his hand under the stovepipe hanging from the ceiling to be sure, in the near dark, that the stove, too, is gone. He knocks on the metal tube and it makes a cold, echoing clang; a fine debris drizzles from its open end.

He feels his way to the bedroom door, walks through it with his arms out before him. It’s cold in the room, cold and dank. The big bed is missing and Bigelow backs out quickly. He hurries through the parlor and down the stairs, spooked by a thought—ridiculous—that his rage has somehow done away with Miriam and her father. All his cursing up on the bluff has worked a spell, reduced them to nothing, the floury dust from the floor that clings to his trousers and boots.

He stamps his feet and brushes off his legs. “What happened?” he asks a man waiting next door for a haircut. With his thumb, Bigelow points over his shoulder at the ransacked store. “What happened to Getz’s?”

The man squints, he wrinkles his nose as if someone has shined a bright light in his face. “Chased him out,” he says.

“Who? Why?”

“Undertaker and his friends. Led a mob on the store. Getz tried to lock ’em out—they was thirty, maybe forty of them— but they busted his windows. Looted the place.”

“But why?”

The man shakes his head. “Getz bragged what she’d done up the hill. Seemed proud.” He shifts from one foot to the other. “You ain’t the first, you know,” he says to Bigelow.

“The first what?”

“Oh, the two of ’em, Getz and whatshername, Miriam, used to be they lived in Juneau.” He feels in his pocket and digs out a penknife, opens and closes it before going on. “Snagged a jeweler in that town, and that jeweler had the name Baxter. Same as the undertaker on the corner of Front and Second.” The man points past Bigelow. “Same because it’s his brother. Engaged to be married, the whole deal, when Baxter in Juneau got cold feet and she, Miriam, took a kettle and poured boiling water on all the watches in his jewelry store. That’s why Getz moved up here.”

The barber, now standing in the doorway, nods.

“But where’d they go?” Bigelow asks. “Where is Getz? Miriam?”

“Police put the two of them on a train. With nothing but the clothes they was wearing.”

“And the cash box,” the barber says.

The man nods, looks back at Bigelow. “You wasn’t—” He squints, tries again. “You didn’t—” He hunches up his shoulders. “You ain’t—disappointed?”

“No,” Bigelow says. “I . . .” He shakes his head, doesn’t bother to finish.

Bigelow buys a pound of toffee from the store down the street. “What’d they call him?” he asks the man behind the counter, wanting to hear the whole story again.

“Everything—criminal, scoundrel, extorter.” The storekeeper weighs out a pound, shakes a few extra pieces into the bag. “Baxter was waiting for something like this. Him and his friends, they wanted a reason to go after Getz.” He hands Bigelow the toffee. “Can you build another?” he asks.

“The instruments are gone,” Bigelow tells him. “I had equipment that I sent up with it, but . . . Well, I know how to build a kite.”

He puts the candy in the pocket of his coat, where it stays until the following day. Until he is standing once again in the woman’s house, looking under pot lids, smoothing the fur blanket on her bed, staring at the picture of the mangle and prying open the biscuit tin where she keeps her candy. When he adds what he bought, he can hardly close the lid.

So there, he’s done it. Left a message.

He walks up the street feeling strangely calm and noting that the birds overhead have thinned. The great exodus of migration is over.

Tomorrow after he goes to the cable office, he’ll climb up the bluff with his binoculars. The kite has to have come down somewhere, perhaps on land, perhaps on land he can see. The image of it, spars broken, muslin caught on a branch or an outcropping, is so clear, a vision he can conjure so absolutely, that Bigelow finds himself expecting what is unlikely.

If only he can find it before heavy snows arrive and blot out its white silhouette.

WHAT WILL SHE DO with the candy? What will she make of it? He considers the possibilities, trying to put himself in her position. Except that she is so opaque to him, so unknowable. Even sitting across the table from her, even lying on top of her— especially lying on top of her—he never had any idea what she was thinking.

She could accept the toffees, as a kind of gift. But from whom? Will she understand that they came from him? He sees her at her table, the tin opened, the candy spilled out.

Having returned, does she think of him? He tries not to ask the more tempting question: is he, is there even a small chance that
he
is, the reason for her return?

HE CAN’T THINK STRAIGHT, and his maps are out of focus. Not literally, for the ink comes out of the pen in its usual fashion, and perhaps a layperson wouldn’t see anything amiss, but to Bigelow the work is sloppy, distracted. The correct information is there, but as if seen through a veil.

Or maybe it’s just him, the veil. Maybe it’s in his head. He pulls one after another of the bound volumes from his shelf, pages through them, storms and calms, looking for something. What? What can they tell him?

Cumbersome books, they weigh heavily in his lap. How hard he has labored at them, how religiously.
I made these lines,
he thinks, feeling the pages, running his hands over their surface, touching his work as he would never allow another person to do.
Day after night after day, I drew them.

His thoughts return to the man, the trackwalker. He thinks of the eight miles between Girdwood and Bird Creek, pictures a solitary figure walking along the track, carrying a shovel, a coil of rope, whatever tools he might need to clear a drift of snow, drag a dead deer from the rails.

We do the same thing,
he thinks,
I and the man.
Walking over the whiteness, inscribing a line. A line that exists independent of inscription: a track through the wilderness, a boundary drawn between one reading and another.
All we do, I and the trackwalker, is make the line visible. Manifest.

WHAT SHE DOES IS THIS: she takes them out of the tin, separating them from her own toffees, and leaves them on the shelf.

She doesn’t eat them, but then neither does she throw them out.

Or does she? Perhaps she’s eaten one.

Six, seven, eight . . . Bigelow lines them up on the table, cursing himself for not having had the presence of mind to count them in the first instance, before leaving them in the tin. Thirty-one.

He replaces them on the shelf.

THE ONLY CURE, of course, is to see the woman. To stay in the house until she returns. She’ll find him by the stove, waiting. With an offering of some sort. Not food, that would seem like a demand. Not soap. Not perfume. And, of course, not the gramophone. Maybe a mangle, like the one in the picture. He could get it from town. Order one. But that would take too long. A pretty plate? No, it might seem like a comment on the ones she owns. Tea, then, or tobacco.

Because he can’t just come knocking on her door with a duck, not after what happened before. Because if he did, and she didn’t answer, he’d—well, he couldn’t stand that. So he’ll have to come in and then sit. Wait.

IN TOWN, the sound of hymns. Yellow light spills from the windows of the church onto the blue snow. Sunday noon, and the frozen streets are empty. Who could see, even if they cared to, where he was going?

By noon he is at the woman’s door, in her house. Because he has trespassed so thoroughly, her two rooms are as familiar to him as they were before she left, and he takes off his coat, he hangs it on the peg in the manner of a guest rather than an intruder. He arranges his gifts on the table, nothing much, just an assortment of small things—a packet of needles, a tin of cocoa, matches, and a small mirror in a hinged case. A set of two long-handled spoons.

It’s warm in the house, and when he opens the stove door to check inside, he’s surprised to see not just embers but flames. He sits on the chair, looking at the stabbing tongues of orange, feeding them twigs and straw from the basket of tinder. What can it mean, a fire left burning?

He could stand and go to check the back room, with its bed, the chest where she keeps the skins she traps. The shelf with the needle and the lump of beeswax. Two spools of thread: one black, one white. But for some minutes he just sits before the stove, its door open, and feeds it, single straw by single straw. Having considered the possibility that she is there, in the other room, he doesn’t want to get up and look, not just yet. He’s afraid of either outcome: her presence, her absence. But then, the last dry bit of grass is used. It curls into ash and drops onto the oven floor.

All along, peering through the binoculars, tracking her as she walked the blocks to the stores, visiting her house when he knew she was out, drinking from her glass, lying on her bed, all along he hasn’t known what he knows in this moment: whether she is home now, in the back room, or whether she returns later, he has embarked on something irrevocable. He feels calm as he stands up from the chair. Or at least he feels resolute, aware of the awful wet pulse of his life.

He opens the door to the second room, whose only light comes from a lamp, if a lamp is burning.

She’s dressed as if to go out, sitting on the bed with her hands in her lap, as still as a photograph. Wearing her dress, her only dress, with buttons all the way from throat to hem. Her hair, just exactly as it was the last time he saw her, when he watched through the window as she stared at the wall: one thick braid hangs over her right shoulder. Its end brushes her thigh.

She looks at him, neither through nor away but directly at his face in the way that she has: not surprised, not inquisitive. Not excited, not agitated. Not apprehensive. Not interested, and not uninterested, either. Not angry, not curious. Not judging. Not dismayed. Not resigned. Not amused. Not delighted, or even slightly pleased. Not displeased.

There are a hundred, no, a thousand ways that other people have looked at Bigelow over the years, and none of them describe the woman’s gaze. He knows all the things that it is not. What it is, is harder to say. She has this trick of just looking.

Bigelow walks close enough to touch her but leaves his hands at his sides, and she leaves hers in her lap. After what seems a long time, she takes his right hand, the one with the scars. She turns it over, tracing the purple mark of the seal’s bite, the pink shadows on his palm from blisters, kite burns. She looks up at his face, raises her eyebrows in question. He shrugs, makes a fist and unfolds his fingers, showing her how they still work.

She takes the hand back and holds it in her own, turns it over to see how the bite has gone through, scarring both sides. Then she lifts it to her mouth. Not a kiss, but the feel of her breath, warm in his hand, makes him hard. His fingers shake.

She allows him to touch her face, to cup his hand under her chin and tilt it up, to brush her cheeks with his scrubbed knuckles, smooth her eyebrows with a finger. She has no expression as he does this, but for a moment her lips part just enough that he can see a white gleam of teeth behind them. Then she closes her mouth.

He undoes the button at her throat, then the top button of his own shirt, then back to hers, one and one and one, until she gets sick of the game. At least, he thinks he sees a faint tremor of impatience at the tit-for-tat silliness of such symmetry, and she pushes his hand away and begins to undo the buttons herself. Down to her waist and then on past her lap—twenty-two buttons to keep it closed, and with each one she releases he feels himself growing that much harder, an erection that seems to claim all the blood in his body. His feet tingle; his ears ring; his head feels as light as if he’s been holding his breath.

Which, he realizes, he has been. The last button slips from its hole, and he lets the air go in a rush. No drawers or petticoats, no bust bodice, no garters. Just the two pointed breasts, one nudging right, the other left, and the navel, her navel. The impossible spiral of it, like the motion of a finger turning at a temple.

Does she look satisfied as he falls to his knees? Triumphant at so complete a capture? He’ll ask himself the question later. Besides, he isn’t looking at her face, he’s pressing his own into the warmth of her groin. Salty, and just a little rank, the unmistakable bitter tang of that smell, he’s about to get his tongue just exactly where he wants it, barely enough time to begin to feel dismayed by her sudden wantonness—who has taught her this!
She,
missionary
she,
who never let him do this before!—when she twists out from under his mouth, pulls his head up by the ears.

To be sure of her constancy, if not her virtue, he tries again, and she shoves his head with both hands, hard enough to send him reeling back onto his buttocks, legs splayed, tailbone jangling with pain, so intense it kills his erection, but back it comes, revived by the relief that she is as she was, she’s not putting up with anything but the straight and narrow.

Strange to be grateful for a woman who won’t tolerate even the one little frill, but there he is, inside her, nose to nose, arms straight and hands off, and she with her eyes shut and fingers busy. It’s insulting, so why isn’t he insulted? She cries out, taking the one orgasm she allows herself, pleasure over with sooner than a foil-wrapped toffee—he hopes at least it’s sweeter or deeper or what? Something. Inside her, he feels so hard, and not just his cock but hard from head to toe, blood pounding all through him, feeling better than good, better than sublime— alive, so alive!—and forget all his tricks for slowing down, he just lets himself come, biting his lip to keep from howling like an animal.