The Seal Wife (10 page)

“We were just leaving,” he says.

The projectionist snorts. “Oh, you were,” he says, and he clamps his hand on the singer’s elbow and pulls her out of the tent, one hand on the wheelbarrow, the other on the silent voice, who trips along by his side, still covering the bloodstain as if she were hiding a wound.

“Wait!” Bigelow says, and the voice looks up. Her eyes meet his just long enough to offer hope.

IN THE STATION HOUSE, having run the black pennant and white square up the flagpole, indicating fair weather with temperatures higher than the preceding day, Bigelow watches through his big windows as the pole lists eastward, almost imperceivably at first, then faster, maybe five degrees in as many seconds. It doesn’t hit the ground so much as recline there, his forecast spreading gently over the mud.

Impossible to dig a hole deep enough to compensate for deep midsummer thaws. Maybe he can shore it up. Water squelches up around Bigelow’s boots as he walks outside. In a few days, each foot-shaped puddle will teem with mosquito larvae, tiny black fish-shaped things. The summer he arrived he collected some from a ditch, held the glass of swarming water to the light and peered through with a magnifier. Like commas or tadpoles or sperm. Except they don’t so much swim as fold and unfold themselves in a furious series of jerks, ricocheting from one side of the glass to the other. A sort of irritating, itchy locomotion.

Bigelow stops scratching his bites to right the pole, first taking off the stained flags and lifting its top high enough to prop in the crotch of a spruce tree’s branch. The last time this happened he managed to buttress the base with lumber, hammering wood into a clumsy approximation of what keeps church spires pointed toward heaven, then filling in the loose hole with sand and rocks and tinder. But, obviously, that hadn’t worked. So now what?

Bigelow rocks back on his heels, looking at the spruce trees around him. Wind blows through their needles, a conspiratorial whisper. Here’s a good idea—perfect!—he’s not going to reset the pole. Instead he’ll use a tree. He’ll find one that’s tall enough, climb up to the top, attach a pulley for the cord, climb down and cut off the limbs as he goes, then, presto: a flagpole that can’t fall over!

Paregoric,
he thinks as he works, sitting astride a branch and sawing the one above it. The word seems to enter his head sideways, like most thoughts of the Aleut woman. What difference if he closes his eyes, averts his gaze, busies himself with his chores? She’s always there.

Tea, tobacco, toffee. Paregoric.

Why paregoric? Could it be that all along she was ill and he didn’t know, hadn’t cared to consider? So intent on sating the demands of his own body—his hunger, his lust—perhaps he hadn’t paid sufficient attention to hers.

He shifts on the bough, and it creaks with his weight.

Well, he had paid attention, but the parts he’d scrutinized— navel, neck, armpits, the crease over her eye, or the one between her buttocks—were those that provided him purchase. They were handholds, or they were mouthfuls. They were like the little notches that climbers search out, places to insinuate fingers, toes, whatever it might take to prevent a fall.

But she’d seemed healthy enough. Strong. She could push him away with no trouble.

An addict, then. Native people were inclined to intoxicants. And paregoric is an opiate, a smooth muscle relaxant that slows peristalsis, soothes abdominal cramps, diarrhea. Bigelow knows this from his father, who suffered intestinal problems brought on by nerves.
Paregoros,
his father taught him the word. From the Greek, to console.

Was that what she had wanted? Straddling the branch, Bigelow rests his forehead against the tree’s trunk, leaves the saw motionless in the half-cut bough.

He cannot think of a single instance, not one, in which he provided anything that might be considered solace.

AFTER A HIATUS of two weeks, the theater reopens, but without the voice. Bigelow endures one showing after another, barely paying attention to the pictures on the sheet. Consumed by frustrated desire, he strains through the first scenes to catch the singer’s shadow as she arrives, eyes crossing with effort so that he couldn’t read a title card if he tried. Then, deprived of even a glimpse of his quarry, over and over he reviews the possible contents of the locket she wears around her throat. Curl from deceased brother? Likeness of mother? Of father? Artifact of religious confirmation? Or, please no, memento of lover?

When the audience disperses, Bigelow stays behind. He asks the projectionist about the singer. “She quit,” he says, latching the reel arm to the body of the projector.

“Quit? You mean for good?”

“For good?” Gnomelike, he squints up at Bigelow. “For good? For bad? I don’t know. She ain’t coming back, if that’s what you mean.”

“But—”

“Forget about her. She’s . . . she ain’t . . .” He doesn’t finish the sentence but bends over to pick up the projector. Bigelow moves forward to help. “Don’t touch it,” the projectionist says.

“I only—”

“Look. She don’t entertain. She don’t keep company. She don’t go for walks. She don’t have dinner or supper or tea. She don’t dance and she don’t play cards. And she don’t anymore go to picture shows.”

“I just want to talk to her.”

The projectionist laughs. “Well, she don’t do that, and that’s for sure.”

Bigelow tries again. “Who is she? That’s all I want to know.”

“She ain’t anybody. She used to be the picture show singer, but she ain’t anymore.”

“But,” Bigelow says, following him out of the tent, running alongside the wheelbarrow, “I—I want to see her.”

“No you don’t,” the projectionist says. And he says it again. “You don’t.”

Bigelow follows the wheelbarrow up the middle of the street, pushing after it through the roiling summer throng, people with nothing to do now that the show has let out, nothing besides drinking or gambling, and these activities aren’t restricted to pool halls, not in the summer they aren’t. No one stays shut behind doors when the sun is up, they sit in the street and tip their flasks and make bets on anything: heads, tails, horseshoes, cockfights, dogfights, fistfights. Whether the next woman to walk by will have her mouth open or shut, her hair up, her boots blacked. Whether she’ll answer a catcall with a frown or a smile. Whether a woman will walk by at all, and how long it might take before one does.

In the midst of the sweaty crowd, Bigelow loses the projectionist. The bent man and the wheelbarrow disappear, as suddenly and mysteriously as the singer did after a show, leaving Bigelow looking around him, hands in his pockets, shaking what money he has, jingling the coins so that they make an impatient noise. Too bad he’s not much of a drinker—not without the incentive of dancing, anyway—because this is a night for it, mosquitoes bedeviling anything with blood to suck, and Bigelow with money to spend, a whole fistful of unseen movies.

“Advertising for pickpockets?” The voice is familiar, and not one Bigelow associates with pleasure. He turns and sees the man with the Stetson.

“Hello,” the man says. “No reason we can’t be friends. After you’ve slept in my—” Bigelow tries to walk away, but the man holds on to his coat sleeve. “Let’s take a walk,” he says. “Down to the line. Stand me some refreshments and we’ll call it a trade.”

“Here,” Bigelow says, and he holds out a handful of change. “Even?”

The man picks up the coins one by one from Bigelow’s palm, counting as he does so. “Dollar . . . dollar five . . . dollar ten . . . More than a month’s worth of picture shows.”

Bigelow shrugs and the man replaces the coins in his hand, all except one, a dime. He holds it up. “The price of a drink,” he says. “I’ll accept the price of one drink.”

Bigelow nods. He turns, heading back toward Front Street.

“You like picture shows,” the man calls after him, but he doesn’t answer. “She’s Getz’s daughter.” Bigelow stops walking.

“Who?” he says, knowing.

“You know.”

Bigelow stands for a moment, his back to the man. When he turns around to look at his face, he is gone. A hat like that—it sticks out in a crowd, but Bigelow can’t see it, not anywhere.

Perhaps he’s imagined the encounter, an effect of frustration, of longing. He feels in his pockets, just to see, is the money still there?

^“
I HAVE A THING you might like,” Violet says. She offers Bigelow what looks like a dish towel, a frayed rectangle of faded blue cloth. “I know you can’t stand my talking. So, here.” She holds the towel out and, when he won’t take it, pantomimes tying it over her mouth and around the back of her neck. “Here,” she says again, and she takes a step forward, toward him. “Go ahead. We’ll call it an extra. You can pay for the privilege.”

It’s a kind of standoff, Bigelow there in the little room, with his hands in his pockets, Violet within touching distance, one hand on her hip, the other pushing the towel at him. After a moment, he accepts it from her.

“How much?” he says, and the girl shrugs.

“I don’t know. A dollar?”

He nods.

“But you won’t say anything downstairs, all right? You’ll give the dollar to me and not mention it?”

“Yes,” Bigelow says. “All right.” He remains standing as she undresses. “Everything,” he says, when she stops at her chemise. Usually he lets her leave it on—even in the summer her damp room is cold—but the new agreement, the extra dollar, makes him greedy.

Or angry—maybe that’s it. Angry at how transparent he must be to her, enough that she’s willing to bet on it, challenge him, buy that much more of his desire. His desire that she be silent.

Silenced. He knots the towel tight. Underneath him, she makes little sticky noises as she breathes, trying to suck the saliva back into her dry throat, and the sound both provokes and arouses him. He drives her up the bed until her head bumps against the wall.

Afterward, when they’re dressed, he hands her the extra dollar, but what’s expensive is the look she gives him, dismissive. She’s figured him out, or so she thinks; and he feels himself slide into a slot in her brain: the one who likes gags. Now, when he comes to visit her, if he does, she need not consider his case any further.

THERE’S NO REASON to hope that the gap-toothed girl is still at Knik, and anyway, Bigelow thinks as the launch approaches the dock, maybe he doesn’t want to see her. She did take his money, after all.

The boat bumps against the pilings, and the captain jumps down and ties her up, heads off toward the Pioneer before the passengers have disembarked. Bigelow hangs back, then follows the crowd up the hill to Open Hall, watching a couple as they walk leaning into each other, her head on his shoulder, his hand squeezing her waist, sliding down her hip and feeling the top of her leg, then, when she apprehends it with a little slap, back up to where it began. Watching them, Bigelow feels conspicuous in his loneliness.

Perhaps he shouldn’t have come. As he walks, he turns his empty pockets inside out, rehearsing the gesture he plans to make if he sees the girl. The dancers are over the crest of the hill now, out of sight, but he can hear their laughter, the occasional squawk from one of the band members’ trumpets. He stops following them and stands on the path, listening as the voices grow fainter. Around him, in the scrub, animals move—deer, rabbits—a restless tremor Bigelow feels more than he hears.

He turns around, looks behind him at the empty boat. The tide nudges it into the dock, then lets it fall away. Having come across the water, he’s stuck here for the next ten hours. He might as well make the best of it.

He chews his way through a sausage sandwich, so dry it makes his eyes water, but he’s no longer foolish enough to start on an empty stomach. The Russian bootlegger has a black eye and a split lip; his hand wavers as he pours out a dime’s worth.
“Na zdorov’e,”
he says as Bigelow picks up the glass.

“Cheers,” he tries when Bigelow doesn’t answer, and Bigelow repeats the word, “Cheers.” He drains the little glass, replaces it on the barrel head for the next customer.

Back at the dance floor, he sees the girl as soon as he steps up onto the planks. The two missing teeth identify her, but she’s forgotten him, he can tell, and anyway the idea of showing her his inside-out pockets seems pointless now, childish and petulant. Besides, he reminds himself, it’s not as if he didn’t get something for the money he lost.

She’s wearing new shoes, shined as shiny as patent, and he tips his hat, he steps aside and lets her pass, watches her thighs move under the fabric of her dress. She walks differently from the way she dances, walks hurriedly; the strike of her heels is that of a predator. Hearing them, Bigelow knows what he wants, to watch her steal from other men. An endless supply of them, people like him, lonely and lusting—trusting—and she so nimble, graceful and quick as a fish, exchanges one partner for another without missing a beat, the lights overhead shining like moons on the toes of her new shoes. Before the evening’s over he’ll have to kiss her, push his tongue through the gap. But for now it’s enough to watch.

Was her hair the same before, coiled in that smooth figure eight? It’s not a hot night, but her pink bodice is dark at the waist, stuck wet to her skin with the effort of dancing. Mouth open, she tips her head back, aware of the effect. Whoever her partner is, even if he doesn’t like the missing teeth, he has to keep looking at that place. She has a system, Bigelow sees, lets his hands go where they will, puts up just enough resistance that the man has to concentrate. After all, she wants him preoccupied as she moves in time with the music, feeling for an undone button. So fast and assured, you can’t not admire her, in and out, a quick light touch, and as Bigelow sees her successes, one after another, he knows that kissing her will not be enough. Tonight he wants to fuck her.

The song is over, and she bends as if to adjust her shoe, slips a pilfered bill beneath the pale sole of her foot, making him smile because that’s where he’s hidden his own money, in the toe of his boot.

“I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.” Bigelow requests the song because he wants it to be the same as it was the time before, at least in this respect. Having had another dime’s worth of bootleg, he steps up to her; he places his left hand at the small of her back, feels the damp cloth, the heat of the flesh beneath. He wants to put his tongue in her mouth, but he’s not going to, not yet. Whatever was in the dirty glass, it hasn’t made him feel dull, just the opposite. The brass of the trumpet, the light in her eye, everything glitters sharply. Above them, stars are out, bright pricks in a black sky.