The Seal Wife (14 page)

Approaching the stairs, he, too, feels shaken and confused. Sometimes his knees seem not so much to flex as to buckle when he descends. A politeness for Getz, then he reels out the door and through the streets, hurrying to the prostitute, Violet, where he has either to pay an extra dollar or listen to her blather until he jumps on her, his hand over her mouth, and rides her flesh, coming so fast it’s not worth the money.

If he’s to spend money on sex, it should last a few minutes, he thinks, and as an economy he’s tried masturbating en route. He’s stopped in the woods, crouched and furtive, adolescent, but it doesn’t work. By the time he follows Violet upstairs he’s hard again, and even for the second time in under an hour, it’s over before it begins. What’s more, no matter who he holds, in his arms or in his thoughts, by the time he comes, that woman has transformed herself. She’s changed into the Aleut. Cool, detached, silent, smiling her closed-lipped smile.

UP ON THE BLUFF, Bigelow never sees the crowds he draws in town, people standing on corners, the barber with his scissors hanging from his hand, the bibbed man with his hair half cut, the waitress holding a pot of coffee, the Indians who work at the sawmill, all of them, necks cricked, watching his kite rise through the air, high above the streets and houses.

Violet and Bunch Grass and Nellie the Pig—all the girls on the Line—lean out of their windows. They run outside with hairbrushes or playing cards still in their hands, wearing nothing but camisoles and garter belts, mud squeezing up between their toes, faces lifted to the sky.

And railroad workers, too, at the end of the track, however far they’ve gotten that day, they stop hammering and lie on the ground, heads resting on ties. They look up to see how the silver wire catches the rays of the sun.

Now, when Bigelow walks along Front Street, people wave, they point and stare. “Today?” they ask. “Are you going to fly it today?”

The town’s undertakers shake his hand, all three of them in their black suits, plump and clean and prosperous. There’s good business in high latitudes; a man in the funeral trade doesn’t have to wait long for the inevitable. Something about the slant of the sun’s rays, or their absence. The sheen on the rails, the relentless scream of the mill’s round blade. People see gold where gold never was. They snowshoe off cliffs or into rivers. They misjudge a bear or forget to feed their dogs.

“Better than whiskey,” one of the undertakers tells Bigelow, referring to the kite’s white flight, an antidote to the persistently surprising weight of a filled casket.

“Thank you.” Bigelow squeezes the hand too hard, unprepared for sudden popularity. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

The Chinese attendant at the bathhouse bows when he comes in.

The barber cuts his hair for free.

A boy of about eleven, pale hair and pale, serious eyes— Bigelow thinks of himself, the spring his father died—follows him from the wireless office to the dry-goods store.

“Hello,” Bigelow says, but the boy doesn’t answer, he runs away at the word.

Standing at the cobbler’s bench, waiting in his socks while his one pair of boots are resoled, Bigelow sees a woman with a long black braid, sees her from the corner of his eye. There she is, just coming in the door, walking in behind him and reaching out to touch his sleeve. He turns, so fast he nearly loses his balance, but it’s not her. It’s not the woman. She.

MIRIAM HANDS HIM a page torn from her notebook, a message written before he arrived.

On Monday, my father is leaving for Talkeetna’s fur fair.
(
He’s
looking for extra pelts to trade at the end of the season, when the
Commercial Company buyers come through.
)
He’ll be out of town
for three days at least. I have to run the store, but in the evenings I’ll
be free. Will you come to dinner?

Bigelow reads silently while Miriam watches. The note contains none of what Bigelow has come to regard as her conversational pauses—no crossed-out words, no blots or grammatical missteps. Looking at it, especially the use of parentheses, he’s sure that she’s drafted it over and over. Can see her hunched over her desk, a wet lock of hair caught between her teeth.

He opens his mouth to answer, and she puts her finger to her lips, hands him a pencil.

Yes,
he writes. And then he writes,
I understand.
She takes the pencil.

Do you?
she writes, and he nods.

Monday arrives, and, after posting his map, Bigelow stops by the store to watch as Miriam waits on people, using a slate and chalk for whatever words a sale requires. It’s unnerving to be in Getz’s General Merchandise without Getz, and Bigelow walks up and down the aisles of shelves, looking into corners, half expecting the man to jump out at him. When he hears the last customer leave, he comes up and leans on the counter. “Well,” he says.

She smiles and reaches for his sleeve, uses it to pull his arm closer.

“Is it—is everything going smoothly?” he asks.

She nods, smiles, tucks loose hair behind her ears.

“Tonight?” he asks.

Tomorrow?
She shrugs self-consciously and takes the slate back as soon as he’s read the word.
I haven’t had time to plan a
meal,
she writes, adding in small cramped letters,
I want it to be
good.

“All right,” he says. “Yes. Eight o’clock?”

She erases the slate with the heel of her hand.
Make sure no
one sees,
she writes.
Come around through the alley.

Getz’s back entrance is cluttered with dismantled crates and leaking jars, piles of burlap sacks, flattened and dank and smelling of ammonia. Bigelow hurries past them and into the store, barely illuminated by light from the parlor above. He makes his way up the stairs, each tread creaking under his weight, making him feel conspicuous.

She’s set a small table, pushed aside piano bench and horsehide sofa to accommodate another ladder-back chair. White cloth and white candle, napkin rings, salt cellar—all these unfamiliar things, and Miriam unfamiliar, too, wearing a dress he hasn’t seen before, her hair held back with ivory combs.

Spanish olives, peeled pears in thick syrup, Norwegian sardines, beans in tomato sauce, a bowl of dark cherries, the soft flesh of each puckered with an X from a pitting machine. How many cans has she pilfered from the shelves downstairs? She serves him before herself, and with his fork Bigelow tries to separate cherries from sardines, pears from tomato sauce, before they all run together.

“Well,” he says, trying to sound enthusiastic. And he makes perfunctory compliments—“Pears
and
cherries!”—but, with Miriam lacking the extra hand conversation would require of her, the only answer is the sound of cutlery.

“Shall I help with the dishes?” he asks, when they’ve both laid down their forks. She gets up to retrieve her notebook from the top of the piano.

Leave them,
she writes, and she remains standing. She pulls at his hand until he gets up, follows her through the door that’s always closed during their Thursday visits, a door Bigelow has come to think of as leading into a female Bluebeard’s den: photographs and used wedding bands, empty hats and shoes, suspenders hanging from pegs. But all there is, is an unadorned room filled by a big bed. At its foot there is just room enough to stand.

While he watches, Miriam undresses, the soft light from the parlor enhancing her nakedness so perfectly that she must have rehearsed the one candle’s effects the previous evening. Still, he doesn’t feel excited. Deceit makes him anxious, and he can’t dismiss the vision of cherries overcome by fish oil.

“Mmmm?” Miriam says, kneeling on the bed. “Mmmm?” She leans forward to grasp his hand, pulls until he climbs on the mattress, unbuttons his shirt while he pulls down his trousers.

The feel of her skin against his, its ardent, adamant heat, surprises him. Here he is, he tells himself, a young man under a naked woman, and the woman has soft, deft hands, she uses both of them to rouse him. Bigelow draws a deep breath and lets it out slowly through his nose, wills himself to enjoy the attentions of Miriam, who is, if nothing else, earnest in her attentions. He’s almost hard when he hears the noise of a latch downstairs.

Bigelow sits up. “Clothes!” he says. “Quick!” He looks and feels around for his trousers. Where can they be in a room so small? He slides off the mattress, gropes on the floor. The stairs begin to creak, and he gives up on the trousers and tries to claw the linens from the bed, but Miriam is sitting on them, motionless, her arms at her sides, not a heavy woman but heavy enough to prevent Bigelow from yanking a blanket out from under her.

When Getz steps into the room, dinner candle in hand, Bigelow has nothing with which to cover himself, nothing except his hands.

“Well,” Getz says. “Ain’t this a picture.” The candle’s flame leaps up, as if in shocked agreement, and Getz holds its light higher, letting it shine into every corner of the little room, showing Bigelow where his clothes have fallen, like drowned limbs clutching a raft, half on and half off the side of the mattress. To retrieve them, he has to expose his buttocks to Getz’s eyes, the candle’s hot flame.

“Put your clothes on, Mimi,” Getz says, and Miriam slips like liquid down the foot of the bed, steps into the waiting circle of her petticoat, and pulls it up to her armpits. She’s still buttoning her blue dress, buttoning it wrong, then unbuttoning and trying again, when Bigelow stands up from tying his bootlace.

Getz escorts him down the stairs with a hand squeezing his elbow, the same as he did on the afternoon he revealed that his daughter had been married before. He sets the candle on the counter and slowly, like a man unleashing an inadequately trained dog, releases Bigelow’s elbow. “You’ll make this right,” he says. “I’m telling you now, you’ll make it right.”

He looks Bigelow up and down. “You think you’re something in this town. Think people like you. That contraption on a string.” He pulls the cash box out from under the counter, opens it as if to see whether any money is missing, as if Bigelow might be a thief as well as a seducer. “I have friends here. They’ll back me up. You’ll do right by my daughter.” He snaps the box shut and leans forward, his face close to Bigelow’s.

“She’s yours now. Now that you’ve took her, she’s yours. And you’ll stand up in front of this town and say so. Say so the proper way.”

THIRTY-NINE CENTS AN HOUR. The scow docks at sunup and its captain, a rich Koniak who works for the Alaska Commercial Company, cuts the engine and just sits while his crew unloads. Sometimes he smokes. He’s all decked out in cowboy gear—hat, leather vest, pointy boots, and incongruous chaps— smug and fat and bad-tempered. He wears a signet ring on the smallest finger of his right hand, and one morning Bigelow asks to see it. YALE UNIVERSITY, it reads.

The boat is so loaded with salmon that it comes in low, scraping over the dock’s gridiron, devised to prevent small craft from sinking into the mud when the tide recedes. Larger ships can’t approach Anchorage, not yet, without a deepwater port. They wait in the inlet, disgorging passengers and freight onto lighters that go back and forth among the dinghies and fishing vessels, the increasingly rare sight of natives in their skin boats.

The scow drips and stinks as the sun goes up, and the Koniak’s two underlings, Indians dressed as Indians, work in an uncharacteristic frenzy; their arms almost blur as they shovel fish out of the boat. Bigelow wonders what the cowboy might hold over them, that they perform with such aggravated industry. The smell is sickening, but the money’s not bad—maybe as compensation for the stench.

Deprived of oxygen, the fish are sluggish; they slide onto the mud bank in slimy, shining heaps, gills wide, eyes staring. A few slap convulsively against one another as they wait to be decapitated. The saddest noise, Bigelow thinks, like clumsy, drunken applause. It’s his job to hatchet off their heads. Another guy takes off the fins and tails; someone else pulls out the guts. Then the last in line packs the meat into drums to be hauled off to cold storage.

The time of day, bruised and sleepy, the backdrop of mud and endless tree stumps, the adhesive scum of blood clotting underfoot, the suck of mud pulling at his heels, the fact that he never has enough money to last from one check to the next, the impossibility of his position in relation to Miriam—surely he hasn’t gotten himself engaged—it all conspires to ruin Bigelow’s mood. Even sunrise, splattered pink and gold over the water’s dark surface, can’t offset the vileness of butchering in such quantity. Still, thirty-nine cents an hour. Bigelow can make a dollar on his way home from the new wireless office, just a half mile up the bluff.

The Koniak chugs off with his crew invisible, squatting in the empty, fish-stinking hold, their lips stretched over chaws of tobacco, and then it’s just the packers, however many of them show up. They divide, four or five to a line, and fall into a kind of rhythm: chop, slice, splat. Gulls stand ten and twenty deep around them, guzzling offal. They hang in the air with their beaks yawning wide, don’t even have to flap if the wind’s just right, unnerving, like a painted backdrop. Motionless, waiting to drop down and yank off a pink coil of intestine, sometimes fighting in midair, stretching a length of it between them until it tears or snaps, until one of them wins. Once, at the Art Institute of Chicago, Bigelow saw a painting with an angel speaking scrolls, annunciation unfurling from his lips on a pink ribbon. It disturbs him that the gulls remind him of this. The Swede who does fins is always hung over, or maybe he’s sick, either with ulcers or from the work at hand; every so often he steps out of line and vomits in a curiously workaday manner, as if it meant no more to him than blowing snot from a nostril, which he also does, but without bothering to step back. Packing such quantities of fish, none of them could stomach a bite of it; they no longer think of salmon as food, they don’t worry about sanitary conditions. Each of them has been issued gloves, and no one wears them.