The Seal Wife (15 page)

The two or three hours pass more quickly, Bigelow discovers, if he forgoes his coffee and his breakfast. He gets out of bed in the dark, reads instruments with automatic accuracy, no higher consciousness to distract him from the simple task. He submits and collects ciphers with barely a syllable passing between himself and the telegraph operator, arrives on the dock only to slip further into a dulled stupor. The sound of the tide, the drizzle, the fog—it’s as if he never got up, the rest of him sleeping while his arms go on chopping.

One morning, the Koniak shows up with a live hair seal hanging by its hindquarters, full-grown, perhaps a hundred and fifty pounds. He has it strung up over the prow, an upside-down figurehead, and Bigelow can see the weird beauty of its eyes, black and wet and shining, the fur around them stained dark. Not that he’s sentimental, but it looks like weeping. The Swede makes a strangled noise, a cough of regret or disgust; or maybe he’s just clearing his throat.

Bigelow doesn’t want to look at the seal, but he can’t help it.
“Siwash cosho mamook tumtum?”
he asks in Chinook.
What’s it
for?
At least he thinks that’s what he says. What he means is
why,
but he’s almost given up on pidgin, words that get him nowhere.

The Koniak doesn’t answer. He spits on his ring and shines it on his sleeve.

“Probably got in the trap,” the gutter says. He points to the load of fish, many of them mutilated, gashed, and bitten.

The seal—the way she submits—strikes Bigelow as unnatural. She doesn’t look sufficiently tired to be passive. Those eyes, so mysteriously bright and black. Looking at her, he has the sense that she could escape if she tried; she could twist out of the ropes, get away from the captain with his boastful fat hands— Yale University—and be off, smart enough now to swim clear of trap leads. She won’t be that hungry again.

But she just hangs there, blinking tears. Bigelow makes a move toward her. He steps forward to see her face more clearly, raises one hand, he’s not sure why—was he going to touch her?—when she swings out. Her body jackknifes toward him with an ominous, keen aim, and she barks a raw, searing cough that shows him long dirty teeth, tusks almost brown at their roots, ochery and luteous and horribly superimposed on the dark red tunnel of her throat. He’s shocked by the sight, the bark, the smell of her breath, fishy but somehow distinct from the stench all around him, and warm, so warm he can feel it hit his cheeks, his lips. Shocked enough to remain standing, not moving, one hand still out as if in greeting, as if, absurdly, he intended to shake her flipper.

A grotesque pendulum, the seal swings back and then returns to Bigelow, twisting and flexing her body so that her arc of travel is even farther—far enough that with one lunging thrust of her neck she seizes his raised hand in her mouth. He stands there, mute and frozen. It can’t be true, but when he thinks of it later it will seem to him that even the gulls stopped their cackling shrieks; the fish were motionless, not one flapping slap or slither; the water was calm, everything so quiet that Bigelow could hear the sound of the bone in his hand as it broke.

Then the captain stands up and calls him a
peshak mesaki
humm
fucking
cowmux,
or something close to it,
evil stinking
dog;
the fish jump and clap in the mud, the gulls screech, the water sucks and slaps, and the Swede takes Bigelow’s hatchet from his other, unbitten hand and whacks the seal neatly on the head so that she opens her mouth in surprise, she releases his broken hand.

“Fucking
cowmux,
” the Koniak says again; he shakes his head and spits.

Pain doesn’t stay in Bigelow’s hand; it travels through his arm and into his chest. He gasps, over and over, as if he’s been punched, hard, in the breastbone. As if he’s forgotten how to breathe, a sense of smothering worse than pain, worse than the nauseating warmth of blood flowing. Bigelow doesn’t look at his hand; instead he stares at the seal. She shakes her head, and more blood flies around, spattering the boat and the dock, the mud, the salmon, the openmouthed packers, and Bigelow, too, standing and staring.

Her eyes are bright, and then they’re not. She’s dying, and he watches as it happens, holding his hand to his chest, staining his coat, his shirt. What can have transpired in that moment?

Seagulls speaking in pink scrolls. A physicist in London weighs the dying as they die; his mother sent him the article, folded as always into fourths. A delicate and exact scale that measures the weight of the soul, or so the man claimed. Bigelow can’t remember the units.

The Swede raises Bigelow’s hatchet again, another blow just to be sure, but Bigelow steps between him and the dead seal. “No!” he yells.

The Koniak laughs.

“No!” Bigelow yells again. “No! No!”

The Koniak reaches for a shotgun lying beside his seat. He looks capable of calm, remorseless murder, and the Swede grabs Bigelow’s elbow, incidentally moving the hand so that Bigelow doubles over.

But the Koniak isn’t aiming at them. He shoots the tackle that’s holding up the dead seal, blows it to bits, and the carcass falls with a heavy splat into the muck below.

IT’S NOT the Engineering Commission doctor but his assistant who sets the bone and packs the bite with germicidal powder, stitches it closed. “Better take him up to the Line,” he says to the Swede, who’s walked Bigelow back into town. “And buy him some liquor. He’s going to need it.” He hands Bigelow a roll of gauze and a packet of the germicide. “Every day,” he says. “No soap or water. Keep it dry.”

“Liquor?” Bigelow asks.

He shrugs. “I’d give you morphine if I had it.”

Bigelow and the Swede head east along Front Street’s new concrete sidewalk, twelve feet wide and eight blocks long. Neither of them speaks; the Swede still carries Bigelow’s bloodied hatchet. The walk to the Line seems to take longer than usual, much longer, and storefronts look suddenly unfamiliar. Twice Bigelow stops and points with the unbandaged hand. “Was that there before?” he says.

The Swede looks where he points, at a flag snapping over the baker’s sign, a pyramid of cans in the window of a dry-goods store. “Don’t you live here?” he says.

Bigelow doesn’t answer.

They cross a field of stumps, straggle through a stream choked with weeds, knock at the door of the house where Violet works, but it’s not yet noon.

“What?” says the girl who answers. Bunch Grass or Six-Mile Mary, one of the girls whose names he doesn’t like to say. Unpainted, her face looks vulnerable, lips so pale Bigelow can’t tell where they leave off and the skin around them begins. It’s a face like his sister’s: smoothly oval, a tired crease beneath each wary eye.

“We’re not open.” The girl pulls what she’s wearing, a faded flowery wrapper, more tightly around her body. Her bare feet are white, the flesh under the nails mauve. She catches sight of the stained hatchet and steps back.

“A bottle,” says the Swede, shoving his boot in the crack before she can close the door. He points at Bigelow’s bandage, a red circle seeping through. “Make it a full one.”

She looks back and forth between them. “Oh all right,” she says finally, and she leaves them at the door.

Expecting a wait, Bigelow sits on the step with his hand in the air, and the Swede leans against the wall. But the girl comes back promptly, wearing a fur over her dressing gown, shoes without stockings. She’s brushed her hair for the transaction. “You’re that fella,” she says as she counts the money Bigelow gives her.

“Sorry?”

“I asked are you the one with the—” She finishes the sentence by gesturing toward the sky over the bluff.

“Oh,” he says. “Yes.”

And she nods, she shuts the door.

At the station, a goose lies dead on the path to his door, its neck broken. Ordinarily, Bigelow is grateful for food he doesn’t have to stalk, but today the bird is a problem. How can he dress a carcass with one hand? He hangs it under the eaves and goes inside. Probably, he’ll end up burying it.

A day passes, and another. Bigelow stares out his big windows, watches the wind push clouds from one frame to the next. Thoughts enter and leave his head the same way, shoved by some invisible current.

A year or so after his father died, his mother sat at her desk and tore up letters, one by one. She read them first, then held the page in her lap, staring at the wall, the same wall Bigelow stared at while doing his lessons, a faded mural of a pheasant hiding under a spray of grass. The bird looked furtive, almost frightened, as if hiding from a hunter or his dog. But, given her expression, his mother was not seeing the bird. Glancing at the letter once more, as if to be sure that she’d committed it to memory, she tore it once, twice, again, again: halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths. She burned the pieces, and the next day, Bigelow, doing his chores, cleared their ashes from the fireplace. A few fragments still bore legible words, his father’s angular hand. Bigelow squatted to read them.

Looking, it seems to him now, for a word such as
love,
or even
hate.
A word worth tearing and burning. But all he saw was
provided.

He has a fever, and the stuff in the bottle makes it worse, but he drinks it anyway, drinks it and goes clumsily about his chores, checking instruments and making notations with his left hand, slow, careful, large numbers. Up the hill to the wireless office and home to translate the cable, drawing his map with halting, inelegant lines, and getting it to the post office by two P.M.

Too tired to take the long way home, the route that avoids Front Street, he’s waylaid by Miriam, who comes running out of the store as he passes, carrying basket and notebook.
What happened?
she writes, her words hurried, less neat than usual.
We
heard there was an accident down at the dock.

In reply, Bigelow holds up his bandaged hand.

But what?
she presses.
What?

“Nothing,” he says, continuing slowly up the block, Miriam following. “Hurt myself, that’s all.”

She pauses to write, then runs to catch up, pushes the notebook into his good hand.
I have some things for you—food. And
I can help around the house. I’ll come home with you and do what
you say.

“There’s nothing,” he says, “I don’t want anything,” aware that he’s being ungracious, surly, and assuming she’ll excuse his bad temper, blame it on what’s under the bandage. Although, like an invalid or a prisoner, a creature whose temperament has been formed by dependence, Miriam possesses an uncanny ability to divine moods.

He shrugs her hand off his sleeve, and she drops back a few paces, walking behind instead of beside him. All the way to the station house, he can hear her steps, the basket brushing against her skirt as she walks.

She follows him through his door and sets the basket on his drafting table, heedless of the maps, the pens. He moves it to the floor and glowers at her, but she pays no attention, walking around, looking at the unwashed pans on the stove, the dirty plate on the table. She walks up the stairs to the room above, comes down so quickly that she can’t have bothered to look out the windows.

What do you do here all day?
she writes.

Bigelow sits, slumped and sighing, hand held above his head to alleviate the throb. “I’m on the bluff a lot,” he answers, finally. “With the kite.”

Curtains will make it much cozier,
she writes in reply.
What a
difference you’ll see when I move in!

She leaves him looking at the words and unpacks her basket, setting out crackers and sardines, cherries in their can.

“I’m not hungry,” he says before she can reprise their terrible dinner, and she nods. She leaves the food where she set it and puts her hands together, fingers and palms aligned, a gesture of patient supplication that makes him feel both guilty and angry.

“You tricked me,” he says, shoving the notebook back at her. “I want you to admit that you tricked me.”

She bends over a page.
I’ll change the dressing on your hand,
she writes.

“No,” he says, “I’m—I want you to go home. I’m tired.” He goes upstairs to avoid her face, her notebook, her welling eyes and praying hands, upstairs where he can make sure from his windows that she walks back to town. It isn’t fair, he tells himself, watching as she stops and turns to look back at his station. He has no tangible reason to assume a conspiracy between Miriam and her father. Bigelow tries to see the small figure on the road as deserving of sympathy, if not love. She’s passionate, anyway. If he married her he’d have sex every night, maybe sometimes in the morning. If he married her he could have sex when—well, whenever.

He takes a drink before removing the splint to change the dressing, braces himself for what’s under the bandage—purple and blue and green and even black, the stitched-up bite a mere dimple in the oozing mess. The wound is infected and the hand is so fat that the sutures look like the thread restraining a mattress button. His fingers are useless, swollen shiny and stiff.

It hurts, even with bootleg it hurts, but not more than the rest of him. Oddly, he aches all over, and he keeps touching himself to check this, his arms, his thighs and shoulders and neck. Everything except his cock. He must be sick, he thinks, because he can’t imagine masturbating. Instead he sits, slumped before his big windows, staring at the town, the creek bed.

Almost glimpsing a map of his own life. Invisible, or nearly so. Like wind. Like weather that he must capture and record. But how? It’s so fleeting, the picture, so vast and impossible to grasp, to fix in place. Like waking from a dream: for a moment it lies before him, whole, every aspect glittering with significance. Then he leans forward, aching, stiff, and great chunks of it fall away and are lost; there’s nothing, nothing to hold, nothing to keep with him.

PART THREE

SEPTEMBER. Already the train station doesn’t look so raw, so new and incidental. Boots have taken the edge off the steps leading to the ticket booth. Shuffling, scuffing, stamping, Alaskans in boots, kicking against the cold. There’s one now, pack on his back, breathing fog against the ticket window. He turns his head to sneeze and Bigelow recognizes the man with the Stetson, except the Stetson is gone, replaced by what looks like a helmet of fur.

Miriam,
Bigelow was rehearsing silently,
Miriam, I can’t marry
you, I won’t marry you, I’m unable to marry, unwilling to marry. I
can’t stand curtains or cans of sardines, I—I don’t love you. Mr.
Getz, I apologize for whatever advantage I may have taken, but,
frankly, circumstances were misleading and unconsummated. They
were . . . they were . . .
They were what?

Bigelow pats the breast of his coat, the interior pocket where he carries readings to and from the wireless office, a nervous gesture, like checking a watch fob or billfold. He flexes and straightens his fingers, testing them, a habit since the splint was removed. “Healed up all right,” the doctor said, examining the hand, turning it from one side to the other. “Good thing we had that germicide. Probably never be as strong as it was. Or as limber.” And Bigelow will have scars forever, even if they aren’t always so purple and puckered.

“Hey,” the man calls from the ticket window. “Hello!” Bigelow stops walking. “I almost paid a call on you,” the man says. “I want to tell you something.”

The man turns back to the window to accept change and a scrap of paper, a ticket or a receipt; he scrutinizes it, then points at something and passes it back under the pane of glass. Bigelow, still flexing and straightening his fingers, waits. It’s a cold day for September, cold and unusually clear. He can see the twin masts of the wireless station, often lost in fog from this distance. Above, birds are flying—another season of dark and cold, inexorable, impossible. Every day seven minutes shorter than the one preceding. Every night seven minutes longer. How will he endure it again, then again? His breath pressed from his lungs, his soul whittled down like a soap carving.

Maybe he could marry Miriam for the winter, see how it goes. He imagines her hot skin next to his, a comfort immediately compromised by the idea of her notebook insinuating itself among his papers.

“I’m going away,” the man announces, walking toward Bigelow. “I have an interest in a . . .” He stops to come up with the right word. “A concern down by Girdwood,” he finishes.

“What did you want to tell me?”

“Cold by Girdwood,” the man says. “What do you think of my hat?” he asks, smiling.

“Warm?” Bigelow intends a statement, but the word lilts into a question.

“Yes, it is. It is.” The man smiles. He wags his eyebrows at Bigelow and the hat bumps up and down with them. He drops his pack and does a little bouncing jig on the stairs, slipping then recovering his balance. He bows deeply, and the hat stays put. “Fits snug,” he says. “As you see.”

Bigelow nods.

“Made for me. Custom-made. Clever seamstress, she measured my head with a string. All around.” The man removes the hat, and with his finger draws a line from the center of his forehead to his temple and on around the back of his skull, then another over the top of his head from ear to ear. “Never seen a person so economical with a needle. Especially with skins. Skins are hard to sew.”

The man holds the hat out to Bigelow, who reaches forward, but then, as Bigelow’s fingers touch the fur, the man takes it back. “Otter,” he says, and he sits down on the step next to his pack. He turns the hat in his hands. “Otter is expensive. But I didn’t have to pay for this.”

The sun’s angled glare, the colorless cold sky, the blank silver badge of the ticket window, the gleam of tracks leading away from the town, the sound of a shovel blade against concrete, ringing brightly—all these familiar things conspire to unnerve Bigelow. He feels hairs rise on his arms, his neck.

The man squints up at Bigelow. “I was going to come to your house,” he says. “I was going to pay you a visit to tell you about my hat. But then . . .”

“What?” Bigelow says when the man trails off teasingly. And he says the word again. “What?”

The needle. The fur. The accurate needle darting through the fur. He feels his heart, like an engine, turn over and catch.

“When?” he says, sitting down next to the man. “How long?” Behind them, the straight tracks shine like blades, like knives laid in the earth. The man stretches his boots out in front of him, and they both consider the sight.

“A week,” the man says. “Not even.”

“Is she . . . She’s . . .”

“She’s alone. Came back alone.” The man answers the question Bigelow cannot ask. Too awful to hear any other answer.
How will I kill him?
he was already thinking of the husband, the boyfriend, whoever he might be.

From his pocket the man produces a flattened pouch of tobacco. On his thigh he rolls a small cigarette, wastes eight matches to get it lit. He holds the cigarette like a woman does, between his first and middle fingers, and Bigelow watches the smoke disappear into the colorless air.

“Thought you’d know right off,” the man says, hat in one hand, cigarette in the other. “Smell her.” He laughs. “I thought for sure someone would tell you. Some barber or”—he pauses— “shopkeeper. But you, I guess you don’t see many people. Talk to them. You don’t get out. Just back and forth to the wireless.” He waves his finger up and down the empty street.

“I’m late,” Bigelow says. “I’m late now.” But he doesn’t get up from the steps. Behind them, the ticket seller’s silhouette moves on the other side of the frost-rimed glass, back and forth inside the booth, in a kind of regular rhythm. From some angles the visor is invisible, and he looks like a man, from others he is a stooped predator.

“She’s . . .” Bigelow says. “She’s . . .” he tries again.

“Back in the same house. Her house.” The man holds the otter hat up before his face, thumbs inside the crown, fingers out. He squeezes it as if to adjust its shape, pressing the sides together, then sets it on his head.

“Why?” Bigelow swallows, ducking his head at the hat.
Mine,
he thinks.
My hat.

“Oh, because I turned the house back over to her without any fuss. I was leaving anyway. Had my plans. Girdwood. The wind by Girdwood is intense. Run a block and your lungs freeze. Not that there is a block.” He stands and Bigelow stands, too.

“What I do is, I get to Girdwood and there’s a house for me. House and job both. Job is trackwalking. Eight miles out and eight miles back, every day. Make sure it’s not obstructed by anything. Snow. Tree. Carcass.”

“Trackwalker,” Bigelow says.

The man nods.

“I saw the notice up at the post office. Pays well.”

“On account of the deaths,” the man says. “For some reason, along that stretch, two walkers, one right after the other, went to sleep in the wrong spot.”

Bigelow nods, trying to imagine the strangeness of such work, the loneliness to which some people were immune. Except, maybe, they weren’t. Otherwise, why lie down in the wrong spot?

“So when she came back,” the man continues, “I pulled my things together, and she—she didn’t say, so I’m talking for her here—she had some pelts and she had a string and it took her, I don’t know, less than the time it took me to pack up.” He shook his head. “Two deep breaths, three—that’s all it takes for them to freeze.”

The man takes the ticket from his pocket, considers it, and then shows it to Bigelow. “Another two hours. Enough time to get to the Line and back for a drink.”

“Oh,” Bigelow says. “No. No thank you.”

The man squints at him. “I wasn’t talking about you,” he says. “I was talking about myself.”

Bigelow says nothing. He’s embarrassed, but he manages to not look away.

“Lucky, your coming along just then. Well, not luck—” He laughs. “I guess I know your habits well enough to guess when you might come along. But it saves me a walk. Because I couldn’t leave not knowing that you knew.

“And,” he says, “I wanted to see your face.”

BACK FROM THE WIRELESS OFFICE, the first thing Bigelow does is look in the mirror. How has it changed him, this information? Is her return a secret, or is it written on him for everyone to see? The reflection stares back, his own features so strange to him that he reaches out, touches the glass.

Upstairs, in his observation room, he leans into the window facing the town, the grid of plots, the blocks of houses. To keep the binoculars from shaking, he has to prop them on an upturned box.

The house, exactly like its neighbors, is easy to find. Easy for him. Were the whole of Anchorage turned upside down, shaken, and poured out, houses tumbling like hundreds of dice from a cup, still he’d be able to find that house. Her house. He holds it in the magnified circle, watches as its black window is suddenly lit silver, like an eye opening.

A cloud has moved from before the sun.

HE RISES AT SIX to read his instruments, to fill a page of his log with numbers. Breakfast: coffee and a slice of bread sopped with molasses. He pushes aside his plate to compose the morning cable; he carries the page to the cable office, hands it to the operator even as the operator is handing him the one from Washington. “Hello,” he says, or “Good morning.”

“Thank you,” Bigelow replies, and he carries it home.

He translates it, he makes his map, he eats his lunch, then he walks back the way he came. He hangs his map on the wall of the post office.

“Afternoon.”

“Afternoon.”

How is it that no one notices?

For surely he must seem vacant, perfunctory. Each day he does a hundred things without any consciousness of them. The pen in his hand moves over the page without his notice, let alone his bidding.

She. She.

He thinks the word over and over, a small word—three letters!—like a key turning in a lock. Inside himself he feels doors spring open.

HE WALKS. He walks, walks, walks. Up the bluff, down the bluff. To the water’s edge.

Where he finds each rock glazed with ice, the sand a flat hard expanse, black and dully gleaming, like wet macadam. Wind whips off the water, and stinging needles of ice take flight, mortifying whatever flesh is left exposed. At his feet, sea foam is frozen into patterns of overlapping waves.

Not yet winter, but cold enough that the surf is slowed and slurred by ice. Waves push in, too thick to curl, too heavy to break. Blue-white and luminous with their burden of ice crystals, they make a drunken, blurred, and hushing sound as they approach over the beach. With his clumsy thick mittens Bigelow digs stones out of the sand and drops them into the slush, testing it.

When?
he asks himself.

SHE HAS A PATTERN. As surely as he comes and goes at a particular hour, so does she.

After eleven, but before noon, she comes out the door, she turns right on the street, she walks, it takes her nine minutes, to the center of town, where she does a few errands: Getz’s (so Getz knows, he knows), and from Getz’s several times to a building five doors up, an undertaker’s and a dentist’s office, and she can’t keep returning to an undertaker, so it must be the dentist she visits. Bigelow peers through the office window; he lets himself in. The dentist, a mild man with spectacles, sets down the cup from which he was drinking.

“Can I help you?” he asks.

Bigelow shakes his head.

“Toothache?” The dentist stands to get to a pocket in his vest. He pulls out a watch. “I have an appointment at three, but I can take a quick look.”

Bigelow stares at him. Hard to imagine her in the tilting chair, submitting to the attentions of this man with his potbelly and foot-pedal drill. Bigelow considers knocking him down, leaves before he does anything stupid.

Her teeth: small, square, and evenly spaced, except for the one lower incisor turned, perhaps as much as ten degrees out of alignment. When she let him, he’d run his tongue along the surface of her teeth, eyes closed, bumping over the one crooked one, his tongue hesitating, exploring. Mostly, though, she didn’t put up with that kind of thing.

Watching her through the binoculars, he has the impression that the particular errand is of less importance than the outing itself. That she must leave and come back as a kind of ritual. For what could she need every day from town? Nothing except a glimpse of the main street, a chance to walk among the people for a moment. He remembers clearly, so clearly the first time, the finger ascending. Tea, tobacco, toffee, paregoric.

Of course, it’s hard to determine much of anything from his vantage. He only knows it’s the right woman because he knows the block, the house. She herself—even as revealed by a power of eighty—she is no more than a moving dot, her head indistinguishable from her torso, itself blending into her legs. Except that he can see her as if she were standing in his room before him. The three lines on her chin, the eyelashes without a curl, straight as straight. He makes her naked—and why not? She is his, this vision—the spiral navel, the hair in the fold under her arm, the breasts, smallish and pointed, the bowed legs and smooth skin. But these are for him and no one else. Back on the street, the tiny enigmatic figure travels toward Front Street, bundled beyond recognition, cloaked to all eyes but his own.

AS SOON AS HE’S SURE, as soon as he’s watched every day for a week (assuming on those two days that he can’t see through his binoculars, days of fog thick enough to obliterate the town, the houses, that she conforms to her pattern, she goes out before noon and stays out for at least an hour), he visits her house. Twelve noon exactly, and he’ll stay only five minutes; he promises himself that he won’t linger.

Impossible to sneak up on the place now that it’s no longer on the outskirts—where is fog when he needs it? and yet it makes him nervous, the indeterminate halo it casts around the sun; he sacrifices speed for nonchalance, trying to appear as if meandering down side streets while examining an old cable receipt in his hands. But there’s no one around. He darts up to the door unnecessarily fast; the hinge gives way so easily that he stumbles, he falls to his knees inside.