The Seal Wife (6 page)

Bigelow watches the First Annual Sled Dog Parade. Hands shoved in his pockets, he counts forty-two teams. Even the dogs look intoxicated, all pant and slobber, snapping at one another’s red, white, and blue ribbons, holding up their procession to drop back on their haunches and howl at the trombone. Abruptly, a bandstand has replaced a grove of unpulled stumps, such overnight substitutions feasible when days are twenty hours long. Bigelow wonders if all the patriotic fervor isn’t a lingering effect of the solstice, just ten days past, or maybe it’s that Alaska is only a territory and not a state, her every citizen necessarily, and nostalgically, far from home.

Black flies and mosquitoes are thick; citronella oil does nothing to discourage them. The crowd from the miners-versus-railroad baseball game washes around him, slapping at bugs, laughing and jostling and hurrying on to the next amusement, a ladies’ nail-driving contest, planks set up on barrels and saw-horses in front of Getz’s store.

Bigelow follows the crowd. At least he can get a look at a girl. “Speed and accuracy. Speed and accuracy. Only ten cents.” Getz stands on a box, accepting dimes from whoever cares to try: the pastor’s wife and, judging from their bright lips and tight clothes, two girls from the Line, a dozen big-armed laundresses, along with the woman who sells water from a cart.

“Skill, not luck. Ten cents to prove yourself,” Getz says, and the schoolteacher steps forward.

“Hey,” Bigelow calls out, and he waves. She’s got bad skin, but her hair is nice, her smile is pretty. She’s talked to him at Getz’s store. She waves back.

“What’s the prize?” Bigelow asks.

“The prize?” Getz licks his front teeth, and for a moment Bigelow can see the bluish underside of his tongue, then it’s gone. “Winning’s the prize,” he says.

The women stand on either side of the planks provided. Twenty-three of them, because twenty-three is how many hammers Getz has to lend. Bigelow watches the pastor’s wife fill her mouth with nails, line them up like sewing pins between her lips.

“Are you ready, ladies?” Getz asks, and he asks again, “Ladies, are you ready?” There’s a final jostle for elbow room as he begins to count backward from ten. “. . . nine . . . eight . . .” Counting slowly, because, as he knows, the men aren’t finished laying bets, they’ve hardly begun. “Speed and accuracy,” Getz interjects, drawing the words out,
speeeed and
“...se - ven . . . six . . .”

Bigelow pushes his way through the crowd of men laying money on a barrel. “A dollar on the schoolteacher,” he says, loudly enough that she can hear. Immediately he’s pushed aside by a notably well-dressed man, one of the town’s undertakers. “Ten dollars on that one,” the undertaker says, pointing to the prettier prostitute, and he counts the bet out with clean hands.

The men laugh and catcall; they tip flasks to their mouths. But the women, they’re hot and nervous, sober and determined. Their hair curls in wet tendrils, and dark, solemn stains spread under their arms. Clenched in the hot crowd of bodies, Bigelow has an erection.

“ Three . . . two-o-o-o . . .”

“One!” Funny what you can, and can’t, tell by looking at a woman. The pastor’s wife with her tidy row of nails waiting between pursed lips—she can’t hit the head of one to save her life. The prostitutes swing in perfect time; their arms rise and fall and strike, five hits to sink a nail completely, then on to the next, a dead heat between them and the sounds of their hammers converge into one, at least Bigelow thinks they do. The noise of twenty-three hammers makes strange, confusing music, rows of arms pumping like legs in a stage revue, an under-rehearsed cancan, moments of synchronicity giving way to scattered shots and bruised cries. Two thumbs squashed, then a third and a fourth, their owners disqualified. The laundresses are strong but slow; too often they stop to wipe wet palms on their skirts. One of the prostitutes thinks she’s finished but comes up three nails short, complaining to Getz; and the winner is either the schoolteacher or the other, prettier whore.

The way the schoolteacher can hit nails is almost unseemly, certainly unladylike; all of her body gathers into the motion, and her hammer snaps through the swarming air, stings the nail heads, and claps echoes off the opposite storefront; just three more blows, faster, faster, faster: a tie, and an immediate brawl among the gamblers.

Getz laughs as the prostitute is lifted out of the fray and into the arms of the undertaker. She kisses him with her tongue, in public, in daylight. Bigelow tries to get close to the schoolteacher, a homely girl with a throng of admirers. “Can I buy you dinner?” he says, too late. A man with a weedy bunch of daisies has her by the elbow.

Bigelow’s testicles ache as he watches them walk off, a complicated ache, both disappointment and relief.

AUGUST. The air is filled with migrating birds, some so high they look like handfuls of pepper tossed into the wind, others low enough that their cries deafen him. Geese fly at the top floor’s big windows, mistaking reflected sky for the real thing. Those that are only stunned fall to the ground, where they lie on their sides paddling their webbed feet with helpless, convulsive jerks. Once upright, they flap and shake their heads and stumble in circles before heading down to the water to take off and rejoin their flock. Others break their necks and die. Without raising his gun, Bigelow has a surplus of game to trade in town for flour, salt, sugar, tea.

Not that he is any good at cooking. Whatever he touches turns out tough and tasteless. He doesn’t have the knack of his stove, which burns the crusts of loaves and leaves the middles raw and gray. Sitting alone, chewing, his mind wanders from the book in his lap. Unbidden, the smooth skin of her arms, the spiral of her navel, the enigmatic lines on her chin: all of these return to him. He puts down his fork and rubs the pad of his thumb against those of his fingers, remembering the feel of one of her coarse hairs between them.

Without the Aleut—and without the promise of her, the excitement of a glimpse that characterized his first months in town—he finds himself prey to anxieties about his situation, worrying about money and food and especially about the coming winter, daylight whose brevity he will be forced to note in one of his logs. Darkness that will not, this time, be relieved by her company, the lamp that cast their shadows on the wall behind the bed.

To supplement his government stipend, he is teaching himself to set wire snares and to skin the animals he catches. If he can master these skills, they will guarantee a subsistence. But he has limited luck with the snares, and each time he goes to buy a trap he ends up putting it back on the shelf. Bigger prey brings higher prices, and a bounty has been set on wolves; still, he is unable to imagine the blow required to finish off a trapped animal without marring its pelt.

“Right here,” Getz tells him, pointing to the spot where his own eyebrows meet. “With the butt of your rifle.”

Walking through the town, making his errands last as long as possible, he notices as if for the first time how few women there are in Anchorage. Nearly three thousand men and, according to a pool hall tally, 486 females, a few of whom are seamstresses and laundresses and cooks, as well as a nurse, a singer, the schoolteacher, and the missionary’s wife—his second, as one has already fled south from the rigors of high latitude. The rest are waitresses or prostitutes or natives or, frequently, a combination thereof.

To address the problem of desire, to mark the end of a day, to fall asleep, Bigelow does as he used to do—he masturbates—but having grown dependent on the woman’s company, physical release now comes at psychic cost: the act only makes his loneliness more acute. It makes him feel pathetic, as it didn’t used to do. He’s resisted spending his limited money on prostitutes, put off by the peculiar names of the women in the parlor of the whorehouses he tries not to visit: Moosehide Annie, Bunch Grass, Nellie the Pig. He doesn’t like the forthright negotiation that precedes the encounter. This is hypocritical, perhaps; he tells himself that in one sense the Aleut woman traded her favors for the meat he brought, and what is the difference between that and money? Didn’t he impose himself on her just as surely as he will impose himself on Violet, the girl he chooses not for her face or figure but for her name—the only one he can say out loud without embarrassment.

He follows her up the stairs and sits on her bed, feeling oddly listless as she makes a performance of removing her blouse and stockings.

“Do you like them on or off?” she says, gesturing at her garters, and he shrugs, struck silent in the face of her loquacity, as if it is he now who must be mute. But Violet goes on, she talks about the telephone exchange the town is planning, about her sister in Vancouver who works a switchboard, about her other sister who is blind in one eye. What does he think will happen to the new sewers when it freezes, she wants to know, and isn’t it a shame that the crop that does so well here is cabbage? What’s the use of a cabbage that weighs seventy pounds? Does he like coleslaw?

All the while she talks she is slipping her hand between the buttons of his shirt and caressing the back of his neck. Is this what it was like for the Aleut woman as he went on and on about water tables and rain gauges and broken anemometers? At least, he thinks, she didn’t understand him.

The girl’s words pelt Bigelow like a fine hail of irritations, and he considers asking her to stop talking, but seeing the anxiety his silence inspires and how earnest she looks in her attempts to seduce him, he says nothing and instead closes his eyes. He’s young enough that arousal doesn’t require expertise, and it’s over well within the half hour allotted. He sits up to watch her gather her clothes and dress. Between stockings, she opens her mouth but, perhaps finally oppressed by his refusal to converse, closes it without saying anything. If he had money to spare he would tip her extravagantly enough that she couldn’t interpret his silence as disappointment, but as it is he just leaves, his hand still in his pocket, folding and unfolding the bills that remain.

Back at the station, he records the pressure, which has fallen a tenth of an inch, from 29.90 to 29.80, and the temperatures, earth 59, air 53. He looks up from the louvered shed and sees a man standing on the lip of the creek, appearing, in the distance, as tiny as a comma on a page. So small that Bigelow is struck, suddenly, by the enormous distances he has traveled. How far he is from mother and sister in St. Louis. From Chicago. Seattle. How is it that he’s never considered this before?

By the time he closes his log and returns it to its shelf, night is pressing on the windows. When he lights a lamp, the panes show him his solitary reflection as it moves from stove to table and back to stove. He has no appetite, and no energy, either, so he adds four teaspoons of sugar to a tin mug of tea before sitting to work at his drafting table. He begins drawing but is distracted by a sensation—not pain exactly—at the tip of his penis, and the accompanying notion that, despite having stopped at a bathhouse afterward, already a disease is taking hold. He shifts in his chair, and the feeling fades, but not the anxiety. It isn’t cold enough to require gloves, but his fingers behave as if they are numb. Twice he drops his pen, and the second time it spatters and ruins his map.

In bed, he yawns and yawns, more deeply each time but without satisfaction. And when at last he falls asleep, it is to the memory of watching her sewing his furs, the needle sharp and glinting in her fingers, slipping in and out, darting among the luster of the dark hairs.

HE DIDN’T CRY when his father died.

“Say good-bye,” his mother told him, and he followed her into the bedroom. The shades were drawn, but the sun found its way through the cracks.

“Why is that there?” he asked, pointing to the white cloth tied under his father’s jaw and over the top of his head.

“To keep his mouth from . . .” She didn’t finish.

“From what?” he asked.

“Opening.”

His mother sent him to his grandmother’s. The idea was that he would stay there for as long as it took his mother to turn their home into a boardinghouse. Otherwise, where would the money come from? It was a big enough house, five stories, with his father’s law office on the street level, a parlor and kitchen above, and bedrooms on up. By the time she finished with it, she said, the three of them—Bigelow, his mother and sister—would live in what had been the law office; all the rest would be boarders. But in the meantime he had to stay with his grandmother.

“Why doesn’t she have to go?” he asked, referring to his sister.

“Because I need her.”

What about me?
he thought.

She packed his trousers and shirts into a valise and told him to be a help to his grandmother. He was to do whatever his grandmother said.

The train from St. Louis to Joplin took four hours, including stops. He had two slices of bread with butter spread between them, and his mother bought him a packet of sugared almonds and a bottle of ginger beer from a man on the platform. He was eleven years old, but when the woman sitting across from him in the compartment asked, he lied and said he was thirteen.

He still thinks of that lie, remembers it with shame, dishonesty not being among his usual childish failings. It must have been that thirteen represented something to him, safety, the safety of distance. Why, at thirteen, he’d be two years past all this trouble. At thirteen, he might understand what had happened to him, to all of them, his mother, his sister, himself.

“You don’t look thirteen,” the woman said.

“Well,” Bigelow adjusted the lie. “I will be next month.”

The train pulled out with a squeal and a jerk, and the bread in its wax paper slipped onto the floor. The woman picked it up.

“I’m going there because my father died.” Bigelow tried out the information, testing its power. Would it silence her? It did, and it got him the window seat as well, so he spent the rest of the trip looking out at the fields, the occasional shed or stream or horse. Averting his dry eyes from her gaze.