The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [17]
She chinked between the shrinking, warped boards of the house with scraps of leather, moss, paper—whatever came to hand—and in her absence these have fallen out and cracks have appeared, admitting air, light. He tries to restuff them, but the dried moss crumbles at his touch, the bits of leather and paper slip straight through and outside, then blow away. He presses his eye to the crack, watching the wind tease them over the packed dirt.
JULY 4, the town explodes, bunting and baseball and smuggled bottles of beer. Despite the fact that the Engineering Commission has designated the town as dry—there are no legal intoxicants in Anchorage, and anyone caught selling contraband beer or whiskey within the town site will forfeit his or her claim to a plot of land—alcohol flows through its streets from the Line, as the straggling track of whorehouses southeast of the site is called. The madams use their connections to buy beer by the crate straight off the dock, packed in boxes labeled BEANS or MOLASSES or LAUNDRY SOAP; and stills abound in the uncut woods. Women who sell their favors sell bootleg, too, either as an aphrodisiac to be consumed on the premises, or as a nightcap, to carry home in a hair-oil bottle.
Thieving and brawling among the workers hold the attention of a police force of two, without either officer troubling himself to cross Ninth Street to begin arresting prostitutes; and anyway, where would he put them? There’s no jail, just a dugout under the cabin that serves as a police station. How would it look if a pair of bachelor officers were to cram a dozen or more fancy ladies into that muddy hole? So whoever wants to drink, drinks openly, especially on a summer holiday.
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