The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [18]
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