The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [34]
The two of them stepped around each other, as if each were alone in her house.
THE USUAL DISRUPTIONS get him nowhere; he has to wait for Hell’s Hinges, the scene in which the church is burned, the drunken minister killed. Then a real riot delivers Bigelow into touching distance of the singer. It’s high summer, days long enough that eight o’clock shows end like matinees, audiences dismissed into the light, blinking and disoriented. And the town is full of alcohol, railroad workers with overtime wages to spend in brothels open twenty hours a day.
Temperance and arson and firearms, Clara Williams as the minister’s sister, Louise Glaum as the whore—to bleary, libidinous, overstimulated and undersatisfied eyes, a prostitute projected onto a grimy bedsheet is more than enough incentive for bench-mates to shove and curse; and on the one night that the projector doesn’t catch the film on fire, a pipe-smoking prospector in the front row leans forward and does the job instead. Human conflagration follows that of celluloid. One minute Bigelow is embellishing a lurid scene with details inspired by his own romantic career; the next his nose has been bloodied by a passing elbow; and when he scrambles forward out of the way, jumping over one bench and then another and quickly ducking and turning his head to avoid further blows, a spot of his blood lands on the voice’s pale blue shirtwaist, just below the swelling of her right breast.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
To see where he is pointing, she puts her hand to her breast, lifts and flattens it, a gesture so pretty and awkward, so artless, that he almost falls down with desire.
“Here,” he offers, and when she doesn’t lift her head he says it again: “Here.” He holds out his handkerchief—clean, folded, never used but carried for just such an occasion, the kind he’s replayed a thousand times in his fantasies, but better, for who could conjure an explosive nosebleed?
But she doesn’t take it, she pushes it away without raising her eyes.
“Go on,” he says. “It’s clean.”
She glances at him, then looks down again; she puts her hand under his and raises the handkerchief to his bloodied face.
He is rehearsing an introduction—I’m sorry for . . . I’m sorry to have . . . what? unwittingly besmirched? No.
Perhaps he should offer to have her blouse laundered. Or is that too forward, implying as it does, taking it off? Why does she persist in staring at her feet? Shyness? Fear of blood? Should he offer to escort her outside? The projectionist steps between them, his equipment hurriedly strapped into its wheelbarrow.
“Let’s go!” he says. “What’re you waiting for—” But before he can add “Christmas,” Bigelow takes the bloody handkerchief from his face.
“We were just leaving,” he says.
The projectionist snorts. “Oh, you were,” he says, and he clamps his hand on the singer’s elbow and pulls her out of the tent, one hand on the wheelbarrow, the other on the silent voice, who trips along by his side, still covering the bloodstain as if she were hiding a wound.
“Wait!” Bigelow says, and the voice looks up. Her eyes meet his just long enough to offer hope.
IN THE STATION HOUSE, having run the black pennant and white square up the flagpole, indicating fair weather with temperatures higher than the preceding day, Bigelow watches through his big windows as the pole lists eastward, almost imperceivably at first, then faster, maybe five degrees in as many seconds. It doesn’t hit the ground so much as recline there, his forecast spreading gently over the mud.
Impossible to dig a hole deep enough to compensate for deep midsummer thaws. Maybe he can shore it up. Water squelches up around Bigelow’s boots as he walks outside. In a few days, each foot-shaped puddle will teem with mosquito larvae, tiny black fish-shaped things. The summer he arrived he collected some from a ditch, held the glass of swarming water to the light and peered through with a magnifier. Like commas or tadpoles or sperm. Except they don’t