The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [39]
“She make a living that way?” Bigelow asks.
“Yuh.” The Russian nods, laughing hard enough now that his eyes water. Bigelow can’t stop, either. His sides ache, he can hardly breathe; and the two of them go on. Gasping, they topple from the stumps.
“I . . .” Bigelow says, on the ground. He tries again. “I . . .”
“What?” the Russian says.
But Bigelow just shakes his head.
“What?”
“I danced inside . . .” He doesn’t finish. Her, he was going to say before he realized that he couldn’t make him—her husband— understand.
Lying on his back, the Russian nods gravely. “No place in Alaska,” he says, “for indoor dances.” And he sighs, his big chest rises and falls. “They’ll build one someday,” he offers, his accent thickened by drink. Zumday. “A ballroom.”
Sobered by the idea, they lie there on their backs, silent, looking at sky between treetops.
When the band finally packs it in, the two of them are sleeping, the girl long gone, the bootlegger gone, too. All around them are bodies, faceup, facedown, snoring, hiccuping.
“Hey,” someone says, nudging Bigelow with his boot, and Bigelow gets to his feet. He walks stiffly down the hill.
The boat goes back, pitching, Bigelow cold and hungry, looking for light on the water.
“LOOK.” Getz reaches into the till and slaps two nickels down on the counter. “Here you are. The price of two shows. The price of admission to two moving pictures without accompaniment. Without the accompaniment that ain’t part of the price of admission but never mind take the damn money and get the hell out. I’m sick of you.” He picks the coins up and then slaps them down again, and Bigelow pushes them back.
“I don’t want that,” he says.
“What do you want then? What. Do. You. Want.”
“I want,” Bigelow says, shaking his head as if trying to dislodge what won’t come out of his mouth. “I want.”
Of all the men in Anchorage, of all the two thousand railroad workers, the hundreds of prospectors, the countless trappers, the mushers, the bakers, the crooked lawyers and half-trained doctors, the stevedores and the stationers, the barbers, the undertakers, the two telegraph operators, how can it be that the father of the voice is the same pinched and leering shopkeeper who watched Bigelow watch the Aleut woman? Who made, each time Bigelow came into his store for kerosene or a box of stale biscuits, a pungently salacious crack about sealskin bloomers or tattooed titties. But there you are. Getz owns the tent, he pays the projectionist, he orders the pictures and picks up the reels from the post office, and he owns the singer. He is the singer’s father.
“I want,” Bigelow says again.
He’s been in the store three times, he’s bought a peach of rude proportion, so ripe that its skin split under his lip and juice ran down his wrist and into his sleeve. He chatted solicitously with Getz as he handed him the penny, and then left without asking the question he’s rehearsed. But he did talk about weather. “You heard,” Bigelow said, “what happened last week? The zeppelins?” A fleet of thirteen blown off course by winds the Germans didn’t anticipate, navigators blinded by fog, they were shot down over France.
Getz raised his eyebrows, daring him to continue. “There’s no modern war without forecasting,” Bigelow said, and he told Getz about the thirsty foot soldiers of Marcus Aurelius saved by a thunderstorm that terrorized the German tribes, securing Roman victory. About the sinking of the armada, not by the British but by storms off the coast of Scotland. Napoléon’s death march across Russia. England’s doomed attempt on the Dardanelles. Bigelow has a whole lecture on weather and military strategy and couldn’t prevent himself from giving it to Getz.
Between visits, he walked up and down Front Street, how many times he couldn’t say, too distracted to pretend an errand. And now he’s come back in and can’t say a thing.
“You want what?” Getz says.
“I want to know, is the, was the wom—the singer in the tent . . .”
He never uses the word daughter, never acknowledges what he’s checked and rechecked with