The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [50]
“Mmmm?” Miriam says, kneeling on the bed. “Mmmm?” She leans forward to grasp his hand, pulls until he climbs on the mattress, unbuttons his shirt while he pulls down his trousers.
The feel of her skin against his, its ardent, adamant heat, surprises him. Here he is, he tells himself, a young man under a naked woman, and the woman has soft, deft hands, she uses both of them to rouse him. Bigelow draws a deep breath and lets it out slowly through his nose, wills himself to enjoy the attentions of Miriam, who is, if nothing else, earnest in her attentions. He’s almost hard when he hears the noise of a latch downstairs.
Bigelow sits up. “Clothes!” he says. “Quick!” He looks and feels around for his trousers. Where can they be in a room so small? He slides off the mattress, gropes on the floor. The stairs begin to creak, and he gives up on the trousers and tries to claw the linens from the bed, but Miriam is sitting on them, motionless, her arms at her sides, not a heavy woman but heavy enough to prevent Bigelow from yanking a blanket out from under her.
When Getz steps into the room, dinner candle in hand, Bigelow has nothing with which to cover himself, nothing except his hands.
“Well,” Getz says. “Ain’t this a picture.” The candle’s flame leaps up, as if in shocked agreement, and Getz holds its light higher, letting it shine into every corner of the little room, showing Bigelow where his clothes have fallen, like drowned limbs clutching a raft, half on and half off the side of the mattress. To retrieve them, he has to expose his buttocks to Getz’s eyes, the candle’s hot flame.
“Put your clothes on, Mimi,” Getz says, and Miriam slips like liquid down the foot of the bed, steps into the waiting circle of her petticoat, and pulls it up to her armpits. She’s still buttoning her blue dress, buttoning it wrong, then unbuttoning and trying again, when Bigelow stands up from tying his bootlace.
Getz escorts him down the stairs with a hand squeezing his elbow, the same as he did on the afternoon he revealed that his daughter had been married before. He sets the candle on the counter and slowly, like a man unleashing an inadequately trained dog, releases Bigelow’s elbow. “You’ll make this right,” he says. “I’m telling you now, you’ll make it right.”
He looks Bigelow up and down. “You think you’re something in this town. Think people like you. That contraption on a string.” He pulls the cash box out from under the counter, opens it as if to see whether any money is missing, as if Bigelow might be a thief as well as a seducer. “I have friends here. They’ll back me up. You’ll do right by my daughter.” He snaps the box shut and leans forward, his face close to Bigelow’s.
“She’s yours now. Now that you’ve took her, she’s yours. And you’ll stand up in front of this town and say so. Say so the proper way.”
THIRTY-NINE CENTS AN HOUR. The scow docks at sunup and its captain, a rich Koniak who works for the Alaska Commercial Company, cuts the engine and just sits while his crew unloads. Sometimes he smokes. He’s all decked out in cowboy gear—hat, leather vest, pointy boots, and incongruous chaps— smug and fat and bad-tempered. He wears a signet ring on the smallest finger of his right hand, and one morning Bigelow asks to see it. YALE UNIVERSITY, it reads.
The boat is so loaded with salmon that it comes in low, scraping over the dock’s gridiron, devised to prevent small craft from sinking into the mud when the tide recedes. Larger ships can’t approach Anchorage, not yet, without a deepwater port. They wait in the inlet, disgorging passengers and freight onto lighters that go back and forth among the dinghies and fishing vessels, the increasingly rare sight of natives in their skin boats.
The scow drips and stinks as the sun goes up, and the Koniak’s two underlings, Indians dressed as Indians, work in an uncharacteristic frenzy; their arms almost blur as they shovel fish