The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [52]
The seal—the way she submits—strikes Bigelow as unnatural. She doesn’t look sufficiently tired to be passive. Those eyes, so mysteriously bright and black. Looking at her, he has the sense that she could escape if she tried; she could twist out of the ropes, get away from the captain with his boastful fat hands— Yale University—and be off, smart enough now to swim clear of trap leads. She won’t be that hungry again.
But she just hangs there, blinking tears. Bigelow makes a move toward her. He steps forward to see her face more clearly, raises one hand, he’s not sure why—was he going to touch her?—when she swings out. Her body jackknifes toward him with an ominous, keen aim, and she barks a raw, searing cough that shows him long dirty teeth, tusks almost brown at their roots, ochery and luteous and horribly superimposed on the dark red tunnel of her throat. He’s shocked by the sight, the bark, the smell of her breath, fishy but somehow distinct from the stench all around him, and warm, so warm he can feel it hit his cheeks, his lips. Shocked enough to remain standing, not moving, one hand still out as if in greeting, as if, absurdly, he intended to shake her flipper.
A grotesque pendulum, the seal swings back and then returns to Bigelow, twisting and flexing her body so that her arc of travel is even farther—far enough that with one lunging thrust of her neck she seizes his raised hand in her mouth. He stands there, mute and frozen. It can’t be true, but when he thinks of it later it will seem to him that even the gulls stopped their cackling shrieks; the fish were motionless, not one flapping slap or slither; the water was calm, everything so quiet that Bigelow could hear the sound of the bone in his hand as it broke.
Then the captain stands up and calls him a peshak mesaki humm fucking cowmux, or something close to it, evil stinking dog; the fish jump and clap in the mud, the gulls screech, the water sucks and slaps, and the Swede takes Bigelow’s hatchet from his other, unbitten hand and whacks the seal neatly on the head so that she opens her mouth in surprise, she releases his broken hand.
“Fucking cowmux,” the Koniak says again; he shakes his head and spits.
Pain doesn’t stay in Bigelow’s hand; it travels through his arm and into his chest. He gasps, over and over, as if he’s been punched, hard, in the breastbone. As if he’s forgotten how to breathe, a sense of smothering worse than pain, worse than the nauseating warmth of blood flowing. Bigelow doesn’t look at his hand; instead he stares at the seal. She shakes her head, and more blood flies around, spattering the boat and the dock, the mud, the salmon, the openmouthed packers, and Bigelow, too, standing and staring.
Her eyes are bright, and then they’re not. She’s dying, and he watches as it happens, holding his hand to his chest, staining his coat, his shirt. What can have transpired in that moment?
Seagulls speaking in pink scrolls. A physicist in London weighs the dying as they die; his mother sent him the article, folded as always into fourths. A delicate and exact scale that measures the weight of the soul, or so the man claimed. Bigelow can’t remember the units.
The Swede raises Bigelow’s hatchet again, another blow just to be sure, but Bigelow steps between him and the dead seal. “No!” he yells.
The Koniak laughs.
“No!” Bigelow yells again. “No! No!”
The Koniak reaches for a shotgun lying beside his seat. He looks capable of calm, remorseless murder, and the Swede grabs Bigelow’s elbow, incidentally moving the hand so that Bigelow doubles over.
But the Koniak isn’t aiming at them. He shoots the tackle that’s holding up the dead seal, blows it to bits, and the carcass falls with a heavy splat into the muck below.
IT’S NOT the Engineering Commission doctor but his assistant who sets the bone and packs the bite with germicidal powder, stitches it closed. “Better take him up to the Line,” he says to the Swede, who’s walked Bigelow back into town. “And buy him some liquor.