The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [55]
PART THREE
SEPTEMBER. Already the train station doesn’t look so raw, so new and incidental. Boots have taken the edge off the steps leading to the ticket booth. Shuffling, scuffing, stamping, Alaskans in boots, kicking against the cold. There’s one now, pack on his back, breathing fog against the ticket window. He turns his head to sneeze and Bigelow recognizes the man with the Stetson, except the Stetson is gone, replaced by what looks like a helmet of fur.
Miriam, Bigelow was rehearsing silently, Miriam, I can’t marry you, I won’t marry you, I’m unable to marry, unwilling to marry. I can’t stand curtains or cans of sardines, I—I don’t love you. Mr. Getz, I apologize for whatever advantage I may have taken, but, frankly, circumstances were misleading and unconsummated. They were . . . they were . . . They were what?
Bigelow pats the breast of his coat, the interior pocket where he carries readings to and from the wireless office, a nervous gesture, like checking a watch fob or billfold. He flexes and straightens his fingers, testing them, a habit since the splint was removed. “Healed up all right,” the doctor said, examining the hand, turning it from one side to the other. “Good thing we had that germicide. Probably never be as strong as it was. Or as limber.” And Bigelow will have scars forever, even if they aren’t always so purple and puckered.
“Hey,” the man calls from the ticket window. “Hello!” Bigelow stops walking. “I almost paid a call on you,” the man says. “I want to tell you something.”
The man turns back to the window to accept change and a scrap of paper, a ticket or a receipt; he scrutinizes it, then points at something and passes it back under the pane of glass. Bigelow, still flexing and straightening his fingers, waits. It’s a cold day for September, cold and unusually clear. He can see the twin masts of the wireless station, often lost in fog from this distance. Above, birds are flying—another season of dark and cold, inexorable, impossible. Every day seven minutes shorter than the one preceding. Every night seven minutes longer. How will he endure it again, then again? His breath pressed from his lungs, his soul whittled down like a soap carving.
Maybe he could marry Miriam for the winter, see how it goes. He imagines her hot skin next to his, a comfort immediately compromised by the idea of her notebook insinuating itself among his papers.
“I’m going away,” the man announces, walking toward Bigelow. “I have an interest in a . . .” He stops to come up with the right word. “A concern down by Girdwood,” he finishes.
“What did you want to tell me?”
“Cold by Girdwood,” the man says. “What do you think of my hat?” he asks, smiling.
“Warm?” Bigelow intends a statement, but the word lilts into a question.
“Yes, it is. It is.” The man smiles. He wags his eyebrows at Bigelow and the hat bumps up and down with them. He drops his pack and does a little bouncing jig on the stairs, slipping then recovering his balance. He bows deeply, and the hat stays put. “Fits snug,” he says. “As you see.”
Bigelow nods.
“Made for me. Custom-made. Clever seamstress, she measured my head with a string. All around.” The man removes the hat, and with his finger draws a line from the center of his forehead to his temple and on around the back of his skull, then another over the top of his head from ear to ear. “Never seen a person so economical with a needle. Especially with skins. Skins are hard to sew.”
The man holds the hat out to Bigelow, who reaches forward, but then, as Bigelow’s fingers touch the fur, the man takes it back. “Otter,” he says, and he sits down on the step next to his pack. He turns the hat in his hands. “Otter is expensive. But I didn’t have to pay for this.”
The sun’s angled glare, the colorless cold sky, the blank silver badge of the ticket window, the gleam of tracks leading away from the town,