The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [56]
The man squints up at Bigelow. “I was going to come to your house,” he says. “I was going to pay you a visit to tell you about my hat. But then . . .”
“What?” Bigelow says when the man trails off teasingly. And he says the word again. “What?”
The needle. The fur. The accurate needle darting through the fur. He feels his heart, like an engine, turn over and catch.
“When?” he says, sitting down next to the man. “How long?” Behind them, the straight tracks shine like blades, like knives laid in the earth. The man stretches his boots out in front of him, and they both consider the sight.
“A week,” the man says. “Not even.”
“Is she . . . She’s . . .”
“She’s alone. Came back alone.” The man answers the question Bigelow cannot ask. Too awful to hear any other answer. How will I kill him? he was already thinking of the husband, the boyfriend, whoever he might be.
From his pocket the man produces a flattened pouch of tobacco. On his thigh he rolls a small cigarette, wastes eight matches to get it lit. He holds the cigarette like a woman does, between his first and middle fingers, and Bigelow watches the smoke disappear into the colorless air.
“Thought you’d know right off,” the man says, hat in one hand, cigarette in the other. “Smell her.” He laughs. “I thought for sure someone would tell you. Some barber or”—he pauses— “shopkeeper. But you, I guess you don’t see many people. Talk to them. You don’t get out. Just back and forth to the wireless.” He waves his finger up and down the empty street.
“I’m late,” Bigelow says. “I’m late now.” But he doesn’t get up from the steps. Behind them, the ticket seller’s silhouette moves on the other side of the frost-rimed glass, back and forth inside the booth, in a kind of regular rhythm. From some angles the visor is invisible, and he looks like a man, from others he is a stooped predator.
“She’s . . .” Bigelow says. “She’s . . .” he tries again.
“Back in the same house. Her house.” The man holds the otter hat up before his face, thumbs inside the crown, fingers out. He squeezes it as if to adjust its shape, pressing the sides together, then sets it on his head.
“Why?” Bigelow swallows, ducking his head at the hat. Mine, he thinks. My hat.
“Oh, because I turned the house back over to her without any fuss. I was leaving anyway. Had my plans. Girdwood. The wind by Girdwood is intense. Run a block and your lungs freeze. Not that there is a block.” He stands and Bigelow stands, too.
“What I do is, I get to Girdwood and there’s a house for me. House and job both. Job is trackwalking. Eight miles out and eight miles back, every day. Make sure it’s not obstructed by anything. Snow. Tree. Carcass.”
“Trackwalker,” Bigelow says.
The man nods.
“I saw the notice up at the post office. Pays well.”
“On account of the deaths,” the man says. “For some reason, along that stretch, two walkers, one right after the other, went to sleep in the wrong spot.”
Bigelow nods, trying to imagine the strangeness of such work, the loneliness to which some people were immune. Except, maybe, they weren’t. Otherwise, why lie down in the wrong spot?
“So when she came back,” the man continues, “I pulled my things together, and she—she didn’t say, so I’m talking for her here—she had some pelts and she had a string and it took her, I don’t know, less than the time it took me to pack up.” He shook his head. “Two deep breaths, three—that’s all it takes for them to freeze.”
The man takes the ticket from his pocket, considers it, and then shows it to Bigelow. “Another two hours. Enough time to get to the Line and back for a drink.”
“Oh,” Bigelow says. “No. No thank you.”
The man squints at him. “I wasn’t talking about you,” he says. “I was talking about myself.”
Bigelow says nothing. He’s embarrassed, but he manages to not look away.
“Lucky, your coming along just then. Well, not luck—” He laughs. “I guess I know your habits well enough to guess when