The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [61]
Miriam ducks out from under his perfunctory embrace and returns to the shelter of the shed, and Bigelow cups his hands around his eyes to watch the end of the line. Say he could change his mind and reel it back. Would he? Would he, when it seems as if he’s got the whole of the sky on the end of a black, blue-sparking wire? Because that is how it looks, he can’t take his watering eyes off it, gorgeous, the line tethered to the sullen clouds, a compact mass of lead gray stratocumulus of an impenetrability more ordinarily seen at lower elevations, ten or fifteen thousand feet.
But there’s nothing ordinary about this day, with the wire jerking wildly, and fire crawling down from heaven. The kite is pitching and pulling, but the kite is hidden, the kite is invisible, and on the ground it seems to Bigelow that he’s contrived to work magic.
He closes his burning eyes, rests them. If everything holds, if the reel doesn’t break, in an hour the kite will run out of wire and begin its automatic descent. So he’ll just have to wait, squat, watch. Dizzy with hunger, he wonders what there might be to eat when he gets home. Has he gone through another sack of rice?
He thinks of the woman when he’s hungry—well, he thinks of her all the time, but especially when he’s hungry. Sees her sleek fingers breaking the blue-white cap of cartilage from a bone, exposing its marrow. The way she considered each morsel fastidiously before raising it to her mouth. No matter how often she did a thing, still he found it worth watching.
Bigelow lifts his head and opens his eyes.
The snow has stopped, the clouds part and then gather, revealing snatches of purple and pink, ethereal and splendid, and high, Bigelow thinks, so high. According to the reel gauge, clicking reliably, the kite is five and a half miles out. His eyes sting from the wind and snow, tears burn his cheeks with their salt.
Watching the sky, he doesn’t see until after it’s happened. But he hears it, a ringing noise, metal on metal, a bright violent clang that yanks him to his feet—the reel, a problem with the reel. Bigelow pushes Miriam out of the way, brushes past her hand holding his hatchet. What is she doing standing there in the wind, eyes staring wide? Why isn’t she in the shed?
Bigelow knocks right into Miriam before he understands the impossible—the murderous—thing she’s done, still holding the hatchet’s wood handle. Wood keeps you absolutely safe?
The reel is stopped, and he can see where, after cutting the wire, the blade nicked a tooth off one gear.
He looks up into the sky and sees the line, sees what he thinks is the line, whisking up into the heavens.
It’s gone. Gone. His kite, the kite he drew in his station and built on the bluff. The kite he made—like no other thing in the sky, flying alone. Untethered in a high wind, above the storm. No telling what height it will reach before it falls back to earth.
“I’ll . . . I’ll . . .” kill you, he’s thinking. Bigelow lunges for Miriam, who drops the hatchet and runs.
Slipping and skipping down the frozen hillside, ice and pebbles loosened by her boots.
He lets her go.
Imagining, already, what he’ll say to her father. He’ll shove a finger into his chest. Even. We’re even. Official Weather Bureau instruments. Sabotaged. You have friends here? I’ll cable Washington, D.C.
Bigelow sits on the reel platform, doubles over, holding his right hand under his parka and shirt, against his bare skin. How it aches in the cold, he wouldn’t have thought it possible.
TWENTY- EIGHT SPARS. 232 square feet of muslin. Five miles of piano wire at $.02 a yard. $.02