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By Root 257 0

× 5 × 1760 = $176.00 = two paychecks = two months = 1440 hours’ worth of piano wire. Barometer, thermometer, and dry cell battery. A hundred nights of sanding. A month of Sundays sewing. A university education. How many trips up the bluff? How many nights of insufficient sleep? How much ink, how much paper? Five miles up = 26,400 feet = Altocumulus = Cirrocumulus = Cirrostratus. Ten cents for a virgin nail, or a dollar for a hundred used ones. Thirty-nine cents an hour to hack up salmon to pay off debts. $176.00 divided by $.39 equals how many mornings of hacking, equals the loss of what? An arm? How much grief can the body withstand? Two dollars and two dollars and two more dollars for the doctor, and seventy-five cents for bootleg that doesn’t stop the pain. How many hours bent over a drafting table? How many equations to determine the impact of wind speed on line curvature? First flight: September 8, 1916. Last flight: October 3, 1917. 390 days. Fifty-seven ascensions, averaging 4.3 miles, adding up to 245.1 miles. If only a person could add success to success, flight on top of flight, climbing and climbing and never coming down. No weather so high, so far from earth. No winds. No storms. 390 days is fifty-five weeks is eleven pairs of bootlaces is $5.50 spent on bootlaces alone. “Don’t pull them so hard,” Bigelow’s mother used to say. All his life he’s broken bootlaces. He has numbers in his field book— times, dates, angles, line lengths, wind speeds. He has records for the heights he reached. Thirty-one spars, if you count the three that cracked and had to be replaced. A seam every night, it took him many hours and his neck was always stiff.

There must be some calculus to apply to a loss of this proportion. But Bigelow does not know what it is.

IN TOWN, he stands outside Getz’s store, considering the splintered signboard and smashed windows before going inside to look at the emptied shelves. He runs his hand over the counter, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. Someone—who?— has broken the electric bulbs overhead, dumped flour and cornmeal and something brown and sticky on the floor, scrawled over the writing on the wall, the cost of eggs, lard, kerosene. Big, black charcoal letters spell out a different word: Pimp.

Upstairs, the parlor has been stripped—no horsehide sofa, no piano or mirror or rug. Bigelow passes his hand under the stovepipe hanging from the ceiling to be sure, in the near dark, that the stove, too, is gone. He knocks on the metal tube and it makes a cold, echoing clang; a fine debris drizzles from its open end.

He feels his way to the bedroom door, walks through it with his arms out before him. It’s cold in the room, cold and dank. The big bed is missing and Bigelow backs out quickly. He hurries through the parlor and down the stairs, spooked by a thought—ridiculous—that his rage has somehow done away with Miriam and her father. All his cursing up on the bluff has worked a spell, reduced them to nothing, the floury dust from the floor that clings to his trousers and boots.

He stamps his feet and brushes off his legs. “What happened?” he asks a man waiting next door for a haircut. With his thumb, Bigelow points over his shoulder at the ransacked store. “What happened to Getz’s?”

The man squints, he wrinkles his nose as if someone has shined a bright light in his face. “Chased him out,” he says.

“Who? Why?”

“Undertaker and his friends. Led a mob on the store. Getz tried to lock ’em out—they was thirty, maybe forty of them— but they busted his windows. Looted the place.”

“But why?”

The man shakes his head. “Getz bragged what she’d done up the hill. Seemed proud.” He shifts from one foot to the other. “You ain’t the first, you know,” he says to Bigelow.

“The first what?”

“Oh, the two of ’em, Getz and whatshername, Miriam, used to be they lived in Juneau.” He feels in his pocket and digs out a penknife, opens and closes it before going on. “Snagged a jeweler in that town, and that jeweler had the name Baxter. Same as the undertaker on the corner of Front and Second.” The man points