The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [63]
The barber, now standing in the doorway, nods.
“But where’d they go?” Bigelow asks. “Where is Getz? Miriam?”
“Police put the two of them on a train. With nothing but the clothes they was wearing.”
“And the cash box,” the barber says.
The man nods, looks back at Bigelow. “You wasn’t—” He squints, tries again. “You didn’t—” He hunches up his shoulders. “You ain’t—disappointed?”
“No,” Bigelow says. “I . . .” He shakes his head, doesn’t bother to finish.
Bigelow buys a pound of toffee from the store down the street. “What’d they call him?” he asks the man behind the counter, wanting to hear the whole story again.
“Everything—criminal, scoundrel, extorter.” The storekeeper weighs out a pound, shakes a few extra pieces into the bag. “Baxter was waiting for something like this. Him and his friends, they wanted a reason to go after Getz.” He hands Bigelow the toffee. “Can you build another?” he asks.
“The instruments are gone,” Bigelow tells him. “I had equipment that I sent up with it, but . . . Well, I know how to build a kite.”
He puts the candy in the pocket of his coat, where it stays until the following day. Until he is standing once again in the woman’s house, looking under pot lids, smoothing the fur blanket on her bed, staring at the picture of the mangle and prying open the biscuit tin where she keeps her candy. When he adds what he bought, he can hardly close the lid.
So there, he’s done it. Left a message.
He walks up the street feeling strangely calm and noting that the birds overhead have thinned. The great exodus of migration is over.
Tomorrow after he goes to the cable office, he’ll climb up the bluff with his binoculars. The kite has to have come down somewhere, perhaps on land, perhaps on land he can see. The image of it, spars broken, muslin caught on a branch or an outcropping, is so clear, a vision he can conjure so absolutely, that Bigelow finds himself expecting what is unlikely.
If only he can find it before heavy snows arrive and blot out its white silhouette.
WHAT WILL SHE DO with the candy? What will she make of it? He considers the possibilities, trying to put himself in her position. Except that she is so opaque to him, so unknowable. Even sitting across the table from her, even lying on top of her— especially lying on top of her—he never had any idea what she was thinking.
She could accept the toffees, as a kind of gift. But from whom? Will she understand that they came from him? He sees her at her table, the tin opened, the candy spilled out.
Having returned, does she think of him? He tries not to ask the more tempting question: is he, is there even a small chance that he is, the reason for her return?
HE CAN’T THINK STRAIGHT, and his maps are out of focus. Not literally, for the ink comes out of the pen in its usual fashion, and perhaps a layperson wouldn’t see anything amiss, but to Bigelow the work is sloppy, distracted. The correct information is there, but as if seen through a veil.
Or maybe it’s just him, the veil. Maybe it’s in his head. He pulls one after another of the bound volumes from his shelf, pages through them, storms and calms, looking for something. What? What can they tell him?
Cumbersome books, they weigh heavily in his lap. How hard he has labored at them, how religiously. I made these lines, he thinks, feeling the pages, running his hands over their surface, touching his work as he would never allow another person to do. Day after night after day, I drew them.
His thoughts return to the man, the trackwalker. He thinks of the eight miles between Girdwood and Bird Creek, pictures a solitary figure walking along the track, carrying a shovel, a coil of rope, whatever tools he might need to clear a drift of snow, drag a dead deer from the rails.
We do the same thing, he thinks, I and the man. Walking over the whiteness,