The Seal Wife by Kathryn Harrison

him—passages in and out of this life.
    But maybe she was just tired of Anchorage, of its mud, its blocks of ugly houses, the clatter of hammers hitting ties, the seemingly inexhaustible, even rising, tide of railroad workers and prospectors, men who watched as she walked down the street. Men who, deprived of women, reverted to animals, hands down their trouser fronts, eyes narrow, appraising. He saw what they did as she walked past; he watched, once even using his binoculars, training them on her back. She never cast her eyes down, never acknowledged the catcalls and whistles.
    He lay in wait at the corner of Front and Ninth to walk with her, tried to protect her, but she wasn’t having any of it. She crossed the street to avoid his company, did everything but push him away, and that, he suspects, because she wouldn’t touch him in public. Instead, she returned to her house. She could wait for whatever it was she wanted.
    Was that what drove her away? Not the one incident, but the assumption behind it, that she was his?
    Could she have left to escape him, his relentless visits to her door, her table, her body? The thought is so painful that he closes his eyes, he shakes his head as if to refuse it.
    Bigelow tries to picture the woman in places other than those few in which he’s seen her—Getz’s store, her chair by the stove, the bed she shared with him, the tin tub—but he can’t.
    Except on those nights when he wakes and sees her in his room, standing at the foot of his bed, gazing not at but through him. She looks as she did the last day he saw her, her long braid pulled over one shoulder. He knows it can’t be true, her presence—in the morning, when he lights his lamp, she is gone—and yet it feels true. It feels truer than the table, the water for his coffee, the match between his cold fingers.
    He scrimps on food in order to drag home another case of kerosene, pulling his sled carefully over the frozen ground. Still, the runners find a slick patch, or they catch on a stone, the sled tips, the box skids. One bottle shatters noiselessly and its golden contents leak away, leaving an iridescent trail in his wake, a prismatic oily sheen on the snow’s blank face.
    And when he crawls under the blankets on his bed, his dreams find another plotless monotony: he holds out his hands to catch a spilling flow, but it leaks through his fingers and is lost.

PART TWO
    ACROSS THE WATER, Knik refuses to die. There’s the Alaska Commercial Company trading post, a couple of roadhouses and a miners’ outfitters, the Pioneer Hotel, Jenkins’s Transfer and Tarpaulins, a barbershop, a saloon, and a fistful of cabins, the winter population holding at eighty-seven. When surveyors for the railroad bypassed Knik, even the postmaster quit and boarded up his office, those planks now gone, torn off by squatters. But Indians keep the town going, Indians and gold-panners and the Friday-to-Saturday dances.
    May through September, a motor launch leaves Anchorage on the high tide and heads fifteen miles up the inlet’s north arm, the city band on board, tuning instruments, taking requests en route.
You are my honey honey suckle, I am your bee. I’d like to sip
the nectar sweet from those red lips I see.
They set up at Open Hall, just off the Pioneer’s potato field: a plank floor with gaps wide enough to catch the ladies’ heels as they dance, a concession offering deep-fried doughnuts, bottles of root beer, a scoop of chicken salad on a hard roll for fifteen cents.
    Bigelow can’t dance; he has no date. He stands in line for chicken salad and, when it’s finally his turn, surprises himself by shaking his head at the aproned girl with the big spoon. He walks off, into a clot of Indians spending their money on hooch. Bigelow puts a dime on the makeshift counter, and the transaction is accomplished without talking: a couple of ounces poured from a beaked can into a communal cup. It’s clear when he holds it to the light, clear