The Seal Wife by Kathryn Harrison Read Free Book Online Page B

officer troubling himself to cross Ninth Street to begin arresting prostitutes; and anyway, where would he put them? There’s no jail, just a dugout under the cabin that serves as a police station. How would it look if a pair of bachelor officers were to cram a dozen or more fancy ladies into that muddy hole? So whoever wants to drink, drinks openly, especially on a summer holiday.
    Bigelow watches the First Annual Sled Dog Parade. Hands shoved in his pockets, he counts forty-two teams. Even the dogs look intoxicated, all pant and slobber, snapping at one another’s red, white, and blue ribbons, holding up their procession to drop back on their haunches and howl at the trombone. Abruptly, a bandstand has replaced a grove of unpulled stumps, such overnight substitutions feasible when days are twenty hours long. Bigelow wonders if all the patriotic fervor isn’t a lingering effect of the solstice, just ten days past, or maybe it’s that Alaska is only a territory and not a state, her every citizen necessarily, and nostalgically, far from home.
    Black flies and mosquitoes are thick; citronella oil does nothing to discourage them. The crowd from the miners-versus-railroad baseball game washes around him, slapping at bugs, laughing and jostling and hurrying on to the next amusement, a ladies’ nail-driving contest, planks set up on barrels and saw-horses in front of Getz’s store.
    Bigelow follows the crowd. At least he can get a look at a girl. “Speed and accuracy. Speed and accuracy. Only ten cents.” Getz stands on a box, accepting dimes from whoever cares to try: the pastor’s wife and, judging from their bright lips and tight clothes, two girls from the Line, a dozen big-armed laundresses, along with the woman who sells water from a cart.
    “Skill, not luck. Ten cents to prove yourself,” Getz says, and the schoolteacher steps forward.
    “Hey,” Bigelow calls out, and he waves. She’s got bad skin, but her hair is nice, her smile is pretty. She’s talked to him at Getz’s store. She waves back.
    “What’s the prize?” Bigelow asks.
    “The prize?” Getz licks his front teeth, and for a moment Bigelow can see the bluish underside of his tongue, then it’s gone. “Winning’s the prize,” he says.
    The women stand on either side of the planks provided. Twenty-three of them, because twenty-three is how many hammers Getz has to lend. Bigelow watches the pastor’s wife fill her mouth with nails, line them up like sewing pins between her lips.
    “Are you ready, ladies?” Getz asks, and he asks again, “Ladies, are you ready?” There’s a final jostle for elbow room as he begins to count backward from ten. “. . . nine . . . eight . . .” Counting slowly, because, as he knows, the men aren’t finished laying bets, they’ve hardly begun. “Speed and accuracy,” Getz interjects, drawing the words out,
speeeed and
“...se - ven . . . six . . .”
    Bigelow pushes his way through the crowd of men laying money on a barrel. “A dollar on the schoolteacher,” he says, loudly enough that she can hear. Immediately he’s pushed aside by a notably well-dressed man, one of the town’s undertakers. “Ten dollars on that one,” the undertaker says, pointing to the prettier prostitute, and he counts the bet out with clean hands.
    The men laugh and catcall; they tip flasks to their mouths. But the women, they’re hot and nervous, sober and determined. Their hair curls in wet tendrils, and dark, solemn stains spread under their arms. Clenched in the hot crowd of bodies, Bigelow has an erection.
    “ Three . . . two-o-o-o . . .”
    “One!” Funny what you can, and can’t, tell by looking at a woman. The pastor’s wife with her tidy row of nails waiting between pursed lips—she can’t hit the head of one to save her life. The prostitutes swing in perfect time; their arms rise and fall and strike, five hits to sink a nail completely, then on to the next, a dead heat between them and the sounds of their