The Seal Wife. Kathryn Harrison

      “And,” he says, “to fly a balloon, you need good weather. That’s not true for kites.”

      Her clothes are off, folded on the chair. She has only the one dress, and sometimes removes it before cutting up game. He’d like to believe this is to please or tempt him, but she’s no more flirtatious than she is modest. It must be that she doesn’t want to get it stained. He watches as she picks up the carcass, turns it over, looking for the place where the shot entered, a way to predict how it will bleed when she butchers it. Her breasts move with the rest of her, not so small that they don’t sway prettily when she stoops to retrieve a fallen knife. Still, he knows better than to interrupt her when she’s working.

      “The first thing that was wrong with the Nairobi experiment was the balloon, because balloons have no line, no line angles to measure, so they could only estimate the height, they couldn’t calculate it. Besides being wasteful, because you have to send up five balloons for every one you reclaim. They just deflate. Or they burst and fall, and that’s no good—not here in Alaska, the population’s too sparse. Around Nairobi there’s a million people who will retrieve a balloon, but here in the territories I’d never get my instruments back.

      “Anyway, a kite’s better. With the length of the line and the angle it presents, I can determine the exact height. It’s a standard equation, Pythagorean, using a sine table for the—

      “Look,” he says to the woman, and he pulls her away from the table, the raccoon divided into a bowl of entrails, a pan of meat. He steps around the pelt, set fur-side down so as not to stain the floor. She’ll scrape it later, after he’s gone.

      With a hand on either shoulder, he sits her on her bed. Then he opens his rucksack. She leans forward, curious. Has he brought another, different animal?

      White fabric. He pulls it out, unfolds, unfolds, unfolds. It covers her lap, her bed, her table; it falls in rippling layers and washes up against the doorsill.

      “A hundred and eighty square feet of muslin,” he says. “Lifting surface. And that’s just one cell’s worth. Do you know how much that is?” He throws his arms open. “Six by nine by twelve. Six feet tall, nine feet long, twelve feet wide. There’s never been a kite this big. Not on record.” He picks up the end of the fabric and wraps it around her naked shoulders, looks at her black eyes. She indulges him for a moment, holding still before shrugging it off so that it crumples around her on the bed.

      Bigelow picks up a corner. “Every night I make myself sew another seam. God, but I’m slow. I don’t know how you do it. An hour every night, and not half, not a quarter as neat as you.” He finds the spot where he left off and pushes it into her hands. She examines the place, smudged gray, where his fingers gripped the cloth. The muslin is puckered in spots, and she pulls at the fabric, trying to smooth it.

      “I found a tall fir. Dragged it two, maybe two and a half miles to the mill and had it cut. Thirty-four spars. The kite takes twenty-eight, but they can crack, sometimes they break in flight. And I’m nowhere near finished sanding.

      “Here’s what I need,” he says. “I need to build a reel that includes some kind of timing device. A stationary reel that I can set to pause at five-, maybe ten-minute intervals. Then instruments can record at selected altitudes. The Nairobi balloon, it was—well, it was famous. Written up in all the papers …” Bigelow trails off.

      “What I need,” he says after a minute, “is line that’s strong enough to go up for miles. And a reel that’s bolted down to some kind of platform. Because you can’t control a kite this big. Not manually. It would pull you off your feet.”

      The woman hands the muslin back to Bigelow, and he sees a fleck of blood on it, from her hands.

      “Silk. I thought silk,” he says. “But silk might fray on a reel. So it’s got to be metal, but flexible. Piano wire. Maybe that would work.

      “It’s going to change everything. Forecasts—it will make long-range forecasts possible.”

      He folds the muslin, folds it tight to fit back inside his rucksack. “See,” he says, laying the bag aside, “what they did in Nairobi was measure the air temperature over the equator. And found out that it isn’t hot.”

      He takes her fingers and gives them a shake. “It isn’t even warm,” he says. “It’s cold. Cold the way you’d expect air to be here. Freezing.”

      Bigelow releases the woman. He throws himself back on her bed, chewing his lower lip, thinking. “Everyone knows that winds move eastward around the globe, because of the earth, the rotating earth. That’s obvious. But it’s also true that heat rises.” He gets up, walks to the stove, holds a hand above its surface. “So you’d think air over the equator would be hot. Hot like it is near the ground. I mean, Nairobi! But. But.”

      Bigelow steps out of his boots and onto the chair, and from chair to table, avoiding the bloody bowl and the knife. He reaches to feel the air near the ceiling, jumps down before she can begin to scold. While she watches, he moves the chair from one part of the room to another, standing on its seat to test the air overhead. Then he sits down next to her with his pen and notebook and sketches her square room, floor, walls, stove, and ceiling. “See,” he says, and he draws arrows coming up out of the stove, arrows that move toward the middle of the ceiling and down the opposite wall, across the floor and back, big, spiraling circles. “That’s the way a closed system of air circulates.”

      He pulls her up from the bed and walks her through the room. “Warm. Cold. Warm. The earth, it’s a closed system, too. Heat from the equator rises. Cold air from the poles sinks. And it would make huge crosscurrents. Streams that flow across east – west winds.”

      The woman stands back, watches Bigelow sweep his arms around. “I bet,” he says, “that the air over Anchorage is warmer than the air over Nairobi. I just have to get the kite high enough.”

      The woman looks at him, her eyebrows drawn together. He’s made her forget the raccoon.

      “You’ll see,” he says. “You’ll come with me, up the bluff. I have a place picked out. A spot where the wind is always perfect.

      “The kite, it’s going to be huge. Enormous. This”—he picks up the rucksack with the fabric inside—“this is just to give you an idea. It isn’t even half of it. A kite big enough to carry all the instruments you could want. Barometer, thermometer, anemometer, hygrometer.” He ticks them off on his fingers. “Dry-cell battery, and rotating barrel for graphing readings simultaneously.”

      She sits on her bed, leaning back on her elbows, and he comes to her. He kneels and puts his arms around her waist.

      “You’ll come with me, up to the place I’ve found,” he tells her. And he tries, because he can’t not try, to get his tongue between her legs.

       Chapter 9

      HE BRINGS HER a bar of soap. He likes to think of her, sitting in the bath.

      There isn’t much of a selection, not in a place like Anchorage, not in April, when the inlet’s ice pack still prohibits shipping, but still, he lingers over the available brands. Canthrox, one bar says—shampoo. He’s never seen her wash or even wet her shining hair. Cuticura, but he doesn’t like its medicinal name or its smell. Naphtha, for laundry only. Most of the soaps have been on the shelf long enough that their wrappers are stained and torn. After all, why buy soap when most people bathe at a bathhouse and bathhouses provide their own?

      Bigelow returns to the one bar with a picture on its label: a lady in a tub, her ringed hand resting on its edge, bubbles floating up from the surface of the water. The bathtub is long and has claw feet. It isn’t much like the one the woman uses. And the woman isn’t much like his woman, either. She has a little cap on her head, with curls peeping out from under. LAVANDE. The word is written under the drawing. French. On the other side of the wrapper is