Storm Tide

by Marge Piercy

  Harlan shrugged. “He’s a new guy.” The machine rocked, forward and back, spewing a shower of pebbles and sand.

  I was shouting above the noise, “Well, get him out of there,” when the huge yellow rig sprang backwards, hit the ground with its rear wheels spinning, shot through two sections of my new cedar fence, lurched forward and died in the middle of the road.

  Tiny Sauvage screamed at the driver, “You fuck, you stupid fuck!” The guys crept up cautiously, as if the big rear tires might suddenly come alive.

  “You crushed the fence,” I said to Tiny. Didn’t seem to bother him a bit.

  Harlan took a step backward, considering the twelve-foot gap of dangling staves and splinters. “Took a hit there. Yup.”

  The door of the loader’s cab creaked open. A hand appeared, then a boot, dangling cautiously in search of a step.

  “Look!” Tiny shouted, his finger pointing at the driver’s pants. “He pissed hisself! Sonofabitch pissed hisself!”

  Sheepishly, the driver spread his hand over the wet splotch of his pants. “I had an accident,” he said. The collective laughter was uncontrolled.

  “Guys. Listen to me.” I wasn’t trying to pick a fight. “The fence is going to have to be replaced.”

  Tiny said over his shoulder, “We’ll take care of it.”

  “When?”

  “When we get to it.”

  “When you get to it? Guys, my best customer’s coming up here tomorrow night. What am I supposed to tell him?”

  Tony Brockmann spit in the dust. “Tell him you had an accident.”

  “It’s dark now,” Tiny said. “We can’t do nothing in the dark.”

  As long as I could remember, there were two-hour lunch breaks behind the ice skating rink, poker games in the town golf course locker room, municipal trucks cruising the highway with their radios screaming heavy metal rock. This was Saltash’s archaic welfare system, a sociopathic elite hired by Johnny Lynch and tenured by the town. But I wasn’t some teacher from Westchester whose electric line they’d accidentally cut. This was my work they’d destroyed and me they were laughing at.

  “I want it fixed first thing tomorrow morning,” I said. “I mean that. Or I’ll have to go over your head.”

  Tiny looked from me to his men—is this guy an asshole or what?—and left me standing alone in the road.

  For all the years I’d lived in Saltash, I could count the times I’d been in Town Hall, the only brick building in town. Its long dark halls, hot in summer and clammy in winter, were bleak and dreary and seemed to discourage invaders. “We are not complainers,” my father used to say. He was fond of declaring our standards. We tip well. We pay local tradesmen on time. A pitiful code of conduct to be sure, but one we adhered to in lieu of our religion and the customs we’d left where we came from. Throughout my life, in spite of lousy tableside service or a pipe that began leaking as soon as the plumber’s truck left the driveway, I tipped twenty percent, I paid my bills the day they arrived. I did not complain.

  The town manager did not know me from my glory years. He was a tall soft tired man who listened with an interest that seemed directly calibrated to the amount of trouble I was likely to cause.

  “Sir, I just want you to know I’m not a complainer,” I began, and outlined the situation from the misuse of town property to the gaping hole in the fence. Without interrupting, the manager made a phone call. “Could you get right up here?” he said, and five minutes later Donkey Sparks arrived.

  “David Greene!” His cheeks were pink, his collar too tight. He wore a tie beneath an old cotton sweater that announced he might be management but still close enough to his rank and file not to betray them by wearing a suit. “Christ, it’s been years. Do you know this guy?” he asked the town manager without waiting for a reply. Then to me: “You’ve been back in town how long? And did you come to see me?”

  “I—”

  “Best damned high school pitcher I ever saw. Damn, he was good. Went all the way to the Chicago Cubs, did you know that? Davey Greene, the Pitching Machine.”

  “Mr. Greene was telling me about an incident he encountered up, where?”

  “This the fence thing?” Donkey waved it off. “Those assholes. Got to watch them every minute. Don’t worry about it. We’ll have it all taken care of. So, Davey, what are you doing now? You think you’ll do some coaching for the Little League?”

  “What do you mean taken care of?” I said.

  Donkey was so named for a horsey staccato laugh, almost a bray, which escaped him now. “I mean we’ll order some sections of fence for you and as soon as they come we’ll get up there and make it good as new.”

  “It was new. These are important customers to me. They’ll be up tomorrow night.”

  “Hey, Davey. Spring is here, my friend. The whole town’s breathing down my neck. I told you. As soon as we can. Is that not reasonable?”

  Complainers were people who didn’t listen to reason; troubled people who searched out trouble. I knew the more I made of it, the less my chances of the fence ever being fixed. “Look, these are difficult customers I’m talking about. They are going to hold me up for the whole job because of that stretch of fence. I’m not going to be able to pay my crew, okay? And why? Because your guys are out there drinking and operating heavy machinery—”

  “Drinking?” Donkey glanced at the town manager.

  “Yes, I think they were,” I said.

  “You think.”

  “They were holding beer bottles.”

  “And you know what was in those bottles? You know positively that it was alcoholic beer? Because you’re making serious accusations, my friend.” The flush of his cheeks intensified; all the blood in his body seemed to collect in his face. His smile turned to warning: back off. “You collected those bottles and had them tested? Is that what you’re saying? You have the results?”

  I didn’t have anything of the kind. “What were they doing up there after work, using town equipment on a private road?”

  Donkey grinned. That was easy. “Making access for fire vehicles,” he said to the manager. “I asked them to put in a little overtime and they were glad to do it. It’s all listed in the work detail.” Then, ignoring me, “Is there anything else?” Donkey waited, his short square body tensed for a fight.

  When I emerged, the weather had turned. A cold fog settled over Saltash, driven by a northeast wind. I drove eighty-five miles to pick up the replacement sections of fence and worked well past dark cementing the posts.

  “It’s over,” Crystal said, warming the meat loaf in a frying pan. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  I ate because she had cooked, but I had no appetite. With no proof—they had taken their beer bottles with them—no witnesses, there was nothing I could have done. Moreover, the fence was fixed. Did I really want to pursue this further, put five men out of work? It was over, I told myself. Over.

  Since I’d started seeing Crystal, I was spending less time with Judith, but Crystal considered herself at war. To the extent that she had studied the enemy, Crystal knew that Judith was well read and interesting to talk to; that she had traveled a good deal; that she had a local reputation as a fabulous cook and hostess; that she was quoted in the newspapers regularly, often saying something witty and outrageous. Moreover, Judith was affluent, genetically thin, and to the extent that it meant anything now, my mentor in local politics. This might have been enough to overwhelm any number of women, if they respected any of Judith’s virtues. Crystal did not. To Crystal, Judith was incomplete. “If you haven’t had a child,” she said more than once, “you’re not a real woman.”

  Crystal had not only managed to neuter her enemy but to employ sex as her most potent weapon. She had asked more than once what Judith was like in bed (I would not talk about it), but was confident she was better. Or at least that she tried harder. For on no occasion that I spent the night with her, or as little as half an hour in a place with a door that closed (including my truc
k) did we fail to have sex. Crystal felt that an evening was incomplete until she had made me come.

  Before we got into bed that night, I had told her honestly, sex was the last thing on my mind. Had I displayed the usual signs of disinterest, she might have believed me, but perversely, I was and remained hard as a pole. I simply could not get off. She squat-fucked me, facing front, then rear (coming twice herself in the process); she greased me with massage oil and pumped me with her fist; she sucked me until her jaw ached, all with no luck. “Where are you?” she said, rising from the bed sheets for air.

  The photographs over the years show my father as a man with delicate bones, an ever thinning pompadour, and a thick blue vein that ran from his hairline to the corner of his eye. He had borrowed a small fortune from my grandmother to buy into the curtain factory. He was up at three every morning, often loading the trucks himself. When I was eight years old, he scored the biggest order the company ever had, a thousand gross of gingham curtains for a department store chain in the Midwest. His stitchers worked double time to make the deadline. The order had to be delivered on or before the first of October. But because his truck driver had been drinking and had disappeared with both sets of the keys to the truck, the shipment never made it on time. My father was furious and fired the driver. That night, Johnny Lynch stormed into my living room. As my mother paced the kitchen, he called my father a heartless New York kike.

  “I’m not doing it, Johnny, no.”

  I was hiding in the hallway.

  “Call.” Johnny’s voice carried the authority of law.

  “The man’s a drunk, Johnny.”

  “He has a wife and children.”

  “So do I, Johnny. So do I.”

  “Call him!” Johnny shouted, and the house shook. “Or the bank calls your loan tomorrow. Tell him you apologize. Tell him you had a talk with me.”

  I remember the ratchet of the old rotary dial, and my father’s forehead in the lamplight, the blue vein throbbing, seventeen years before the stroke that killed him.

  “You can’t give it up, can you?” Crystal said. But neither could she. Having invested two hours in my satisfaction, she was afraid that she’d be sending me off to Judith in the morning hornier than ever. But all I felt was a weight pressing on my head from the inside, a pounding need for revenge. I had two choices: to back off or go at them, not only the idiots on the crew or Donkey Sparks above them, but Johnny at the top of the pyramid. Johnny Lynch had viewed my father as invisible, the way they all looked through me. I doubt I was the first to decide to run for political office while having sex, but something did happen just then. Something had fallen into place. Compare it to a gear, spinning for years without engaging. Compare it to catching your breath; or to orgasm itself, the explosive fusion of mind and body.

  I came in what felt like a torrent of memory and emotion. Crystal swallowed, swinging her head to release the crick in her neck. “Finally,” she gasped, for both of us.

  JOHNNY

  Johnny thought of parking in the woods and walking to the house, like the old days when the whole town knew what he was doing before he had his pants off. Around here, your car told people everything they wanted to know, what you drove and where you parked it. He’d learned that the hard way. He’d lost his first election because of that little red Triumph. It was months later before he’d understood how people here perceived him. Playboy. High roller. You could get away with a lot in this town if you knew the limits. Marry a black girl. Drink yourself pickled. Be a lesbian. But drive around in some fancy Mercedes? People wouldn’t put up with it.

  Ever since, he’d driven a Ford Crown Vic brown or maroon four-door sedan. The dullest car in town, everybody knew it on sight: his problem today. He didn’t want the boy to see it in his mother’s driveway and drive off angry. But Johnny no longer had the strength to park the car on a sand road and go on foot the way he used to: half a mile sometimes, through the woods like a tomcat.

  Johnny didn’t like involving Linda Greene, but what could he do? David Greene avoided him. Never set foot in the office when he picked up Crystal. Never returned Johnny’s wave in the parking lot. Something had to be done.

  “Hello, dear. How are you?” Johnny kissed her cheek but was careful to thrust his gift between them.

  “Roses, Johnny! You didn’t have to do that.”

  “You’re putting yourself out for me and I appreciate it.”

  “Oh, you. Putting myself out. It’s just brownies and coffee with David.”

  Linda Greene was a fine-looking woman still, with a high broad bosom and slender legs. Unlike the others her age, she never let herself go gray. She dressed young; a ribbed cotton sweater over black leggings. He’d watched her walking over the years, sometimes with women friends, sometimes just with her dog, but out there rain or shine on Ocean’s Edge Road, keeping up a pace, working on her figure.

  Johnny usually avoided being alone with Linda Greene, but thought it best to be seated at the kitchen table when the boy walked in. “You’ll want to get those in some water.” Linda was a little too passionate. He had his excuse now: he could blame his bad heart and her feelings wouldn’t be hurt. She was a needful woman. Emotional. Not emotional like his wife, not delicate but the opposite. Before her husband passed away, she’d made her interest in Johnny plain enough. At curtain factory parties. Good Christ, in the elementary school parking lot one snowy December night after the Christmas play. She practically shoved her tongue down his throat. It wasn’t for lack of desire on his part. He could have met her in Florida any number of times, where she visited her sister. But Johnny knew this town well enough to keep his hands off the widow of his ex-partner.

  He anticipated her return from the sink, her cool fingertips grazing his skin above the shirt collar. “So young David said he was coming, dear? Just what did you tell him?”

  “That I wanted him to see a friend.”

  “You didn’t say who?”

  “He doesn’t hate you, Johnny. He just doesn’t understand.”

  “But you didn’t—”

  “No, I just told him somebody he hadn’t spoken to in a long time wanted to talk to him about running for selectman.”

  “That’s good. That’s very good.” He let her fingers drift up to his cheek before he removed himself to the window. He supposed he was no better than any man; he enjoyed being wanted. But the truth was, he’d always liked Linda Greene. Far more than the husband who’d never learned to play the game, she was a practical woman. Sure her feelings were hurt when he ignored her interest in him, but she got more out of him as a friend than she ever would in bed. The son was like the father, looking at the dark side of everything. Sure enough when he rolled into the driveway and saw the Crown Vic, he stormed from his truck like a company of marines, throwing open the kitchen door.

  “What’s he doing here?” David Greene said, without so much as the courtesy to address Johnny by name. He was small like his father but an outdoor man, well-muscled, a scrapper. For a moment Johnny feared for his safety. He studied the boy’s eyes, light gray like storm clouds.

  The boy had always been a cold one. He’d never sat at Johnny’s knee with the other children for stories but hovered back. Even when Johnny had picked the boy to ride with him in the big parade—two hours in the backseat of a convertible, creeping along Main Street in the scorching July sun—David Greene never spoke a word. “Hello, son. Your mother and I were having coffee and cake. Will you join us?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this is the friend you wanted me to see?”

  “David—”

  “Because I asked her not to,” Johnny said. “You wouldn’t have come.”

  “You’ve got that right.”

  Linda Greene placed herself between them.

  “And why is that?” Johnny asked.

  David folded his arms. “Where do you want me to start?”

  “By sitting down. Stop embarrassing me,” Linda said. “The past is the past. You don’t k
now everything.”

  “I know he bled my father’s business dry.”

  Linda looked away, as if from a photograph she didn’t want to see.

  “When I first showed him the factory, I told him there was a good life to be had in this town. The idea was to give people jobs, draw a modest salary, enjoy his life. Your uncle George understood that. I told your father again and again to wait, the factory would pay off eventually.”

  “David, you were so young.” Linda Greene was close to tears. “Your father was a very impatient man. There was only one way, his way.”

  “Enough of this,” Johnny said. “I didn’t come to rehash the past. I came to wish you luck in your run for public office and to ask you, man-to-man, if you’re planning to turn this election into a referendum against me.”

  “Is there another issue?”

  Johnny caught Linda’s wrist. “We need a little time alone, dear, the boy and I. Is that all right with you? If David and I take a ride together?”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  “Then we’ll sit right here and have it out in front of your mother, won’t we? Is that what you’d rather?”

  “Any closer to that car door, son, you’ll be on the sidewalk.”

  David didn’t answer. He sat as far from Johnny as was possible in the front seat. His face was a mask of stone. Only the police scanner broke the silence, spitting out the urgent business of the Saltash P.D. “Roger. Who has the jug of windshield wiper fluid? Over. I think Duffy had it last. Over.”

  Johnny caught the boy smiling. “You’ve got to love this town,” he said.

  David, obviously uncomfortable, shifted in his seat, staring frontways, sideways, anywhere but at Johnny. He looked at the backseat covered with election posters for Blossom Endicott.

  “First thing Monday, she’ll have these up at every traffic light on the highway, every window in the center of town.”

  “Why would you tell me that? Why rat out Blossom?”

  “Because you might win.”

  “Where are we going?” David sighed, sounding almost resigned.