Tide King

by Jen Michalski

  “Young peasant.” he said to Bolek. “You will be well rewarded by the Prussians for your bravery in bringing this Satanic menace to our attention.”

  Bolek lifted his head, and Ela could see his smile, self-satisfied, through her tears. But it was only for a second before the soldier pulled his sword from his side and, in one stroke, lopped Bolek’s head off.

  “Stupid peasant.” He kicked Bolek’s head, no longer smiling, across the field. “Enjoy your reward.”

  The soldiers laughed. The fire burned blue and green and then orange as everything spat and cracked and turned to black.

  “We’ll take this one back.” The copper-haired soldier nodded at Barbara. “If she is a witch, surely it can be proven. And until then, let her bewitch us with her fruits.”

  And with that, he dropped his pants and moved toward her mother.

  1945

  He woke up in blackness. It choked him like a coffin. The trees of the Hürtgen forest and the large bowl of gray sky above them were gone. He tried to sit up, but darkness pressed on him like heavy taffy, ensnarling his limbs. No birds sang in the black trees he could not see. He vaguely remembered winter, the Germans, the cold.

  His hip ached. He dug his hands through the black weight to his thigh. He felt a stump where his left leg had once met his hip, the skin smooth and round like a baby’s head, a mossy substance covering the tip like afterbirth. A memory of men, of Stanley Polensky and others, swam before him. But they were not here, nor were the others in his unit. In his mind, he could see them around him in the forest still, lumps in faded fatigues, helmets upturned like opened walnuts.

  He thought of his parents in Ohio. He imagined them sitting in the living room, listening to The Abbott and Costello Show on the radio, interrupted by a knock at the door. It would be the only knock, as their nearest neighbors were a half-mile north, they were expecting, the knock they’d hoped never to get. His mother’s hands would clench her knitting, her fingers moving over the seams, counting them absently as the officer at the door took off his hat and his father turned toward her, his face like a quarry. He thought of his room, the clothes he would never wear again, the line of sun crawling over his bedroom wall and dresser in the red dawn that he would never see. He imagined the wife he would never touch, whose shoulder he would squeeze in the car on the way to somewhere, anywhere, as long as she was beside him. Would he ever kiss anyone again? Would anyone ever love him, beside his parents?

  He thought of the field behind his parents’ house and the beet and carrot seeds he would never again press into the yielding earth with his mother during the spring, his hands still chapped from the raw March. He would not hear the sound of husks swishing in the wind in the late summer, the smell of warmed dirt and motor oil and the sound of crickets and the glow of the moon from his window.

  He thought about the war. He wondered where the war had gone, if everybody had died. If he was dead. If this, this suffocating purgatory, was all he had for all his prayers.

  He had fallen asleep. When he woke up, his left leg itched. He still could not see and could barely move. His hands swam to his phantom thigh and grazed something firm, fleshy. Now, his stump ended at his knee, smooth and round like a baby’s head. A sticky glue clung to the end. He felt sweat in his armpits, in his crotch. It was warmer, smellier in this darkness. He could see slits of light above him, like cracks around a basement door. He had dreamed, or hallucinated, that he was a full amputee.

  Where were the men? It was so quiet, a few birds, rustling leaves, a voice, laughter, far away. He pushed against the weight above and around him, remembering the shells raining from the canopy of trees and the bullets whizzing like mosquitoes.

  Whatever the medic had done, it worked great. Johnson ran his hand over his exposed knee. No gangrene. A completely healed-over stump. That man deserved a medal. If he’d only been good enough to save the whole leg, but this was better than nothing. Johnson wondered how he lost it in the first place. All he knew was that he was pissed as hell at Polensky. Leading them back to the forest like that, when they could have followed the ditch. Nearly gotten him killed.

  It was not Polensky’s fault. If Johnson were, in fact, dead, if this were hell, or the afterlife, he could not be mad at Polensky. He could have followed the ditch if he wanted. He would tell Stanley, if he could, that it was okay. That he was sorry for being such a jerk, for teasing him all the time. When he thought about it, although he played poker and talked rough stuff with Green and the others, Polensky was the only one he’d ever told anything to. About his childhood nightmares of faceless men who kidnapped his parents and led him into the field to beat him. About how he lost his virginity to an older woman, Eva Darson, a divorcee who didn’t go to their church but who always smiled, a mouth of slightly crooked teeth, and asked him about his parents when he was at the drugstore. That she had asked him to come over to help move her couch but they had moved their lips, their bodies against each other, against things instead. That he thought of marrying her once, that he liked how she ran her index finger along things, sizing them up, speaking her mind in a way that most women had not been taught, or allowed.

  “I am half Spanish.” She’d bounce the bottom of her coffee-colored hair with the palm of her hair. It fell in bangle-sized curls around her neck. “If we do not speak, we do not breathe.”

  He did not spend time with her because she was half Spanish. He supposed he felt sorry for her. She always prepared extravagant dinners for him—pork loins and sirloins—although he was too young and probably too self-absorbed to consider how she managed them on her meager resources. Once she gave him a bottle of cologne, called Garcon, that he hid, like a girlie magazine, on the top of his closet shelf, lest his mother smell something on him other than the Skin Bracer aftershave she bought him for Christmas and his birthday, like an obligation. Eva always had cigarettes, which she liberally encouraged him to smoke. He supposed now that she had done these things to extract some sort of promise from him that, even if he didn’t love her, he would always be available to her. That he would always worship and admire her with the dewy eyes of youth, that she, in various stages of emotional starvation, could at least quench her thirst with a tall, cool drink.

  She did not love him, he knew. She did not love anyone, as far as he could tell. Her drunk of a ex-husband who couldn’t provide for her in the way she was accustomed, the men she’d dated who could barely spring for dinner and a movie, always skipping those acts and wanting to add a third, which usually took place in her bedroom. The girls at the telephone company where she worked, who gossiped and were boring and never heard of the Louvre. Eva required a sophistication and kindness and curiosity from everyone that she assumed she had herself, if only because she always reminded him she was all of these things.

  “I can’t help it; I’m a sophisticated woman,” she had apologized after he asked her, with his money, to buy his mother a nice blouse at Pennelmen’s Department store. “I would never step foot in Pennelmen’s. The cheapest fabrics you ever saw. And no imagination, no style. I mean, maybe that’s okay for an old woman…you should let me get her something at Barrett’s.”

  “I don’t think my mother would wear anything from Barrett’s,” he answered, looking in his wallet. And even if she looked good in the frilly chenille, the billowy scarves, and other French-looking outfits, he couldn’t afford it.

  “Well, I will not set a foot in Pennelmen’s, I’ll tell you that. My reputation couldn’t stand it.” She lit a cigarette and crossed her arms, ending the conversation. She had compromised enough in her life, she’d always told him—and look where it had gotten her!

  It was not the sex, not only the sex—the sole benefit he imagined most boys to derive from such a relationship—that he continued to see her. She was a good-looking woman, for thirty, and had a quick wit and could flatter one with a single raise of her eyebrow. But why he thought he had loved her, he didn’t know. He supposed he felt sorry for her. It was the hole
of the persecution in which she was buried, by men, women, by society, she had impressed upon him to believe, all while she stood there holding the shovel.

  “People from Ohio, they just don’t know anything.” She floated her eyes to the ceiling, taking a cigarette herself. “They certainly don’t know how to live.”

  Well, he had certainly lived, and he had seen some things. He had lived, she would be happy to know. If he saw her again.

  He dug at the darkness, twisting his body in increments so small, it was a miracle there was oxygen to breathe. But he could not squirm without becoming tired. He felt himself doze off. When he awoke again, his left leg burned. His hands went to his phantom calf and grazed something firm, fleshy. His stump had grown again. He wriggled the toes on his left foot, all five, and the steely, curly hairs he remembered on them burned as the nerves beneath them fired their own internal gun battle. He breathed and choked on the acrid stink of flesh. Jesus. He had dreamed, or hallucinated, he was a below-knee amputee.

  Where were the others? He wiggled, kicking his legs, his arms in little motions. He was buried in rocks, maybe. Had there been an explosion? And why was he not broken into so many sticks, marionette limbs?

  His voice. It sounded so far away, like those other voices. Murmurs of men close by but far away. Was he hearing things? He inhaled, wondered whether his lungs were punctured. Once he inflated the branches of lung in his chest, a few deep breaths, he shouted over and over again in the rocks. Why would he wake up after such catastrophe, only to die in rubble? He had to be found. His parents had to know. Stanley Polensky had to know. He shouted but what sounded like a wounded gurgle came out. He gurgled until he was too tired to make a sound.

  When he awoke again, he was so hungry. The rocks were softer; he wondered whether it had rained. He could see ribbons of blue sky above him, and he kicked and pushed and managed to move the rock above him slightly to the side. Something fell on his face, a bat, a mouse, he was not sure, and he closed his mouth and pressed his eyes shut but it did not move. He rocked his body back and forth, widening the space around him. The rocks oozed wet and stink on him and the squiggly feeling of maggots. The ribbons of blue sky widened, and occasionally a fly swarmed in, crawling on his face. He shook his head back and forth, back and forth, and the thing on his face fell to the side. Curiously, he touched it with his tongue. It tasted salty, sour. Rubbery. Fleshy.

  “Oh Jesus, we got an animal down there or something,” Johnson heard someone say.

  “Well, let’s not sit around and let Sarge find out,” another answered. “Come on, let’s scare it out of there.”

  Suddenly the pile of rocks above Johnson was rolled away, one by one. The air grew fresher, the sky brighter, and Johnson could see that the rocks wore fatigue wool, canvas jackets, socks. He was buried in a pile of corpses. As soon as his arms were freed, he began to push against the bodies around him. The sourness in his stomach rocked against his cheeks.

  “Oh, Jesus. Oh shit.” The men, fresh-scrubbed privates by the look of them, wiped their hands on their thighs. They squinted their eyes, grabbed him by the shoulders. They shook him. “Are you all right?”

  At a clearing station of the Graves Registration Service, T/O 10-298, north of the Hürtgen Forest in Aachen, Germany, Johnson waited for a private to find him some clean clothes. He could not be picky. He was lucky that he had not been buried already, that his personal effects were not shipped to Depot Q-290 in Folembray, France, where they would be sorted and sent to the Army Effects Bureau at the Quartermaster Depot in Kansas City, Missouri, as one sergeant had painstakingly and eye-glazenly explained to him. He was given wool pants that were too short, a shirt that scratched at his chest. Still he’d had a shower, the first in presumably months, since D-Day at least. He’d used a whole bar of soap on his balls and ass.

  “The form pinned to your body said you died of shock from an amputated leg.” The platoon leader looked over his makeshift desk at Johnson’s full set of appendages. “Now how do you suppose those EMT tags got messed up?”

  “I don’t know, sir.” Johnson rubbed the leg in question. “I don’t remember much of anything.”

  He suddenly remembered the corsage. For some reason, Johnson thought maybe Stanley Polensky had been trying to stuff it into his mouth. He shook his head, licked the inside of his cheeks. He had imagined so many things—his leg all sizes of amputation, the changing of the seasons. He knew for certain he’d been left behind—whether by the Allies or Germans he wasn’t sure—left for dead.

  “Now you don’t suppose you were faking it, were you?” The sergeant frowned, drumming his fingers on the desk.

  “Fake an amputation, sir?” Johnson sat up. He’d heard about the deserters but had never thought he’d be assumed one of them. No one had mentioned that the right pant leg of his old fatigues was missing, that the torn cuff, up near his groin, had been tinged with blood. Why he had not kept the pants for proof he did not know. Shock, he supposed.

  “Let’s say for a minute the medic pinned the wrong tag on you, made a mistake.” The sergeant leaned back in his seat. There were lines on his face angled in every direction—at the corners of his mouth, across his forehead, vertically in the sunken parts of his cheeks—but Johnson didn’t believe him to be any more than twenty-five. “And maybe you played dead for awhile on the ground. Tired of people shooting at you, maybe. Couldn’t take it anymore.”

  “No, sir.” He didn’t tell him about the hallucinations. “I must have passed out somehow—the shelling, maybe. I remember a big explosion. And then I remember waking up in the ground.”

  The sergeant sat with his index fingers in a triangle, touching his lips. Johnson was not sure what he debated—whether Johnson would make a stink about being left for dead in a pile of bodies, or whether the Army should prosecute him for full desertion. Whether he should be examined for fugue, or brain damage, before being sent back to the line. Whether he was so much human collateral to be worth the trouble.

  “Sir, I wouldn’t lie to you,” he offered. “I enlisted, and I’m prepared to stay through the end.”

  The sergeant sighed. “What’s your outfit?”

  “First Division Infantry, sir.”

  “I’m sending you to the hospital,” the sergeant said finally, lighting a cigarette. With this decision, his energy increased. His eyes burned like coals. “Those boys need every warm body they can get right now, but you’ve been sitting here like you don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground, and, honestly, I don’t think you’re faking it. I mean, you haven’t eaten for a couple of weeks, you’ve been transported in a truck with the other bodies…it just don’t make sense. I’m not sure how I’m going to report this, but I would prefer you don’t talk to anyone until we get it straightened out. We’ll be in touch with your family, to redact our mistake.” The sergeant stood up, and Johnson followed.

  He did not talk to anyone at the base about the mix-up, how so many human bodies were lumped into piles without sheets or bags to cover them and all the other things that Graves Registration was not supposed to do, but what he most wanted to talk about was what had happened to him, exactly—how he had been dead, maybe, or almost dead, and something had happened so that he was alive. Something had happened in the darkness that was not supposed to have happened. His religion could not explain what had happened and his parents could not explain what had happened and the Army sure as hell could not explain what had happened. It came down to Polensky, he reasoned, the last person who he saw in the forest. Stanley and thing he stuffed in Johnson’s mouth.

  Maybe Polensky was a witchdoctor; maybe he had gotten a formula from one of his Tom Swift books. Johnson would get back to the front and grab Polensky by the neck and he’d better start talking or he’d break it. Or maybe he would thank him for saving his life. Right now, he just wanted to not throw up, to break down in tears like a little girl, like Stanley. He bummed a cigarette from a soldier outside the mess tent and stretched in the grass, hopi
ng the sun would bleach out the burn of memories that were seared in his limbs. He watched another truck arrive, full of bodies. He pushed himself up on his own two legs and felt his muscles expand and contract as he walked over, the air swimming down his throat. The sun warmed the top of his ears, the back of his neck. He saw the arms and legs, trunks of others piled one atop one another, and those men were dead. The sun warmed their bodies but when the night came, they would cool again, and nothing would make them move their mouths, laugh, open their eyes. They would not tunnel their way out of the pile. They were not so lucky. Why was he?

  When he made it to the truck he was crying, tears like he hadn’t cried since he was six and his father put down their bird dog, Shotzie.

  “Hang in there, buddy.” A boy-soldier, the barest of fuzz on his chin, a sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of his nose, knocked him on the shoulder. “The first few are weird, but then they’re just bodies. Nothing to get upset about.”

  “How long you been here?” Johnson asked, wiping his eyes. He felt the muscles in his arm simmer, his fist clench. How could he disrespect those men, men Johnson had played poker with, catch with, shared cigarettes? He imagined the small explosion of pain in his fist when it would meet the bone of the boy’s jaw.

  “A few months. It’s gets old—you’ll see.” The boy grinned, and before Johnson could react, he held the legs of a dead man in his arm, boots dry caked with mud and blood, the boy straining to square the man’s head and shoulders against his chest. The boy jerked the man’s shoulders upward as the face, placid white and set like wax, lobbed to the side. “You ready?”

  The boy moved backward, and Johnson moved forward. And they took the men to a shed and collected their things from them, pocket watches and crucifixes and girlie pictures and foiled-wrapped chocolate. The bodies had only one dog tag—the other had been taken by the medic when he declared them dead in the field of combat. Johnson and the boy went through a box of tags brought in by the medics and matched them up to the bodies, making them men again briefly, before they were zipped into bags to be interred at the temporary military cemeteries all over Europe. When the boy wasn’t looking, Johnson slipped one of the tags from the box up his sleeve and held it against his wrist, underneath his cuff. Before dinner he squatted behind the mess tent and retrieved the tag: CALVINE. JOHNSON. He slipped it on the chain on his neck, reuniting it with its partner. He rubbed them together against his thumb and forefinger, feeling his name and number and branch of service agitate the skin. But he felt not like man nor body. He pulled at the chain against his neck until it snapped, watching it slither with the tags through his fingers. Wherever they fell on the ground, in a jumbled dance, was where he left them.