Tide King

by Jen Michalski

  “Come back to my house and I will tell you.” Ela jumped down from the tree, a little smile staining her lips. Safine looked back at her own house for a moment before following.

  “Before my matka died, the soldiers had come to our house for her lover, who did a bad thing.” Ela sat on the bed, holding the lalka and the herb. “A bad thing he blamed on my mother. But my mother made medicines, and some of her medicines were made from this flower. I ate this flower before the soldiers came. Antoniusz, my stepfather, says the soldiers shot me, and he buried me himself. I didn’t remember anything for a long time after that. But I woke up in the ground. Little by little, I dug myself out. When I got out, so much time had passed, my mother was already dead. And many springs have passed since. But I am still a little girl.”

  “But why?”

  “It was struck by lightning, this flower—I have tried other flowers of burnette saxifrage, and cannot replicate the medicines. It must be the soul of the lightning captured inside. It healed all the rabbits and frogs we maimed. And it healed me. I am very old, and I cannot die.”

  “But why?” Safine shook her head.

  “The herb—do you understand?”

  Safine looked at the flower as Ela held it out to her.

  “If you eat it, you’ll never die.” Ela nodded to her as Safine shook her head. “Won’t it be fun? We could play dolls and live in my cottage and the villagers will give us things because they are scared of us and want us to stay away. We can have beautiful clothes and honey and butter and dolls and even meat.”

  “Can my matka take it, too?” Safine asked. “I would miss her.”

  “Take it.” Ela pressed the herb up to Safine’s lips. “Take it for me.”

  Safine scrunched her face, the way a child might resist medicine. She opened her mouth the width of a finger and then widened it.

  “Safine!” The scream came from the entrance of the bone house. A moment later, it was joined to Matka’s body, still in her nightclothes, followed by a man from the village, brandishing a torch. She picked Safine up and pushed at Ela. “Get away! Get! Get, you witch!”

  Ela stuffed the herb into Safine’s palm, and her fingers closed over it tightly. Safine’s matka mumbled prayers, curses, as she ran down the hill, Safine tucked against her.

  “We mean no harm to you.” The man backed out of the bone house, torch in front of him. “The mother wants her baby back, that’s all. They’re leaving for America tomorrow. Please leave them safe through the night. Here.”

  He dropped some goat meat wrapped in cheesecloth at the entrance of the bone house. Ela followed him outside, in time to see Safine and her matka disappear into their cottage. She wondered if it was too late to get the herb back. The next day, she watched the man load Safine and her mother and their belongings into a wagon and head toward the village. She searched the cottage, empty and swept clean, for the herb. She searched the grounds around the cottage, the soot of the fireplace. But the herb was gone, along with Safine, forever. She went back to the bone house.

  “We were not patient enough.” She threw the blonde lalka against the wall. She took Barbara by the arms and shook her, hoping that the dainty smile, the mocking eyes, would fall off her face. “Why did you not speak your mind, warn me? Why do you want me to be alone, to live old and haggard in the heart and mind, but young in body? Stop laughing at me. I am tired that you laugh at me.”

  She threw Barbara next to the other lalka and built a fire outside. When it crackled orange, coughing black puffs of smoke, she tore off their arms, then legs, and fed them to the flames. Their smiles remained, weak but preserving, martyrs to the end.

  “You shall seal your own fate.” She twisted off the heads and threw the bodies and heads into the fire. Their cloth unfolded and burned. “You are not even human.”

  Was she? She watched their smiles disappear into the soot and was relieved that she was finally free of them. But she felt sick. They were gone, and she remained. She was really alone, with no one but herself to blame.

  1947

  When they had moved into the farmhouse, it looked less like a house and more like a collection of boards that been blown together upwards. Window shards jutted from panes like incisors, a wilderness of weeds and stones grew from the baseboards, and the nearest neighbor looked to be a quarter mile away south. But, Stanley found, it was less than a mile from the dump, and when he felt better, when Cindy had washed his wound in warm soap and water and dressed it for five days straight, he dragged home a table, a sofa they’d later discover to be infested with spiders, and various slats of wood that he hammered into crevices, converted into shelves, and used to repair the porch steps. His skin healed over the wound, wormy and shiny, and he could not lift his arm all the way above his head.

  Until they could afford to fix the upstairs window, they slept in the living room on a pile of quilts they had gotten from the Salvation Army. During the day, Cindy worked with her sewing kit on the front porch, trying to give her silky, gaudy clothes a drab, humbler life of knee-length dresses and shawls and blouses. They drank watered coffee grounds for weeks on end and tossed Stanley’s combat boots at the things that scrambled in dark corners. Stanley picked up work at a neighboring farm for harvest, corn, working twice as hard with his good shoulder and arm. He bought a truck that didn’t run and rebuilt the engine by reading a manual, and Cindy cleared out a small square of land behind the back of the farmhouse, where she planted carrots and kale, green beans, tomatoes, and potatoes.

  But the piety of their present life could not bury the bones of the old. Stanley bought a fifth of cheap whiskey and hid it under the porch. It was his only ammunition against his dreams. Every night, when he settled from the pain in his shoulder, shrugged off the ache of the fields, and floated into the ether dark of his mind, Johnson would be waiting, demanding to know why Stanley hadn’t saved him. In each dream Johnson met a different death—explosions, shrapnel, rifle wound, gangrene, influenza—his body bloody, dismembered, burned, and pale. Johnson’s mouth did not move in the dreams, but his questions grow more insistent, his brown eyes sharpening, locking onto Stanley with such force and tenacity that he woke up shivering.

  “Why don’t we go out tonight, baby?” Cindy washed the tomatoes in the kitchen and put them in a pot to boil and can for the winter. She stood on the stool Stanley had made her, her legs pale drumsticks underneath her skirt, and when he moved behind her, the curve of her hips and buttocks pushed against his stomach. “It’s so quiet out here, I can barely stand it.”

  It didn’t matter to Cindy how the men looked at her—with scorn, with bemusement, with pity, or with longing—so long as they looked at her. She drank from the syrupy attention gotten as the result of her beauty and her deformity just as greedily as Stanley from the bottle. Stanley—and her inability to drive the truck—was all that stood between her and her admirers and detractors.

  “I don’t know.” At the sink, he wrapped his arms around her, feeling his erection swell against her leg. “We can’t really afford it.”

  “Honey, I swear I might go crazy if we don’t go into town—just to window shop?” She turned her head and puckered her lips the way he liked. “And maybe you can do a little window shopping later.”

  The trump card, if there ever was one. Perhaps they were not truly compatible, but they were man and woman, the most natural compliment, and for Stanley, that was enough. But maybe it wasn’t enough for Cindy, who’d been with men before him, men of all shapes and sizes. In all those years lying on his bed as a teenager, reading books, he hadn’t read much about women. He didn’t know if Cindy, riding on top of him like a child on a miniature pony, liked his cock, whether her orgasms, big productions of shuddering and hyperventilating and pounding his chest with her lemon-sized fists, were real, but he loved everything about her because she was a woman, silky, milky, her breath on his shoulder light in sleep, the feel of her lips on his brow when he woke up shivering, Johnson dead again.

 
Johnson. He could go to Ohio and see about Johnson’s family. They could go to Ohio, if Cindy wanted to come. And if she didn’t want to, then perhaps it was for the best. Their relationship, and its failure, it would not be the first or last mistake either of them would make.

  Cindy became pregnant. Stanley had not been not sure if she could get pregnant, if it was possible, given her condition, her compressed woman-ness that he assumed extended to all of the inside of her, but then slowly the front of her began to stretch, smooth and round, and she began to throw up in the morning, loud, gut-spilling retches from the upstairs bathroom that woke Stanley down in the living room, Stanley who had surrendered to slumber only precious hours before, his dreams finally too tired to haunt him.

  They had not talked about children, but he figured it was assumed, the product of the time-tested man-woman equation. He felt safer, that with impending motherhood, the attention of men would be replaced by the attention of child. And maybe Johnson would go away, too, seeing that Stanley was firmly planted in civilian soil, and a new generation, shiny-eyed myopics to war and atrocity, was on its way.

  “What do you want to name it, baby?” She called from the living room as he stood on the porch smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee water. The morning settled cold like dust on his shoulders and hands, and he brought his mug, steaming, closer to his face. Winter was coming, and neither of them had a good coat. Cindy’s was now too small, and Stanley’s wool overcoat from the Army was lost back in Baltimore. And now there would be baby coats and baby food and baby things on top of everything else.

  “We could name him after your father, if it’s a boy.” She stood beside him on the porch, her head nestled into his waist. He wondered if the baby would be a midget. He did not feel sorry for himself if this was true, but he would feel sorry for the baby. He wondered whether Cindy would be okay having a baby. He’d already wondered, so many times when they were having sex, where exactly things were located in her body, whether he was stabbing vital organs, tearing tissue to shreds, poking holes in things. But Cindy had never complained, and she complained no more even now that she was pregnant.

  “Now why in the hell would we want to do that?” He kissed the top of her head. “I’d rather have a girl, anyway, pretty like you. Now go inside; you’re going to catch your death.”

  The season had ended at the farm, and now a twenty-dollar-aweek pension from the Army was all that stood between them and their first winter. Some of the men who worked on the farm shot deer and lived off the meat, and Stanley had considered this, except he did not have enough money saved for a rifle. Not when Cindy had to go to the doctor and she needed new clothes and new shoes, too, because her feet had swollen.

  “You’re so good at cars, Stanley.” Cindy pushed the bowl of beans to him across the table. They had eaten beans, which Stanley had gotten from the church’s charity pantry on his trip to town, three times that week. “Why don’t you get a job at a garage? You’re so smart and did so well in school. Maybe we could move closer to town and you could work in an office and do something. Make friends. Have people over, go dancing.”

  “I don’t know.” He moved the beans around in his mouth but didn’t taste them. The baby was not nearly born yet, and she was already building their postpartum social life. “I like being out here in the middle of nowhere. I’ll get a job—don’t worry. Something has to shake out. Someone’s always got a job for a vet.”

  “You and fifty thousand other vets, right? You could go to school on the GI Bill and learn a trade or something.”

  “Let’s wait until the baby’s born—we’ve got too much on our plate right now.”

  “If we’ve got so much on our plate, how come I’ve got so much energy?” She swept the kitchen floor and sang. He wondered how a woman, dwarfed by her own broomstick, could have a locomotive in her big enough to power those vocal chords. She sang songs from her childhood and songs she remembered from the radio. When she got tired of those songs, she made up songs of her own. The songs comforted him, like his mother. Although his mother had not sung—it was her noise, the clanging pots and thumping rugs and splashing laundry water and chopping vegetables, that cloaked him in the soft dew of youth. He dropped his head on his hands as Cindy’s voice washed over him like a cat bathing her kittens.

  But he still had not found work, and he could not cancel Cindy’s appointment he’d made at the doctor’s because she’d know he had taken their last few dollars and spent it on more whiskey. Outside the house, so cold a bird could drop from the sky in an ice cube, he lifted her up in his arms and settled her in the front seat of the truck. He figured he’d beg, grovel at a few places while Cindy was at her appointment and maybe even have a job by the time she was finished. He walked her to the front door of the doctor’s office, kissed her hair, which smelled faintly of roses and oil, and walked to the post office to apply for the civil service exam. Then, he drove to the outskirts of town to see whether the shirt factory was hiring. Fabrics were no longer being rationed, since the war ended, and rumors floated at the post office that the factory was going to triple its production from the previous two years’.

  Cindy was waiting outside at the curb when he returned, her arms linked underneath her little scallop of belly.

  “What’s the news?” He swung her up into his arms and kissed her cheek before depositing her into the truck. “Why didn’t you stay inside, where it’s warm?”

  “I’m never going back to that peckerhead,” she answered, her little features stewed into a frown. “What a lotta nerve he has!”

  “What’d he say, baby?”

  “He asked me if I knew what kind of risks I was taking, having a baby—that I had no business putting my health and the baby’s health at risk like this.”

  “What does he know? Women only a little bigger than you have babies just like women two times your size.”

  “I’m just so tired of it, Stanley.” She rubbed her stomach absently. He could see the straps of her Mary Janes, the ones he’d bought just last month at the five and dime, stretching, her flesh red and sore and poking out. “Some people act like I shouldn’t do anything, shouldn’t say anything, shouldn’t even be alive. Of course, the men weren’t complaining when I was their little fantasy doll, right?”

  “Don’t worry about them. I love you. And we’re going to have the most beautiful baby in the world.”

  “I’m hungry, Stanley. Do you think we could stop by the diner near the police station?”

  “I would, if we had any money.”

  “What about them few dollars we had left over?” When he didn’t answer, she hit him on his bad shoulder. The pain razored up and down his shoulder and elbow before bottoming out.

  “Christ, Cindy—why you gotta do that?” His fingers went white on the steering wheel.

  “Because you are the most unreliable SOB I have ever met! Can’t you do anything right? I have to save your ass from being killed, nag you into getting a job, you spend all our money on booze…Jesus Christ, Stanley. You’re supposed to take care of me.”

  “Well, I guess there’s nothing I can say about that.” He always knew when to fold them. Cindy stared at the diner, as if willing it to rectify their situation.

  “You go to the diner anyway, Stanley,” she said finally. “I got an idea.”

  He wondered if he would spend the evening washing dishes in the diner kitchen but instead outside the door she pulled the wool hunter’s cap off his head and dropped it open side up. She plopped on the steps of the diner and began to sing.

  “Jesus, Cindy—get the hell up.” He grabbed her arm. She shrugged him off. “We don’t need no charity.”

  “We do when you act like a peckerhead and drink away all our money,” she said while smiling, and continued to sing.

  “Christ, I’m not going to take that. You weren’t getting shot at overseas. Hell, you weren’t even shot by your boyfriend, but you sure plugged me good.”

  “Yeah, and if I had a gun I�
�d plug you again right now.” She stared at him, and her eyes plunged into his chest, extracting the warmth of love and companionship that she had slowly filled it with in the last year. Or perhaps he was mistaken, and his chest was merely a balloon, fooled by the pressure of mere air.

  He went back to the truck and sat in the cab, staring at her like a puppy locked inside. He vowed to make things right, to get a job like any self-respecting man. But he did not know if it would be enough. He watched as a tall, soft man in a suit and cowboy hat approach Cindy, reach for his wallet. The man bent his head back as he laughed. He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, impervious to the falling thermometer, and bent over and shook Cindy’s hand. Stanley strained to see the bill that the man left in his hunting cap. Then he watched Cindy pick up the cap and the money and follow the man inside.

  He waited for her to come get him. He kicked at the baseboards of the truck, squirmed in the seat to get warm. He thought about driving away, about not letting a damn woman push him around. He was disappointed he was not that type of man. When she came out, an hour later, she was rosy and warm, carrying a brown paper bag. The man tipped his hat to her and waved to Stanley in the truck before heading up the street.

  “Well, I see you still know how to sucker the men out of their money,” he spat when she opened the cab.

  “Shut your stupid ass up, Stanley, and help me in the cab.”

  “I don’t see why I should,” he answered, but he did anyway, secretly happy that she was back, that she didn’t walk down the street with the heavyset cowboy man and out of his life forever.

  “You wouldn’t believe it, Stanley.” Cindy’s rubbed her little hands together in the truck as he started the engine. The smell of pot roast filled the car, and he swallowed once, twice. Down the street, the headlights of a sedan traveled through the purple dusk past the doctor’s office and over his fingers, dotted with goosebumps. Cindy had made gloves for Stanley from her old wool coat but he stupidly had left them home. “I was singing there on the sidewalk thinking that you were right, that it was a terrible idea, and a man come by and heard me singing. He said I should be on the radio and bought me dinner and gave me his card! He wants me to come down to the radio station and sing a song! You would a known if you hadn’t been such a stubborn ass and stayed outside with me.”