Tide King

by Jen Michalski

  “Where are you going to go, Stanley?” She laughed at him, laughed at him like he was nothing, the baby sucking at her breast. “Home and drink yourself to death?”

  “I’m going to Ohio. There are things I have to do.”

  “Oh, that’s right, your little dead soldier friend.” She pulled Heidi from her breast and placed her in the bassinet. “I wonder who you really are in love with, Stanley. It would make much more sense, wouldn’t it?”

  “You have to burp her.” Stanley dove toward the bassinet and cradled Heidi on his shoulder as she cried, then burped. “We know who you’re really in love with, and it ain’t me or this baby.”

  “Go to Ohio or wherever, you goddamn pansy.” Cindy lit a cigarette and picked up the hotel phone. She reached into her purse and pulled out two one-hundred dollar bills and they fluttered toward him, birds with broken wings. “Just get out. I’m going to the Grand Ole Opry.”

  He went to the bus station to purchase his ticket for Bowling Green, Ohio. But as he waited on the bench, smoking cigarettes, he thought of Heidi’s eyes, her sprout of hair, her little hands that had begun to memorize the contours of his face, hands that grasped frantically until she felt him, his shirt or his forefinger, his earlobe. Her weight pulsed in the muscle memory of his arms and chest. He felt tears in his eyes, her place in the foxhole in his heart right next to Johnson.

  He went back to the hotel. Cindy looked up at him quizzically from the phone. She did not stop him as he packed Heidi’s bassinet and her bag and put her in the stroller. At the station, he traded in his ticket to Bowling Green and bought two bus tickets to Maryland. As he watched the fields of wheat and corn and barns and water towers and bus exhaust accumulate between him and Cindy, he thought of what he would do to Heidi’s room at home. A bunny painted on the wall, a crib. A doll. He could read her books, Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. He could find the child who abandoned him when he left for war. He did not have much to give her, except for his undivided love and attention. He figured it was a good start.

  1970

  He awoke in the womb, water pushing into his lungs and eyes, dark and soundless. But he was a man and the womb a lake, its enormity both alienating and suffocating. He flapped his arms to drive himself up to the disk of pale light that rested on its ceiling, where the black gradually dissipated into layers of hazel and green. But he could not move, his foot prisoner to something in the cloudy blackness below. He groped around his ankle and felt a rock, its slimy ridges resisting his grip. There was no need to panic, no matter how hard his lungs screamed, the crescendo of synapses in his primitive brain that warned him of danger, of possible death. No, he had been awoken once, awoken again. Now he was alive again, and he’d chew his fucking foot off if he had to.

  He hugged the sharp boulder and tried to loosen his foot, but he could not straighten it flat enough to wriggle it free from this narrow crevice. He wondered whether he even had a foot when he descended, a gelatinous mound of burned flesh, whether it had grown back and now was trapped in the place that had welcomed, anchored him, until he was ready to be born again. He strained, tried to push the rock from its location. His lungs burned, screaming for air, his eyes full of fireworks. He wondered if he’d pass out and wake up again, unable to dislodge himself, stuck in a Sisyphean nightmare.

  He held onto the rock and twisted his leg as far to the right as he could, until he could feel the muscles and tendons straining, a pop, and then a warming, increasing pain as the space in his broken ankle filled with blood and produced a clot and fibroblasts to mend the space. He could feel the heat coming off his body, the accelerated steam engine of his healing. He yanked his foot, a broken hinge, out of the space before it had time to mend and floated up to the surface.

  The sun burned his eyes, and he squinted as he paddled toward the shore. The lip of land greeted him with sharp teeth, the rocks tearing into his soft, milky blue skin, as he washed up against them, and blood seeped out of his hands and arms like a surprise. The pain came first, a bloated ache through his body, as he gasped for air, air, to fill every spider branch of his lungs, every tendon and muscle, for air to inflate his heart and arteries, to move the dark sludge of his blood. The smell came next, a sweet, bloody sour eggy steak. His smell. He closed his mouth as a spasm of air and gastric juices made its way from his stomach to his throat and pressed his face into the pebbled shoreline.

  A rifle clicked overhead. He strained upward to the blur of body before him, the limp pale blonde hair, an ear. A woman. As his eyes adjusted to the light, the blur of her became older. Calm, flat lines weighed her lips and eyes; lines like tree branches grew from between her eyebrows and across her forehead. The weight of her cheeks set her mouth into a frown. She was not an angel, he figured, but she was his saint.

  “Don’t move.” She leveled the barrel at his head. “Do you speak English?”

  “Yes.” He made to stand but his skin was soft, wrinkled, on his feet, like a little baby man, his legs puffy. He wondered whether his bones had molted. He flopped in the pebbled bed. He must have looked like a seal man, an alien, the living dead at best. But she did not frighten, did not flinch.

  “Where’d you come from?” She steadied the rifle.

  “Ohio.” He held up his arms, the skin thin and sagging on the undersides. “Please. I’m not going to hurt you. If you could help me up—”

  “Ohio? You’re from Ohio?” She leaned toward him, studying his face, his seal skin. Her eyes narrowed then widened. Her jaw dropped. She stepped back. “Oh my goodness, you’re a man.”

  From where he lay on his stomach: soft cedar wood walls, a quilt on a hand-carved rocker. A cabin. She had carried him here on her back, feet forward, and he’d watched the river bob farther and farther away, a narrow path growing behind them as they moved steadily upward. From the bed, he watched as she heated water on a stove on the other side of the room.

  “I’m awake now,” he called. He didn’t want to scare her. He counted two rifles, a hunting knife, in his limited sweep of her quarters. It was one room, maybe fifteen by twenty feet, a basic stove and ice box wedged into the corner opposite the bed on which he sat, the only bed. A table with a red gingham tablecloth was pushed against the wall at the other end. A glass vase with some fresh wildflowers seemed the only decorative touch. Two windows on the front side of the cabin supplied light. The front door opened onto a screened porch half the size of the cabin.

  She turned and placed a cup of tea on the floor near where his right arm dangled. “You can sip at that if you want—there’s some chamomile petals in it.”

  “Who are you?” He lifted his head and shoulders and steadied the cup to his lips. It was heavier than he expected, or perhaps he was weaker. His skin still rippled loose from his muscles, as if the glue of his body had evaporated.

  “My name’s Margaret, but people call me Maggie.” She came to him and slid her hands under his armpits, turning him rightward and upward as his legs dangled off the mattress. An ice bag was tied with a kerchief to his broken right ankle, with a makeshift splint from a split log. She stood before him in men’s dungarees, the sides unbuttoned to allow the spread of her hips, and a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Her skin, clear and brown, glistened from the heat. A looker when she was young, and a looker still if she had cared about those kinds of things.

  “I’m Johnson.”

  “Johnson, huh? I’ve been calling you a lucky son of a bitch ever since I found you washed up off the lake.” She straightened the sheet around his shoulders as he sipped at the tepid liquid in the cup.

  “There was a fire.” He set the mug down between his legs, conserving his strength. “Down at the gulch. Burned like a monster.”

  “What fire?”

  “The one in the big gulch—you know where that is?”

  “I know it where it is—everybody in a hundred miles knows it.” She walked across the cabin, turned to look at him. “But there hasn’t been a fire there since ‘47
.”

  She patted his back as he vomited over and over into a tin bowl. He vomited so much he didn’t think he could vomit any more of himself. When he was done, he sat shivering in the blanket as she heated up some broth and potatoes. But he still could not believe it, that he had been in the lake for 23 years. The situation in Germany was hard enough to accept. This hardly seemed possible.

  “I apologize.” He wished he hadn’t awoken, only to be this sick. “I don’t mean to take up your bed.”

  “It’s all right.” She said from the sink. “I don’t sleep very well, anyway. This soup needs to cook a little longer. It’s not much, but you can’t take much right now.”

  “Tea’s okay.” He motioned to the mug with his head. “I bet I was quite a sight, huh?”

  “That don’t even begin to describe it.” She sat on the rocker by the bed and began to chew on a piece of jerky. “I’ve been wondering all kinds of things while you’ve been sleeping, about you washing up here, about the fire, about your family. About whether I’m really talking to a human being or…something else.”

  “Something happened to me back during the war,” he explained. “In Germany. And I haven’t been right since. It’s driving me crazy—it’s like…I can’t get injured. Apparently I can’t die. Have you ever heard of such a damn thing? Who the hell would want such a thing?”

  “The government.” She leaned toward him, her blue eyes mere slits. “I knew it. They’re probably making soldiers who never die, that can fight all their wars for them. The government is up to their elbows in all kinds of stuff we don’t want them to know, like UFOs. And Vietnam.”

  “Vietnam?”

  “The new war—there been others since Germany. A lot has happened, even I know.”

  “But you believe me?” He leaned forward, their noses almost touching. “You don’t think I’m crazy, do you?”

  “Well, I seen some weird things in my life.” She sat back and looked into the distance. “I seen a flying saucer over the lake one night. And I seen a bear walk on its front paws instead of back ones, like it belonged in the circus. I ain’t one to say something can’t happen. Besides, I’m up here in the mountains. They coulda blown up half the world and I wouldn’t know it. And I wouldn’t care.”

  “But why did you take me in?”

  “I don’t know.” She shook her head slowly, looking at the air in front of her. “I didn’t know what you were, but you looked so sad, like some doe caught in a trap.”

  “You have any family?”

  “My daddy died ten years ago. I live alone.” She slumped in the rocker, her knees spread. “The other girls always made fun of me at school for living out in the woods, and the men…sometimes some smart aleck from the Forest Service ties one on and comes up here, thinking he’s gonna get a little hanky panky with me. I’m pretty accurate from 100 yards, they find out pretty quick.”

  “So you’re up here by yourself?”

  “I know how to take care of myself in the woods,” she answered, her eyes level and penetrating. “I grew up here, and I’m going to die here.”

  “I didn’t mean to upset you. Not really having a home, I say it’s nice to feel like you’ve got one.”

  “How on earth did you get to Montana from Ohio?” She pulled a foot up on the edge of the rocker.

  “I was looking for somebody. Somebody who might know why I’m like this, what’s happened to me.” He let the sheet fall from his chest. The smell was stronger underneath. “Jesus, how can you stand my smell?”

  “I got a big jar of vapor rub. Kills most smells. But I would be lying if I said I’d forget the smell of you.” She ripped a chunk of jerky with her teeth. “And the varmints been coming up to the cabin something awful. Plunked me a few raccoons. Had to scare off a mountain goat yesterday.”

  “Well, once I get better, I won’t be any more trouble.” Would he get better? Outside the window, through the porch, he could see pines and fir, the cloudy bowl of early spring above them.

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m not scared, if that’s what you’re worried about. I could kill you ten different ways before you even got off the bed.”

  “I’m the one who should be scared.” He smiled. “And I guess I am, a little. Especially of how I look.”

  “Well, you look a little more human than you did when you washed up.”

  “Could I trouble you for the mirror on the wall?”

  She did not look at him as she handed over the rectangular slab. And after one look, he did not look at himself, either.

  Now that he was conscious, he dreamed of the fire. It seemed like yesterday to him and not over twenty years ago. He woke up with the heat on his back, his hands gripping the sides of the mattress, just as the fire made to sweep over them. He wondered what had happened to Lane, if he survived. What had happened in the world while he was sleeping. Perhaps he was still dreaming. In bed at night, he knocked his head against the wall of the cabin, harder and harder until he thought his crown would break through to the other side.

  “Jesus Jiminy, will you stop doing that?” Maggie mumbled from the rocking chair. “This is not a dream, Johnson. Next time you start banging your head, I’m going shoot a tranquilizer in you.”

  He wanted to go to town, as soon as he was able, and find Stanley. Maggie did not make trips to town often. Since he’d been at the cabin, Maggie had gone once, bringing canned beans and bread for herself and jars of baby food for him, but she never mentioned any news of the outside world. Perhaps she did not want to upset him. Sometimes she caught him staring in disbelief at the free calendar from the marina that hung by the stove. August 1970.

  But she was gentle. Every night she dabbed his back and legs with a cold rag with which she had seeped chamomile flower, explaining it would fight off infection and dull any pain. His hands faded to white and then warmed with peachy ochre. Thin white hairs grew between his knuckles and then thickened.

  “I don’t really understand it.” Maggie wrung the rag into a tin bowl between her bare feet. She brought it back up and dabbed his neck. “I have half a mind to call Dr. Porter down and have him take a look at you. Every day I wake up and you’re alive, I can’t believe it’s hardly possible.”

  “Why don’t you call him? Maybe he knows something.” He liked when sometimes he felt her fingertips on the sides of his back, his neck. It had been a long time, Kate, since anyone had touched him with any intention. He longed to ask her for more, to touch every part of him, to prove to him he was alive, that she was alive, but felt he’d already taken too much. Already, when she fell asleep in the rocking chair, he pushed himself to a sitting position and practiced sleeping against the wall so that soon he could insist she take the bed, he the rocker.

  “I don’t know what Dr. Porter knows that I don’t,” she sighed. “My father grew up around the Flathead Indians. They used osha and gumweed for a lot of general healing. But I never heard of an herb that makes you heal like this. You sure the government ain’t gone done something to you, Calvin?”

  “I don’t think so. Why would they leave me in a pile of bodies?”

  “Maybe they treated all of you. Maybe you’re the only one who woke up.” She leaned back in the chair. “My daddy and me, we have a few folks we trust in the town, but I don’t trust anyone else, really. Especially the government.”

  “But you trusted me. And I could be the government Martian spy you’re all spooked about.” He smiled. His skin was still rubbery, not entirely responsive to his muscles, and he imagined the loping, sloping jack-o’-lantern of his face, like a stroke victim’s.

  “Don’t make me have to shoot you, Johnson,” she answered, picking up the bowl, in which lukewarm water and sloughed skin lay, forming a paste. “I lay awake all night already wondering why I didn’t leave well enough alone.”

  Although she didn’t drink, when Maggie went to the post for her usual supplies one week, she came home with a flask of whiskey.

  “That got Mr. and Mrs. Rumsey
a twitter,” she laughed, watching him take a small sip while standing near the window. He’d practiced walking around the cabin, building the muscles in his legs, testing the weight of his ankle. He could make it from bed to stove and halfway back before feeling tired, before having to steady himself on the back of the rocking chair. “I told them I was having a little trouble sleeping and needed a nip before bed.”

  “How can I pay you back?”

  “You don’t worry, Johnson. You may be many things, but you ain’t been much trouble. Maybe if you can help me with the corner of the ceiling over there before winter comes. It looks like it’s ready to leak.”

  “I don’t want to cut into your season.” He knew she earned her living as a game guide, taking groups of recreational hunters hunting for deer and antelope in the fall, bison in the winter, sometimes black bear in the spring. She made him split with pain laughing as she told him stories of the men staying in the lodges across the lake who needed help shooting game, how she’d have to stand right next to them and fire exactly when they did, insisting the bullet that killed the deer or antelope was indeed theirs and not hers. They never argued with her, and they came back every season. And she lived well enough off the money and the game, making venison jerky and stew and fillets of antelope that she sold to some of the restaurants to supplement the gnarled, undersized potatoes and radishes she harvested from her rocky garden.

  “It’s maybe another month before the hunters will start coming.” She put away the canned milk and anchovies and woman products she’d gotten from town. “I really should have been canning some of the carrots and potatoes.”

  “I could help you.” Johnson sat up in the bed, pulling at the band of the boxer shorts Maggie had given him, her father’s. He was thankful for the hand-me downs, but they did not leave much to the imagination. Although he supposed there was not much Maggie didn’t know about him physically by now. He watched the muscles of her arms move as she boiled the water for coffee, the broadness of her shoulders and the soft back of her neck where her hair was swept up in a bun.