Tide King

by Jen Michalski

  “So, yeah, I’ll ask Richard.” They reached the car. It couldn’t get any worse at that point, she figured, how could it? Except that when she grabbed her backpack and went to open the passenger door of Oliver’s Mustang, Shauna was already sitting in it. Her eyes widened as she cracked her gum.

  “Jesus—yuck, you scared me.” Shauna pulled the door closed on her. “Go away, troll.”

  “I’m giving Heidi a ride home.” Oliver said, opening the driver’s side door. He threw his own backpack roughly into Shauna’s lap. “So shut the fuck up.”

  Shauna’s jaw dropped at perhaps the same velocity and speed as Heidi’s. They stared at each other as some weighed balance rolled, like a roulette ball, between them. For a moment, there was a pinhole of vulnerability in the irises of Shauna’s eyes, the beginning of a tear on one of her eyelids, before their gentle, pulpy black hardened irreversibly, and Heidi knew that her remaining days at Mt. Zion would be as cursed and unforgettable as a nightmare.

  “Get in.” Oliver said to Heidi, nodding toward the front seat. “Shauna was just leaving.”

  “I just remembered—my father is going to pick me up soon.” She backed away, unable to unlock her gaze from Shauna, a medusa busy turning Heidi’s limbs and stomach to stone the longer she stayed put. “Thanks, though.”

  At an alarming and embarrassing speed, Heidi ran back toward the school, hoping to catch Ms. Webster before she left. She could get a ride and perhaps some advice on how to avoid the freight train of Shauna’s wrath that would be barreling through the school at her as early as Monday morning. But the halls were dark, smelling of dust and adolescence—an eau de gym sock, bubble gum, and hormones. She stood outside in front, willing the orange monster to make its slow turn from State Avenue and lumber before her.

  After forty minutes, she traced the route her father would take to the school to get her, if he was indeed coming. Six miles. It was breezy, and she scurried along the side of the road like an opossum for two hours, ready to duck into the high grass or ditch at any vehicle that wasn’t the truck. She had been stupid not to take Oliver’s offer, and for some reason, this made her angry at her father, rather than Shauna or Oliver. Her father was at fault, along with her stupid mother, for her existence in this shit world. And Ms. Webster, too, for giving her a chance. She became angrier every step she took, and by six o’clock, reaching the driveway of their farmhouse and seeing the truck parked in the driveway, she was furious.

  Right away, she knew something was wrong. All the lights were out, and her father was a notorious waster of electricity on account of his glaucoma. Even during the day, at least the kitchen light burned. She stepped inside the hallway and there he was, like a pile of laundry that had settled at the bottom of the steps.

  “Shit.” She lifted his face between her hands, his head the weight of a bowling ball. Some of his drool smeared across her right palm, but he was cold, unmoving. She pinched his nose and blew in his mouth and pushed his chest, trying to approximate the CPR she’d learned during swimming classes years ago. Finally, she rested on top of him, feeling her short, beleaguered breaths press against the rigidness of his chest.

  She got a glass of water from the kitchen, gulping it greedily by the sink, pressing her lips tightly so that she would not immediately throw it up. When she turned, he was still there, where she’d left him. She sat down and took one of his hands. It was strange to think that the only person she’d ever known on earth, really, her only home, had gone to some other place, some other home. And left her here to fend for herself, with thirteen sixty-eight in his checking account until his next pension check.

  She picked up the phone and called Ms. Webster. She waited, strangely composed, as the rings went unanswered and she hung up. If she spoke of it, it therefore would be true, and the thing, strong and green inside her, would rot and snap and never grow again. She could not speak of what had happened just yet. She willed the tears from her eyes and went back to the stairs. She grabbed her father’s shoulders and pressed her foot aside the side of the step for leverage, pulling him up to a sitting position. He looked like he did when he slept, except he was cold and everything about him was weighted down with gravity, enclosed in a faint smell of urine.

  “Why’d you have to go and pull this? Jesus,” she asked, smoothing the collar of his shirt. Her thoughts began to gather speed, when his pension would come in, how much she could cash at a time, when she could pay the bills and get gas. She’d already done so much of it with and without him present, that it didn’t seem so hard. So hard to what? To pretend nothing was wrong? It was her senior year, and in a few months, she’d graduate. She didn’t want to go into foster care, for the state to sell the house, to evict her from the only memories she had. She didn’t want any extra attention at school, or even pity. And, mostly, she didn’t want to believe it. He’d left her. She sat on the stair above him and dropped her head in her hands.

  She heard it then, creak in the kitchen, not the creak of mice or settling foundations, but the creak of an intruder, a slow moan on the soft spot of the kitchen floor near the stove.

  A young man appeared at the entrance to the living room, wearing a white V-neck undershirt and jeans, a leather jacket, some undetermined type of mountain boot, a timeless nondefinitive style, certainly no one she’d ever seen before.

  “Wait…” He held out his hand, but she was already up the stairs, the charge of survival electrifying her limbs like a cattle prodder. She locked her father’s bedroom door and made for the shoebox at the top of her the closet where he kept his .22 pistol. It felt heavy and foreign, like an alien transponder, and she wished she’d taken him up on his numerous attempts to train her in firearms. Unfortunately, he was usually drunk when the offers had occurred, and she spent more time trying to talk him out of shooting the empty Wild Turkey bottles he’d lined on the fence for his own safety than wondering when her own marksmanship would come in handy.

  She crouched by the door and listened to his boots squeak on the wooden planks of the steps. Each board pressed against her heart, pinning it against her throat. She moved the safety with her finger, thank goodness she knew that much, and pointed the gun at the door.

  “Heidi?”

  The knock, his voice, startled her. She held the gun as steadily as she could with two hands and waited, her breaths quick through her nose. He knocked again, and she felt the sweat build in her armpits and begin in run down her sides. There was no third knock, and as the boots moaned again on the planks down the stairs and outside the house, she moved to the bedroom window, peering out. He turned, and she caught a glimpse of his face—placid, square—and she leapt back, wondering if he saw her. She thought of a Joyce Carol Oates story Ms. Webster assigned them last semester—about a convict with a motorcycle jacket and too-big boots who talks a girl out of her house and into his car while her parents are gone.

  He walked toward the truck. She took a deep breath and flew down the stairs, hurdling over her father’s body to the front door to lock it. She let the gun fall to her side and glanced through the curtains. At the truck, he had turned, staring at the door, realizing what had happened, and he trotted back up and tried the doorknob before disappearing around the side of the house. Her heart flittered in her ears as she moved back through the house to the kitchen. Sure enough, he was coming around the back of the house.

  She locked the back door and ducked as his form filled its six glass panes. The handle jiggled, and then he knocked again. She tried to imagine herself part of the wallpaper, a chameleon.

  “Heidi, I don’t mean you any harm. Please—answer or something.”

  But he didn’t knock again, and after a few seconds, she could see smoke lazily spiraling up to the sky. She stood up to find him sitting on the back porch steps, smoking. She wondered how long he would wait.

  A long time, apparently. Fifteen, twenty minutes passed, and she crept from room to room, peering through different windows. She could not turn on the lights as t
he sun began to disappear in the sky, could not turn on the television, not even take a shower. She thought about slipping out the front and running to the Harris’s house a mile up the road, asking Mr. Harris to come back with her. But she was a terrible runner; surely he would catch up with her. It would be better to be bold. It was not, she realized, as if she had anything to lose. Her life was no longer anything she knew and she would have to walk through the storm’s eye and get to the other side, wherever that would be. She sighed loudly, walked with the gun at shoulder level, and opened the door.

  “What do you want?” She growled. The man stood up quickly in surprise.

  “I’m sorry,” he answered calmly, backing down the steps and into the yard. He seemed unbothered by having a gun leveled at him. “I came to see your father, Stanley Polensky.”

  “And you killed him?”

  “No—he had a heart attack.” He twisted the cherry out of his cigarette and crushed the filter in his hand. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re trying to rob us? Does it look like we have anything? I called the police, just so you know.”

  “Oh.” He looked at his boots, his lips tight. One of his shoelaces was stained with ketchup or blood. She squeezed the handle of the gun, hoping the former. “I wish you hadn’t.”

  “I bet.” She felt tears on her face, but there was nothing she could do. Her arm began to warm and ping and numb from pointing the gun at him.

  “No, it’s just that I wanted to explain.” He held his hands up over his head. “I’ll stand here like this and we’ll just talk and then I’m going to beat it out of here when the police come.”

  “Hurry, then.”

  “Heidi, I’m so sorry about your father.” He blinked his eyes, and for a moment, she felt as if his eyelashes had wiped her face dry, had held her chin, caressed her cheeks. She noticed how stunning he was, like Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby. “I surprised the hell out of him, that’s for sure. We haven’t seen each other…for years.”

  “Are you…my brother?” It was entirely possible that, if her mother had hidden one child from the public eye, she had hidden another.

  “Oh, no.” He laughed. He shook his head and chuckled again, as if sharing in some inside joke to which she was not privy. “I’m a little older than that. I’m an old friend.”

  He poked around in his leather jacket for his cigarettes and pulled out a pack of Pall Malls. “Want one?”

  “I don’t smoke. My father doesn’t—didn’t—have any friends.”

  “So you’re his daughter, huh?” He looked up at her and cocked an eyebrow. “You really don’t look anything like him.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Hey, come on—you gonna level a gun at me all day?”

  “Until you get out of here and don’t come back. I told you, the police will be here any minute.”

  “Listen.” He inhaled his cigarette and squatted on the ground. “Did Stanley Polensky—your father—ever mention a Calvin Johnson to you?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, Stanley and Calvin were in the war together, which I guess you’d know if you know Calvin Johnson. I just wanted to get some information from Stanley about the war. I’ve come a long way. I’m not here to rob you or anything, I swear.”

  “What kind of information?”

  “Yeah.” He scratched the back of his head. “Probably a strange request. But I’m interested in a—corsage—that Stanley carried around. A dried flower that he kept in his helmet. I always figured it was probably a corsage from a girl at a dance or something, right, although Stanley never talked about any sweetheart, from what I can recall. Anyway, it’s really important that I see the herb. I’ve wanted to get in touch with Stanley for a long time, but I lost track of him after he moved from Baltimore. I finally find him, God, it was so good to see him, but he got all worked up seeing me and had a heart attack. I tried to resuscitate him, but…anyway, the herb isn’t important right now, is it? Your father is dead. We should help him, not leave him there like that.”

  “He’s staying where he is.” She waved the gun as if to remind him it was still there. “How do I know you didn’t hit him or choke him or kill him some other way?”

  “You don’t.” He flicked his cigarette onto the ground and stepped on it.

  “So maybe you’ll explain that to the police.”

  “Heidi, I’m Calvin Johnson.” He looked up at her. “I served with your father during the war.”

  “Stop it.” She shook her head. “Do you expect me to believe that? I don’t know what’s going on here, but we’re going to wait here until the police come. And if you try and run, I’ll shoot you.”

  “It wouldn’t matter if you shot me or not, but I won’t run.” He sat on the ground cross-legged. “I’ll wait.”

  “I’ll be right back.” She backed into the house toward the phone to call the police. In the kitchen, she poured herself a glass of water and watched him through the window. He remained on the ground, smoking another cigarette, as if resigned to his fate. Something about him seemed so harmless, so familiar. And he knew about the crazy herb in her backpack, the one her father had told her about, the one Melanie Huber told her was definitely not pot, but if her father was growing any shrooms, to please let her know. Suddenly, a stranger was her only familiar face in the world. She sighed and poured another glass of water and took them outside.

  “Here—if you’re thirsty.” She put the glass down between them, then backed away, pointing the gun at him. He took the glass and gulped it empty.

  “Thanks,” he answered. “I’m glad Stanley had a family. He was so shy with the ladies while we were in the army. I bet he was good to you, huh?”

  “Don’t.” She wiped the sweat from her brow and sat on the porch steps. “Don’t try to play my sympathies.”

  “I’m not. I’m just really sorry you had to come home…to this. Were you in school or something?”

  “Why are you curious about this—corsage?” She interrupted him. He studied her, but she could not tell what he was thinking.

  “Well, it may have some medicinal qualities. Do you know anything about that?”

  She looked at her water glass and then past his shoulder.

  “Do you know what I’m talking about?” He stared at her. “The flower? You are aware of its existence, right?”

  “Yeah—I’ve heard about it,” she answered finally, and his face lit up. His hands dug into each other as if he were trying to keep himself from her.

  “Is it in your possession? Stanley said he gave it to you.”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Listen, I don’t have any money. I can’t pay you anything, but I’d do whatever it takes to get to see it. You see, a friend of mine, a scientist, he wants to examine it.”

  “Can’t he get his own somewhere?”

  “That’s the thing.” He stood up and lit another cigarette, running his hand through his hair and pacing back and forth. She felt her body stiffen. Her hand with the gun followed him back and forth. She grabbed the railing with her other hand to steady herself. “It’s very rare, this herb, he thinks. Maybe a few patches existed in Europe a few centuries ago, or maybe this particular piece that Stanley owns was tampered with in some way. But we’ll never know until we test it.”

  “Why do you think there’s something medicinal about it?”

  “Because.” He stopped pacing and looked at her. “Because Stanley Polensky fed it to me in Germany in 1944 and then left me for dead…but I lived. And I’ve been like this…young, undead…ever since.”

  “What are you saying? That Calvin Johnson is still alive?” Heidi thoughts raced, constructing a man as old as her father withering away in some nursing home in Ohio. Her heart swelled for her own father, that he did not live to have the incident that weighed him down reclaimed, like lost baggage, years later.

  “Yes.” he smiled. “I survived. And we—the scientist and I—think it might have to do with the herb Stanl
ey gave me.”

  “You are so full of it,” she said, even though she felt herself shaking. “What’s my grandmother’s name?”

  “Safine.”

  “My aunts and uncles?”

  “Henry, Thomas, Cass, Julia…and Kathryn. Linus was your grandfather.”

  “What about my mother?”

  “Don’t know.” He dug his hands in his pockets. “I only knew him until 1944. Listen, did your father ever eat the herb, to your knowledge?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “Did you?”

  “Of course not.” She picked at her tennis shoe. “But you expect me to believe you did.”

  “I don’t know how much I ate. I remember your father stuffing it into my mouth, my wound. It was pretty bad, the wound. I was missing most of my leg from taking a shell.”

  “I know this. I also know the paramedic pronounced Calvin Johnson dead at the scene. And, theoretically, you’re just a guy who knows it, too, since I saw my father’s diary on the floor of the living room.”

  “Police sure take a long time in these parts.” He cocked an eyebrow toward her.

  “Well, I guess you have more time to make shit up,” she answered.

  Over the next hour, he told her everything as if he expected her to believe it. She wondered whether he had stolen anyone else’s identities aside from Calvin Johnson’s, whose Social Security checks he had stuffed in the backpack she’d noticed lying in the living room. Whoever he was, it puzzled her why he cared so much about Calvin Johnson’s past enough to come here and involve her father. Did he have some serious cash tucked away that she did not know about, perhaps recording royalties from her mother? Had he lied to her all this time, forcing them into some austere existence for the sake of making some point about his own frugality?