Tide King

by Jen Michalski

  “I can prove this to you,” the man said. “The herb. I’m telling you, that herb is magic.”

  “Either that or you’re a nut.” She sighed. He seemed smaller, shallower, to her, a con man off his meds. She figured that, like most con men, he thought he had his in with her and now he wouldn’t leave unless she got the police involved.

  “We should do it now.” He stood up. “Come on.”

  “What?”

  “I want you to shoot me.” He stood in the backyard, arms and legs spread out. “I’m proving to you that everything I’ve said is true.”

  “I’m not going to shoot you, you moron.” She felt sick to her stomach. It was turning out to be some crazy Joyce Carol Oates story after all. Maybe she had wanted to shoot him a few times in the past few hours, but this was not the same. “I don’t want to go to jail.”

  “Nobody will hear. I’m sure gunfire isn’t that foreign a sound in these parts,” he said. “Now, come on. You think I’m a con artist, that I’m trying to milk you dry or something, right? All I’m saying is shoot me in, here, the hand, and you’ll see.”

  He held his palm open toward her, far away from his body.

  “And then what?”

  “Well, it’ll hurt like hell, and it’ll bleed for a bit, but a few hours from now, you are going to see the wound start to heal. In no time at all, it’ll be completely gone.”

  “Either you’re a fool or I’m dreaming.” She scrunched her eyebrows. “And I’m supposed to take care of you during your convalescence?”

  “Not if you don’t want to. If you’ll kindly lend me a towel, I’ll sit out there in the cornfield by myself.”

  “Couldn’t you just rob us like a normal person?” She laughed at the unreality of her evening. Perhaps she had fallen asleep during seventh period. Everything, from Oliver to her father to this faux Johnson had morphed stranger and stranger as if she’d eaten chocolate before bed. “Why did you have to bring my father into this, and poor Calvin Johnson, too?”

  “Do you think I want to be twenty-two years old forever?” He narrowed his eyes as he felt for his cigarettes in his jacket. “You think it’s fun watching the people you care for age and get sick, knowing that every person you meet, you’re going to watch die? Believe me, I’m secretly hoping that this is the bullet that will kill me.”

  “Well, since you’re not going to back into the truth anytime soon, how about I start? We have nothing. There isn’t any money for you to take. We live on $230 dollars a month. You know what that buys, besides gas, when the truck is working, electricity, water, and food? Yeah, nothing. Sometimes, it doesn’t even buy water and food.”

  He turned from her and walked away, toward the cornfields, kneeling down on his hands and knees, eyes closed. She saw the bands of muscles in his arm, his legs, and his jaw tense before he started to cry, big bawling sulks, his head shaking, a cry even worse than any she’d ever had. He pounded the ground with his fists, his eyebrows slanted in fury toward his nose. Then he sat up, the residue of his anger rolling off him.

  “We can still give him the herb.” He nodded his head as he stood up, as if it had never happened. “He might wake up. Where’s the herb? Let’s give it to your father.”

  “He’s been dead for hours.” She fell back on the step, relieved that he was no longer angry, perhaps a little less dangerous.

  “It doesn’t matter how dead—it can’t matter. My whole leg was gone. I must have been dead for a month.”

  “But you already had the herb in you when you were alive,” she pressed, and then grabbed at her hair. “What am I talking about? This is all a bunch of bullshit.”

  “Look.” He sat back on his haunches. “I know this is all very, very difficult to swallow. I wouldn’t believe it myself, if you came up to me with the same story. But there are others like me, even. I can show them to you, if you want. There’s all sorts of classified research going on to isolate what’s going on in me, the others, and the flower, to see whether the secret to immortality is finally known. Even if you don’t believe me, at least let’s go inside. I know you didn’t call the police. I know you must believe in something, Heidi.”

  “I don’t know what I believe.” It was dark. She wanted to talk to Ms. Webster.

  “Believe me when I say I want to help you.” He walked toward her slowly, his palms facing outward. “I want to help your father, help you, and then maybe you’ll help me.”

  She let him come inside. They sat on the couch and looked at Stanley across the room. In the deepening twilight, he looked asleep. Everything in her father that Heidi had always assumed to be available to her, her father himself, had been washed away as if it were written in sand.

  “I feel so selfish for never having asked him anything about himself,” she said, to the man or to herself. “I’ve spent all my life worrying about myself.”

  “You’re young. I didn’t think about my parents, really think about them, until we shipped out from Fort Benning and I thought I might never see them again.” He pulled out his wallet and showed her a folded black and white photograph of a man and woman. The woman wore a shin-length polka-dot dress with white lapels folding out over a square collar. “Here they are, in front of our home. I wasn’t born yet, so it’s probably the 1920s.”

  “That’s very nice.” Heidi studied the man, who had thick Brylcreemed hair, a straight nose, and a square jaw. “You look a lot like that man. Even the slicked hair. And you definitely look like the guy on the ship.”

  “Heidi, get the herb. I want to save your father.”

  “He didn’t want to eat it. Look, I will give you the herb—I don’t really care about it. But you’re not giving it to my father, okay? I have to respect his wishes.”

  “But I need to know if he can undo this.” The man pressed her arm. “I can’t be like this the rest of my life. Don’t you want your father to live?”

  “No…yes…I don’t know.” She shook her head. “He never asked anything of me, except for that.”

  She rummaged through her backpack and put the sandwich bag on the table. His hand hovered over it, but he did not touch it.

  “Do you think it’ll work?” She stood up, her legs like paper, unsure whether she was scared or hopeful.

  “It has to,” he answered. “I’m living proof.”

  “But if you give it to my father, there might not be any more. Maybe the scientist should try and replicate it first…if it’s that important to you.”

  “Heidi, your father is dead over there.” Calvin picked up the bag. “Don’t you want him to live?”

  “Of course…but not if he’s going to be some Frankenstein.”

  “Is that what I am to you?”

  “I don’t know.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “I didn’t ask for any of this. I just wanted to get through high school. Yes, please save him.”

  The man bent over her father and pinched open his mouth, manipulating the herb out of the plastic sandwich bag with the other.

  “I’m sorry, Dad.” Heidi held her hands in prayer. She did not know any prayers, so she made one up about her appreciation of her father, his hard life, his small enjoyments of losing money at the track and at the liquor store, his faith in the orange dragon, who might miss his erratic and drunken driving, even if the rest of the world wouldn’t.

  “I can’t do this.” The man sat back on his heels. “Why would I take from your father the only thing I’ve wanted all these years for myself?”

  He stood up and placed the herb on the table before her.

  “Here, I can’t. Can you?”

  She looked at the herb, the one she almost sold to Melanie, in her gym class, who sat on the bleachers singing “Sugar Magnolia, blossoms blooming” with a doctor’s note about her asthma even though her lungs were stronger than an elephant’s. She looked at her father. He would be pissed. He would be so pissed. But he was her only father, her only…anything.

  “Will he stay fifty-five forever?” She asked
the man, who absently took her father’s pulse. “How long has he been dead now?”

  “Over two hours. Almost three.” He stood up. “Look, I don’t mean to take the decision out of your hands, but if it works, he’ll never die. There’s another one, this girl Ela—the scientist adopted her—she’s been nine for nearly two hundred years. She’s watched so many people die, and she’ll never become a woman. I thought I wanted your father to take it, but I don’t know. He’ll have to watch you die, which will kill him, even though he can’t die. Because he loves you so much, Heidi. I’ve never seen someone love a child so much. He told me how smart you are, how you’re going to do the Polenskys proud, that ‘Lil Cindy didn’t know what she missed.”

  “At least he gets to see her again. I don’t know if she’ll want to see him,” she laughed. But the tears that started growing in her eyes were not funny. “He’s probably giving her an earful right now.”

  “Well, she deserves it.” The man walked over to her and put his arms around her, squeezing her, warm and soft. He smelled like his jacket, clean but wild. He kissed the top of her head and held her in his arms and she let him.

  It took over an hour to dig the grave. She could barely see Johnson in the darkness, the dirt flying over his shoulder. Her father lay wrapped in the spare plastic shower liner by the widening hole. She sat on the porch drinking a glass of water. Perhaps, when her father went in the hole and she didn’t see him again, it would begin to hit her. It was easier to accept that it was Calvin Johnson digging the hole than her father dead beside it. She wondered what would happen when he left with the herb. She would go back to school on Monday and try to pretend that nothing happened. Maybe she could ask Ms. Webster to lend her a little food money until the beginning of the next month, when the pension check arrived, ready to be stretched every which way.

  Over the mound, Johnson crossed himself, and so did Heidi.

  “Do you think animals will get to him?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” He mopped the back of his neck with a dish towel she’d brought outside. “I dug it six feet. The shower curtain is wrapped pretty tight. I’ll put some two-by-fours I found in the basement as a layer. That might help.”

  “I’m sorry you had to do all that,” she said in the kitchen as he soaped up to his elbows at the sink.

  “Don’t worry about it. You just worry about yourself.” He smiled at her from the sink. “So where’s the gun?”

  “Oh, Christ, you’re not going to ask me to shoot you again, are you?” Sweat pooled in the small of her back as she tried to comprehend the pendulum on which his personality swung. He could have been waiting all along to gain her trust, then kill her. She gripped it where it rested into the waistband of her corduroys.

  “It’s the only way I’ve got to get you to believe me. Please don’t make me do it with my hunting knife. It’ll take longer and hurt so much more.”

  “I’m done with you, really, I am.” She shot from the kitchen and out the front door. If she could escape, she could drive to the police station, somehow find Ms. Webster. His boots kicked up the gravel behind her as she ran. She reached the truck and flung the driver’s door open before realizing she did not have the keys. She could feel him on the other side of the door. Her heart beat in her ears, blood filling her head, as she tugged at the gun in her waistband.

  “Heidi.” She felt his hand on her back, and she screamed, but no sound came out as she spun, pistol in her hands, and fired. Calvin fell back on the gravel, and the rocks underneath his boots spit at her legs.

  “Oh my God.” She dropped the gun on the seat and kneeled next to him as he grabbed at his abdomen. Blood seeped over his fingers. It was dark, almost purple, and she felt sick. She took off her sweater and tried to press it under his hands, trying not to think too much about how it was her favorite, an old cable knit sweater she had gotten at the thrift store in town, such a rare find, because she knew it was selfish, and it didn’t matter because it was soaked in few seconds.

  “Can you walk?” she asked, standing up a little. “We need to get you to the house.”

  “I might,” he grunted. “Thanks. I would have preferred the hand, but the stomach will do okay, too. It’ll just take a little longer.”

  “What are you talking about?” She wrapped her arms around his waist, taut and smooth like an inner tube, and he wove his arms gently around her shoulders. “I’m calling an ambulance.”

  “No, you’re not.” He pushed gently on his heels, taking the gun off the seat, as she lifted with her knees, something she had learned after helping to carry her father’s body through the house. “The bleeding will stop in a little while. Trust me. And in a week, you won’t even know it happened.”

  “And what about the bullet?” she asked, as they walked gingerly to the house. “It’s just going to stay in there?”

  “I still have shrapnel in my leg from 1944. I can still feel it sometimes when it rains.” His weight gradually burned in her legs, her shoulders. She stooped but kept moving. “Let’s rest for a minute. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  He slumped to the ground, a few feet from the porch. Blood covered her skin and his skin, as if they were conjoined twins moments before, now separated and left to die. And Calvin really did look like he might. He began to sweat; his face was pale, brow furrowed.

  “I’m going to get some sheets.” She hurdled the porch steps to the front door. “We can make a tourniquet.”

  She flew up the stairs, flecks of blood splattering on the walls and wood, and pulled the sheets off her father’s bed. When she got back, Calvin had pulled himself on the porch and sat on the steps, leaning against the porch railing.

  “How do I do this?” She began to thread the sheet around his arm.

  “We don’t need to make a tourniquet. Just pressure.” He helped guide the sheet around his body, and when it was finished, he took her hands in his and pressed them against his stomach. She was sickened by how cold they were, how cool the skin on his back felt. The blood on her breasts and stomach smeared sticky against his back.

  “I need to call an ambulance.” She moved to stand up, but he held onto her hands.

  “I’m telling you, I’ll be fine. If anything, let’s just get inside the house so no one driving along the road sees us.” His weight pulled her forward as he dragged himself to his feet and moved slowly to the door. Once inside, he took heavy, slow, teetering steps up the stairs as Heidi stood a few steps behind, wondering whether he’d fall back onto her at any second. In the bathroom, he shrugged off the sheet before sitting on the toilet and easing himself out of his jeans, the waist of which was rimmed in blood. He grabbed her arm for support as he lowered himself in the tub.

  “What now?’ She sat on the toilet and held the jeans in her hands, kicking the sheet to the corner.

  “Nothing. Maybe if you could get me a pillow, I’ll just take a nap in here after I bathe.” He pulled the curtain tight between them, and she could hear the water running from the faucet. She went into the hallway closet and got a spare pillow and some washcloths, a towel.

  “Are you still alive?” she said to the shower curtain.

  “Yep. Just hurts.”

  “I’m leaving the pillow by the tub here, along with some towels, okay?”

  “Thanks. Do you mind bringing me some water, too? And my cigarettes. I hate to be a pest.”

  “You’re not a pest—you’re dying. How am I going to get you out of that tub after you’ve died?”

  “I’m not going to die—why is that so hard to believe?” She heard him laugh, then suck shallowly for air.

  “I’m going to call 911.”

  “You do, and we’ll have to explain why we buried your father outside in the woods. Just give me some time, okay? I’ll tell you some things about him when you come back.”

  She went downstairs and filled a glass of water from the kitchen, along with Calvin’s packs of boxers and tube socks from his backpack. When she returned to the bat
hroom, the pillow was missing from the floor, replaced by a wet pair of bloody boxers. She could hear the water draining in the tub.

  “You okay?” She put the glass of water on the tub’s edge. “Are you alive?”

  “Yep. Just waiting for you, doll-face.”

  “The minute you stop talking is the minute I start dialing.”

  “Stop worrying, Heidi. I’ve already died twice.” She watched his hand, big and pale, grab the water, heard it disappear in sharp gulps behind the shower curtain. “I think the bleeding’s stopped. You mind giving me one of those clean towels?”

  She leaned over, dangling the towel in the crack between the wall and shower curtain for him to grab.

  “Oww, that hurts,” he said. “You know, we always had the runs in the Army. It was easy to understand why. But your father, he had the stomach of rice paper. One night outside of Germany, we were in the foxholes, freezing cold, and he had the shits bad. From the chocolate bars we got, at that—Christ, that was practically all we ate. I’m thankful I still have teeth. All night—we couldn’t leave the foxholes—he’s shitting into that helmet and dumping it off to the side. I said, ‘Christ, Pole, you’re going to drive off the Krauts with your ass alone’.”

  “What’s a Kraut?”

  “You know, a German. I guess it’s not the correct word nowadays. Not the stuff you’d find in your textbooks, anyway.”

  The cloth shower curtain wrenched open, and Calvin stood before her, a towel high around his waist, covering the wound. She gasped, but not because he stood before her, less worse for wear. It was because he stood before her—a boy/man/God, talking to her, like she wasn’t a freak.

  “It’s already looking better.” He curled the towel down slightly to show her. The hair around his bellybutton was mottled red, a dark leeching scab that left little puddles of pink on the white terrycloth. “It stopped bleeding, mostly.”

  She watched her fingers hover near the wound, her stomach full of glass. He grabbed her hand and pressed it against the furry, gelatinous spot, and she recoiled at the fire on his skin. She imagined his metabolism churning, little mitochondria in the cells pushing them to collect and stick and close the wound, little red elves with fire heads. But it could not be true, she thought. It was not the way she learned in biology class. It could not happen so quickly. And yet, there it was. She pulled her hand away, savoring the light pressure that remained on her skin from his fingers. She looked at her skin, clean but moist.