Tide King (2 page)

“Is that what you learned in that Tom Swift book?” Johnson opened his eyes, studied Stanley lying on his back, knees swinging open and closed, smoke pluming upward between them.

“Wouldn't you like to know?” Stanley stared at the sky. His eyes broke up smiling when he looked at you, happy or sad. They squished a little, the outsides wrinkling, along with his forehead, his cheeks dimpling. Polensky was the youngest of six. Johnson had always wanted siblings. His mother had him. Another had died in the womb.

He imagined Stanley as a little brother and grimaced. But you took what you got, not what you wanted.

They set the pup tent over an abandoned trench that they could roll into if any funny business found its way to the camp. They laid boot to head. Stanley was a kicker. It was easier if Johnson fell asleep first.

“Read me something from your book.” Johnson laid his arms across his stomach. When they'd first started the whole bloody business, in Africa, he'd seen a soldier trying to hold in his intestines after getting shot, a slippery pink worm pulsing out between his fingers.

“Read it yourself.”

“I'm tired. What's it about?”

“Well, every book Tom invents something new. So this time, it's the metalanthium lamp.”

“Metalanthium lamp? What the hell is that?”

“It's a device that emits these rays that can heal the sick and bring people back from the dead.”

“Sounds interesting. How does it work?”

“I'm not telling you anymore. You want to find out, you have to read it yourself.”

“I don't have time to read.” Johnson rolled over, away from Stanley's feet. “In case you didn't notice, there's a war on. Why are you carrying a children's book, anyway?”

“My mother bought it for me when I was a boy.”

“Couldn't you have brought something more useful?”

But Stanley had fallen asleep, his snoring choked with hot, dusty mountain air. The sound reminded Johnson of the clogged carburetor on a motorcycle he'd fixed up one summer in Ohio. At night, his own mind churned. The war had been hard to swallow. He did not know what he had expected, but he had not expected this. The exhaustion. The hollow fear—fear so intense it burned a hole through you and left you hollow. The walking. They walked along ridges and through valleys for miles and miles, up and up on roads that lead to little towns full of rock and cement houses in which lived Italians with gaunt, piercing eyes who begged for candy or sugar and cigarettes and mostly had nothing because the Germans had taken everything.

The Italian women were attractive. Sometimes he would look at them as they took his chocolate rations, their long olive necks the soft fruits of their lips, and he wanted to lay with one on the ground. Not anything sexual, although he always thought of that. He wanted to lay on the ground with one to feel her heart through her chest with his fingers, the pulse of a vein on her neck, the soft skin on the underside of her arm, to remember what it felt like, the warmth of living skin, the soft quiet of humanity in measured breaths. The skin on the dead looked like rubber, and he did not understand the difference, the living, the dead. So many had died, men in little piles, only boys, really, their limbs thrown about like tire irons, hoses, their mouths open where something had taken flight. If they could all only go on living, with quiet pulses in their necks, wrists, little bird chirps. If no one had to die, except the very old.

Sometimes it got so bad, the need to touch, he wanted to hold Stanley. He thought of waking him up and asking for the book, to take his mind off things. But he was too tired to even open his mouth. He thought of Spanish galleons instead. For some reason he imagined that they were gold like coins and flew across the ocean. But for one to take you home, you would have to die.

Johnson guessed that was fair.

They were on a warship stationed in the Isle of Wight. The bunk-room was still, the usual snores, jacking off replaced by the quiet of men's eyes blinking in the dark. Before they slipped into the sheets, they had made amends with their girlfriends, their parents, with God. When they finally stepped off the landing craft the next morning onto Omaha Beach, the First Division's fate would be clear, but they would not take any chances tonight. Stanley opened the envelope lying on his chest and felt the dry fibers of the herb in the lines of his palm, which were licked with sweat. His mother had sent him care packages at Fort Benning, North Africa, and Italy—knitted socks and dollar bills wrapped in cheese cloth, a few words written carefully on lined notepaper. But she never mentioned the herb. Perhaps it was bad luck to discuss it. He had forgotten about it completely until he sewed a torn pocket on his backpack that afternoon and discovered it pushed deep within. A bit of luck, he figured. That night, he laid it on the pillow next to him. His eyes blinked; the dark sleep, dreamless, weighed them closed.

“Wake up, Polensky.” A hand, heavy, dry, covered his face. “Drop your cock and grab your socks.”

Johnson, from Ohio. They had entered combat in North Africa, each killed their first men in the desert. They were uneasy, unlikely, friends. Johnson was tan and shiny, a farm boy who had lettered in high school before, as he explained to Stanley, a gimpy ankle kept him from getting a scholarship to college. Stanley swore he smelled like corn, although he probably smelled like Stanley and all the others—cigarettes and rotted teeth and stink.

Stanley turned in his bunk, feeling the film of sweat break from his body and release onto the sheets. His hand trailed on the pillow, feeling for the herb, but it was empty. He shot up, nearly hitting his head on the bunk above. A man stole something that wasn't hammered down, everyone knows. Veins pulsed in Stanley's neck, his biceps. But a flower? He might kill a GI before he killed a Kraut.

“Lose something?” Johnson, bent over, emerged with the saxifrage. “Your mother's corsage?”

“What time is it?” Stanley ignored him.

“Four-thirty.” Johnson straightened. The doctor measured him six foot five during their physicals. Stanley had topped out eight inches shorter. “First wave 0630 to Normandy. Better shower, get that shit off your ass.”

One hundred thirty thousand men. Two years ago, Stanley could not have guessed so many to have existed in their divisions, much less his hometown, or the world. One hundred thirty thousand men dragged over the English Channel to Omaha Beach in battleships, landing craft, to fight like gladiators, mongrels. There were so many ships, Stanley wondered whether they could just cross the channel by stepping from one to another.

They climbed down the rope ladders of the battleship and into the landing craft, a steel bread box, that would shuttle them to the beach. The chop was terrible. Each wave sent that morning's oatmeal into the roof of each man's mouth, and they swallowed it again. Their helmets clicked together like teeth.

But the waves were too powerful; the landing crafts could not get in close enough to the shore to let the men out. They would have to swim. One end of the craft, its gate resting just under the water; the men stood and began to wade out waist-high. The first were sighted immediately by the 352nd Infantry German Division waiting ashore. From their concrete bunkers among the dunes and perches among the cliffs, the Germans scattered those first hundred men like pins. Shells exploded water into the boat, and the remaining men inched back, pressing against the sides as bullets rattled off the floor, walls, men.

“Picking us off like fucking lemmings,” Johnson said from where he and Stanley sat in the back. He stood up and began to climb the wall of the boat. “Come on Polensky, you waiting to die?”

Stanley scrambled up the wall after Johnson, the weight of his packs and rifles pulling at him like children. The water stunned him for a second, and he was confused, thinking he was at Porter's Beach as a child, the chilled water of the Chesapeake Bay grabbing through the wool of his bathing suit and squeezing his nuts, his sister Kathryn bobbing beside him.

But it was Johnson beside him, the lasso of his arm pulling Stanley away from undertow of the boat. Stanley's fatigues stuck to him like skin. He wondered whether his rifle would work wet, if the grenades attached to his belt would go off after he threw them. He crouched in the water so only his eyes, helmet, bobbed above.

They waded to the shore, the water throwing up around them as the German shells exploded underneath, bullets flicking around them like whitecaps. No matter how fast he moved, Stanley fell behind Johnson's long stride, Johnson becoming his human shield, which filled Stanley with relief and disgust. Thirty feet in, to the right of Stanley, a man's upper body rose as if being yanked from the water by an invisible hand before sinking into the sea. The men thinned out closer to shore; if by miracle one were to make it to the beach, he was fired upon from several directions, his body a dancing pile in the surf.

The water squished in his socks and his underwear, and the straps of his backpack cut against his shoulder. He thought of stupid things while in danger, like his bedding being wet that night when he unfurled it to sleep, his cigarettes gone to mush. He touched his helmet, wondering if the herb he'd stuffed there that morning was secure. Suddenly Johnson lifted his rifle, set, and ran, firing at the shore. Stanley followed, although he thought it was a waste. He wasn't even looking at the beach. He was crouched so low that the current shoveled water into his open mouth and now here was Johnson, moving his big legs out of the water like pistons, lead flying from his rifle, a human tank forgetting it was closer to jellyfish than steel.

But Stanley followed. He moved his legs and spread out to the right of Johnson. He felt the burning in his hamstrings, the blood straining his heart, the veins in ears ready to spout like whistles. The shelling and fire screamed in his ears until it became quiet. The beach grew on each end; he could see the bunkers of the Germans beyond the dunes. Pinholes of light flicked from them; the water spit bullets around him in response. He aimed his rifle toward the holes and fired, the kick pulled him forward. He feared his skeleton, his muscles, might fall out of his body behind him. He clamped his mouth shut and felt the shells and pebbles of the surf scrape against his knees.

He had made it. He looked left for Johnson. Good fuck, the farm boy made it, too.

On the beach, they found a man who was not quite dead. They wanted to find a man who was dead, but they could not be picky. The man who was not quite dead was moaning and breathing thick, gurgly, lying on his stomach. Almost dead. He and Johnson rolled the body on its side and propped their rifles on its left arm. Above them, 50 yards up the beach, lay the Longues-sur-Mer battery, or the German bunkers, huge square cement structures that housed mortars and men. Artillery fire flashed from these holes and scattered the sand around them. Stanley reached for the dying man's helmet to put between the rifles, a barrier so they could peer up to shoot. A pack of cigarettes fell to the beach from it, which Johnson picked up and pocketed. Why Stanley hadn't put his own cigarettes in his helmet to keep dry, instead of the herb, he didn't know. There was no time to mull it over. They were alive, but only by luck and perhaps not for long. Around them, disembodied heads, arms, and backpacks floated in the air before gravity pulled them back to earth. Stanley coughed and shivered, peering up and sighting his rifle on one of the bunkers.