Tide King (25 page)

“I know you love me, baby.” Cindy crawled on the bed. “But it's good to know other people do, too.” Her hair, still in various stages of primping from last night's show, framed half of her face, the other side matted where it lay on the pillow. She looked like some sort of mythic creature, a temptress turned siren. She smiled at him and he touched her face, a face he did not recognize some nights, behind the stage lights and the lipstick and rouge. A little woman propped on a stool in the front of the pickers so the audience could see her, a little woman with a big voice. Perhaps, he had never known her. Perhaps, he was one rung of the ladder on which she was climbing her way to adulation, to acceptance. A hunger for approval, for love, that seemed insatiable. A love Stanley had thought, foolishly, he could provide solely. And her love for him? On stage, she was everyone's savior, dressing their wounds with her voice, her eyes.

“If one person loves you, that should be enough.” He took her hands and squeezed them, smelled the woman of her. He pushed her back on the bed, released her hands. He felt himself push against his pants as he straddled her. “You don't need anybody after that.”

“Baby, not now.” She wriggled underneath him. “I have to call Wendell back. We've got a lot of free dates next week. There's got to be a barn dance or radio show we can do while we wait to hear from the Opry. I bet they'll give us a spot on the Louisiana Hayride after that show we did on KWKH.”

He leaned over her, his strength quelling her struggle, as he loosed his drawers. Heidi began to cry in the crib, a little cry that cracked his spine upright, sending pressure to his head, a headache. He gathered her and brought her to Cindy, who took her to her breast.

“Think we got a little country star on our hands, baby?” She stroked Heidi's head. “Momma's baby. Maybe we can get mother-daughter act going, when the time's right.”

“Isn't one selfish little country star enough?” He grabbed his shirt and his boots, his erection sinking. “I'm leaving.”

“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.

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?”