Tide King (28 page)

“You're a real kidder.” She exhaled and poured the steaming water. “I ain't laughin'.”

“I just wanted to read the newspaper. About the fire. I wanted to know if I'd been listed as missing. I got twenty years to catch up on. You should see the cars they're driving now, Maggie. The engines are so powerful. And the way people dress. The things you can buy.”

“I could have told you that. Nobody ever said nothing about anybody missing in the fire.” She thrust a cup toward his hand. “And I already asked around town about your Stanley Polenksy. No one's ever heard of him. And things might change, but people don't. That's all you need to know.”

“But—”

“You know, why don't you just leave if you've got ants in your pants? The season is starting, and I'm going to be too busy to worry about you.”

“I can't.”

“Why not?”

“Because you're the only person who knows that I'm alive, who knows anything's wrong with me.” He turned to her in the doorway. “Who believes me. I owe you for that much, and plenty more.”

“You don't owe me anything, Calvin Johnson.” She walked past him and sat on the porch steps, cigarette between her fingers, coffee mug snug between her palms.

“But you keep me here like some animal at the zoo.” He touched her on the back. “I don't mind working off any debt, but I need to be able to come and go as I please. We're not married or anything, you know. And, to be honest with you, there's someone else.”

“Don't you think I know that?” He could hear the break in her voice, feel the slight heave of her shoulders. “Don't you know you say her goddamn name every night? How do you think that makes me feel, after you ask me to share the goddamn bed?”

“I'm sorry, Maggie.” He sat down next to her. “I didn't mean it that way. I like you so much, and I think you're a great woman, but I love someone else.”

“It don't matter, anyway. I can't love no one no more, Johnson.” She stood up and walked into the cabin. “My daddy dying, it tore the seam in me. I ain't enough rope left to lend.”

“Maggie, just tell me what you need from me, and I'll stay as long as it takes.” He stood in the doorway and watched her slam her mug in the sink, the sickening sound of it vibrating and settling.

“You get the hell out of here.” She moved to the cedar chest without looking at him. “I mean it, Johnson. I got some money. You take it, take the bus out of here, find your friend.”

“What about the roof?”

“It's best that you go right away.” She swung open the cedar chest and emerged with an envelope. She licked her finger, and counted out ten $20 bills. “I realized that when you were gone.”

They rode in the boat down the Missouri. Johnson stared at her back, the width between her shoulder blades, imagined his head nestled between them. It was possible to wear her down, to massage open the heart, to be patient and let her tell him, in her own way, that she loved him. She already had. But why would he subject her to such cruelty, when all he saw in the shadows of his thoughts was Kate, just out of reach, around the corner, behind the door?

She stayed in the boat. He hugged her while they moved this way, that, against the tide. It felt more like they were hanging onto something other than each other. He thought about asking her whether he could visit, but as soon as he stood on firm ground, his weight on his own feet, she waved a little wave and the boat bounced away, seeming to glide over the choppy waters, not touching anything.

In the forest, there were sounds. She did not know what they were at first, the clipped song above her, far away and close. Her fingers spread in a cold soup of mud. Water pelted her face. Rain, so much rain, making the dirt soft, gauzy. And birds. The song of birds. She stared at hands, small and pale with deep whorls on the fingertips, little hair. Smooth skin that glided gracefully upwards and connected to shoulders, her shoulders, a torn dress, an exposed nipple on a flat breast. She felt her feet in the mud and pressed, pushing herself up to stand. She was in a gully, a mud slide. A depression in the earth made by rain. So much rain, the only good thing about it was the way it cleansed the dirt from her legs and her hands and her hair.

Where was her matka? She remembered the bone house, a trailer chased by death. Mongrels. A woman with sunken eyes, blood-smeared lips. She moved her feet in the mud, a slippery floor of fish, and felt them graze something of permanence. She knelt and removed it from its grave. A long bone, longer than her own forearm. A glint of white, like diamonds, grew in the mud as the rain attacked it, had its way with it. More bones, slighter larger than her own. An arm bone and a leg bone, ribs.

A skull. She brought it to her own face. A slightly older child than she. Above its left eye the skull had caved in from the clumsy precision of force. She put her finger through it and felt the power and trajectory of it. It seemed to cave in her own skull, stir the memories that had settled like the paste of leaves and grit on her. The officer's bullet. Ferki and the trees. Ferki. Her heart was alive and it pounded pain through her, releasing memories like a gorged stream. Weakness washed over her. She squatted and wove her hands through the little white pieces that had comprised one of Ferki's hands, and already they were fragile, like winter branches. She put them in her mouth, to warm them, to taste them, but Ferki was long gone, with his grandmother Tsura and perhaps his parents and her own mother as well.

A grave washed away by rain, so much rain it seemed determined to reveal the dark secrets of the world. One by one, she found the pieces of Ferki, and she was angered that he had been dead so long, with no one to know, not even her, except the Nazi soldiers that put him there. And she was angered that the grace of God had shined on him, taken him away, and left her here in the mud. For what?

“Niech cięszlag trafi!” She shouted at the sky.
Drop dead
. “What did I ever do to you?”

She gathered the bones in the bottom of her dress, so thin and threatening rupture, an embryonic sack ready to birth a skeleton, and walked. She walked and the sun sunk and rose. She walked barefoot, her hair knotted and frizzy, layer upon layer of salty sweat drying to her face. She walked until she came to a farm, where a man spearing hay dropped his pitchfork and hurried to her.

“Child,” he said in Polish. “Oh, child. Where have you come? And what is that you're carrying?”

“My husband,” she answered, and because her arms were so tired, let him rain from her dress to the ground.

Alojzy the farmer and his wife, Anatola, fed her stew. They grew potatoes and rye and their children, Benedykt and Daniela, went to school in town. Their house, with three small bedrooms, a sitting room, and a kitchen, was to Ela a palace. But they moved in and out of the kitchen, around the kitchen table, in the sitting room, with great difficulty, as if they lived in the bone house. It was easy to see what the problem was—so many things! A wooden box that glowed in the corner and from which voices and strange music vibrated, to which Daniela swayed in a way that would cause Ela's matka to slap her. Chairs that were dressed with fabric finer than any of her dresses. Tables and papers. Light that came from the ceiling and from statues on the tables. She pressed the switches on and off for minutes to watch the little suns appear and disappear. Pictures on the wall, not drawn, but of the family, captured on the paper. Photography, Alojyz explained, scratching his beet-shaped head, a frown above his whiskered chin. A spring of blond hair sprouted from the top of his head like a carrot tussle.

“Where is it that you come from?” Anatola was hardy, like an ox, and seemingly as strong. Her features lived in the puffed folds of her face, her eyes blue and hard like marbles.

“Reszel,” Ela answered between bites of meat. In the corner, a cast-iron box held fire and kept the stew warm, along with coffee. Alojyz had put Ferki's bones in a sack so that their dog, Opi, would not bother them. They rested under her chair. From her chair, her bare foot grazed the top of the burlap to ensure that they remained.

“Oh, yes.” Alojya left the kitchen and returned with a piece of paper, which he spread out on the table. “You see, Reszel is here.”

She looked at the picture of a green blob with blue at the top. Words were written all over the green blob.

“What is this?” She leaned over her bowl and studied it. Perhaps it was a potion.

“A map.” Alojya coughed, looking at Anatola. “I show you where you are, from like, bird's eye, from the sky, and where you are from.”

“How do you know from the sky where you are?”

He ignored her, pointing his finger toward the middle of the map. “Bydgoszcz. We are here.” He moved his finger up higher and more leftward, toward the blue. “Reszel here. Not very far, but far enough. How did you come about this way?”

“What is the blue?” She trailed her hand on the paper.

“The sea.” He shook his head and folded up the map, disappearing from the kitchen. Momentarily, he returned with another piece of paper.

“You see?” There were lines that went up and down, making boxes. “This is the year. 1964. September 1st.”

“Where are the Nazis?” She peered at him. “Will the Nazis come for me?”

“She is not old enough,” Anatola shot a look at her husband. She rubbed a cup made of glass with a rag. “She must have had family tell her.”

“The Nazis killed my husband—you understand?” She nodded her head toward the burlap sack. “They kill him and I hide. I…fall asleep. Then I come to you. This is the truth.”

“Child, it is not possible.” He pointed to the piece of paper again. “This here, you see? 1964.”

She stood in the chair. “Well, how long have I been asleep, then?”

They arrived from Reszel, from the Child Welfare Services. When they came to Alojya's, a middle-aged woman with outdated glasses that slid down her nose and a younger graduate from the University of Warsaw who was being groomed to take her place as supervisor, Ela learned of other strange things that had happened over the years, excluding the wars (they were a constant): carts that moved without horses but with the speed of them, telescopes that one wore in front of one's eyes to see better, clothes that looked like she did not know what. Especially Daniela's. Everything had shifted, the world a foreign place that did not have room for her. And yet, it refused to let her go, a tree from which an apple did not fall, soft and rotten and swaying in the breeze.

“My name is Ana.” The older woman put her suitcase down on the kitchen table and held her hand toward the younger woman. “And this is Emile. We'd like to be your friends.”

What Ela said was, “I'd like you to help me.” What she thought was,
I want you to help me die
. Surely, it could be done—metal birds in the sky, soldiers with rifles that shot many bullets at once, wires strung across the sky on poles, and people's words sent across them—why could they not kill her, chop her up in little pieces and bury the parts far from each other, not like the mongrels, who even the Nazis had driven away, beat when they had began to pull her limbs from her body?

“Oh, dear.” They looked at each other when Ela pulled Ferki's skull from the sack and placed it on the table.

“My husband.” She said matter-of-factly, as if his presence gave her an advantage, authority. But she realized, more than anything, that she was entirely alone. She was alone and no one could help her, not even herself.

“Don't cry, little one.” The older woman patted her shoulder as she cradled her head on the table, big boulders of tears tumbling from her eyes and dripping down her forearms. “We're here to help.”