Tide King (30 page)

Friday afternoon, a car came to the school and drove her directly to the Institute, no afternoon snack. She went to sleep on a big white bed with tubes in her arms and mouth. Such a big to-do, she thought, to chop off her pinky. When she woke up, a bandage the size of an oven mitt covered her left hand. At home, she waved the stub in the air and giggled as Carol Palmer put her hand over her mouth.

“And now, they say, the magic happens!” she laughed.

There were more operations after it grew back, but they were inside of her. She woke up with scars on her stomach, over her heart, and then she underwent x-rays and the scars disappeared and they drew new scars to see whether what they had taken had grown back.

Every time I grow back but I do not feel whole
.

Eighth, ninth, tenth grades, she did not grow. The girls called her midget, snickered behind her back, locked her in the bathroom stalls. Her mother had taught her never to use the tinctures for harm, so she had no other choice but to fight back on her own.

She tripped girls in the hallway, hid their clothes while they showered after gym. She squirted mustard and ketchup packets she had gotten from the cafeteria onto their seats.

“Ela, you're not in the third grade anymore.” Carol Palmer lit a cigarette at the Manhattan deli where she sometimes took Ela for liverwurst. “You need to behave in a manner becoming of a lady.”

“They do not act that way.”

“Your teachers…have found no evidence of other girls teasing you.” Carol crushed the cigarette in the kidney-shaped ashtray between them. “Look, I know it's hard when you don't feel like yourself…”

“I am old woman. I am not a girl.” Ela chewed on her soda straw. “I have no interest in Calculus or British poetry. I go back to Poland now. I do not want to be here anymore.”

“Oh, honey.” Carol shook her head. “How could you mean that? You have everything here.”

I want to go home
.

Psotka was sick. She was only eight, but she did not eat. Ela felt her ribs, fed her lavender seeped in milk. She thought of the animals who looked at her in the labs, who pleaded to be free. She thought she saw the same stare from Psotka, the same droop of head, the same sigh.

From chemistry class, she knew how to make the tincture: vinegar and baking soda. After school in her bedroom, she ran a tube from a covered pitcher into a plastic sandwich bag and waited for the gas to fill the bag. She fit the bag over Psotka's head, petting her coat with the other.

“Wieczne odpoczywanie racz Jej dac Panie,” she whispered.
Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord
.

“Ela.” Carol Palmer dropped the glass of milk, napkins, and cookies in the doorway. “What are you doing to Psotka?”

From behind the locked study door, they talked about her in murmurs, voices rising and falling in frustration. Ela went up to the roof and lay between the mums. She had wanted to bury Psotka in the park, Carl Schurz, a few blocks from their house. But it seemed that her opinion, spoken or written, did not carry much weight anymore. The handyman took Psotka away in a trash bag. She wondered if it ever had.

The farmhouse had aged, its white clapboards needing a fresh coat of paint, the front steps sagging from the weight of time and weather. Branches of the oak tree he had climbed as a boy poked at the upstairs windows, as if looking for a fight. There was a newer car in the driveway, a brown Buick, but Johnson knew his parents still owned the house because of the tulips his mother cultivated every spring in the little garden that surrounded the porch like a moat. It was Sunday morning, and he waited for them to go to church. He held his breath as they emerged, gray haired and frailer, his father's jowls touching the collar of his shirt, the flesh on his mother's upper arms sagging, as if gravity were trying to pull them into their graves.

Tears ran rivulets into his cheeks. He had prepared himself for this, for his return to Ohio, but despite the warnings from his head, his heart had fed on the warm honeysuckle of memory, which contrary to everything else, did not age, except for himself. He wondered briefly whether he was a memory caught in the folds of time, or perhaps a ghost. Maybe he was not real, nor Maggie, nor anything that had happened once he had left Ohio. But the barrier between the world before him, where time had moved along, and his, did not seem to have a beginning or an end, as thin as air but as impenetrable as a boulder.

What had his parents thought when he had not written them or called upon arriving in Montana? Did they call the police, urge them to contact the station in Helena? Had his father driven out to Helena himself, visiting restaurants, hotels, and bars, describing his tall, muscular son with the slightly crooked nose, his hazel eyes and dimples, a boy who looked like any other boy but who was theirs and was missing; had there been a report filed? Had they given up, or had they not even tried, fearing he had become one of the lost men, who had returned from the war but had not stopped fighting, the drip of alcohol into the bloodstream the only anesthetic for spiritual casualty.

He watched the Buick back out of the driveway before scrambling for the rear of the house. Outside the door, a broken planter stood, one that had once held sunflowers. It seemed strange that his parents, so meticulous that they replaced or repainted all outdoor ornaments every season, had left it to disintegrate, slabs of faded terra cotta that had fallen outward like petals and mixed with dirt and stone to form its own curious layer of earth. He lifted the circular bottom plate and found the back door key in a wormy crater underneath. He wondered if they had left the key there, if they had not the heart to close the door on him.

The smell of coffee and his mother's perfume still lingered in the kitchen. He pressed his palm on the stone countertop, feeling sick from the scent. The sickness was in his heart, not his stomach, a cloud with hammers that drummed over his chest and made the back of his neck sweat. He inhaled the traces of gardenia and honeysuckle, hoping he'd pass out and wake up, his paper on Beowulf on the table, a half-filled coffee mug, his life still before him. But he would have to go back further than that, before the war, when he was still a boy, still normal.

But he was home now. Maybe he was still normal. Perhaps it had all been a strange dream. But the kitchen was different—new cabinets and appliances—an oven in the wall, a refrigerator with two long vertical doors, one of which had a lever sticking out of it. He pulled the lever, and then pushed it back, jumping when cold, square boulders tumbled out. He squatted and picked them up, feeling them melt on his palm. Ice cubes. Had he broken the refrigerator? He pushed the lever again. More ice tumbled out. A refrigerator that dispensed ice cubes. It was like everything that had changed when he was gone, so inconsequential, so significantly massive.

Still, he was home now. Perhaps it would all end. He needed to know for sure. He scooped up the new ice and put it in a paper towel with the old ice, numbing the pinky finger of his left hand. Then, with his right hand, he reached for the butcher block, pulling out his mother's butcher's knife. In the back yard, he found a mostly level stump, a tree that possibly had been diseased, too close to the Johnson home, and therefore removed. He knelt and folded the fingers of his left hand into a tight fist, except for his pinky, which he extended as far from the others as possible. Then he lined up the butcher's knife with his pinky and drew back, closing his eyes.

His scream hurt him more than the pain; high, then low-pitched, like an animal crouched in the shadows of its life as death closed from the corners and softly kissed light to darkness. He staggered around the yard, holding his hand in the flimsy paper towel, wetting Maggie's father's flannel shirt with warm, sticky blood. When the white-hot sensation that traveled from his fingers to his teeth became recognizable as pain, rather than an altered state of existence, he stumbled back to the house and to get paper towels from the kitchen. He was never much of a planner. He sat on the steps outside the back door and unthreaded the shoelace from one of the logging boots and looped it around what remained of his pinky, pulling tight. He pulled until the remaining skin, just below where his mid-joint had been, began to close inward toward the bone. But the blood was everywhere, the step, his shirt and hands, splashed on the tops of his boots, one loose and laceless.

The pinky. It remained on the stump in a pool of blood. He scooped it into a bloody towel and stuffed it into his pocket. Then he took off the flannel shirt and mopped up the stump and the steps before wrapping the rest of the paper towels into the shirt and heading inside. He sat at the table, shaking. What had he done? The familiar contours of the wooden seat, the squeaking of the legs, leaned against his heart, and he could not stop the tears from tumbling down his cheeks. Here, he had sat eating dinner every day of his life—pot roast and chicken pot pie and beef stew and mashed potatoes. Here, he sat in December 1941 and announced to his parents he was enlisting in the Army. They had been returning from church, in the older, green Buick, and the first thing they noticed was crying. People crying in the streets downtown, huddled under their mufflers and woolen caps, wandering through space like empty wrappers. They huddled in small groups, their faces broken, before dispersing again into pairs of twos and threes.

“Turn on the radio, Harv.” Johnson's mother touched his father's shoulder in the front seat.

The voice of the disc jockey filled the car.
Japanese warplanes have attacked Pearl Harbor…more than two thousand Americans killed
.

He was young, and there wasn't much to think about, in terms of consequences. He was young and didn't know what lay ahead, which was the beauty of being young—so many risks taken before one has the sense to realize the dangers. He was young and going to fight.

“Of course,” his father merely had said after Johnson stated his intentions at dessert, after his mother served the tapioca. He pushed back in his chair and patting his stomach, bulbous like an onion over his slacks. “It's the honorable thing to do. The American thing to do.”

“Harv.” His mother dropped her spoon. Her face, broad and unassuming, had knit itself into lines of worry as she had prepared dinner. It had permitted the minimal movement required for her to consume food, but now the tension in it had snapped completely. Her eyes bulged from her face, her mouth hung open, her bottom lip was wet and flecked with tapioca. “He could get killed. He could get hurt. We might never see him again.”

“Mom, I'll be all right,” Johnson said. “Don't cry, now.”

“Well, the thing is, Helen, they gonna draft him eventually, anyway.” His father lit a cigarette and pushed the pack across the table to Johnson. “Here, you're a man now, Calvin.”

“Thanks, Dad.” He pulled a cigarette from the pack of Lucky Strikes and fumbled with the matches so his father would not know he'd been smoking since he was a junior, behind the football field and the barn and the drugstore.

“When I was in the war, our replacements were terrible.” Calvin's father talked, cigarette bobbing in the corner of his mouth. “Could barely aim a weapon. And they got killed as soon as they stepped off the convoys. If Calvin enlists early, he'll get better training. He'll have a better chance now than later.”

“A better chance to live?” His mother pushed back her chair and stood up. She leaned over and snapped the cigarette in Calvin's mouth. “That's what we're talking about? Improving my son's chances of living?”

She hurried from the dining room, the back door slamming behind her. Calvin put the broken cigarette in his father's ashtray and didn't ask for another.

“She'll be all right.” His father exhaled. He looked thoughtfully into the distance. Or perhaps he had indigestion. “This is a new ball game, with the Japs attacking. And we'll all need to make sacrifices. You're doing the right thing, fighting the right fight. I'm proud of you, son.”

His father had not been terribly proud of him up to that point. He did not get a scholarship to Ohio State. He did not get the grades for anywhere else. He knew his father wanted him to join him at the police force, but the precinct at Bowling Green suffered from a severe lack of adventure to a boy who'd not been anywhere except for Yosemite the summer he was fourteen.

But his mother, he had not wanted her pride, only her love. She sat outside in the small gazebo he and his father had built the summer before. It was cold and she did not have a coat. He sat opposite her on the round bench inside the gazebo as the air whipped through the sleeves of her dress, blew up her apron.

“You don't have to go.” She looked at him, and what she was saying with her eyes was
I don't want you to go
.

“There's no other choice,” he answered. “Our country needs me.”

“I need you, Calvin. Your father.” She wove her hands together. She always wove them together after finishing half of her desert, as if she was not allowed, did not deserve, any more than she had already taken.

“Mom, you can't say that. If Pastor Smith heard you…”

“I don't care about what the pastor hears or doesn't hear. You're our only child, Calvin. Now. There was one before you…but we lost him before he entered this world. I never told you because we didn't see the point in burdening you with it, but I'm not going to lose another.”

“I don't see what other choice I have,” he repeated. He rose and wrapped his arms around her. She felt stiff, empty, like a turkey carcass after Thanksgiving. “I'll be all right.”

Now, at the table, he wondered if there had been another choice. Perhaps he could have gone to Canada, or to Mexico. Maybe none of this would have happened. He could have returned a few years after the war, gotten a job, gotten married. Had children. Made his mother happy. She had only wanted his love, and he couldn't even give that to her. He put his head on the table and cried, his nose clogged and runny, his eyes swelling like golf balls underneath his lids. He'd done nothing in his life, given his parents nothing to be proud of, no solace for their sacrifice of raising him, of loving him. He wished he were dead. At least they would have closure.