Tide King (11 page)

She waited many years for Antoniusz to come back, even when it was impossible for him to be alive because the earth would have asked for his old bones, and she no longer had a father, either. But Ela was still a little girl, even as her mind had begun to weave all manner of thoughts, complex and layered, rich, and desires, deep in her chest and loins, and she did not get older. One day, she packed the wooden horse with the herb and a few other trinkets and went back to the bone house. It had not changed, except for a slight weathering by the seasons, and she had not, either. It was one small comfort.

Stanley's mother had been dead for two months when he finally got the telegram. They had passed through the Harz Mountains, happy green lumps against the spring sky, into Czechoslovakia, when he requested to go home on furlough. But then the war ended, and Stanley went home for good. When he docked at Locust Point in Baltimore, he smelled the factory smoke belching out over the harbor and thought of the stories of Dachau and Auschwitz. He imagined the Domino Sugar plant, or the American Can Company, a three-story warehouse on Boston Street where his mother Safine had worked as a child, packed full of hair, charred flesh. A room full of watches, jewelry. A room full of skulls. It was the smell, though, that remained with him, deep in his nostrils, of human rot. He had smoked cigarette after cigarette by the boat rail until he couldn't smell anything.

The buildings in Fells Point had bowed with age but were not broken, not like the piles of bricks and dust that demarcated most of Europe. At 919 South Ann Street, his mother's pansies, pink and yellow, still perched in their windowsill pots, unaware of history's realignment, and the marble steps out front still gleamed like bone.

“She go in her sleep. Is likely her heart.” Linus, his father, blotted his eyes with his handkerchief. His cheeks, still damp, had settled down his face above the corners of his lips, where his beard began. He was frailer than when Stanley had left, although that was to be expected. Still, Linus's white hair, his yellow and blue eyes, the dried spit on the corner of his lip unnerved him. Her death had rotted him worse than any pint of whiskey.

“How was the funeral?” he asked. In the kitchen, he made coffee and placed the mug with the unbroken handle into Linus's hands, whose fingers, crippled with gumball knuckles, half closed around it. He lifted the mug and pushed it into his beard where, eventually, it found his lips.

“Beautiful service—Henry and Thomas and Cass pallbearers.”

All of Stanley's brothers and sisters had moved out while Stanley had been overseas. Henry, Thomas, and Cass worked at the steel mill in the county, over on the Patapsco River. Their jobs and their ages had kept them out of the war. In letters, his mother had updated Stanley about Julia's wedding, Kathryn going into the convent, Thomas' baby, but none of them had written to him personally.

“You ask Thomas for work, he could prolly get you job.” Linus leaned back in the wooden chair. It grunted under his weight as he packed his pipe. His suspenders, he grabbed close together in the front. As each place on his waistband frayed, thinned, Linus had moved the clips little by little to newer spots, until they too became frayed. Now the suspenders were dangerously close to touching.

“I'm not asking Thomas for a job.” Stanley lit a cigarette. The brothers had gotten rich, according to his mother, working double shifts at the mill, making the steel for warships and planes. They seemed to forget that it was his own hide, freezing in the trenches, that had paid them to do so.

“What Thomas done to you?” Linus lit his pipe, sucking at it with little-girl breaths until it glowed.

“Nothing, that's exactly what Thomas has ever done for me.” Stanley sat across from Linus and reached into his duffel bag for his comb. He felt what was left of the charred herb in the front pocket. He thought of Johnson. He had thought of him on the ship home—the man underneath his bunk had not snored like him. He thought of Johnson in the woods, lying there every day, farther behind. Further dead. He slid the herb into the front pocket of his pants, feeling the pulse of blood in his fingers. He hoped he would see his brother Thomas after all. He needed an excuse to fight.

He went up to his parents' room. It was as he remembered, the Bible on the end table, the white blankets tucked tight on the mattress, the crucifix above the bed. The afternoon light cut a line across the bed. He opened the closet, pulled out a dress and brought it to his nose. The smell of garlic made him cry. He ran his hands across the other dresses on the hangers, wondered why Linus had not gotten rid of them. Perhaps Linus would give them to his daughters. Perhaps they would use the fabrics, thin and dated, to make Linus shirts.

Stanley shrugged off his boots and lay on the bed, closed his eyes. Below. Linus coughed and tapped his pipe. It was quiet, and Stanley fell asleep. He dreamed about Johnson. He was alive, coming toward him with a mouthful of herb. His eyes were bleeding. Snow was everywhere. Black spikes of trees shot from the ground. Johnson was shouting something, holding his rifle at his waist. Before he reached Stanley, he turned into a Kraut. Stanley pulled his revolver out and shot him. The Kraut stopped and looked at him in surprise.
I'm sorry
, Stanley said. He dropped the gun in the snow, put up his hands. The Kraut sat down on the earth and lay back, his face to the sky, arms behind him like a sunbather.
Mudder
. The Kraut, the boy, Johnson, wept.

Stanley woke up. He walked into the bathroom. It was bare and clean like his mother's room, and the simplicity, the sanctity of it, comforted him. He filled the sink with water, scrubbing his face, his hair, his teeth with soap. He plunged his face in the basin and caught the line of it in the mirror as he stood back up. He touched his cheeks, his ears. They seemed different, although they were the same size, shape, as he had always remembered them. But something was different. Had he come back a man? He had cried, cried like a baby those first few weeks at boot camp in Fort Benning, wondering why he ever enlisted. There were better ways to see the world, to be Tom Swift, to feed his curiosity of foreign lands. But now, the fear in him was dead, along with everything else. He simply didn't care about anything anymore. Stanley Polenksy had left this house, left for the war, but he had not come back. And he could wait for him no longer. He walked down to the bar to get some whiskey.

He got a job shucking oysters south of Baltimore, at Locust Point, in 1946; at least that's what the calendar in the foreman's office said. Time did not feel as if it had restarted since he'd been back. It was low-paying, women's work, but he would not go to Sparrows Point and work at Bethlehem Steel with his brothers. He stayed at home with Linus. In the evenings, he drank on Lancaster Street, where no women came, except the fat horse of a bartender whose armpits mooned with sweat while she dried draft glasses. Nobody talked to him. He didn't shave every day. Sometimes the person in the mirror behind the bar looked like someone else, and he liked that. But sometimes he'd see Johnson, the German boy, in the faces of the other grimacing, sweating men around him, and he'd buy a pint of whiskey and take it home so he could drink in the dark of his room. Sometimes he'd put the radio on. The rye settled over him like a velvet cloth, along with the voice of Bing Crosby, blotting out most of the dead men, mostly Johnson. Johnson's frowning face, choking on the herb. Stanley kept the rest of the crumbly mess in his pocket but didn't know why.

One night, he went to a bar over on Thames, in the grittier section of Fells Point. He would have never gone to such a place before the war, but he'd been tossed out of his usual bar, on Lancaster, the night before, because he pissed on a man in the bathroom. A mistake, he'd tried to explain. Sometimes he went places in his head, back to Germany, to Italy, and he'd smell the shell fire, the blood, tinny and sour, the diarrhea and beans. He'd see the shadows of men in trees, feel the zip of bullets by his ears. He went to these places but his body stayed in Baltimore and he didn't always know what it was doing in the meantime. He had pissed on the man—he must have been at the next urinal—and then he had to fight him.

The man was older, a shriveled wharf rat, pickled and brined from the docks. His fingernails were yellow and curled, like his teeth. He lunged at Stanley, unsteady and smelling of piss. Stanley punched him once in the gut and folded him over. Then he let the men in the bar grab him by the cuff, push him to the ground outside, and kick his ribs until he curled into a ball.
A mistake
, he said as they went back inside.
Don't come back
, they responded.

The bar on Thames Street was crowded. It smelled like underarms, like beer and rot. It smelled familiar. He bought a whiskey and made his way to the back. Two men were playing poker at a table. Russians, Stanley thought. Their eyes were sharp, dark like dogs; their spirits were clear, like vodka.

“You play?” One, with a face flat like a board, a nose broken down into a hook, looked up at him. In the army, when Stanley wasn't firing his rifle, sleeping, or jerking off, he was playing poker.

“A little.” He waved his hand in the air. The Russian smiled.

“Take his place.” He nodded at a heavy form, passed out at on one end of the table, before pushing it onto the floor. The Russian kicked it for good measure, and Stanley heard it grunt. He felt for his Colt in the back of his pants. He picked it up in an alley shop off Green mount after the war. He had hated guns when he had one, all those years in Europe, and then after the war, he hated not having one.

“Vadim.” The flat-faced man nodded. He wore a sleeveless undershirt that looked like it had been dipped in cooking oil. On his arm was a tattoo of an owl with raised wings, a top hat, and bowtie. He nodded toward the other man, who was wearing a vest but no shirt. “Nicolai.”

“Stanley.” He sat down at the table and bent over to tie his shoe. He could see the gun, straight and clean, in Vadim's waistband. A TT Tokarev.

“You boys in the war?” Stanley picked up his cards. They were worn to felt, greasy on the edges.

“Why you need to know?” Nicolai smudged his cigar into an ashtray, brought his glass to his lips.

“I'm a vet myself.” Stanley shrugged. It occurred to him the money he planned on winning could be put to good use. He could take the train to Ohio, find Johnson's parents, and let them know how Johnson died, not honorably for his country as they probably thought, but because of his own foolishness, his vote to go back along the ditch. On the other hand, it seemed a stupid thing to do, to snatch whatever veil of delusion lay like gauze over their eyes just to heave an anvil off his own chest. But maybe it would be of some comfort to them that their son had not died alone, in pain, that Stanley knelt before him and mourned his ascent into the afterlife.

“We are all brothers here.” Vadim cupped Stanley's shoulder with an open palm, stirring the soup of his murky plans. Stanley rubbed his eyes, cleared his throat. “We all on same side. To victory, eh? Here, I give you a shot.”

Vadim brought an unmarked bottle from under his seat and poured it into Stanley's glass. They raised them, and Stanley watched the fluid rise to the rim before ebbing. He opened his mouth and the liquid went hot, icy, down his throat.

“Spasiba.” Stanley nodded. “Thank you.” He looked at his cards. It occurred to him suddenly that the Russians would not let him win, and that if he somehow did, perhaps they would kill him.

The war had made him many things—alcoholic, apoplectic, apathetic—but if they were going to try to plug him in the alley later, he was going to win the dingy, greasy shirts off their backs first. He tossed aside two cards as Vadim dealt him three more. Nicolai raised a modest sum, and Stanley saw him. Vadim folded.

“Two pair.” Nicolai laid down two fours and two eights

“Three pair.” Stanley tossed three sevens over top. “Are we gonna start betting real money, or what?”