Tide King (13 page)

“Cynthia Meekins. But you can call me Cindy. What about you, baby doll?”

“Stanley. Fish that piece of paper out of my pocket, will you?” His face pressed back against the mattress in a pool of his own sweat. If he wound up dying, which at some points he dismissed but other points, when he faded in and out of consciousness, when the walls began melting and the roses on the wallpaper began swirling into boars and coyotes, was convinced, he wanted to give her the deed to the farm proper. If it was really a farm.

“Let's see.” He felt her little hands moving in his pockets, fleshy spiders, but even so, he felt his erection press against the bed. “Looks like you got seventy-five dollars, a dried-up corsage, and, oh, here's something”

“Don't throw that away.” He lifted up his head as high as he could. “The flower, I mean.” Although he did not know why he kept it, the stupid herb that didn't do anything, didn't save anyone. If his mother believed in it so much, why didn't she take it herself, make sure she was alive for him when he returned from Europe? But, with it in his hands, fragile and crumbly, he relaxed, breathed easier.

“Looks like some kind of property deed.” He heard Cindy unfold the paper. “To someplace in Fruitland. Where the heck is that?”

“It's on the other side of the bay, the Eastern shore. You ever been?”

“Honey, I ain't been more than twenty blocks outta this neighborhood in any direction.”

“Well, listen, if I die, I want you to have it. The money too, of course. But this way, I'm giving everything to you proper, and you don't have to worry about whether you feel like you're taking it from a dead guy.”

“You're a strange one,” Cindy laughed. He felt her hand in his hair. “You're not going to die. And you don't seem like a criminal to me.”

“I'm not,” Stanley said. “I just got a little drunk, got a little lucky at poker, got a little luckier that you were staring out the window.”

“Well, I'm just a nice girl, too, aren't I?” He heard her voice, slightly wistful. “Don't think I haven't tried to get respectable employment. But lotsa places, they don't hire people like me—they say we'll scare the customers. Or we're too short to work the registers or the machinery. They all tell me to run off to the circus. I ain't no freak, Stanley. I just want to work respectable like everybody else. A lot of guys, they like the kinky stuff. They like little girls, right? But they ain't going to actually screw or marry no little girl, get run outta town by a lynch mob.”

Stanley drifted away. He wasn't sure if it was the wound or his usual drifting. He dreamed of circuses, of Cindy riding a Shetland pony, hanging on by the neck, her little legs bouncing off the shoulders. Both wore their hair in ringlets. Johnson was there, too. He sat in his own cage, looking glum. Above him, a sign read THE BOY WHO NEVER GROWS UP.

“Stanley.” Cindy was shaking him. “Stanley? You okay?”

“Just sleeping,” he said.

She petted his head. “You want me to run to the store, get you some aspirin now?”

“Stay. I need someone to wake me up if I start to go again.” He turned on his side, feeling a little stronger. His shoulder burned like fire, and he wondered whether a cold shower would help.

“Just stay down for a little bit, Stanley.” Cindy hopped off the bed. “You like eggs? We got a few eggs left, some Tabasco. I'll split an omelet with you, okay?”

“Just hurry back,” Stanley called after her. Although he supposed it wouldn't matter once he was dead, he wanted someone to see him die. So many men had died in the fields, in the dark, in the middle of fighting, without anyone to say goodbye to. Even Johnson, left there to rot. Had the cleanup crews brought his body back to America, or had they buried it in the Hürtgen?

Cindy came back before long with a hot plate of eggs and splash of coffee. She put the plate between them as Stanley eased himself up on his elbow. He could see better now, with the sun up. She had a pretty, baby doll face: an upturned nose, lips in a permanent slight pucker, a round chin and chubby cheeks. She had breasts like a real woman, but there's where the similarities ended. He wondered whether she wore children's clothing. He wondered how the men could fuck her, how she could take a larger man. He could not imagine fucking her himself, even kissing her, and yet her voice drizzled over him like honey. She was how he imagined a woman would treat him, a woman he wanted to marry. And yet, she was a child.

Stanley sat up gently in bed, wondering if, after breakfast, his cue to leave would be short in coming. He tested the weight of each foot on the floor before pushing off the bed. The room vibrated faintly, still, like a spun quarter laying down to rest, and he made it to the window, sticking his head out, just before the eggs and last night's whiskey plumed out of his mouth and in the small concrete yard below. Beyond the fence, he could not see Vadim and Nicolai. She must have only had a head shot on each. Maybe the wrong sex had been enlisted to fight.

“Stanley, what's wrong?”

“Come with me,” he heard himself say. It wasn't a proposition, he didn't think, but he wasn't ready to let her pass by his life. She was the first solid thing he'd seen, touched, since sailing back to Baltimore. Not an anchor, more like a buoy, something steady in the undulating sea. “I got this farmhouse, see…”

“I got a room here, a job,” she answered. “You're sweet, baby, but I don't even know you.”

“Well, here, take this.” He handed her half the bills. “For your trouble. But I'm going to this farm. To start over. If you want to come, come over to the ferry docks. I'm leaving as soon as I can.”

“Do I look like a farmer girl to you, hon?”

“You don't look like a sharpshooter, either,” he said. She opened the closet and rummaged through the few shirts, dresses.

“Here.” She held out a large, purple satin women's shirt. “Here—this looks like it might fit you. One of the girls, Rhonda, left it behind. Let's see that wound.”

She peeled the bed sheet off. The bullet had carved an alley across the top half of his bicep. It wept blood, but Cindy was able to wrap a smaller bandage of bed sheet around it before helping Stanley into the shirt.

“Thanks a million.” He leaned down and kissed her cheek. “I'm sorry we have to part ways like this.”

“Just stay out of trouble, huh?” She answered as he opened the bedroom door. “If you bother me at three in the morning in the alley again, it'll be your head I'll be aiming for.”

“Well, if I have to be shot at one more time, I'd want it to be you.” He smiled before frowning. It was probably the stupidest thing he ever said. He wondered if he'd ever learn how to talk to a woman. But she laughed and beamed at him, a little too long, and he thought he'd better leave before the space between them filled with branches that pulled at their arms and legs and organs and got them tangled up in each other, like Siamese twins.

“Stanley, wait—” Cindy grabbed at his leg. “Can you get that suitcase down from the top shelf?”

They slid into a bench under the deck of the ferry with Cindy's suitcase. Stanley had not even stopped home to say goodbye to Linus. It was like he had never been home anyway, a listless ghost that dissipated when Linus opened a window. Cindy dabbed the dirt off Stanley's face with a spit-moistened tissue. He was tired still, so tired he might die. But he was so afraid Cindy might be a figment of his own imagination, his angel taking him to heaven, that he slapped himself awake in his wounded shoulder. Blood dotted his purple satin shirt, and the fabric strained against his back. The plank rose from the dock, and slowly, Baltimore shrank until it became a miniature city, too small even for Cindy. He felt like they were running away to the circus, although to many aboard, they probably looked like they were already in it.

The man who came back from the dead, they called him at church. The man with nine lives, they called him at the drug store. At the gas station, they called him lucky. Calvin smiled, laughed, let his back get slapped by his father, his cheek pinched by the wrinkled ladies who smelled like rose water, let himself get roped into football games when the kids at the playground called after him, begged for a game of catch.

“Can you believe it?” His father laughed to his friends. “It's like God gave us our life back.”

His mother touched Johnson's shoulder, lightly. She had been touching him more since he returned. He wondered whether she thought he was real, whether she'd go to grab his arm and her fingers would sink into it like sand.

“Leave it to the government to make a clerical error.” His father rocked on his heels like a proud father. “Worst month of our life because some paper jockey got the wrong man.”

They called him heroic, brave, honorable. He always knew the men who said these things to him had not served. The men who served said nothing. He'd see them at the movie theater, sitting next to their girls, their wives. They stared in their popcorn sacks as if they'd lost a tooth in it. At the dance hall, their hands would hold their girls close, but their eyes would be far away. He held girls close as well, mindful of their gravity. Without them, he would certainly float away.

When they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Johnson's father came through the door of the house, late edition of the newspaper in his hand.

“You know what this means, boy?” He slapped Johnson on the back. “We won, we won it all!”

He wondered about the other men in his platoon, Polensky, Abraham, mostly Polensky. Did he go back to Baltimore, or was he an occupier? He'd have to write the platoon. He waited in the line, filled out forms, talked with a few of the other soldiers returning, had no equipment to return. He listened to occupational counselors, who stressed on him the decorum of the GI, one's presentation at the employment office, job interviews. The need to take advantage of civilian goodwill toward vets, turn it into a good-paying job. Find a girl, pick up a hobby. Return to a normal he had yet to know.

“Maybe I should go to school.” He put down his fork one night at dinner.

“What would you study?” His mother scraped her plate by the sink, shaking her head. She dried her hands and returned the table, straightening her dress, a simple cut that she had sewn from some old satin curtains. Materials were still in short supply; she made him two ties from the same curtains, embroidering a duck on one and a deer on the other. Animals he didn't think he'd ever have the heart to shoot again. He'd worn the ties to church in her presence but carried his old tie from high school in his truck in case of an interview for the postal service, for a job administering civil service exams, an electrician's apprentice.

“Architecture,” he answered, dabbing his lips so she couldn't see his face.

“Architecture,” his father laughed. His nose was thick, his eyes wide and steady on either side, like Johnson. Slow and deliberating. Dumb to some. Like his son, he had been a pupil of the physical field in high school, not the academic one. He'd served in the first World War and still had the shrapnel in his shoulder to prove it.

“Yes, architecture.” He stood and put his dish in the sink.

He'd been captivated by the architecture the corporal at Camp Upton, who'd been drafted out of Princeton, had described to him. He talked about buildings, the arch of stone and metal girders. Vertical space. The only way to move—up. Johnson imagined rebuilding churches, houses, storefronts, in London, Salerno, Berlin. He imagined making structures that could withstand all manner of bombing and blitzing. A city of clean lines that paid homage to the past but looked forward to the future. And even if his ability matched more of card houses than cathedrals, he knew he did not ever want to draw a gun again. He wouldn't have to tell his father, he figured, for a semester, at the very least.

Johnson enrolled at Bowling Green State for one class. His mother spent the evening starching and ironing his one white shirt while he sat at the kitchen table, writing his name in the clean, unmolested notebooks. CALVIN JOHNSON. Before the war, he had assumed he would take over the farm. But the war had made him bigger and everything else in his life a little smaller. He hoped his greed for the big world was not bigger than his ability. He had held a rifle. He had shot men and thrown grenades and looked into the unmoving faces of his battalion mates in the sand of Normandy and the snow of Germany and he had been left for dead. He could surely become an architect.