Tide King (20 page)

Stanley did not know how it happened, exactly. When Earl came by one winter morning with plane tickets to Nashville to record a demo at his brother's studio, Cindy had been recording for the “Happy Hayride” show for almost three months as ‘Lil Cindy Sunshine. She was the talk of the tri-state area, although, thanks to Earl's carefully timed studio sessions, no one in Maryland-Delaware-Virginia had ever laid eyes on her.

“You're not going to Nashville to do anything.” He stood in their renovated bedroom, with window panes and a real bed frame and mattress courtesy of Cindy's earnings from Happy Hayride. “You're almost four months pregnant.”

“Since I'm the only one earning any money in this house, I think that decision should be mine, don't you?” She lay on her side, head propped on her elbow, looking at sheet music of the songs Wendell wanted her to record in Nashville.

“They'll probably use your voice and put some other girl's picture up—Earl already told me he can't do anything with you because you're a pregnant midget.”

“He didn't tell you that.” She stared at him with narrowed eyes. “You take that back.”

“I may be unemployed, but I'm not a liar.” He moved toward the bed. “I'm sorry baby. You don't need him, anyway. I love you just the way you are.”

“Don't touch me.” She squirmed out of his grasp and hopped off the bed, padding toward the bathroom and shutting the door. “You've always been jealous of my dreams.”

“Baby, I'm sorry.” He knocked. “I'm not jealous of your dreams. I just think we should have the same dreams.” But weren't his, chasing down the parents of a dead comrade in Ohio, just as selfish, as foolish?

He sat outside the bathroom door.

“We can make this work, Cindy. The two of us. I'll get a job and you'll never have to work again, I promise you. You'll be royalty, Cindy. My royalty.”

He sat outside for a long time, listening to her motions inside, a slight cry, the toilet flushing, water running. He dozed off until the door opened suddenly and he fell inward, looking up at her from the tiled floor. She held a wadded, soaked facecloth dabbed with pink.

“Stanley, I lost the baby.” Her stubby legs stepped over his head and down the hall. “I need to talk to Earl.”

When he hit McDonald Pass outside of Helena, Montana, where the two-lane blacktop curved and disappeared into mountains of pine and fir trees, Johnson had been on the road three days, his tires were sizzling, and he prayed to God for the first time since the war. He'd gone west past Helena, looking for some cabin that a man in a bar back in Kansas had told him about, a hunting cabin that wasn't locked, where he could spend the night. But the details, scribbled in pencil on a napkin in the man's drunken, unsteady hand, made less sense the farther west Johnson went, and he looked for a place to turn around in the winding mountain road that resembled the man's arched, urgent script. He prayed that his tires, leaving black horizontal smears of rubber across the road as he braked, would not blow out and send the truck tumbling into the Rocky Mountains. The chassis shuddered as he fought against the steering wheel, sending silt to the edges of the road.

He slowed the truck to a crawl and coasted to a spot where he could see a good mile in front and in back of him. To his right, the Rocky Mountains climbed, obscuring his view of the North, and to the south, the road dropped away into the deep blue Montana sky. He inched the truck back and forth across the width of the road, noting where his rear tires grabbed the edges of the narrow shoulder before it descended. He pulled at the steering wheel, traces of last night's whiskey from some whistle stop in North Dakota beading on his neck and forehead and the palms of his hand.

He spotted a late-model truck heading east in his rearview mirror and pushed on the gas pedal, backing the truck westward before grabbing the clutch to move into first and forward. But he idled, in the transition, perhaps a second too long, his thoughts bottoming into the dark well of uncertainty, what he was doing in Montana, if he would find Stanley, where he had gone off the path, a side route where roads disappeared into mountains without the promise of emerging, and he felt the right rear tire spin because there was nothing under it. He pressed the pedal harder and leaned forward in the seat as rocks and dust swirled behind him and the right wheel sank into a soup of stones and silt. As he and truck tilted backward, moving toward the sky, Johnson pushed open the driver's door with his left arm. He dropped from the truck and rolled to his left, the ground unforgiving to his shoulder and face. From the corner of his right eye, he saw the front of the truck, wheels in the air like a bucking bronco, the engine whining for a moment in the rush of motion, the futile spin of suspended tires, before sound and truck were sucked into the below. A second passed, two, and the sound took up where it had left off, like a radio coming back into reception, as metal twisted and glass shattered and tires exploded, a vehicular accordion moving through the chords of its swan song.

He heard the other truck, now only hundreds of feet away, its brakes slowing the tires, its engine shifting downward in gears, and he became aware of his body, of the raw abrasion that clung to it like a dew, and he bent his elbows and knees and neck without moving from the ground, where gravity had locked his stomach and chest and back until the enormity of what had happened could be processed by his head. He laughed, feeling a tooth loose in his bottom jaw, a stiff, unbendable left index finger, and he saw boots, scuffed bald on the toes, the steel of the toe almost peeking through, little caulks on the soles, by his head.

“You all right, buddy? Jesus.”

He forced his eye upward, toward the young man, blond, cleft chin bristled with stubble, with deep-set eyes looking at him from a height that may have been heaven.

“I think I need a ride into town,” Johnson answered, closed his own.

“I think I heard of a Stanley at the Fire Service,” the man, Lane Gustafson, answered. “You looking for a forestry job?”

“Yeah—Stanley's my friend. We served together.” Johnson sat on the passenger side of Lane's truck, patting his face with a handkerchief. A dotted pattern of blood emerged on the yellowed fabric as he moved it over his cheeks and forehead. He was sure his index finger was broken. The middle joint had swelled to a plum, almost as purple. He could not bend it; it was as immobile as a knife in a full jar of peanut butter.

“You want to go to the hospital, have that looked at?” Lane nodded at it as he steered them along mountain roads at speeds that made Johnson a little queasy.

“Naw. I'll get a little ice somewhere. Back in the war, we called this a boo-boo,” Johnson answered.

Lane laughed, and Johnson took note of the throbs reporting from the various centers of his body: his lower back, his left forearm and elbow, his neck, his left thigh. The memory of his stumps entered his consciousness as randomly as a lightning flash on a clear day, and his first instinct was always to bury it in a stiff drink. Johnson turned and watched the buildings roll by on main street—the Martha Hotel, F.W. Woolrich, the Harvey Hotel. Mountains towered over the far end, a protective giant that closed the valley of firs and pines and bright peaked houses in its arms. Lane guided the truck off the main strip and eastward out of town.

“I know a bar,” Lane seemed to read his thoughts. “Let's get the shake off you, man.”

Johnson settled his shaking hands into his lap, where Lane could no longer see them. He seemed to skirt harm more than most people. Perhaps that was an understatement, or perhaps the strangeness of it kept him constantly vigilant, afraid that the truth of this statement would catch up with him and pronounce itself boldly; that he was actually a freak, a demon, a ghost. That something really had happened over in Germany.

The handkerchief he pressed against his face stopped absorbing blood. When he flipped open the sun visor and glanced into small rectangular mirror, covered with a paste of smoke and dust, to his surprise, he noticed that his cuts were pink and closed, on their way, he supposed, in another moment, to disappearing completely. He curled his hands into fists and realized his index finger bent along with the other fingers, its plum-sized joint now just a peach pit. He covered his left hand with his right and hoped Lane would not notice, but he was too busy trying to find reception on his radio, the thick tuner bar moving lazily across the numbers.

“Can you pull over for a minute, buddy?” Johnson turned in the seat, unrolling the window, letting the wind dry the sudden sweat on his face and neck. Before the truck's tires had stopped rolling, he jumped from the seat and crouched on the rocks and dirt by the shoulder, vomiting up God knows what from whenever he'd eaten last, acidic brown plumes tinged with red that singed the dirt and leaves and sent up an ominous smoke signal in the wake of their destruction. His clothes were drenched in sweat. He was in the middle of crisis in the middle of nowhere. He looked at his hand, wriggling the jammed finger, bending the joint. It moved as free as a stick through the air. He felt his skin, the sides of his face, as if they would supply him with answers. He felt his heart clicking in his chest—he could not be a vampire or a zombie or countless other versions of the undead he'd seen at the movies.

“I need you to take me to Stanley now,” Johnson said when he climbed back in the truck.

“Calm down, buddy.” Lane laughed at him before pulling off the road. He picked up his cigarettes from the dashboard, waving them up and down, back and forth, as if to tantalize him. “I don't even know where this Stanley is. We'll need to ask around a bit, and we may as well do that at the places that men usually go, right? Now, have a cigarette and calm down. Where are you from?”

“Ohio,” Johnson answered, pulling one from the pack, slapping his jacket pockets for a match. “I think my lighter was in the truck.”

“That's a shame about your truck.” Lane held out his Zippo. “Maybe later we can get down there, have a look, get your stuff out. You gotta be careful on these roads.”

“I'm just happy she got me here. This is where I needed to be.”

“You run into some trouble back there in Ohio?”

“No.” Johnson shook his head. He stared through the windshield before him, trying not to look at his finger, trying not to think. His brain pressed against his skull, and he put his fingers in his ears for fear it would seep out. “Just need to find Stanley real soon. What about you?”

“I'm taking it easy. They're starting building on the new dam soon. I'm going get a job there—the money's great. You oughta come and get a job with me at the dam, Johnson.”

“I really want to try and find my friend at the fire service. It's kind of important.”

“Well, not before we get you a drink, my friend. You almost met with the angels back there.” They watched as lightning, silent, cracked over the mountains. “Besides, it might rain. Keep ourselves under cover until it passes, you know.”

“Couldn't hurt.” His feelings were fire in his pores, sweat on his skin, knots in his stomach. “I am feeling a little thirsty.”

“Can get mighty hot in Helena, my friend.” The Pint, a little roadside bar, came into view. “You'll have your work cut out for you at the Park Service.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The land is dry grass in some of those gulches up there in the mountains, and it's damn hot in the summer—hundred degrees in the middle of the day. Lightning strikes, and the fire races right through them.” Lane laughed, a raspy cough punctuating it. “You'll be praying for a job at the dams, then.”

Johnson followed Lane into the green-paneled one-story building. Lane was taller than Johnson, lankier, with a relaxed gait about the hips, shoulders back. A man who never felt in trouble, Johnson figured. A man who was not apologetic about having a whiskey at eleven in the morning. Lane rolled the box of cigarettes into the sleeve of his undershirt and swung the door open wide. In the darkness, Johnson could make out the outlines of men at the bar, and when his eyes adjusted the lines of them deepened like carved rock, the only soft things about them were the worn white undershirts or plaid and the knees of their canvas pants.

“Well, if it ain't the good-time boys.” One of the men said. He held a shot glass in his fingers and the whiskey disappeared down his throat with efficiency and ease.

“Coming from one to another.” Lane slid onto the vacant seat next to the man and patted the stool on the other side. “Sit down, Johnson. What's your poison?”

“Whiskey,” Johnson answered and nodded at the man. Over the top of the bar, behind the counter, two timberjacks were mounted in an X. Faded photos of lumberjacks, logging competitions, and woods dotted the walls. A musty billiards table rested under the dim halcyon of a hanging lamp, and some woman with a child-like voice sang a slow and pretty country song on the jukebox.