Tide King (22 page)

Johnson stood gingerly on the slope. He felt the bones of his heels touch the warm, soft carpet of soot that now covered the hill. The backs of his legs were a pastiche of exposed muscle and skin and strips of canvas, a white glow of bone at the heel. He touched the back of his head and felt only skull.

“Get help,” Johnson said.

Lane moved up the slope, looking back at him, not with concern, but with sadness. Johnson would be dead when he returned, he thought, and Johnson figured he would be right. A vacuum of air and popping rocks, twigs surrounded him. No birds or wind. He thought he could hear the Missouri running downgulch of him, but it sounded so close at times he thought maybe it was the rushing in his ears. He felt asleep and awake at once, a dreamy happiness flooding his circuits along with the uninhibited endorphins and toxins. He strained to hear other men, a rescue party, cursed Lane for leaving him to die on purpose, even as he knew at some logical level that it would take hours for a team to get here, whether by boat down the gulch or helicopter. But he could not tell one minute, one hour from the rest. He stood on a hill, ashen and pocked with stumps, black stones, and he wondered whether he had time-traveled back to Germany, whether he was in Dresden.

Damned if he was going to stay here. He crawled slowly up the slope, trying to stay off his heels. He had gotten twenty feet before he realized he left the canteen behind. He kept moving upward, reasoning in some way that the river was closer, that there was more water in the river than in the canteen, and he could not waste any more time. He thought about Kate, in New York, and was saddened he would not be able to tell her of his demise, or even see Stanley, so close, somewhere in these woods.

At the top of the slope was a reef barrier, tall white saw rocks jutting out with little space between them. Johnson squeezed himself through a slit and saw the glint of the moonlit river below. If he could make it to the river, baptize himself in its cool embrace, he could fill his mouth and his reserve and he could make it. At the very least, he could quench the terrible thirst that scraped his throat and glued his eyelids together, that spasmed his stomach like a wrung-out dishcloth. He stood up, and in a minute of hysteria, thought he would run like hell, that he could feel no pain, and that it would be over fast.

He took a few large leaps before losing his balance on the impacted stones of the slope, and he rolled and bounced, airborne at times, down the hill and into the river with a rush. The water filled his back and legs with white-hot pain, and as he drank the dark water, it seemed to leave him as quickly as he drank it in. He vomited hot into the cold space around him. The basin of night was bare on the east side of the Missouri. A skeleton of trees scraped the cloudless sky. No owls or night creatures convened, as was their ritual, to discuss all matter of nocturnal importance. It could have been hell on earth, or it could have been actually hell. All he knew was everything was dead, and he was alone, too tired to get out of the water.

She dreamed of violins, playful notes that leapt up and down the scale like mice. They became louder, louder still, and when she woke up, they were outside, a cacophony of horseshoes, bells, the crunch of wagon wheels. From the door of the bone house, she watched the gypsy caravan disassemble in the valley below, two squat rusted trailers on tall wagon wheels from which eight Romani emerged. Older women in scarves, the color of cinnamon and tough as jerky, strung a clothes line between two trees. A man, his beard dark like ink, squatted in front of smoking kindling. She was so mesmerized by the emerging makeshift village of the travelers, she did not see him loping up the hill on the right side until he stood in front of her, a barefooted boy, thin and dirty but clean with youth and curiosity.

He smiled at her and tapped his chest. “Ferki.”

She smiled and tapped her chest. “Ela.”

Ferki curled his fingers as if holding a spoon and ladled air to his mouth. He pointed toward the campfire, where some of the older women cut onions and forest mushrooms into a now-smoking pot. She followed him down to the campfire and sat to the side, waiting for the women to scowl and wave her away or look at her fearfully, giving her a generous serving of stew in the hopes she would leave them alone. Their eyes studied her in quick thrusts upward as they concentrated on peeling and cutting and feeding the fragrant broth that made her stomach claw against her sides in hunger. They asked Ferki questions in Romani about her. He shook his head and shrugged his shoulders, his mouth full of gaps from his baby teeth, half-filled with incisors that sprouted like glaciers anchoring his gums. No, he did not know whether she was a Pole or a Jew or Russian, whether she was an orphan or a witch. He only knew she was a girl, a girl he wanted to play with.

The women murmured among themselves. Finally, they looked at her and smiled, handing her an earthen bowl filled with stew.

“Te avel angla tute, kodo khabe tai kado pimo tai menge pe sastimaste,” Ferki's grandmother, named Tsura, said. Her eyes, cloaked almonds, sat far in her face, as if she saw everything from a distance deep within her.
May this food be before you, and in your memory, and may it profit us in good health and in good spirit
.

Ela had known gypsies before. They had come through once, many years ago when her matka was alive, trading herbs, tinctures, some fabrics which were now part of her bed quilt. In the years since, she'd seen their caravans from the hill of the bone house, small plodding dots heading northwesterly, toward the sea. But they had not come this close in a long time. She watched the women boil dandelion roots and elderberries and sage while the men loaded a smaller wagon with fabrics, jerkied meat, and jewelry to take to the village to hawk.

“Germans everywhere,” Ferki explained to her in broken Polish when she asked him why they were heading east. “The Russians no better. Jekh dilo kerel but dile hai but dile keren dilimata.”

One madman makes many madmen, and many madmen make madness
. She had heard talk in the village when she went down to trade her tinctures—small things, mixtures for gout, for headaches, for fever—that she remembered her matka making. Talk about Germans invading, about people leaving. It was not anything to which she'd paid much attention. Poland had changed so many hands since she'd been alive, it was hard to keep track of the ruling parties, their petty laws and greed. She floated above them, a ghost, a menace, a shadow. She did not understand why they fought so long, so hard, even died for a land they would only have for a little while. The land always won in the end, slowly grinding their organs to rot, their bones to dust. And yet every generation thought they would conquer it for all eternity.

Except for her. Despite her best efforts, she remained to see the same mistakes over and over again.

“You come with us.” Ferki kicked a ball made of old rags toward her. She moved it back and forth between her feet. He made a gun with his fingers and pretended to shoot her. “The Germans shoot Roma on side of road, in towns, in Serbia. Say we spread disease, are spies.”

“I don't know,” she answered in broken Romani. If she disappeared, the villagers would burn her house to the ground. The local priest would bless the earth. She would be a nomad. But they might kill the villagers, too. It was hard to know, these days, who would be called a witch and killed.

“The land is our home.” Ferki spread his arms wide, as if to hug it. He smiled at her. He would be a beautiful man. She imagined the slight hook of his nose, his full, red lips, the fold and curls of his earlobes and the gentle slope of his hair over his head, the way its chestnut curls licked his ears and the back of his neck. She imagined clinging to his body, the itch of his chest hairs and groin as they rubbed against her, the pulse of his gorged member, but this would not happen. She may see him become a man, she may see him to the grave, but she would always be a girl, and the earth would not break her.

He walked toward her, his arms still wide, and then he drew them around her. Had Antoniusz been the last man, the last person, to hug her? Ferki smelled like curry and sweat and dirt. She ran her hands along the smooth cliffs of his neck, pressed her cheek against his before grabbing the cloth ball and kicking it as far as she could. She watched as he ran, light, wiry, after it, the soles of his dirty feet catching the sun. She could not be broken, but if she was not careful, he would melt her.

Ferki and Tsura followed her to the clearing where she had found the burnette saxifrage. She pointed at the sky and then the earth as Ferki explained to his grandmother, adding “cccrrracckkkk!” and waving his arms for theatrical flourish. Tsura touched the earth, no longer black, covered with a century of blown dirt and seeds, and began to dig. She motioned for them to help her, and they knelt in a circle, raking their fingers over the earth, the hole around them becoming bigger and bigger, layers of sediment and clay exposed until they happened upon a small area of white ash, several feet in, no more than a handful. Ferki's grandmother scooped it into her palm and dropped into a leather pouch tied to her waist.

Back at the bone house, Tsura gave Ela a knife, sharp with dull rubies on the handle. Ela held it against the creamy white of her inner forearm and pressed, the dark blood bubbling to the surface like lava. Tsura bottled the blood in a flask and pressed a cloth over the cut and then dressed it with a spiderweb that had been seeped in black wort.

“We wait.” Tsura nodded at Ela's dressed arm. “To see this healing.”

“We won't wait long,” Ela answered.

In the bone house, Ela sat every morning and made a cut on her arm, from which Tsura could collect a sample. Then they ground and pestled the dried herbs and mixed them with the white ash. Ferki brought in the rats and frogs, which they cut and applied the paste to and waited. All the animals died.

“Sometimes the Gods' powers are one time.” Tsura searched for words. “I chirikleski kul chi perel duvar pe yek.
The droppings of the flying bird never fall twice on the same spot
. Then they cannot be taken advantage of, and so they are also properly revered.”

“My grandmother means, if everybody can live forever, what is the use of it?” Ferti added, lying back on Ela's bed.

“But if no one can, it is of no use, and if one person can, it is a curse,” Ela answered. They looked at her in confusion, and she frowned. “Curse!” She said louder. She put her hands to her neck as if to choke herself and then pointed to the sky.

“No…you stay now. I want you stay. We will help you.” He rested his hand on her shoulder and smiled, his hodgepodge of teeth filling his face. She imagined his face growing around his teeth, his eyes burrowing deep into his face, his eyebrows covering them. His muscles growing, stretching his skin, and then the reverse when his muscles sunk like Tsura's, hung from the bone. Skin slipped from her cheeks like curtains as if something inside her had been used, reused, finally abandoned.

“Everyone has gift that is only theirs,” Tsura shook Ela's chin in her hands. “Some can be seen more than others, that is all.”