Tide King (26 page)

“Well, I seen some weird things in my life.” She sat back and looked into the distance. “I seen a flying saucer over the lake one night. And I seen a bear walk on its front paws instead of back ones, like it belonged in the circus. I ain't one to say something can't happen. Besides, I'm up here in the mountains. They coulda blown up half the world and I wouldn't know it. And I wouldn't care.”

“But why did you take me in?”

“I don't know.” She shook her head slowly, looking at the air in front of her. “I didn't know what you were, but you looked so sad, like some doe caught in a trap.”

“You have any family?”

“My daddy died ten years ago. I live alone.” She slumped in the rocker, her knees spread. “The other girls always made fun of me at school for living out in the woods, and the men…sometimes some smart aleck from the Forest Service ties one on and comes up here, thinking he's gonna get a little hanky panky with me. I'm pretty accurate from 100 yards, they find out pretty quick.”

“So you're up here by yourself?”

“I know how to take care of myself in the woods,” she answered, her eyes level and penetrating. “I grew up here, and I'm going to die here.”

“I didn't mean to upset you. Not really having a home, I say it's nice to feel like you've got one.”

“How on earth did you get to Montana from Ohio?” She pulled a foot up on the edge of the rocker.

“I was looking for somebody. Somebody who might know why I'm like this, what's happened to me.” He let the sheet fall from his chest. The smell was stronger underneath. “Jesus, how can you stand my smell?”

“I got a big jar of vapor rub. Kills most smells. But I would be lying if I said I'd forget the smell of you.” She ripped a chunk of jerky with her teeth. “And the varmints been coming up to the cabin something awful. Plunked me a few raccoons. Had to scare off a mountain goat yesterday.”

“Well, once I get better, I won't be any more trouble.” Would he get better? Outside the window, through the porch, he could see pines and fir, the cloudy bowl of early spring above them.

“Don't worry about it. I'm not scared, if that's what you're worried about. I could kill you ten different ways before you even got off the bed.”

“I'm the one who should be scared.” He smiled. “And I guess I am, a little. Especially of how I look.”

“Well, you look a little more human than you did when you washed up.”

“Could I trouble you for the mirror on the wall?”

She did not look at him as she handed over the rectangular slab. And after one look, he did not look at himself, either.

Now that he was conscious, he dreamed of the fire. It seemed like yesterday to him and not over twenty years ago. He woke up with the heat on his back, his hands gripping the sides of the mattress, just as the fire made to sweep over them. He wondered what had happened to Lane, if he survived. What had happened in the world while he was sleeping. Perhaps he was still dreaming. In bed at night, he knocked his head against the wall of the cabin, harder and harder until he thought his crown would break through to the other side.

“Jesus Jiminy, will you stop doing that?” Maggie mumbled from the rocking chair. “This is not a dream, Johnson. Next time you start banging your head, I'm going shoot a tranquilizer in you.”

He wanted to go to town, as soon as he was able, and find Stanley. Maggie did not make trips to town often. Since he'd been at the cabin, Maggie had gone once, bringing canned beans and bread for herself and jars of baby food for him, but she never mentioned any news of the outside world. Perhaps she did not want to upset him. Sometimes she caught him staring in disbelief at the free calendar from the marina that hung by the stove. August 1970.

But she was gentle. Every night she dabbed his back and legs with a cold rag with which she had seeped chamomile flower, explaining it would fight off infection and dull any pain. His hands faded to white and then warmed with peachy ochre. Thin white hairs grew between his knuckles and then thickened.

“I don't really understand it.” Maggie wrung the rag into a tin bowl between her bare feet. She brought it back up and dabbed his neck. “I have half a mind to call Dr. Porter down and have him take a look at you. Every day I wake up and you're alive, I can't believe it's hardly possible.”

“Why don't you call him? Maybe he knows something.” He liked when sometimes he felt her fingertips on the sides of his back, his neck. It had been a long time, Kate, since anyone had touched him with any intention. He longed to ask her for more, to touch every part of him, to prove to him he was alive, that she was alive, but felt he'd already taken too much. Already, when she fell asleep in the rocking chair, he pushed himself to a sitting position and practiced sleeping against the wall so that soon he could insist she take the bed, he the rocker.

“I don't know what Dr. Porter knows that I don't,” she sighed. “My father grew up around the Flathead Indians. They used osha and gumweed for a lot of general healing. But I never heard of an herb that makes you heal like this. You sure the government ain't gone done something to you, Calvin?”

“I don't think so. Why would they leave me in a pile of bodies?”

“Maybe they treated all of you. Maybe you're the only one who woke up.” She leaned back in the chair. “My daddy and me, we have a few folks we trust in the town, but I don't trust anyone else, really. Especially the government.”

“But you trusted me. And I could be the government Martian spy you're all spooked about.” He smiled. His skin was still rubbery, not entirely responsive to his muscles, and he imagined the loping, sloping jack-o'-lantern of his face, like a stroke victim's.

“Don't make me have to shoot you, Johnson,” she answered, picking up the bowl, in which lukewarm water and sloughed skin lay, forming a paste. “I lay awake all night already wondering why I didn't leave well enough alone.”

Although she didn't drink, when Maggie went to the post for her usual supplies one week, she came home with a flask of whiskey.

“That got Mr. and Mrs. Rumsey a twitter,” she laughed, watching him take a small sip while standing near the window. He'd practiced walking around the cabin, building the muscles in his legs, testing the weight of his ankle. He could make it from bed to stove and halfway back before feeling tired, before having to steady himself on the back of the rocking chair. “I told them I was having a little trouble sleeping and needed a nip before bed.”

“How can I pay you back?”

“You don't worry, Johnson. You may be many things, but you ain't been much trouble. Maybe if you can help me with the corner of the ceiling over there before winter comes. It looks like it's ready to leak.”

“I don't want to cut into your season.” He knew she earned her living as a game guide, taking groups of recreational hunters hunting for deer and antelope in the fall, bison in the winter, sometimes black bear in the spring. She made him split with pain laughing as she told him stories of the men staying in the lodges across the lake who needed help shooting game, how she'd have to stand right next to them and fire exactly when they did, insisting the bullet that killed the deer or antelope was indeed theirs and not hers. They never argued with her, and they came back every season. And she lived well enough off the money and the game, making venison jerky and stew and fillets of antelope that she sold to some of the restaurants to supplement the gnarled, undersized potatoes and radishes she harvested from her rocky garden.

“It's maybe another month before the hunters will start coming.” She put away the canned milk and anchovies and woman products she'd gotten from town. “I really should have been canning some of the carrots and potatoes.”

“I could help you.” Johnson sat up in the bed, pulling at the band of the boxer shorts Maggie had given him, her father's. He was thankful for the hand-me downs, but they did not leave much to the imagination. Although he supposed there was not much Maggie didn't know about him physically by now. He watched the muscles of her arms move as she boiled the water for coffee, the broadness of her shoulders and the soft back of her neck where her hair was swept up in a bun.

“You help me with the roof,” she answered. “You save your strength until then.”

“Tell me something about yourself, Maggie.”

“I'm not that interesting of a person.” She did not turn to face him. The skin at the base of her neck was flushed, whether from sun or embarrassment he didn't know.

“Tell me about your father. I feel mighty strange wearing another man's underwear. You can at least do me that favor.”

“He was the most honorable man I've known.” She came and sat on the rocker, her hands clasped between her legs. “He taught me everything I know about hunting, fishing, the woods, God. My momma, I didn't really know her that well—she died when I was so young. But my father wasn't scared of raising a little girl. I had dolls at Christmas and my birthday.”

“You ever had a boyfriend, Maggie?”

“I've got more of daddy's stuff.” She stood and moved to the foot of the bed, where a large cedar chest stood. An elaborate scene was carved on top, a clearing of river in the woods from which an elk drank. “I never could bring myself to get rid of it—figured I'd take it in a little and wear it myself. But I'll take it in for you. Not all the pieces, but some of them.”

“That's very nice of you.” He studied his feet. His hair and toenails had grown back, although his skin was still baby smooth. “Thank you.”

“Well, anyone'd be so nice.” She held up a green flannel shirt with blue checks. “This one would look good on you.”

“Yeah, that one I'll wear when I go to town.”

“You want me to take you to town, is that what you want?” She stood up, looming over him, and he flinched. He'd seen her chop wood through the window, drag a 20-lb sack of flour from her motorboat and up the hill to the cabin, carry him back and forth to the outhouse like a doll. “You tired of being cooped up with a crazy old girl in the woods?”

“No,” he answered. He reached up and took her hands. “I just don't want you to get in any trouble, that's all.”

“That's a crazy idea.” She pulled her hands away, brushing a strand of blonde hair from her face, where it pressed against her lips. It looked fuller and softer, and he wondered whether she had washed and combed it recently. “Why someone helping somebody would get in trouble. That's the craziest idea I've ever heard.”

She left the cabin, and Johnson watched her through the window walk aimlessly around the clearing in front of the cabin, clenching and unclenching her fists, kicking up the dirt. When she came back in, ten minutes or so later, he pretended he was asleep so she would not have to explain herself to him.

“See how these fit you.” The next day, Maggie placed her father's old logger boots on the floor by his feet. They were broken like an old back, the unlaced mid-calf sides falling open on each side, a long tongue unfurling from the opening. The soles still held their caulks. He pulled them over his pink baby-seal feet, and he stood in them unlaced, feeling his toes graze the roof of them.