Tide King (32 page)

He did not drink or smoke or talk. He merely watched, blotting time and circumstance away, her voice, the glint of her eyes, the curled and set bouffant of her hair, all for his pleasure, his pain, and no one else's. He wondered whether she knew he watched, whether she sang a special phrase for him, whether the wink between the second verse and the last chorus was for him or for someone else.

Sometimes after she sang, she would chit-chat with Lawrence Welk, Conway Twitty, whoever was the host, and she'd touch her hair absently, sprayed and unmoving, laugh a little forced, high-pitched squeal at someone's joke, talk about upcoming tour dates, an album. Then she'd be gone, some comedy sketch or standup act following her, some commercial for Coca-Cola, and he'd stand out on the porch, looking at the road, wondering how to get to her. Roads connected all of America, he figured. One could find anyone if they took the right combination of roads.

He never got into the truck. He went back into the house, sat at the kitchen table, and drank. He drank until he passed out and if he was lucky, he did not remember the evening in question until it was long past, weeks later, too far to touch or hurt him.

Heidi would be thirteen in two months. Old enough for him to tell her who her mother was. But what purpose, he wondered, did it serve? They'd received no child support, no royalties, not even a Christmas card from Cindy or her accountants, managers, lawyers. They hadn't received a goddamn cent in the thirteen years they had lived in the farmhouse. Not even a phone call. Years ago, Stanley had sent pictures of Heidi taken at the Sears Portrait Studio to Nashville Records. They probably sat in a mail bag with thousands of other letters from fans. He wondered whether the secretary who finally opened them threw them away or had passed them along, what had been discussed. He had never been offered hush money, although he had thought, from time to time, of asking for it. Not for himself, but for Heidi. He'd been laid off from the shirt factory and, except for an occasional job, relied on his pension to clothe and feed her. There was no money for anything, even as she deserved everything that thus far escaped her—beauty, biological parents, presents.

It would be cruel to tell her, insult to injury. She'd asked, once or twice, as a child, about her mother, cried at parent's day in kindergarten when Stanley had come and sat on the little kindergartner chairs with all the other mothers, his polyester church paints riding high up his shins, his clip-on tie drooping over his belt like a sad dog. She'd run to the girls room, her face red and strained like an exotic fruit, and the teacher had to bring her out to Stanley.

“Why don't I have a mommy like everyone else?” She asked in the parking lot as Stanley lifted her into the truck. She was wearing the pink and white dress she had picked out at JC Penney, one she had worn the first day of school. So proud she was of it, of herself, until she had realized that she looked different from the others, her honey skin, her angularity, her green glass eyes, Dumbo ears. She had come home asking what an Oreo was, having overheard the teacher's aide talking about her to the teacher.
It means you're as sweet as a cookie
, he'd replied.

“You have a mommy, baby.” His hands gripped the steering wheel. He'd gone back and forth over the years about whether to tell her Cindy had died, had been kidnapped, was a secret agent. How to tell a child her mother hadn't wanted her, wanted them? “She'll come home. You'll see. And she'll bring with her everything you could ever want. All you need to do is wait.”

Heidi looked out the window. He stole glances at her as she looked far across the fields, the horizon, the cotton candy clouds, and he knew what she was thinking: how to get to her, where to start. He stopped at the Dairy Queen on the way home, and she'd smiled, gotten a chocolate and vanilla twist. It had satisfied her that day. But there would be many others to come, he knew, waves of days crashing harder and faster, pulling him out to sea if he was not careful, both of them unmoored.

That day before Heidi's birthday, Stanley turned on the television, hoping to catch the Orioles game. Heidi's presents were wrapped in newspaper in his bedroom: the record album
Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player
from some nancy boy, Elton John, that she'd asked for and some Bonne Bell lip bubblegum lip gloss that a counter girl at Woolworths had found for him when he asked what fifty-five cents, the last of his money for the month, could buy a young girl. Heidi was in the kitchen, trying to bake a cake. She was taking home economics that year, all the kids were, and she'd bought some cake mix and frosting at the store with what was usually Stanley's cigarette money.

He turned the dial on the television while looking through butts in the tray, hoping for a cylindrical centimeter of tobacco to smoke, but stopped at stock footage of Cindy on the picture tube. It was not time for the Opry or the Lawrence Welk show or whatever variety show on which she may have been scheduled to appear. Rather, it was a news item, a still photo, her name and dates underneath: 1917-1973. He turned up the volume.

“What are you, deaf all of a sudden?” Heidi stood in the doorway, ghost hands spotting flour on the hips of her jeans. Her face dropped like the cake she was baking. “Dad, what is it?”

He shook his head, waving her away. A child should not have to see her father cry. He felt her move toward him, her hand dangling out in front of her as she considered whether to touch the overripe fruit of his head, red and shaking and simmering with tears. She had touched him when she was little, wrapping her thin brown arms against the pale, hairy trunks of his legs. But she had clung to him full of her fears, her disappointments, her slights. Now her face, mouth agape, confessed to him that she did not know what his fears and disappointments were, had not realized he had them.

“Dad, can you tell me, for my birthday?” She touched his shoulder, smearing the flour on him.

“Tell you what, honey?” He looked at her, his blue eyes, the bird sprout of hair and long nose.

“How you could be my father.”

The words tumbled out of her mouth like change. He knew she had not meant to say them, but now they choked the air like wet-hot garbage. Her cheeks burned as she looked away from him.

“Come here.” He patted the floor next to him. They sat and watched the rest of the news story. The reporter with blonde hair shellacked into a curved lampshade stood in front of Nashville Recording Studios and recounted Cindy's life in a seven-second sound byte: the struggles of being a midget in the country music world, her little girl named Heidi, who died of pneumonia after she was born, her twenty-year career that netted her five top-10 singles and two platinum albums, a tour with Patsy Cline, and her eventual death from kidney disease brought on by her condition.

“Her child, Heidi, didn't die of pneumonia.” Stanley turned to Heidi. “You're that child.”

He told her about everything, then, holding her hands, long and tapered and wanting mastery of the guitar or some other elegant dexterous profession. He squeezed them as they grew clammy and shook, as Heidi's eyes grew wide and then narrowed as she processed the enormity of Stanley's words.

They forgot about the cake until it burned. Heidi scraped the brindled skin off the cake and covered it in frosting, and they ate pieces that night because there was no other cake.

“I wish you wouldn't make up stuff like that,” Heidi said to Stanley at breakfast the next day. In the empty chair where her mother would have sat rested the newspaper-wrapped gifts. “About who my mother is. It was mean, and maybe you thought it was funny, or maybe you did it to make me feel better, but I wish you wouldn't do it again.”

The trajectory of Stanley's coffee mug to his mouth stopped as he regarded her, eating the yellowest, spongiest parts of her birthday cake, shoving forkfuls into her expanding cheeks, her eyes focused on the plate, on what little goodness remained, and he wanted to cradle her back into a baby, suck the venom of this life out of her, and send her in a basket on a stream, where some fairies might find her and turn her into a princess. Instead, he picked up the Elton John record, wrapped in the comics section, and slid it over to her.

“I'm sorry, honey.” He smiled. “It was awfully mean of me, and I'm so sorry. I can be a real dunderhead, huh? Now, how about some gifts?”

After he dropped her off at school, Stanley went through the rooms of the farmhouse. There wasn't much to collect. He took the record albums he'd bought of ‘Lil Cindy's and the fabrics from her gaudy madam clothes she'd never made into anything else from the back of his closet, along with the quilt they'd slept under when they first arrived, a tiny perfume bottle of Shalimar. And the herb. He knew it was not connected to Cindy, but it was something he had kept alive, like hope. Hope that Cindy would come back to him. Hope that he would make peace with Johnson. Hope that he would be a better person, that Heidi would have a happy life.

He pressed the herb into the folds of the purple silk shirt he'd worn on the ferry and carried everything to the back yard with a squirt bottle of lighter fluid. He coated the pile with the clean, chemical smell of butane and felt clinical as he struck a match bulb on the side of its box. It was a surgical incision, a painless recovery, a fresh start, he hoped. He watched as the flames waved over the fabrics and turned the cardboard LP covers as black as the melted vinyl inside. He smoked a cigarette, as he watched, to suffocate and blacken any spore that might still be floating in him, threaten to multiply when it felt safe to do so.

When the pile of memories turned to ash, he took a nearby stick and sifted through them. A lump the size of coal remained. He blew the ashes away, and the fuzzy brown carcass of the herb stared back at him. He felt a sharp knock at the back of his head, as if his mother Safine had reached all the way from heaven to slap him. He squirted more lighter fluid onto it and struck a second match, watching it fall and explode on the herb. It burned like a sun, and Stanley shielded his eyes and looked back toward the house for the garden hose. But then, the brightness dimmed, the fire consumed itself, and the herb still remained, glowing orange like an ember. He leaned forward and touched it with his finger. It was not hot, as he expected, but a current of energy vibrated faintly in its core. Thoughts came to him that were not his, a house of bone and mud, a musket, suffocating dirt. A pain in his hip. He saw himself above himself, stuffing part of the herb into his own mouth, a winter forest alight with shrapnel behind his helmetless head. He looked down and, where his left leg had once rested, red meat and white chipped bone stretched on the ground like streamer paper.

He dropped the herb and waited until it glowed no longer, then he picked it up with grilling tongs and put it in a plastic bag on the kitchen table. He wrote everything that happened in the diary he'd been keeping, an old spiral-bound day planner he'd gotten free from the dentist's office that listed one day on each page along with several lines for notes and errands. Then he got in the truck and went to the library.

“Dad, what's with all the books on herbs?” Heidi sat at the kitchen table after school, reduced now to the burned pieces of cake. She flipped one book with her fork and gazed at the herb encased in plastic.

“Nothing.” He swept everything into his arms and hurried upstairs to his bedroom. After telling her about Cindy, relating his experience with Johnson and the herb would probably convince Heidi he was out of his mind, a state he had not entirely disproven himself. A few minutes later, he listened to Heidi come upstairs. He held his breath like a boy as he waited for her to knock, but instead she continued onto her room, where a minute later, the sounds of her new record filled the upstairs. Something about croc rocking being something shocking. He looked through the pages of the illustrated book until he came upon the phrase his mother had uttered to him decades ago, before he went off to war:
burnette saxifrage
. And then, he began to read.