Tide King (40 page)

“And you killed him?”

“No—he had a heart attack.” He twisted the cherry out of his cigarette and crushed the filter in his hand. “I'm sorry.”

“You're trying to rob us? Does it look like we have anything? I called the police, just so you know.”

“Oh.” He looked at his boots, his lips tight. One of his shoelaces was stained with ketchup or blood. She squeezed the handle of the gun, hoping the former. “I wish you hadn't.”

“I bet.” She felt tears on her face, but there was nothing she could do. Her arm began to warm and ping and numb from pointing the gun at him.

“No, it's just that I wanted to explain.” He held his hands up over his head. “I'll stand here like this and we'll just talk and then I'm going to beat it out of here when the police come.”

“Hurry, then.”

“Heidi, I'm so sorry about your father.” He blinked his eyes, and for a moment, she felt as if his eyelashes had wiped her face dry, had held her chin, caressed her cheeks. She noticed how stunning he was, like Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby. “I surprised the hell out of him, that's for sure. We haven't seen each other…for years.”

“Are you…my
brother
?” It was entirely possible that, if her mother had hidden one child from the public eye, she had hidden another.

“Oh, no.” He laughed. He shook his head and chuckled again, as if sharing in some inside joke to which she was not privy. “I'm a little older than that. I'm an old friend.”

He poked around in his leather jacket for his cigarettes and pulled out a pack of Pall Malls. “Want one?”

“I don't smoke. My father doesn't—didn't—have any friends.”

“So you're his daughter, huh?” He looked up at her and cocked an eyebrow. “You really don't look anything like him.”

“Doesn't matter.”

“Hey, come on—you gonna level a gun at me all day?”

“Until you get out of here and don't come back. I told you, the police will be here any minute.”

“Listen.” He inhaled his cigarette and squatted on the ground. “Did Stanley Polensky—your father—ever mention a Calvin Johnson to you?”

“Why?”

“Well, Stanley and Calvin were in the war together, which I guess you'd know if you know Calvin Johnson. I just wanted to get some information from Stanley about the war. I've come a long way. I'm not here to rob you or anything, I swear.”

“What kind of information?”

“Yeah.” He scratched the back of his head. “Probably a strange request. But I'm interested in a—corsage—that Stanley carried around. A dried flower that he kept in his helmet. I always figured it was probably a corsage from a girl at a dance or something, right, although Stanley never talked about any sweetheart, from what I can recall. Anyway, it's really important that I see the herb. I've wanted to get in touch with Stanley for a long time, but I lost track of him after he moved from Baltimore. I finally find him, God, it was so good to see him, but he got all worked up seeing
me
and had a heart attack. I tried to resuscitate him, but…anyway, the herb isn't important right now, is it? Your father is dead. We should help him, not leave him there like that.”

“He's staying where he is.” She waved the gun as if to remind him it was still there. “How do I know you didn't hit him or choke him or kill him some other way?”

“You don't.” He flicked his cigarette onto the ground and stepped on it.

“So maybe you'll explain that to the police.”

“Heidi,
I'm
Calvin Johnson.” He looked up at her. “
I
served with your father during the war.”

“Stop it.” She shook her head. “Do you expect me to believe that? I don't know what's going on here, but we're going to wait here until the police come. And if you try and run, I'll shoot you.”

“It wouldn't matter if you shot me or not, but I won't run.” He sat on the ground cross-legged. “I'll wait.”

“I'll be right back.” She backed into the house toward the phone to call the police. In the kitchen, she poured herself a glass of water and watched him through the window. He remained on the ground, smoking another cigarette, as if resigned to his fate. Something about him seemed so harmless, so familiar. And he knew about the crazy herb in her backpack, the one her father had told her about, the one Melanie Huber told her was definitely not pot, but if her father was growing any shrooms, to please let her know. Suddenly, a stranger was her only familiar face in the world. She sighed and poured another glass of water and took them outside.

“Here—if you're thirsty.” She put the glass down between them, then backed away, pointing the gun at him. He took the glass and gulped it empty.

“Thanks,” he answered. “I'm glad Stanley had a family. He was so shy with the ladies while we were in the army. I bet he was good to you, huh?”

“Don't.” She wiped the sweat from her brow and sat on the porch steps. “Don't try to play my sympathies.”

“I'm not. I'm just really sorry you had to come home…to this. Were you in school or something?”

“Why are you curious about this—corsage?” She interrupted him. He studied her, but she could not tell what he was thinking.

“Well, it may have some medicinal qualities. Do you know anything about that?”

She looked at her water glass and then past his shoulder.

“Do you know what I'm talking about?” He stared at her. “The flower? You are aware of its existence, right?”

“Yeah—I've heard about it,” she answered finally, and his face lit up. His hands dug into each other as if he were trying to keep himself from her.

“Is it in your possession? Stanley said he gave it to you.”

“What's it to you?”

“Listen, I don't have any money. I can't pay you anything, but I'd do whatever it takes to get to see it. You see, a friend of mine, a scientist, he wants to examine it.”

“Can't he get his own somewhere?”

“That's the thing.” He stood up and lit another cigarette, running his hand through his hair and pacing back and forth. She felt her body stiffen. Her hand with the gun followed him back and forth. She grabbed the railing with her other hand to steady herself. “It's very rare, this herb, he thinks. Maybe a few patches existed in Europe a few centuries ago, or maybe this particular piece that Stanley owns was tampered with in some way. But we'll never know until we test it.”

“Why do you think there's something medicinal about it?”

“Because.” He stopped pacing and looked at her. “Because Stanley Polensky fed it to me in Germany in 1944 and then left me for dead…but I lived. And I've been like this…young, undead…ever since.”

“What are you saying? That Calvin Johnson is still alive?” Heidi thoughts raced, constructing a man as old as her father withering away in some nursing home in Ohio. Her heart swelled for her own father, that he did not live to have the incident that weighed him down reclaimed, like lost baggage, years later.

“Yes.” he smiled. “I survived. And we—the scientist and I—think it might have to do with the herb Stanley gave me.”

“You are so full of it,” she said, even though she felt herself shaking. “What's my grandmother's name?”

“Safine.”

“My aunts and uncles?”

“Henry, Thomas, Cass, Julia…and Kathryn. Linus was your grandfather.”

“What about my mother?”

“Don't know.” He dug his hands in his pockets. “I only knew him until 1944. Listen, did your father ever eat the herb, to your knowledge?”

“No, he didn't.”

“Did you?”

“Of course not.” She picked at her tennis shoe. “But you expect me to believe you did.”

“I don't know how much I ate. I remember your father stuffing it into my mouth, my wound. It was pretty bad, the wound. I was missing most of my leg from taking a shell.”

“I know this. I also know the paramedic pronounced Calvin Johnson dead at the scene. And, theoretically, you're just a guy who knows it, too, since I saw my father's diary on the floor of the living room.”

“Police sure take a long time in these parts.” He cocked an eyebrow toward her.

“Well, I guess you have more time to make shit up,” she answered.

Over the next hour, he told her everything as if he expected her to believe it. She wondered whether he had stolen anyone else's identities aside from Calvin Johnson's, whose Social Security checks he had stuffed in the backpack she'd noticed lying in the living room. Whoever he was, it puzzled her why he cared so much about Calvin Johnson's past enough to come here and involve her father. Did he have some serious cash tucked away that she did not know about, perhaps recording royalties from her mother? Had he lied to her all this time, forcing them into some austere existence for the sake of making some point about his own frugality?

“I can prove this to you,” the man said. “The herb. I'm telling you, that herb is magic.”

“Either that or you're a nut.” She sighed. He seemed smaller, shallower, to her, a con man off his meds. She figured that, like most con men, he thought he had his in with her and now he wouldn't leave unless she got the police involved.

“We should do it now.” He stood up. “Come on.”

“What?”

“I want you to shoot me.” He stood in the backyard, arms and legs spread out. “I'm proving to you that everything I've said is true.”

“I'm not going to shoot you, you moron.” She felt sick to her stomach. It was turning out to be some crazy Joyce Carol Oates story after all. Maybe she had wanted to shoot him a few times in the past few hours, but this was not the same. “I don't want to go to jail.”

“Nobody will hear. I'm sure gunfire isn't that foreign a sound in these parts,” he said. “Now, come on. You think I'm a con artist, that I'm trying to milk you dry or something, right? All I'm saying is shoot me in, here, the hand, and you'll see.”

He held his palm open toward her, far away from his body.

“And then what?”

“Well, it'll hurt like hell, and it'll bleed for a bit, but a few hours from now, you are going to see the wound start to heal. In no time at all, it'll be completely gone.”

“Either you're a fool or I'm dreaming.” She scrunched her eyebrows. “And I'm supposed to take care of you during your convalescence?”

“Not if you don't want to. If you'll kindly lend me a towel, I'll sit out there in the cornfield by myself.”

“Couldn't you just rob us like a normal person?” She laughed at the unreality of her evening. Perhaps she had fallen asleep during seventh period. Everything, from Oliver to her father to this faux Johnson had morphed stranger and stranger as if she'd eaten chocolate before bed. “Why did you have to bring my father into this, and poor Calvin Johnson, too?”

“Do you think I want to be twenty-two years old forever?” He narrowed his eyes as he felt for his cigarettes in his jacket. “You think it's fun watching the people you care for age and get sick, knowing that every person you meet, you're going to watch die? Believe me, I'm secretly hoping that this is the bullet that
will
kill me.”

“Well, since you're not going to back into the truth anytime soon, how about I start? We have nothing. There isn't any money for you to take. We live on $230 dollars a month. You know what that buys, besides gas, when the truck is working, electricity, water, and food? Yeah, nothing. Sometimes, it doesn't even buy water and food.”

He turned from her and walked away, toward the cornfields, kneeling down on his hands and knees, eyes closed. She saw the bands of muscles in his arm, his legs, and his jaw tense before he started to cry, big bawling sulks, his head shaking, a cry even worse than any she'd ever had. He pounded the ground with his fists, his eyebrows slanted in fury toward his nose. Then he sat up, the residue of his anger rolling off him.

“We can still give him the herb.” He nodded his head as he stood up, as if it had never happened. “He might wake up. Where's the herb? Let's give it to your father.”

“He's been dead for hours.” She fell back on the step, relieved that he was no longer angry, perhaps a little less dangerous.

“It doesn't matter how dead—it can't matter. My whole leg was gone. I must have been dead for a month.”

“But you already had the herb in you when you were alive,” she pressed, and then grabbed at her hair. “What am I talking about? This is all a bunch of bullshit.”

“Look.” He sat back on his haunches. “I know this is all very, very difficult to swallow. I wouldn't believe it myself, if you came up to me with the same story. But there are others like me, even. I can show them to you, if you want. There's all sorts of classified research going on to isolate what's going on in me, the others, and the flower, to see whether the secret to immortality is finally known. Even if you don't believe me, at least let's go inside. I know you didn't call the police. I know you must believe in something, Heidi.”