Tide King Read online

  The Tide King

  Jen Michalski

  Contents

  Prologue—1976

  1942

  1943

  1944

  1806

  1945

  1807

  1945

  1946

  1894

  1947

  1947

  1938

  1960

  1970

  1964

  1972

  1973

  1974

  1976

  Heidi

  Johnson

  Heidi

  Stanley

  Johnson

  Heidi

  Johnson

  Heidi

  Johnson

  Heidi

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue—1976

  Andrei thought they were strange as far as Americans went. He’d picked them up in his cab outside the Kaliningrad airport to drive them over the border to Reszel, Poland. They resembled the basic unit of family, one man and woman in their early twenties and an eight-or nine-year-old girl. But that was all. The woman seemed too young to be a mother, and the man seemed too old, somehow, to be a young man. The woman, an unattractive-looking rat with bulbous eyes, long nose, no chin, the color of jaundice, spent several minutes at the beginning of the trip explaining to the man, dark-haired, large and muscular, the top of his head pressed against the greasy roof of the cab, how to use traveler’s cheques.

  “You sign them like checks,” she explained. “But they’re really money—checks that have been already paid for.”

  Andrei turned his attention back to the road. The days and nights were separated by subtle gradation. Congested, industrial skies the color of bone and smoke bled into charcoal and faded into smoke and bone once again. One found different ways of staying awake, of keeping the lines between them sharp, understandable. Sometimes Andrei put horseradish in his coffee. Other times, he speculated about his passengers. The man, woman, and child baffled him. They had no baggage, except for a camper’s backpack. They appeared too soft, too clumsy, to be fleeing the mob. Perhaps they were drug mules. But to go to Reszel, a town with a few tourist attractions, more of a “this-to-that” place, seemed crazy. Only the young girl, perhaps adopted, spoke Polish, a bit of Russian, both with a strange dialect.

  He studied their expressions from the rearview mirror. Tourists liked for him to talk, point out the sights, few that there were, the whole nine yards. But then, they were not tourists. He lit a cigarette and fumbled with the radio dial until a station with a strong signal wove into the stale tobacco of the cab. A woman’s voice sang out before being swallowed by a wave of guitar chords. Drums machine-gunned into the space between the chorus and verse.

  “Who is Katarzyna Sobczyk?” The little girl stood in the well of the back seat, repeating the name the disc jockey had spoken moments before. She hugged the front seat from behind, her chin propped up on the shoulder rest.

  “How you say,” Andrei answered, waving his hand away from his forehead. “Pop singer. Big star in Poland with her band, uh, Czerwono-Czarni. Like, uh, Fleetwood Mac?”

  The little girl shook her head, her eyebrows close together in puzzlement.

  “You from Reszel?” he asked.

  “Why? Do you know your way around? You get to the old Bishop’s Castle, I can show you where to go.”

  “No—I take you in from main road. Then you tell me, okay?”

  “It’s easy to find,” she answered, staring at her little fingers. “There is not much in Reszel worth remembering.”

  He’d seen someone like her in the circus, once, he decided. Like a midget but not. An adult in a child’s body.

  “Ela.” The man, singular in syllable and intention, spoke, and the little woman-girl slumped into the space between her two companions in the back seat.

  “Pretty girl,” Andrei said to the man, who studied him for a moment. “Visiting family?”

  “Just visiting,” the man answered. The lights of Reszel grew like low-hanging stars, etching a canopy of night that replaced the blackness and straws of light from the cab’s headlights.

  “The castle,” the little girl said, pointing to an illuminated turret topped with orange tiles. Tears appeared in her eyes, big childish drops that her eyelids reflexively sought to stop. “Oh, Matka…”

  Andrei looked to the woman next to Ela for her response, but she did not answer, did not comfort her.

  “Who are these people?” Andrei addressed Ela in Polish. She shook her head, motioned for him to stop the cab. The young woman pulled out a wallet fat with zloty, paid the total on the meter, gave him a generous tip.

  “Will you be safe?” he asked Ela again as the man opened the right-side door and slid out, the absence of his weight buoying the cab.

  “What does he ask you?” The woman, looking at Andrei with fear, irritation, in her gold eyes, asked the little girl, nudging her toward the open door, where the man fumbled outside with the backpack.

  “He asks us who we are,” Ela said as she hopped into the darkness. “Should I tell him we are gods who live in hell?”

  “We are tourists,” the woman laughed, fake, and nodded toward Andrei. “Thank you—goodnight.”

  “Bezpieczniej podróży,” Andrei answered. He fingered the pile of zloty she had given him, crisp, and held them to the light, saw that they were real. He turned off the meter, flung the gearshift into reverse. And that is how he forgot about them.

  1942

  It was almost time to go. His mother, Safine Polensky, would see him out the door but not to the train station. She would not watch him leave on the train, his face framed in the window, his garrison cap covering his newly shorn head. She would see him to the door, where he could go to work, to school, to the store, and in the corresponding memory of her mind, he would return.

  She opened the lock of the rose-carved jewelry box on the kitchen table with a butter knife, the key orphaned in Poland somewhere. He wondered whether she would produce a pocket watch, a folding knife, his father’s or his uncle’s, that he could fondle while trying to sleep on the hard earth, dirt full of blood and insides, exposed black tree roots cradling his head like witch fingers.

  He opened his hand, waiting. She pulled out an envelope, old and brown, and the dark, furry object he regarded. A mouse carcass. A hard moldy bread.

  “Burnette saxifrage.” She put the crumbly mound in his palm. “Most powerful herb. I save it until now.”

  He glanced at the leaves and roots spread over his palm, dried like a fossilized bird. His lips tightened. His whole life to that point a stew of herbs—chalky and bitter and syrupy in his teas, his soups, rubbed onto his knees and elbows after school. Safine had brought them from the homeland, Reszel, Poland—stories of baba yagas and herbs and the magic of her youth. He may have believed once, been scared, as a child. He put it back in the envelope, more fragile than the herb.

  “You take this.” She grabbed his palm, her knuckles blue and bulbous. “Eternal life. You take it when you are about to die. You will live. This is the only one. You understand?”

  He nodded, pushing it into the far pocket of his duffel bag, where he was certain to forget about it. Herbs had not saved his father from pains. They had not spared his mother’s hands, curled and broken, her lungs, factory black. How would they save his head from being half blown off, his guts from being hung like spaghetti on someone’s bayonet? He hugged her. She smelled like garlic and dust. Then he, Stanley Polensky, walked to the Baltimore station, got on the train, and went to war.

  1943

  They carried what they could carry. Most men carried two pairs of socks in their helmets, K-rations in their pockets, their letters and cigarettes
in their vests. That queer little private, Stanley Polensky, also carried a book, and it was not the Bible.

  “Polensky, throw that thing away.” With the nose of his carbine, Calvin Johnson, also a private, poked him in the small of his back, where a children’s book, Tom Swift and His Planet Stone, was tucked in his pants, under his shirt. “No wonder you can’t get any.”

  “At least I can read.” Polensky flipped him the bird over his shoulder. They were in a line, two men across, stretching for miles from Cerami on their way to Troina. Stanley Polensky was a boy who, back in Ohio, Johnson would have given the full order to. He would have nailed him with a football where he sat in the bleachers, reading a book. He would have spitballed him from the back of class or given him a wedgie in the locker room after track. Polensky had cried in his bunk at night for their first week at Fort Benning, wrote long letters to his mother the way others wrote to their girls.

  Now, Johnson stared at his slight, curved back all day, the sun hotter than fire. On narrow trails in the hills, they pulled themselves up with ropes and cleats through passes that only they and their mules—the dumbest, smelliest articles of military equipment ever used to transport supplies—could navigate, driving back enemy strongholds at Niscemi, Ponte Olivo Airport, Mazzarino, Barrafranca, Villarosa, Enna, Alimena, Bompietro, Petralia, Gangi, Sperlinga, Nicosia, Mistretta, Cerami, and Gagliano. It would seem so easy if not so many men died, if Johnson was not walking on an ankle he’d jammed on a hill that had swollen to the size of a softball. And yet their toughest fighting was still to come, at Troina, with Germans shooting at them from the mountains in every direction.

  But not today. Today there was sky and food and the Germans to the east of them.

  “You want these?” Polensky tossed the hard candies from his K rations over to Johnson. Every day, they had scrambled eggs and ham, biscuits, coffee, and four cigarettes for breakfast; cheese, biscuits, hard candy, and cigarettes for lunch; and a ham and veal loaf, biscuits, hard candies, and cigarettes for dinner.

  “I thought a nancy boy like you liked a little candy now and then.” Johnson stuffed them in his mouth, pushing them into his cheeks like a squirrel.

  “I haven’t brushed my teeth in months.” Stanley shook his head. “I’m afraid I’m going to lose them all.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what.” Johnson lit his cigarette. “If I come across a toothbrush in my travels, I’ll save it for you.”

  “I think you’ll have better luck finding a Spanish galleon.” Stanley lit his own cigarette.

  “What do you know about Spanish galleons?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I don’t know.” Johnson closed his eyes. He had not done well in school. When he did not get a football scholarship to Ohio State, he thought he’d become a police officer, like his father. Knowing the war would help his chances, he’d enlisted the first opportunity he got. “What is it, like money or something?”

  “No.” Stanley drawled, smiling. “It’s a ship.”

  “Warship?”

  “And commerce, too. They sailed mostly in the 16th to 18th centuries.”

  “Is that what you learned in that Tom Swift book?” Johnson opened his eyes, studied Stanley lying on his back, knees swinging open and closed, smoke pluming upward between them.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Stanley stared at the sky. His eyes broke up smiling when he looked at you, happy or sad. They squished a little, the outsides wrinkling, along with his forehead, his cheeks dimpling. Polensky was the youngest of six. Johnson had always wanted siblings. His mother had him. Another had died in the womb.

  He imagined Stanley as a little brother and grimaced. But you took what you got, not what you wanted.

  They set the pup tent over an abandoned trench that they could roll into if any funny business found its way to the camp. They laid boot to head. Stanley was a kicker. It was easier if Johnson fell asleep first.

  “Read me something from your book.” Johnson laid his arms across his stomach. When they’d first started the whole bloody business, in Africa, he’d seen a soldier trying to hold in his intestines after getting shot, a slippery pink worm pulsing out between his fingers.

  “Read it yourself.”

  “I’m tired. What’s it about?”

  “Well, every book Tom invents something new. So this time, it’s the metalanthium lamp.”

  “Metalanthium lamp? What the hell is that?”

  “It’s a device that emits these rays that can heal the sick and bring people back from the dead.”

  “Sounds interesting. How does it work?”

  “I’m not telling you anymore. You want to find out, you have to read it yourself.”

  “I don’t have time to read.” Johnson rolled over, away from Stanley’s feet. “In case you didn’t notice, there’s a war on. Why are you carrying a children’s book, anyway?”

  “My mother bought it for me when I was a boy.”

  “Couldn’t you have brought something more useful?”

  But Stanley had fallen asleep, his snoring choked with hot, dusty mountain air. The sound reminded Johnson of the clogged carburetor on a motorcycle he’d fixed up one summer in Ohio. At night, his own mind churned. The war had been hard to swallow. He did not know what he had expected, but he had not expected this. The exhaustion. The hollow fear—fear so intense it burned a hole through you and left you hollow. The walking. They walked along ridges and through valleys for miles and miles, up and up on roads that lead to little towns full of rock and cement houses in which lived Italians with gaunt, piercing eyes who begged for candy or sugar and cigarettes and mostly had nothing because the Germans had taken everything.

  The Italian women were attractive. Sometimes he would look at them as they took his chocolate rations, their long olive necks the soft fruits of their lips, and he wanted to lay with one on the ground. Not anything sexual, although he always thought of that. He wanted to lay on the ground with one to feel her heart through her chest with his fingers, the pulse of a vein on her neck, the soft skin on the underside of her arm, to remember what it felt like, the warmth of living skin, the soft quiet of humanity in measured breaths. The skin on the dead looked like rubber, and he did not understand the difference, the living, the dead. So many had died, men in little piles, only boys, really, their limbs thrown about like tire irons, hoses, their mouths open where something had taken flight. If they could all only go on living, with quiet pulses in their necks, wrists, little bird chirps. If no one had to die, except the very old.

  Sometimes it got so bad, the need to touch, he wanted to hold Stanley. He thought of waking him up and asking for the book, to take his mind off things. But he was too tired to even open his mouth. He thought of Spanish galleons instead. For some reason he imagined that they were gold like coins and flew across the ocean. But for one to take you home, you would have to die.

  Johnson guessed that was fair.

  1944

  They were on a warship stationed in the Isle of Wight. The bunk-room was still, the usual snores, jacking off replaced by the quiet of men’s eyes blinking in the dark. Before they slipped into the sheets, they had made amends with their girlfriends, their parents, with God. When they finally stepped off the landing craft the next morning onto Omaha Beach, the First Division’s fate would be clear, but they would not take any chances tonight. Stanley opened the envelope lying on his chest and felt the dry fibers of the herb in the lines of his palm, which were licked with sweat. His mother had sent him care packages at Fort Benning, North Africa, and Italy—knitted socks and dollar bills wrapped in cheese cloth, a few words written carefully on lined notepaper. But she never mentioned the herb. Perhaps it was bad luck to discuss it. He had forgotten about it completely until he sewed a torn pocket on his backpack that afternoon and discovered it pushed deep within. A bit of luck, he figured. That night, he laid it on the pillow next to him. His eyes blinked; the dark sleep, dreamless, weighed them closed.

&n
bsp; “Wake up, Polensky.” A hand, heavy, dry, covered his face. “Drop your cock and grab your socks.”

  Johnson, from Ohio. They had entered combat in North Africa, each killed their first men in the desert. They were uneasy, unlikely, friends. Johnson was tan and shiny, a farm boy who had lettered in high school before, as he explained to Stanley, a gimpy ankle kept him from getting a scholarship to college. Stanley swore he smelled like corn, although he probably smelled like Stanley and all the others—cigarettes and rotted teeth and stink.

  Stanley turned in his bunk, feeling the film of sweat break from his body and release onto the sheets. His hand trailed on the pillow, feeling for the herb, but it was empty. He shot up, nearly hitting his head on the bunk above. A man stole something that wasn’t hammered down, everyone knows. Veins pulsed in Stanley’s neck, his biceps. But a flower? He might kill a GI before he killed a Kraut.

  “Lose something?” Johnson, bent over, emerged with the saxifrage. “Your mother’s corsage?”

  “What time is it?” Stanley ignored him.

  “Four-thirty.” Johnson straightened. The doctor measured him six foot five during their physicals. Stanley had topped out eight inches shorter. “First wave 0630 to Normandy. Better shower, get that shit off your ass.”

  One hundred thirty thousand men. Two years ago, Stanley could not have guessed so many to have existed in their divisions, much less his hometown, or the world. One hundred thirty thousand men dragged over the English Channel to Omaha Beach in battleships, landing craft, to fight like gladiators, mongrels. There were so many ships, Stanley wondered whether they could just cross the channel by stepping from one to another.

  They climbed down the rope ladders of the battleship and into the landing craft, a steel bread box, that would shuttle them to the beach. The chop was terrible. Each wave sent that morning’s oatmeal into the roof of each man’s mouth, and they swallowed it again. Their helmets clicked together like teeth.