Storm Tide

by Marge Piercy

  “What’s the fuss, dear? You know you can’t be a millstone around a young man’s neck.”

  “He’s on the island,” she said. “With her.”

  “Well, if that’s true, I think there’s a good reason for it.”

  “What do you mean?” she said, meeting his eyes for the first time.

  The lobby was empty but voices carried in this old building. Years ago he’d had a conversation in the men’s room that was all over Town Hall before he zipped up his fly. “Have you eaten?” Johnny asked, first Crystal, and when he got no response, the boy. “Have you had a good dinner, my friend?”

  “French fries and a hamburger.”

  “Well, that’s more than I’ve had. How about a little dessert? Would you and your mother be my guests?”

  The boy shuffled his feet. He was unsure but sensible. Anything that might cheer up his mother. “Can we?”

  “I’ve got some movie videos my grandchildren used to like. I think we can find something.” The boy seemed eager. “Why don’t you just follow me home. I’ll pick up some ice cream. What’s your favorite flavor? Let’s have a little party.”

  “A party for what?” Crystal said.

  “Just follow me home.” Johnny smiled, eager to share the news.

  In the past few years of living alone, Johnny made little use of his recreation room, spending his time in his living room between the TV and the mini bar. He’d stopped shooting pool and never looked at the autographed photos of his favorite baseball stars, the big model of the schooner, the basketballs signed by six Celtic championship teams. The little boy followed Johnny downstairs as if entering Santa’s workshop. His eyes were wide as quarters as he turned around and around, stepping toward the trophy case and then the ship in full sail.

  Johnny took him by the shoulder. “You like it, then?”

  The boy nodded, shy but enthusiastic.

  “How about I set you up with a bit of ice cream and a good movie while I talk to your mother upstairs?”

  “What movie?” Laramie settled himself on the Naugahyde couch.

  “Here’s a good one,” Johnny said. “Star Wars, would you like to see that?”

  Laramie nodded and nodded. He kept looking around. “Do you have kids?”

  “I have two boys and a girl, but they’re all grown up and they don’t live here any longer.”

  Laramie stared at him. “You live here by yourself?”

  “That’s the way it is, son.”

  He tucked a quilt around the boy’s legs before starting back upstairs. The boy gazed at him as if he were an uncle, a family member, a trusted friend. Crystal was pacing before the big windows in the living room, staring at the whitecapped chop of the harbor where the lights from his outdoor floods illuminated the blackness.

  “I was going to make a Jewish holiday dinner for him, from the stupid cookbook. But when I went to invite his mother today, she told me it was tonight, not tomorrow night. She said Holly had left already for her in-laws. That’s why I asked you to let me off a little early today. I went straight to the nursery. But it was closed.”

  “Now sit down,” he told Crystal. “You’re soaked through. I’m going to give you a little something to calm you down.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t drink. What did you want to tell me?”

  “This is fifteen-year-old single malt scotch. It’s not a drink, it’s an occasion. Now I’m not going to say a word until you sit down and take off that wet jacket and have a little sip.” Given no choice, she obeyed. “That’s better. Now I’m not happy about what I have to say, because it involves someone’s bad fortune,” yet he could feel the scotch rise up in his chest like victory. “Gordon Stone is dying. He hasn’t got but a week or two to live.”

  Crystal’s face went deadly still. The finger of scotch he’d given her was gone. When he poured another glass for each of them, she didn’t resist. “So you see, if he is over there, there’s no hanky-panky going on. The whole harem is there, his dozen wives, his children, his grandchildren.” At the thought of all Gordon’s grandchildren surrounding him at his deathbed, Johnny felt a cold pang of jealousy. Where would his own grandchildren be when he was ready to pass on? His two sons and adopted daughter were all on the West Coast—but of course, he couldn’t be jealous of Gordon. Gordon was about to die. Johnny had won.

  “How do you know this?” Crystal said. Again her drink was gone; again he filled it.

  “Gordon may be a socialist and satyr, but he’s always been good to Stumpy Squeer. That may be the one thing the two of us have in common.” One cold April night the idiot burned his own house down. Having gone through the two cords of wood Johnny had provided him, and too lazy to cut up more, Stumpy dragged an entire log into his living room, stuck the end of it into the fireplace and lit it as if it would just burn like a candle. That summer Johnny had provided the materials, Gordon the labor, and by late fall Stumpy had a new house. Johnny had to admit he’d enjoyed driving over to the island to see the progress of the house: the arguments with Gordon over the Vietnam war, still raging that summer; the beautiful women Gordon always had around the compound. He’d seen that ex-actress, then Gordon’s wife, sunbathing once without her top on.

  Crystal was on her feet.

  “Now where are you going?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, taking two steps forward, then back, clutching herself. “To see if Laramie’s okay.”

  Johnny poured himself another drink. Waves of rain from the west struck the windows like buckshot. He had constructed the government of this little town as carefully as one of his ship’s models; glued his people in place with loving care, the selectmen, the Board of Health, every member of every committee, with himself at the helm. He steered this town like the captain of a ship, through budget crises and state land grabs and unfunded mandates from on high that had sunk other towns this size. For thirty-five years he was the captain, until Gordon and his hippie riffraff and his intellectual pretenders rose up to challenge him. Now who was left standing?

  When Crystal returned, she strode directly to the bottle and poured herself a glass. “Is he all right, dear?”

  “He’s asleep. He fell asleep smiling. He hasn’t done that in weeks.”

  “My own children used to fall asleep on that old couch.” He noticed her face, all puffy and red. She’d gone downstairs to cry. “What’s the matter, dear? I thought you’d take heart in the news. No one’s glad to hear of a man’s death, but surely you understand why your man went over there. I dare say I’ll pay a visit myself, if not before he passes, then certainly afterward. That’s the way of politics.”

  “Don’t you understand? Now she’s free. Now he can go to her, he can live with her.” Crystal’s words were tumbling one on top of another. Too much to drink. “Now he doesn’t even live with me, doesn’t want to live with me, and he’ll go to her.”

  “No, he will not go to her. Sit down, dear. Sit down and no more whiskey.” She did sit. She hung her head, then lifted it as he spoke, looking at him as a little girl looks at her father. “You are a warm and beautiful woman.”

  “He doesn’t think I’m beautiful.”

  “Then he’s an idiot. Because you are. And you’re young. Too young to have lost anyone close to you. Because when you do, the last thing on your mind is finding another. Believe me. As cold as Judith Silver is, it’ll be months before she’s ready to think of loving again. Maybe years. I know that because I went through it. During that time, you will have your chance to talk sense into David, and, I truly believe, you’ll win him.”

  Crystal took his hand, dangling at his side, and kissed it, kissed it not like a daughter on the back of his wrist, although it began that way, but like something else. Slowly, lovingly, the way he’d only imagined in his most private thoughts, she touched the tip of her tongue between his fingers. Then she rose and pulled him close.

  “No, dear,” he said.

  “Yes,” she whispered, taking his hand and putting it on
her breast. “Yes, Mr. Lynch—Johnny. You’ve been so good to me. I want to be with you now. I want to be in your bedroom with you.”

  “But the boy—”

  “He’s fast asleep under the quilt you threw over him. Where’s your bedroom, Johnny?” It was the woman, not the little girl, who spoke now, who led him upstairs and knelt at his feet and unbuckled him, who took him in her mouth, and then inside her body. “You’re so good to me, so good to me.” She locked her legs around his back and rocked. She cried into his shoulder. He couldn’t believe what was happening, really happening, just like something he imagined when he couldn’t sleep. Her body was smooth, lush. When he felt her down there, she was hairless. Maybe young women now shaved themselves? Both her nipples had little rings through them. It was all strange. It was as if she had taken him into a strange country, the country of the young where bodies were beautiful and fragrant, smelling of roses and sex, and exotic in ways unlike the bodies of women he had known, pierced and shaven.

  “It’s so nice to be with you,” she murmured. “You make me feel safe. Your wife was a lucky woman. You make me feel beautiful.”

  He was half asleep when he heard her dressing. He stood at the window and watched her lift the boy like a sack of potatoes—the way he used to lift his own children—and carry him out to her car. Twice she stumbled but kept on going. Then he slipped back into his warm bed. By the clock, it was now only 9:45. If he was a younger man she might have stayed, but of course, she was not about to share his bed. He would not fool himself. This had happened once and would never happen again; or not for a long while, not until she was secure and married to Greene.

  But this was more than satisfaction; this was a justice he could never have imagined. As his enemy lay dying across the roiling waters of the harbor, Johnny Lynch took a woman less than half his age. He slid easily into a deep and blissful sleep.

  DAVID

  I must have been dozing when I heard the horn, a long blare as if the driver had fallen into the steering wheel. Three cats leapt to the window. It must have taken me a few minutes to register all this, to shake off the wine and the heavy supper, to run from Judith’s shack to the big house. I arrived as the car pulled up and Beverly climbed the stairs.

  Rain ran down the woman’s face, blurring her makeup, blue liner through rouged cheeks. “There’s a car off that little bridge,” she sputtered. “The headlights are on. It’s just sitting there underwater.”

  She spoke to relatives grouped around the kitchen table. Judith was not there. “Call the rescue squad,” I said, halfway out the door.

  The angry son, Larry, ignored me and languidly stretched his neck in Beverly’s direction. “A car underwater? Right, Mom. You drink a little too much Manischewitz tonight?”

  “Call 911,” I said. Gordon’s second wife was a pretentious, overdressed woman who decked herself in gold, but she had summered on Squeer Island for a decade and knew the territory. “Now!” I directed the stupid boy. “You tell them there’s a car off the Squeer Island bridge. Tell them Selectman Greene is down there. Do it now.”

  All that night I’d been expecting trouble—a screaming phone call from Crystal or Gordon’s deathbed curse. An accident didn’t surprise me. My truck was blocked. I jumped in the waiting car. “Take me to the bridge.”

  “Where’s my wife? Who are you?” His accent was thick west Texas. Buck, they called him. He was drawing the last puff of a cigarette and listening to a baseball game on the radio.

  “A friend of the family.”

  There was sarcasm in the man’s laughter. “Some damned family.”

  “Take me to the bridge.” I was prepared to throw him out of the car and I believe he knew it.

  The bridge to Squeer Island was a mile from Judith’s house. The road was all sand up to the causeway, slow going in good weather, pocked with deep black puddles in tonight’s storm. There was no moon. Wind pushed the rain up the windshield, swamping the wipers. I imagined Judith in that car, crouched in the seat well, rationing air. “Do you have to steer around every puddle?” I said.

  “I do if I want to have brakes. For Christ’s sake, I’m going as fast as I can.”

  What I knew as silver-green marsh in the daylight was a vast shifting surface, bottomless and black. Up ahead, in the high beams, I caught sight of the causeway, a thin asphalt ribbon just emerging from the sea.

  “You know we could have just seen the accident and driven right on,” he said, steering hard right to avoid a mudhole. “We could’ve looked for a phone booth on the other side and not turned back to the house at all.”

  “You’re a model citizen.”

  The blacktop was slick as ice. It was six feet wide. Whitecaps lapped the tires. What looked ahead like an old gray raft broken free of its mooring was the Squeer Island bridge, the guardrails hanging in splinters off one side. “Stop the car,” I told Buck and jumped out. The bridge seemed to ripple underfoot, thrumming with the force of the wind. As I leaned over the splintered rail, I saw two beams of light in black water. The car was upside down.

  On the mainland side, vehicles sped down the hill, lights flashing: police cruisers, an ambulance. By my watch, the tide had peaked two hours ago. But even as the water receded, the rain whipped the shoreline, searing my skin with the force of shot. I couldn’t open my eyes without squinting. I could barely hear above the wind. A parade of headlights snaked along the water’s edge. Car doors slammed. Rescue workers poured out. The force of their boots shook the bridge.

  I shouted, “We can get down there. It’s not too late. We can get her out.” Her. I don’t know why I thought I knew, but I felt her down there, cold, alone. “We can,” I insisted, tears and raindrops on my tongue.

  Abel Smalley did not address me, but neither did he order me off the bridge. I’d be tolerated, I understood, as long as I stayed out of the way. Divers suited up in the mist. Hulks in orange slickers stood at the ready.

  “What are we waiting for?”

  “We can’t do nothing in a current like this,” Abel said. “No way in a wind this fierce.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “We have to move now. We have to do something.”

  He turned his back. “You know the procedure,” was all he said.

  The Rescue Squad was as close to a hospital as we had in this town. Their bravery was beyond question. But their first priority was safety. Risk versus benefit; I’d been apprised of their policies from the day I took office. They would be assessing a car off a bridge in a forty-five-mile-per-hour wind. No bodies visible; no one assumed to be alive.

  A fire truck rolled slowly to the water line, its floodlights casting the bridge in a stark white light. I heard the crackle of orders over handheld transceivers. When the tide subsided and the current slowed, they’d have an hour before the creek gave way to mud. Black mayonnaise, they called it. Silt and water, a texture like pudding between the toes: a runny voracious mud known to swallow fishermen and suck a man up to his neck in seconds. All Saltash parents told the story of a little boy who wandered away from his family while chasing a crab and disappeared in front of his mother’s eyes, simply slid into the mud quick as an oyster down a man’s throat.

  “We are not going to stand here and do nothing.” I felt my throat burning as I imagined hers filling with saltwater. “I order you—” I screamed at the chief of police, just before he thrust me out of the way.

  It was past one A.M. when I saw the first diver blow water from his mouthpiece, adjust his mask and plunge. He shifted the searchlight between his hands. I heard bubbles playing on the surface. By this time, the tires of the car were visible, like the paws of a dog on its back. I seemed to have lost the strength to stand. I leaned against what was left of the railing. Island people were huddled along the causeway. Finally the diver broke the surface. “The driver’s side window is smashed,” he said, swallowing. “No one in the driver’s seat. One body in back. Looks to me like a kid.”

  DAVID

  Crystal’s body
was discovered at daybreak the following morning and wrested from the mud by a small hovercraft. Using a canvas winch fastened beneath her arms, the vessel tugged until the vacuum was broken and she was lifted aboard. A Coast Guard helicopter circled above a small army of rescue personnel and their assembled vehicles, news vans and photographers and a hundred onlookers come to gawk behind a yellow cordon strung up by the police. I watched from the bridge. I heard a radio barking orders, trucks spinning tires in the sand, car doors slamming, and above it all voices asking, Who was she? Why did she climb out the window? Why did she leave the little boy?

  I tried to call Crystal’s mother that day, but I could not find her address or phone number. It was Johnny Lynch who called her father. Far from dead, as she had told me, he was living in New York outside Troy, remarried and raising Airedales. He drove down at once, a heavyset red-faced man with bulging pale blue eyes, a shambling walk and slightly slurred voice. He seemed overcome and kept wiping his forehead and then his eyes. “I gave her that Olds when she was on her way here. She stopped with us for a month. I had it fixed up for her. It’s such a big car, I thought it was safe for her and the boy. I gave it to her because the wreck she was driving had bad brakes. I thought it was a safe car ….”

  He said he would take the bodies back to Troy, after the autopsy was completed. He wrung my hand. “She thought she could get a better job here. We didn’t have room for her to stay with us, but there were apartments. She thought she could do better for herself here. Now look what’s happened!”

  I meant to arrange some kind of memorial for Crystal and Laramie, but the day after the accident my mother informed me there would be a morning service in the Catholic church. Crystal was not Catholic. The service was not held in the sanctuary nor conducted by a priest. Johnny arranged for the basement hall. In Quaker style, all those whose lives had been touched by the deceased would rise and speak their minds.