Tideland

by Mitch Cullin

  But Moon the Loon was delighted.

  "I won’t say I don’t like country," he exclaimed, "because I do!"

  He had arrived in my father’s dressing room disguised as an orthodox Jew, reeking of brandy and hyperbole.

  "Musical innovation, a step forward backwards," he cheered maniacally. "Just like Mozart, except different! A

  Gordian Knot in a shoelace!”

  And as a gift, he ushered forth my mother -- "an insane bint for your pleasure and gratuity” -- who waltzed into the dressing room costumed as Pippi Longstocking. She looked tomboyish, tall and slender, with the cheeks of her face freckled and her blue eyes shining.

  "Don’t know if it was love at first sight,” my father had said on the Greyhound, "but pretty darn close, I think. And it was good to begin with, and it stayed good for a long time because she made me feel like a kid-and I still had some money then. And she knew where to get diamorphine cheap, so I saved some dough because by the time we met I’d been buying expensive Chinese heroin. But she could get me brown and medical heroin for much less than what I’d been paying for the Number 4 type. Your mother was connected, Jeliza-Rose. Even when we moved to LA, she knew who to call and where to go. And before she got lazy and fat she could cook us up a storm. She made burritos and pizza and all kinds of greasy nice stuff. I miss that about her. I wish you’d known her then. She really was a treat.”

  But he might as well have been talking about someone else. My mother slept all day and ate Crunch bars for dinner and talked to herself until dawn. And she wasn’t a treat.

  I can’t say when it was exactly that I began to hate her, but I suppose it started after I turned nine. By that point, my parents were full-time junkies. My father was incapable of touring, and he had grown emaciated and weak. My mother, on the other hand, had ballooned in weight -- so much so that on the rare occasions when she managed to climb from bed, the springs creaked as if groaning relief, and the mattress continued to sag with the impression of her body.

  At nine, I was given two chores -- massaging my mother’s legs, sanitizing and preparing the syringe. And while I became conscientious at both, there was only enjoyment to be had in making sure the needle was ready. Because my father believed public education bred dumb children, I was schooled at home, which amounted to little more than stolen library books (literary classics picked by my father, way beyond my reading ability), and afternoons of PBS.

  Soon as I awoke in the mornings, my first class began in the kitchen -- where concentrated bleach was drawn into the syringe from a coffee cup, then squirted away in the sink. After the process was repeated, I flushed the syringe and needle through with cold water. Next, I scooped some junk from its hiding place in a sugar tin, dissolving the brown dust in a teaspoon with hot water and vitamin C powder. Then using a dining table chair for a perch, I stood at the gas stove, holding the spoon over a burner, feeling the stainless steel warm as the flame helped bubble clean the remaining particles.

  Once the solution was safely sucked up into the syringe, I carried my homework to the living room. My father would either be sitting on the floor with his guitar or stretched across the couch gazing blankly at the television.

  Sometimes he’d say, "Good morning,” while taking the syringe from my hand. But usually he said nothing.

  He just targeted the large vein running the length of his inner arm, injecting himself, then -- in the brief moments before the rush seized him -- brought the remaining amount to my mother in their bedroom.

  After the morning ritual, I was pretty much done until evening. My recess lasted hours. I was free to watch TV, and -- by organizing the dining table chairs, collecting the dirty clothes and sheets strewn around the apartment -- I erected an elaborate tent home in the living room. There I ate quiet meals in the company of my Barbie heads.

  For breakfast it was two Eskimo Pies from the freezer. For lunch I alternated between Pop Tarts and Nutter Butters. Dinner consisted of Dr. Pepper, a Milky Way, cinnamon toast.

  But, if all the Milky Ways were gone, I’d substitute one of my mother’s Crunch bars, which were supposed to be off limits. And even though she spent weeks in the bedroom, somehow she sensed when I’d been at her candy; while rubbing her feet at night, I always paid for the transgression by receiving an abrupt kick on the chin.

  "What have I told you before?” she’d say again and again. "You miserable creep, you never learn! I can’t teach you anything about what’s mine!”

  But I had learned something: heroin gave my father neutrality, serving as an antidote for a mind too difficult to manage. For my mother, having lived a short life lacking much meaning at all, heroin offered nothing. The drug had run away with her as a teenager, and the experience was ultimately a mediocre one. Her warm, dreamy, carefree bubble had become a void. So, when going to her bedside, I knew who the real miserable creep was. And I knew she would eventually kick out, or throw the wet rag she used to wipe the sweat from her puffy face. Still, she never struck hard enough to make me cry. Mostly, she just ranted. Sometimes making sense, often not.

  While massaging the fatness of her pale legs, pushing my fingertips along the lumpy skin, my mother’s mouth seemed to function independently of her brain. "Lip-smacking junkie baby,” she called me, and I understood a verbal barrage was about to follow. It seemed scripted, differing slightly with each performance: "Withdrawal is what I went through -- that way you wouldn’t get born hooked. Irritable and hyperactive baby too, nothing but a high-pitched cry and twitching and spasms and convulsions. Your daddy blew smoke in your mouth to keep you quiet, you know that? Think you got damaged by that, but don’t blame me. Because I breast-fed you forever -- and they’re all wrong, dear, because drugs don’t mess with breast milk in a major way. It’s your daddy’s fault you’re like you are. Not mine. I loved you.”

  Taking a labored breath, she dabbed the rag to her forehead and then propped up on her elbows, the bedsprings squeaking as she did. Her voice suddenly changed, becoming softer.

  "Jeliza-Rose, do you know I love you? Honey, I’m sorry. If you'd just fix me a hit and something to eat, I'll do something nice for you soon. I promise, baby.”

  I always played my part too, nodding, fully aware of the lie -- she would never do anything nice for me soon. But leaving her bedside, I’d manage a smile anyway, tormented by the thought of ever entering that bedroom again, or of touching her swollen calves.

  So on the afternoon she turned blue and died of respiratory failure, I skipped around the living room whistling the theme from Sesame Street, the happiest song in the world.

  "The methadone killed her,” my father said, looking haggard and confused on the couch. "I should’ve kept her on junk -- just cut her daily dose and kept her on it.”

  Junky logic: with the hope of finally getting clean, he had traded the Buick for pills -- though he understood that methadone was more addictive, more dangerous, and more deadly than heroin.

  Bringing his hands to his face, he said, "Now she's dead, and I don’t have a car.”

  A week earlier, he and my mother had decided to quit mainlining. The tough decision came after our apartment was robbed late one night. I remember waking to the sounds of the front door splintering and breaking open, my father shouting, "Get the fuck out of here! I said I’d get the dough Thursday! Talk to Leo, that’s what I told him!” There were other voices, men with calm and threatening tones, saying, "Listen, Noah, we’ve been through this,” and, "No more screwing around, all right?"

  But in my bed, I pretended it was all a spooky dream.

  When I stirred the next morning, I found my father in the kitchen. He was pouring the contents of the sugar tin into the sink. His hands were shaking, and his teeth chattered, even as he said, "Howdy, sweetheart."

  The microwave was missing. So was the toaster.

  In the living room, the TV and VCR and stereo were gone.

  "Bog men paid us visit,” he told me. "But now we’re okay. I’ve talked with your mother. It
’s all good. You’ll see.”

  And I started crying -- not because I was glad or relieved, but because the very idea of bog men dragging themselves into the apartment filled me with horror.

  My father set the tin aside. "Oh, no,” he said, "everything’s fine." Then he tried lifting me, but couldn’t gather the strength. So he hugged me instead, patting my neck, saying, "See, when was the last time Daddy did this? It’s getting better already.” I felt his fingers trembling, the sweat on his palms. "Not a thing to worry about, my little girl." And I almost believed him.

  But on the day my mother’s corpse rested in their bedroom, it was my turn to be the comforter. Her overdose had taken about twelve hours to run its course. What began as irregular breathing, concluded with blue skin and pupils reduced to a pinpoint, but all the while my father expected her to pull through. In a last effort to revive her, he poured cold water on her face, but it didn’t help.

  "Please don’t be sad," I told him in the living room, putting my head against his shoulder. "We can go to Jutland if you want.”

  For a moment he grinned. "Wouldn’t that be wonderful.”

  "Yes," I said, "and we can eat her Crunch bars too.”

  Then he held me close, saying, "No one’s taking you from me. That’s not happening here. We’re leaving, okay?”

  "Okay.”

  While I quickly packed, my father swaddled my mother from head to toe in the bedding. Then he called me to join him in their bedroom.

  "If she was a Viking ship,” he announced, "we’d have to bury her with horses and food and gold plates.”

  He wore his backpack and seemed anxious to get going. I stood beside him with my suitcase, staring at the shrouded corpse. Even in death, her body odor was potent. "Anything you want to say?”

  I shrugged. "I don’t know. She’s like a mummy.”

  He sighed.

  "Well, I’ve pretty much said what I wanted when she was alive, so no point wasting time.”

  He dug his Bic lighter from a pocket, clicked on the flame, and attempted to ignite the mattress. But it wouldn’t catch, so eventually he gave up, saying, "Bad idea anyways. It might burn the whole building and everyone else."

  And as we hurried from the bedroom, I paused to take a final glance at my mother, imagining her congested breathing while dying. Her pulmonary arteries had become clogged with blood, forcing the fluid through the capillaries and into the lungs. In the violent throes near the end, she kicked her chubby legs wildly, shaking the bedsprings to the limit.

  "Come on,” my father said. He was waiting at the end of the hallway. "Don’t stare, it’s bad luck.”

  "Mom’s dead all right,” I said, turning to face him.

  Gripping my suitcase, I thought, Poor Queen Gunhild -- drowning in a bog like that.

  5

  It was still night when the mystery train appeared. The whistle entered my dreams, manifesting itself as a doorbell buzzing.

  Waking on the kitchen floor, I listened while the freight cars flurried alongside Grandmother’s property, picturing the school bus shaking in the pasture. Soon the whistle grew fainter until the only sound came from the portable radio, a female DJ reading the news: "A mixed message from the White House, conflicting with earlier statements-”

  I rubbed my eyes and yawned. Then I sat up, squinting around the kitchen.

  The jug was on the counter without its cap. Cracker crumbs dotted the floor. The gown remained damp in spots from my reckless guzzling. But my throat was dry, and while licking at the sore lip, I tasted peanut butter instead of blood.

  "A miracle,” I whispered, sensing the creamy substance coursing in my veins. And if I hadn’t felt so suddenly alone, I would’ve laughed at the thought of being a Peanut Butter Girl, just flesh and bone and crushed edible seeds.

  Climbing from the floor, I called out, "Daddy-? I’m in the kitchen!”

  The gown hem lagged under my feet, so I pretended it was the soles of satin slippers and shuffled to the stove. Then taking the radio in hand, I shuffled out of the kitchen, through the dining room, and into the living room.

  "Daddy-? I was in the kitchen. Daddy-?”

  As if roused by a rooster’s crow, I was hoping my father would be awakened by my voice. The vacuousness of his face, head, and posture would vanish. He would quickly rise from the chair. But standing before him with the radio, I noticed only a small difference in his appearance. In the dreary light of the living room, his lips had grown purple, his breathing had ceased. Lifting the big sunglasses, I was met with an icy stare- two pupils reduced to almost nothing -- so I lowered the sunglasses back over his eyes.

  "I brought you this," I told him, putting the radio in his lap. Then I crouched before his boots, bending my legs inside the gown, and gazed up the expanse of his stiff body.

  "Three are dead in a college motor coach crash,” the DJ reported. "The motor coach, packed with college cheerleaders from the University of Texas in Austin, flipped over near Georgetown yesterday, killing the coach and two cheerleaders. Seven others were injured, four critically. The accident is under investigation."

  Just then I recalled my father on the Greyhound, holding the radio against an ear, listening to similar news broadcasts. "They’ll be searching for me,” he told me. "I need to monitor the information as it develops." But during our trip, there was no mention made of him or my mother’s corpse, a fact which somehow disappointed him. "Seems I don’t matter much anymore, Jeliza-Rose,” he later said. "Not worth a lousy headline.”

  And squatting there by his boots, I wanted to tell him how much he mattered to me-how it was good being at What Rocks with just him, even if it wasn’t really Denmark. Then tears welled uncontrollably under my tired, heavy eyelids.

  "It’s not your fault she’s dead,” I said. "She wasn’t very nice anyways.”

  "Now don’t get all weepy,” I pictured him saying. "Everything’s fine."

  But it wasn’t fine, and I told him that.

  "It’s awful!”

  I crumpled across his boots, my chest heaving.

  "It’s all right," he’d tell me. "You’re safe as houses."

  I imagined his hands stroking my neckline, soothing. Exhausted again, I began to drift off. And before sleep overtook me, I conjured the Bog Man in his bed of peat. His bones gnashing as he dug himself from the earth. But on my first night in the back country, the idea of him was no longer so frightening.

  "He survived thousands of years," my father once said. "He just lay there waiting to come back to life."

  "Please, come back to life,” I pled, dimly aware of the radio wavering on my father’s lap, the batteries loosing power as my eyes closed. "Please-"

  The wind was now blowing around What Rocks, sweeping along the porch, clanking the hoist rope against the metal flagpole. The old place shuddered. In the pasture, the school bus rocked gently, the high Johnsongrass wavered. Thunder rumbled in the distance. But inside I slept once more, the wind droning in my dream like a horn -- and somewhere the mystery train whistled for no one as it chugged through barren and forbidding terrain, weaving further and further away from us.

  6

  I yawned with the feeling that dawn was just beginning, but the sunbeams descending through the windows, slanting crosswise on the floorboards, told me otherwise. The living room was warm, full of radiance and shadow. Rays had already fallen across the lower half of my gown, where my toes fidgeted in the dusty light. "Morning, morning," I muttered to myself, lifting my head from the boot tips, an uncomfortable pillow.

  Then I stood quickly, pivoting on bare heels to my father.

  "Good-morning.”

  Skin that had grown pale was now completely pallid. But his earlobes, chin, forearms, and fingertips were discolored with a reddish-purple stain. It seemed that overnight the stiffness had left his body. The rigor around his lips and nose had vanished, giving him a sagging, almost benign expression. In the daylight, he was limp, his muscles no longer controlled anything. For a moment
I held his hand, cautiously peering at his sunglasses. He wasn't cold. In fact, his temperature was equal to the warmth of the room. And a stubble had begun growing on his cheeks.

  But I wasn’t too worried. He’d done this before: back at the apartment, he’d sometimes sit in front of the TV for days, statuelike, or he’d curl up on the couch and sleep and sleep and sleep. Then he’d suddenly stir. He’d climb from the couch, make himself coffee and something to eat, and be all smiles again. So once I asked, "Were you dead?”

  And he replied, "Sugar, nothing can kill me. Daddy was only on vacation. That’s what I do, your momma too. We’re playin’ possum, you know?"

  Playing possum for days, while I waited with my toys and watched TV and wondered when they’d return. And they always did. Except now Mom was really dead; I knew that for certain. But not my father -- he was playing possum again, vacationing in Denmark or somewhere else. Anyway, people didn’t just sit down and die. They rolled around sweating and screaming and dying. Like on TV, they gasped a lot while bleeding, or they fell to the ground in pain. They held their sides and kept their eyes open until, at last, they were gone. On TV, I’d seen people die a million times, and they never just sat down and stopped. They didn’t play possum or go on vacation. They died -- like Mom.

  "Are you on vacation?"

  Instead of waiting for an answer, I grabbed the silent radio from his lap, bringing it to my ear. I turned the volume dial back and forth, moved the station meter from one end to the other and back. Nothing worked. So I returned it to him with a sigh.

  "Because if you’re not,” I said, "then it’s not funny then."

  I wanted to rage around the living room, pounding the floorboards in frustration. But the urge to pee was so bad that my insides hurt.

  "Won’t talk to you too,” I told him. "It’s not nice, you know. You won’t like it too.”