Tide King

by Jen Michalski

  “Are you a freshman?” She seemed unperturbed by the commotion.

  “Yeah, kind of. I mean, I’m not from high school. The Army.”

  She nodded as well. A pause stretched into awkwardness. “Well, I’m sure my father is waiting. I just felt bad…Shilling giving you a hard time like that.” They stood at the entrance. Johnson spotted a man near the parking lot, hands in his wool trousers, his sports jacket open casually. He sized up Johnson with a disinterested nod as Johnson quickly closed his jacket over his tie with the duck. “I’ll see you around, Calvin.”

  “Sure.” He nodded, and he watched her legs move away from him, her hand in her hair, the way it splayed over her back. As they moved together toward the car, a green Ford, new off the lot, it seemed, she turned her head toward him and waved.

  “How was class?” His mother sat on the edge of the glider while he scraped the last of the glazed apple off his plate.

  “Good. Pie’s perfect.” He leaned over and kissed her. “Everything’s perfect.”

  They looked at the moon, the same moon he’d seen in Africa, Normandy, Germany. The moon that betrayed them, their movements. The moon that hid the sun. That night, it was just the moon, maybe a little more.

  From the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, he read about the great kings of England, Henry and Richard and Edward. He read slowly at the kitchen table, sometimes aloud to his mother when she wasn’t listening to the radio. In the living room she sat on the couch nodding, her mending resting between her hands, a baby of brown and blue threads, mostly his father’s shirts and sometimes his uniforms from the force. Sometimes she lay her head back, eyes closed, and he could not tell whether she was listening, and sometimes he’d change his voice to differentiate between the characters and his mother laughed, a half sigh and half giggle.

  He read Beowulf and understood the horror and beauty of the battles in a way he had not in high school. He could not wait to read The Iliad and The Odyssey again. And maybe his mother would listen and they would have something else since the war that they could share.

  “Worried about class, Calvin?” his mother asked one morning, serving him waffles. He had spent most of the night in the bathroom, bathed in a cold sweat, his heart humming in his ears. It had been something practically undetectable, unthreatening to civilian life—an unusual sound outside, a foot snapping a twig. Or so he had thought. After he’d checked the barn and the surrounding ground, he sat on the porch smoking a cigarette. In the corner of his eye, he’d see a shadow move, but when he turned to focus, it was no longer there. It reminded him of nights on foxhole duty, trying to detect a shadow, an outline, in blackness, back in the months before the snows. Was it one of their men, a Kraut? Should he risk shooting into the night, giving away their position? He smoked another cigarette on the porch, and the shadows were everywhere—in the corn, by the barn, behind the truck. There were hundreds of men swarming like silent wasps, a swirl of lost souls, but when he ran out into the middle of the yard, daring them to take a first shot, no one fired. He ground out his cigarette and went back inside to the bathroom. His balance felt off; he thought he might vomit. His father almost stepped on him at five-fifteen, when he stumbled in for his shower.

  “I’ve got a paper to write,” he answered, cutting the waffles along the squares. He tried to keep the syrup contained within the spaces, but the knife was dull and his precision clumsy and many of them bled onto the plate. “About war in early English Literature.”

  “You were never much of a writer,” his mother said, joining him at the table, patting his hand. She put her hand on his shoulder as if in apology for the truth. She’d never diminished him or his accomplishments in his life (if you’d concentrated more on sacks, you would have been starting at Ohio State was a scrap of wisdom his father liked to hurl at him on the weekends, when they listened to the games on the radio), and he was hurt that she’d start now. But perhaps she thought it was cruel to be kind, lest he muddle too far along and drop out, become bitter.

  “I’ll figure it out,” he answered. His plan was a bit disingenuous. Each class he had sat a seat closer to Kate, and although she said hello to him and smiled, he didn’t know how to approach her under any premise, except perhaps to appeal to her greater intelligence, which she displayed modestly when Dr. Schillings called on her. Once or twice, Johnson had raised his hand, in response to questions so easy some didn’t even bother, but he wanted Dr. Shillings to know his intentions, to acknowledge his earnestness and motivation. Still, he was carrying a C minus and needed a good term paper grade to ensure his passing the class.

  “Have you written your term paper yet?” Johnson asked Kate when she lingered in the hall one night after class, tying a shoelace, retying. It could not have been for him, he was sure, but he was more than happy to take advantage of her delay.

  “Oh,” she sprang up quickly. He felt the breeze her body generated on his neck, and he felt his cheeks coloring. He coughed, fist to his face. “Hi, Calvin.”

  “Hi. Did you, uh, finish your term paper?”

  “I’m sorry.” She blushed also. “I’m almost finished. How about you?”

  “I haven’t.” He scratched the back of his head. “I mean, I’ve got some ideas…but I’m not much of a writer. I was wondering if you wanted to read what I had…I could buy you an egg cream or a hamburger or something.”

  “Well.” Kate smiled. He could draw the line of her face in one stroke, so smooth and gradual the curve from chin to cheek to eye. “I suppose my parents won’t mind a study date.”

  “Oh, I don’t want to make anybody mad.” His shoulders tightened, feet jumpy. He scanned the entrance ahead of them.

  “No, no.” She shook her head. “It’s perfectly fine. Why don’t you meet me tomorrow at seven?”

  “Okay, great,” he answered. As relief filled him, it drained quicker out his chest. He’d written not a word of his term paper.

  At home, he sat at the table, crumpled pages surrounding him. In Beowulf nature is violent and death is uncontrollable. Beowulf is a warrior, like I was. Once you enter a world where nothing makes sense, it is hard to leave it. He smoked a cigarette on the back steps. Many people think Beowulf and everyone had what was coming to them because they were pagans, but a hell of a lot of Christians lost their lives for God and Uncle Sam in Europe and the Pacific. He heated the leftover coffee in a pot on the stove. I think Kate is a woman I will fall in love with.

  He awoke because his mother was frying eggs. Sleeping on the hard table had stiffened his neck. He sat up and pulled his work to his chest. His balled-up notes were gone, and he wondered whether his mother had uncurled them carefully and read them in an attempt to gauge his academic prowess, whether she’d seen the one about Kate.

  “You’d better wash your face.” She touched his back, betraying no thoughts. She had not asked him about the war. He wished she would. “The eggs are almost done and you need to milk Tawny.”

  He dragged himself up to the bathroom and plugged the sink to shave. He had pinched a nerve in his arm by falling asleep on it, and the razor in his right hand moved crazily across his face, catching its edge and cutting his skin. He dropped the razor in the water and put a finger on his cheek where a cut had bubbled with blood, shaving the rest of his face with his left hand. He stuck a wad of toilet paper the size of a quarter on the wound and hoped he wouldn’t still be wearing it that night like some high school kid.

  He wore his high school tie and the short-sleeved button-down he’d worn at graduation years ago, even though his time in the Army had filled his muscles out and the seams cut his biceps when he bent his arms. He’d spent a half hour after dinner sweeping the dirt off the floor mats of the truck, taping the rip in the seat, and wiping the dashboard and windows until they gleamed. He sprayed a little bit of his mother’s White Shoulders in the cab until he thought maybe Kate would think he had another girl, and then he drove through town with all the windows open, airing it out.

  As he waited
for Kate outside the steps of the school—she took a second summer class—Introduction to Calculus—he glanced at himself in the rearview mirror. The first thing he noticed was that the cut on his face was gone. Not even the faintest of red lines remained on his lower cheek. He opened the driver’s door so that the interior light would come on. His skin was free of blemish. Perhaps he had not cut himself as badly as he thought. Perhaps he needed more sleep. From the corner of his eye, he saw Kate’s form on the stairs, and without thinking about it any further, he hopped from the truck and hurried up the walk.

  “Well.” Kate leaned over, a strand of her hair brushing the top of his hand. “Shall I take a look at that paper of yours?”

  At the end of a long, double-horseshoe counter at the drug store, Johnson watched her eyes move back and forth over what he had compiled, hastily, that morning after breakfast. He followed the line of her shoulder next to his down to her side and hip, afraid and transfixed by her proximity. Her perfume layered the air along with the grease of twelve-cent hamburgers and percolating coffee, the steady beat of the jukebox. She was not like Eva, and for that he was thankful. She had a confidence that did not announce itself from her lips; it emanated in the way she sat, the way she moved and turned his typewritten sheets with her fingers, slowly, with interest.

  “I like this line, Calvin—Like Henry in Henry V, once you enter a world where nothing makes sense it is hard to leave it. But I think you need to follow it up with an example, maybe from your own experience.” She tapped her pencil against her cheek. He liked that she was able to compliment his work but also criticize it, unlike the girls in high school, who repeated his opinions like parrots, who smiled at him bashfully and sat with their hands in their laps, shoulders turned inward.

  She did not look away when he caught her looking at him, her dark eyes soft smudges of charcoal. She blinked in a manner less seductive and more puzzled. “So what’s Europe like? How come you never talk about it?”

  “I don’t know. I guess no one has ever asked,” he answered, stirring his coffee, even though he took it black. Everyone was afraid to ask, as if he would have a nervous breakdown in front of them. “Well, the churches in Italy are beautiful. Even the ones that were destroyed. And the mountains in Africa. Even the snow in Germany, as cold as it was. Of course, Paris. Sometime it’s strange sleeping in a bed, night after night, when for months at a time, you slept outside on the ground and, in a strange way, you owned the world. Or the world owned you.”

  “I like that.” She rested her chin on her hands. “My brother Stephen and I used to play soldiers when we were younger. We both fantasized about it a lot, going to war, the noble sacrifice, seeing the world. Of course, it had a very Homer-esque quality to it.”

  “You wouldn’t want to go to war, believe me.”

  “Why?” She cocked an eyebrow toward him, tilting her head slightly and smiling. “You don’t think girls are tough enough? You’re not one of those boys, are you?”

  “It’s not that.” He shook his head, his cheeks flushed. She could have told him then that women had two heads, and he would have agreed with her. “I mean, plenty of women served honorably as nurses and stuff. It’s just…when it’s happening to you, the horror of it becomes unreal. You get used to…terrible things. And then when you come home, safe from it, you can’t believe you ever thought anything you saw or did was okay. I don’t think anybody should have to live like that.” He closed his eyes, struggling to explain the emptiness that filled him with such weight. He may have lived, but he’d left something behind. His heart, his sense of wonder. His future. He wondered if he needed to go back to the Hürtgen forest to get it.

  “Calvin?”

  “I’m sorry.” He opened his eyes. “Sometimes it’s still hard to talk about. There’s a lot…I haven’t told anyone”

  “Will you tell me?” She touched the straw of her egg cream to her lips, and it was more of a command than a question. She was like Eva, more than he’d thought. She was fearless. But was she persecuted? She drank from the glass, opaque with milk and sweetness, her eyes trained on him like a bird dog.

  “Maybe another night…I promise. So what about the paper?” He changed the subject, although he was unable to concentrate. A vein pulsed on his head. He knew, at that point, that he would not finish school, do anything. His world was inside him, what had happened to him in the war, what would happen to him. It consumed him.

  “Well, I think you should concentrate on the violence aspect of Beowulf, maybe, instead of Henry.” She dabbed the wet ring from her glass on the Formica countertop with her napkin. “Both Grendel and Beowulf were violent, but one was heralded a hero and one was feared. But a lot of pain and suffering, as you mention here, was caused by both, and will continue, because someone is always avenging someone.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got a great idea for your paper,” Johnson smiled.

  “I already finished my paper. On King Cnut.” She turned her head, taking in the soda fountain around them.

  “Who was he?”

  “The king of Denmark, England, and Norway, during the 9th century. He was pagan but converted to Christianity and was a great statesman. In fact, his subjects believed he could do anything, even turn back the tides. So one day at Westminster he kneeled before the Thames and ordered the tides to turn away.”

  “Did they?”

  “I guess you’ll have to read it and find out.” She finished the last of her float and blotted her lips. “You’d better get home to get this written, huh?”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “I’m a horrible typist, so please don’t ask me to type it for you.”

  “No, no—it’s just…you’re not like any other girls I know. I know that sounds like a line, but it’s the truth. Do you want to go out with me? On a real date?”

  “Oh…I think I should be getting home.” She grabbed for her purse, a sudden, stilted motion, and it fell to the floor, her compact and lipstick clattering and rolling away from them, along with his hopes.

  He crouched, his fingers straining for her things. On that first date that would never happen, he would have told her the things she wanted to know. He would have told her that, since the war, the world moved by him on a screen, like those AFO reels civilians watched at home of troop movements, of minor setbacks, or high-stakes advances, of the inevitable sacrifice otherwise known as casualty. The theater was dark and he was alone and there was nothing to do but watch the story of the war over and over, his death and rebirth, until the doors of the lobby had opened, and Kate stood, a dark silhouette, beckoning him into the light of the lobby.

  “I’m sorry I was so forward.” He stood by the passenger side of the truck, hands in his pockets, as she clutched her purse. “I really do appreciate your help with the assignment. I’ll uh, see you in class, then.”

  “Goodnight, Calvin.” She moved toward him. “I’m sorry I…it’s just that…the thing is…well, I think you’re the most interesting boy I’ve ever met.”

  Before he could react, she placed her lips on his. He could feel things in his heart, moving around slippery in his mouth, marbles of love and desire and marriage, marbles that had never risen above his pants with Eva, along with other lumps that he swallowed as she rested her head on his shoulder and they breathed the small space of air between them until there was no air left. Love was hunger, was suffocation. But also soft quiet, the rise of her chest on his, the weight of her head on his shoulder. Her head came up and they kissed again, Johnson holding her face in his hands so she could not slip away.

  Spears of fall began to poke at the bubble of summer—a few unseasonably cool mornings in August while Calvin planted the broccoli, cauliflower, and radishes in the field; a sweater draped on his mother’s shoulders as she knitted on the glider; his father’s gun parts gleaming on the table as he cleaned and assembled them for goose season. In class, he sat in his usual seat behind and to the left of Kate and wrote short-answer essays on The Odyss
ey on his final exam. When he finished, he stayed at his seat, watching the slow wave of Kate’s hair cascade down her back as she looked to the ceiling, turned her pencil on her cheek and then moved it feverishly across the bluebook. When she closed it and stood, he did too, and followed her up to Professor Shillings, who held up his palm to Johnson as he turned to follow Kate.

  “I’ll be reading with great interest.” Professor Shillings raised an eyebrow as he took Johnson’s bluebook. “Maybe we’ll see you for the fall semester, Mr. Johnson?”

  “I haven’t registered yet,” he answered. “I liked your class, sir. Thanks for the opportunity to take it.”

  Kate waited for him in the hall.

  “How about an egg cream?” He smiled at her. He looked forward to talking about their schedules for the fall, kissing in his truck in the parking lot behind the bowling alley. She had grounded him. He didn’t feel essential to himself, even alive in a normal sense, but he felt tethered to Kate, her gravity keeping his moon rotating, surviving its long trip around the galaxy.

  “When were you going to tell me that you were going to New York?” They sat in the truck behind the bowling alley. He lit a cigarette and stared at the tip of the neon bowling pin that cleared the roof and poked at the sky.

  “I’m sorry, Calvin. I wanted to from the beginning, that night at the drug store, even. But I wanted to spend time with you. I’ve always wanted to go to New York University. I just stayed close to home during the war so my parents wouldn’t worry. I think they were hoping I’d be engaged or married by now to someone at Bowling Green and ready to pop out a baby.”