Tide King

by Jen Michalski

  “You could have invited me in.”

  “I ain’t your mother, Stanley. You could have come and at least protected my honor.”

  “You shouldn’t have been begging in the first place. We got beans at home.”

  “Well, I hope you enjoy them while I eat this leftover pot roast, mashed potatoes, and blueberry pie,” she answered. “Now shut up and listen to me. He said he was having tryouts for a radio program like the Grand Ole Opry.” Cindy hit his arm. “Ain’t that something, Stanley!”

  “Would they pay you?”

  “Well, the singers would get ten dollars a week for being on the radio show.”

  “We could you get you a new coat.” He guided the truck onto the highway. “And some things for the baby. But is it okay, with you being pregnant and all?”

  “I don’t know,” she shrugged. “Why not? I sing all the time. Isn’t this great, baby? We’ll finally have some money.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed, tightening and loosening his hands on the steering wheel. “So when you going to do it?”

  “Well, he said to come to the station on Saturday. By then, I’ll have a bunch of songs practiced and ready.”

  “Well, even if it don’t turn out to nothing, I’m proud of you, baby. Maybe you’ll make a little money to last through the thaw and I can go back to the farm.”

  “Hell, maybe this’ll be something bigger and we won’t be talking about being farmers no more. Earl Wooten—he’s the guy who owns the station—said he’s hoping to send some of the singers out to his brother Wendell in Nashville for recording contracts.”

  “You don’t want to be a farmer’s wife?”

  “I never, ever wanted to be a farmer’s wife,” she answered, and took his hand. “I thought it might have been obvious to you by now. Now, hurry up and get home or your food’s going to get cold.”

  “My food?”

  “I asked Earl if he would buy a plate for my poor, proud husband who’d rather freeze to death in the truck than take charity.”

  “Well, you know what’s wrong with that, right?’

  “What? I shouldn’t have gotten you any food?”

  “No, you shouldn’t have called me your husband until I had a chance to make it official.” He pulled the truck to the side of the road and turned to her. “Cynthia Meekins, will you marry me?”

  “Well…of course, silly.” She smiled, as if he had brought her some crudely composed painting from elementary school. “You could have asked months ago, or when I got pregnant, even.”

  “I was waiting until I could afford a ring.”

  “I don’t need a ring, Stanley—I just need your word. Besides, we don’t need to worry about weddings right now. Maybe I’ll be able to buy myself the biggest ole’ ring you ever did see if I sing my cards right with Wendell.”

  He nodded, but the whole thought left a bitter taste in his mouth, one he could not rid himself of even after a plate of pot roast, mashed potatoes, green beans, and blueberry pie.

  Earl Wooten was a resourceful and unlucky man. At least, that was how he explained his current ownership of WXFB radio in Salisbury to Stanley and Cindy. In his office, Cindy sat in her best dress. They stopped by the department store on the way to WXFB so Cindy could get a free spritz of perfume from the fragrance counter. “Oh, my, aren’t you a pretty little girl!” The saleswoman, beaked and boned, leaned over Cindy until Stanley cleared his throat.

  “My fiancée would like to try that Shalimar.” He nodded to the bottle.

  “Of course.” She reddened. “I’m so sorry. Geez.”

  “That’s okay—thanks so much, ma’am,” Cindy beamed, as she always did—her public persona was finely calibrated to handle any variety of humiliation. But not Stanley’s, and Cindy tugged him away from the counter before he considered knocking the other perfumes—the White Sands and Christian Diors that lined the glass counter—onto the floor with a flick of his elbow.

  Earl’s secretary led them to a wood-paneled, smoke-clouded office with a square glass window to the broadcasting booth. Framed records on the walls hinted at respectability, although they were not names that Stanley had ever heard of. He stood, hands in his pockets as Earl grabbed and kissed Cindy’s hand, offered her a faux leather seat with a duck-taped arm.

  “You ever gambled, son?” Earl, looking at Stanley, positioned his girth, packed tightly into his six-and-a-half-foot frame, on the edge of his desk with unusual delicacy. He crossed his leg, and Stanley noted his thin ankles, long fingers. “Let’s just say I lost a bet and won a radio station. My brother, he’s even got worse luck. He lost a bet and won a recording studio! Course, the studio ain’t here—it’s out in Nashville. Nashville, you’re sayin’—why not New York or Chicago or Los Angeles where all the big boys are? Well, let me tell you something—Nashville is hot. Country music is going places, and your little lady here, well, she ain’t no bigger than a pushpin, but she got a big voice.”

  “So how are you gonna make her a star?”

  “Record? Well, let’s not get ahead of the game, here.” Earl lit a cigarette. “We’re going to let the little lady sing a song live on the air, and if our listeners like it, we’ll have her come back in as part of the barn dance ensemble. We got all kinds of radio shows, you see—Jimmy Ray Housin and Betty Dandy. And now we’re gettin’ together one of them weekly radio barn dances like they got at WLSAM in Chicago.”

  “Sounds fair, Stanley.” Cindy nodded, her eyes seeking his approval. “Kind of like the free spritz of perfume—you like it, you might buy it.”

  “You know your business, little lady.” Earl grinned, his face squeezed into folds from his cheeks to his forehead, his eyes little black pins under his eyebrows. “I can tell who’s doing the thinking in the household. So, are you ready? Stevie over there in the booth’s got a guitar, he plays almost anything out there.”

  “Does he know ‘Keep on the Sunny Side’?”

  “Of course he does, little lady.” Earl guided her through the door. “Stanley, why don’t you have a seat? We can listen from here.”

  Earl came back and offered Stanley a smoke.

  “Is it too much trouble to take two?” Stanley asked. “We’ve been a little tight for money, especially now Cindy’s pregnant.”

  “Yep, yep—congratulations, son. It’s marvelous what medicine can do these days for, uh, people who…” Earl stared at his lighter. “Well, when I seen her outside the diner, I thought she was the cutest little kid. And I thought, here we’ve got another little Shirley Temple or Peggy Lee. I was counting my money already! But imagine my surprise when she turned out to be that pint-sized little thing.”

  “Yeah, she’s pretty gifted singer, I’d say.” Stanley pressed on the balls of his feet.

  “It’s such a shame. I mean, she could be a star if she were…you know…”

  “No, I don’t.” Stanley lit his cigarette and leaned forward, ready to jump over the desk. “Maybe you should say what you’re really thinking?”

  “Well.” Earl exhaled and touched the back of his head with his palm. “I told my brother all about Cindy, how I thought…well, she’s got a great voice for radio. But she’s no…I mean, what picture you got by your foxhole during the war, Stanley? Betty Grable.”

  “You’re saying nobody’s going to be interested in Cindy because she’s a midget?”

  “I don’t think that’s true. Like I said, she’s a little button. But there’s also…well, she’s pregnant.” Earl stubbed out his cigarette. “My brother, he runs that side of the business. I’m just on the radio side. It’s my responsibility to listen, not to see.”

  “Then why the hell is she here, then?” Stanley felt his jaws, his legs tighten.

  “Well, I don’t go back on my promises. I asked her to come in and sing, and people is gonna hear her, right? I think they’re almost ready.” Earl stood up, patting his forehead with his handkerchief, and motioned him to the window. Cindy stood on the radio jockey’s chair, her lips close to the mi
crophone.

  Stanley did not know how it happened, exactly. When Earl came by one winter morning with plane tickets to Nashville to record a demo at his brother’s studio, Cindy had been recording for the “Happy Hayride” show for almost three months as ‘Lil Cindy Sunshine. She was the talk of the tri-state area, although, thanks to Earl’s carefully timed studio sessions, no one in Maryland-Delaware-Virginia had ever laid eyes on her.

  “You’re not going to Nashville to do anything.” He stood in their renovated bedroom, with window panes and a real bed frame and mattress courtesy of Cindy’s earnings from Happy Hayride. “You’re almost four months pregnant.”

  “Since I’m the only one earning any money in this house, I think that decision should be mine, don’t you?” She lay on her side, head propped on her elbow, looking at sheet music of the songs Wendell wanted her to record in Nashville.

  “They’ll probably use your voice and put some other girl’s picture up—Earl already told me he can’t do anything with you because you’re a pregnant midget.”

  “He didn’t tell you that.” She stared at him with narrowed eyes. “You take that back.”

  “I may be unemployed, but I’m not a liar.” He moved toward the bed. “I’m sorry baby. You don’t need him, anyway. I love you just the way you are.”

  “Don’t touch me.” She squirmed out of his grasp and hopped off the bed, padding toward the bathroom and shutting the door. “You’ve always been jealous of my dreams.”

  “Baby, I’m sorry.” He knocked. “I’m not jealous of your dreams. I just think we should have the same dreams.” But weren’t his, chasing down the parents of a dead comrade in Ohio, just as selfish, as foolish?

  He sat outside the bathroom door.

  “We can make this work, Cindy. The two of us. I’ll get a job and you’ll never have to work again, I promise you. You’ll be royalty, Cindy. My royalty.”

  He sat outside for a long time, listening to her motions inside, a slight cry, the toilet flushing, water running. He dozed off until the door opened suddenly and he fell inward, looking up at her from the tiled floor. She held a wadded, soaked facecloth dabbed with pink.

  “Stanley, I lost the baby.” Her stubby legs stepped over his head and down the hall. “I need to talk to Earl.”

  1947

  When he hit McDonald Pass outside of Helena, Montana, where the two-lane blacktop curved and disappeared into mountains of pine and fir trees, Johnson had been on the road three days, his tires were sizzling, and he prayed to God for the first time since the war. He’d gone west past Helena, looking for some cabin that a man in a bar back in Kansas had told him about, a hunting cabin that wasn’t locked, where he could spend the night. But the details, scribbled in pencil on a napkin in the man’s drunken, unsteady hand, made less sense the farther west Johnson went, and he looked for a place to turn around in the winding mountain road that resembled the man’s arched, urgent script. He prayed that his tires, leaving black horizontal smears of rubber across the road as he braked, would not blow out and send the truck tumbling into the Rocky Mountains. The chassis shuddered as he fought against the steering wheel, sending silt to the edges of the road.

  He slowed the truck to a crawl and coasted to a spot where he could see a good mile in front and in back of him. To his right, the Rocky Mountains climbed, obscuring his view of the North, and to the south, the road dropped away into the deep blue Montana sky. He inched the truck back and forth across the width of the road, noting where his rear tires grabbed the edges of the narrow shoulder before it descended. He pulled at the steering wheel, traces of last night’s whiskey from some whistle stop in North Dakota beading on his neck and forehead and the palms of his hand.

  He spotted a late-model truck heading east in his rearview mirror and pushed on the gas pedal, backing the truck westward before grabbing the clutch to move into first and forward. But he idled, in the transition, perhaps a second too long, his thoughts bottoming into the dark well of uncertainty, what he was doing in Montana, if he would find Stanley, where he had gone off the path, a side route where roads disappeared into mountains without the promise of emerging, and he felt the right rear tire spin because there was nothing under it. He pressed the pedal harder and leaned forward in the seat as rocks and dust swirled behind him and the right wheel sank into a soup of stones and silt. As he and truck tilted backward, moving toward the sky, Johnson pushed open the driver’s door with his left arm. He dropped from the truck and rolled to his left, the ground unforgiving to his shoulder and face. From the corner of his right eye, he saw the front of the truck, wheels in the air like a bucking bronco, the engine whining for a moment in the rush of motion, the futile spin of suspended tires, before sound and truck were sucked into the below. A second passed, two, and the sound took up where it had left off, like a radio coming back into reception, as metal twisted and glass shattered and tires exploded, a vehicular accordion moving through the chords of its swan song.

  He heard the other truck, now only hundreds of feet away, its brakes slowing the tires, its engine shifting downward in gears, and he became aware of his body, of the raw abrasion that clung to it like a dew, and he bent his elbows and knees and neck without moving from the ground, where gravity had locked his stomach and chest and back until the enormity of what had happened could be processed by his head. He laughed, feeling a tooth loose in his bottom jaw, a stiff, unbendable left index finger, and he saw boots, scuffed bald on the toes, the steel of the toe almost peeking through, little caulks on the soles, by his head.

  “You all right, buddy? Jesus.”

  He forced his eye upward, toward the young man, blond, cleft chin bristled with stubble, with deep-set eyes looking at him from a height that may have been heaven.

  “I think I need a ride into town,” Johnson answered, closed his own.

  “I think I heard of a Stanley at the Fire Service,” the man, Lane Gustafson, answered. “You looking for a forestry job?”

  “Yeah—Stanley’s my friend. We served together.” Johnson sat on the passenger side of Lane’s truck, patting his face with a handkerchief. A dotted pattern of blood emerged on the yellowed fabric as he moved it over his cheeks and forehead. He was sure his index finger was broken. The middle joint had swelled to a plum, almost as purple. He could not bend it; it was as immobile as a knife in a full jar of peanut butter.

  “You want to go to the hospital, have that looked at?” Lane nodded at it as he steered them along mountain roads at speeds that made Johnson a little queasy.

  “Naw. I’ll get a little ice somewhere. Back in the war, we called this a boo-boo,” Johnson answered.

  Lane laughed, and Johnson took note of the throbs reporting from the various centers of his body: his lower back, his left forearm and elbow, his neck, his left thigh. The memory of his stumps entered his consciousness as randomly as a lightning flash on a clear day, and his first instinct was always to bury it in a stiff drink. Johnson turned and watched the buildings roll by on main street—the Martha Hotel, F.W. Woolrich, the Harvey Hotel. Mountains towered over the far end, a protective giant that closed the valley of firs and pines and bright peaked houses in its arms. Lane guided the truck off the main strip and eastward out of town.

  “I know a bar,” Lane seemed to read his thoughts. “Let’s get the shake off you, man.”

  Johnson settled his shaking hands into his lap, where Lane could no longer see them. He seemed to skirt harm more than most people. Perhaps that was an understatement, or perhaps the strangeness of it kept him constantly vigilant, afraid that the truth of this statement would catch up with him and pronounce itself boldly; that he was actually a freak, a demon, a ghost. That something really had happened over in Germany.

  The handkerchief he pressed against his face stopped absorbing blood. When he flipped open the sun visor and glanced into small rectangular mirror, covered with a paste of smoke and dust, to his surprise, he noticed that his cuts were pink and closed, on their way, he supposed
, in another moment, to disappearing completely. He curled his hands into fists and realized his index finger bent along with the other fingers, its plum-sized joint now just a peach pit. He covered his left hand with his right and hoped Lane would not notice, but he was too busy trying to find reception on his radio, the thick tuner bar moving lazily across the numbers.

  “Can you pull over for a minute, buddy?” Johnson turned in the seat, unrolling the window, letting the wind dry the sudden sweat on his face and neck. Before the truck’s tires had stopped rolling, he jumped from the seat and crouched on the rocks and dirt by the shoulder, vomiting up God knows what from whenever he’d eaten last, acidic brown plumes tinged with red that singed the dirt and leaves and sent up an ominous smoke signal in the wake of their destruction. His clothes were drenched in sweat. He was in the middle of crisis in the middle of nowhere. He looked at his hand, wriggling the jammed finger, bending the joint. It moved as free as a stick through the air. He felt his skin, the sides of his face, as if they would supply him with answers. He felt his heart clicking in his chest—he could not be a vampire or a zombie or countless other versions of the undead he’d seen at the movies.

  “I need you to take me to Stanley now,” Johnson said when he climbed back in the truck.

  “Calm down, buddy.” Lane laughed at him before pulling off the road. He picked up his cigarettes from the dashboard, waving them up and down, back and forth, as if to tantalize him. “I don’t even know where this Stanley is. We’ll need to ask around a bit, and we may as well do that at the places that men usually go, right? Now, have a cigarette and calm down. Where are you from?”