Tide King by Jen Michalski Page A

would never again press into the yielding earth with his mother during the spring, his hands still chapped from the raw March. He would not hear the sound of husks swishing in the wind in the late summer, the smell of warmed dirt and motor oil and the sound of crickets and the glow of the moon from his window.
    He thought about the war. He wondered where the war had gone, if everybody had died. If he was dead. If this, this suffocating purgatory, was all he had for all his prayers.
    He had fallen asleep. When he woke up, his left leg itched. He still could not see and could barely move. His hands swam to his phantom thigh and grazed something firm, fleshy. Now, his stump ended at his knee, smooth and round like a baby’s head. A sticky glue clung to the end. He felt sweat in his armpits, in his crotch. It was warmer, smellier in this darkness. He could see slits of light above him, like cracks around a basement door. He had dreamed, or hallucinated, that he was a full amputee.
    Where were the men? It was so quiet, a few birds, rustling leaves, a voice, laughter, far away. He pushed against the weight above and around him, remembering the shells raining from the canopy of trees and the bullets whizzing like mosquitoes.
    Whatever the medic had done, it worked great. Johnson ran his hand over his exposed knee. No gangrene. A completely healed-over stump. That man deserved a medal. If he’d only been good enough to save the whole leg, but this was better than nothing. Johnson wondered how he lost it in the first place. All he knew was that he was pissed as hell at Polensky. Leading them back to the forest like that, when they could have followed the ditch. Nearly gotten him killed.
    It was not Polensky’s fault. If Johnson were, in fact, dead, if this were hell, or the afterlife, he could not be mad at Polensky. He could have followed the ditch if he wanted. He would tell Stanley, if he could, that it was okay. That he was sorry for being such a jerk, for teasing him all the time. When he thought about it, although he played poker and talked rough stuff with Green and the others, Polensky was the only one he’d ever told anything to. About his childhood nightmares of faceless men who kidnapped his parents and led him into the field to beat him. About how he lost his virginity to an older woman, Eva Darson, a divorcee who didn’t go to their church but who always smiled, a mouth of slightly crooked teeth, and asked him about his parents when he was at the drugstore. That she had asked him to come over to help move her couch but they had moved their lips, their bodies against each other, against things instead. That he thought of marrying her once, that he liked how she ran her index finger along things, sizing them up, speaking her mind in a way that most women had not been taught, or allowed.
    â€œI am half Spanish.” She’d bounce the bottom of her coffee-colored hair with the palm of her hair. It fell in bangle-sized curls around her neck. “If we do not speak, we do not breathe.”
    He did not spend time with her because she was half Spanish. He supposed he felt sorry for her. She always prepared extravagant dinners for him—pork loins and sirloins—although he was too young and probably too self-absorbed to consider how she managed them on her meager resources. Once she gave him a bottle of cologne, called Garcon, that he hid, like a girlie magazine, on the top of his closet shelf, lest his mother smell something on him other than the Skin Bracer aftershave she bought him for Christmas and his birthday, like an obligation. Eva always had cigarettes, which she liberally encouraged him to smoke. He supposed now that she had done these things to extract some sort of promise from him that, even if he didn’t love her, he would always be available to her. That he would always worship and admire her with the dewy eyes of youth, that she, in various stages of emotional starvation,