The Tides by Melanie Tem Read Free Book Online Page A

didn't matter that it hurt.
     
    Petra Carrasco, in fact, didn't give a damn about the glare. Very little mattered to her, or everything mattered so much that she couldn't stand it , Bob's presence beside her on the chair and the thought of him inside her, his sudden and total and tragic absence from her life when he stepped to the edge of the porch to flick ash from his cigarette, her husband's violent death real or imagined, wished for and dreaded, reconstructed in her mind over and over, the warmth of the sun, the nest of red ants she knew had lodged in her rectum, the glare of the sun in her eyes. Petra was crazy. She had been crazy most of her life. She knew she was crazy, and it didn't matter, and it had mattered most of her life so much she couldn't stand it.
     
    There was somebody else in her head. A new voice, one she'd never heard before. Petra cursed out loud. None of the others even looked at her, except Rebecca, who glanced up sharply and was embarrassed to find herself embarrassed and wishing she could think of some morally justifiable way to get Petra to be crazy somewhere other than the front porch.
     
    Petra would screw or blow or jerk off any man in the place for cigarettes, and she always had enough takers to supplement nicely the one pack a day her doctor said she could have. When she went with her husband for the weekend she could still sometimes earn a few dollars, a few pennies, a few beers on the street. Her husband loved her and he beat her for doing other men; he beat her and he loved her because even now, crazy and sick and getting old , however old she was: forty or fifty or sixty even now with the fiery red ants she delighted in telling people about busy inside her rectum, she could still earn more money than he could.
     
    She loved him desperately, though sometimes she forgot who he was. For a long time they wouldn't let her see him because of the things he did to her; then she had thought she would die, had tried to make herself die, was often convinced she was already dead without him. When she took the Thorazine they put it in orange juice or burritos so she wouldn't know it was there, and sometimes she didn't it made her crazy, and when she didn't take it she was a different kind of crazy but crazy still.
     
    Petra opened her blouse to Bob, who didn't seem to notice, although he did notice, furiously. The voice inside her head, a woman's voice brushing like gauze against the inside of Petra's skull, softening, tickling, murmured nice things that Petra couldn't quite make out. Bob got up off the swing again and picked a pine bough and brought it back for her like a bouquet.
     
    Gordon Marek was asleep. Awake. Asleep. He'd been up and down all night. All his life he'd been used to sleeping about three hours, being awake three hours, sleeping another three hours. At the other nursing home they'd made him take a pill so he'd sleep all night and they'd rolled up his bed during the day to keep him out of it. It had worked, they'd established a normal sleeping pattern for him, and he'd felt awful. Here he could listen to the all-night jazz station, sitting on his bed with earphones on, snapping his fingers in approximate time to the music. Several times a night he'd leave his earphones on his bed with music seeping tinnily out of them and go quietly out the side door, against all fire and safety regulations propping it open with his shoe. He'd brush away dirt or snow or pine needles and lift the hidden bottle to his lips, sitting on his haunches under the stars, until the booze hit.
     
    Now his puppy slept warm and round in his lap. A bottle with half an inch of Ripple in it teetered between his feet. Ripple or Thunderbird or Annie Greensprings by now, by the fifteenth of the month when he was back to counting pennies in the bathroom and making booze runs for twenty-five cents commission each from the poor suckers who couldn't get out to get their own. Or wouldn't, wouldn't take the chance. His