Wild Fell

by Michael Rowe

  The bus driver shoved me back down into my seat. He pointed his finger at me, then jabbed his finger into my chest for emphasis. It hurt when he did that. “You sit down and shut up, you crazy little freak. You don’t move. Boy, you’re in some kind of trouble.” He looked down at Prince, who was moaning and starting to regain consciousness. Then back at me. His face was a mixture of adult fury, worry, and a grudging sort of admiration. At least it felt like admiration, though I could have been wrong about that, too. “Jesus fuck,” he said. Then, to the other boys: “Okay, you bozos, what’s this about a turtle? Did one of you take his turtle?” He looked back at me. “What the hell . . . was this about a goddamned turtle? Seriously? A goddamned turtle? Do you two little fucks know how dangerous it is to fight on a bus?”

  “The turtle is mine,” I said weakly. “He’s just a little turtle I found in the swamp. A midland painted turtle.” It was as though by naming the turtle’s species and genus, I might make it easier for the driver to either locate Manitou on the floor, alive, or else identify his remains if one of these other monsters had done the unspeakable while I was taking apart their leader. I felt everything—the rage, the strength, the fight, the pleasure in the blood and the pain—rise up out of my body and dissipate like vapour. I was lightheaded with it. It was as though an entirely different being had abruptly taken leave of its temporary occupancy of my body and left me with what I had started with before the possession. A sting of tears pricked my eyes. “John was going to hurt him. He took him out of the bag and he was waving him around like an airplane. Manitou was really scared.”

  “Manitou!” The driver gave me a look of fury leavened with frustration, perhaps even sympathy. But when he addressed the bus full of dumbstruck boys in the bus, there was no sympathy, just anger. “Everyone look on the ground, and under your seats. If there is a turtle there, alive or dead, bring him to me right now.” The boys all scrambled to obey the driver, obviously grateful for something to do to break the tension. They dove onto the floor of the bus and peered under their seats. “You,” he said to me, pointing again. “Don’t move a goddamned muscle.”

  Finally, a boy in the back I didn’t recognize shouted out, “Sir, I found him!” He held up Manitou, who kicked his legs in the air. My relief—for I’d had visions of the turtle’s crushed shell and limbs—was so all-encompassing that I felt as though the air had been sucked out of me.

  “Bring that thing up here,” the driver told the boy. “And give it to this kid,” he added, pointing at me. “Right now.”

  The boy hurried up the aisle and handed Manitou to me, not looking me in the eye as he did it. I cupped both hands like a crèche and he deposited the turtle’s little body into them. As gently as I could, I retrieved the paper bag and put Manitou back inside. The boy hurried to the back of the bus, still not looking at me.

  I could feel, if not actually hear, the collective exhalation of breath when the driver helped Prince to his feet and Prince shrugged him off with a defiant, if bruised I’m fine, Jesus Christ, leave me alone! before limping down the aisle back to his friends in the back row. But Prince didn’t look at me, either, and no one bothered me on the last forty-five minutes of the bus ride back home.

  The bus driver came to my defence at the terminal when Mrs. Prince saw her son’s battered face and began to scream. Cold-eyed and red-haired like her son, it was apparent even to me where his splenetic temperament came from. She swept him up in her arms as though he were an injured refugee from a lifeboat suddenly reunited with his lover.

  “Your boy started it with this boy, ma’am,” the driver said when she wheeled on him and demanded to know what had happened to her baby. I saw Prince wince at the word baby, which made me smile in spite of myself. But I was in no way confident enough to laugh at him, however much I wanted to. The driver continued. “He came up behind him and smacked him in the head. And he took this boy’s pet turtle away. The boy’s reaction was maybe too . . . impulsive. But your boy started the fight. No question about that at all.”

  “My Johnny is a good boy. He would never have started a fight with this little brat. This boy must have started it—look, he doesn’t even have a scratch on him. What kind of camp are you people running anyway? Where are this boy’s parents? Where?” Mrs. Prince turned to the throng of parents and called out shrilly, “Who are the parents of this boy?” She plucked the sleeve of a random passing brown-haired man in a madras summer jacket who looked nothing like me. “You? Are you his father?”

  “Excuse me,” said the man, looking appalled. He extricated himself from her clutch and hurried away, looking back only once, as if to make sure she wasn’t following him.

  Turning back to the driver, Mrs. Prince said, “I demand to speak to someone about this right now! Do you hear me?”

  The driver had clearly had enough. A small crowd of parents and boys had gathered nearby. “I expect everyone has, ma’am. I’m not running the camp, I just drive this bus. You can talk to one of the counsellors if you want. Or you can find the boy’s parents and complain to them. But if anyone asks me, I’m going to tell them that your son is a bully and a brawler and he picked on this kid for no reason. Now, good day, ma’am.”

  Mrs. Prince wheeled, about to turn her fury on me, when her son abruptly went rigid in her arms and said, “Mom! Fucking leave it alone. Let’s go. I want to get out of here.” He looked around at the people staring and lowered his head.

  “Johnny, don’t curse! And besides, your poor face. You poor baby. We need to get you to the hospital. Then we’ll call the police. We’ll sue . . .”

  “Mom, now. I mean it. Let’s go.”

  The crowd of parents and boys had grown larger now and were all staring. The mothers in particular, seemed to be taking the measure of the differences in the relative height and weight of Prince and our respective demeanours, as well. In their faces was the beginning of disapproval, though directed not at me but at Prince. They knew a bully when they saw one.

  The mother of the boy who had brought Manitou to me in the bus pointed at Prince, and then leaned down to whisper something in her son’s ear. When he nodded, she stiffened, hurried him out of the terminal. The boy looked back at me, almost apologetically. For a moment, I thought I saw something like empathy, but by the time I could have been sure, he was already gone. In any case, the summer was over and the time for empathy long past. I looked around for my parents, feeling very alone in the terminal with the paper bag containing my turtle clutched in my hand.

  For a moment, it looked like Mrs. Prince was going to say something else, but her son gave his mother a hard, brutal shove toward the exit, picking up his duffel bag from the heap of luggage near the bus door and left the terminal without even a backward glance at me.

  From inside the paper bag, I heard Manitou’s feeble scratching as he tried to get out of the bag. I opened it and stroked his shell with my index finger, hoping he’d feel some sort of comfort from it. “We’ll be home soon, Manitou,” I whispered. “We’ll be safe from all this stuff soon.”

  My parents pulled up to the entrance of the bus depot fifteen minutes later. I was waiting for them outside, beside the curb, my duffel bag at my feet and the paper bag in my hand.

  I’d caught sight of my own reflection in one of the windows in the terminal and had noticed that I was smeared with Prince’s blood. Not only had it spattered all over my white t-shirt, there were droplets of it on my forehead and under one eye. My knuckles were beginning to ache. I ducked into one of the bathroom stalls in the men’s room of the terminal and changed into one of the unwashed t-shirts I’d shoved to the bottom for my mother to wash once we got back to the house. It smelled musty, but at least there was no blood on it.

  When she stepped out of the car, I saw that my mother wore a dark linen dress. This was a change from the slacks she’d been wearing around the house all summer long. It signalled to me that picking me up was an event, and that she’d missed
me. That, at least, was how I chose to interpret the gesture. My parents apologized for their lateness and for not being there to greet me as I stepped off the bus. God knows what image they had in their minds of who, or what, would be greeting them. I’m sure they envisioned their proud, sunburned son, returning home to them from three weeks away, a little closer to manhood now, and proud of his achievements of the summer. The reality is what they’d missed: the apoplexy of Mrs. Prince, the bellowing of the bus driver, and the shame in Prince’s eyes. And me, spattered with his blood.

  I inhaled the smell of my father’s blue cotton broadcloth sport shirt, which smelled like fresh laundry, sun, and Bay Rum aftershave. He held me tight and squeezed me. In my ear he whispered, “Welcome home, Jamie. Did I ever miss you, son. We both did.” Then he hugged me again and I collapsed into his arms.

  While pleased to see me, my mother was not remotely pleased to see Manitou. When I opened the bag to show her, beaming with pride, she recoiled and took a step backward.

  “Jamie, what on earth . . . ? What is this? You brought home a turtle? What were you thinking?”

  “Mom, his name is Manitou.” Her face remained blank. “He’s a midland painted turtle,” I coaxed. I was hoping that by working up my own level of excitement about the painted turtle, the excitement would become contagious and magically spread to my parents. “I found him on the last day of camp. He was lying on a rock. I’ll take care of him, I promise. He’ll be my responsibility. You won’t have to do anything.”

  My mother said, “We’re going to take that . . . that thing right to the pet store on Bank Street and see if they want it. They can sell it. Maybe they’ll let you keep part of the money. But you didn’t ask permission to bring that turtle home. You know how your father and I feel about pets.”

  I blinked, feeling tears prick my eyes. Having endured three weeks at Camp Manitou already, let alone the horror of the day that had just been, the turtle was the only decent thing that had come out of it and I felt responsible for him. In many ways, he had come to symbolize everything about the vulnerability and fear I had felt during that three-week eternity. I had a sudden image of him in Prince’s hand, his tiny legs kicking in terror as that monster swept him through the air from side to side.

  “Mom, please . . . he’s so far from home. I’m all he’s got right now. And he’s so beautiful. Look at him. Mom, please? Let me keep him?”

  But she was adamant. “Absolutely not. We’re going right to the pet store on the way home. I don’t know what you were thinking, Jameson, but you’re going to have to learn that sometimes your actions carry consequences. This is as good a time as any to learn that lesson.”

  “Dad?” I looked imploringly at my father, but he looked away. I had a sudden, dreadful vision of Manitou on display in one of the terrariums at Willard’s Pet Shoppe on Bank Street, as far away from the paradise in which he was born and had lived his short, wild life as possible. I pictured children poking him with their grubby fingers, or tapping on the glass walls of his prison trying to get a reaction. I felt a return of some of the rage I felt on the bus when Prince swung him through the air, but there was a new, desolate identification with Manitou that I hadn’t felt the last time. I hated my mother then, and wished her dead. “Dad, please. Please? I’ve never wanted anything more in my life. And if you let me keep him, you never have to give me anything ever again, not even for Christmas, or on my birthday.”

  My mother said peremptorily, “Don’t try to play your father and I off one another, Jameson. You know better than that.” She turned to my father. “Peter? Where did you park? Let’s get home. After we drop the turtle off, we can all go to Ponderosa to celebrate Jameson’s first night back. Would you like that, Jameson? It would be a special treat.” You can tell us all about your adventures at Camp Manitou this summer. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

  Before I could reply, my father said to my mother in a very clear, firm voice, “Alice, I think Jamie’s old enough to be responsible for the turtle he’s brought home. I think it’ll be fine.”

  My mother stared at my father, open-mouthed. “I beg your pardon? The decision has been made, Peter. I’m not having that thing in my clean house. Turtles are messy and they’re crawling with disease. I’m not having us all die of salmonella just so Jameson can keep a pet.”

  “We can talk about it later, Alice, if you like.” There was the faintest trace of an edge to his voice, faint but detectable to both my mother and myself. “But I think it’ll be fine. What was his name? Manitou? Like Gitche Manitou, the head-honcho Indian spirit? Good name. Jamie will take good care of him, won’t you, son? We can use that old terrarium, the one I kept my garter snake in when I was a boy. I think we still have it, don’t we, Alice?”

  My mother narrowed her eyes and said nothing.

  “Yes, Dad, I promise.” I turned to my mother pleadingly. “Mom? You’ll see. Is it okay? Dad says I can.”

  She didn’t reply to me, either, but she shot my father a look of icy fury. Then she said, “Jameson, take your duffel bag and wait for us outside. I want to have a quick word with your father before we drive home.”

  I slung my duffel over my shoulder. My parents never raised their voices to each other in public, let alone fought in public, so I knew that this would be settled in a matter of minutes in one of two ways. Either Manitou would be coming home to live with me in a terrarium in my room where I could take care of him, or else we’d be stopping off at Willard’s on the way home, in which case I would never forgive my mother as long as I lived. Just before I reached the exit, I turned back and observed my parents.

  My mother’s face was white with rage and she was speaking to my father in a voice too low for anyone around her to hear. But whatever she was saying was no less furious for its inaudibility. So engrossed was my mother in berating my father that she didn’t even notice that he stopped listening to her long enough to give me a brief, almost imperceptible wink.

  When he did that, I knew we’d won, at least this round.

  My mother sat in the front seat and smoked steadily as she stared out the window. My father tried to make light conversation—with her, at first. When she pointedly ignored him, he tried to engage me instead, but I was too self-conscious to answer beyond monosyllables. Both my father and I were acutely aware of my mother’s silence, as we were doubtless intended to be.

  Jovially, my father said, “I guess Ponderosa is out of the question, Alice . . . ?

  Or would you still like to have dinner there? I bet Jamie could use a steak, couldn’t you, son? I sure could.”

  My mother stared straight ahead without replying.

  “It’s okay, Dad,” I said. “I’m not all that hungry.”

  My father glanced sideways at my mother, then back at me in the rear-view mirror. He sighed. “Well,” he said. “Hidey-ho! Home we go!”

  As soon as we arrived at our house, my mother went up to their bedroom and slammed the door. Rather than jumping, both of us exhaled our relief simultaneously.

  My father grinned and said, “Well. Let’s get this little fellow out of that bag and into something more comfortable.” He laughed at his joke. I laughed too, more in solidarity with my father than at his joke, which really wasn’t all that funny. The love I felt for my father at that moment was profound and all-encompassing. “Put him in the sink, Jameson. Run some water first so the porcelain is a bit moist. It’s high enough that he won’t be able to get out. Then you and I will get the terrarium out of the garage and get his new home ready.” My father reached out and gently squeezed my shoulder. “You like him, don’t you? I can tell. Your first pet. Well, well. How about that? Kind of exciting, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it is. Thank you, Dad. You know . . . for making it, you know, okay with Mom.”

  “I wouldn’t say it’s okay with Mom,” my father said. “But it’s okay with me, and she’ll get used it, you’ll see. Come on now; let’s get that sink r
eady for him. He’s been in that paper bag of yours for a very long time.”

  I ran the water in the sink, then gently took Manitou out of the bag and placed him on the damp porcelain. It could have been my imagination, but the turtle seemed to revive as I watched. He crawled around the perimeter of the sink, not scrabbling hysterically as he had in the bag. If not actually pleased with his temporary quarters in our kitchen sink, he seemed, at least, resigned to it. I felt the first stirrings of something like actual guilt for having taken him home with me. I shuddered to imagine the height from which he must have fallen to have landed on the floor of the bus.

  I knew fear. I’d known it for three weeks. I could only imagine what Manitou had felt when he fell from John Prince’s hand.

  Inside the sink, the turtle circled the perimeter of the porcelain, pausing where the water had puddled, as though he was confused by its presence in a world gone so completely alien in every other way.

  I said, “Dad, do you think he’ll be okay?”

  “What do you mean, son?”

  “I mean . . . do you think he’ll be okay living here with us? Do you think he’s happy?”

  My father regarded me thoughtfully. “Jamie, let me ask you a question,” he said. “Did you think about any of this when you brought him home? I mean, I know he’s beautiful, and I know you wanted to have him as a pet. But did you ask yourself about any of that when you reached for him this morning?”

  I thought about it, then shook my head. “No, I guess not.”

  My father paused. When he spoke again, his tone was gentle but serious. “Well then, son,” he said, “it’s pretty simple: you made a choice that has impacted this creature’s life. You brought him home with you. You took him out of his world and into yours. Now you’re responsible for him. Actions have consequences. Your mother was right about that part, even if the way she said it wasn’t quite the way she meant it to sound. It’s up to you to take care of him now. Do you understand what I’m saying, Jamie?”