The Turtle Warrior

by Mary Relindes Ellis

  John Lucas did not want to enlist. He wanted to serve the war effort by working as a merchant marine on the Great Lakes, but his old man was adamant. Basil Lucas made it clear during their Christmas dinner of 1944.

  “I’m gonna go with you tomorrow. You’re gonna sign up,” he said, gazing at his son across the dinner table with hard-boiled eyes and pointing to him with a mustard-covered butter knife. “We are Americans, and it is your duty to serve your country. You can fight the Germans because you are an American first.”

  John Lucas thought about his father’s handshake before he boarded the train for basic training. That stubby-fingered paw that threatened to crush the bones in his son’s hand.

  “Make sure they send you to Europe,” his father said gruffly. And then he walked away from the train platform.

  John Lucas almost didn’t pass basic training when it became apparent that anything beyond fistfighting was hopeless. He was so cockeyed in shooting a rifle that they had his vision tested several times, and they discovered, after his initial physical, that the hearing in his left ear was impaired. But an opportunity arose and he tried out for and was accepted into the Army football team. He rationalized that his playing football for the Army was a contribution as well, to lift morale. He never wrote home, fearful of his father’s response to a letter postmarked in the United States. He also dreaded the day of his release from military service because he had no stories or medals, only a letter praising him for his skills as a quarterback and one of the tallest quarterbacks ever at that. He did mingle with some of the returning veterans, working part-time at a VA hospital, and escorted them on various outings. Disabled or not, they all found a way to hit the local bars and taverns, and John went with them, quietly listening to their stories of hand-to-hand combat, the types of bombs, the snipers, the various landscapes they had been in and the various strategies of fighting. They weren’t all enlisted men. One man who frequently joined them was an Army officer, and John often felt the man’s dark eyes rest on him while they played cards. The officer usually didn’t say much, but John knew that he had fought in Europe and that his wounds were less physical and more mental. Shell shock.

  “I thought you were a doctor or an orderly,” the officer commented one evening, “until they told me that you were a football star. At least in the Army. How did you manage that?”

  “I applied several times to be sent overseas, and they wouldn’t send me,” John lied. “Do you think,” he added, his temper rising, “that I should’ve gotten my own rowboat and gone over?”

  “No, I guess not. Pretty peachy, though, that you got to play football. I guess,” the officer drawled out, “you can get injured that way. Too bad, huh? Big German fellow like you. We could have used you on the front lines.”

  “I said I wanted to be there. It’s not my fuckin’ fault I didn’t go.”

  John got up from the table and threw some bills down. Striking an officer when he was so close to being discharged would be stupid, but his temper often got the best of him, and so he decided it was safer to leave. John could see the contempt on the man’s face.

  “It’s none of your fuckin’ business anyway,” he said, and, dramatically clicking his heels together, saluted the officer just as contemptuously.

  Two days before John was to go home, they all went out for another evening of cards and beers. The Army officer remained quiet during the entire evening and finally slumped over in his chair. He’d been drinking bourbon while the rest of them had stuck to beer.

  “Jesus Christ,” said the sergeant they called Limb Limkowski because he was missing his entire left arm, “he’s gonna take a leak soon, and it’s gonna be over our fuckin’ shoes.”

  “I’ll take him to the biff. I have to get back to the base anyway.

  John hoisted the officer up and managed to get him to half stumble, half walk, leaning heavily on John’s shoulder, as they made the trip through the dark and narrow hallway behind the bar to the men’s room. John kicked open the stall door, yanked down the man’s pants and underwear, and pushed him down on the toilet. The officer’s upper torso leaned sideways like a branch heavy with fruit until one stubbled cheek was resting against a stall wall. John listened as the urine hit the side of the toilet, and he briefly considered pulling the bastard off the seat and shoving his head into the toilet bowl. He noted that the officer was not circumcised and that his previous assumption that the man was Italian was probably not right. He was dark-skinned in a funny way. It was hard to deduce from the name. Captain Waterston.

  The guy was taking a long time to piss.

  Fuck ’im, John thought.

  He opened the stall door and looked around. Nobody else was in the bathroom, which was unusual, given the amount of drinking going on in the bar.

  He shut the stall door again. He grabbed the officer’s head by his hair and rammed it into the stall wall at least three times until John was sure the officer was unconscious. He held his breath and stood still to listen for any other noise. Then he unpinned the man’s Purple Heart and Bronze Star from his uniform and shoved them into his own pants pocket. He slipped from the bathroom, left the bar from the nearby back door, and ran down the alley.

  Before John was discharged two days later, it was with only a minimum amount of questions about the incident from his CO.

  “He was drunk but okay when I left him in the bathroom.”

  “You left him? Was he conscious?”

  “Yeah. He told me to beat it because he could go to the pisser by himself. So I left him and went out of the back door of the bar,” John lied, “because I was on my way out anyway.”

  When he disembarked from the train, his father was waiting. Basil Lucas stared in wonder at the medals pinned on his son’s chest. Then he did something he had never done before in John’s memory. He embraced his son.

  “No letters? Ach! You were probably too busy fighting.”

  “Yeah, it got pretty rough out there. But boy, can I tell you some stories.” And John proceeded to tell his father the stories he had heard, embroidering them so that his father’s face flushed with more and more pride every time.

  Then John met Claire at a VFW dance and told his father he wanted to go to college on the GI Bill.

  “You think you’re a Uihlein? Or a Pabst or Miller? That fancy fiancée of yours has filled your head with corncob dreams. A workingman doesn’t need an education beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic. If I was your age again, I’d go north. The land is cheap there, and the only reason some of those poor SOBs ended up back here in Milwaukee is that they didn’t work hard enough or weren’t smart enough. Uncle Sam still giving GIs house loans?”

  John nodded.

  “Then get that loan and go north. When you own your own land, you are your own boss. And you have more freedom. The secret is to make the land work for you! Then you can go hunting and fishing all you want. You’ll be a happy man then. You will have,” his father said, slapping him heartily on the back, “Gemütlichkeit! Unless,” his father added shrewdly, “you want to stay here and work at the brewery.”

  John looked at the 40-acre field in front of him. It was but a portion of the 250 acres he owned, and although it was paid off, he was just a hop ahead of losing it because he was always late paying his property taxes. His father didn’t know what he was talking about. Sure, it was beautiful, but the joke was on him. Just like his wife. How proud he had been that such a petite dark-haired beauty had chosen him, a lowbrow German boy with only a high school education. She had been beautiful in the beginning too. But like the land, she was mostly swamp and rock now. Farming this far north required an innate sense of what to do, and John clearly didn’t have it. It didn’t matter how hard he worked, he couldn’t make a living off the place like some of his neighbors. He was sure they had family money of some kind, and that was how they did it. Or like his neighbor Morriseau, who probably got a government subsidy because he was a timber nigger. Within a year of their moving north, John kn
ew he was licked and got a job with the lumber company instead

  He was grateful that his father died five years after they had left Milwaukee and had never come up to visit them. Just picturing his shriveled white-haired father in the hospital made the tears start up in his eyes.

  His old man never understood. None of them understood. He was a good man, but the world had always been against him. What had been hard for some was harder for him. He worked, didn’t he? He raised a family and didn’t run out on them, did he? Yet they weren’t grateful at all. People in Olina looked at him as though he were eight years old again and wearing hand-me-down clothing. Shit, his son was dead, but Jimmy was talked about like a hero. Why the hell was that?

  John had been secretly relieved when Jimmy had asked for his help in signing the enlistment papers because Jimmy was underage at the time. Thank God, he remembered thinking, signing the papers in the Cedar Bend recruitment office, the kid is finally going to do something besides listen to records. He was grateful that Jimmy was leaving. The kid had been nothing but trouble and was too smart for his own good. Just like his mother. Well, smart-ass, he thought smugly as the bus drove away from the Olina Standard station, welcome to the real world. Life won’t be so easy anymore. You’re gonna get what’s comin’ to you. They’ll dress that fathead of yours down. That’s what happens when you disobey your father, when you point a gun at your father, when you humiliate your own father.

  On the way home from seeing Jimmy off, John whistled a tuneless song and, glancing back at his younger son lying across the backseat, began to make some plans. Now that Jimmy was gone, John was going to make sure his younger son didn’t grow up as cocky as his older brother. John wasn’t sure how he was going to do it, but Bill was not going to point a rifle at him. That pipsqueak in the back of the car was going to grow up knowing the normal order of things. Father first. Then son.

  He sucked at the bottle’s glass lip, tilting it every now and then for a small dribble to make it last longer. A sudden chuffing breath came from the field, and he put the bottle down. Something black was moving within the tall grass. His head hurt again, and this time his chest chimed in and his heart coughed so that he held his breath. Then he saw the thick, long tail and realized it was just his neighbor’s busybody dog. He had wanted to shoot that goddamn dog so many times for roaming over to their place. But despite his racial disdain for his neighbor, John Lucas was wary of him. Ernie had fought in the war. John knew that Ernie was considered a premier hunter and marksman, even by some of the most racist men in Olina. He had no idea that Ernie had taught Jimmy how to shoot until someone at Pete’s Bar and Grill mentioned seeing Ernie and Jimmy duck hunting on the Chippewa. Although drunk, John drove home as though on fire. He knew Claire had something to do with it. He had split her lip and thrown her across the kitchen until she hit the refrigerator before feeling the steel of a double-barreled shotgun pushed into the small of his back. His son said nothing. He didn’t have to. John raised his hands in the air, and his thirteen-year-old son pushed him outside with the gun barrel jammed into John’s back. Then he gave John a frightening demonstration by moving the barrel only slightly past his father’s waist, and firing until the old outhouse door was full of holes. The last thing John heard before passing out dead drunk was the sound of his son reloading.

  His wife was humming now. How dare she sing while he was sitting in the hot sun? He had tried to make her happy, but she didn’t listen to him. She never did anything he wanted, and it seemed she deliberately did the opposite, often acting like a crazy woman. He used to warn her ahead of time. “I told you that makes me angry,” he’d say, and she’d go and do it anyway. His father was right. Women could make a man feel bad about himself. It was their small and sneaky way of bringing a man down. They didn’t have a bit of sense, and his wife was worse in that she thought she knew more than he did because she had a fancy degree and had once taught school. All that book learning had only made her crazy. He thought it was just a phase of grief until she began to walk at all hours of the day and night. Before she began talking to invisible people. And then that night when he heard her and could have sworn that she surrounded him on all sides, even floating above him and laughing hysterically. Jesus Christ! The woman was a bitch and a witch. He stayed away from her after that.

  But he was angry now. She had the nerve to sing while he worked. He started to rise, bracing his free hand against the tractor tire.

  His wife had once told him that he went about it all wrong and that he didn’t understand where they lived. The fury he felt at her criticism came out swinging until he had knocked her down. They hardly talked anymore, but he was going to talk to her now in a way he felt she best understood. She deserved to be hit just for the audacity she had in singing while he was out there trying to fix the damn tractor and for the way she looked at him sometimes. His older son had that same look, and now his younger son too stared at him as his brother once did. On the rare occasion when he ran into Ernie Morriseau, he saw the same look. Through their eyes came Captain Waterston’s cold stare.

  “Liar,” it said.

  “What?” he asked, because he could have sworn he heard it spoken aloud.

  Then his chest seized up, and he was falling down, the bottle slipping from his hand so that he could grab his chest.

  THERE WAS NO INDICATION IN his mother’s voice about why he had to come home in the middle of his shift as a mechanic at the Standard station. Bill had just gotten the job after school let out that May and was still thrilled, although not outwardly so. He was seventeen and had a natural knack for fixing engines. It was the perfect job for him. It allowed him to work and not have to talk to people. That was the owner’s job. Wally Wykowski explained to the car owners what needed fixing on their vehicles, how much it was going to cost, and when the cars would be ready. Wally praised him every other day, slapping him on the back. Bill swelled under the rare light of being told he was good at something. Now it was July 5, and his mother had called the station in the middle of the afternoon.

  “Come home.”

  “Now?” he asked irritably. “My shift isn’t over. What’s so important that I have to come home now?”

  “Come home,” she repeated. “Now.”

  He bristled after hanging up the phone. His mother could be maddeningly taciturn. Yet Bill was just as reserved as his mother, just as reluctant to give words away or any hint to what he was feeling, keeping his voice flat like his mother’s when she spoke the language of everyday needs and wants. He had seen his mother unhappy, seen and heard her sob uncontrollably, and experienced her voice raised in anger. But it was mostly her choice of words that conveyed what action she wished him to take. Now meant “right away.”

  So Bill drove the six miles home in the battered ’67 dull blue Ford Falcon that he had purchased for a hundred dollars and arrived in time to see the Olina ambulance unobtrusively depart from the Lucas’s long driveway. He pulled his car onto the shoulder to let the ambulance pass and waited until it was well on its way down the gravel road toward town before he turned into the driveway. His mother, dressed in her slippers and her blue polka-dot housedress, stood near the back porch of the house. Standing on one side of her was their neighbor Ernie Morriseau. Standing on the other side of her was the very fat Alfred Meyer, the sheriff who doubled as the coroner and was a parody of a small-town sheriff. Someone who didn’t have to chase, and couldn’t have chased, crooks. He was merely a waddling presence, wearing a uniform to signify law and order. He called upon the state troopers for any chasing that needed to be done.

  About forty feet behind them and apparently unnoticed by everyone except Bill sat the Morriseaus’ dog, Angel. When Bill parked his car alongside Ernie’s truck, the dog silently loped into the tall grass next to the barn.

  “I’ll be all right,” Bill heard his mother say to the two men as he got out of the car. “Bill’s home now.”

  “Are you sure?” Al Meyer asked.

  “I�
��m sure. We’ll be all right.”

  “Billy,” Ernie Morriseau said, lightly clasping Bill’s upper arm, “call us anytime if you or your mother need help.”

  It was only after the two men had left, their vehicles spewing pillows of dust as they drove away from the Lucas farmhouse, that Bill’s mother spoke to him.

  “Your father is dead. Ernie found him. He came over to talk to your father. I told him I didn’t know where he was. But I said to check behind the barn. And sure enough,” his mother said, shrugging her shoulders, “that’s where he was. Heart attack, they think. Maybe a stroke too,” she added as though Bill had asked.

  She stood next to Bill with a tired but composed face. Bill had already known it was his father when he saw the ambulance lumber out of the driveway. What was inevitable had finally happened. Bill was unable to react because he had no emotions to react with except one. He glanced at his mother with curiosity.

  “Well, Mom,” he asked hesitantly, digging the heel of his boot into the ground, “do you want me to do something?”

  “You don’t have to do anything,” she answered matter-of-factly. “Neither do I. It’s already been done.”

  That night Bill opened his bottom dresser drawer and pulled out a shoebox of childhood memorabilia. He sat on the floor next to his brother’s bed and habitually wrapped one arm up into a corner of the bedspread. He rifled through the box’s contents with his other hand until he found what he wanted. It was the last picture he had of his brother, the one James had sent Bill from Vietnam. Bill turned the Polaroid over and reread the message he knew by heart.

  “These are the highlands I was telling you about—a lot bigger than our ridge, huh? They’re pretty, though,” James had written in his heavy block-style print. “It’s too bad they’re in Vietnam. I’ll tell you more about them when I come home. Love, James.”