“Pretty boy can shoot,” Sergeant Davidson drawled. “Our man Elvis here might be worth something after all.”
Davidson quit calling me the worst of the names he used on all of us and chose me, among the select few, to go on for more weapons training.
“You’re a natural leader,” he told me one day, and all I said was, “Yes, sir.” But how nuts is that? I could shoot. How did that make me a leader?
The goal of the military is to take your brain, wipe it clean of anything you have ever cherished, and write its own bullshit on it. I had grown up with my old man’s mind games. I was not as vulnerable as some of the guys. As much as I hated the Corps in basic, I discovered that unlike my old man, it did give me some skills to survive by. And something I’d felt only when I spent time with Ernie: a sense of pride. Not necessarily American pride, but pride in belonging to the Marines. They wanted me. Was that so bad? It was not so much the Corps as it was the guys I met and trained with. I got a whole slew of brothers when I joined up, with only a few of them being assholes like in any family. I was worth something to them. They were worth something to me. That was the secret of survival. If I was conned, then the Corps was conned on another level. Once we landed in Nam, we could see that the Corps was dicked around just like any other branch of the military by LBJ and Westy. By McNamara, who my buddy Rick nicknamed McNightmare. But when we first landed on Okinawa, we were treated like the sons of Zeus. Then a week before some of us in the Fifth Division were scheduled to rotate into the Khe Sanh Combat Base, Sergeant Fuller laid it down real and gritty.
“Martinson! Wipe that shit-eatin’ grin off your face. This is not a Boy Scout trip!” he roared. “Some of you are not comin’ back. Do you hear me? But at the same time you will come back. The Corps will never leave you. But I want you to understand one thing. You are never to leave one another. Do you understand me? NEVER! If you stick together, most of you might come out of this shithole alive. And another thing: Always keep your rifles clean.”
Marv Martinson had bad dreams that night. Rick and I had to wake him up, to keep him from yelling so much. I wasn’t going to buy all of it. I was gonna go home, come hell or high water. I think I survived as long as I did by thinking about Bill.
Barricaded inside the KSCB, I would think about how my brother had a way of traveling inside his own body. How he seemed born with the ability to ignore our old man. He had no illusions. He didn’t love the old man and didn’t need his approval. I wanted to know what that was like, to travel so lightly, to need so little. Only after I got drunk or stoned did I even get near to what I thought that experience was.
I became good friends with one of the Bru scouts. We called him Peanut Butter Pete sometimes because he loved peanut butter so much. But his real name was Kho. He was my age, which shocked me at first. He looked older, and he had kids. Once his daughter became sick, and he left us for a few days. When he came back, I asked him if his daughter was better. He said she was, but that was all he said. I wondered what she was sick with and how she got better. Then our chaplain explained to me that the Bru believed that when someone is sick, a bad spirit is living in that person and causing the sickness. So Kho’s family cooked rice and other food and put it on a little altar in their house to feed the bad spirit. I guess they hoped the bad spirit would crawl out of his daughter and go after the food. When I thought about it, it made sense.
Kho told me that there were spirits everywhere. Once when we were returning from a short patrol, we came to the edge of a rice paddy. Kho made us stop, and he covered his mouth and shook his head. We were not to talk. I thought it was because he saw a North Vietnamese. But it wasn’t that. The people from his village were harvesting the rice. Silently. Nobody talked. It was weird seeing all those women working without saying a word. The way their small hands slid up the stalk and stripped off the seed heads without dropping any of them. Kho told me later that to talk while harvesting the rice would anger the rice spirits, and they might cause the crop to fail the next year.
I thought about Bill then. About the way he could not go to sleep until I crawled into my own bed. He thought there was a monster under his bed. It didn’t matter how many times I shone the flashlight under there to show him that there was nothing but dust bunnies and mouse turds. He was stubborn. He said that something pinched his toes at night, and it lived underneath his bed.
I teased him. “Maybe it’s your damn mice. Or your hamster. Maybe they’re getting out of their cages at night and biting your feet.”
“No!”
Christ, he was stubborn about it.
I thought about Bill’s funny ways. I was ashamed on those nights when I thought about him. I don’t know what came over me when I was mean to him. When I hung him by his ankles from the bridge, knowing that if someone had done it to me, I’d have beaten the pulp out of him. Or the time that Terry and I dumped a whole bottle of Tabasco sauce in a glass of grape juice and gave it to him. Bill took a big drink of it and started to choke. I was terrified, but at least I remembered not to give him water to clear it. I poured milk into his mouth. Water would only have spread the pepper sauce whereas milk helped neutralize it. A fact I learned in first aid and that bubbled up just then when I needed it. Bill ran and hid in the upstairs closet, his mouth and throat burning. I could hear his gasps between crying. I told Terry to go home. Then I went into the barn loft and beat hay bales with a baseball bat until I broke it and finally cried. What was wrong with me? To make it worse, my brother always came back to me, looked up at me with those eyes the color of aspen bark. So hopeful. As though he could see some good in me when I was just a lousy bastard.
Some nights when I felt afraid, I would think about him fighting with that wooden sword that I had made for him in shop class and that snapping turtle shell he used as a shield. There was never anyone out there in the barnyard. Just my brother, spinning on the balls of his feet and shouting threats to some imaginary enemy. I would watch him from my window in the barn loft and shake my head. I told Mom once that I thought Bill was retarded. She got mad and then laughed.
“Retarded! Do you know what his school tests say?” she said. “You’re smart too, but Bill’s IQ is supposedly near genius level. So much for his being retarded. He’s just different. Always has been.”
Then she laughed and hugged me. “You are both smart boys.”
All those boxes from home. Cookies, sweet rolls, venison sausage, candy, and clean underwear. I didn’t have the heart to write to my mother and tell her that I could buy underwear at the PX cheaper than what she had paid for them at home. I knew Bill helped Mom pack the boxes, and he did what only Bill would do. The entire box was usually lined with cedar leaves from our swamp and sometimes with leaves of wintergreen. All the food had a faint aftertaste of cedar, but that was okay. It did something to the rest of the guys too. After the box was empty, the smell of cedar lingered and possessed them. Nobody wanted to throw the empty boxes out. They had to smell them and even rub their faces against the cardboard. In addition to the cedar, each box always had a little something extra that Bill had found. One box had a shed garter snake skin wrapped in tissue. Another box had a mud turtle’s shell and a smooth skipping stone from the river. The box I received just before Christmas had Mom’s fruitcake in it, and a Canada goose feather had been placed on top of the cake. I was made to understand that I wasn’t allowed to open those boxes until most of the guys could be present. It was as though they all wanted to belong to that box somehow. I could pretend to be a Marine, a fighting man without ties to distract him, but I was James Peter Lucas and I was from northern Wisconsin and my brother sent me continual proof of our home.
Kho was there too. He would not touch the snakeskin or the turtle shell, the stone or the goose feather. But the cedar he put up to his nose just like the rest of the guys. Cedar is like that. You can’t get enough of that smell.
“Your brother,” he said to me one night as we sat out near the razor wire, “holds many spirits i
n here.” Kho tapped his chest.
I didn’t know what to say back. Kho didn’t look as though he expected me to say anything. I thought about it. I was raised to think that we all were supposed to have souls, and it’s funny but when Kho tapped his chest, I realized that I had always thought that souls did live in the chest area. At least that’s where the nuns implied the soul lived, and we all were supposed to have souls although my friend Terry told me something different.
“Girls have souls,” Terry whispered, leaning over in class. “Boys have guts.”
But I never believed I had a soul. If I couldn’t see it or feel it, then it didn’t exist for me. Still, after what Kho said, I had to wonder. Then I thought about those people with their brains in their asses. I suppose they are sitting on their souls too. Kho was right when it came to Bill. I think that was where Bill traveled to when he was quiet. His soul filled with spirits.
I found a way to puncture a hole in the turtle shell so that I could tie it to my gun belt. Everybody had some sort of lucky charm he carried. Most of them were harmless but significant. There were a few guys, though, that lost it. Mostly the Special Forces guys who went nuts after their second tour. I can’t even say out loud what they carried or kept as souvenirs. What they shot at for the hell of it. I kept my gun with me at all times, knowing that it wasn’t just the VC or the North Vietnamese I had to be afraid of.
It’s been a long time since Nam. I didn’t have control over people then, what they thought or said or did. Now I don’t have control over what people see. I can’t see myself. That hot July day when I just wanted to look at my old man. I had no idea what it was he saw. But it scared my father to death. To death. And wherever that is I don’t know. I didn’t see him go anywhere after his jaw fell open, after he grabbed his chest and his face caved in except for his eyes. They stayed wide open. If I had known the effect I had on him, well, I would have looked at him sooner. But at least now it’s done. My mother and brother are free.
When the vacant sapphire sky
finds an alley of black trees
I feel you haunt an unknown layer
of my heart. How can I set in order this debris?
It’s all I am.
—Roberta Hill, “A Song for What Never Arrives”
1982 and 1983
IT’S JULY. THE DOG LIES on the porch, catching the hot July wind in his mouth, tasting it between his pink tongue and the roof of his mouth before panting it out again. I watch him determine in a second what the messages in the wind are—who’s coming, who’s been where, who’s alive, who’s dead—and then he sends his own message when he lets the wind go, to whatever animal will savor and understand it the way he does. Angel’s done this a million times. He’s an old dog. So I imagine he has much to say.
I’m washing the supper dishes, listening to some of Jimmy Lucas’s old records, watching the dog, and ignoring the heat. The records are stacked like a vinyl layer cake, losing a layer every time a record falls and is played on the stereo. Right now Roy Orbison is singing one of my favorite songs. “Blue Angel.”
“Hey!” I yell, rapping the kitchen window with a soapy knuckle. “He’s singing your song.”
Angel briefly looks up at me and then, swatting a horsefly away from his mangled ear with his front paw, resumes his panting. I stare at the dog, stretched out on the porch floor. And I remember the day we found him fifteen years ago.
We were driving home from a Friday night fish fry when I thought I saw something moving in the shadows beside the road. Ernie slowed the truck down. I motioned for him to stop and rolled down my window.
Something big and dark was trying to drag itself back into the ditch, away from the headlights. At first I thought it was a bear cub and looked up at the trees along the road for the sow. Ernie opened his door and stepped out. Then he stood there, leaning against the open door and taking long drags on his cigarette. I waited. My husband just continued to stare at the ditch. Finally I leaned over in the seat.
“Are you meditating or what? You want me to check it out?” I whispered.
Ernie dropped his cigarette and smashed it with the heel of his boot.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “I think it’s a dog.”
He slowly walked around the front of the truck and to the edge of the ditch. I poked my head out of the window just in time to hear a low growl. My scalp tingled.
“Be careful! He might have rabies,” I whispered again, and grabbed the flashlight out of the glove compartment. I got out of the truck and shone the light down into the ditch.
Ernie was right. There, in the watery mud of spring, was a dog, his breath whistling through his blood-caked nose. He was about six months old but was already a big animal. The light caught the glistening blood running down the side of his head, and he weakly pulled himself around so that he faced us. He was as black as a night without stars. Blue-black. One eye shone white and luminous in the light, but the other was swollen shut and covered with clotting blood. Ernie stepped forward for a better look. The dog barked and tried to lunge forward.
“Christ!” Ernie said, stepping back. “It looks like he’s been shot in the head and shot in his left hip ... and I think he caught some birdshot in his chest. Whoever it was couldn’t shoot straight. That’s why he’s still alive ... and in one piece. Good-lookin’ dog, though, huh, Rose? Think he’s part Lab?”
The dog looked away from Ernie and focused on me with his one good eye before I could answer. I stared at that dog. He stared at me. His eye burned a path through all of the hidden memories in my head. Standing on that dusky gravel road, I felt the sudden chill of knowing what the reality of his wounds meant. The same meaning that accompanies a calf born too deformed to live or a piglet whose back has been broken by the carelessness of its mother’s bulky roll in the pen. It is not a mean decision but one that comes with the harshness of rural life and expensive veterinarian bills. Ernie had anticipated what was coming and had already retrieved the shotgun from the back of the truck. I ignored the gun and squatted, resting on the balls of my feet.
“You’re right. Looks like almost all Lab. Poor fella,” I crooned.
He stopped growling and whimpered. Then Ernie cautiously moved toward him again. His good eye left me and zeroed in on Ernie. He growled, this time baring his teeth. That’s how I knew it was a man that shot him and threw him into that ditch. His head must have been searing with pain, like someone stuck a knife into it, but he could still tell a woman from a man.
I loved him in that instant.
“Stop,” I said. “Not this time. I can fix him up.”
“Oh, Lord, Rose,” Ernie said. “It’s pretty bad. He’s never gonna be the same. He’s gotta be in a hell of a lot of pain too.”
I started to get up and prepare myself for a good fight with Ernie. But as I stood up, a sudden warmth that felt almost blessed infused me from my belly up to my chest. I am not a religious person, but I can’t think of any other way to describe it. It was like that circular feeling I had when I anticipated being a mother and remembered what it was like to be mothered, that feeling of having been chosen without having to ask. And this dog chose me.
“Well?” my husband asked, turning to face me.
Then the name just popped into my head. “Angel,” I said. “We’re going to take him home and call him Angel.”
“Angel?” Ernie said, giving me a funny look. “He looks more like a Bruno to me.”
“Angel,” I repeated.
Ernie shrugged and walked to the bed of the truck for some twine. Angel’s good ear stood up like a small wing. I kept talking to him until he slumped back into the mud. He gazed into the flashlight beam and became mesmerized enough by both the pain and the light so that Ernie could grab his muzzle and tie the twine around it so he wouldn’t bite us. Then we took him home.
I don’t know how he lived. Whoever tried to blow his brains out had missed the best part, the telling part. Angel has fits every now and then, chasing his tail a
round and around, and sometimes he gallops in his sleep, his legs scissoring through the air and going nowhere. His head appears a little lopsided when you look at him straight on, and the shredded remains of his one ear wave in the breeze. They are soft, though, when you touch them, like strips of black chamois cloth. He let me touch him from the very beginning. But it took Angel a long time to trust Ernie. I’ve always been secretly proud that Angel took to me right off. I’m good with animals and children, but Ernie’s better.
Angel’s memory is whole and enduring. I don’t think any of the buckshot got into that part of his brain even though I can feel with my fingertips the round bumps of lead coming to the surface when I rub his head. When he loves, he loves completely, recognizing someone he trusts even after years of not seeing him or her. He lopes down the driveway in an easy way, his big tongue hanging out. This is the way he greets women and children. Yet his hatred is just as complete, just as absolute. He hates men, all men, except Ernie and our neighbor Bill Lucas and his brother, Jimmy, even though Bill’s a grown man now and not the little boy who spent so much time visiting us and even though Jimmy has been dead for fourteen years, somewhere in Vietnam.
Angel’s my dog. He sits in the cab of the truck with his big muzzle poking out of the window, tasting the wind as we fly down the road.
I’m almost done with the dishes. It’s seven o’clock, it’s hotter than hell, and I’ve got the blues really bad. I look out the window in the hope that I’ll think of something else besides crying when a flash of color catches my eye from the Lucas field. Then I see Bill Lucas in the field. Angel sees him too and scrambles to his feet. His good ear rises like a flag, but he doesn’t bark.
The Turtle Warrior Page 19