The Turtle Warrior

by Mary Relindes Ellis

  “The front,” she whispered, and lightly bit his ear.

  The breasts that filled his hands. She unzipped his pants and pushed them down to his knees. He pulled her to him so that they were lengthwise on the couch. He became so lost in the dreaminess and intense sensation of arousal that he didn’t feel her slide his underwear down. Then she moved down his chest and bent over his pelvis to take his penis into her mouth. He momentarily came out of the haze of his arousal and began to sit up, but it was too late.

  She froze and stared at his genitals. “What is that?”

  He saw the distaste, even the horror on her face. He panicked and squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Is that a rash? Oh, God. Do you have herpes?” she fired away. “And why are your balls so small? You weren’t going to tell me, were you?” she shrieked.

  He pushed her away and yanked up his underwear and then his pants. He reeled and crashed against walls on his way through the dimly lit rooms of her rented house, feeling as big and as ugly as Frankenstein. He nearly fell out her front door and stumbled down the broken cement steps before running for his car.

  Bill frantically drove away from Olina and toward Cedar Bend. It was two in the morning when he got home, carrying a third six-pack of beer. He bumped against the kitchen table and knocked over a chair. He had been so drunk that he didn’t realize the light he was moving toward in the living room meant that his mother was sitting on the davenport.

  “Bill,” she said faintly, “what happened?”

  He dropped the six-pack on the floor. Heard the thud as it hit the wood, and he knew that he had dented and scratched the floorboards.

  “Here,” he heard his mother say and felt her pull on one of his hands. “Sit down.”

  He sat down and looked at her hand, a pearly shell inside his large paw. She was so small beside him. A little bird. A very tired little bird.

  “What happened? Are you all right?”

  He saw the years ahead through the inebriated wash of his brain. It was now 1983. He’d live at home with his mother and work at the Standard station. He’d avoid people in town. He’d never, ever date again. He could never forget that look of horror and disgust.

  “Nobody,” he sputtered, “will ever want me.”

  He leaned over, buried his head in his mother’s lap, and let his sorrow drain into her thighs.

  Bill had been terrified to go to worK after that and to even walk through town. He imagined the teacher whispering to other teachers, the whispering growing until it became a roar in town. “Bill Lucas is deformed.”

  But if she did talk, he was not aware of it, and nobody said anything at the station. He avoided her completely although she did not do the same for him.

  “Don’t cry over that one,” Wally remarked one day after she left. She had brought her car in for an oil change, and Wally had another mechanic do it. Bill retreated to the picnic table behind the station and sipped a Coke. He waited until he was absolutely sure she was gone.

  “Word has it that she has screwed any and everybody available, and I guess she’s now spending her nights driving to Cedar Bend. I think”—Wally chuckled, chewing on a peppermint-flavored toothpick—“she got Ray too. He’s been pretty ornery lately.”

  Bill said nothing.

  “Funny,” Wally went on, “she looks sweet, and you’d think she’d have more sense, teaching little kids and all. But I guess she’s a real bitch. Uses ’em and tosses ’em. She’s only here for the fall and she’s plowin’ these fields before she moves on.” Wally slapped Bill on the shoulder. “She wasn’t good enough for you, kid.”

  Bill sometimes scrubbed himself raw in the shower. But it was the inside he couldn’t reach, and he had a funny mental picture of himself: a green garden hose shoved down his throat while his pants were dropped around his ankles, drinking and peeing himself clean. Nothing made him feel at home with himself. Nothing except for spending time in the woods or on the river. Or on the ridge.

  He frightened his mother whenever he left the house and walked through the field, into the swamp and toward the ridge. He could sense her watching him from her bedroom window. He did not want to hurt her, but he could not help it. There were days and evenings he had to go back. He could not say exactly why, but he was instinctively driven there.

  It was November again, two days away from the first-year anniversary of when Ernie found him. He sat in his usual spot on top of the ridge, centered in the middle of the four red pines that had always been his imaginary room. He stared down at the kettle lake.

  He knew what it was now. He thought that being on the ridge would help him regain what he saw and felt when he was younger, before he began drinking at the age of thirteen. He watched as a breeze rippled the surface of the lake. The lake reflected the color of the sky. A gunmetal gray.

  A huge glacier, his mother had told him when he was five, created the lake. A glacier, she said, was a large bed of moving ice, like a giant mattress that could crawl. She said the glacier had many hands underneath it, some of them huge. Think, she said, of all the legs on a centipede. Only the glacier, she said, had hands. On every palm side of the hands were crusted boulders and sharp rocks. As the ice moved across their part of the world millions of years ago, the hands scooped and scoured out small holes and sometimes larger holes, which then filled with water. Lakes. Glacial moraine lakes. He had always imagined the hands as looking like the oven mitt that his mother used when she cleaned out the oven. One side was covered with a layer of steel wool. She had also told him that the ground underneath his feet was alive, and he remembered believing it because he felt it then.

  He stretched out and stared up at the fading afternoon light filtering through the trees. He was conscious of his back as it made contact with the ground. His mother said the ground had a heartbeat, and if he was quiet enough, he would feel it and hear it.

  They were outside that morning, and his mother was squatting on the balls of her bare feet, picking up rocks from the driveway. He watched her roll them between her hands and study their shapes before dropping them and picking up some more.

  “Do you know what makes dirt?”

  He shook his head. His mother was funny. He knew the formal word for it. Eccentric. While other Olina mothers talked about cooking, their hair and makeup, Tupperware parties, Mary Kay parties, or who was doing what in the community, his mother in her bare feet was talking to him about dirt on a cold November morning. He did notice that those shopping trips with Rosemary were paying off. His mother had nicer clothes, and she clearly felt better. Although her hair was white and her face carved with old worries and fears, she was still pretty in an oddly delicate way.

  “It’s when geology and biology get mixed together. Organisms and rocks. Or an easier way to think about it is rocks and bodies. Isn’t that fascinating?”

  He smiled. Her bliss was contagious.

  “Yeah, Mom. It is.”

  He sat up. He’d have to leave soon. The sky was becoming a darker gray. He shivered. It reminded him of one February night when the moon was luminescent enough to change the sky from black to twilight gray. James had pulled him out of bed and taken him outside in the middle of the night, saying only that it was a night for foxes.

  On the field behind the barn lay a hard crust of snow that glittered under a full moon. Bill could hear several short, high-pitched barks coming from the field, and James had lifted him onto his shoulders so that Bill could see better. At first he saw nothing. Then James pointed and said, “See ’em? See ’em dancing over there?”

  Sure enough, a vixen and dog fox were chasing each other on top of the hard crust, running in playful circles and lifting themselves up on two hind legs as though to dance with each other. As the two boys watched, the vixen abruptly stopped running and crouched low as the dog fox maneuvered his body behind hers, roughly nipping the back of her neck. He then mounted the vixen, thrusting hard, and remained locked into his mate for what seemed like hours instead of minutes to Bill
.

  He tugged at his brother’s hood. “What’s wrong? Why are they fighting?”

  “They aren’t fighting. It’s their mating time. You know. To make little foxes.”

  Confused and uneasy, Bill watched as the dog fox suddenly released himself from the vixen and then nipped the back of her neck again.

  “I heard them barking. That’s how I knew,” James whispered to Bill, letting him slide off his shoulders.

  Bill lingered for a moment by the fence post. It was a magical night with the wind blowing through the shelterbelt of pines so that it sounded like a flute and the moon shining down on the fox pair as though to illuminate their performance.

  “You’re gonna freeze out here,” his brother said, returning to hoist his brother up on his shoulders again.

  Bill relaxed into the rhythm of his brother’s gait and watched the sky as his brother slowly worked his legs through the deep snow. Sister Agnes had told him that God lived in the sky with the Virgin Mary and their son, Jesus. Sister Agnes had told him that the Virgin was kind and gentle and loved little children. James told him that it was all a pile of crap, the stuff they tried to make you believe in Catholic school, but Bill did think the statue of the Virgin Mary in church was beautiful. Looking up, Bill had taken off his mitten and waved, just in case she was watching him.

  He brushed the pine needles and other leaf litter from his jacket. He laughed aloud. Only a nerdy backwoods kid would keep his innocent belief in the Virgin Mary after watching a pair of foxes screw their brains out. “Mating is part of a wider scope of natural stimuli that affects even humans,” he recalled his high school biology teacher saying.

  He flopped back down and rolled over on his side and stared at the lake again.

  A week ago he had taken his mother fishing on the river. He paddled and watched as she trailed her hand in the water, periodically lifting it and letting the drops run off her fingers before placing her hand back into the water. She seemed to be in good spirits, but he could tell something was bothering her. She waited until after they were done fishing and he had loaded the canoe on top of his new but used truck parked near the bridge.

  She unbuttoned the top pocket of her field jacket and pulled something out.

  “I’ve had these for a few years now. But I kept them because I didn’t think you were ready.”

  She pressed them into one of his hands. He felt metal and a chain. He opened his hand and stared at them.

  “A veteran who had gone back to help search for POWs in 1978 saw this around the neck of a little mountain boy. Very near what used to be the Khe Sanh Combat Base, where Jimmy was. Actually it was the Navy chaplain who came to the house that day with Ernie to tell us about Jimmy”

  Bill fingered his brother’s dog tags, their edges thick as though they had been partially melted and the metal chain they were connected to.

  His mother leaned against the side of the truck. “Do you understand what this means?”

  He knew why she picked this moment. She thought it would stop his forays back into the woods and to the ridge.

  “I know James is dead.” He sighed. “Can I have these?”

  His mother nodded and reached into her pocket again. “And these.”

  She gave him the medals. A Purple Heart. The Bronze Star.

  “They don’t mean much. But at least Jimmy earned them.”

  She paused.

  “Your father’s stories were never true. He never fought in WW Two.”

  “I figured.”

  Bill put the dog tags and the medals in his own coat pocket. He reached through the window and pulled out two cans of pop from the cab of the truck and gave her one. They drank in silence and listened to the river. Bill watched the last of the yellow birch leaves fall and drift onto the surface of the rapidly moving water.

  He wondered what his brother would have been like if he had lived. Would he have come home like so many other Vietnam vets? Visibly and invisibly wounded? In a few months, during the grip of late January, it would be the anniversary of his brother’s death.

  “How did you know,” he asked, startling his mother, “that James was dead?”

  She poured the rest of her soda onto the ground and gave the empty can to him.

  “Missing in action is an ambiguous phrase.”

  She crossed her arms and looked back at the river.

  “Think of what action means when you are fighting a war. It means that bombs and guns are going off. It means that something has happened to that person that is unmentionable and not visible. There is action, and in the middle of it, they cannot be seen or found. That’s the way I’ve always thought of it.”

  “Isn’t it possible,” Bill cautiously ventured, “that he was taken prisoner?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I knew this about your brother,” she said. “He would never have let himself be taken as a prisoner. He knew what could happen to a prisoner of war. The torture. He could never have tolerated that. Never did.”

  Bill drained the rest of his can with one swallow and threw both cans into the box of the truck. He glanced at her and wondered if she felt his brother in the way that he did. But he couldn’t ask.

  She set her face in such a way as to end the conversation. He knew that look well. She was not going to talk anymore. He used to think she did it on purpose just to yank his strings. But lately it came to him that she was of a generation and culture that didn’t talk much and that his mother was an aberration, talking more than her parents ever did. She could only give away so much information at one time. It exhausted her, riding against that ingrained stoicism, and she needed to break and rest before she could say more.

  IN THE MIDDLE OF NOVEMBER of ’83 the dog became more incapacitated, limping outside only when the need to urinate or defecate became intolerable. He barely made it beyond the porch steps. The piles of excrement from his aging dog’s body left a scent so overpowering that even after they were shoveled away, Ernie had to spread lime repeatedly over the spots. One night a week before Thanksgiving, Angel settled on his blanket and would not get up, nor would he eat or drink. Although Rosemary had always been the most attached to the dog, it was Bill who seemed to take Angel’s impending death the hardest. Bill had moved back home at the end of summer, but he spent the last five nights of Angel’s life in a sleeping bag on the Morriseaus’ kitchen floor. Angel died early in the morning three days before Thanksgiving.

  Ernie sat helplessly in the kitchen and watched as his wife and Bill knelt over the stiffening dog, their bodies wrenched with grief. He had always considered it a miracle that the dog lived in the first place. He did not ask Rosemary how much she paid or what strings she pulled to get the dog’s body cremated so that they could have his ashes for Thanksgiving morning.

  They had invited Claire and Bill to their house for the holiday. Ernie helped Claire in the kitchen while Rosemary and Bill bundled up. Ernie waved them off from the porch, but he watched them for a while as they somberly crossed the field and entered the swamp. Bill carried the canister with the dog’s ashes in his arms, and Ernie was pretty sure he knew where they were going.

  A couple of hours later Claire and Ernie were setting the table when they heard loud singing and bursts of laughter approaching the house.

  Ernie looked out the window and saw Rosemary and Bill striding arm in arm. The song was familiar. His wife’s head was nearly tucked under Bill’s armpit. Ernie glanced at Claire, who stood next to him.

  “Orbison. ‘In Dreams,’ ” she said.

  “I haven’t heard that song in years.”

  Claire smiled and shook her head. “Jimmy’s records. Bill must have found them.”

  1998

  HIS SON PLAYFULLY CHASES the dog in the yard, and Bill watches the boy as he delights in following the dog. The lanky Lab and collie mix occasionally stops and barks at the boy as if to challenge him. His son stops too, laughs, stomps his feet, and the dog begins running again. The sun is warm, and Bill is relaxed,
slouched on the steps of his porch. The past years seem like a lifetime ago, and watching the little boy who is his son makes him acutely aware of where he is now and where he has been.

  His mother was right. Small towns and the life in them could be cruel and self-defeating. He discovered in that first year of sobriety that there were many in the community who did not welcome his recovery. He had cheated them out of talk and out of the role they had willed upon him. He denied them the failure they wanted to focus on against the misery of their own lives. They wanted him to enact and carry on his father’s misdeeds for the rest of his life. The message was as plain as his first-grade Dick and Jane reader. See Bill run. See Bill fall.

  One day at the end of his shift at the gas station he blew his nose and noticed for the first time that the mucus was as black and tarry as the oil he cleaned out of car engines. He stared at the gummy and toxic substance wadded in his handkerchief and thought about how it was robbing his life little by little. That night he filled out his admissions and financial aid forms for the University of Minnesota. Although his grades from his senior year in high school were barely above a C because he had rarely shown up for class, his SAT scores were excellent.

  Still, leaving was hard. He would never forget the sight of his mother, Rosemary, and Ernie as they stood in front of Bailey Hall on the St. Paul campus, getting ready to climb back into the Morriseaus’ sedan and go home. He saw how love caved in their shoulders and threatened to collapse them at the knees. Ernie blew his nose. His mother absently wrung her hands. Rosemary shifted from foot to foot. They would do anything for him, so desperate were they to make things right and give him some happiness. They wedged themselves as much as they could against the past, acting as though they were killdeers, faking broken wings to trick the bad memories and bad spirits away from him so that he could run to safety. He was homesick and could not speak. He hugged them all and then picked up his duffel bag and quickly walked inside the dorm before he changed his mind.