The Turtle Warrior (26 page)

“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 knew 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.