The Turtle Warrior (31 page)

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.

—Roberta Hill, “A Song for What Never Arrives”

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 around 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.

“There goes your friend,” I say softly, but of course the dog can’t hear me through the window.

Bill stops then. Just stops and stands there and faces the big swamp. Angel continues to watch him silently. He lifts his nose. I turn my head for just a minute, and that’s when Angel barks, once. I look back just in time to see Bill get swallowed into the thick cover of those swamp cedars. This is the fifth time this summer I’ve seen him disappear like that into the swamp. I stand up on my toes to catch a glimpse of him, but he’s gone, and the only thing I see now is my husband by the toolshed, watching Bill just like me, just like the dog. Once last summer I saw Bill up close at the Standard station where he works and was shocked by the oily stubble and savage look of his face. His eyes are no longer the soft gray color they were when he was a kid. They are a rock gray now, and like a split rock, they are small but with jagged edges.

We wait and watch, but nothing. Ernie’s shoulders sag when he realizes that Bill will not reappear, and he trudges off toward the barn, fifty-eight years of exhaustion in every step.

We will not talk about this. My husband does not know that I know he watches the Lucas place, looking for signs of life, a vigorous wave of a hand or the yellow halo of the yard light when night falls. The little boy who used to visit our farm, eat dinner with us, and play with the dog grew into a remote and painfully shy young man. We see him rarely and almost always at a distance. And the oddest thing is that his name is never spoken between us ... as though he were dead instead of his brother, Jimmy. Which is nonsense because we do
see him,
working, walking, or driving, even if it isn’t often. It hurts Ernie that Bill does not come to our place anymore or accept visits easily from us. But Ernie doesn’t talk about that either. He deals with his pain like most men, treating it as though it doesn’t exist and therefore cannot be talked about.

I, on the other hand, have never been known to stay quiet. When I’m in pain, I cry a blue streak, and when I’m angry, I yell like hell. And when something is bothering me, I talk. A lot.

But I don’t have another person to talk to easily outside of Ernie, who has been punishing me with silence for the past two weeks and who has even struggled to keep his feet from touching mine while we sleep. I don’t even know what I’m being punished for, that’s how nonexistent our conversations have been. I’ve given up trying, fearful that I might use the most intimate details that people who have lived together for a long time can carry like swords. But I still need to talk to somebody. Most of our neighbors are a good two, three miles away and busy farmers like us. So I talk to the dog, whose eyes have taken on a kind of old man wisdom to match his graying muzzle.

Some days it’s hilarious. Angel patiently trails behind me as I do the housework, ducking behind a chair when I vacuum, sitting by the bathroom door as I scrub the toilet and floor, or lying on the porch while I peel vegetables or count eggs, all the while listening to the constant run of my mouth.

It is only at night when I let Angel out of the house that he leaves me for a few hours, running out the door and into the nearest patch of woods with the determination of a reconnaissance pilot, his black coat giving him a natural camouflage at night. In the past I had only an inkling of what he did on these forays, what any male dog would do, and him especially, pent up all day in the house with me. But lately I’ve suspected that Angel’s nightly journeys are not meaningless wanderings or chance matings, and if he could talk, he would tell me things that my husband never does. It frightens me. Other women who are isolated and lonely drink or pick fights with their silent husbands or take up with other men or maybe just suffer silently. I talk to the dog. And watch a little boy who was never mine and who has long since grown up and abandoned me.