The Turtle Warrior (41 page)

Ernie placed Bill on the same twin bed he had slept in when he was a child and was permitted to spend a few rare nights sleeping over. Then Ernie slumped into the yellow chintz-covered rocking chair in the corner. His arms were so sore, he said, that he wasn’t sure if he’d ever be able to lift them above his shoulders again. I had to hold my breath as I pulled off Bill’s rank outer clothes, then his boots, socks, pants, and shirt. I fingered each piece of clothing before dropping them to the floor and then looked at Bill’s nearly naked body. No blood anywhere.

“He’s not shot.”

“I never said he was. I found him on the ridge,” Ernie said, and sighed. “Or I should say he found me. He’s dead drunk.”

I considered Bill as being closer to dead. The pelvic bones jutting up like river bluffs. The lower abdomen so sunken that it could have held water and a few minnows. There was little fat on him. Even his butt cheeks were as flat and as thin as Swedish pancakes. His underwear would have slipped down his legs effortlessly if I had stood him up. I looked at his face. The cracked and chapped lips and hair as dry as ripe corn tassels. The white spittle gathered in the corners of his mouth. The swollen eyelids red-rimmed and crusted with eye sand. His was not the body of a happy drunk, a drunk of evenings and parties. He did not even have the body of a middle-aged drunk. Bill reminded me of those men I saw as a child. Impoverished and despairing men of the Depression, homeless and starving slowly because they had no will to live and no appetite for food. Whatever money they acquired all went for beer, wine, whiskey, and toward the end raw alcohol, which often killed them. They were found dead on the outskirts of Cedar Bend, sometimes in the alley behind the old hotel, and once a group of them were found frozen to death in Washaleski’s barn. They all had that pickled-in-formaldehyde look, green-tinged white skin from their self-inflicted drowning. I ran the years in my head. Bill was twenty-three years old.

I drew a hot bath for Ernie while he set up an electric heater on one of the bedside tables. Before I shut off the faucets, I filled a large bowl with sudsy water and carried it into the bedroom. Ernie had brought up a chair from the kitchen for me to sit on, and I took out a washcloth and bath towel from the linen closet. As my hand pressed the green washcloth below the surface of the warm water, I could hear Ernie groan as he lowered himself into the tub and then whistle as his cold limbs hit the steaming water.

I began washing Bill’s head, tilting it from side to side, stopping to place two fingers on one of the arteries of his neck. His pulse was weak but not as bad as I thought it would be. Bill’s eyes rolled underneath his eyelids, but they did not open.

There are the normal ABCs of the human body. What should be there from birth and then a record of normal life experiences as they impact the body. A scraped knee scar from climbing a tree, the fleshy bumps left from chicken pox pustules that were scratched repeatedly, and the pincushion of a vaccination shot on the upper arm. The last time I’d seen Bill naked was when he was six years old. He sheepishly allowed me to undress him and give him a bath after a day of play spent in our muddy farmyard. The shivering thighs and the small bud of a penis contracting so that it was almost hidden between his legs. The sweet timidity of a little boy.

I didn’t bother to pull Bill’s underwear off. His briefs were so grimy that I took the scissors from the bedside drawer and cut them free. I tilted the shade on the bedside lamp so that I could see Bill better. I bent down and wet the washcloth again and then stood up. It was only when I heard Ernie washing himself, the splash of water as he soaped up his own washcloth and rubbed it vigorously over himself, that I realized that I hadn’t made contact with Bill’s skin. That the washcloth in my hand was dripping soapy water onto his genitals. I stared as the water trickled over the skin and disappeared between his thighs.

A naked body can also tell stories to the practiced eye. After what we’d been through the previous summer, I wanted to be free from the weight of secrets and bad dreams. I wanted Ernie to be well, and I wanted peace. And here was yet another secret. One that burned my eyes and hurt so bad that I couldn’t detach from it. I didn’t know what to do.
I didn’t know what to do.

I heard more splashing from the bathroom. I wasn’t sure how long Ernie would stay in the tub. I quickly finished washing Bill. I remember how the heat came out in waves from the red coils of the old heater. How it emitted a sound that was like a baby’s rattle. I had to take my red cardigan off because the sweat was pouring down my face and stinging my eyes. I ducked into our bedroom and grabbed a pair of Ernie’s pajama bottoms from a dresser drawer. I swabbed Bill down with the towel, slid the pajama bottoms over his feet and up his legs. His legs were so long that the pajama bottoms ended just below his knees. I brought the cotton blankets up from the foot of the bed and tucked them under and around his long body until he was swaddled so tightly that only I would be able to uncover him.

I remember walking down the stairs to the kitchen to get two cups of coffee. The dog slept as though the birdshot sprinkled on his sides were a forgotten irritation. I wrote a note to myself and taped it to the refrigerator door: “Angel—shot of penicillin tonight. BBs in A.M.”

I walked up the stairs and handed a cup to my husband soaking in the tub before I sat on the toilet cover and watched him. His chest glistened with water and did not reveal his fifty-eight years as it did on some men. His pectoral muscles were taut from hard work, his shoulders and arms contoured and firm. If our night had been different, I would have stripped and stepped into our large antique tub, and eased myself down until my back was against his chest. As I had done in the old days after making love. I mindlessly lifted the cup to my lips. The first sip burned the roof of my mouth.

Ernie took a drink of his coffee before resting the cup on the edge of the tub. Leaned his head back and gazed at me.

“Now we know what he was doing out there all this time.”

I thought of what I’d just seen and could not fully take in or even speak of.

“Well,” I murmured, “we know some of it. We may never know all of it.”

Ernie took another sip of coffee before placing the cup down on the tile floor. I stared at the familiar keloid scars on his brown skin from shrapnel wounds. I could see two gray bumps on his right shoulder, the skin stretched thin as though they were erupting pimples. After taking care of the dog in the morning, I would then go to work on Ernie. I always lanced the bumps with a razor blade and squeezed out the nugget of metal. I was the archaeologist of my husband’s body, extracting history from thirty-nine years ago. It seems perverse, but I save those nuggets, putting them in a jelly jar and keeping the jar on the shelf with my other preserves.

I turned and stared out the bathroom window. The snow was coming down faster, so white that I wouldn’t have known it was nighttime. It was a November storm that would cover everything, all the gut piles left in the woods from the first day of hunting. It would have covered Bill if Ernie had not found him. Or if he had not found Ernie.

I had the equipment and the saline bags to start an IV in Bill. When he could eat without throwing up, I’d have to start him on something mild for his stomach. Cream of rice or cream of wheat. We would have to take turns sitting with him. The delirium tremors would start in a day or maybe sooner. If we were lucky, he’d have only mild ones, given that he was so young and not a career alcoholic yet. Until I could figure out what to do or what to say, I would be the only one to wash and dress Bill. I was thinking of asking Ernie if we should take Bill to the detox center in Cedar Bend in the morning when he spoke.

“Have you called Claire?”

I shall never forget how at that moment, as though Ernie’s voice had summoned her, Claire banged on our back door.

How she walked inside the kitchen almost unrecognizable, dressed in her late husband’s outdoor clothes. Huge Sorel boots on her feet, men’s red-and-black-checked wool pants with suspenders, and an oversize parka covered with snow. I reached forward and pulled back the hood.

“I need help. I can’t find Bill.”

That breaking of fine china voice. A mother’s voice near the point of hysteria.

“We have him. Ernie found him.”

Claire remained motionless and stared at me. I repeated it a little louder as though she were deaf.

“We have him. Ernie found him.”

I cautiously reached forward and grasped the zipper of the parka. When Claire showed no resistance, I unzipped the parka, took it off, and threw it across the kitchen table. I unbuckled the suspenders on Claire’s wool pants and removed the thick leather mittens and their woolen liners from her hands. Claire lowered herself into one of the chairs so I could pull off the oversize boots.

“Lift up.”

She obediently braced her hands against the sides of the chair and lifted her rear. I rolled the pants down from the waistband. Then I grabbed one of Claire’s hands, felt how cold they were.

“How did you get here?”

“My car got stuck at the farm. I walked across the fields.”

I got up and poured another cup of coffee.

“I want you to drink this,” I said, putting the cup in Claire’s hands, “and then I’ll take you upstairs to see Bill.”

CLAIRE AND I DRANK THREE pots of coffee that night and didn’t sleep at all. She sat in the chintz-covered rocker on the right side of the bed. Ernie sat in another rocking chair at the foot of the bed, and I sat on the left side, on the kitchen chair.

Ernie replied to Claire’s questions with as little detail as possible but enough to soothe her. That he had found Bill on the ridge while he was hunting. That Bill was drunk and crying, and that when he calmed down and fell asleep, Ernie was able to carry him to our place. Just as the snowstorm was beginning to hit.

“Bill was out there by himself?” she asked.

Ernie sat up, smacked out of his exhaustion for a moment. I didn’t dare look at him.

“Yes, he was. Was Bill hunting with someone else?”

“Oh, no,” she said quickly. “He didn’t hunt. He just liked being in the woods. I was just worried because this is hunting season and people do trespass on our land.”

We let it drop at that. I could tell Ernie was bothered by Claire’s question, but he was exhausted and struggling to stay awake. The warmth of the bath, the rhythmic rattling of the electric heater had put him in a hypnotic state. Finally I watched as his eyelids dropped and then shut. He slumped, his head falling to one shoulder, and was out.

We sipped our coffee in silence at first. Claire occasionally reached out to caress Bill’s cheek. I had brought my knitting up from the wicker basket in the living room and pretended to concentrate on adding rows to the sweater I was making.

How strange it was. In all the years that we lived less than a mile apart, this was the longest time I had ever spent with Claire. The first time I’d ever been that physically close to her. She always declined my invitations to come over for dinner, my offers to help, and she never returned my waves when I saw her in town. Even so, I knew we were alike in some ways. We were not the barrel-shaped, knee-slapping women sitting at Clemson’s Bar and Bowling Alley, having one too many beers and laughing in rough, smoky voices, waiting for their league’s turn to bowl. Nor were we women who participated in 4-H or the PTA. We didn’t wear our hair in towers of shellacked meringue that got washed and styled only once a week. Beehive hairdos that had gone out of style years ago except in Olina. Some of those women stretched their styling and washing to once every two weeks, and it would not have surprised me if bugs were hidden in the honeycombs of those columns. Claire used to have black hair like me. But it had turned completely white, and she wore it in a short pageboy that was becoming to her. My own hair was a mix of silver and black. I had always kept it long because Ernie liked it that way.

We had the same taste in books. I know because I saw her name on the library cards of the same books that I borrowed from the bookmobile.

There were differences between us, though. I had gone to nursing school, which was an education and a trade in those days. From what little I picked up from the boys when they were young, Claire had gone to a private liberal arts college in Milwaukee. She still went to church on Sundays. Ernie and I hadn’t stepped into a church in years. I had, all things considered, a wonderful husband. She had had the husband of a B-rated horror movie.

But Claire had children. I did not.

I watched her out of the corners of my eyes. Watched her sip her coffee.

I had wondered for years what her story was and why we never saw company at their place. Company, as in relatives. You would have thought that some of her family would have visited after Jimmy was declared MIA. Or at John’s death. The boys never mentioned grandparents or aunts and uncles. I didn’t ask them. They were children, and I didn’t want to make them feel uncomfortable.