The Turtle Warrior (44 page)

“I think you have a new name,” Rosemary said after they’d gotten Bill home and put him to bed. They sat under the yellow light at the kitchen table, too exhausted to even drink their coffee. Ernie tented his hands over his forehead. He was more tired than he ever thought was possible, and his arms ached from wrestling Bill into the truck.

“Let me guess,” he said, rubbing his hands down his face and looking at Rosemary. “Fuckin’ bastard.”

His wife smirked.

“I’ll have to set him straight the next time,” Ernie wisecracked. “It’s fuckin’ half-breed. Not fuckin’ bastard. My folks were
married.”

They laughed then until their lungs burned, until they coughed from lack of air.

Rosemary and Claire went with Ernie and Bill to the first few weeks of AA meetings in Cedar Bend. Then it was only Ernie and Bill driving to Cedar Bend every Monday night.

Early in May Bill tipped again. He told them he was going for a walk after dinner. When ten o’clock rolled around, Ernie walked outside and contemplated how far Bill might have gotten on foot and if he had walked the six miles into town.

Tough love, they preached at the weekly meetings. Tough love.

Jesus Christ!
he fumed.
Tough on who?

He decided to heed the advice. Let Bill fall down wherever he was. But of course Ernie could not sleep. He paced his kitchen floor until he went outside and walked up and down his driveway.

He remembered on his second time down the driveway. Claire had warned him. The Lucas farm was a veritable liquor store, all of it buried underground. He didn’t have to imagine John Lucas doing it. Ernie could see the tall and slope-shouldered man rooting around in the dark when he could not or did not want to go into town. Combing the ground and then digging with the obsessiveness of a red squirrel looking for a lost stockpile of pinecones. Claire had estimated that the entire field behind their barn held bottles beneath its surface. She had gone through their barn with a hay rake. She found and drained twenty bottles of Ever Ready, buried and insulated by old hay and hay bales. At least the barn was clean. But a whole field? How was he going to find all that booze? He looked down at the dog patrolling beside him. He wondered if he could teach Angel to scent alcohol like the pigs they used in Europe to sniff out truffles.

He sat down on the porch steps with the dog. He had a hunch and was proved right when he heard Bill before he saw him, coming from the direction of the Lucas farm. Claire was right. High-proof alcohol, it seemed, could be preserved for eternity in a gopher hole, despite the frost line.

When Bill saw Ernie, he ran into the small patch of cedar swamp just north of the house. Ernie chased and tackled him, and they fell down in the mud, the dog barking wildly from the edge of the barnyard. In an attempt to pin Bill’s arms behind his back, Ernie missed one of Bill’s flailing fists. It careened off his cheekbone, just missing his left eye. He dragged a howling Bill out of the swamp and into the barnyard, where he could see him under the light. Bill twisted out of Ernie’s grasp, and the two men circled each other underneath the yard light.

The dog would not stop barking. Ernie was afraid that Rosemary would wake up, if she hadn’t done so already. So he stood still, and finally so did Bill. They eyed each other from ten feet away. Bill was tanked, but he did not wobble or weave. His feet remained solidly planted to the ground. He was shivering, though, his arms wrapped around his chest. Mud was caked over one side of his face, gumming the eyelashes on his left eye together so that he had to squint.

Bill glanced at the dog. The dog’s barking had diminished to a whining growl, but he remained agitated, walking between the two men.

“For as drunk as you are, you run pretty fast.”

Ernie bent over and rested his hands on his thighs, but he kept his head up and his sight pinned on Bill. The twenty-four-year-old certainly looked better than he had six months ago. Although he remained slender, it was not the skeletal look of a crow-picked deer carcass. Food had put enough flesh on his frame so that Bill carried himself with the languidness of a long-limbed cowboy.

Ernie wiped his brow. He could hear the wind of his own breathing as it struggled to regain its normal rhythm through the pipes of his lungs. He could not figure Bill out. During the day he was deceptively quiet but easygoing and helpful. Occasionally he betrayed that calm by nervously pulling on his thumbs. But if he got a hold of some hard liquor like the bottle of Wild Turkey Ernie had found, he was just that.
Wild.

Jesus! He got worked up.

Ernie remembered seeing Jimmy drunk a couple of times, but it was nothing like this. Bill seethed and foamed with the rage of a rodeo bull. Bill was looking at him now with an expression that could not be mistaken. Hate.

Ernie took a deep breath, lifted his head just like the dog when he wanted to sniff the air. If he got any closer to Bill, he’d get loopy just on the exhaust coming out of the kid’s mouth.

Tomorrow he’d have to do something about that field, about the supply resting in its soil. It was evident that John Lucas had taken great care never to run out of what made him tick. He had apparently buried his treasures down far enough so that the freeze of winter would not shatter all of the bottles. Ernie wondered how long Bill had combed through the grass to find a mound. How long did it take him to dig up even one bottle? Then he briefly pondered if hard liquor aged with the changing seasons. Could the whiskey in the bottles have evaporated enough so that instead of being a hundred proof, they were two hundred proof? Alcohol distilled so much that it could kill its consumer. Or anybody close to that consumer.

He straightened up slowly. He was too old at fifty-nine to be physically fighting.

“Hell, Bill, what is it this time?”

Bill’s face crumpled. A thin stream of saliva ran out of the corner of his mud-crusted mouth and rolled down his chin.

“You!” he screamed. “You were always there for James. You went hunting with him! You never took me! I was alone over there!” He stopped and roughly wiped the mud away from his lips with one hand. “You think it was a picnic living with the old man? At least James had you! I didn’t have anybody!”

Ernie groaned inwardly. He hadn’t thought and shouldn’t have spoken as he had. He didn’t mean to sound uncaring or fed up, but he was tired. Still, he should have been more careful.

The dog paced between the two men. Ernie opened his mouth to apologize, to try to explain those lost fifteen years, but Bill beat him to it.

“You wanna know what happened after James left?”

Bill walked until he stood directly underneath the yard light. Then he undid his belt, pulled the zipper down on his jeans, and shoved both his underwear and his jeans down to his knees. He pulled off his T-shirt. Tilted back his shaking head and bit down on one corner of his dirt-smeared mouth. The cracking in his voice.

“Take a good look.”

Ernie stumbled forward and held out his hands as if to shield his face. It couldn’t be what he thought it was. He could feel the pulsing underneath his left eye, the throb of what he knew would be a shiner in the morning. He lowered his hands and stared at Bill’s nakedness. He thought Rosemary had been strangely possessive, insisting on being the only one to help Bill with his bedpan and then, when he could stand and walk, being the only one to escort him to the bathroom. She had been the only one who gave him his baths while he remained bedridden.

It couldn’t be what he thought it was, and he had to fight to keep breathing while his eyes took in what was shown to him.

Rather than the normal-size testicles of a grown man, Bill had lumps the size of small walnuts. Across those lumps were brownish red circles like full moons. Bill had the same lunar scars on his upper thighs and in the creases where his thighs met his groin. On the head of his penis.

Ernie blew air out of his mouth and gulped it back in against the sudden rage that sucker-punched him. Although he did not utter it, a scream ripped through the creases of his brain and bottled up near his ears. The pressure in his ears. He thought he was going to blow up.

He had been so preoccupied with Jimmy, with the possibility of his appearance again, with his own guilt and paralyzed grief for fifteen years that he had done to Bill what it appeared everyone else had done to Bill. They did not question his silence but relinquished the quiet boy to a dark corner, and because he did not speak out, they thought he was all right and forgot about him.

Ernie had trouble focusing on Bill, but he limped toward the young man anyway until he stood in front of him. Still breathing hard against the pain in his chest, Ernie bent and gently pulled up first Bill’s underwear and then his jeans. Zipped up his fly and buckled his belt. He wrapped his arms around Bill’s waist and rested one cheek against Bill’s bare chest. And sobbed.

Neither one of them could recall how they got inside the house and made it up the stairs. Ernie only vaguely remembered taking Bill’s boots off before tucking him into bed. Bill cried and would not let go of him, would not let Ernie leave the room. So Ernie wedged himself next to Bill on the twin bed and held him until they both fell asleep.

They did not hear the muffled dragging going up the staircase. Or realize that they had left the bedroom door ajar. The arthritic old dog took one step at a time, hauling his stiff and painfully knotted hind legs up behind him.

Rosemary found them all the next morning. Ernie and Bill asleep on the bed. Angel asleep in the corner behind the door.

ON THE FIRST DAY HE awoke with complete clarity, Bill became aware that he was not in his own bedroom but in a bedroom faintly familiar to him. He tried to raise one hand and discovered that both his arms had been tied to the bed. He turned his head and saw the IV stand and the saline bag hanging from a hook with its tube trailing to his right arm. He tried jerking his arms free, but it was no use. He did not have the muscle strength to try more than twice. Then he saw Angel.

The dog was lying in the corner by the door. Bill dimly recalled a night in which he’d seen the dog in the field, but he could not be sure that it had been just a dream. The dog coughed and yawned. His breathing was a wheeze and a rattle, as though the air passing to and from his body had to pass nearly insurmountable obstacles. He could not believe the dog was still alive.
If I’m twenty-four,
Bill thought,
then Angel must be at least sixteen years old.

He watched as the dog got up stiffly and stretched. Noticed that his muzzle and the hair around his eyes were ivory. The dog recovered from his stretch, yawned again, and sat. He stared back at Bill.

Ernie did sport a shiner and a pouch of fluid under his one eye the morning after his tussle with Bill, but he only weakly kidded Bill about a possible career in boxing and then told him to rest. Ernie didn’t eat breakfast. He mumbled something about town to Rosemary and got into his truck. He was gone all day and most of the night.