The Turtle Warrior (45 page)

Despite having a self-inflicted headache that would drop a moose, Bill did all the chores that day in Ernie’s absence and was grateful when it was time to go to bed. He was so tired. Just as he was pulling off his boots, he heard a whine and a scratch at the door. He let the dog in, and Angel limped to his usual corner behind the door. Bill stripped down to his briefs and climbed into bed but did not go to sleep right away. He listened to the labored breathing of the dog and shifted to lie on his side, to quietly observe the sleeping animal. But Angel was not asleep. His large dark eyes caught and reflected the moonlight coming in through the window.

“This dog has been through hell and back,” Rosemary commented that morning as she watched Bill wipe away the eye mucus that crusted the corners of Angel’s eyes. “Do you remember when we found him?”

Bill couldn’t remember, but he lied because he didn’t want Rosemary to think he’d forgotten.

“Yeah. He’s an old dog.”

She leaned down from her chair and scratched the dog under his chin. “Angel knows me better than anyone,” she said. Thoughtfully pausing, she added, “Even better than Ernie sometimes. I can’t bear the thought of losing him, but he can’t live forever. And the aspirin I give him for his arthritis can only do so much.”

With the dog’s crusty eyes watching him, Bill suddenly did remember the nearly half-dead six-month-old puppy that Angel had been and his tenacious will to survive. They’d found him in a ditch.

Bill could not look at the dog any longer and turned his face into his pillow. Bill had done the same thing a year and a half ago, taking the corner too fast and spinning the car into a full circle before it slid, back end first, into the ditch. Then he passed out. Wally Wykowski had found him after having driven out to the farm, wondering why his mechanic hadn’t shown up for work.

A couple of weeks ago his ability to dream suddenly returned, and he did not have good dreams but nightmares. Images so vivid they spiked right through him and caused him to wake up yelling. One night he woke up covered in a sweat that chilled him and that pierced his senses. What he saw and felt was neither a dream nor a nightmare. It had been real once.

That smell in the middle of the night of diesel oil and beer and of days-old sweat. The big hand between his legs, squeezing down with a viselike force. The pain was so intense that his eyes rolled to the back of his head. He dimly saw the glow of the cigarette, felt it burn into his thighs. Then on the tip of his penis, and he screamed. A hand was slapped over his mouth. The hand with the cigarette. Hot ash was flicked into his face. Always the same thing said. A chanting in the middle of the night.

“There is only one man in this house.

“Only one man.

“Only one man.

“Only one man.
”

Then Bill could remember nothing but waking up. His bed was often wet, but sometimes he made it to the toilet on time, and that was even worse. His groin cramped, and he pissed fire, the stream of urine coming out of his body in pumped jerks.

It did not occur to him that he could tell anyone because he did not know if it was real. It had a nightmarish quality, something that couldn’t be explained in the daytime. Yet when he looked down at himself, it was shamefully visible on him.

He wanted a drink so bad that he considered drinking the awful salty stuff that Rosemary cooked with. He knew where she kept her cooking sherry, and he swung his legs out of bed. He was reaching for his pants when the dog blew air loudly through his nose and clacked his jaws as though he were cold. The dog stared at him and clacked his jaws again. He’d never heard a dog do that before, and it frightened him. Angel had stretched out so that he was lying in front of the closed door, and Bill wasn’t sure if the dog would let him pass.

“You weren’t the only one we had to take care of that day,” Rosemary said, making conversation at the lunch table. She was uncharacteristically edgy, and he noticed that she looked out the window at the driveway a lot during the course of that day.

“Angel had been gone all night, the night before. He showed up just before Ernie brought you home,” she went on. “His right side was covered with birdshot. Somebody had shot him. We still don’t know who or why. Thank God it was birdshot,” she added, looking down at the dog lying near their feet, “and not a deer slug.”

He had told Ernie that he couldn’t remember much from that night, and it was the truth at the time. That night came to him in bits and pieces, out of the blue and mostly while he was working during the day. But it came to him now in one big chunk. He remembered raising the gun and being angry at the dog. How the dog had stood up and become a man. Then fire and burning.

He crawled back into bed and pulled his knees up to his chest. Tomorrow he would have to tell Rosemary. He had shot the dog.

He wished his mouth were not so dry. He wished Ernie were home.

The dog took a deep breath, exhaled noisily, and rested his head on his front feet.

He scrutinized the dog in the moonlight. He remembered Angel as being so black that he had merged with the night, and the only way the dog had made his presence known was through his breathing. Now his coat appeared flecked with stars, small white hairs interspersed through his body, and of course, the ivory muzzle. The changing season of old age. Winter coming on the dog.

Bill wondered why the dog didn’t hate him or give any outward sign of it. The dog had to have known it was him, smelled him, and of course, he sat in the field and watched him. Wouldn’t Bill have hated someone who had shot him?

He thought about Angel lying in that ditch fifteen years ago. He had been put there to die by someone else until Ernie and Rosemary had pulled him out.

“It wasn’t easy getting him out of that ditch.” Rosemary laughed. “He growled and tried to lunge at Ernie. We hypnotized him with a flashlight. But he was so weak too. Ernie was the brave one who tied the twine around his muzzle. It took him a long time,” she said, “to get used to Ernie.”

“He likes him now.”

“Oh, sure. But it took awhile. He still likes women better. And children who don’t tease him. You just prefer us gals, don’t you?” she crooned to the dog, rubbing the top of his head. “He never forgets anything,” she added.

Bill wiped his face. He had dug his own ditch. Steeped in the mud and shit of his life while it seemed everybody whizzed past him. Ernie and Rosemary and his mother had pulled him out even while he fought against them.

He sat up and, leaning forward, looked out the window.

Bill was staying in what used to be Ernie’s boyhood bedroom. He could see the barn and the field behind it from the window. He briefly tried to imagine Ernie as a little boy and what Ernie saw out of that window fifty years ago.

Then he thought of his father. It was going to be hard to stay sober. What else would help him against the memory of that remorseless, cold-eyed man or the chanting Bill still heard in his sleep? What would brace him against the hatred of the man and the marks he left as though he had branded his son with an identity he could never erase? His father had been one mean fucker, and stories about him still hovered in the community. Hovered over Bill.

Bill looked at the dog again. Angel had never lost his hatred of most men. His reaction to their presence was still so strong that their first priority was to get to the dog first when someone drove onto the Morriseau place, just in case Angel bit someone. What the dog had been through was visible on him. The lumps on his head. The one ear tattered as though it had been put through a paper shredder. How it waved in the wind like a shot-up flag.

Bill wiped his eyes again.

Some dogs wounded as badly as Angel had been either became so savage they had to be put down or they cowered and shied away from people, crying even if they were touched lightly. Angel had done neither. He had never walked as though he were wounded. He had acquired a ruff around his neck with age and a slow stroll that made his big shoulders ripple with authority. That announced his territory and his determination to protect those within it. Had Angel been a wolf or coyote, his scars and his age would have identified him. To have survived those injuries and have reached that age in the roughness of the natural world would have elevated him. Made him larger than life and a legend.