The Turtle Warrior (50 page)

Her mouth on his neck. The unbuttoning of his shirt. Then she removed her blouse, revealing a lacy bra. He fumbled, trying to unhook her bra from the back.

“The front,” she whispered, and lightly bit his ear.

The breasts that filled his hands. She unzipped his pants and pushed them down to his knees. He pulled her to him so that they were lengthwise on the couch. He became so lost in the dreaminess and intense sensation of arousal that he didn’t feel her slide his underwear down. Then she moved down his chest and bent over his pelvis to take his penis into her mouth. He momentarily came out of the haze of his arousal and began to sit up, but it was too late.

She froze and stared at his genitals.
“What is that?”

He saw the distaste, even the horror on her face. He panicked and squeezed his eyes shut.

“Is that a rash? Oh, God. Do you have herpes?” she fired away. “And
why
are your balls so small? You weren’t going to tell me, were you?” she shrieked.

He pushed her away and yanked up his underwear and then his pants. He reeled and crashed against walls on his way through the dimly lit rooms of her rented house, feeling as big and as ugly as Frankenstein. He nearly fell out her front door and stumbled down the broken cement steps before running for his car.

Bill frantically drove away from Olina and toward Cedar Bend. It was two in the morning when he got home, carrying a third six-pack of beer. He bumped against the kitchen table and knocked over a chair. He had been so drunk that he didn’t realize the light he was moving toward in the living room meant that his mother was sitting on the davenport.

“Bill,” she said faintly, “what happened?”

He dropped the six-pack on the floor. Heard the thud as it hit the wood, and he knew that he had dented and scratched the floorboards.

“Here,” he heard his mother say and felt her pull on one of his hands. “Sit down.”

He sat down and looked at her hand, a pearly shell inside his large paw. She was so small beside him. A little bird. A very tired little bird.

“What happened? Are you all right?”

He saw the years ahead through the inebriated wash of his brain. It was now 1983. He’d live at home with his mother and work at the Standard station. He’d avoid people in town. He’d never, ever date again. He could never forget that look of horror and disgust.

“Nobody,” he sputtered, “will ever want me.”

He leaned over, buried his head in his mother’s lap, and let his sorrow drain into her thighs.

Bill had been terrified to go to worK after that and to even walk through town. He imagined the teacher whispering to other teachers, the whispering growing until it became a roar in town. “Bill Lucas is deformed.”

But if she did talk, he was not aware of it, and nobody said anything at the station. He avoided her completely although she did not do the same for him.

“Don’t cry over that one,” Wally remarked one day after she left. She had brought her car in for an oil change, and Wally had another mechanic do it. Bill retreated to the picnic table behind the station and sipped a Coke. He waited until he was absolutely sure she was gone.

“Word has it that she has screwed any and everybody available, and I guess she’s now spending her nights driving to Cedar Bend. I think”—Wally chuckled, chewing on a peppermint-flavored toothpick—“she got Ray too. He’s been pretty ornery lately.”

Bill said nothing.

“Funny,” Wally went on, “she looks sweet, and you’d think she’d have more sense, teaching little kids and all. But I guess she’s a real bitch. Uses ’em and tosses ’em. She’s only here for the fall and she’s plowin’ these fields before she moves on.” Wally slapped Bill on the shoulder. “She wasn’t good enough for you, kid.”

Bill sometimes scrubbed himself raw in the shower. But it was the inside he couldn’t reach, and he had a funny mental picture of himself: a green garden hose shoved down his throat while his pants were dropped around his ankles, drinking and peeing himself clean. Nothing made him feel at home with himself. Nothing except for spending time in the woods or on the river. Or on the ridge.

He frightened his mother whenever he left the house and walked through the field, into the swamp and toward the ridge. He could sense her watching him from her bedroom window. He did not want to hurt her, but he could not help it. There were days and evenings he had to go back. He could not say exactly why, but he was instinctively driven there.

It was November again, two days away from the first-year anniversary of when Ernie found him. He sat in his usual spot on top of the ridge, centered in the middle of the four red pines that had always been his imaginary room. He stared down at the kettle lake.

He knew what it was now. He thought that being on the ridge would help him regain what he saw and felt when he was younger, before he began drinking at the age of thirteen. He watched as a breeze rippled the surface of the lake. The lake reflected the color of the sky. A gunmetal gray.

A huge glacier, his mother had told him when he was five, created the lake. A glacier, she said, was a large bed of moving ice, like a giant mattress that could crawl. She said the glacier had many hands underneath it, some of them huge. Think, she said, of all the legs on a centipede. Only the glacier, she said, had hands. On every palm side of the hands were crusted boulders and sharp rocks. As the ice moved across their part of the world millions of years ago, the hands scooped and scoured out small holes and sometimes larger holes, which then filled with water. Lakes. Glacial moraine lakes. He had always imagined the hands as looking like the oven mitt that his mother used when she cleaned out the oven. One side was covered with a layer of steel wool. She had also told him that the ground underneath his feet was alive, and he remembered believing it because he felt it then.

He stretched out and stared up at the fading afternoon light filtering through the trees. He was conscious of his back as it made contact with the ground. His mother said the ground had a heartbeat, and if he was quiet enough, he would feel it and hear it.

They were outside that morning, and his mother was squatting on the balls of her bare feet, picking up rocks from the driveway. He watched her roll them between her hands and study their shapes before dropping them and picking up some more.

“Do you know what makes dirt?”

He shook his head. His mother was funny. He knew the formal word for it.
Eccentric.
While other Olina mothers talked about cooking, their hair and makeup, Tupperware parties, Mary Kay parties, or who was doing what in the community, his mother in her bare feet was talking to him about dirt on a cold November morning. He did notice that those shopping trips with Rosemary were paying off. His mother had nicer clothes, and she clearly felt better. Although her hair was white and her face carved with old worries and fears, she was still pretty in an oddly delicate way.

“It’s when geology and biology get mixed together. Organisms and rocks. Or an easier way to think about it is rocks and bodies. Isn’t that fascinating?”

He smiled. Her bliss was contagious.

“Yeah, Mom. It is.”