The Turtle Warrior (52 page)

His mother was right. Small towns and the life in them could be cruel and self-defeating. He discovered in that first year of sobriety that there were many in the community who did not welcome his recovery. He had cheated them out of talk and out of the role they had willed upon him. He denied them the failure they wanted to focus on against the misery of their own lives. They wanted him to enact and carry on his father’s misdeeds for the rest of his life. The message was as plain as his first-grade Dick and Jane reader. See Bill
run. See Bill fall.

One day at the end of his shift at the gas station he blew his nose and noticed for the first time that the mucus was as black and tarry as the oil he cleaned out of car engines. He stared at the gummy and toxic substance wadded in his handkerchief and thought about how it was robbing his life little by little. That night he filled out his admissions and financial aid forms for the University of Minnesota. Although his grades from his senior year in high school were barely above a C because he had rarely shown up for class, his SAT scores were excellent.

Still, leaving was hard. He would never forget the sight of his mother, Rosemary, and Ernie as they stood in front of Bailey Hall on the St. Paul campus, getting ready to climb back into the Morriseaus’ sedan and go home. He saw how love caved in their shoulders and threatened to collapse them at the knees. Ernie blew his nose. His mother absently wrung her hands. Rosemary shifted from foot to foot. They would do anything for him, so desperate were they to make things right and give him some happiness. They wedged themselves as much as they could against the past, acting as though they were killdeers, faking broken wings to trick the bad memories and bad spirits away from him so that he could run to safety. He was homesick and could not speak. He hugged them all and then picked up his duffel bag and quickly walked inside the dorm before he changed his mind.

It had been the right thing to do.

College filled a part of him that had been starving. He felt himself rise with each challenging course. He loved studying. It was the best drink of his life. Every A he earned was a sword against the real and imaginary enemies in his head. He wanted them off the cliff that was his life. He wanted his brain to be free of all the unwanted garbage that was buried in it. The only dirt he wanted near him was the real thing. As if she could read his mind, his mother sent him a pint-size pickle jar full of dirt from the farm. He placed it on the windowsill above his dorm room desk, and it solidified what he would do with the rest of his life. He double-majored in soil science and wildlife biology. They were the two things that never betrayed him: animals and where they lived, what they walked on.

He thought about going out west, but the pull to go home was stronger. He heard the words in his sleep:
Don’t ever leave here.
He knew his chances of getting a job with the U.S. Fish and Game Service in northern Wisconsin were almost impossible because it usually assigned its new biologists elsewhere. But he had a plan. He sent in his first application during his freshman year in college, and he applied every year until he graduated. He specialized in the flora and fauna of northern Wisconsin. He was born to it, he argued in his cover letters. He knew exactly what the damage was and how he intended to undo it. He decided that he would study constantly, that he would not date and thereby keep anyone away from pushing him off his chosen road.

Elizabeth had red hair. He could not name its particular shade, and he pondered it frequently when they talked. She accused him of not paying attention to her, but he was listening. There was something familiar about that particular shade of red hair and her amber brown eyes.

He liked her too much. It made him afraid. They met in a soil science class, and despite his fear, he was drawn to her. She was double-majoring in soil science and geology. She liked dirt just like his mother did, and although they shared some other things in common as women, they were different. He told her he just wanted to be friends.

“You are full of layers,” she said one day. They were eating pie and drinking coffee at Vescio’s restaurant in Dinkytown near the East Bank of the campus.

“Don’t dig too deep,” he answered cynically, “or you won’t like what you find.”

The grin vanished from her face. “Every time we start to have fun, you say something like that. Why?”

“Sorry. I just meant”—he fumbled—“that I’m not a saint. I have my bad elements.”

“I wasn’t talking about elements,” she retorted.

He didn’t answer and ate the last piece of his lemon meringue pie. He thought the meringue resembled and tasted like plastic. The waitress dropped off their bill.

“Is this real meringue?” he asked.

“No. It’s called flacto-macto,” she replied curtly, and was gone.
Flacto-macto.
He looked at the crumbs left on his plate. What was that? What had he just eaten?

Elizabeth persisted.

“I wasn’t talking about elements,” she repeated. “I was talking about layers. Good and bad. Everything,” she added as though daring him to contradict her, “grows from layers.”

He liked her too much. He was more than afraid. He was terrified.

But one night it occurred to him that although he never needed people much, there would be a day when his mother would die. When Ernie and Rosemary would die. The three most important people still living in his life would not live forever.

They were friends for a year before they became lovers, and then two years later they married. Looking back, Bill was amazed that Elizabeth kept trying. He pushed her away and pushed her down with the weight of words thrown hard, only to pull her back up in confusion, to soften his tone and apologize frantically.

One night they were sitting together on her couch, drinking Seven-Up and relaxing after having seen a movie. Elizabeth was talking about her parents’ divorce and the fact that she never saw her father much. She stopped in midstream during her monologue about her father. “Huh. I just thought of something. You never talk about your father. Or a father. Did you have a father?”

He had told her about his mother and about Ernie and Rosemary. He had talked about his brother as though James were still alive. When he told stories about James, he never tripped over his words. It wasn’t as though he didn’t feel pain. Of course he felt pain. His brother was dead, and the loss of him was a tragedy that did not diminish. But Bill did not believe in heaven or hell. He believed in systems, natural and unnatural. He believed in zones. And there was more than one zone of death.

He realized that people who were much loved and who died had a way of clinging. Rather than fade, they grew in another dimension, became epizoic, although not harmful like a disease. He had helped that process by casting his brother in a fertile zone that he knew best. In his mind, his brother had crossed the river and was walking in woods. It was his natural habitat.

But his father? In those silent minutes before he began speaking to Elizabeth again, he imagined that Holocaust survivors or anyone who had been tortured, nearly murdered, or hurt in ways by other people filled with hate had to do something with those unforgettable memories in order to survive. As he had done without realizing it. Just as he had willed his brother to love and life, he had willed his father to death. He put him in a most unnatural place in his mind. A museum’s airless closet where his father’s remains became mummified. Where none of Bill’s memorial juices could hydrate him again.

Still, it was hard to find the words to describe what was marked on him. He did not look at her while he talked. When he did turn his face toward her, expecting to see disgust, he saw something else.

Awe.

“GIVE THE DOG A REST!” he calls out to his small son.

His son is so happy today. As though nothing has happened. Last night he had a bad dream. The same bad dream as always. His cries are so piercing that it takes only one or two to wake Bill up. As his son suckered to his chest, Bill wondered, as he always did when he got up to soothe his son, if the boy remembered the first eighteen months of his life. If the mystery of those months would be known someday.

Most of the time he rocks his son back to sleep. But sometimes Bill has to crawl into his son’s bed and hold him until he goes to sleep again.