The Turtle Warrior

by Mary Relindes Ellis

  He turned to look at her. It took him a minute to hear the irritation in her voice, even to recognize that she had come home.

  “I just got a call,” he said.

  His wife stiffly walked to the kitchen sink and, leaning over it, stared out of the window. He gazed at her and at the expression on her face. His thoughts shifted so that he concentrated on her. He knew what was happening in himself, how the body protected itself against this kind of injury. This was the kind of news that caused a shock, which quickly turned into denial. He understood denial as a biological response, a survival tactic. It was necessary at first so that the unspeakable could be absorbed more slowly. He looked at his wife and thought of something else. What seemed an inappropriate thought at such a time was indeed appropriate. His mind filtered past the news as if to seek a safer place to stay, and it settled upon one of his happiest memories.

  Of the night he met his wife.

  After he was released from the hospital in Hawaii, he flew to San Diego and took the train from there. He got off the train in Milwaukee for a short hiatus before the final leg home. He had no civilian clothes with him, only a second, dressier uniform, which the Pfister Hotel promised it would have cleaned and pressed by that evening. He wanted to hunt up some old friends or news of them, hoping that they had come home alive. When he heard about the VFW Hall dance on East Wisconsin Avenue just a couple of blocks from the hotel, he went there, thinking he might run into someone familiar. The large rectangular hall was packed. He pushed through the crowd of dancers, bought a beer, and sat down at a table in the corner. He immersed himself in the anonymity of the crowd. In the general joy bordering on much-needed amnesia, which alcohol and a local swing band, in imitation of Benny Goodman, helped instill.

  It took him a while to get used to seeing so much color and so much activity that was happy. There were many pretty women and most of them were dancing, if not with men, then with one another. The hall was well lubed with three bar counters, one at each end of the room and a large one against the back wall. He didn’t see anyone who looked familiar. He was making a third visual sweep across the crowd when he caught sight of her.

  She was leaning against the largest bar. Unlike the other women, she had on a black satin dress with spaghetti straps and a low heart-shaped neckline. A dress that was not meant to twirl away from the body but to hug it. While the other women had mimicked the look of stockings, having drawn seams up the back of their legs with eyebrow pencils, she wore the real thing. He wondered how she had found a pair of stockings when so many women could not. Even from a distance, he could see that they were silk and not orange rayon. Even more impossible than finding them she had evidently found a pair that fitted what appeared to be the longest legs he’d ever seen on a woman. She was tall, and the open-toed heels with black ankle straps made her even taller. Her toenails were painted red. Her lips were red. And her black hair was pinned into a chignon.

  She was not from Wisconsin. He was sure of it. He watched as she turned around, bent over the bar—Jesus!—and paid for another drink. She slid onto the empty barstool next to her and, with a kind of tipsy movie star bravado, pushed herself so that she swiveled around to face the crowd of dancers. She crossed her legs, and it was then that Ernie became aware of the vacuum around her.

  None of the available men was flirting with her. He tried to catch her eye so that he could test the waters of her mood with a wink, but she was drunk and didn’t appear to focus on a single individual, staring out over the crowd instead.

  What the hell, he thought. He’d be leaving Milwaukee in a few days. He got up and walked toward her, his legs feeling wobbly and treacherous. He lightly tapped her bare arm and set his jaw against the anticipated rejection. When she turned and looked at him, he caught his breath. Her face mirrored the same disillusionment and weariness that he felt, that look of something lost, something that could never be returned. He knew what it was. He’d seen it when he shaved a few hours before in the hotel’s bathroom. They would never be young again.

  It was unsettling to see the anger and sorrow he felt reflected back at him from a woman. She wasn’t vulnerable, though. That dress. You had to have guts and the body to wear a dress like that. Even if her mood had been visibly sweet and inviting, the men still wouldn’t have flirted with her. The incongruity of her threw them off-balance, and in their confusion they stayed away from her.

  He swallowed and tried to smile his best smile. “War’s over. Wanna dance?” he asked. She put her drink down and slid off the barstool. He could smell the gin and tonic on her breath. The sharpness of juniper berries. He tried to keep from shuddering as she ran one hand across the top of his shoulders.

  They danced for hours. At one point he pulled slightly away from her.

  “You’re a nurse, aren’t you?”

  “I was a nurse,” she answered, leaning her head back to appraise him. “In the Army. I was in the Philippines. I just got back.”

  “I was in the Army too.”

  “I know,” she said, tapping his uniform shirt with one finger.

  When the VFW Hall closed, they went back to his room at the Pfister. It was an expensive hotel, filled with marble and brass. He had, in a moment of recklessness, decided to treat himself, having heard that the Pfister was the Milwaukee hotel to stay in. He regretted it at first after having settled into his room, feeling that it was too much luxury until he saw Rosemary. Then he was grateful for his recklessness and considered it fateful. She sat on the edge of the bed, and he knelt down and undid the ankle straps on her shoes. He got up and sat on the bed next to her, watched as she pulled up the hem of her dress, undid her garters, and rolled the precious stockings down her legs. He unbuttoned her dress. When she was free of her clothes, he ceremoniously took the pins out of her chignon, placing each pin on the bedside table before removing another one. The coil of thick black hair unraveled in his hands and he let it go so that it fell in one long wave down her back. He could not stop touching her hair, mesmerized by the weight of it, the length. All the nurses he had seen in the Philippines had had short hair.

  “Your hair.”

  “Because it’s long?”

  “Yeah. You didn’t cut it?”

  “No. It’s like an arm, you know? Can’t cut it off.”

  He pulled his fingers through it. Lifted it and let it fall in fans across her face. That night he was grateful for the streetlight shining through the windows. He wanted to see her. When he swung her above him, he saw what the wounded men in their hallucinatory pain had seen as she bent over them to check their pulses and palm their foreheads. The large brown eyes with long lashes. Her pale throat beaded with sweat. The black hair slipping from the pins, strands of it pasted to her neck.

  She swept her right hand across his chest, and he shivered. Then she did it again with her left hand, her fingertips pressing down as though to feel his heartbeat.

  At breakfast the next morning in the hotel café, he asked her to marry him. Then he asked her where she was from. “I know you’re not from around here,” he added.

  She grinned impishly. He noticed a dimple indenting one cheek.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Nobody wears a dress like that around here.”

  “That’s why I like it. I bought it and the shoes in San Diego. And one of the doctors I worked with gave me the stockings as a good-bye gift. In case,” she added, “you were wondering where I got them.”

  He lit a cigarette, remembering how the slow unrolling of her stockings had resembled the unveiling of a marble statue. The stockings were a serious gift. He wondered about the doctor. Wondered if it was wise to ask. She spoke again before he could risk it.

  “My mother will shit peanuts when she sees this dress.”

  Ernie exhaled and laughed at the same time.

  “You didn’t answer my questions,” he said.

  He took a sip from his coffee.

  “Yes. I’ll marry you. And,” she said, �
��I’m from Cedar Bend.”

  Ernie choked, nearly spraying her with his mouthful of coffee.

  “I was about to ask you the same question,” she said, taking the cigarette from his hand. He wiped his face and the front of his shirt with a napkin while she took a drag from his cigarette. “What’s so bad about being from Cedar Bend?”

  “Not bad.” He coughed and then cleared his throat. “I’m from Olina.”

  “No! Really?”

  The comedy of fate. He had fallen in love with a woman who not only had been in the Army and in the Philippines at the same time he’d been but also had grown up in a small town only twenty miles away from his own. Jesus, he thought. Cedar Bend. Why hadn’t he seen her before?

  They exhausted themselves with laughter and listened to each other until their voices diminished into occasional chuckles and, in Rosemary’s case, incredibly charming hiccups. Then they sat wordlessly and studied each other. He forgot to consider that she might really be from somewhere else. That to have her might mean leaving northern Wisconsin. It was a thought that he’d never entertained once in the service. It was home. Just as certain animals returned to habitual nesting grounds, he too could not imagine going anywhere else except to the boreal bogs, forests, and the Lake Superior of his youth.

  Before last night, he had felt grief, fear, terror, and finally numbness. When he woke up, he remembered her sweeping his chest. How she’d opened it without breaking the skin, the palm of her hand parting the pectoral tissue as if it were water, and indeed, when he woke up, he breathed and felt his lungs expand freely for the first time in a year. He knew that if she asked, that if she didn’t want to go home, he would leave northern Wisconsin for her. He was shocked at what his body knew before he even thought it. Of how the instinctual in him gravitated toward that which unconsciously was home. He realized, watching her smoke his cigarette, that she had physically articulated for him something that he knew but could not have described. That home was not always familiar or easy. That the land of his youth was sometimes neither of those, and that was why he loved it so. She was like that. A surviving and survivable beauty. She had enough of what he knew in her. And more of what he didn’t. He wanted that. He wanted to hunt for that mystery.

  He dropped some money on the table and stood up. Held out his hand. She hiccuped.

  “Let’s go back to bed.”

  He got up from his chair and wrapped his arms around his wife. She took a deep breath, turned, and buried her face into his chest.

  She had told him a few weeks into their marriage that she hadn’t wanted to marry someone who had been in the war. She hadn’t wanted a military man. She had wanted someone free from all that knowledge. But when she met Ernie, she knew that it would never have worked that way, that what she initially wanted was the opposite of what she needed. Who else would believe some of the things she had seen, endured, and done but another veteran?

  Ernie looked around the kitchen. Although it had been remodeled after his parents had died, it was still the same room where his mother and father had received the telegram notifying them that their son had been wounded in the Pacific. That was all they’d known until they received a letter from him a couple of weeks later, postmarked Hawaii. The telegram hadn’t given them any details. They did not know how badly their son was wounded or if he would live.

  He had never really thought about those days. How wretched they must have been for his parents. But they were fortunate in one way. Their ignorance of modern warfare protected them from even more pain.

  His shoulders sagged. He could feel the palsy of his wife’s crying in his chest. There was nothing to protect them.

  THE WARM AND CLOUDY WEATHER held, and on a Saturday in late January I began to contemplate the possibility of an early spring. I was staring out the dining room window, envisioning where to plant my marigolds, my petunias, and my morning glories, when I saw Ernie Morriseau’s gray truck coming toward the farm, a cloud of white exhaust billowing behind it. When the truck turned into our driveway, I saw that a car was following it, veiled and hidden in the trail of Ernie’s exhaust. I didn’t know that my cup had tipped in my hand until I felt the warm coffee spilling down the front of my housedress. I didn’t make a sound until I saw the insignia on the sedan’s driver’s door. I sucked air in so fast that it whistled before I dropped my coffee cup and ran into the living room.

  “Go upstairs to play,” I said, roughly lifting Bill to his feet and pushing him toward the stair.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Now!” I shouted.

  I waited and watched Bill scamper up the stairs before I ran into the kitchen. I didn’t know what to do. I ran to the table and then to the refrigerator, jigsawing around the room, my hands touching every surface until I stopped at the kitchen sink. I gripped the edge of the stainless steel sink and listened for the first knock at the back door. It came and went and then again. Minutes passed, and still the insistent knock on the back door. I opened the door slowly and saw Ernie’s face before I saw the two uniformed men behind him.

  “Claire. We need to talk to you. Can we come in?”

  I motioned them in. They all walked into the kitchen.

  “Claire,” Ernie said again, “this is Lieutenant Hildebrandt, who is with the United States Navy Chaplain Corps, and this is Lieutenant Schlessinger, also with the Navy. They are from the reserve base in Madison. May we sit down?”

  “Yes.”

  All three of them pulled out chairs and sat down at the table. I did not sit down, choosing instead to lean against the countertop.

  “Won’t you sit down, Mrs. Lucas?” Lieutenant Hildebrandt urged. I shook my head and stared at him. I shoved my hands into my pockets and picked at the lint gathered in the seams. The three men tried not to stare back. I knew what they were looking at. I was a mess. My pink foam rollers were loose and unraveling in some places on my head, my housedress was stained with coffee, and even I could smell the dishwater, coffee, and the musty remnants of sleep on my body. I could see that the officers were afraid of putting their immaculate uniformed arms on the kitchen table. Besides having stacks of magazines and newspapers crowding the center, there were breadcrumbs and smears of peanut butter and grape jelly from where Bill had made his own lunch.

  “Is John home?”

  “He’s at the mill,” I answered Ernie. I saw the one officer part his lips, and I knew what he was going to ask. So I cut him off at the pass. “And won’t come home even if I call him.”

  “Where’s Billy?”

  “Upstairs. I made him go upstairs. Please don’t talk loud.”

  “Claire, we’re here because—”

  “I know, Ernie,” I said, interrupting him. Then I could not shut up, my mouth running on a single breath of air. “I know because the military only visits for a reason. And that car ... I know what that car means. Didn’t you guys used to drive black sedans during World War Two? It’s a good thing it’s not summer. Otherwise every farmer in the field from town to here would know. Everyone knows what your car means. Everyone.”

  It was as though the pain had lifted me above myself, above the men in the kitchen, and kept me hovering close to the ceiling. Although I could feel it, some part of me moved away from it, and I could be calm. I know it surprised them. The men were so startled that they remained speechless. So I asked them.

  “What has happened to my son?”

  Lieutenant Hildebrandt leaned forward and looked up. She was direct. His instinct, honed by his own tour of duty in Vietnam, was that this was not a woman easily deceived. She had the blank stare of an insomniac and skin so milky white that she was nearly transparent. He had seen that look before, that look of endurance sustained by desperation and hope. She appeared to be reduced to the same basic elements as the men he’d seen at the end of their calendars, counting the days till their tours were up.

  He was not supposed to tell the specifics. But the higher-echelon assholes in Washington who made such policies w
eren’t sitting in this woman’s kitchen three miles outside the tiny farming and logging community of Olina, Wisconsin. He’d been in so many kitchens. Yellow kitchens, blue and white kitchens, kitchens with rooster plates lining the walls. He had come to realize that it did worse damage not to tell the families at least some of the details. Especially to those families where a body wasn’t shipped home. When it was an MIA.

  She waited.

  He nervously fingered the envelope in his hands, aware of Lieutenant Schlessinger’s by-the-book righteousness. So what if they heard all the way back to Quantico that he had disobeyed the policy? Fuck the policy. He had been a theology student and then an ordained priest before he had become an officer, and his tour of duty in 1965 and part of 1966 had been in the same area where her son had been killed. His thirteen-month roll through Vietnam had obliterated any foolish idealism he had ever spouted or believed in, any of the big world concepts about peace. He could no longer sleep through the night, and his thoughts were anything but pure. It had even changed the way he talked.

  He had never heard the word fuck used so often or in as many contradictory combinations. Fuckin’ Fantastic. Or we’re fucked. Fuck off. That’s fuckin’ A-okay with me. Cute little fuckers. Every now and then the men remembered who he was and what he stood for. Then they apologized for swearing in front of him. But after a while he ceased to hear the language, considering it background noise like the wind. It had even become part of his vocabulary. What a blessed fuckin’ mess. But he would never say “motherfucker.” That was more profane than taking the Lord’s name in vain.

  His time in Vietnam had altered every cell in his body. He could still smell it on his skin: lime-covered shit and the puking odor when they burned the latrine waste, fresh blood, and the gutty smell of ruptured abdomens. Blood. He’d never forget the smell of blood. Or the heavy greasiness of it on his hands, slippery between his fingers.