A huge rack followed by a sizable head, neck, and body materialized in front of the tree and made it look small. Ernie stared at the buck. Like the trophy animals of badly written outdoor stories, he appeared ethereal in the mist, and Ernie wondered if the swamp fog was fooling his eyes. An animal of that size had survived many hunting seasons and was most likely the dominant buck in the area. The buck was so preoccupied with the whereabouts of the does that he had not registered the presence of the two men. He seemed to be almost drunk on the scent of his does and lifted his black muzzle, his nostrils flaring, to catch the direction they had taken. Jimmy scoped and aimed. In the seconds that followed, Ernie surprised himself by hoping that Jimmy wouldn’t pull the trigger. Then the shot was fired, and it whistled as it spliced the air. The huge buck surprised them, going down immediately rather than running a ways as many deer were able to do even with a bullet-shattered heart. And Ernie knew that Jimmy’s aim had been perfect. As it should be. As he had taught Jimmy. Ernie expected Jimmy to whoop, but the boy only lowered his rifle and stared in astonishment.
Ernie walked over and slapped Jimmy on the shoulder. “There’s your twelve-pointer!” he said jovially. “You were right. I would never have thought he’d bed in the swamp.”
“I didn’t know if he’d bed in the swamp either.” Jimmy faltered. “I only guessed it ... Jesus . . . he’s bigger than I thought.”
“C’mon,” Ernie urged. “Let’s drag him to hard ground.”
They each grabbed a hind leg and pulled, the buck every bit as heavy as he looked. They propped the animal on its back at the base of the ridge. Before Ernie made the abdominal cut with his knife, he bent over the animal in a moment of silence just as his father had always done.
Jimmy took off his jacket and folded it before reaching into the buck’s belly and pulling out the entrails: the red-brown liver; the coiled ropes of intestines; the nearly empty stomach of a buck in rut, too preoccupied to eat. Sweat ran down Jimmy’s forehead and cheeks and dripped back down into the buck’s abdomen. When he pulled out the shattered heart, Jimmy looked at it for a few seconds before placing it alongside the rest of the gut pile.
When he was finished, he wiped as much of the blood off his hands as he could in the grass before carefully reaching in his coat pocket. He took out a hand brush and a bar of soap. He walked until he came to a depression in the sphagnum moss that held water and washed his hands. Then he came back to where Ernie was sitting next to the buck. He sat down and took the Hershey bar that Ernie held out to him. He peeled the wrapper off the chocolate. Ernie noticed that Jimmy’s hands were scrubbed until they showed no trace of blood.
“I always thought it was crap,” Jimmy said, staring at the gut pile, “that some guy wrote up in Outdoor Life about finding the trophy buck of his dreams, only to end up not shooting it because it didn’t seem right. But I almost didn’t shoot him. Now I wonder if I did the right thing.”
His face betrayed his usual affected teenage toughness, the Brylcreemed black hair with its small ducktail in the back, the dark eyes and slightly pouty full lips. Sitting next to him, Ernie could almost feel again the difficulty of being a teenager, the grappling with hormones that promoted the premature desires of an adult but without the knowledge or experience to handle them. Shooting the buck had punctured the veil of toughness on Jimmy’s face, and Ernie pretended that he didn’t see the rapid blinking of Jimmy’s eyes.
“It’s always that way,” Ernie explained. “I don’t think any good hunter feels totally sure. When I shot my first deer, I thought I was going to cry. I couldn’t look at its eyes. Those long lashes. There’s something about deer that doesn’t seem real . . . like they’re spirits. I still feel like that sometimes. My father told me that day that it was a good thing to feel that way. That I recognized the seriousness of killing. I was lucky. My father was a good man and a traditional man. He believed in hunting to feed your family and only that. Remember,” Ernie told Jimmy, “now that this big guy is gone, it will give the younger bucks a chance to mate with the does.”
“Well,” Jimmy commented, looking down at his boots, “we can always use the meat. I think that’s why Mom lets me hunt with you.”
Ernie nodded. Almost everyone in Olina knew that John Lucas’s entire paycheck was often in danger of supporting Pete’s Bar and Grill in town rather than his family.
“Are you gonna mount the head?” Ernie asked, although it was something he would never do.
“I guess before I shot him, I thought I would,” Jimmy answered. “But I don’t have the money, and Bill would be mad as hell at me.”
He turned to Ernie, his face suddenly brighter. “My little brother is somethin’ else,” he said with a quick grin. “He fights with make-believe warriors, swinging at the air with that stupid wooden sword and that turtle shell he uses as a shield. But I don’t think he’d really ever kill anything. You know if he could, Bill would try. to take care of even bigger animals in our bedroom. It’s a damn zoo in there now!”
Ernie laughed, the sound echoing across the swamp.
“Christ!” Jimmy exclaimed. “The other night I crawled into bed, and as soon as my head hit the pillow, two deer mice came running out from underneath it. Scared the shit outta me! I called him a little bastard. Then Mom yelled at me for swearing. But I’m the one who’s got mouse turds all over his bed!”
Although Ernie had never stepped inside the Lucas home, he could imagine the mice, birds, snakes, and whatever else inhabited the boys’ bedroom and the noise and smell that filled Jimmy’s nights.
“Don’t be too hard on him,” Ernie said, his laughter trailing off. “He’s a good kid.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy replied. “But he sure doesn’t like people. He’s always been funny that way. Kind of a loner. He hates my friend Terry. Course Terry is an asshole sometimes. Picks on Bill bad if I don’t stop him. I think if Bill could, he’d stick that wooden sword right through Terry.”
Ernie knew about Jimmy’s friend Terry—chain-smoking backwoods hood—and he silently agreed with Bill. Stick that sword right through him.
Ernie glanced up at the sky. He thought it was about nine, but the sun never broke through the clouds, and the sky remained its characteristic November gray. Still, the temperature had risen to the mid-forties, and they could hear the quiet drip of melting snow. Without turning around, Ernie knew that the north slope of the ridge had lost its white cover of snow and was now a slippery wet bed of brown pine needles and birch leaves. He pulled a thermos full of coffee out of his field jacket. He was pouring some into the thermos’s cup when Jimmy spoke.
“Is killing a man like killing a deer?” he asked.
Ernie nearly dropped his cup. He put the thermos down and steadied the hot cup of coffee between his hands before answering.
“How do you mean?” he asked, stalling for time.
“Well, when you were in World War Two,” Jimmy asked, “you probably had to kill some men to defend yourself, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
He could tell by the way Jimmy dropped his head that he was uncomfortable.
“It’s not that you can’t ask,” Ernie said quietly. “I don’t know how to answer. It’s not the same, but at the same time it is because you’re taking a life.”
Ernie paused and looked at Jimmy. The confusion and embarrassment were apparent on his young face. How was Ernie going to explain the Battle of Leyte in the Philippines as a way of justifying why he had killed other men? He was part of the U.S. Eighth Army, the soldiers brought in, they were told, for the task of “mopping up,” which in effect meant killing off any remaining Japanese on the island. In an effort to distance the men from thinking of the Japanese as human, their commanding officers told them that the Japanese were a stain on the whole of humanity. It was as though they were being sent in to clean floors. Only it was their rifles and artillery, not a bottle of Pine Sol that would do the housekeeping of war. He was not a violent man, had never been one, and this ha
d not served him well in the Army. He found it hard to fight the Japanese with any sort of rage. It was merely self-defense and luck that kept him alive. He knew that Jimmy, despite his embarrassment, wanted to hear stories of heroism, his heroism.
Out of the corner of his eye he could see Jimmy, now eager to hear what Ernie had to say. What could he say? War was full of little stories. A man’s dress shoe found in the mud on his ascent up the island. A woman’s brooch made of ivory. Once a jawbone that was clearly human and small, perhaps a child’s. Mostly, though, Ernie thought that war was alternately boredom and anxiety with occasional bursts of real fear. Sitting in the mud and rain and rain and rain. The fuzzy growth called jungle rot that made his feet stink and swell. K rations that made you forget what fresh food was like. The god-awful odor of his own body when they’d been unable to wash for days. The horrific stench of rotting corpses, most of them Japanese, piled upon one another and covered with thunderclouds of flies. If there was any action, it occurred all at once. Those little signs of life were forgotten momentarily in the roar of artillery going off, the shelling and falling shrapnel, and his own desperation to stay alive. Then the skirmish was over, and he was back to sitting in the mud and the rain and wishing that he could look up and see a clear blue sky, pines, and the fiery color of sugar maples in fall.
He wasn’t sure why he made it home alive when so many other men didn’t, men he knew and thought about from time to time. They had not been told just how many Japanese were left on the island. They popped up out of nowhere like jack-in-the-boxes. It was the worst dogfighting he’d ever experienced. Hand-to-hand combat using his non-Army-issued bowie knife, instinctively knowing just where to stab under the rib cage and work the blade and handle up toward the heart. Sometimes he used the stock of his rifle like a big stick, swinging until it made contact with a head. The noises that came with such fighting. The cracking of bone and the sucking sound a knife made going into a human body.
He tried not to think about that one terrible day that had caused him to be sent home with enough metal in his back and legs to draw an industrial magnet.
They were humping up a slope. The humidity was such that they were wet all the time. It made their helmets feel like molded steel on their heads, compressing their brains. There was so much water in the air that they breathed noisily, as though asthmatic, straining to sift out the airborne oxygen. Frank was saying something to him and laughing. Frank’s last words were “steak sounds good right now.” There was a sudden burst of rifle fire and the whine of bullets whizzing past them. They dropped to the ground, and Frank returned fire. When it was quiet, he ran up the muddy trail, thinking that he had killed the Jap who had fired at them. Ernie, beginning to follow him, had turned around to see if the rest of their platoon was behind them when the explosion lifted him off his feet and sent him flying forward as though a burning hand had shoved him in the back. The pain was horrific, and he tried to breathe against it and the thick smoke and debris. He could not hear or see Frank, so Ernie got to his feet in his desperation to find him. Someone else pushed him back down and held him. It took them an hour to cover the thirty feet, searching for more land mines. Only then was he permitted to get up, and he crawled behind the munitions expert.
How could you tell a seventeen-year-old boy what it was like to find a man’s head? His friend’s head. How he cradled Frank’s head and sobbed, closing the lids over the blue eyes with his trembling and blood-covered fingers. Frank was as close to a brother as he had ever gotten. He roared like a wounded bear when they tried to pry Frank’s head out of his arms, and he kicked at anyone who dared try again. They left him alone until he was lifted and placed on a litter, still holding Frank’s head. Ernie didn’t recall feeling any pain in his back even though it rubbed against the canvas of the litter. It was only after they got him to an evacuation hospital and he was given a shot of morphine that they were able to take Frank’s head out of his arms.
How lucky he had been. He had caught an almost fatal blast of shrapnel in the back, and miraculously not only had he survived but none of the hot metal had sliced into his spine, rendering him paralyzed. Ernie tried to feel grateful, but there was a nagging suspicion that he hadn’t been brave enough. That he hadn’t taken enough risks or aided better those who had died.
He didn’t trust himself with a rifle or shotgun after the war and almost didn’t go deer hunting after he had married Rosemary and come back to Olina. Claude Morriseau sat in a rocking chair in the kitchen and sensed his son’s discomfort, his confusion. His speech was slow and measured.
“You did what you had to do,” his father said while he watched his son put on his cedar-scented hunting clothes. “You are still a good man.”
Then his father said something that contradicted what they had been taught to chant during basic training. His father leaned forward.
“This,” his father said, drawing the words out slowly and tapping the barrel of Ernie’s rifle with a calloused finger, “is a tool, nothing more. It is not you. Think when you use it, but don’t love it. Then you won’t kill stupidly with it. Only foolish and weak men,” his father whispered in the dim light of the kitchen, “love their guns.”
Ernie shifted his body so that he would face Jimmy directly.
“When somebody is comin’ at you with a rifle and bayonet,” Ernie explained, “you don’t have time to think about killing. You just do it. It’s either you or him.”
“Did you get any medals?”
Ernie nodded. “I have a Purple Heart because of all the shrapnel in my back, and I have a Bronze Star for bravery. Rosemary,” he commented, gesturing toward his back, “is still cutting out the shrapnel with a razor blade. It works its way to the surface, even after all these years.”
“Dad has medals too,” Jimmy said bitterly. “He takes them out and waves them at me when he thinks I need to be taken down a few notches. But you know,” he added, looking at Ernie quizzically, “I don’t think he ever fought in WW Two. I don’t have any proof. It’s just a feeling and the fact that he shoots so badly. I think it’s all a pile of crap. I think that’s all I’ve ever heard from him. Crap.”
“Well,” Ernie answered lamely with a wave of his hand, “some guys handle it differently.”
But Jimmy’s perception knocked Ernie momentarily off course. Ernie too was sure that John Lucas had never seen action in the war, despite his stories told at Pete’s Bar. But he would never say that to Jimmy. It was not Ernie’s place to expose John Lucas to his son.
He sighed and poured more coffee, which he offered to Jimmy. He watched as Jimmy threw back his head and drained the cup, and he refilled it when Jimmy held it out.
“I wasn’t the only one,” Ernie added, hoping to divert the conversation away from any more war-related questions concerning himself. “Rosemary was an Army nurse in the Philippines. There were a few times when she had to run down to the beach to help them unload wounded men and the Japanese were strafing the whole beach. One of the nurses was killed that way. Rosemary came down with some sort of fever and was sick for a long time.”
“She told me that.”
“Oh! You’ve been asking her questions too?” Ernie grinned and reached over to punch Jimmy’s shoulder lightly. “Speaking of Rosemary, let’s get going. She’s probably baked a coffeecake.”
They dragged the buck home on foot, trudging across the field toward the Morriseau farmhouse. Rosemary’s face appeared in the kitchen window, and they could see her wave before she dashed outside to meet them in the barnyard. They hung the buck from one of the huge beams in the barn before heading into the warm kitchen for more coffee.
IT WAS THE GUTTURAL CRY of a heron that yanked Ernie back into the present. He had to shake himself as though he’d fallen asleep standing up, and that was when he noticed the spit that had trailed out of his open mouth onto his jacket. He finished crossing the swamp. It took another five minutes of slowly walking the base of the north slope of the ridge before he reached th
e place where three deer trails crossed and where he had hunted the most. Ernie was fifteen feet away when he looked up expectantly and caught his breath.
His deer stand was gone.
Rather, it was no longer perched in the large red pine above Ernie’s head but scattered in pieces on the slope around the tree. Even the wooden ladder he had built up the trunk to reach the camouflaged small platform had been pulled out of the tree and tossed into the snow. At first Ernie thought the culprit was a bear. When he got closer, he saw the platform had been shot up at close range and the ground around the red pine was littered with yellow shotgun casings. Then he saw the gun. Five feet away from the tree and dusted with snow was an older-model pump shotgun. Ernie stared at it, pulsing with anger and confusion until his common sense got the better of him. He looked again at the snow around him and saw the tracks. The gun looked familiar. It was a popular shotgun, a Remington 870 Wingmaster that had sold well during the late 1950s and early 1960s. He picked it up and wiped it off, then pumped the gun to eject any rounds and looked into the breech to make certain it was empty. He balanced the barrel against his shoulder alongside his own rifle and began his slow ascent up the slope.
The tracks did everything but run in a straight line, and interspersed with them were the familiar paw prints of Ernie’s own dog. He had trudged two-thirds of the way up the ridge when his right foot slid on some wet needles, and he went down on one knee. He quickly but painfully straightened up, using the Remington as a staff. He stared at the shotgun again. No wonder it was familiar. He had once owned it and given it as a gift. He ran his fingers over the stock and found the worn letters carved near the end of the butt. JPL. James Peter Lucas.
The Turtle Warrior Page 23
