The Turtle Warrior

by Mary Relindes Ellis

  His gut cramped up. Ernie turned his head from side to side and did a swift visual reconnaissance of the area. He scanned the trees and brush for any signs of green canvas, for the slightly askew pattern of camouflage or the rounded top of a metal helmet. What he had feared facing that morning was back again, and he could almost smell it.

  He instinctively loaded his rifle but kept the safety on and the barrel pointed at the ground. He leaned the old Remington against the nearest pine before turning his attention to the tracks that disappeared when they reached the top of the ridge. His mind felt muddy, and he rubbed his forehead as though to massage his brain into action. Ernie slowed his breathing so that he could hear better. The woods were silent except for the chattering of chickadees and a nuthatch’s occasional zweeee call. Ernie quickly counted; fourteen, almost fifteen years since Jimmy died. He had wanted to see Jimmy again, to talk to him, but now he was terrified, his stomach cramping. Jimmy was close by. He didn’t want to turn his back on him, but he was afraid of him. Even if he wanted to run, Ernie could not safely turn his back on Jimmy now.

  “Jimmy!” Ernie shouted up the slope, and listened as his own voice echoed through the silence of the trees.

  “Jimmy! It’s Ernie.”

  He waited for fifteen minutes, never taking his eyes off the top of the ridge.

  “Jimmy! I know you’re up there!” Ernie shouted again. “I’m not angry ... you know ... about the stand.”

  Ernie waited for another fifteen minutes. Then, when he was about to give up and chance turning around, he heard the snapping and rustle of brush being pushed aside. He had been so preoccupied with his last vision of Jimmy that when the silhouette of a man appeared on the top of the ridge, Ernie’s heart kicked against his ribs, and he had to stifle a gasp.

  Bill.

  The tall young man was emaciated, and his big, bony hands dangled out of his coat cuffs helplessly as though broken. His hair was wet and covered with leaves and dirt, as was his red and black plaid jacket. But what really stunned Ernie was the look of Bill’s face. Rather than having the florid meatiness of heavy drinkers, his face had the white waxiness of suet, and his eyes were sunken into the sockets of his skull.

  “You’ve come to get me, haven’t you?”

  Ernie paused.

  “No, Billy!” Ernie exclaimed. “I didn’t even know you were out here.”

  “I’m the one who did it,” Bill answered in the monotone of exhaustion. He dazedly stared down at Ernie.

  “Ahh,” Ernie said with a wave of his hand, “don’t worry about the stand. I can make a new one. That one was about to rot off the tree anyway. That was nothin’. Just a little horseplay, huh?”

  “I’m the one,” Bill repeated flatly. “I did it.”

  “I don’t care who did it.” Ernie tried to persuade Bill. “It was only a deer stand. Just forget it. I’ll tell you what,” Ernie went on, adopting the soft tone he used on sick animals. “Why don’t you come home with me? Rosemary would love to see you. How ‘bout it?”

  “You’ve come to get me,” Bill said again, and shifted his gaze toward the rifle in Ernie’s hand.

  “No, no,” Ernie answered quickly. “I was going deer hunting.” He bent down but kept his head up and his eyes focused on Bill as he placed the loaded rifle on the ground. Then he stood up and began to walk slowly up the slope toward Bill. “What do you say, Bill? You don’t look like you’re feelin’ so good. I’m gonna take you home with me, okay? Okay?”

  “No!” Bill shouted, and Ernie immediately stopped moving toward him.

  “I did it! I’m the one!” Bill shouted again. He obsessively began to rub his hands over the dirty jacket covering his chest.

  “Billy,” Ernie asked, confused and frustrated, “what are you talking about? What did you do?”

  Bill tilted his head back to look up at the canopy of the pines while his mouth desperately tried to work the words out. Then he looked down at his neighbor’s face, and the kindness he remembered from childhood released the years of stored grief. He stumbled down the slope a few feet before falling down hard on his rear.

  “It was me,” he suddenly sobbed, making no attempt to get up. “I killed my brother.”

  Ernie let go a deep breath as though he had just been slugged in the stomach. He bent over slightly, resting his hands on his thighs.

  “Bill,” Ernie tried to say evenly, “that’s impossible. Jimmy’s been dead for fourteen, almost fifteen years. You were only nine years old. You didn’t kill him. He died in Vietnam, remember?”

  “No,” Bill cried, gulping in between breaths, “I saw him. I didn’t mean ... to shoot him. I thought it ... was the dog. I was mad‘cause he wouldn’t ... c-c-come to me.” Bill hiccuped. “Then I saw James. And he ran away from me. I kept yelling at him . . . to wait . . . but he kept runnin’. I d-d-didn’t mean to shoot him. I tripped . . . and dropped the gun ... and it went off. He was burnin’ ... and runnin’ ... and then he fell. I looked all over . . . the field ... for him. I’ve been waitin’ ... and waitin’ ... for him. I was happy,” Bill sobbed, “to see him. If I’d a known . . . it was him . . . I wouldn’a fired at him. I tried to find him. I c-c-couldn’t find him . . . anywhere. He ran away from me ... and I shot him.”

  Then Bill raised his knees up and rested his forehead against his kneecaps. Ernie stared at the sobbing young man. His hands trembled, and sweat trickled down his wrists to wet his palms. Is killing a man like killing a deer?

  He’d never forget that day. Never forget the smooth handle of the spade in his hand. The dog’s howl. The sight of Jimmy standing in the middle of his field. The pain so severe in his head and chest that Ernie thought he’d die there, kneeling in the snow.

  How after that it insidiously began to invade him. That creeping of muck that covered his senses and that he couldn’t put a name to for fifteen years, that gradually robbed him of the simplest joys, the simplest details. The drift of clouds over a full moon, the click of the dog’s nails on the floor, the graying of his wife’s hair, and the growing loneliness reflected in her eyes. Just when he thought he had no other option but to end the pain by swinging from his own barn rafters, Ernie trudged down the stairs one night in July and walked toward his wife sitting in the living room, his mouth open, the words of 1968 finally reaching the air. He would never forget her outstretched arms, ready to catch him as he lurched toward her. And catch him she did. In the past five months, she didn’t let him go back down, pulling him to the surface again and again, holding him when he cried. He never once saw doubt in her face over his story or a furtive glance that might have indicated that she thought he was crazy. Ernie begged her not to say a word about what he’d seen, and Rosemary did as he asked her, folding the story into herself. But he hadn’t counted on Bill.

  Ernie cautiously began trudging up the slope toward Bill. When he got to within three feet, Ernie dropped to his hands and knees and crawled up next to him. He lifted and pulled Bill toward him until the young man’s head was cradled in the crook of Ernie’s left arm and his body lay across Ernie’s lap. He pulled out the gun rag from the pocket of his hunting jacket and wiped Bill’s nose, wiping again when he saw he’d left a smear of gun oil on Bill’s cheek.

  “Billy,” Ernie said quietly as the young man slumped against him, “Jimmy’s been dead a long time.”

  “Not to me,” Bill cried, shaking hard in Ernie’s arms.

  “No,” Ernie said, gently rocking Bill back and forth. “I know he’s not dead to you. He’s probably been with you,” Ernie said, looking down the slope at his rifle lying in the snow, “all this time. Here,” he added, sweeping his free arm at the surrounding pines, “all this time.” Then he quit talking and listened to Bill’s deep sobbing punctuate the silence of the woods.

  Ernie raised his head and stared at the November sky. This was the year he had begun to love autumn again. He liked the canning of fruits and vegetables and the last-minute winterizing of the house and barn. He liked the dark fur
rows of dirt after he plowed the fields to ready their absorption of melting snow in the spring. He loved the smell of woodsmoke from his fireplace, an ancient smell that clung to his skin and made him grateful for a warm house. He loved the stark and skeletal outline of the hardwood trees against the mottled gray skies and the intense yellowing of the tamarack needles in the swamp. He loved the increasing silence and the space it encompassed above his head, space often filled with the passing flocks of migratory birds whose voices it seemed had been with him even before he was born. He strongly believed that it was the season in which life did not die but transformed itself, flew to another part of the world, went underground, went to sleep, and in some cases throve. It was the season of the spirits and the spiritual, the season most embedded with tradition and ritual for him, the season of his father. At the age of fifty-eight, Ernie still missed both his parents, but especially his father.

  Feeling Bill’s head slip from the crook of his arm, Ernie hoisted him up so the nape of Bill’s neck was resting against Ernie’s chest. He brushed the wet hair from Bill’s forehead and gazed at the small blue veins in his eyelids. The color of his skin was startling. Ernie lightly pinched Bill’s cheek. It did not redden but stayed a waxy, nearly albino white. Ernie realized with horror that he could lift the skin from Bill’s cheekbones. He had lost so much weight that the skin on his face folded in places, giving the twenty-three-year-old man the appearance of being decades older. With one hand, he methodically rubbed Bill’s cheeks to warm them. Bill was fair-skinned and did not have his brother’s olive brown complexion. Ernie remembered teasing Jimmy when he started shaving, tapping him lightly on one cheek when he noticed a nick on the boy’s face. Rubbing Bill’s cheek harder, Ernie tried to remember at what age Jimmy had first made himself known to the Morriseaus. Was it five?

  He had sought them out. Ernie and Rosemary did not question his wandering over to see them until the visits became frequent. They surmised from rumor and observation that all was not well at the Lucas home. Jimmy ate fried egg sandwiches with Rosemary in the mornings and tried to help Ernie in the barn in the afternoons. By then Rosemary was calling Claire to ask if Jimmy could stay to supper. Soon it was little Bill, tagging after his brother on their neighborly visits. Ernie remained slightly gruff with them, wanting to maintain a distance from the boys, while Rosemary lavished maternal care on them. They were not his sons, and he was acutely aware that their father did not like him. Ernie in turn did not like John Lucas.

  Even with the boys over at their place so much, it still came as a surprise when Claire Lucas unexpectedly phoned Ernie one August day. “Jimmy wants to hunt, and I’m exhausted from saying no. I don’t want my husband to teach him how to hunt. He doesn’t have the time,” she breathlessly added. “Would you be willing to teach him how?”

  He heard her nervousness, the way her voice dwindled down after speaking from one intake of air. It had taken all of Claire Lucas’s strength to ask him. “Claire,” he mouthed silently to Rosemary, who was kneading bread dough. Her eyebrows shot up in surprise. It was as though a ghost had called them, so rarely did they see Claire Lucas. He hesitated before answering, wondering if John Lucas knew of his wife’s request.

  “Does he have his own gun?”

  When she paused long enough for it to be an answer, he interrupted. “Don’t worry. I have a safe gun he can use and some hunting clothes.”

  He lied. He did not have a gun he would trust with a twelve-year-old, and they certainly did not have hunting clothes that would fit Jimmy.

  “I don’t know about this,” he commented, shaking his head after he hung up the phone. “I don’t want that drunk bastard on my doorstep yelling at me. He should be doing this. It’s his son. What if something happens? Then we’re liable.”

  Rosemary stopped kneading the dough, straightening up from the table to brush a stray hair away from one eye with the back of her hand. It left a floury sash above her eye.

  “Honey, you can be so dense sometimes. Why do you think the boys are over here so much? Do you really think that John Lucas cares? And for Claire to ask you . . . well, that speaks for itself. She is the other parent there,” Rosemary reminded him, “and she has asked you.”

  She dropped the mound of dough into the buttered bowl and covered it with a flour sackcloth.

  “We can afford to buy another gun and some hunting clothes,” she said calmly, scraping the dried dough off her palms with a thumbnail. “This will be good,” she added with a smile, “for you too.”

  Whatever hesitation Ernie had felt disappeared with his wife’s response. He rose to the challenge, fueled by memories of his own father and by the sobering fact that he had no children to pass on what his father had taught to him.

  The distance between them dissolved on hunting trips. They suffered through cold, rainy weather, hunkered down in a duck blind, drinking coffee, eating brownies, and laughing while waiting for rafts of mallards, wood ducks, teals, and bluebills to drop out of the sky and land on an oxbow of the Chippewa River. They hiked through stands of poplar and aspen, their faces scratched by the slap of branches and their pants covered with burrs, trying to keep up with Butter, the yellow Labrador that Ernie had then. He was an old dog but full of mischief. They never knew when that sudden explosion of feathers that was a flushed ruffed grouse would occur because Butter was a dog bent on his own wishes.

  Once, when Jimmy was fourteen, the dog enraged a sow bear, having tampered with one of her cubs by chasing it. Ernie and Jimmy scrambled for the nearest big trees. Ernie instinctively put himself between Jimmy and the black bear, raising his shotgun and aiming while Jimmy climbed to safety first. They stayed up in the branches of their trees until the bear had sufficiently rebuffed the dog and retrieved her cub before running off. The dog sat under Ernie’s tree, his mouth dripping foamy saliva in what appeared to be a fool’s grin as he peered up into the branches at Ernie.

  Ernie took Jimmy fishing too. They fished the Namekagon, the Brule, the Flambeau Flowage, and even Lake Superior for whitefish and steelhead. Wherever they went, people mistakenly took them for father and son. Except that Jimmy was much taller than Ernie’s five feet, nine inches. Other hunters and fishermen slapped Ernie on the back kiddingly about his height compared with his “son.” Ernie corrected them while Jimmy smiled and said nothing.

  By the time he became seventeen, Jimmy had grown into a more skilled and sensitive hunter than many men three times his age. Ernie was a good teacher, and Jimmy was a good student. That, as Ernie saw it now, was his biggest mistake. Jimmy became too good with a gun, too confident that he could protect himself.

  Bombs. That was one of the many obvious differences between hunting and war. There wasn’t a bullet made that could disarm a technological rock of hell. Or something so lethal that it could be tossed at you as easily as a baseball. Jimmy fought in a different war. While the bombs and artillery had gotten sleeker, and the grenades more effective in their timing, it was the reason for Jimmy’s war that was never clear to Ernie.

  SOME OF THE BEST MEN I’d ever known were in the Marines with me. Even some of the officers. But the grunts like me were automatically considered stupid if we didn’t have a college education. Some of the guys in Fifth Division didn’t even have their high school diplomas. But that didn’t mean they were stupid. They were poor. They came from poor families. More poor than I thought was possible. The Corps seemed like an island with pineapples and coconuts to those guys. Some like Cracker Jack had been facing jail time. He told me that he’d had his nickname since childhood because he craved boxes of Cracker Jacks and the small prizes that were in them. When he didn’t have the money to buy them, he began stealing them from the store, and as he got older, he stole bigger things. When he got caught stealing a car, he was given a choice: prison or the military. He said he picked the Marines to get his ass kicked and his head screwed on right.

  I did have my high school diploma. My mother also drilled it into my head by dragging me to
the bookmobile that reading was as necessary as breathing. She was right. I had no idea what kind of country Vietnam was. I was terrified, and the only way I knew how to get rid of some of my fear was to figure out just where I was going and who lived there. I always was a history buff. So I read everything I could about Vietnam in what little free time I had during basic. I spent one night screwing a prostitute and getting a case of clap that everybody laughed about. But the rest of the time I read. It helped in some ways. Made it worse in others.

  Dienbienphu kept surfacing in the talk among the officers at Khe Sanh. I knew exactly what they were talking about although I never let on. It was like saying the Battle of Little Bighorn except it happened in Vietnam. Led by Giap, the Vietnamese slaughtered the French in 1954. I could read my CO’s thoughts. The French were nothing in comparison to what Giap wanted to do now. If Giap could mastermind that one, he could do it to us, and what a notch in his belt that would be. Slaughtering soldiers from the most powerful country in the world. The Khe Sanh base was just one big corral, and we were a lot of pigs. That’s what we were looking at: being gutted.

  I learned a lot of good and bad things in the Corps. Those bad things contradicted nearly everything I had been taught that was any good before I joined up. One good thing stood out above the rest: Don’t take what doesn’t belong to you.

  It was close to Christmas when one night Marv asked me, “Do you know why we are here?”

  It wasn’t a dumb question. He would never have asked such a question before we left the States. But once we landed in Nam and realized the big shittin’ lie we had been dropped in, it had to be asked. You had nothing to lose by asking. Especially if you were stuck at Khe Sanh.

  “To fight Communism,” I said, giving the standard answer. I was reading Huckleberry Finn for the umpteenth time and drinking a beer we had pinched from a supply we had found in another bunker. I had my copy of The Man Who Killed the Deer with me too. Ernie had given me those books as well as many others. I had left the rest of them at home. My .45 was napping on my belly. I kept it available when I was relaxing because of rats. The biggest rats I’d ever seen, and they carried anything and everything you didn’t want to get, rabies and fleas that carried diseases like typhoid. Being bitten by a rat was a war wound just like getting shot or bombed. They lived and squealed in the sandbags, and some nights they even fell on us while we were sleeping. That was as bad as being shot in my book. What hell it was at night sometimes. I’d feel a thump and then that wild scratching on my face and chest as they scampered to get off. That squealing. I woke up like a three-alarm fire, hollering like hell. I swear the fuckin’ Viet Cong trained those rats. God, I hated ’em. I shot every fuckin’ rat I saw.