Jesus! He got worked up.
Ernie remembered seeing Jimmy drunk a couple of times, but it was nothing like this. Bill seethed and foamed with the rage of a rodeo bull. Bill was looking at him now with an expression that could not be mistaken. Hate.
Ernie took a deep breath, lifted his head just like the dog when he wanted to sniff the air. If he got any closer to Bill, he’d get loopy just on the exhaust coming out of the kid’s mouth.
Tomorrow he’d have to do something about that field, about the supply resting in its soil. It was evident that John Lucas had taken great care never to run out of what made him tick. He had apparently buried his treasures down far enough so that the freeze of winter would not shatter all of the bottles. Ernie wondered how long Bill had combed through the grass to find a mound. How long did it take him to dig up even one bottle? Then he briefly pondered if hard liquor aged with the changing seasons. Could the whiskey in the bottles have evaporated enough so that instead of being a hundred proof, they were two hundred proof? Alcohol distilled so much that it could kill its consumer. Or anybody close to that consumer.
He straightened up slowly. He was too old at fifty-nine to be physically fighting.
“Hell, Bill, what is it this time?”
Bill’s face crumpled. A thin stream of saliva ran out of the corner of his mud-crusted mouth and rolled down his chin.
“You!” he screamed. “You were always there for James. You went hunting with him! You never took me! I was alone over there!” He stopped and roughly wiped the mud away from his lips with one hand. “You think it was a picnic living with the old man? At least James had you! I didn’t have anybody!”
Ernie groaned inwardly. He hadn’t thought and shouldn’t have spoken as he had. He didn’t mean to sound uncaring or fed up, but he was tired. Still, he should have been more careful.
The dog paced between the two men. Ernie opened his mouth to apologize, to try to explain those lost fifteen years, but Bill beat him to it.
“You wanna know what happened after James left?”
Bill walked until he stood directly underneath the yard light. Then he undid his belt, pulled the zipper down on his jeans, and shoved both his underwear and his jeans down to his knees. He pulled off his T-shirt. Tilted back his shaking head and bit down on one corner of his dirt-smeared mouth. The cracking in his voice.
“Take a good look.”
Ernie stumbled forward and held out his hands as if to shield his face. It couldn’t be what he thought it was. He could feel the pulsing underneath his left eye, the throb of what he knew would be a shiner in the morning. He lowered his hands and stared at Bill’s nakedness. He thought Rosemary had been strangely possessive, insisting on being the only one to help Bill with his bedpan and then, when he could stand and walk, being the only one to escort him to the bathroom. She had been the only one who gave him his baths while he remained bedridden.
It couldn’t be what he thought it was, and he had to fight to keep breathing while his eyes took in what was shown to him.
Rather than the normal-size testicles of a grown man, Bill had lumps the size of small walnuts. Across those lumps were brownish red circles like full moons. Bill had the same lunar scars on his upper thighs and in the creases where his thighs met his groin. On the head of his penis.
Ernie blew air out of his mouth and gulped it back in against the sudden rage that sucker-punched him. Although he did not utter it, a scream ripped through the creases of his brain and bottled up near his ears. The pressure in his ears. He thought he was going to blow up.
He had been so preoccupied with Jimmy, with the possibility of his appearance again, with his own guilt and paralyzed grief for fifteen years that he had done to Bill what it appeared everyone else had done to Bill. They did not question his silence but relinquished the quiet boy to a dark corner, and because he did not speak out, they thought he was all right and forgot about him.
Ernie had trouble focusing on Bill, but he limped toward the young man anyway until he stood in front of him. Still breathing hard against the pain in his chest, Ernie bent and gently pulled up first Bill’s underwear and then his jeans. Zipped up his fly and buckled his belt. He wrapped his arms around Bill’s waist and rested one cheek against Bill’s bare chest. And sobbed.
Neither one of them could recall how they got inside the house and made it up the stairs. Ernie only vaguely remembered taking Bill’s boots off before tucking him into bed. Bill cried and would not let go of him, would not let Ernie leave the room. So Ernie wedged himself next to Bill on the twin bed and held him until they both fell asleep.
They did not hear the muffled dragging going up the staircase. Or realize that they had left the bedroom door ajar. The arthritic old dog took one step at a time, hauling his stiff and painfully knotted hind legs up behind him.
Rosemary found them all the next morning. Ernie and Bill asleep on the bed. Angel asleep in the corner behind the door.
ON THE FIRST DAY HE awoke with complete clarity, Bill became aware that he was not in his own bedroom but in a bedroom faintly familiar to him. He tried to raise one hand and discovered that both his arms had been tied to the bed. He turned his head and saw the IV stand and the saline bag hanging from a hook with its tube trailing to his right arm. He tried jerking his arms free, but it was no use. He did not have the muscle strength to try more than twice. Then he saw Angel.
The dog was lying in the corner by the door. Bill dimly recalled a night in which he’d seen the dog in the field, but he could not be sure that it had been just a dream. The dog coughed and yawned. His breathing was a wheeze and a rattle, as though the air passing to and from his body had to pass nearly insurmountable obstacles. He could not believe the dog was still alive. If I’m twenty-four, Bill thought, then Angel must be at least sixteen years old.
He watched as the dog got up stiffly and stretched. Noticed that his muzzle and the hair around his eyes were ivory. The dog recovered from his stretch, yawned again, and sat. He stared back at Bill.
Ernie did sport a shiner and a pouch of fluid under his one eye the morning after his tussle with Bill, but he only weakly kidded Bill about a possible career in boxing and then told him to rest. Ernie didn’t eat breakfast. He mumbled something about town to Rosemary and got into his truck. He was gone all day and most of the night.
Despite having a self-inflicted headache that would drop a moose, Bill did all the chores that day in Ernie’s absence and was grateful when it was time to go to bed. He was so tired. Just as he was pulling off his boots, he heard a whine and a scratch at the door. He let the dog in, and Angel limped to his usual corner behind the door. Bill stripped down to his briefs and climbed into bed but did not go to sleep right away. He listened to the labored breathing of the dog and shifted to lie on his side, to quietly observe the sleeping animal. But Angel was not asleep. His large dark eyes caught and reflected the moonlight coming in through the window.
“This dog has been through hell and back,” Rosemary commented that morning as she watched Bill wipe away the eye mucus that crusted the corners of Angel’s eyes. “Do you remember when we found him?”
Bill couldn’t remember, but he lied because he didn’t want Rosemary to think he’d forgotten.
“Yeah. He’s an old dog.”
She leaned down from her chair and scratched the dog under his chin. “Angel knows me better than anyone,” she said. Thoughtfully pausing, she added, “Even better than Ernie sometimes. I can’t bear the thought of losing him, but he can’t live forever. And the aspirin I give him for his arthritis can only do so much.”
With the dog’s crusty eyes watching him, Bill suddenly did remember the nearly half-dead six-month-old puppy that Angel had been and his tenacious will to survive. They’d found him in a ditch.
Bill could not look at the dog any longer and turned his face into his pillow. Bill had done the same thing a year and a half ago, taking the corner too fast and spinning the car into a full circle before it sli
d, back end first, into the ditch. Then he passed out. Wally Wykowski had found him after having driven out to the farm, wondering why his mechanic hadn’t shown up for work.
A couple of weeks ago his ability to dream suddenly returned, and he did not have good dreams but nightmares. Images so vivid they spiked right through him and caused him to wake up yelling. One night he woke up covered in a sweat that chilled him and that pierced his senses. What he saw and felt was neither a dream nor a nightmare. It had been real once.
That smell in the middle of the night of diesel oil and beer and of days-old sweat. The big hand between his legs, squeezing down with a viselike force. The pain was so intense that his eyes rolled to the back of his head. He dimly saw the glow of the cigarette, felt it burn into his thighs. Then on the tip of his penis, and he screamed. A hand was slapped over his mouth. The hand with the cigarette. Hot ash was flicked into his face. Always the same thing said. A chanting in the middle of the night.
“There is only one man in this house.
“Only one man.
“Only one man.
“Only one man. ”
Then Bill could remember nothing but waking up. His bed was often wet, but sometimes he made it to the toilet on time, and that was even worse. His groin cramped, and he pissed fire, the stream of urine coming out of his body in pumped jerks.
It did not occur to him that he could tell anyone because he did not know if it was real. It had a nightmarish quality, something that couldn’t be explained in the daytime. Yet when he looked down at himself, it was shamefully visible on him.
He wanted a drink so bad that he considered drinking the awful salty stuff that Rosemary cooked with. He knew where she kept her cooking sherry, and he swung his legs out of bed. He was reaching for his pants when the dog blew air loudly through his nose and clacked his jaws as though he were cold. The dog stared at him and clacked his jaws again. He’d never heard a dog do that before, and it frightened him. Angel had stretched out so that he was lying in front of the closed door, and Bill wasn’t sure if the dog would let him pass.
“You weren’t the only one we had to take care of that day,” Rosemary said, making conversation at the lunch table. She was uncharacteristically edgy, and he noticed that she looked out the window at the driveway a lot during the course of that day.
“Angel had been gone all night, the night before. He showed up just before Ernie brought you home,” she went on. “His right side was covered with birdshot. Somebody had shot him. We still don’t know who or why. Thank God it was birdshot,” she added, looking down at the dog lying near their feet, “and not a deer slug.”
He had told Ernie that he couldn’t remember much from that night, and it was the truth at the time. That night came to him in bits and pieces, out of the blue and mostly while he was working during the day. But it came to him now in one big chunk. He remembered raising the gun and being angry at the dog. How the dog had stood up and become a man. Then fire and burning.
He crawled back into bed and pulled his knees up to his chest. Tomorrow he would have to tell Rosemary. He had shot the dog.
He wished his mouth were not so dry. He wished Ernie were home.
The dog took a deep breath, exhaled noisily, and rested his head on his front feet.
He scrutinized the dog in the moonlight. He remembered Angel as being so black that he had merged with the night, and the only way the dog had made his presence known was through his breathing. Now his coat appeared flecked with stars, small white hairs interspersed through his body, and of course, the ivory muzzle. The changing season of old age. Winter coming on the dog.
Bill wondered why the dog didn’t hate him or give any outward sign of it. The dog had to have known it was him, smelled him, and of course, he sat in the field and watched him. Wouldn’t Bill have hated someone who had shot him?
He thought about Angel lying in that ditch fifteen years ago. He had been put there to die by someone else until Ernie and Rosemary had pulled him out.
“It wasn’t easy getting him out of that ditch.” Rosemary laughed. “He growled and tried to lunge at Ernie. We hypnotized him with a flashlight. But he was so weak too. Ernie was the brave one who tied the twine around his muzzle. It took him a long time,” she said, “to get used to Ernie.”
“He likes him now.”
“Oh, sure. But it took awhile. He still likes women better. And children who don’t tease him. You just prefer us gals, don’t you?” she crooned to the dog, rubbing the top of his head. “He never forgets anything,” she added.
Bill wiped his face. He had dug his own ditch. Steeped in the mud and shit of his life while it seemed everybody whizzed past him. Ernie and Rosemary and his mother had pulled him out even while he fought against them.
He sat up and, leaning forward, looked out the window.
Bill was staying in what used to be Ernie’s boyhood bedroom. He could see the barn and the field behind it from the window. He briefly tried to imagine Ernie as a little boy and what Ernie saw out of that window fifty years ago.
Then he thought of his father. It was going to be hard to stay sober. What else would help him against the memory of that remorseless, cold-eyed man or the chanting Bill still heard in his sleep? What would brace him against the hatred of the man and the marks he left as though he had branded his son with an identity he could never erase? His father had been one mean fucker, and stories about him still hovered in the community. Hovered over Bill.
Bill looked at the dog again. Angel had never lost his hatred of most men. His reaction to their presence was still so strong that their first priority was to get to the dog first when someone drove onto the Morriseau place, just in case Angel bit someone. What the dog had been through was visible on him. The lumps on his head. The one ear tattered as though it had been put through a paper shredder. How it waved in the wind like a shot-up flag.
Bill wiped his eyes again.
Some dogs wounded as badly as Angel had been either became so savage they had to be put down or they cowered and shied away from people, crying even if they were touched lightly. Angel had done neither. He had never walked as though he were wounded. He had acquired a ruff around his neck with age and a slow stroll that made his big shoulders ripple with authority. That announced his territory and his determination to protect those within it. Had Angel been a wolf or coyote, his scars and his age would have identified him. To have survived those injuries and have reached that age in the roughness of the natural world would have elevated him. Made him larger than life and a legend.
He would be the talk of the woods and a presence that would cause fear in most hunters.
ERNIE WAS GONE MOST OF that day and into the night. Not because he couldn’t face Bill but because his rage was so severe he could not risk its unwarranted explosion on those he loved.
He killed time before nightfall by driving up to Lake Superior. He had taken one of his rifles with him, but after reaching the hardware store in Washburn, he realized that using bullets would be dangerous. He was about to the leave the store when he caught sight of a shelf full of baseball bats. He bought six of the cheaper wooden ones but reconsidered and went back into the store to purchase two of the more expensive heavy alloy bats. Then he drove on to Bay-field, where he bought a whitefish sandwich and thick-cut potato fries from a lakefront restaurant. Sitting on one of the docks, he ate his food and watched the ferry cross back and forth from the main-land to Madeline Island.
It was midnight when he reached Olina again and parked by the cemetery on the edge of town, shaded by very old and lofty elms. He gathered the bats under one arm and, using a tiny flashlight from the truck’s glove compartment, walked through the newer section of the cemetery.
The headstone was as clean and polished as the day it had been set into the ground. An expensive gray granite. He had to give Claire credit, though. The only words chiseled on it were the name. No date of birth or date of death. No terms of endearment. Still, it galled him. The mon
ey spent for a meaningless piece of stone. Money that Bill and Claire needed. And the harshest joke of all, John Lucas was buried in an area of ground known as the Sacred Heart Cemetery.
He picked up one of the wooden bats and raised it above his head. He listened for a moment, to make sure that he was alone. Then he brought the bat down and struck the headstone. It splintered after the third strike, and he tossed the handle aside. He picked up another bat, and then another, beating the headstone until they broke.
It was the metal alloy bats that did the most damage, and he regretted not purchasing more of them. He stepped sideways and thought of what he’d seen the night before. The maimed genitals. The humiliation and agony on Bill’s face. He swung so that the tip of the bat smashed into the chiseled name. He shut his eyes against the chips and wedges of granite that flew with each strike. When the first alloy bat was so severely dented that it was useless, he picked up the second alloy and last bat. Exhaustion stopped him before he had destroyed the last bat. His shirt was soaked with sweat, and he felt something heavier trickle down his chin. He had bitten his lip.
He stood for a while until his breathing was steadier. Squatting down, he gathered up as much of the splintered wood as he could and the two alloy bats, and headed back to the truck. He took the long way home and stopped to dump the remains of the wooden bats into the Chippewa, where they would secretly float away.
He hid the alloy bats in the far corner of the hayloft in his barn before going into the house and taking a shower. Then he crawled into bed next to Rosemary and fell asleep.
The Turtle Warrior Page 28
