The Turtle Warrior (3 page)

“I won’t. I promise.”

Out the corner of his eye, Bill could see Terry grin. He hated Terry, hated his shit-stinking cigarette breath and large beaver teeth. Bill could still see the jagged rocks loom before him and feel the thundering of blood in his ears as James and Terry had held him by his ankles and dipped him up and down over the side of the rust-colored bridge. He halfheartedly believed that they weren’t going to let go of his legs, but they’d been drinking that day too, and their grip wasn’t as tight as it could have been. At one point when Bill thought his eardrums were going to explode from the pressure of blood in his ears, he saw the river beckon to him. Her watery arms splashed upward when the fast-moving current hit the rocks, and he felt the spray on his face. He thought the river might grab his head, disengaging it from the rest of his body with a quick yank. But then James and Terry swung him over the bridge and onto the road, dropping him so that he fell painfully onto the gravel. They laughed as Bill’s arms frantically clawed the air before he hit the ground.

“It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s ... it’s ... it’s Billy Baboon!” they shouted in unison before howling with more laughter.

As Bill lay on the dirt, trying to catch his breath and establish his bearings, he saw his brother gradually stop laughing. James dropped his beer bottle and walked toward him. A frightened look came over his brother’s face, and he hoisted Bill up, roughly grabbing him under his armpits. Bill knew then that James would never have let go of his ankles. What he didn’t know was what caused his brother to do it in the first place.

James did not treat him that way when Bill was very small. But as James grew older and especially when he spent time with Terry and his other friends, he entered blind periods of cruelty. When Bill was thrown in with his brother and his friends, the dark and unseeing maliciousness of his brother encircled him. During those times James seemed to forget who Bill was and even that he loved him. Bill could see his brother’s jaw jut out and set, the small muscles knotting along the bone. His face looked as though winter had passed and crusted it with ice. Still, Bill sought out his brother when their father’s drinking became severe and their mother’s sorrowful anger ricocheted through the house.

The snapper was almost to the river when Terry shouted, “Hey! Don’t let her get away!”

The older boys raced down the bank. James grabbed the turtle’s thick, rough tail and dragged her back, her claws raking at the sand. He placed one boot on top of the snapper’s back and pressed down.

“What are you gonna do with her?” Terry asked.

James stared down at the turtle, absently chewing on the soft end of a timothy weed stalk. “Take her home maybe. Mom can make soup outta her.”

“Got any more firecrackers? Maybe we could put ’em up her other end,” Terry suggested gleefully. Bill instinctively squeezed his buttocks together with horror. Just watching James and Terry the first time was bad enough.

They had spotted the big snapper as she was climbing down the bank after having deposited her eggs. James teased her with a stick the size of his wrists, and it was then he got the idea of using his firecrackers. He stood up and reached into the back pocket of his Levi’s, produced a packet of red and white striped tubes the size of cigarettes.

“You don’t tell Mom I’ve got these either,” he warned Bill, his eyes slightly bloodshot from the four beers he had chugged.

James taunted the turtle with the stick; her head darted forward, and her jaws snapped at the wood waving in front of her. Then she bit down on the stick and hung on. The size of the stick made her jaws spread far apart, and Terry quickly inserted six firecrackers in the gaps. James struck a farmer’s match against the silver metal buckle on his belt and, reaching forward with his other hand, lit them. The snapper surprised him by letting go of the stick and lunged toward him. She razored part of his thumb, and if it hadn’t been for the firecrackers protruding from her mouth, she might have bitten down fully, severing his thumb from his hand.

“Jesus Christ!” He yanked back his hand. Then the firecrackers went off. Bill automatically jerked an arm up to protect his face. When the white smoke had cleared seconds later, his stomach rolled at what the small explosion had done to her jaws.

“No!” Bill surprised himself by yelling. “How’d you like your butt blown apart!”

But rather than look at Terry, Bill stared at his brother. He’d seen James do some mean things, but this was the worst. His brother picked up his bottle of beer and held his arm away from his body as though he could not believe the limb belonged to him. He seemed shocked at the blood dripping from his thumb and flexed it slightly across the bottle’s label. The turtle had only managed to cut through skin and veins, not the bone or tendons that enabled James to move his thumb.

“You—” Bill shouted again, so angry that he felt the spit gather and build into foam in his mouth—“had it comin’! She didn’t do anything to you!”

His brother’s mouth fell open, and he stared back at Bill. He let his arm fall limply to his side, and he shifted his gaze toward the turtle. She groaned, and his brother’s face darkened with shame. Rather than feel kindly toward his brother, Bill became even angrier.

“You! You!” Bill searched for the right words, the worst words he had heard. Words that would damn his brother to hell. “
YOU
...
GOD ... DAMNED ... BASTARD!”

“Are you gonna let him talk to you like that?” Terry asked incredulously. When James continued to stare wordlessly at his younger brother, Terry spun around and, opening his big tobacco-stained mouth, began to yell.

“You little shit! It’s just a fuckin’ turtle!”

Bill immediately backed up, knowing Terry would try to grab him. Terry had calloused palms and stubby fingers that were as stained by tobacco as his mouth. He extended his hands toward Bill, ready to pound him into the sand next to the turtle.

“Knock it off!”

His brother suddenly came to life again and pushed Terry back. “I’ll beat on my little brother if I feel like it, but not you.”

Terry hiked up the steep bank toward the road, cuffing the sand now and then with his boots.

“Listen,” James said, bending over so that he was eye level with Bill, “I’m sorry, okay. I’m
sorry.
It was a stupid thing to do,” he whispered hoarsely, his breath sour with beer.

He wiped his eyes with the back of his uninjured hand.

“I need your red bandanna to wrap my thumb,” he said, his voice cracking.

Bill pulled his bandanna from his pocket and gave it to James. His brother wrapped the red cloth around his thumb before reaching down and grabbing the snapper by the tail.

“I can’t take it back. It’s done now. When we get home, I’ll shoot her so she doesn’t suffer anymore. Maybe Mom can use her for soup, so she doesn’t go to waste.”

“Mom is gonna know what happened to her,” Bill said hesitantly.

“I know. But you don’t tell her. That’s my job. I’ll tell her what I did. Just shut up about the beer.”

His brother glanced up at the road where Terry was waiting. “C’mon. We gotta start home or Mom will really get pissed. And just don’t say anything more to Terry, okay? I don’t want him to sock you.”

Bill nodded.

James began hiking up the steep bank. The turtle’s head swung just above the ground, and blood from her jaws splattered his jeans. Bill hung back, waiting for the two older boys to get ahead of him. He looked back at the shore. Brown beer bottles were scattered across the grass, and there was a trail of clawed-up sand and blood. He stared at the rippling surface of the river.
We never did go fishing,
Bill thought. He wondered if his mother would notice that they had left the house without rods and reels or that they had come home with no fish. He began to walk up the bank.

He continued to trail behind his brother and Terry, already about fifty feet in front of him, when they reached the gravel road that led to the Lucas farm. Bill could hear the low sounds of their talking and occasional laughter, but he couldn’t hear the words. James didn’t turn around to see if Bill was following them. So Bill studied his brother as he walked, his own black high-topped sneakers kicking up the brown dust of the road.

The sun arched steadily downward in the sky. He wished that James and Terry weren’t ahead of him and that he had his turtle shield and wooden sword. He would fight his enemies here, hidden in the bright rays of the afternoon sun and the grassy ditch alongside the road. And when he was through fighting, his enemies bloodied and littered in the gravel, he would run back to the Chippewa and dive beneath the water’s surface to join the other Turtle Warriors, lying beneath the lily pads. Only he was special. He would keep his human form and still be able to live in or out of water.

James and Terry began to sing “My baby does the hanky panky.” Then they switched to an Elvis tune that Bill didn’t know the name of. But he knew it was an Elvis tune because James sang it all the time. Watching them scuffle the dust into knee-high clouds ahead of him, Bill saw how much they tried to look like Elvis. Both of them wore their hair slicked back with Brylcreem, ridged on either side of their heads and combed toward the middle so that the ridges came together and formed ducktails at the nape of their necks. They both wore white T-shirts with sleeves rolled up to the shoulder except that Terry had a pack of Camels tucked into the right arm sleeve.

“The doctor says his lungs are black from all the smoking he does,” James whispered to Bill once. After that, all Bill could think of when he saw Terry was his black lungs shrunken into dried mushrooms and how much he hated him.

Then Bill looked at the lower half of their bodies. Both wore tight Levi’s jeans with rockabilly black boots to complete the Presley look. But his brother looked more like Elvis than Terry did. Bill momentarily swelled with pride. James had silky black hair and their mother’s dark brown, almost black eyes. He could rotate his hips, rising up so that his boot-covered feet balanced on the tip of his toes while he jerked his knees obscenely back and forth just like Elvis. Throwing his already deep voice down even deeper, James warbled the songs out of his throat just like the King, using an old dried corncob for a microphone.

It was 1967. The Beatles had already invaded the United States, but time moved so stubbornly in the Olina community of six hundred that it was as though they didn’t exist yet. Not just in Olina but in the whole of northern Wisconsin. James stuck by Elvis, Roy Orbison, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Sometimes the Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens, and Buddy Holly. He played them so often, the music blaring out of the hayloft of the barn where their mother had banished the record player to, that Bill knew all the lyrics to James’s records and sang them while fighting his enemies in the barnyard.

He sang “Don’t Be Cruel” and raised his wooden sword. Swish! Another enemy was dead. He sang “Love Me Tender” loudly and out of tune, speeding up the beat while cutting off the purple tops of thistles by the chicken coop with a few sweeps of his sword. He screamed the words to “Great Balls of Fire” while pretending their mutt dog, Beans, was one of his archenemies and chased him around and around the outside of the barn and sometimes into the field. And when Bill got tired of playing, he sang “Blue Angel” and sat on the wooden fence post behind the barn while the dog retreated to a safe distance to rest, his tongue lolling and dripping out of his mouth but his eyes kept warily on Bill.