The Turtle Warrior (36 page)

But by the time Ernie had gotten three-quarters of the way across, he began to have nagging doubts about walking up the north slope. Not that he wasn’t capable of doing it. It was a small ridge, and its sides, though a climb, were not treacherously steep. If he took it slowly, it would be as pleasant a walk as any on flat land. He had begun moving toward it with the happy memory of hunting it with his father, thinking it had been forty years ago when he was last on the ridge, until his faulty memory made him suddenly recall differently. He stopped and stared at the big red pines, deeply bothered that he had forgotten what had been a momentous day. It was sixteen years ago, not forty, and it was not his father but Jimmy Lucas who had last hunted with him on the ridge. It was the fall of Jimmy’s senior year in high school, the November he shot the big twelve-pointer that many people had seen in the area but could never find during hunting season. Like a fist smashing through a wooden door, the area of his brain that kept all pain locked away opened up. The memory bled and pooled in his eyes.

THAT DAY THEY HAD POSITIONED themselves at the base of the ridge in the hope that they would catch the deer either coming down or going up the slope.

“I think he’s in there,” Jimmy had whispered to Ernie, jerking his head toward the swamp. It was before sunrise, and Ernie could feel the warmth of Jimmy’s breath on his cheek.

“Maybe,” Ernie whispered back. “But remember what I said. If you shoot him in the swamp, you better make sure it’s a clean shot. Otherwise it’s gonna be you spending your day trying to find a blood trail in that soup.”

They stopped talking and quietly moved into their positions, leaning into red pines that were twenty feet apart. Ernie was doubtful that the buck was in the swamp. It was too wet for deer to bed down, and they usually reserved the swamp as a last effort to shake off a predator.

It was half an hour before the darkness gradually became gray and, within a matter of minutes, lightened up enough for both of them to see the white pines towering in the distance on the edge of the Morriseau farm. At first the boreal cedar growth appeared quietly empty. Ernie watched as the mist thinned with the gain of light and whole patches of canary reed grass and moss became visible with the lift of fog. Then they heard a snort and saw the flagged tails of three does as they emerged from behind a large white cedar. Neither man raised his gun. Both had doe permits, but they had tacitly agreed to try for a buck first. Ernie watched with surprise as the does bounded out of the swamp in single file on the well-worn path that led through the white pines into his field. He had swiftly concluded that there weren’t any more deer coming out of the swamp when out of the corner of his eye he saw Jimmy slowly raise his rifle. Ernie looked back at the cedar.

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 had 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.