Wild Fell (10 page)

“
Give him back to me!
” I screamed. “
You’re
scaring
him! Give him to me!
”

Prince said, “Make me, Brown Nose. I fuckin’ dare you. Make me.”

The bus driver half-turned. He shouted, “Sit down, you two! Get back to your seats
right now
, or I’ll pull this bus right over to the side of the road till the police come, you hear me? And then you’ll be headed straight for reform school!”

But of course, it was too late for any of that.

Prince swung Manitou through the air, making
vroom vroom
airplane noises as he did. His friends in the back seat all laughed as though it were the funniest thing they’d ever seen. A few of them started to clap, and one of them—I didn’t see which one—said,
Throw it! Let’s see if turtles can fly!

What happened next is still a bit unclear after all these years, but my memory is that I had glanced up at the driver’s rear-view mirror and seen nothing in it but clouds.

In one second, the mirror reflected the entire rear aisle of the bus and the faces of forty shouting, jeering prepubescent boys; in the next, it went blank, the view—if it could even be called that—was something akin to looking out the window on one of those mornings in late fall, right before winter, when the fog lies as thickly on the glass as white paint.

Then my vision blurred. I tasted blood in my mouth, and the world was reduced to the sweet music of Prince’s screams. I found myself standing up in my seat with a handful of Prince’s hair in my fist, smashing his head against the metal bar of the seat. I felt the vibration of the impact thrum up my forearm. I was possessed of a sudden, vicious strength that was so entirely
unlike
me that I felt myself observing the scene as though from a distance. It was a dark and delicious, even voluptuous, violence that lifted me up above myself on black wings.

It occurred to me that Prince sounded much less terrifying with blood from the gash over his eye smearing the chrome and the cheap vinyl upholstery of the bus seat. I loved the sound of his screaming. I
loved
it. I adored it with a barbarism that was entirely alien to my nature. I wanted to lick the air around him and taste that sound. Then I was punching him in the face, hitting his nose, his forehead, and his chin.

The bus swerved as the driver pulled over to the side of the road and the boys were all screaming,
Fight! Fight! Fight!
But there was an undercurrent of awe beneath it all, because someone had changed the rules of dominance, neglecting to tell John Prince or his friends that the impossible had occurred, and Brown Nose was going to kill him unless someone pulled them apart.

At the roadside, the bus diver did just that. He pulled the bus to a stop and broke up the fight, though “fight” was a bit of misnomer: Prince was out cold and his face looked as though someone had swished it around in a tub of blood. It would be closer to the truth to say that the driver pulled me off Prince, and Prince slid to the ground like someone had poured him from a pitcher.

I looked down at his hands: they were empty. The paper bag was crumpled under the seat across the aisle where Prince had kicked it during his struggle. I looked around for Manitou, but I didn’t see him anywhere nearby. I shrugged out of the driver’s tight grip, kneeled down on the floor of the bus, and looked under the seats.

I stood up and stared at the now dead-silent bus. “Where’s my turtle?” Silence answered me. The other boys seemed transfixed by the blood, still trying to reconcile what they had just seen, the utter demolishment of Camp Manitou’s Goliath by the unlikeliest possible David. “
Where’s my fucking turtle? If anything happened to him, I’ll fucking kill you guys!
”

The bus driver shoved me back down into my seat. He pointed his finger at me, then jabbed his finger into my chest for emphasis. It hurt when he did that. “You sit down and shut up, you crazy little freak. You don’t move. Boy, you’re in some kind of trouble.” He looked down at Prince, who was moaning and starting to regain consciousness. Then back at me. His face was a mixture of adult fury, worry, and a grudging sort of admiration. At least it felt like admiration, though I could have been wrong about that, too. “Jesus
fuck
,” he said. Then, to the other boys: “Okay, you bozos, what’s this about a turtle? Did one of you take his turtle?” He looked back at me. “What the hell . . . was this about a goddamned
turtle
? Seriously? A goddamned
turtle?
Do you two little fucks know how dangerous it is to fight on a bus?”

“The turtle is mine,” I said weakly. “He’s just a little turtle I found in the swamp. A midland painted turtle.” It was as though by naming the turtle’s species and genus, I might make it easier for the driver to either locate Manitou on the floor, alive, or else identify his remains if one of these other monsters had done the unspeakable while I was taking apart their leader. I felt everything—the rage, the strength, the fight, the pleasure in the blood and the pain—rise up out of my body and dissipate like vapour. I was lightheaded with it. It was as though an entirely different being had abruptly taken leave of its temporary occupancy of my body and left me with what I had started with before the possession. A sting of tears pricked my eyes. “John was going to hurt him. He took him out of the bag and he was waving him around like an airplane. Manitou was really scared.”

“
Manitou!
” The driver gave me a look of fury leavened with frustration, perhaps even sympathy. But when he addressed the bus full of dumbstruck boys in the bus, there was no sympathy, just anger. “Everyone look on the ground, and under your seats. If there is a turtle there, alive or dead, bring him to me right now.” The boys all scrambled to obey the driver, obviously grateful for something to do to break the tension. They dove onto the floor of the bus and peered under their seats. “You,” he said to me, pointing again. “Don’t move a goddamned muscle.”

Finally, a boy in the back I didn’t recognize shouted out, “Sir, I found him!” He held up Manitou, who kicked his legs in the air. My relief—for I’d had visions of the turtle’s crushed shell and limbs—was so all-encompassing that I felt as though the air had been sucked out of me.

“Bring that thing up here,” the driver told the boy. “And give it to this kid,” he added, pointing at me. “Right now.”

The boy hurried up the aisle and handed Manitou to me, not looking me in the eye as he did it. I cupped both hands like a crèche and he deposited the turtle’s little body into them. As gently as I could, I retrieved the paper bag and put Manitou back inside. The boy hurried to the back of the bus, still not looking at me.

I could feel, if not actually hear, the collective exhalation of breath when the driver helped Prince to his feet and Prince shrugged him off with a defiant, if bruised
I’m fine, Jesus Christ, leave me alone!
before limping down the aisle back to his friends in the back row. But Prince didn’t look at me, either, and no one bothered me on the last forty-five minutes of the bus ride back home.

The bus driver came to my defence at the terminal when Mrs. Prince saw her son’s battered face and began to scream. Cold-eyed and red-haired like her son, it was apparent even to me where his splenetic temperament came from. She swept him up in her arms as though he were an injured refugee from a lifeboat suddenly reunited with his lover.

“Your boy started it with this boy, ma’am,” the driver said when she wheeled on him and demanded to know what had happened to her baby. I saw Prince wince at the word
baby
, which made me smile in spite of myself. But I was in no way confident enough to laugh at him, however much I wanted to. The driver continued. “He came up behind him and smacked him in the head. And he took this boy’s pet turtle away. The boy’s reaction was maybe too . . . impulsive. But your boy started the fight. No question about that at all.”

“My Johnny is a good boy. He would never have started a fight with this little brat. This boy must have started it—look, he doesn’t even have a scratch on him. What kind of camp are you people running anyway? Where are this boy’s parents? Where?” Mrs. Prince turned to the throng of parents and called out shrilly, “Who are the parents of this boy?” She plucked the sleeve of a random passing brown-haired man in a madras summer jacket who looked nothing like me. “
You?
Are
you
his father?”

“Excuse me,” said the man, looking appalled. He extricated himself from her clutch and hurried away, looking back only once, as if to make sure she wasn’t following him.

Turning back to the driver, Mrs. Prince said, “I demand to speak to someone about this
right now!
Do you
hear
me?”

The driver had clearly had enough. A small crowd of parents and boys had gathered nearby. “I expect everyone has, ma’am. I’m not running the camp, I just drive this bus. You can talk to one of the counsellors if you want. Or you can find the boy’s parents and complain to them. But if anyone asks me, I’m going to tell them that your son is a bully and a brawler and he picked on this kid for no reason. Now,
good day
, ma’am.”

Mrs. Prince wheeled, about to turn her fury on me, when her son abruptly went rigid in her arms and said, “
Mom!
Fucking leave it
alone
. Let’s go. I want to get out of here.” He looked around at the people staring and lowered his head.

“Johnny, don’t curse! And besides, your poor face. You poor baby. We need to get you to the hospital. Then we’ll call the police. We’ll
sue
 . . .”

“Mom,
now
. I mean it. Let’s go.”

The crowd of parents and boys had grown larger now and were all staring. The mothers in particular, seemed to be taking the measure of the differences in the relative height and weight of Prince and our respective demeanours, as well. In their faces was the beginning of disapproval, though directed not at me but at Prince. They knew a bully when they saw one.

The mother of the boy who had brought Manitou to me in the bus pointed at Prince, and then leaned down to whisper something in her son’s ear. When he nodded, she stiffened, hurried him out of the terminal. The boy looked back at me, almost apologetically. For a moment, I thought I saw something like empathy, but by the time I could have been sure, he was already gone. In any case, the summer was over and the time for empathy long past. I looked around for my parents, feeling very alone in the terminal with the paper bag containing my turtle clutched in my hand.

For a moment, it looked like Mrs. Prince was going to say something else, but her son gave his mother a hard, brutal shove toward the exit, picking up his duffel bag from the heap of luggage near the bus door and left the terminal without even a backward glance at me.

From inside the paper bag, I heard Manitou’s feeble scratching as he tried to get out of the bag. I opened it and stroked his shell with my index finger, hoping he’d feel some sort of comfort from it. “We’ll be home soon, Manitou,” I whispered. “We’ll be safe from all this stuff soon.”

My parents pulled up to the entrance of the bus depot fifteen minutes later. I was waiting for them outside, beside the curb, my duffel bag at my feet and the paper bag in my hand.

I’d caught sight of my own reflection in one of the windows in the terminal and had noticed that I was smeared with Prince’s blood. Not only had it spattered all over my white t-shirt, there were droplets of it on my forehead and under one eye. My knuckles were beginning to ache. I ducked into one of the bathroom stalls in the men’s room of the terminal and changed into one of the unwashed t-shirts I’d shoved to the bottom for my mother to wash once we got back to the house. It smelled musty, but at least there was no blood on it.

When she stepped out of the car, I saw that my mother wore a dark linen dress. This was a change from the slacks she’d been wearing around the house all summer long. It signalled to me that picking me up was an event, and that she’d missed me. That, at least, was how I chose to interpret the gesture. My parents apologized for their lateness and for not being there to greet me as I stepped off the bus. God knows what image they had in their minds of who, or what, would be greeting them. I’m sure they envisioned their proud, sunburned son, returning home to them from three weeks away, a little closer to manhood now, and proud of his achievements of the summer. The reality is what they’d missed: the apoplexy of Mrs. Prince, the bellowing of the bus driver, and the shame in Prince’s eyes. And me, spattered with his blood.

I inhaled the smell of my father’s blue cotton broadcloth sport shirt, which smelled like fresh laundry, sun, and Bay Rum aftershave. He held me tight and squeezed me. In my ear he whispered, “Welcome home, Jamie. Did I ever miss you, son. We both did.” Then he hugged me again and I collapsed into his arms.

While pleased to see me, my mother was not remotely pleased to see Manitou. When I opened the bag to show her, beaming with pride, she recoiled and took a step backward.

“Jamie, what on
earth
 . . . ? What is this? You brought home a turtle? What were you thinking?”

“Mom, his name is Manitou.” Her face remained blank. “He’s a midland painted turtle,” I coaxed. I was hoping that by working up my own level of excitement about the painted turtle, the excitement would become contagious and magically spread to my parents. “I found him on the last day of camp. He was lying on a rock. I’ll take care of him, I promise. He’ll be my responsibility. You won’t have to do anything.”

My mother said, “We’re going to take that . . . that
thing
right to the pet store on Bank Street and see if they want it. They can sell it. Maybe they’ll let you keep part of the money. But you didn’t ask permission to bring that turtle home. You know how your father and I feel about pets.”

I blinked, feeling tears prick my eyes. Having endured three weeks at Camp Manitou already, let alone the horror of the day that had just been, the turtle was the only decent thing that had come out of it and I felt responsible for him. In many ways, he had come to symbolize everything about the vulnerability and fear I had felt during that three-week eternity. I had a sudden image of him in Prince’s hand, his tiny legs kicking in terror as that monster swept him through the air from side to side.