The Turtle Warrior (10 page)

Bill stared at the Polaroid of his brother under the night-light. He had his helmet on, so Bill couldn’t see how short his hair was, but the rest looked reasonably enough like James. Except his smile wasn’t real. His mouth looked as though invisible fingers had taken his lips prisoner and pulled them sideways, the skin unnaturally tight underneath his nose. His eyes were sunken and dark, and it was clear that his brother had lost some weight. Besides the picture there was more money still, and Bill counted five ten-dollar bills. He leaned back against the wall.
Little man.
That’s how he felt, as though when his brother left, all the unspoken reasons for James’s leaving had suddenly descended upon Bill, and in his awareness of them, he had become old.

It was a week past Christmas. Bill’s father had come home, had drunk and slept through Christmas Eve and most of Christmas Day, getting up only to eat the holiday meal. It surprised Bill, covertly watching his father eat his turkey, how little he knew or cared about the tall, pasty-skinned man at the head of the table. His nine-year-old life had revolved so intensely lately around his daily struggle to survive at school, the strained wait for his brother’s letters, the fields, the woods, the swamp, and the sky of their farm, and lastly, the fragile web of his mother’s world that he had forgotten to be cautious around the beer-reeking presence that he’d been avoiding, it seemed, since he was born. He silently ate a forkful of stuffing before catching his mother’s eye. A small conspiratorial smile passed across her lips. Her dark eyes had lost their dull captive look and shone.
Things are gonna get better.
He glanced down again to the far end of the table where his father sat and felt an unfamiliar stab of pity. James was thousands of miles away from them in a country that even Bill in his enormous capacity for imagination could not imagine but only carried with him in the word
Vietnam.
A country of purple mountains, man-made woodchuck holes that stabbed, wriggling barbed-wire bombs, a bird that flew bigger than a Canada goose, and hot metal that flew like a bird. Yet Bill knew it was his father, not his brother, who was in a strange country he’d never get out of, a country where only he thought as he did, and whose borders he broke through occasionally to hit his wife, to despise his sons.

Still, now that John Lucas was home for the holidays, Bill wondered how he was going to survive without his brother there to shield him, to shield her. But in his small head he knew, survive he must. James would come home. And James would tell the priest that what he preached at the Christmas mass was wrong. The loving brotherhood of man did not exist.

Bill stopped. He could hear his mother shouting in the kitchen and the banging of pots and pans. His father’s deep, rumbling voice answered her. Bill tensed up. Then he heard a heavy thump. His mother shouted some more. Bill sighed.

 

Can they let you out earli?

 

Bill raised his pencil from the paper. Now he could hear his mother sobbing.

He put his notebook down. His mother’s crying was ebbing. Bill crawled back into bed and covered his ears against the muted notes of her sorrow. It was the middle of January, the middle of a freak midwinter thaw. The chickadees had broken into their spring song that day. Bill had opened his window to the unseasonably warm wind, and it blew the ivory curtains into midnight dancers. He felt both elated and ashamed, having betrayed his fear to his brother. But as much as he wanted to destroy what he had written, he also felt sure that it would bring his brother home. Maybe, he thought, listening to the melting ice drip from the eaves, he could even persuade his mother to call the Marines and tell them that James was needed at home. That he had made a mistake by enlisting.

Bill turned to lie on his right side. He tried not to think of tomorrow. Tomorrow was school. Tomorrow meant Merton. He stared at the dancing curtains. Their fluttering hypnotized his already tired eyes, and combined with the soothing plunk, plunk of the melting ice, his eyes closed. Tomorrow was not now.

The wings flapped, enclosing Bill for a few seconds and brushing his face and chest. They opened again, lifting upward against the surging wind, and he raised his eyes to see that the white wings spanned an enormous length from side to side. His bare legs swung back and forth, and he was held this time by his shoulders. The air was heavy and moist, so moist that he felt slippery like a fish and as helpless as one, clutched in the talons of an eagle. But his shoulders felt no pain, just roped and secure. He dropped his head against his chest and looked below.

They were passing over the Morriseau farm with its two silos and big duck pond. The eighty-acre field behind their house was filled with little clouds of dust, each one exploding like spores from the head of a smashed puffball mushroom. Poof! Poof! Poof! Little black specks were chaotically running through the field, and every time a speck hit one of the clouds, it burst into flames, becoming a ball of fire. He could hear shouting and the deep pop and zing of rifles going off. The air became thick and choking with dust. Bill’s small chest caved in, and his lips quivered. He coughed hard, and his hands jerked up toward his mouth.

Then the wings came together again, enclosing his small body in a cocoon of feathers. When they opened, he saw that the field was clear and a cloud of cowbirds dipped and circled beneath them. His chest cleared, and he no longer felt like crying. He heard the high, clear notes of whistling and looked down. There was someone standing in the middle of the grassy field, waving and waving. The wings caught an upcurrent of air, and they glided toward the far end of the field. They cruised its wide square edge before coming back around.

Bill cried out. It was James, wearing a dull green helmet that had “Elvis” painted in black letters on the side and balancing a rifle across his shoulders. He dropped the rifle and waved with both hands.

“Hey, Billy! Hey, Billy Baboon!”

“Jaaaamess! Jaaamess!” Bill shouted, but the wind took his voice and it disappeared in the rush of air between the feathers above him.

“Over there!” his brother shouted, and picked up his rifle and pointed with it toward their own field. A single black speck was running over the brown plowed earth. The wings caught the cue and flapped harder. They closed the distance in a few seconds and swept lower.

Bill screamed joyfully. “Shit house! You better run! You’re up shit creek now!”

Merton was desperately running and tripping over the deep furrows in the field. Bill pulled his legs up to his chest and curled his toes. They dropped altitude and cruised right up behind Merton. Bill lowered his legs and hooked his feet under Merton’s arms. With legs suddenly as strong as steel cable, he lifted the squirming tonnage of a boy into the air twenty feet before dropping him.

“Don’t hurt the little Hun! Jus’ scare ’im!” his brother shouted.

Merton hit the soft plowed earth with a thump and a groan. But he got up and began running again, his head swiveling to pinpoint Bill’s location. Bill whooped. Merton, his eyes rolling wildly, ran harder. Again they came off a large current of air to level themselves behind the nemesis of Bill’s days. This time Bill did not pick him up but, with legs wound tight as springs against his chest, aimed and kicked, knocking Merton between the shoulder blades. Merton went down so hard he bit into the overturned field and ate dirt. He stayed down, breathing hard, grinding and spitting dirt. But he was not hurt, just scared. Bill stared at the sprawled-out boy as the wings lifted him back into the sky. Then, as quickly as the desire for revenge had come, it had gone, and they left the Lucas’ field with its cleaved and unplanted earth and returned to his brother, standing almost perfectly camouflaged with his green jungle uniform in the middle of their neighbor’s lush grassy field.

James had taken off his helmet and stood smiling broadly up at Bill. The wings, despite their massive size, lowered Bill until the bottoms of his feet touched his brother’s shaved and bristly head. Bill could not speak. The wings didn’t lower him any farther, and they hovered while Bill’s feet curled around and hugged his brother’s head. A look of pain crossed his brother’s face. James reached up and encircled Bill’s ankles with his hands, kissing the bottom of his little brother’s feet.

“Man! It’s really good to see you, Billy Baboon,” his brother said softly. “Really good.”

James released one of Bill’s ankles and swept his arm in a semicircle around him. “I dream about this place all the time ... yeah, all the time.”

He kissed Bill’s foot again. “Don’t ever leave here, Bill. You and me ... we’ll have some fun when I come home.”

The wings flapped. Bill strained, stretching his legs as far as he could to touch his brother’s head. But the wings lifted him higher and higher. His brother put his helmet back on and picked up his rifle. He wiped his face on his sleeve and stared past Bill to the wings. James opened his mouth as if to say something but shut it again, raising his hand slightly.

“I gotta go. But don’t worry. I love you, Billy! And Elvis,” James said, pointing to his helmet, “loves you too!”

Bill watched James run from the field and disappear into the swamp on the edge. His heart beat against the wall of his chest. He heard the high notes of whistling echo from the swamp and smiled through his tears. “My baby does the hanky panky.” He tried to cry out. Nothing. He listened to the lingering sound of whistling, and then it struck him. If his brother had been down there, who was above him, carrying him?

He stretched his neck to look up, but all he saw was sunlight, bright yellow and blinding. The wings flapped, covering his face, tickling and brushing his cheeks. A high guttural call pierced the air around him. The wings swept forward and covered him for the last time, enveloping him with the more familiar feel of his sheets and blankets, and with the descending silence of dreamless sleep.

SO MUCH I DIDN’T KNOW when I left home.

So much I did know.