The Turtle Warrior (25 page)

John couldn’t figure out why his wife seemed so happy today. He took another drink. What the hell did she have to sing about? At least it wasn’t crying, though. He hated it when she cried, and he remembered her blubbering the day they had taken Jimmy to the bus station. She had only made things worse by doing that, and their son was just doing what other people’s sons had done for hundreds of years. Served their country.
Hell,
John snorted, feeling the bourbon in his nose,
he
didn’t have a mother to see
him
off when he enlisted. Had circumstances been different, he might have been killed too.

God, he had a sudden terrible pain in his head. He put his head between his knees to relieve some of the pressure. He sniffed again, and he thought he smelled blood, and then, oh, God, that was another memory he thought he had buried.

The truth was it never left him. The sight and smell of those blood-soaked bed sheets or how the smell of blood mingled with the odor that was always in their Milwaukee neighborhood, living as they did four blocks away from the Schlitz brewery. That dank primeval smell of blood mixed with the odor of fermenting hops and yeast. Because it was too late to transport her to the hospital, the doctor did what he could in their home. But his mother died in childbirth anyway, the baby girl dying with her as well. He and his sister, Edna, sat on the parlor sofa and listened to the frenzied sounds of footsteps and watched as two neighborhood women ran back and forth from the kitchen to his parents’ bedroom. Then it became quiet except for the low, moaning sobs of the women.

His mother’s labor had come on with sudden force while she was preparing breakfast for eight-year-old John and his younger sister. His mother hadn’t been feeling well for the last month of her pregnancy, but nothing prepared him for her collapse next to the stove and the sight of all that pinkish fluid that flushed out from beneath her skirts followed by a river of blood. He ran to their next-door neighbor, the Krugs, and Gertrude Krug called for Dr. Horowitz before running over to the Lucas house. She sent John to the brewery to get his father, but Basil Lucas sent his son home, saying there was nothing to worry about as women had babies all the time and he was needed more at work than he was at home.

His father remained speechless for a few minutes upon his arrival home hours later. John thought it was grief, the way his father bent over and moaned, smacking his hands against his thighs. But then he started shouting.

He had no wife! How the hell was he supposed to work and raise two kids? “What was wrong with her? What was wrong with you? Why the hell didn’t you do something!” he yelled at the doctor. “She didn’t have any trouble before! They slid out like butter!” How the hell could she do this to him?

Dr. Horowitz stared at Basil Lucas. He was wet with sweat, and the front of his shirt was soaked with blood. If he had not been a medical doctor, John knew Basil Lucas would never have let him in their home because he was Jewish.

“You thickheaded ass!” Horowitz shouted back. “She had high blood pressure! She’s always had high blood pressure, and your son and daughter did not slide out like butter! Your wife had a massive stroke! The placenta detached too soon, and the baby died before it could breathe.”

Horowitz wiped his forehead against his shirtsleeve.

“Mr. Lucas! Mrs. Krug says your wife hadn’t been feeling well for a while. It was not your wife’s fault! Why didn’t you bring her in to see me? She never regained consciousness, the poor woman.”

“Damn it all!” John and his sister heard their father say as Gertrude Krug was pushing them out the door toward her own home. “It was that goddamn baby! A girl! What a waste!”

Gertrude Krug fed John and his sister pork roast with heavy gravy and onions, poured over boiled potatoes. Henry Krug, over his wife’s protest, put two large glasses of lager in front of John and his sister and told them to drink it. His sister refused, hating the taste of beer, but John drank it and was grateful for the numbness it brought him. Henry Krug filled the glass up a second time and a third time until the boy was nearly incoherent. Then they were put to bed, John with the Krug boys and Edna with the Krug girls. He dimly recollected hearing the conversation between Henry and Gertrude Krug float up from the kitchen, as the boys’ bedroom was directly above the kitchen.

“The cheap bastard. He wouldn’t pay for Amelia to go to the doctor.” To which her husband responded, “Enough, Gertie. The man has just lost his wife.”

“Well!” Gertrude Krug cried. “He might not have lost her now, would he, if he’d have dished out some money? You yell about the Jews being cheap? They take better care of their women!”

Rather than mourn his wife, Basil Lucas bore a grudge toward her until he died. It never occurred to John to be angry with his father. In his family’s particular German culture, obedience to a father and a husband was absolute and remained the highest value, above love and respect. His mother had disobeyed her husband by dying. Without his wife, Basil Lucas seemed to forget about things his children needed, such as new socks and decent shoes and boots. He and his sister did without or quietly accepted the clothing neighbors gave them. Their humiliation deepened when their neighbors’ children recognized their own cast-off clothing on the Lucas children and teased them relentlessly. John and his sister stayed miserably silent. His father would not tolerate complaining. In this way he was just like the other working-class German fathers in their neighborhood.

Whenever his father beat him, John cried with anger at his mother. He silently agreed with his father. His mother should have been stronger. His father labored fourteen hours, sometimes eighteen hours a day. The other German women in the neighborhood were as tough as horses, and many of them had more than five children. Why not his mother? It was Basil Lucas’s excuse whenever he thought his children were faltering.

“You’re weak!’ he would yell. “Like your mother! I’m doing this,” he often added, hitting his children with the belt and the belt buckle, “to toughen you up. You won’t make it in this world if you cry all the time!”

In his child’s mind, John concluded that his mother wanted to leave them, and without realizing it, he nursed this thought his entire life. When later asked about his mother, he would feign to have no recollection of her and would simply say she died.

Gertrude Krug and two other neighborhood women took turns cooking the family meals and cleaning the house, having Edna work alongside them so that when his sister turned ten, she became responsible for the housekeeping. Their father continued to work at the Schlitz brewery despite his loud opinions and garrulous nature. Basil Lucas was the physical epitome of the beer-drinking, working-class German man: big-chested, thick-waisted, and ham-fisted with graying blond hair and watery blue eyes. Unlike a baker who spends his days so drenched with the smell of sugar and spices and cream fillings that he cannot eat his own creations, Basil Lucas drank his company’s product with pride and as frequently as if it had been water. He puffed on nothing less than Cuban cigars. It was not uncommon for his father to come home from the brewery with a bucket of beer, its sides smeared with butter to keep the foam down. He drank the entire bucket with his heavy meals of pork, sausage, or beef and fried cabbage or potatoes. His skin reflected the basics of his diet, and his red face had the corrugated consistency of a tire tread. He might have retained his pride in being a German had it not been for the backlash and prejudice during the First World War. Basil Lucas bristled anytime his loyalty to America was called into question. He could not have proved his loyalty, as he was just a hair too young to fight in the First World War, but
oh,
what he would have given to have the chance. He was a fighter. There was no one that could stand up to Basil Lucas’s fist, and he carried out his job as a foreman at the Schlitz brewery just by the threat of that fist.

While Edna maintained their house, John Lucas got a job at the brewery during high school by the force of his father’s will. Basil Lucas did not want anyone to think he favored his own kid, so he worked his son to exhaustion, running errands, filling in for a sick worker in any one of the sections of the brewery. If he made a mistake, his father’s punishment was immediate. Once he hit his son so hard in the head that it nearly shattered his eardrum. John hated working at the brewery. It was the local priest’s intervention that allowed John Lucas to participate in the school sport he loved the most, football. For three nights of the week he trained with his high school football team.

John Lucas did not want to enlist. He wanted to serve the war effort by working as a merchant marine on the Great Lakes, but his old man was adamant. Basil Lucas made it clear during their Christmas dinner of 1944.

“I’m gonna go with you tomorrow. You’re gonna sign up,” he said, gazing at his son across the dinner table with hard-boiled eyes and pointing to him with a mustard-covered butter knife. “We are Americans, and it is your duty to serve your country. You can fight the Germans because you are an American first.”

John Lucas thought about his father’s handshake before he boarded the train for basic training. That stubby-fingered paw that threatened to crush the bones in his son’s hand.

“Make sure they send you to Europe,” his father said gruffly. And then he walked away from the train platform.

John Lucas almost didn’t pass basic training when it became apparent that anything beyond fistfighting was hopeless. He was so cockeyed in shooting a rifle that they had his vision tested several times, and they discovered, after his initial physical, that the hearing in his left ear was impaired. But an opportunity arose and he tried out for and was accepted into the Army football team. He rationalized that his playing football for the Army was a contribution as well, to lift morale. He never wrote home, fearful of his father’s response to a letter postmarked in the United States. He also dreaded the day of his release from military service because he had no stories or medals, only a letter praising him for his skills as a quarterback and one of the tallest quarterbacks ever at that. He did mingle with some of the returning veterans, working part-time at a VA hospital, and escorted them on various outings. Disabled or not, they all found a way to hit the local bars and taverns, and John went with them, quietly listening to their stories of hand-to-hand combat, the types of bombs, the snipers, the various landscapes they had been in and the various strategies of fighting. They weren’t all enlisted men. One man who frequently joined them was an Army officer, and John often felt the man’s dark eyes rest on him while they played cards. The officer usually didn’t say much, but John knew that he had fought in Europe and that his wounds were less physical and more mental. Shell shock.

“I thought you were a doctor or an orderly,” the officer commented one evening, “until they told me that you were a football star. At least in the Army. How did you manage that?”

“I applied several times to be sent overseas, and they wouldn’t send me,” John lied. “Do you think,” he added, his temper rising, “that I should’ve gotten my own rowboat and gone over?”

“No, I guess not. Pretty peachy, though, that you got to play football. I guess,” the officer drawled out, “you can get injured that way. Too bad, huh? Big German fellow like you. We could have used you on the front lines.”

“I said I wanted to be there. It’s not my fuckin’ fault I didn’t go.”

John got up from the table and threw some bills down. Striking an officer when he was so close to being discharged would be stupid, but his temper often got the best of him, and so he decided it was safer to leave. John could see the contempt on the man’s face.

“It’s none of your fuckin’ business anyway,” he said, and, dramatically clicking his heels together, saluted the officer just as contemptuously.

Two days before John was to go home, they all went out for another evening of cards and beers. The Army officer remained quiet during the entire evening and finally slumped over in his chair. He’d been drinking bourbon while the rest of them had stuck to beer.

“Jesus Christ,” said the sergeant they called Limb Limkowski because he was missing his entire left arm, “he’s gonna take a leak soon, and it’s gonna be over our fuckin’ shoes.”

“I’ll take him to the biff. I have to get back to the base anyway.

John hoisted the officer up and managed to get him to half stumble, half walk, leaning heavily on John’s shoulder, as they made the trip through the dark and narrow hallway behind the bar to the men’s room. John kicked open the stall door, yanked down the man’s pants and underwear, and pushed him down on the toilet. The officer’s upper torso leaned sideways like a branch heavy with fruit until one stubbled cheek was resting against a stall wall. John listened as the urine hit the side of the toilet, and he briefly considered pulling the bastard off the seat and shoving his head into the toilet bowl. He noted that the officer was not circumcised and that his previous assumption that the man was Italian was probably not right. He was dark-skinned in a funny way. It was hard to deduce from the name. Captain Waterston.

The guy was taking a long time to piss.

Fuck ’im, John thought.

He opened the stall door and looked around. Nobody else was in the bathroom, which was unusual, given the amount of drinking going on in the bar.

He shut the stall door again. He grabbed the officer’s head by his hair and rammed it into the stall wall at least three times until John was sure the officer was unconscious. He held his breath and stood still to listen for any other noise. Then he unpinned the man’s Purple Heart and Bronze Star from his uniform and shoved them into his own pants pocket. He slipped from the bathroom, left the bar from the nearby back door, and ran down the alley.

Before John was discharged two days later, it was with only a minimum amount of questions about the incident from his CO.