The Turtle Warrior Read Online Free

The Turtle Warrior
Book: The Turtle Warrior Read Online Free
Author: Mary Relindes Ellis
Pages:
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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
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