Snapper (5 page)

I don’t know, incidentally, whether Fast Eddie, the proprietor of the sleaziest bar in the Midwest, still attends Fellowship Christian. It wouldn’t surprise me.

Back to that boat: with me and Shane and Eddie and Moe. Eddie said stop and could we pass Moe up to Eddie for his expedition. Moe still lay on the bottom of the boat between Shane and me, but Eddie had decided it was time to drop him in and see what happened. I looked over my shoulder to see where we were in relation to the far bank. Shane shouted. Eddie yelled “Shit!” I turned back around and saw Shane’s thumb on the floor of the boat.

I fainted.

Shane completed a BA in comparative literature before he became a librarian, and he went through an infuriating phase of constantly analyzing “texts” in conversation. I put the word in quotes because I thought he should call them stories or novels or poems or advertisements, and not go all faux-scientific
about it. Anyway, in the back of my mind, a little Shane voice is describing this story as a “castration scene” in which the severed thumb is a proxy; in which the protagonist is deprived of his masculinity in an encounter with a primeval force, due partly I suppose to the carelessness of his companions. I think this Shane voice is channeling Derrida or somebody. It’s bullshit. His thumb was reattached, though you can obviously still see the circular scar (Aha, says the voice. So it’s more of a circumcision scene …). He fathered three fine children and two months ago he even had a poem published in
The Southern Review
.

The reattachment, though, is an eternal testament to the quick reflexes and clear thinking of Eddie. I have no memory of these events and Shane was in no state to notice. It seems, however, that Eddie lunged over my inert mass to hoist Moe by the tail from the floor where Shane had dropped him, and where, Eddie said, he was eyeing the severed thumb hungrily. He dropped Moe over the side—surely the temptation was to fling him as far as possible—and smoothly shoved me toward the bow without upsetting the boat—all, again, in practically the same motion. In seconds his Led Zeppelin T-shirt was wrapped and knotted around Shane’s hand. The doctors commended him for this in particular—he saved Shane a lot of blood. Shane looked terrible anyway, though: his arm was red to the elbow, his chest and face were splattered, and the bottom of the boat was stamped with bloody boot prints. Shane thinks Eddie asked if he was all right—and surprisingly, he was, until the pain hit a few seconds later and he began to yowl. Eddie rowed for shore and I woke up, asking what had happened. When he told me, shouting over Shane, I nearly fainted again. We beached and helped Shane out; Eddie went back for the thumb. I wouldn’t have thought of
that. He wrapped it in my T-shirt. Shirts off, I am sure we looked like a couple of vain hayseeds who had an accident with a knife or a gun after too much beer. The difference was Eddie. We made it to the truck as quickly as we could and Eddie drove like hell: if there is any native advantage to being a Hoosier it is in the ability to drive on bad terrain at unsafe speeds and through town at greater speeds and in violation of every known traffic law yet arrive safely in one piece. Or in Shane’s case, two.

We were in the papers the next day, along with a few precautionary words about snapping turtles. Moe, it seemed, was an alligator snapper, larger and less aggressive than the common snapper, and rarely found this far north. The alligator snapping turtle takes its name, incidentally, from a habit of eating baby and juvenile alligators, though Moe was probably not big enough for that yet.

Obviously, we saw Eddie now and then after that—in the hallways at school, and later at bars and pool halls and so on. Shane tried to hang out with him once or twice just to say thanks, but really, we never talked to him again. Shane described one afternoon he spent with him: all “heavy metal, handguns, and dirty magazines.” For all I know he was talking about the church group. He could have been describing half the bedrooms in Evansville. Either way Shane couldn’t go back.

Shane still won’t hear a word against him, though. When Fast Eddie’s ran an Ass Wednesday contest before Lent Shane’s dad was very upset. This was twenty years on and 150 miles away. Shane said his old man just didn’t get it. I think they didn’t talk for a couple of days.

Then again, Shane won’t even hear a word against Moe. It’s not as though the turtle is actively prejudiced, acting out
of malevolence, he says. That’s because he’s a turtle, I say. We speak of him in the present tense in deference to the longevity of his kind. In truth that twine must have snagged on something long ago and left him drowning, baffled. I picture him sinking into the mud and even in death accumulating an impenetrable disguise.

Uncle Dart and Aunt Loretta didn’t just come from Texas, they brought it with them. Dart would have put longhorns on the Cadillac if Loretta had let him. He smoked Lone Star cigarettes, and he had nineteen Stetsons that Loretta used to hide “to learn him they need to stay in one place.” He was sixty-two but still lean and swaggering. Loretta was the same age but her hair had gone white before she reached thirty. She always stayed the same after that, just got a little more wiry each year. She put jalapeños in her cornbread. When her new Indiana neighbors came over to say welcome she handed that out and left them speechless and gasping for Dart’s Lone Star beer.

Dart kept a loaded gun in every room of the house. I disagreed with that, but I didn’t grow up in Texas. His grandfather had been scalped by a Kiowa brave on the Oklahoma border in his father’s own lifetime. I think I’d keep guns, too.

Both wore boots most days, and if you asked what kind of skin they were made from you got a different answer every time. It might be rattlesnake or alligator, but it might be puppy or chimpanzee. That was Texas wit, and some of their new Indiana neighbors weren’t sure how to respond.

They had Texas tablecloths and
DON
’
T MESS WITH TEXAS
bumper stickers. They had just about every book about Sam Houston ever published, and some dubious theories that placed him in the family tree. They had plates on the kitchen wall with cartoon kids saying things like
If we’re good, we’ll go to Texas
. They had every conceivable thing that could remind them of home, and there was no trouble at all until Uncle Dart hung a
WHITES ONLY
sign up on the front porch.

Perhaps in Texas that would pass for a charming bit of historical paraphernalia, but people in Indiana expect you to be just as sincere as they are.

I worked in Box County State Forest seven days a week starting at five in the morning, though only for spring and summer. Dart said I was a birdwatcher, and he didn’t think that a fitting line of work for a young man. I didn’t either. Birdwatchers stand at a safe distance with expensive equipment marveling over colors and wing bars. What I did was track songbirds back to their nests and monitor the progress of their offspring. They were in massive statewide decline and Indiana University, my employer, was attempting to establish why.

“You’re a little John James Audubon,” said Loretta.

“Naw,” said Dart. “Audubon was a crack shot. How you think he got his birds to sit still?”

Each morning in any weather until ten thirty or eleven I patrolled a square mile of forest. There were several others
doing the same throughout the state, but none nearby. I could differentiate by ear the male and female sounds of thirty-four species. When I heard a female I tried to spot her and follow her home. Some birds are wilier than others, and this could take hours. I also checked on nests I had already found. It is a myth that a mother won’t return to a nest contaminated by human touch. Frequently I took nestlings out to count and inspect them in my hands. Some birds are braver than others, too. A female Hooded warbler will fly her bright yellow body into your chest with all her might until you leave her babies alone. Her mate perches at a safe distance, chirping angrily.

About half my birds were ground nesters. I found a Louisiana waterthrush nest once eight feet from a whole brood of corn snakes. Sad, but I couldn’t interfere. Twice a week I carried an enormous telescopic pole with a motorcycle mirror mounted at the thin end. Holding this in one hand and my binoculars in another I could just about guess the number and condition of eggs and nestlings in trees I couldn’t climb. The binoculars were heavier than the pole. They were German, about fifty years old. They were so powerful I imagined a previous owner atop a Swiss Alp just watching the whole war from there.

I knew every tree, ravine, raccoon lair, fox den, and deer run within my square mile. I knew the local humans only by reputation, and I would have preferred to keep it that way: that reputation was one of armed service in the cause of white supremacy.

Loretta explained to me that there was only one acceptable reason for leaving Texas.

“God don’t make everyone Texan so it’s a kind of ingratitude
to up sticks and go live somewhere else,” she said. That could apply to my mother, too, but I didn’t point that out.

“But sometimes God’s a little forgetful and he gives you a grandchild from some other place.”

Dart and Loretta’s first grandchild had recently debuted in Indianapolis, home of their son Dave and his wife, Elia. They handed the ranch down to Dave’s older brother Jack.

“So you got to go there and make sure the child gets brung up right,” she concluded.

They were disgusted by some of the things we told them about Indiana. My dad explained turtle shooting, for example. Tin cans worked okay, he said, but you have to arrange them yourself. Turtles, usually sliders, will line themselves up nicely on any log you fix in a lake. Dart and Loretta had a half-acre lake outside their Indiana home with two logs perpendicular to the western bank. There were four or five sliders on each as he spoke, shining in the morning sun. The trick, said my dad, is to shoot one off without the others noticing. It wasn’t something he had done since he was a kid with a .22, but it was common in Indiana.

Dart and Loretta gave the impression that Texans were a little more sporting.

I had been sent to Texas for several teenage summers, myself, where Loretta had done her best to bring me up right. She was a woman of very sharp opinions.

“Git married young, Nate,” she told me. “Older you git the more you realize if you want a horse you gotta clean the shit out of the yard.”

One aspect of my Texan education was helping Uncle Dart out on the ranch, at which I was spectacularly inept. I once spent two hours on my belly painting one square foot of an old barn. After that I was put on paperwork and other stuff
usually left to Loretta. I will say this for Dart: whatever signs he hung on his porch, he was scrupulously fair to his employees. I saw that in the ledgers I used to read when I should have been working, bound I think in the hide of one of his own steers. Sons of his friends got no special consideration. A black man named Moses was his right hand for sixteen years, and he got paid accordingly. I was family, but I got less than minimum wage.

My dad was dismayed when I told him that, but he explained it correctly, I think.

“Your uncle Dart takes every man as he finds him.”

Sometimes over dinner Dart cracked jokes about wetbacks and niggers. When I reported this by phone from Texas to Indiana in hushed tones to my parents they told me firmly that he was a man of a time and a place that weren’t like my time and place. More important, he was my uncle and I should overlook his shortcomings and indiscretions, because he loved me. He sure as hell didn’t overlook mine, I said. They told me to get used to it.

Loretta put a different spin on things privately one afternoon in the kitchen.

“He doesn’t say that stuff when you’re not around,” she explained. “He doesn’t hate anybody but self-righteous Yankees, and he’s worried you’ll grow up to be one of them. He’s baiting you.”

When cousin Dave turned twenty-two he lit out for Mexico and spent several years writing jingles for Mexican radio on his computer. Computers were new then, especially in Mexico. He would get a phrase like “thirty pesos for each tooth” and he had to compose appropriate music for it.

After six years of that he phoned the ranch to announce he had married a local girl named Elia, and he was coming home.

They had one month before Elia and Dave arrived. In that month Loretta and Dart spent five hours a day on an intensive Spanish course. “Shouldn’t have bothered,” said Loretta. “Her English is better than ours anyway.” Dart read deeply in Mexican history, and he could name every Mexican state and its capital city, though he had to slow right down for Tuxtla Gutiérrez and Tlaxcala de Xicohténcatl. Loretta bought a tortilla press, which was more work than it was worth. She marked all the saints’ days on the calendar, too. This from a couple who hadn’t forgiven the Alamo.

Dart still made wetback jokes out of habit sometimes, but otherwise he treated Elia as his own daughter. Dave and Elia didn’t hang around in Texas very long, though. Indianapolis had a nascent IT publishing industry and Dave’s expertise was in demand.

Box County was one hour’s drive from Indianapolis and it had what they required most—space. “Room for Dart’s boots” is how Loretta put it, but it was not a detail, shifting everything from a sprawling Texas ranch to a smaller Hoosier home. They got what they were after—a small A-frame on six acres of land, with a half-acre lake by the house. They had forest instead of pasture, and they had intermittent water and unreliable electricity they hadn’t counted on, but they said it would do for a while. They hadn’t been through a Yankee winter.

I stopped by most days after work and scandalized them both by drinking Dart’s Lone Star before noon.

“I get more done by nine a.m. than the army does all day,” I said. Dart found that unbearably smug.

“Ranchers don’t sleep late either,” he said.

I went to their bathroom to get my deer ticks out and flush them down the toilet. I never had fewer than nine or more than twenty-seven, and I always got them off before they sank into my skin. When I finally got Lyme disease I was four thousand miles away on a different project in central Europe.