Snapper

by Felicia Zekauskas

  Mayor Meyer let this important piece of information sink in.

  “The likelihood of finding such a small body part,” he continued, “in such a large body of water, within such a short period of time, is exceedingly low.”

  The mayor paused before adding the clincher.

  “Furthermore, the cost of dredging would have to be paid for with funds from a budget that is already strained. Dredging,” he concluded, “would be expensive, impractical, and ultimately useless.”

  “What do you say, Chief?” called out Jack Sully, a non-council member in attendance.

  Police Chief Rudolph turned to face Jack.

  “I think that toe could be anywhere now,” he said. “It could be in the belly of whatever it was that bit your little girl. Or, if it’s not there, it might’ve been swallowed by some pike or pickerel or who knows what.”

  “Oh, come on, Chief, we can’t just do nothing,” said Jack. “What if it were your kid?”

  “It’d make no difference,” said Chief Rudolph. “The odds of finding that toe are higher for a fisherman than for any dredging company we could hire. I’m sorry, Jack.”

  Meanwhile, Joanne Sully was miles away, in a bed at Northern Ramapo Hospital. The little girl might want to think twice about wearing open-toed shoes in the future, but other than that, she’d be just fine.

  Certainly she wouldn’t be the first or only resident of Turtleback Lake to be missing part of an extremity.

  * * * *

  Two hundred over ninety.

  And that was on a good day.

  Bill Lupo’s blood pressure was elevated to start. But the constant aggravation of his chosen occupation only pushed it higher. Hardly an hour in his life passed without someone infuriating him with one thing or another.

  Receivers who slanted in instead of out. Guards who forgot to pull. Linebackers who missed tackles. Running backs who didn’t seem to know the difference between the two hole and the four hole. Throw in school administrators, parents who complained about how much playing time their kids were getting, gym classes, and driver’s ed, and you had a man ready to blow like Vesuvius.

  Bill would probably already have been laid out in Schlemm’s Funeral Home if it hadn’t been for Sunday mornings. While others settled into creaking pews, Bill sat peacefully in a rowboat, a congregation of one.

  Out on the lake with nothing but a rod and reel, Bill became another man. Catching something was beside the point. Here there was no one to give him agita.

  And this Sunday morning was especially good. This Sunday morning Turtleback Lake had offered up its one true delicacy – a lovely, sixteen-inch lake trout. Trout were the only fish Bill kept. The rest – the large and small mouth basses, the perches and pickerels, the sunnies, blue gills, and pikes – all went back into the lake to catch again another day. But a trout like this one, silvery and speckled, with plump, delicate flesh, such a fish was meant to swim in a pan of melted, bubbling butter.

  Bill knew that when he got back to shore, his daughter Mimi and his granddaughter Lulu would be waiting for him. They always came for Sunday morning brunch. But the rolls and cold cuts Bill had bought for their visit would have to wait. Today, they’d all be having fresh-caught lake trout.

  For a moment, it actually felt good to be alive. Bill dipped his oars into the water. He couldn’t wait to get to shore and show his catch to his daughter.

  Then the oar in Bill’s right hand jerked. Something was tugging at the end of it. The oar slipped out of his hand, swung wildly and struck Bill in the mouth, splitting his lip. He grabbed the oar again with two hands and pushed down hard. Using the gunwale as a fulcrum, he attempted to leverage up whatever was at the other end. The glare on the lake’s surface was too bright for him to see what was beneath.

  “Damn!” he muttered.

  Whatever had hold of his oar was heavy.

  Bill stood up to get better leverage.

  Then he slipped and fell. The small wooden boat rocked violently. The back of Bill’s head slammed against the side. Now he’d have an egg-size lump to go with his fat lip. Bill was sprawled across the bottom of the boat when he noticed the end of the oar suspended in the air. The wood was splintered, as if it had been thrust into a wood chipper. For a brief moment, Bill’s mind flashed back to a night almost forty years earlier – the night he and his friend Oscar had tried paddling out to Turtleback Rock.

  Bill peered into the water. A large dark form seemed to pass beneath the boat, but he couldn’t be sure. It could’ve been the shadow of a cloud passing in front of the sun. All he knew for sure was that the oar in his hands was now useless.

  Rowing back to shore with one good oar would be no piece of cake.

  *

  “Honey – I’ve fished that lake for fifty years and I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Bill had just walked into the kitchen carrying the mangled oar.

  “Whatever did this has gotta be one helluva of a snapper,” he said, showing the oar’s ravaged edge to his daughter.

  Mimi Lupo wasn’t particularly interested in the oar or her father’s musings. She had her own story to tell. Little Lulu’s tumble off the turtle in front of Druckers’ was big news in her life. In a private corner of her mind she was secretly pondering the possibility of a lawsuit. Now she was being pre-empted by a broken oar and a trout.

  “Clean this, will you, baby doll,” her dad asked, slapping the trout onto the kitchen counter.

  Mimi Lupo certainly didn’t have the smarts to be a doctor. High school had been the end of the line for her, but still, she could clean a fish with the efficiency of a surgeon.

  While little Lulu watched a DVD in the living room, and Bill sat puzzling over his oar, Mimi slit the ventral side of the trout from cloaca to gullet. The contents of its alimentary canal spilled out onto the cutting board.

  Through the translucent membrane of the trout’s distended belly, Mimi glimpsed something that looked vaguely human. She leaned in closer for a better look.

  “Oh my God, Daddy!”

  “What is it, baby?” said Bill, putting down the splintered oar and rising from his chair.

  Bill walked over to the kitchen counter. There – inside the belly of his beautiful trout – was Joanne Sully’s toe. The nail was painted pink.

  * * * *

  The Snappers were the pride of Turtleback Lake. Over the years, the team had won sixteen conference championships, and the display case in the high school’s front hall provided the gold-plated proof.

  But beneath the surface, under the varsity jackets and thick letter sweaters, a darker truth lurked. Members of the team were given special license. They got away with stuff. They made underclassmen take back their trays in the cafeteria. They made smart kids do their homework. And they did other things that were even worse. But everyone looked the other way. You didn’t mess with success. And for decades, The Snappers had been a powerhouse.

  For freshman players, the first few weeks of September were a rude awakening. Even those whose had gone to Snapper games all their lives weren’t prepared for what was to come. Towns had secrets – and the residents of Turtleback Lake kept theirs. There were things that no one knew about until it was their time to know.

  The posted hours of Ted Tanner’s Pet and Turtle Shop were 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Now it was 8:30 p.m. and the sign hanging in the shop’s darkened door said –

  SORRY, CLOSED. PLEASE CALL AGAIN.

  The streetlamp in front of the store barely illuminated the side alleyway where a group of teenage boys moved through the shadows, making their way to the back of Ted Tanner’s store.

  There was no light in back, and when Barry Calabrese bumped into a garbage can, its lid fell to the pavement and clattered like a cymbal.

  “Willya watch where you’re goin’, ya putz!” hissed Savarese.

  Savarese rapped on the back door. A minute later, the door cracked open an inch. A single eye peered out.

  Ted Tanner scrutinized the faces of the
boys gathered at his backdoor. He’d known most of them since they were toddlers. He’d sold them their first gold fish, their first pet turtles, their first aquariums. Now he would serve them in a different capacity.

  “C’mon in, boys,” he whispered.

  The boys, eager to comply, all tried to squeeze through the doorway at once.

  “Quit being such stunods!” snarled Savarese, shoving them forward from the rear.

  They were in a narrow hallway at the back of the store. The only light came from a single light bulb screwed into the ceiling of a tiny bathroom. Through its half-closed door, the boys could hear the drip, drip, drip of a spigot. It had been dripping for twenty years.

  “Watch your step, boys, we’re going down,” said Ted, “to the basement.”

  Descending the darkened stairs, JJ heard something besides the boys’ clunking boots. It was a scraping, scuffling kind of noise, like wooden blocks being brushed and tapped together. There was also a foul smell, like animal waste mixed with dampness. But JJ couldn’t see a thing. The basement was pitch black.

  “Just keep moving,” said Ted, “Keep your hands on the railing. When you reach the bottom, move aside and make room for the others.”

  Groping in the dark, JJ bumped into a teammate. He startled to tumble. He put out his foot to stop his fall. But his foot didn’t come down onto the flat concrete floor that he expected. It landed on something hard, curved, and slippery – like a wet rock.

  Ted Tanner didn’t have to see the string dangling from the overhead light bulb to find it. He reached up into the blackness, grabbed the string, and pulled.

  The sudden glare blinded the boys. They reached up to cover their eyes. They squeezed their eyelids shut, trying to squint away the pear-shaped image branded onto their retinas. It took almost a minute before they were able to look around and see where they were.

  Now JJ understood why Ken Lubowsky had told him to wear work boots – “with steel toes if you’ve got ’em.”

  The basement floor of Ted Tanner’s Pet and Turtle Shop was crawling with hundreds of snapping turtles.

  “It’s just like when you go to Max’s Sea Shanty,” said Ted, looking around at the boys who stood frozen as the turtles climbed over their boots and rubbed against their ankles.

  “You know how they got that big tank up front – the one where you get to pick out your own lobster?”

  The boys all nodded, even those who’d never been to Max’s.

  “It’s the same deal here,” said Ted. “You get to pick out the turtle you want. Only difference is, here you gotta grab it and kill it yourself. Makes him yours, if you know what I mean.”

  This was more than JJ had bargained for when Ken Lubowsky, the Snapper’s starting halfback, had told him that afternoon that there was going to be a secret team meeting for freshmen players at eight-thirty.

  “My dad’s gonna wanna know where I’m going,” said JJ.

  “Make up some excuse,” Ken had told him. “Tell him you’re going to the library to study.”

  “But the library closes at six,” JJ had said.

  “Then make something else up,” said Ken. “Tell him anything. Just be there.”

  JJ wasn’t used to lying to his dad. It was something he’d never done. Every alibi he came up with seemed false and phony. As evening drew near, JJ began feeling almost sick. Then his dad called up from the bottom of the stairs.

  “Hey, JJ! I was thinking about catching a movie at the Rialto tonight. Wanna come?”

  JJ thanked God.

  “I can’t, Dad,” he called. “Too much homework.”

  “Mind if I go?” asked Judd. “You’d be alone for a couple of hours.”

  It was perfect. The Rialto was on the other side of the mountain, at least thirty minutes away. There and back would take an hour, plus the length of the movie. JJ would have three hours plus. How long could a team meeting last?

  “I’ll be fine,” said JJ. “Have a good time.”

  *

  “So,” said Savarese, glowering at the boys in Tanner’s basement. “Who’s going to be first?”

  No one answered.

  “No problem,” said Savarese. “I’ll get the ball rolling. Mars man – you’re up first.”

  “Mars man” was Ricky Marsten, a gawky, six-foot kid who had hoped his height would make him a good target as a pass receiver.

  “How am I supposed to grab one,” he asked, “without getting bit?”

  “From behind,” said Ted Tanner. “Like this.”

  Tanner bent down and plucked a turtle from the writhing mass on the basement floor.

  The turtle craned its head and neck. It thrashed with its front paws and snapped violently at the air, but neither its blade-like jaw nor its razor-sharp claws could reach Ted Tanner’s fingers.

  “It’s easy,” he said.

  As the angry snapper hissed in the glare of the naked bulb, JJ observed something he’d never noticed before: The ring finger of Mr. Tanner’s left hand was missing.

  “C’mon, son, show some spunk!” said Mr. Tanner. “We haven’t got all night!”

  JJ wasn’t the only player who had noticed Ted Tanner’s missing digit. Ricky Marsten had seen it, too. Mr. Tanner had grabbed the turtle as though there was nothing to it, but the stump on his left hand made Marsten think there definitely had been a learning curve involved.

  Marsten thought about his parents. If he lost a finger, eight years of piano lessons would go right down the drain. They wouldn’t be happy.

  “I can’t do it,” he said.

  “Either you do it,” said Savarese, “or you turn in your uniform tomorrow.”

  Marsten knew he was already less than nothing in Savarese’s eyes. He couldn’t redeem himself now. His moment of hesitation had marked him as a coward forever. He knew his football playing days were over. At least he’d still be able to play the piano. And face his parents.

  “I’ll drop my stuff off in Lupo’s office tomorrow,” he said.

  No one said a word as Marsten clomped back up the basement steps and disappeared through the backdoor.

  “All right,” snarled Savarese. “Who’s next?”

  During the next hour, two boys followed in Ricky Marsten’s footsteps, three boys received nasty bites that Tanner stitched up without anesthesia, and two dozen snapping turtles were caught and killed.

  When JJ’s turn came, he did as the boys before him had done. After grabbing a turtle, he drove tacks through its limbs to pin it on its back. Then he placed the tip of a six-inch nail against the turtle’s hard undercarriage. Then, he lifted a hammer above his head and with one ferocious blow drove the nail through the turtle’s plastron and heart.

  When the turtle finally stopped twitching, Tanner gave JJ a long, pointed knife and instructed him on the art of cleaning a turtle. Using the knife’s serrated edge, JJ sawed through the wrinkly, leathery hide and tough, sinewy ligaments that connected the turtle to its carapace and plastron.

  Then, using something that looked like an oversized grapefruit spoon, JJ scooped out the turtle’s guts. The slop of bloody innards was sloughed off the edge of the table into a large metal pot.

  When the turtles all had been butchered, and each shell tagged with a player’s number, Savarese addressed his teammates.

  “Tonight, each of you has made a major step toward becoming a true Snapper. The shell of the turtle you caught, killed, and cleaned, will be baked dry and enameled. It will become your shell, the armor protecting your manhood, in our battles on the gridiron.”

  Savarese glowered at the remaining boys. Then, at a nod from Mr. Tanner, Savarese thrust his right hand deep into the crotch of his pants and withdrew a cup.

  It wasn’t a store-bought plastic cup like the one he had pulverized in front of JJ’s locker.

  It was the kiln-fired shell of a snapper that he had killed in the same ceremony three years earlier. Over the decades, who knew how many snappers had met the same fate?

  Ted Tanner
. Ted Tanner knew. He was the keeper of the book – a deathlog in which Ted kept a running count of every snapper ever killed.

  “Oh, and one last thing,” said Savarese. “We’ll be having our Freshman Team Dinner on Friday. You’re going to love it. Especially if you like homemade turtle soup.”

  * * * *

  A week passed without a word from the Woods.

  Jack and Janet Jensen were getting nervous. Judd had told them he was sure that the Woods were “this close” to making an offer. So what was the problem?

  For three straight days the Jensens called Judd. On the third day they demanded he call the Woods. “Look,” said Judd. “It’s best not to appear too needy.”

  “We don’t care how it appears,” said Jack. “Just call them and see what’s happening.”

  “All right,” said Judd. “I’ll call.”

  Rebecca Woods was tying up newspapers when the phone rang. She answered without checking to see who it was.

  “Hi, Rebecca. It’s me – Judd Clayton. I just thought I’d touch base.”

  Rebecca said nothing for two or three seconds. Judd knew it was a bad sign. Rebecca was clearly couching her reply.

  “We liked everything you showed us, Judd,” said Rebecca, “especially the Jensen house. But we’ve decided it’s just not the right fit for us.”

  Judd knew it was a lost cause. Still he couldn’t help himself. He kept on selling.

  “I know the house is pretty pricey,” he said. “But I think the Jensens’ might be willing to bend a bit.”

  “That’s nice, Judd,” said Rebecca, “but it’s not really a matter of price.”

  “If it’s not price,” said Judd, “could you tell me what it is? You and Dan both seemed so excited.”

  Rebecca kicked herself for taking the call. She should have let it go through to voice mail. This was a conversation she definitely did not want to be having.