Snapper

by Brian Kimberling

  The origin of the word is unknown. Silly stories abound about the sound of someone calling “Who’s there?” through the door of a log cabin in pioneer days, and of bar brawls followed by inquiries into whose ear lay on the floor. One of the more reasonable theories is that the name stems from a shipping magnate from the nineteenth century. “John Hoosier’s men” referred to a number of notorious roughnecks who plied the Ohio River on flat log rafts near Evansville, and who may have given the state denizens their nickname and a precursor of their reputation.

  And yet: if Indiana is the bastard son of the Midwest, then Evansville is Indiana’s snot-nosed stepchild. A bend in the river—causing it to stretch a mile wide at some points—gives the area other peculiarities, which may have some bearing on its residents’ eccentricities. To the west of the city of Evansville lies the northernmost cypress grove of its kind in the country, a miniature swamp where bald eagles nest and paddlefish flash in the sun. To the east of the city, as you approach the stripper pits, lies the northernmost pecan grove of its kind, somewhat less picturesque. Ecologically speaking it is as though two slender Southern fingers were reaching up to pinch Evansville and spirit it back to Dixie, or at least back to northern Kentucky. It was near Evansville that the Confederates made their only raid north of the Ohio. The local speech has inflections that are closer to the mellifluous twang of Kentucky than the harsh bland nasalities of Indiana proper. Kentucky, of course, would rather move en masse to Mexico than claim any kinship with Evansville, but its likeness is undeniable.

  I talked to Shane’s dad about this once. He makes great company over a pitcher of beer and a pool table.

  “Neither North nor South nor fish nor fowl,” he said.

  “I guess that makes it red meat,” I said.

  “It’s peculiar,” he said. “But it’s not all bad. You know the Whirlpool factory?”

  That was a rhetorical question; it was one of the city’s largest employers. It’s closed now; the operations were moved overseas.

  “They made airplanes during World War Two. A city that can make an airplane out of refrigerator parts can’t be all bad.”

  “That was sixty years ago,” I said.

  “A place with more self-respect would have built a museum,” he conceded. “The Spitfire pilots assigned to these things in Britain scoffed,” he added. “Called them flying anvils. Until one magical day when a German squadron tried diving to safety. There wasn’t enough Nazi left to fill an ashtray.”

  “Now they just make appliances,” I said.

  “Nothing wrong with making appliances,” he said. “We had a big shipyard, too. Built half the troop carriers that landed at Normandy and floated them down the Ohio to the Mississippi and out. First ship in was the USS Evansville, though she was barely afloat from the shelling.”

  Shane’s dad put up a good fight, I think. Eventually he moved to central Indiana, though. Up there you can find a forest and a major university and other things that make a more natural habitat for a poet. In Evansville he had to cling to the past.

  Central Indiana has beautiful autumn foliage that draws visitors from thousands of miles away every year. By contrast, Southern Indiana, with the humidity of a great river, swings between subtropical heat and subarctic cold with hardly an interval between. Central Indiana is renowned for its Amish population; the roadsides are dotted with Amish kitchens and the back roads are clotted with horse-drawn buggies. Evansville is still a river town, full of brash brawling beer drinkers and women with skin like goat leather.

  It has changed—there are two universities—but the changes are purely cosmetic. The city’s biggest moneymaker is an immense floating casino. Gambling is illegal in Indiana and Kentucky but not in the middle of the Ohio River. People come from every state and then some to gamble on this boat. A correspondent of the London Telegraph once filed a report about playing tic-tac-toe against trained chickens there. Every night about half the gamblers emerge with black eyes and bloody noses. The ones who have any money left head to Fast Eddie’s, which runs salacious contests for most of the days of the week now.

  “You guys do this a lot, huh?” said Eddie. I didn’t know then that he was Fast Eddie. I guess he didn’t know that yet, either. We were barrelling through the city outskirts—cornfields then, Walmart superstores now.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Sometimes,” Shane said, which was uncharacteristically evasive. So why did you invite him? I wondered.

  “Cool,” said Eddie.

  “I seen you guys at school,” he offered after a moment’s reflection.

  “Yeah,” said Shane.

  “You’re in the marching band,” he said to me. I played bass clarinet. Neither that band nor any other marching band in the world has ever needed a bass clarinet. I don’t know why the school owned one at all, but I was its custodian for a while.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Cool,” said Eddie.

  “You guys wanna get some food and stuff?” said Shane.

  “Can you guys get beer?” said Eddie. He meant did we have fake IDs, but we didn’t. Still, Eddie managed to score some Camels from the unquestioning cashier at an isolated gas station after Shane and I had paid for our Twinkies. I was impressed. The thrill expired when we were back on the road and we discovered that none of us had a lighter.

  “How’d you guys hook up?” I asked.

  “Eddie just moved in two doors down from us,” said Shane.

  “Three,” said Eddie. “It’s cool.”

  Essentially Shane was being polite. It’s one of his great failings. He pushed a cassette in: it was the Clash or the Jam or some other English band that nobody in a hundred-mile radius except us listened to. The U.K. in Southern Indiana invariably means the University of Kentucky.

  Eddie was a little sniffy about it. He wasn’t directly critical but he said he didn’t know anything about English bands.

  “You’re wearing a Led Zep T-shirt,” I said, and that was probably my first mistake. He didn’t say anything, just sulked, but it was the first thing he hadn’t found cool. I wasn’t trying to be superior.

  We were on a gravel road by then. Shane and I found an abandoned puppy in the middle of it at dusk one time—a black lab crossed with a beagle, we thought. Shane took him home and called him Bear. Shane was with him when he died on the bathroom floor sixteen years later, and to this day can’t bring himself to get another dog. That is neither here nor there. Bear wasn’t with us that day, and I don’t know why. Things would have turned out differently with Bear along. Once when I was kissing Shane’s sister Bear got very upset because I should have been kissing the other sister, and he knew it. He knew people. But it is an unfortunate fact that Bear was not in his accustomed spot in the flatbed choking on gravel dust as we rolled along.

  “What do you guys do out here?” asked Eddie.

  “We got a boat,” said Shane. We talk about poetry would have been asking for trouble.

  “That’s cool. I coulda brought my old man’s whiskey if I’d known. Maybe next time.”

  “Maybe next time,” said Shane. “That would be cool.”

  “Cool,” I agreed. Suggesting a next time was probably Eddie’s first mistake.

  He picked up a ball of twine off the floor. I don’t know why it was there or why he picked it up, let alone why he brought it with us into the woods. Boys are like that. I have a boy of my own now, carries things around all day: a book of matches, an extension cord, a stick. I always carry a pocketknife. Maybe centuries of carrying clubs and swords have imprinted themselves so that at last the middle-class white Midwestern man is never without his Victorinox.

  Scratch that. Half of us carry guns.

  What I am getting at is that Eddie carried that ball of twine into the woods. Maybe his ancestors were hangmen or slave traders or mule skinners; maybe he had some deep need for a length of rope.

  A snapping turtle, if you have never seen one, is one of the most hideous and magnificent creatu
res on earth. It is a stone gargoyle with an aquiline beak and stern hunter’s eyes, a spiny ridge over its granite carapace and down its tail, and long dagger claws at the end of each leg. It can’t walk very fast, and it is not a swift swimmer as far as turtles go. What it can do is lurk, often for so long that it becomes encrusted with aquatic gunk and indistinct from its background. When an unsuspecting fish wanders past it strikes with its neck and jaws faster than any rattlesnake and with more force than any crocodile. In the Southern Indiana version of Aesop’s fable it eats the hare.

  The specimen we found sunning itself was somewhere between two and three feet long from beak to tail. It had come some distance from the water to perch on a flat sun-drenched stone. It was Eddie who spotted it and Eddie who had hoisted it up by the tail before we knew what he was doing. He would have made a superb photograph: handsome teenage boy holding aloft a vanquished, prehistoric monster.

  Standard procedure when you are an unsupervised adolescent in possession of a snapping turtle is to bait it with a branch the width of a broom handle, in the hope that it will snap the branch in half. In my experience the turtle never does, regardless how you prod it. Somewhere in that ancient brain it knows that you are an idiot with a stick, to be endured, and that tomorrow there will be fish to catch. It can’t, like other turtles, withdraw into its shell, but, serious and adult, it will not rise to your childish taunts.

  This turtle, held upside down in Eddie’s grasp, was remarkably composed. There was nothing he could do, and he knew it, so he held still.

  Eddie’s voice shot up an octave as he shouted to us.

  “My old man shot one of these things twice with a twelve gauge! Didn’t even leave a scratch!”

  I grabbed a branch and held it near the turtle’s head, but he didn’t strike.

  “Let’s take him home,” I said. I had never heard of anyone keeping a snapping turtle as a pet. It would be like having a cross between a Sherman tank and a dinosaur in your backyard, much better and more original than a snake or a tarantula in a terrarium.

  “Yeah, cool,” said Eddie.

  “You got a lake?” said Shane.

  Eddie pulled a face.

  “Seriously,” he said. “Let’s take it home. Maybe let him loose at the mall.”

  “How are you going to feed him?” said Shane.

  “We’ll turn it loose after. Maybe find a swimming pool.”

  It had been my idea, but I could see that Shane was right. Even if we just took the turtle to show off for the afternoon there was nowhere to release him unless we drove all the way back to the pits. Eddie wouldn’t care about a thing like that, though.

  “I got this twine,” said Eddie. “I’m gonna make him a harness.”

  In no time Eddie got the twine looped around each leg and tied in a neat square over the shell, with twenty feet of lead in his hand.

  “How you gonna get that off?” said Shane.

  “I ain’t got it on yet,” said Eddie. He was making a decorative loop around the turtle’s tail.

  “If it catches on something he’s gonna be one slow turtle. Watch the legs,” said Shane. “Make sure the twine doesn’t cut in.”

  “Shit,” said Eddie. “You couldn’t cut this mother with a chainsaw.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Shane, “don’t do that either.”

  The turtle had barely moved. We thought he might even be dead, but every ten minutes or so he craned his neck a fraction of an inch to watch one of us. Eddie christened him Slo-Mo, which turned shortly into just Moe.

  I am not sure exactly why we went out in the boat. I think Eddie wanted to see if Moe could pull us along or even catch us a fish. The commonest fish in those waters were mournful catfish three and four feet long with faceplates like steel. They’re delicious deep-fried.

  Once Eddie had him trussed, we walked a half mile around the lake’s edge to where the boat lay, with Eddie lightly swinging Moe at arm’s length in the harness at one point and Shane wincing every time Moe bounced off a tree.

  “Didn’t your mom ever buy you a yo-yo, man?”

  Eddie laughed, but Shane was serious.

  We got in and shoved off, but by that time we had stopped talking about turtles. The whole thing was turning into work. I was rowing, facing Shane in the stern with Moe on the floor between us. Eddie was in the bow issuing occasional orders. He seemed to think he knew where the lake was deepest and he wanted to try Moe there. In between his orders there was no sound but the creak of the oarlocks and the swish of the oars.

  “Your dads is both professors, huh?” said Eddie.

  “They share the same office,” said Shane.

  “Cool,” said Eddie.

  There was a lull. Creak, swish.

  “My dad makes refrigerators.”

  Creak, swish.

  “Where y’all go to church?”

  Shane’s dad is a devout Catholic, but I don’t think Shane ever went to church. When Shane married a Jewish girl some of the family feathers were ruffled. I knew about the Catholicism but I didn’t know about the devout. My mom is a church organist, which meant that I grew up Lutheran, Methodist, and Episcopalian, depending where the work was at the time. With her at the keyboard and my dad in the choir I never, ever stuck around for the service. I went for long walks along the Ohio River instead. I probably haven’t been to church since I was six or seven. I didn’t try to explain this to Eddie. I just chorused with Shane, we don’t.

  “Y’all oughtta try Fellowship Christian.”

  It’s hard to say definitively what denomination Fellowship Christian belongs to; it’s big enough to constitute its own. It wasn’t new when Eddie mentioned it: in fact it runs the nation’s oldest Dial-A-Prayer service, since 1955. These days it’s a megachurch, almost as popular as the floating casino.

  “I go there every Wednesday night for youth group,” he said. “Y’all could come. If you want.”

  Neither of us replied.

  Creak, swish.

  Moe seemed pretty placid. That is a strange thing to say about a turtle, but he had come out for the sunshine, and in the bottom of a boat in the middle of a lake he got it in every chink and corner of his gnarly armor. He kept an eye on us but he didn’t move at all. I was wearing sandals and I kept my feet clear, but Shane has been wearing combat boots since he was about three, and he didn’t seem to worry.

  It was Fellowship Christian, years later, which convinced me I could never live in Evansville again. I was driving home from my college upstate for Thanksgiving when I passed it, and what I saw almost made me turn around again. It’s an immense shopping mall of a building with gaudy gold reflective plates all over a lumpy pyramid that approximates a steeple, and out in front of that is a huge marquee advertising whatever is coming up that week. It is, proudly, a twenty-four-hour church. On that marquee in block capitals I read: HOW TO COPE WITH A HEATHEN—WEDNESDAY 7:00 P.M. PASTOR RON PAN. I didn’t much like the idea I had to be coped with, and I was in a town that organized seminars on the subject.

  Shane got it typically right when I told him about it later.

  “Just remember,” he said, “they’re a lot better at coping with us than we are with them.”

  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 thoug
ht 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.