The Turtle-Girl from East Pukapuka

by Cole Alpaugh

  The attention was welcome, even though it interfered with his attempt to determine the exact number of dimples in the section of ceiling tile directly over his pillow. The surface of the tile resembled the craters of the moon that arced outside his window. The tile was about twenty inches by twenty inches, with approximately ten indentations per square inch. The trouble spots were in the middle, where it became hard to keep track of what he’d already counted as opposed to new territory. He had a rough estimate, but was confident he’d come up with an exact number without all the interruptions. There was no longer a typewriter in his brain sub-captioning dialogue, a positive sign, because he could now follow conversations quite easily. He was in some sort of convalescent home, and weeks, if not months, had passed.

  “They make me lie here and stink,” grumbled Dante’s latest roommate, an eighty-year-old former school teacher from Tallahassee. “The turnip gets all the goddamn attention.” The roommate rolled away from the current sponge bathing by a tall, dark-haired nurse named Derrick, who sported finely plucked eyebrows and carefully manicured fingernails. His breath was hot and minty, and Dante could hear the candy clicking around his teeth.

  “You’re next, Mr. Thompson.” Derrick didn’t look over his shoulder. “If you behave yourself.”

  The old school teacher let go a wet fart that reverberated in the rubber mattress, sealing his fate of spending another day unwashed.

  “I know this feels nice,” Derrick cooed, raising Dante’s elbow to run the soapy sponge into his armpit. “I added a few drops of wild fig bath oil,” the nurse whispered, extending Dante’s arm and slowly drawing the soft sponge along his flaccid bicep, down to his wrist. Derrick didn’t wear rubber gloves, so that his skin often touched the injured skier’s flesh.

  “Your skin is so cold.” Derrick dropped the sponge into the basin, using a coarse washcloth to dab at wet spots on Dante’s chest before heading to the bathroom and running the water hard. “I’ll be right back,” he called around the corner. “Don’t you dare move a muscle.”

  “Fudge packer,” the former teacher barked at the wall.

  In the hours after daily medicine rounds, Dante’s eyelids became heavy, narrow fissures offering blurry images of the daily parade of nurses and attendants. He only caught glimpses of most of them, while they were busily washing his head and hair, sometimes leaning in close to speak in whispered tones. Some of these whispers were accompanied by quick, surreptitious kisses square on his lips. These kisses confused Dante, since he understood he was in some sort of care center. Could they be relatives? A wife and perhaps an overly affectionate uncle? Dante didn’t mind the closeness, only that their attentions were so brief and secretive. He craved being held, or even having one of these people climb on top of him, enveloping his entire body and pinning him down under their weight. He felt physically suspended, motionless, as though caught halfway between the surface and the bottom of a swimming pool.

  Not that he was sure he’d recognize a relative. Dante had no recollection of who he was, let alone who might be a family member. Nurses called him by name and often spoke to him as if certain he understood. His world had been reduced to sponge baths, a ceiling tile, hours of television, and countless questions he could only ask himself.

  Why am I here? I mean, I know I can’t move anything but my penis and a finger, but what the hell happened? Is this punishment? And where is this guy with the plucked eyebrows and minty breath taking me now?

  Dante tapped his middle finger on the gurney’s metal guardrail as Derrick wheeled the drying ski racer out of his room and down the long, brightly lit corridor. He tapped and tapped, trying to replicate the Morse code signal for help. He had questions that required immediate answers.

  Was I in a car accident? Was I in a plane that fell out of the sky? Was I shot? Food poisoning?

  Tap, tap, tap! Tap tap! Nothing. The eyebrow guy was humming, oblivious, as they rolled along. Dante didn’t actually know any Morse code, but he’d spent hundreds of hours in the community room parked underneath the television in a place chock full of ancient men and women. The programming favored World War Two movies, courtroom dramas, and The Lawrence Welk Show.

  Dante may not have known what caused his current predicament, but he did know the names of four polkas and how many yards a howitzer shell traveled.

  “Hey, Dead Guy’s here! How’s the pecker today?”

  “Don’t be cruel, Abe.”

  “What? He gets the best seat. A little teasing is all.”

  “God hears you, Abraham Levin. Your filthy mouth right to God’s ear.”

  “Look, we could play ring toss with his ding dong!”

  “Grow up.”

  “Grow up? I’m eighty-seven years this July, my ass wrapped in a diaper and my roast beef spooned out of a jar. And you tell me to grow up?”

  “Just take it easy on the dead guy.”

  “Which of you bastards has the remote?” Abe had begun frantically searching his wheelchair. “The People’s Court has been on for five minutes. We ain’t gonna know who the real putz is!”

  Three hours later, the community room had thinned to a few snoring souls. Dante could not see them, only heard the different tones in what seemed like a triangle of calls and answers, like frogs or other creatures staking out territory to lure a mate.

  Dante had drifted off at some point. His gurney had been realigned to provide a clear view of the wide-screen television—a positioning he assumed was for babysitting purposes. The attendant assigned to check on him was probably at dinner. Something else was different, and it took him a few minutes to locate the source of change.

  Under Dante’s one working finger was a smooth, hard object, with a small triangular shape slightly raised from the larger surface. Although he did not know more than his name and a few bits of polka and war trivia, Dante immediately recognized the universal shape and feel of the object at his finger tip.

  This time, Dante did not have to fight to bring the tears of joy that blurred the flashing screen above; they simply flowed over his cheeks and into his ears. He’d suffered through a show about a household of old lady roommates called The Golden Girls for the past twenty minutes—a program he endured on a daily basis. Before that, a show called The A-Team had the room hooting and cheering. And earlier, a female panelist from a black and white version of To Tell The Truth had inspired catcall-induced coughing fits.

  But now it was Dante’s time. A sense of power, a transformation into a gatekeeper rather than mere observer took hold, flushed him with power. The answers to his endless list of questions could wait. No longer was he just some poor sap hopelessly damaged by a bad case of food poisoning or a parachute that hadn’t opened, no sir.

  Dante Wheeler drew in a deep, cleansing breath and clicked the revered television remote control with his right middle finger.

  The whole world unfolded before him.

  Chapter 5

  The intra-axial lesions from Dante’s traumatic brain injury made him see fireflies. They blinked inside his catheter tube and from the folds of the thick burgundy window drapes. His eyes followed them in circles above his bed late at night, as he tried to keep track of which was which. It was frustrating when they crossed paths, but he noticed each bug’s light was a different intensity.

  The fireflies sometimes took Dante’s mind off the cold, which lurked barely out of reach, cat-like, preparing to pounce with claws bared. He didn’t even mind when the fireflies landed on his closed eyelids, stirring him from a dream. From the way they made speedy little concentric circles, he imagined that their tiny legs must tickle. He longed to feel the energy behind the light. Dante envied how a firefly, like few other creatures, must always be warm, in easy command of its core temperature.

  Dante’s early vegetative state dreams were restless and unpleasant. Despite the swirling, omnipresent aroma of wild fig bath oil, Dante’s mind screamed of a deep forest, with ragged, sharp-limbed pines and an underpinning of decay. His brain re
gistered the cold not as a temperature, but in degrees of sharpness. It made him certain that touching any object would be like handling jagged razor blades and long surgical needles. Breathing this cold air meant inhaling tiny glass shards, opening slices in his windpipe and lungs, setting warm blood free to steam against the flooding cold.

  The spiny tipped, razor-sharp cold surrounded Dante’s sterile bed and his crisp white sheets. His most mundane dreams—concerning simple tasks performed in a former lifetime—would end on a similarly disturbing note. He would be standing over a sink with soapy water, holding a razor blade and making up and down strokes. Then, suddenly changing course, his right hand would slide from side to side across his cheek until the basin overflowed with blood.

  Or he was back at ski camp playing the childhood game of kamikaze lawn darts, but instead of glancing blows and near misses, the darts would impale hands and pierce eyes, even puncture hearts and lungs. Punishment wasn’t washing dirty dishes but digging graves for his friends and for himself.

  Familiar laughter startled Dante awake. But the ceiling was too high, and there was no wall to his left. Panic surged through him as he fell backwards, dizzy. Naked and exposed, he searched for some landmark for his eyes to lock onto. The flickering television came into focus just as a giant lizard swallowed a man and his automatic rifle whole. It took a moment for his heart to quit racing, for him to recognize where he was—alone in the community room.

  Laughter again emanated from the overnight cleaning staff out in the hallway, people used to ignoring time. It was not at all raucous. Their day was simply everyone else’s night. Dante liked these women he’d never seen. For one thing, they interrupted his nightmares. And their stories, which he could never really follow, kept him company in the loneliest hours. Sometimes English, but more often in a language like a song. They were his lullabies.

  The television remote again in touching distance, he escaped the giant lizard show. He would have smiled—had he been able to—as he held the button down, creating his own firefly of flashing light. Ownership of the remote control was intoxicating. Channel after channel zipped by, and Dante was consumed by the authority one finger could wield, a stark contrast to the complete and total impotence of his daily life.

  When his finger grew tired, Dante released the little triangular button. And his overwhelmed senses sought to grasp his current reality.

  “Salty,” Dante tried to say, in a sudden urge to narrate. “The air is salty and the sun is bright and hot.” Dante could feel the sand and small shells under his feet, as the gentle tide lapped over his ankles. The sea breeze ruffled his brown hair, felt delightful on his naked balls. The pressure from the catheter gone, Dante raised his chin to the blinding sun, arms extended, palms facing upward. Goose pimples—from excitement not cold—broke out across his body, and he experienced the glory of each and every one.

  There were calls from exotic birds and shrieks from small mammals, all accompanied by crashing waves out near the coral reef barrier. Dante lowered his chin, opened his eyes to the white caps in the distance, and slowly turned to the lazy motion of dark, swaying palm leaves.

  “There is nothing cold here.” Dante’s voice hummed with peace and calm. “There is nothing sharp.”

  Dante squatted, scooping rocks and bits of shells in his impossibly pale, needle-scarred right hand. The rocks had been tumbled to make smooth jewelry, the shells were polished treasures. He returned the fragments to the shallow water, rinsed the sand from his hand, and splashed warm water onto his hot shoulders.

  There were curious, zigzag lines on his legs. He followed them with his fingers as he stood back up, intrigued by how they seemed not to end, as if he’d been stitched together like a rag doll or a winter quilt. Dante’s peaceful state was strengthened by this discovery. It answered a question that often nagged his damaged brain as it tracked fireflies across his dark room. It solved the mystery of why he had no memories of family, of a mother and father. It put to rest any terrifying speculation about tragic accidents, any violence that would result in his confinement in a hospital or nursing home.

  “Someone made me.” Dante’s traumatized brain was craving to assemble the puzzle, even if the pieces had to be hammered into place. “Someone sewed me together from things they found.”

  Dante splashed his way out of the ocean, up onto the white sand beach and into the shade of the heaven he’d found on channel sixty-three.

  “Home,” Dante said simply. “I am home.”

  Chapter 6

  The ninety-foot Gypsy Dancer’s diesel engines rumbled in neutral while her captain worked a stainless steel gaff over the port side, hooking pieces of debris left in the tsunami’s wake.

  For all its death and destruction, its catastrophic human toll, a tsunami provided salvagers with what amounted to a totally awesome Easter egg hunt. These were good days, the best of times for trash-pickers treated to a near endless bounty reaped from other people’s misfortune. A salvager might find a hundred dollar life vest or a swamped hundred thousand dollar boat.

  Captain Jesus Dobby, a stout, middle-aged man of Texas decent, hauled in a size-four Prada high-heel shoe with leather and snakeskin ankle straps. Dropping the ten-foot gaff pole, Dobby carefully examined the exotic piece of footwear, sniffed it, and looked out at the nearby sea. Calculating the odds of finding the matching shoe was beyond Dobby’s first-grade education, but he correctly surmised they weren’t all that hot. But Dobby knew a guy in Tang who had a queer thing for women’s shoes and figured his friend would swap it for a shot of whiskey, if not a whole bottle. The captain turned and tossed the keeper onto the growing pile of jetsam and flotsam in the middle of his tugboat’s main deck.

  Climbing the bridge ladder up to the wheelhouse, Dobby scanned the horizon for the most promising debris field, then gunned the engines toward a curious object that seemed to be self-propelled and leaving a slight wake. The seasoned captain took pride in his uncanny ability to identify water-logged, half-submerged objects, but this damned thing made no sense. It was surely a living creature, but not one his mind could place. Fifty yards off the Gypsy Dancer’s tire-laden port bow, the strange animal seemed to catch wind of approaching danger and paddle faster.

  * * * *

  The sea turtle battled an overwhelming instinct to dive.

  “Dive, dive, dive!” shrieked an inner turtle voice, but he knew the kind human girl clinging to the top of his shell didn’t like being under water, even for a few seconds. When she’d slipped below the surface, she’d come up scrambling, clambering for a handhold on his slippery back. She had coughed and coughed, her body wracked in spasms as the guilt washed over him. He could feel her pain, wishing he could make it go away the same way she’d banished the pain of his once cracked shell.

  The passing of time was a difficult concept for the elderly turtle, but he knew the girl hadn’t grown much bigger since she’d rescued him out near the coral reef where he’d spent his entire life. He was only alive because of the girl clinging to his back. He’d loved her from that first traumatic day they’d met. He remembered being upside down—a frightening and vulnerable position for any sea turtle—his own blood forming a growing slick all around. Tiny swarming fish had poked at his head and shell, nibbling small morsels of his body. It went to show just how quickly everything in your life could change. One minute you have a fat shrimp cornered, the next minute you’re bobbing belly up in your own gore. The sea turtle had known it was only a matter of time before the sharks caught the scent and came for him.

  When the turtle had heard the splashing, he’d closed his eyes and waited for the second terrible impact. The first had been the passing metal beast. He hadn’t noticed it because his full attention was on the fat shrimp. Most of the surface creatures avoided the dangerous reef. This next impact would surely be from a white shark, the meanest of all animals in these waters. They swam with stupid grins on their faces and dead, unblinking eyes. The sea turtle had kept close to escape routes i
n the reef shelves when the biggest of the white sharks was hungrily lurking. The turtle had seen the shark eat a dolphin mother, orphaning a tiny calf that had disappeared alone into the deepest water. He’d even seen the same big shark attack a human for no apparent reason, biting him in two and then swimming off without feeding.

  The splashing had stopped suddenly and the cringing upside-down sea turtle had held his breath. But no heavy blow had come, no horrible chomping or gnashing of giant shark teeth. There had come, instead, a soft voice and a careful touch. He had been turned with great care, slowly propelled, brought to shore and dragged into an alien world. He’d concentrated on the human girl’s voice, a sound that lifted him away from his damaged shell, where he looked down from above at the angel who had whisked him away from the sharks.

  The young island girl had hand-fed him a stew of ground shrimp and sea grass, after first applying a smelly paste to harden along the searing two-centimeter wide crack. The paste had taken away the sting, allowed him to sleep. He’d entered a comfortable existence in a flooded skiff, napping for extended periods half-submerged in the water the girl changed each day. Was there anything better than a warm sun baking your top half, while your belly was awash in cool water? And the kind little human girl was always there to tell him a story while he recovered from the near fatal wound. Her soothing voice told and retold the story of a magic sea turtle named Kauila, who was born on a mystical place called Hawaii. The magic sea turtle loved children so dearly that she sometimes changed into a little girl, playing on the black sand beaches of Ka’u. What would it be like to rise up naked, with funny round toes and long strings dancing from the top of your head, laughing like a bird and wrestling your brothers and sisters like nesting snakes? Maybe it was weeks, or months, the sea turtle wasn’t quite sure. But he grew to love the human girl with all of his heart.