Turtleface and Beyond Read online

  * * *

  Back at home I took charge of the turtle’s rehabilitation. I visited a veterinarian, who offered a grim prognosis.

  “It won’t survive,” he said. “The wound is too severe and infection has set in. I don’t know why it’s still alive, to be honest.”

  Against his advice I paid $800 to have an antibiotic IV inserted into the turtle’s small vein. I also learned that it was a female turtle, not a male, as I had for some reason assumed. I named her Charlotte, after an elderly woman I once knew who sort of resembled a turtle. I purchased a plastic children’s wading pool and filled it with rocks, water, and moss-covered tree limbs. This I placed inside my small apartment to provide a habitat for Charlotte. If she was going to die, I reasoned, it would be in relative comfort.

  Otto was laid up in the county hospital for nearly a month. They treated several infections, brain swelling, and did their best to reconstruct his face. The doctors and nurses there kept commenting on how lucky he was to be alive.

  “I’m not lucky,” Otto would tell them. “I ran into a turtle.”

  I visited Otto often during his recovery, a gesture meant to be kindhearted, but somehow interpreted as an effort to ease my own guilt.

  “Ah, so you’re the accomplice,” remarked one of Otto’s attendants upon my arrival.

  “I wouldn’t call it that,” I said. “I was just there at the time.”

  “You told me where to dive,” said Otto, sipping on a blended fruit shake.

  “When I told you that, there was no turtle in the water.”

  “Well, how could you know?” said the attendant, smiling in an odd placating manner that I’ve come to believe is taught at medical institutions.

  The swelling in Otto’s face had subsided, but what was left now was an unsettling tableau not unlike one of those big rubber masks you sometimes see kids wearing on Halloween. His nose had been rebuilt into a small nub and remained shifted off to one side. He was missing a cheekbone, or something, below his left eye, so that side of his face was sunken significantly. He’d lost several teeth as well and now spoke out of the side of his mouth. It was an odd sensation, watching Otto heal up in the hospital. At times I felt jealous of all the attention and care he was receiving. He was the hero who had braved the cliffs and survived, albeit scarred. I was just the petty coward accomplice, the one who had watched from below and directed him toward the invisible turtle. I knew it made no sense to envy a man with injuries such as Otto’s, but I did.

  * * *

  A wealthier, better-insured person would likely have had more options for reconstruction than Otto. As it was, he had no insurance at all, and once his condition was considered stable, he was given a mix of prescription pills and asked to leave. I was the only one there on the day of his release.

  “Where’s Sheila?” asked Otto.

  “She’s not here,” I told him.

  “Great. Fantastic.”

  As I mentioned before, Sheila and Otto’s relationship had extended only a week prior to his accident, and throughout his stay at the hospital I could see her performing an awkward calculus in her head. How long must she stay with him? I guess she had determined his release date was as good a time as any to move on, and I couldn’t truly blame her.

  You will not be surprised to hear that Maria dumped me as well. She had come to visit me in my apartment and gazed disdainfully upon Charlotte resting in the pool I had set up for her.

  “This is ridiculous,” Maria told me.

  “She’s doing better than expected,” I pointed out. “She’s begun to eat the food I give her.”

  “Your best friend is in the hospital,” said Maria, “because of this turtle.”

  “Otto is not my best friend,” I pointed out.

  “That’s not the point,” she said.

  “And it wasn’t Charlotte’s fault,” I continued. “If anything, she’s the victim here.”

  “That’s not the point either,” said Maria.

  I had thought Maria might be impressed with my rehabilitation of the wounded turtle and see that I was indeed capable of compassion and competence, but that was not the case. She pronounced the whole situation disappointing, and left.

  Once the paperwork was complete, Otto and I departed the hospital and located an organic food shop, where I bought him a fruit smoothie. He sipped it and gazed at the hustle and commerce on the street outside. You could see people walk by and do subtle double takes when they saw Otto’s face, startling as it was.

  “I guess everything just moved along without me,” he said.

  It was true. In fact, Otto had been evicted from his home while he was laid up as well. Apparently he had fallen behind on the rent long ago and his crafty landlord seized upon his absence to move his belongings to the curb.

  “Can I stay with you for a while?” asked Otto. “While I figure things out?”

  I said yes, of course, though my place was small, and already made more cramped by the presence of Charlotte and her pool. I had meant to tell Otto about Charlotte before we arrived, but it was a hard subject to broach, and so he simply came upon her when he arrived.

  “What the fuck is this?” he asked me.

  “That’s Charlotte,” I said.

  Otto moved closer and saw the ridgeline on Charlotte’s shell where the crack once was. It was a vicious scar, but few would have guessed at the sorry state she had been in. Charlotte was quite recovered at this point and, seeing Otto and the turtle together, it occurred to me that despite her smaller size she had fared better in the collision. Although it was also true that she was now confined to a plastic wading pool as opposed to living free in the wild. I suppose a sound argument could be formulated for either conclusion, now that I think about it.

  “Is this the turtle I think it is?” asked Otto.

  “Yes, Otto,” I said. “It is.”

  “You kept this thing?”

  “She was going to die out there,” I pointed out. “Tom wanted to eat her.”

  “Eat a turtle? Like in a soup? Is that what he wanted?”

  “I don’t know. Yes, I think he mentioned making a soup.”

  Otto reached into the tank and pulled Charlotte out. He held her high in the air as her stubby legs flailed about.

  “Careful,” I said, “she might bite you.”

  “I ought to chuck this reptile out the fucking window,” he said.

  “Please don’t do that,” I said.

  I moved toward Otto and he held Charlotte away from me, his damaged face twitching in anger. We remained stuck in an uneasy standoff as the water filter bubbled gently in the pool beside us. Charlotte retreated into her shell, ready for yet another shock to her system at the hands of my friend Otto. But he didn’t have the stomach for such cruelty in the end. He flipped Charlotte back into the pool, where she landed upside down, and I quickly righted her.

  “It wasn’t her fault,” he admitted nobly.

  * * *

  Otto was not a good roommate. He snored loudly and was up at all hours, pacing about and muttering to himself. Whereas he had once been a great outdoorsman, he now preferred to stay inside most of the day. On the few occasions he did venture outside, people could not help staring at his odd features. I even caught myself staring at times, such was the severity of his injuries. Every so often someone would approach me privately and ask what had happened. The story was always met with such incredulity that I took to simplifying it greatly.

  “A diving accident,” I would say.

  On the rare occasion that someone asked Otto directly, he would usually answer, “A hockey fight.” This explanation was always accepted without question.

  Sometimes I would return to the apartment to find Otto deep in conversation with Charlotte. He would whisper things to her, observations about the TV show he was watching or snide comments about my housekeeping habits. Otto’s injuries required him to blend up most of his food and he expected me to maintain a steady supply of fruit and yogurt as well
as clean up the mess he made preparing his shakes. As he drank down his meals he would often sit beside Charlotte and gloat.

  “No, Charlotte,” he would say. “You can’t have any of this! Turtles can’t eat citrus.”

  These conversations would go on at all hours, sometimes becoming so heated that I feared for Charlotte’s safety. But for the most part it was just companionship. Where Otto had once seen Charlotte as the agent of his destruction, he grew to view her more as a comrade in arms. No one else understood what they had been through. I sometimes felt that they were forming an alliance against me, despite all I had done for them. We rarely spoke of the accident, but when we did Otto would always be sure to centralize my role in encouraging him.

  “We all know why you took Charlotte home and nursed her so carefully,” Otto explained to me. “Because of what you’d done.”

  “She needed help,” I said. “If anyone should feel guilty, it’s you. You landed on her.”

  “Ha!” Otto said with a laugh. “I should feel guilty? Look at me. Do I look like I should be feeling guilty about anything?”

  Throughout this period Otto ingested vast amounts of pain medication and I began to suspect that he was playing several doctors at once for prescriptions. Meanwhile, preposterous bills relating to his hospital stay showed up in the mail.

  “One hundred and forty thousand dollars!” screamed Otto. “How do they expect me to pay that?”

  One of the bills suggested Otto call a helpline to discuss his situation, which he refused to do. I decided to call the number myself one afternoon. It turned out this wasn’t a financial helpline, as I had thought, but rather a connection to some kind of support group for people who had experienced traumatic injury. I signed Otto up for one of their meetings and told them I’d bring him there myself.

  “Why would I want to attend some shit like that?” asked Otto, after I told him what I had done.

  “It might be helpful,” I said. “You stay in the house all day long. It isn’t healthy.”

  “Healthy? What does that even mean, ‘healthy’?”

  Otto retreated to the corner near Charlotte’s pool, as was his wont. He stared in at her and whispered something I could not understand.

  The next day Otto fashioned a small leash for Charlotte and announced he was taking her outside for walk. At first this idea seemed ridiculous to me, but it turned out regular constitutionals of this sort are recommended for captive snapping turtles and the practice proved to be enjoyable for both Otto and Charlotte. Of course, the walks were anything but brisk, and the two of them together presented an odd spectacle, eliciting even more attention than Otto had when he’d ventured out on his own. But Otto clearly took comfort in Charlotte’s companionship, and I was thankful for the time alone in the apartment. Around town, Otto became known as “Turtleface,” a moniker I did my best to hide from him.

  When the time came for the first support group meeting, Otto put on his coat agreeably, then casually picked up Charlotte and wrapped her in a thin blanket.

  “She’s coming with us,” he said.

  “Okay,” I consented. It seemed a small price to pay for progress.

  The meeting was held in a classroom at the local community college. Otto and I walked in late and scanned the room, a semicircle of wheelchair-bound amputees and various examples of disfigurement. One man had a leg swollen up the size of a barrel.

  “Oh fuck,” said Otto, “would you look at this?”

  “You’re one to talk,” said the man with the swollen leg. “And what’s that, a turtle?”

  Otto covered up Charlotte with his coat, a protective gesture.

  “It’s my turtle,” said Otto. He seemed to think the man wanted to take it from him.

  “Actually, the turtle belongs to me,” I pointed out. “I was the one who nursed it back to health.”

  “We share custody now,” said Otto.

  “Why don’t you two sit down?” said a small woman named Nadine. She was the facilitator. We sat down and joined the semicircle.

  Although they were in compromised physical shape, the people before us seemed to be a fairly well-adjusted bunch. They told stories and laughed at their wild misfortunes. One woman had been mauled by a chimpanzee at the zoo.

  “It was my own fault, really,” she said, showing us the scars on her neck, back, and shoulders. “Everyone knows how strong a chimp can be when it’s angry.”

  Another man had a mental affliction that compelled him to dump scalding hot liquid on himself whenever he discovered it was within reach. The coffee machine was kept in another room on his account. His face was shiny from all the burns he had suffered, and much of his hair was gone.

  Otto had no sympathy at all for this person. “Well, I can tell you how to solve this problem,” he said. “From now on don’t pour any more hot water on yourself, okay? Just stop doing it.”

  The burned man looked Otto up and down. “Suppose I told you to stop running into turtles,” he replied. “Would that help?”

  Otto pulled Charlotte out of his coat and handed her to me. “Hold her,” he said. “I’m going to kick this guy’s ass.”

  Nadine stood up and expertly talked Otto down. Apparently this sort of confrontation was not uncommon when someone new entered the group.

  “You seem angry,” she told Otto.

  “Of course I’m angry,” he said.

  * * *

  Afterward, I felt that the support group had done little for Otto, but the next day he told me he had experienced an epiphany overnight.

  “I’ve come to the conclusion that we need to return Charlotte to the wild,” he said.

  I was resistant to this idea at first. I liked Charlotte and had imagined that when Otto finally left my home the two of us would lead a content existence together. Perhaps you are aware that snapping turtles have life spans nearly as long as humans’ and as such make for good long-term companions.

  But Otto laid out his plan and I couldn’t deny the simple logic of it. We would return to the location of their misfortunes. Charlotte belonged back in her homeland now that she was well. And the journey would be cathartic for us all, he claimed.

  Maria wanted nothing to do with such an endeavor, but we managed to persuade Tom and Sheila to join us for the trip. It was late fall, and chilly, by the time we got everything together and set off. Tom brought along a crossbow because he claimed it was bow-hunting season and he hoped to shoot an animal of some sort.

  “I’d be more than happy to dress and cook it for everyone while we’re camped along the river,” he said.

  “No, thanks,” said Sheila. She was a vegetarian.

  Tom refused to apologize for wanting to eat Charlotte back when she had been injured.

  “It would have saved us a lot of trouble,” he pointed out. “Though I do support returning her to her natural state since the resources have already been wasted bringing her back to life.”

  “She was never dead,” I pointed out.

  “Close enough,” said Tom.

  Otto was stoic throughout the journey down the river. He spoke softly to Charlotte, who rode in a large cooler beside him, and pointed out the sights along the shoreline.

  Tom and I took to drinking whiskey from a tin flask, and by the time we reached the sandy cliffs where Otto had crashed months before, I was feeling sick. We had gotten a late start that morning and the days were shorter at that time of year, so it was nearly dark.

  “We’ll camp here,” declared Otto, “and release Charlotte in the daytime. She might get disoriented if we let her go at night.”

  “I’m going hunting,” said Tom. He donned a headlamp and smeared mud on his cheeks. “I’ll go get us some dinner.”

  Tom stumbled off into the woods and that was the last I saw of him.

  I helped Sheila set up the tents and then passed out inside one of them. Outside, I could hear Otto making a fire and chattering away with Charlotte. He was full of energy and kept calling out for Tom. At some poin
t Sheila crawled inside my tent and said, “I’m cold. Can I sleep with you?”

  I woke up in the morning, naked, holding on to Sheila, who was naked as well. My arms and head were freezing, having been exposed to the cold all night. Sheila shivered and huddled farther beneath our blankets. She felt wonderfully soft and warm and I tried to remember what we had done together.

  Eventually I wandered out of the tent and found the fire still smoking. The other tent was empty and one of the canoes gone. On Charlotte’s cooler I found a note. It said:

  WENT LOOKING FOR TOM —OTTO

  The sun rose and things got warmer. I made myself some coffee and began to feel awake and good. I splashed some of the cold river water on my face and looked around for signs of Otto and Tom. It was all trees and wilderness. Sheila and I seemed to be the only humans for miles.

  Up above me loomed those tall sand cliffs. Sheila was still sleeping and I decided Charlotte had been left in that cooler long enough. It was my understanding that Otto wanted to make some kind of ceremony out of releasing Charlotte back into the wild, but I overruled him. I placed the cooler in the remaining canoe and paddled across the river to the cliffs and the spot where Charlotte and Otto had collided earlier that summer. It was difficult to determine the exact place, but when I’d gotten close enough I opened the cooler and dumped Charlotte in the river. She landed sideways and spun about, bewildered at her new surroundings. She paddled up to the surface and poked her hooked snout into the air. She stayed there for a moment, floating, that sealed-up scar still visible on her bumpy shell. I imagined the other turtles would wonder at it, and perhaps she’d tell them of the strange land she had visited and the weird behavior of her caretakers. Readjusted now, Charlotte sank down below the surface, swiftly paddling her sturdy legs, and disappeared into the murk and sway.

  I turned my attention now to finding Tom and Otto. I thought I might climb the cliff to get a better vantage point. From there I could call out for them and see the lay of the land. I fastened the canoe to a nearby tree and began to climb up the sandy slope, just like I should have done earlier that summer when I had meekly watched Otto from below. Stopping several times to catch my breath, I eventually ascended even higher than Otto had, until my feet were scratched and sore and my chest heaved from the exertion. I stood there gazing down at the ribbon of river beneath me and tried to steady my breathing.