Turtleface and Beyond (2 page)

Sheila and I fell asleep in the dirt next to the canoe and woke up hours later to the sound of a truck engine. It was nearly dawn. A logging rig had picked up Maria several miles up the road. They'd managed to contact the state police and a trauma unit was on its way in a helicopter.

I woke Otto up and told him help was coming.

“Help?” he said. “What's the matter?”

“Do you remember what happened?” I asked him.

Otto was silent. I pulled the bandanna away from his face and let a bit of light from my flashlight shine upon him. Maria had done a good job cleaning things off, but now the swelling had set in. It was a gruesome sight, hardly recognizable as a face. Something had shifted, or disappeared.
Where is Otto's nose?
I thought.

Finally Otto said, “I'm in a canoe.”

“Right, right,” I replied.

“And you told me to run,” he said.

“Well, no, you decided to run,” I pointed out. “You were on a cliff.”

“And you told me…”

“No, you had made up your mind…”

“Stop bothering him,” said Maria.

“Okay,” I said.

I got up and approached the loggers who had picked up Maria. They were standing beside their truck smoking cigarettes in the dim light.

“Our friend is hurt,” I told them.

“We know that,” they said.

“Do you have any tape?” I asked. “Strong, sturdy tape?”

“Duct tape?” said one of the loggers. “You want duct tape?”

“Right,” I said. “Duct tape.”

The logger reached inside his truck and pulled out a dirty silver roll.

“Like this?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “I'll give it back.”

I took the roll of tape and found the cracked turtle in the cooler. I placed a strip of tape carefully over the break in its shell, as much to keep things out as to keep them in. The turtle's head and legs remained retracted and it was difficult to tell if it was even alive. Maria watched my efforts with disdain.

“When this is all over you and I need to have a talk,” she said to me.

“Okay, sure, I know,” I said.

The sunrise brought a fresh round of blackflies and we swatted them away until the helicopter finally arrived. It hovered over the dirt road spraying dust and rocks in every direction. Three men jumped out with a stretcher and suddenly the place was bustling with activity. With crack precision they loaded Otto into the chopper and it was decided that Sheila and Maria would go along. I stayed behind with the canoe to wait for Tom.

The helicopter lifted off and things grew quiet once again. The loggers turned to me.

“You mind if we depart now?” one of them asked. “We're late already.”

It occurred to me then that I might hitch a ride to wherever they were going. But I'd said I'd wait for Tom and those loggers didn't seem eager for my company anyway. “Go ahead,” I told them. I gave them back their roll of tape and they left.

It seemed as if Tom should have arrived by then. I decided he must have stopped somewhere when it got dark. He was probably sleeping in, hoping for the problem to get solved before he arrived on the scene. I washed the blood out of the canoe and settled in to wait.

I watched the turtle in the cooler. Toward noon his little nose poked out cautiously and my heart jumped. He was alive! I dipped his body into the cool river and cleaned him off as best I could.

*   *   *

Tom showed up that afternoon, wet and angry. His canoe was half full of water and all of the gear was gone.

“Where the hell is everybody?” he asked me.

“A helicopter came,” I said. “They went to the hospital.”

“A chopper? Here? Aw, fuck.” Tom held up his hand. The cast over his thumb had mostly crumbled away.

“I think I'm going to need a doctor too,” said Tom. “They should have waited for me.”

“Otto was in bad shape,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, but … look at this,” said Tom. He motioned toward his swamped canoe. “I could have died back there. You assholes abandoned me.”

Tom was drunk. Although our gear was gone, he had managed to save a few beers. He offered one to me.

“Thanks,” I said. The beer tasted terrible and I felt immediately dizzy because I hadn't eaten anything since the day before.

Tom peered into my cooler, looking for booze, and saw the turtle, cleaned off and wrapped in tape.

“Well, look at this,” he said. “You're a regular Doctor Doolittle.”

“He's still alive,” I told Tom.

“He's not going to survive.”

“You might be right.”

“Oh, I'm right. You know what we're going to have to do?”

“What?”

“Eat him.”

“The turtle?”

“Right,” said Tom. “It's the proper thing to do when you mortally wound an animal in the wild.”

“I'm not going to eat that turtle,” I said.

“Look,” said Tom, “it's more respectful than letting him die in vain. That little fella was doing fine until you and Otto decided to fuck up his day. Now you just want to tape him up and flee the scene. Show some respect, Georgie. It's the least you can do.”

“Hold on,” I said. “What do you mean by ‘you and Otto'? It was Otto's decision to run down that cliff. I was just there to provide support. We all were.”

“I had nothing to do with it,” said Tom. “I wash my hands of the matter. Except this turtle here. I'll help you make a soup if you want. I'm hungry as hell and the meat will go bad if we wait much longer. It's the law of the jungle, Georgie. Eat what you kill. Leave no trace.”

I had no response for this logic except to say that we were not going to eat the turtle and the matter was no longer up for discussion. About an hour later we caught a ride to our car in the back of a pickup truck. I held the cooler with the turtle on my lap, trying not to let it bounce too much on the dirt roads. Tom clutched his broken thumb and moaned.

*   *   *

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.