THE GUY WHO KILLED THE TURTLE
1. THE GUY WHO KILLED THE TURTLE:
I was remembering the time I read the episode in Breece D'J Pancake's stories about when he killed a snapping turtle - and just because he was from West Virginia everyone said it was OK just natural the way things are and all that but just because that was so it didn't help me any because I still saw that entire little scene way too vividly - and I didn't much like it I felt for the snapper I hated the guy doing the killing I wondered about our constant attack on nature I thought 'why didn't that turtle have more of a right to live than the jackass with the knife' and all stuff like that but I realized (as they say) 'no telling for taste' or whatever that stupid line is or was or whatever they say about things I just hated the scene and it still pains me - 'I take up my sack and gaff for a turtle and some quick chubs flash under the bank and in the moss-dapples I see rings spread where a turtle ducked under and that sucker is MINE the pool smells like rot and the sun is a hardish brown' that's the way the episode starts and even from the very beginning it's unsettling to me because the lead character the guy invading the water he already seems like a lout a pain-in-the-butt who thinks right off he can interrupt all other life just because 'HE' is somewhere and I always hate those sorts of people - the take-control 'I'm in charge' types who can never leave anythng alone or the way it was when they got there - 'I wade in and he goes for the roots of a log where I shove around and feel my gaff twitch - and it's a small turtle but still a sucker and I bet he could pull the liver off a hook for the rest of his days but he is a sucker for the roots that hold him while I work my gaff and I pull him up and see that he's a snapper - with his stubby neck curved around biting at the gaff and I lay him on the sand and take out Pop's knife as I step on the shell and press hard and the fat neck gets all skinny quick and sticks way out and a little blood oozes from the gaff wound into the grit but when I slice a puddle forms just as quick and I know I got him and he's finished and he's mine' - and that's essentially it the story carries on from there but not for me for that essential IT was enough scenery for me I couldn't stand this guy or the rest of his bullshit story and even if I wanted to I couldn't because I was just too mad over the turtle scene and I didn't care anymore for anything about this West Virginia guy or his troubles or problems nor his million-year-old craggies which later became the foothills of West Virginia (yeah yeah his 'mountain' home) unworn by time and rivers (whatever that means) and he searches these hills for fossils but never finds his coveted trilobite but the 'search distracts him from the present wherein he's losing the family's farm' and I'm supposed to - because of that - feel some sympathy for this jerk's murderous ways - no reason absolutely that I can see why he would revere and be so aware of all this exalted past bullshit and then go around gratuitously attacking turtles and all this junk goes into the narrative effort of course of dragging the reader along with him as a proud tour-guide would do - pointing out all the sedimentary bands of geology and layers of stories and the eternal (supposed) return that has all these sedimentary bands of his own personal geology in it - layered with different centuries separated by eons which coexist in the very landscapes where they originally occured - and I see it as all of that for nothing really buy to portray some stupid story of the killing of a turtle - which makes me realize all of a sudden that I do NOT are for his personal geology nor any of his tired bullshit about old nature and all of that : neither do I care about his slow and dusty time or his stories of the town coffee shop where he and Old Jim watch the lethargic hip sway of Tinker's sister (who is also a fourteen-year-old waitress there) or his ex-girlfriend Ginny who passes by - driving slowly - and honks or the sugar cane in his field which turns purple with rot after it's too late to do anything about it OR his mother who stares out motionless on the porch watching and surrounded by inaction and all this world sits around as still as the fossil rocks in his fossil rock collection and this stillness exists ONLY above ground and under the surface are the volcanic layers and the pressures of the memories which build up like a natural gas well ready to explode at the first spark - YET I can't get past the killing of that turtle the gratuitous extirpation of a real piece of nature here overlooked because its supposed meaninglessness and lack of power make it expendable and even the description here of lust fuck and love doesn't hold my attention : 'I slide her to the floor and her scent rises to me and I shove crates aside to make room and I don't wait for nothing else - she isn't making love she's GETTING LAID and 'all right' I think 'all right get laid' and I pull her pants around her ankles and I rut her and I think of Tinker's sister and Ginny isn't here and this IS Tinker's sister under me this is the waitress from upstairs in the coffee shop - Holy Howee Hell! - and a wash of blue light passes over me and I open my eyes to the floor and smell that tang of rain-wet wood and black snakes...' and then he goes on to talk about remembering the time his daddy gave him a whipping by beating him with the body of a dead black snake or the time he believed an airplane's shadow was a pterodactyl passing overhead and any of these moments plucked from the long lost past someplace long lost times crop up as bright red splotches of paint or blood or something lava-like on the gray background and not so lost at all but ALL I can't get over is the turtle and I don't really care about anything else and it just seems it seems EVERYTHING sneaks into the present anyway and NOTHING can get past that turtle for me and I'm sick and tired of dumb-bell stupid mother-fuckers who think just because they're 'country' and living on the land we're supposed to have some special reserved habits for all that they do and I can already sense the same bastards shooting at squirrels or slicing live snakes in two with their big-ass hunting knives just to watch the remnants of the snake twitter and twitch while they hoot and whoop it up like some fucked-up lords of a mis-begotten Nature and a mis-directed energy of blight and doom and I'm tired of all their crap and their shacks and stories and outhouses and sister-fucking and dead brothers and wiry pallid fathers and the long field behind the house where they buried the kin and the dogs who once were and the water that went bad and all that just makes me sick and WHY ? you ask ? because this is the same decrpit moron killing river turtles for fun and that's good enough reason for me to just walk away from everything else having to do with all the 'South will rise again' stuff this crap engenders and wash my hands of the entire lot of them all.
-
And Trent the new owner - who talks the character's mom out of the farm already by the time the story starts - Trent has plans to fill in the bottomland raise the floodline and swallow up 'Daddy's' grave and the turtles who live under the rising water and the mother will move to Akron and Ginny the ex has already moved to Florida and the father is dead already -leaving him too young to run the farm and thus giving Trent the way in he needed to TAKE the farm and this all leaves him (the boy narrator) with NOWHERE to where he belongs (even discounting evidently Tinker's wonderful sister) and he says simply 'I was born in this country and I have never very much wanted to leave' and we find him thus a sucker for the roots that hold him (like the turtle was) even if it's underwater drowning - all SOMEHOW it just all seems to pat perfectly pat for me - and it's supposed to be all about belonging or not belonging - even if it means killing a turtle - but whatever and I read too that Breece D'J Pancake's favorite Bible quotation was of Revelation 3:15-16 which says 'I know thy works that thou are neither cold nor hot and I would thou wert cold or hot - so then because thou art lukewarm and neither cold nor hot I will spew thee out of my mouth' and so anyway the point I guess is you better be something one way or the other - either Hot or Cold - because if not God's just going to spit you out of His mouth because God don't like wishy-washy and you must make a choice one or the other and neither of them is any better than the other neither - what's important is just God-damn it all make a choice!
-
And that was what was in my brain right then anyway and it's what I thought about like to myself because it's not the kind of stuff you can share with other people and they wouldn't get it anyway - for most of the drivel we impart to others and between oursleves is the stupid idle chit-chat of necessity and it's all essentially filler to ward off the discomfort of a very discomforting life - something that doesn't fit very well but something that we must by necessity wear - as some stupid garment of function in which we get little choice (at first) about but then which - later on - floods us with choices but when (by that time) everyone's grown too stupid and comfortable and enfeebled with their own already lives as to be unwilling to make any choices and it all goes to waste and no matter no way because (one assumes) that's the way it's supposed to be - just like the way the sun skies across the Heavens or the little birds twitter in the trees or the mosquito swarms like a dagger seeking your neck and water pools or fire burns and something gets old and tired or worn out and breaks and withers or just crumbles to the ground - NOTHING no one thinks about but stuff which just happens in some long unending paroxysm of design or mistake or fate or disaster whatever it all may be.
-
So it seems like there's always a weave to things - some weird fabric by which they connect or gain meaning and it reminds me in a way if I dwell on it of when I was young - about 10 or so - when one of the remaining large estate homes which once ruled over the properties on which our tacky subdivisions had been built was still standing at the top of the hill and at the back corner of this huge place there lived - in a small one-room isolated wooden cabin - a lone hermit who resided there with no apparent connection to anything of the present and who carried himself in his own way oblivious to the modern world or the housing which had grown up around his area - a small squat man always in gray work clothes some sort of khaki uniform to which he was attached and wearing a matching gray cap and sporting a long white beard dirtied and discolored yellow around the mouth whether from coffee or food stains or merely his pipe-smoke we'd never know - and we'd taunt him mercilessly whenever we could which wasn't I suppose really that often as I now think back on it maybe on Saturday mornings or something and not much else - but we'd throw stones and pebbles and rocks at his cabin or run up to it and bang on the door or kick a pail or something stupid some brazen act of idiocy for which newcomer neighborhood kids are known - usurping his presence and power and acting as if we'd always been there and he had not - until finally at the breaking point one day he just began responding to our taunts by firing a salt-gun or salt-rifle at us - not real bullets not buckshot nothing like that - just some strange salt-like substance which did and would sting if it hit and to which we generally grew wary and shied from rather quickly and then he was gone LIKE THAT one day no more cabin no more corner no more hermit no anything and we never knew who'd won or lost and probably still to this day not one of us knows what happened but something turned over something took the new place of the old and the world notched another change into itself and he was gone and we were gone and so was all trace of what had been there and now if I go to that spot it is housing and more - peoples' yards sheds garages bicycles pools lawnmowers - the entire gamut of living and it's like that everywhere with every story I'd guess no matter what the farm or the river or the turtle or the bridge or the shed or the friend's sister beneath your loins - whatever - there's little apparent sense to little apparent anything yet we go through this life blind as a bat and enfeebled as much by the events we transcribe and GREAT GOD ALMIGHTY!! somehow live to tell about it all (if we do so choose).
I was remembering the time I read the episode in Breece D'J Pancake's stories about when he killed a snapping turtle - and just because he was from West Virginia everyone said it was OK just natural the way things are and all that but just because that was so it didn't help me any because I still saw that entire little scene way too vividly - and I didn't much like it I felt for the snapper I hated the guy doing the killing I wondered about our constant attack on nature I thought 'why didn't that turtle have more of a right to live than the jackass with the knife' and all stuff like that but I realized (as they say) 'no telling for taste' or whatever that stupid line is or was or whatever they say about things I just hated the scene and it still pains me - 'I take up my sack and gaff for a turtle and some quick chubs flash under the bank and in the moss-dapples I see rings spread where a turtle ducked under and that sucker is MINE the pool smells like rot and the sun is a hardish brown' that's the way the episode starts and even from the very beginning it's unsettling to me because the lead character the guy invading the water he already seems like a lout a pain-in-the-butt who thinks right off he can interrupt all other life just because 'HE' is somewhere and I always hate those sorts of people - the take-control 'I'm in charge' types who can never leave anythng alone or the way it was when they got there - 'I wade in and he goes for the roots of a log where I shove around and feel my gaff twitch - and it's a small turtle but still a sucker and I bet he could pull the liver off a hook for the rest of his days but he is a sucker for the roots that hold him while I work my gaff and I pull him up and see that he's a snapper - with his stubby neck curved around biting at the gaff and I lay him on the sand and take out Pop's knife as I step on the shell and press hard and the fat neck gets all skinny quick and sticks way out and a little blood oozes from the gaff wound into the grit but when I slice a puddle forms just as quick and I know I got him and he's finished and he's mine' - and that's essentially it the story carries on from there but not for me for that essential IT was enough scenery for me I couldn't stand this guy or the rest of his bullshit story and even if I wanted to I couldn't because I was just too mad over the turtle scene and I didn't care anymore for anything about this West Virginia guy or his troubles or problems nor his million-year-old craggies which later became the foothills of West Virginia (yeah yeah his 'mountain' home) unworn by time and rivers (whatever that means) and he searches these hills for fossils but never finds his coveted trilobite but the 'search distracts him from the present wherein he's losing the family's farm' and I'm supposed to - because of that - feel some sympathy for this jerk's murderous ways - no reason absolutely that I can see why he would revere and be so aware of all this exalted past bullshit and then go around gratuitously attacking turtles and all this junk goes into the narrative effort of course of dragging the reader along with him as a proud tour-guide would do - pointing out all the sedimentary bands of geology and layers of stories and the eternal (supposed) return that has all these sedimentary bands of his own personal geology in it - layered with different centuries separated by eons which coexist in the very landscapes where they originally occured - and I see it as all of that for nothing really buy to portray some stupid story of the killing of a turtle - which makes me realize all of a sudden that I do NOT are for his personal geology nor any of his tired bullshit about old nature and all of that : neither do I care about his slow and dusty time or his stories of the town coffee shop where he and Old Jim watch the lethargic hip sway of Tinker's sister (who is also a fourteen-year-old waitress there) or his ex-girlfriend Ginny who passes by - driving slowly - and honks or the sugar cane in his field which turns purple with rot after it's too late to do anything about it OR his mother who stares out motionless on the porch watching and surrounded by inaction and all this world sits around as still as the fossil rocks in his fossil rock collection and this stillness exists ONLY above ground and under the surface are the volcanic layers and the pressures of the memories which build up like a natural gas well ready to explode at the first spark - YET I can't get past the killing of that turtle the gratuitous extirpation of a real piece of nature here overlooked because its supposed meaninglessness and lack of power make it expendable and even the description here of lust fuck and love doesn't hold my attention : 'I slide her to the floor and her scent rises to me and I shove crates aside to make room and I don't wait for nothing else - she isn't making love she's GETTING LAID and 'all right' I think 'all right get laid' and I pull her pants around her ankles and I rut her and I think of Tinker's sister and Ginny isn't here and this IS Tinker's sister under me this is the waitress from upstairs in the coffee shop - Holy Howee Hell! - and a wash of blue light passes over me and I open my eyes to the floor and smell that tang of rain-wet wood and black snakes...' and then he goes on to talk about remembering the time his daddy gave him a whipping by beating him with the body of a dead black snake or the time he believed an airplane's shadow was a pterodactyl passing overhead and any of these moments plucked from the long lost past someplace long lost times crop up as bright red splotches of paint or blood or something lava-like on the gray background and not so lost at all but ALL I can't get over is the turtle and I don't really care about anything else and it just seems it seems EVERYTHING sneaks into the present anyway and NOTHING can get past that turtle for me and I'm sick and tired of dumb-bell stupid mother-fuckers who think just because they're 'country' and living on the land we're supposed to have some special reserved habits for all that they do and I can already sense the same bastards shooting at squirrels or slicing live snakes in two with their big-ass hunting knives just to watch the remnants of the snake twitter and twitch while they hoot and whoop it up like some fucked-up lords of a mis-begotten Nature and a mis-directed energy of blight and doom and I'm tired of all their crap and their shacks and stories and outhouses and sister-fucking and dead brothers and wiry pallid fathers and the long field behind the house where they buried the kin and the dogs who once were and the water that went bad and all that just makes me sick and WHY ? you ask ? because this is the same decrpit moron killing river turtles for fun and that's good enough reason for me to just walk away from everything else having to do with all the 'South will rise again' stuff this crap engenders and wash my hands of the entire lot of them all.
-
And Trent the new owner - who talks the character's mom out of the farm already by the time the story starts - Trent has plans to fill in the bottomland raise the floodline and swallow up 'Daddy's' grave and the turtles who live under the rising water and the mother will move to Akron and Ginny the ex has already moved to Florida and the father is dead already -leaving him too young to run the farm and thus giving Trent the way in he needed to TAKE the farm and this all leaves him (the boy narrator) with NOWHERE to where he belongs (even discounting evidently Tinker's wonderful sister) and he says simply 'I was born in this country and I have never very much wanted to leave' and we find him thus a sucker for the roots that hold him (like the turtle was) even if it's underwater drowning - all SOMEHOW it just all seems to pat perfectly pat for me - and it's supposed to be all about belonging or not belonging - even if it means killing a turtle - but whatever and I read too that Breece D'J Pancake's favorite Bible quotation was of Revelation 3:15-16 which says 'I know thy works that thou are neither cold nor hot and I would thou wert cold or hot - so then because thou art lukewarm and neither cold nor hot I will spew thee out of my mouth' and so anyway the point I guess is you better be something one way or the other - either Hot or Cold - because if not God's just going to spit you out of His mouth because God don't like wishy-washy and you must make a choice one or the other and neither of them is any better than the other neither - what's important is just God-damn it all make a choice!
-
And that was what was in my brain right then anyway and it's what I thought about like to myself because it's not the kind of stuff you can share with other people and they wouldn't get it anyway - for most of the drivel we impart to others and between oursleves is the stupid idle chit-chat of necessity and it's all essentially filler to ward off the discomfort of a very discomforting life - something that doesn't fit very well but something that we must by necessity wear - as some stupid garment of function in which we get little choice (at first) about but then which - later on - floods us with choices but when (by that time) everyone's grown too stupid and comfortable and enfeebled with their own already lives as to be unwilling to make any choices and it all goes to waste and no matter no way because (one assumes) that's the way it's supposed to be - just like the way the sun skies across the Heavens or the little birds twitter in the trees or the mosquito swarms like a dagger seeking your neck and water pools or fire burns and something gets old and tired or worn out and breaks and withers or just crumbles to the ground - NOTHING no one thinks about but stuff which just happens in some long unending paroxysm of design or mistake or fate or disaster whatever it all may be.
-
So it seems like there's always a weave to things - some weird fabric by which they connect or gain meaning and it reminds me in a way if I dwell on it of when I was young - about 10 or so - when one of the remaining large estate homes which once ruled over the properties on which our tacky subdivisions had been built was still standing at the top of the hill and at the back corner of this huge place there lived - in a small one-room isolated wooden cabin - a lone hermit who resided there with no apparent connection to anything of the present and who carried himself in his own way oblivious to the modern world or the housing which had grown up around his area - a small squat man always in gray work clothes some sort of khaki uniform to which he was attached and wearing a matching gray cap and sporting a long white beard dirtied and discolored yellow around the mouth whether from coffee or food stains or merely his pipe-smoke we'd never know - and we'd taunt him mercilessly whenever we could which wasn't I suppose really that often as I now think back on it maybe on Saturday mornings or something and not much else - but we'd throw stones and pebbles and rocks at his cabin or run up to it and bang on the door or kick a pail or something stupid some brazen act of idiocy for which newcomer neighborhood kids are known - usurping his presence and power and acting as if we'd always been there and he had not - until finally at the breaking point one day he just began responding to our taunts by firing a salt-gun or salt-rifle at us - not real bullets not buckshot nothing like that - just some strange salt-like substance which did and would sting if it hit and to which we generally grew wary and shied from rather quickly and then he was gone LIKE THAT one day no more cabin no more corner no more hermit no anything and we never knew who'd won or lost and probably still to this day not one of us knows what happened but something turned over something took the new place of the old and the world notched another change into itself and he was gone and we were gone and so was all trace of what had been there and now if I go to that spot it is housing and more - peoples' yards sheds garages bicycles pools lawnmowers - the entire gamut of living and it's like that everywhere with every story I'd guess no matter what the farm or the river or the turtle or the bridge or the shed or the friend's sister beneath your loins - whatever - there's little apparent sense to little apparent anything yet we go through this life blind as a bat and enfeebled as much by the events we transcribe and GREAT GOD ALMIGHTY!! somehow live to tell about it all (if we do so choose).
posted by gary j. introne at 4:16 PM
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