Turtleface and Beyond (5 page)

“Who the hell are you?” cried William, staring up at the wild-eyed woman who had disarmed him.

There was a lot of sorting out to do, with much shouting and accusing bandied about, but eventually I was able to explain to both William and JoAnne how the matter lay.

“I was trying to play a joke,” I said, clutching my wounded hand.

“A god-awful joke, at that,” said William.

“When did you start bringing a gun into your outhouse?” I asked him.

“It's my right to do so,” said William. “When did you start bringing feisty women to my home?”

“Her name is JoAnne,” I said. “She's a friend of mine. She fixed your TV and we thought you might want it back.”

“Well,” said William, “the Celtics
are
playing tonight.”

We gathered in his little shack and JoAnne dressed my hand, picking out the shotgun pellets with a set of rusty tweezers and pouring iodine into the bleeding holes. Every time I looked down at the bloody mess I felt dizzy and thought I might puke. William comforted me by saying that I could now legitimately claim to be in that select number who have survived being shot.

“Although the circumstances were less than honorable,” he added.

We placed the TV in its rightful spot and to our surprise the Celtics came on like gangbusters. The disappointing loss from the night before was forgotten as they poured in one unlikely shot after another. The voyage outside the shack seemed to have improved the television's reception, and although William had not welcomed a woman into his home in nearly a decade he took a liking to JoAnne and proclaimed that her presence was influencing things in a positive manner.

“This gal here has boosted the frequency,” he said. “Perhaps you might return for future contests, JoAnne.”

Then, toward the end of the third quarter, William collapsed and fell onto the floor. A strange foamy spittle gathered at the edges of his mouth.

“Oh Jesus,” said JoAnne.

He was having a stroke, though we didn't understand that at the time. I tried to lift him back into his seat, but he kept slumping down. When I spoke to him he gazed up at me uncomprehendingly.

“Do you know where you are right now?” I asked William.

“Of course I do,” he eventually said. “I'm in the mines. Why is it so dark? Hit the lights, will you, Raymond?”

“The mines?” said JoAnne. “Who's Raymond?”

William had worked in the asbestos mines as a young man, back before the stuff was outlawed. It had left him with weak lungs. I didn't know who Raymond was.

We piled William into my car and drove him to the county hospital, where they explained to us that he'd had a stroke and what that meant.

“He's going to take a while to recover,” said the doctor. “He can't be living out in that shack anymore.”

While I was there I had the doctor look at my hand. He said JoAnne had done a fine job of cleaning it out and if I was diligent I'd avoid infection. I couldn't help but feel my prank had played some part in old William's stroke.

“It's possible,” said the doctor, “though the conditions for his collapse were present in the body long before you started tickling his buttocks.”

I called William's sister, who lived down in South Carolina. She suggested he might stay with their cousin, a dairy farmer, or perhaps move into a nursing home.

“I don't think William would like that,” I told her.

“Well, he hasn't got much of a choice, has he?” she said. “That's what comes of living in a shack by yourself for so long. He should have found himself a wife.”

William recovered slowly in the hospital. He remembered nothing about shooting me in the hand, which I considered fortunate. My hand healed up just fine, which was fortunate as well.

JoAnne was the one who first suggested we move William into the farmhouse with us. The hippies held a meeting about it beforehand. This was a rule of the house. We had to have a meeting before a new roommate was permitted to take up residence. Seeing as it was winter and several folks had abandoned ship already, there was plenty of space, even for a bedridden hermit.

“I'm concerned about the sanitary aspects,” volunteered Roger. He was still bitter about JoAnne's betrayal and opposed any idea of hers regardless of its merit.

“He's been living in harmony with nature for years,” I pointed out. “We could all learn something from this man.”

“What did he eat out there in his shack?” asked someone.

“Potatoes and rice,” I said.

“What about vegetables?”

“I'm not sure about that.”

“Well, that's why he had his stroke, then,” said Roger. “Improper diet.”

This debate went on for some time, but eventually the “yeas” won out over the “nays” and William was installed in a corner bedroom on the ground floor. There was an open fireplace in there which JoAnne took to keeping lit and stocked with wood that we transported from his shack. Now that William was gone from there, the porcupine began making his presence known, gnawing away great chunks of the porch and doorway.

“Why does he eat the wood?” asked JoAnne.

“It's the salt,” I said. “And the fiber perhaps.”

“There's plenty of wood in the forest,” said JoAnne.

“Well, maybe William was right,” I said. “It's revenge for the time he tried to shoot him. We shouldn't tell William about this.”

“Okay,” said JoAnne.

William didn't mind how cold the farmhouse was, or, surprisingly, the constant flow of people in and around his room. For a hermit, he was quite social, and he regaled anyone within earshot with stories of the old days in the mines and logging camps where he had spent his youth.

“You kids are lucky you don't have to work like we did back then. Do any of you even have jobs?”

William's biggest issue at first was the lack of a television set on which to watch the Celtics' games. The hippies had voted to ban its presence. But finally JoAnne made an impassioned plea on his behalf, and, just as the Celtics began their late-season playoff run, the little black-and-white TV was fired up once again.

JoAnne had to rig up a series of wire hangers which stretched out the window and onto the roof in order to bring in proper reception, and William was very strict about the placement of each body in the room. At first the hippies avoided the TV and its commercial trappings, but then they began to creep in, warming themselves around JoAnne's fire and submitting with amusement to William's strict edicts concerning where they might sit and what positions were acceptable to assume.

“Since when did we take up watching sports in this household?” asked Roger.

“It's a communal activity,” said a girl named Feather. “It gives us purpose.”

I suppose this was true, and, in fact, I would say the same about William's general presence there. It gave us all a bit of a purpose. We fed and bathed him in his weakened state, and patted his back when the coughing fits struck hard. In return, he made us feel less useless and disconnected from the world “out there,” the one we claimed to want to shun.

That was the year the Celtics made it to the NBA finals and beat the dreaded Los Angeles Lakers in six games, behind the storied “Big Three” of Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, and Ray Allen. Those three got all the credit, but there was a houseful of us in northern Vermont who knew the truth behind that championship. We watched every game of that playoff run, moving accordingly in front of the magic television set, holding hands when we had to, in an attempt to make the picture more clear and therefore assist our team.

By the time the Celtics won the championship, the winter had finally faded. It was mud season then and the air was full of blackflies. William didn't last long once the warm weather set in. His lungs began to give out for good.

I tried to take him back out to the shack with me one day in early June but my car got stuck in the mud on the way there and he said, “Aw, to hell with it. I bequeath my belongings to the porcupine.”

It was JoAnne who held William's hand as he took his last breath, lying there in that dusty bed at the farmhouse, and all of us sang some silly song before the ambulance arrived and took him away.

JoAnne left town that fall, after William had been buried. She headed for Alaska, where last I heard she was working on a fishing boat. I left the farmhouse as well, done, like so many hippies before me, with that particular experiment. On my way out of town I took a detour out to William's shack. Already the summer vegetation had grown thick around it. Already that little shack was getting swallowed up by the land. The door had been gnawed thin by the porcupine and inside there were little brown pellets, animal droppings scattered about the floor. I left the black-and-white TV set there on William's sunken armchair, plugged into the rusty generator with its wire antenna pointed skyward. It would be there for the porcupine, should he ever find the need to conjure its powers.

 

LOST LIMBS

 

It wasn't until my second date with Lenore that I discovered one of her arms was missing. Our first meeting had been a blind date, arranged by a friend who had neglected to mention this arm situation. I suppose I'm not a particularly observant person. This is something I've been told on a number of occasions. Lenore wore a very well made prosthesis though, and I believe it was an understandable oversight on my part.

My next-door neighbor at the time was a magician named Clifford and on the weekends he performed at a club called Singing Henry's. There was no singer named Henry involved with the place. That's just what they called it. I decided to ask Lenore if she wanted to go see Clifford's magic show for our second date.

Lenore said yes and when I stopped by to pick her up I noticed there was a set of metal hook-pincers where her hand was supposed to be.

“Hey, what's this?” I said. I thought perhaps she was playing some kind of odd prank.

“It's my hand,” she said.

“No, it's not.”

“It's a prosthesis,” she said.

She rolled up her sleeve to just below her shoulder so that I could see where her flesh ended and the device began. It was held on by a suction cup and two spandex straps.

“Well, okay,” I said. How could I have missed that?

“Did you have that thing on before?” I asked. “When we went out before?”

“It's called a prosthesis,” said Lenore. “I was wearing a different arm that night. It had rubber fingers. It's less noticeable, but not as useful.”

Lenore stepped back into her apartment and retrieved the rubber arm. I still don't know how this device escaped my notice. Upon even a cursory glance it was immediately apparent that the arm wasn't real. The fingers didn't even move! But that's the way things are in life, I've found. Once you learn some fact, then all the clues become obvious and you feel like you should have known it all along.

The magic show was extremely lousy and I kept looking over to see how Lenore managed to clap with her prosthetic arm. She would raise it up a bit and then just pat down on the forearm part. This method didn't produce much noise, but Clifford didn't deserve much. Watching Lenore clap was more interesting than most of the magic tricks.

After each trick Clifford would yell, “And voilà!” and we'd all have to cheer for him. This became tiresome, but he did do one trick toward the end which I found impressive. He grabbed a live dove out of a cage, then he smacked it on its back really hard and confetti went flying everywhere. I got the impression the bird was supposed to disappear but instead it just stayed in his hand, looking stunned. So Clifford smacked it again, a little harder. This time the dove let out a little
squawk!
and more confetti flew into the air, but still it didn't fly away or disappear. I was beginning to feel bad for the bird and you could tell something was wrong because Clifford shook his head and pressed his lips together. Then he just sighed and stuffed the dove into his pocket. His coat pocket! The show went on and I kept waiting for the dove to fly out or at least struggle in there, but it didn't move. Where did it go? It was amazing!

Afterward I asked Lenore about this and she said, “It just stayed in his pocket.”

“A dove in his pocket?”

“Look, I don't know, maybe he killed it.”

“What?”

“I'm kidding. I bet he tossed it away when we weren't looking.”

I mulled this over but I'm pretty sure Clifford never tossed a bird offstage that night.

I asked Lenore if she wanted to come back to my place and she said, “No, thanks.”

“Maybe we could just drive around a little?” I suggested.

“Why would we do that?”

“I don't know. It's easier to talk that way, when you are moving.”

“You can just drive me home,” said Lenore. “We can talk on the way home.”

Once we'd started driving I said, “Well, Lenore, how did you end up losing that arm?”

“I was in a car accident,” she said. “Actually, it was a van accident. I was eleven years old. We were on a school trip.”

“Did anybody die?”

“No.”

“That's good.”

“Yes.”

“Did they try to sew your arm back on?”

“It was crushed. The van rolled over onto it.”

“Oh. Well, I'm sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

“I'm sorry I didn't notice it before.”

“I thought you did but you were trying not to mention it.”

“Why wouldn't I mention it?”

“Most people pretend they don't notice it.”

“I wouldn't pretend something like that.”

“It's okay if you did.”

“But I didn't.”

I tried to kiss Lenore good night. She was a very attractive woman. She had these unusual irises that were light gray but had dark edges around them. She wasn't too interested in kissing me though. I thought about telling her how wonderful her eyes were, but this seemed like something she might have been told before. Another question occurred to me.