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jerrygabriel.net Turtle The Tampa Review, fall 2003 Walking from the gravel drive to the house in the dusk, he saw something flash behind one of the out-buildings (he told Nate). He walked a little closer and saw that it looked like the red plastic encasement of a reflective light. Probably an old bicycle's reflector, he thought. Coming close enough to touch it, though, he saw that it was a taillight covering, and that it was attached to a small pickup. Henry and Nate were on their morning break and had just finished off a can of tuna and a package of saltines between them. Now Henry was putting in a dip, telling the story of last night. "At first," he said, "I figured Trish's dad had bought an old beater, probably to haul wood with or coal. But then I found a lighter in my pocket and saw that it was pea green." He knew then whose truck it was, because there was only one Datsun truck that color in the world, and it belonged to a boy named Roger Carr whom Henry and Nate had graduated with not a month before. "I stood there for a minute just thinking," he said. He leaned back against the small truck's door, he told Nate, and looked down toward the woods which were pitch dark already, and then toward the sky where he saw a handful of stars. "It was weird," he said. "If I didn't know any better, I'd say I was a little relieved." He took his time there, leaning against Roger's truck. He took a piss on a hubcap and then he started for the backdoor. "I knew I shouldn't," he said. "I even stopped halfway across the yard and asked myself why I wanted to go in there." He walked into the kitchen first, though, which was small and sat at the back of the house. Trish's dad was never home in the evenings because he worked second shift at the foundry-a situation Henry and Trish had taken plenty advantage of in their year and a half together. And her mom lived down in Kentucky and Henry didn't think Trish ever even talked to her anymore. He knew there was no one in the house but Trish and him, and probably Roger Carr. Out on Carmichael Road, where Henry was telling Nate all of this, it was a perfect, breezeless June morning. They sat on their truck's tailgate, parked right on the bridge over Bremen Creek, leaving a little space for a car to pass if one wanted to, though they hadn't seen any on the road all morning. Below them, the creek ran flat and fast over sand and rounded rocks; it was clear water and you could see all the way to the bottom, maybe a foot or eighteen inches down in some places. Earlier, Dick Mills, their foreman, had told them to weed-whip the guardrail on either side of this bridge-about a quarter mile of road, all told-and then drive down to the southeast of the county to do some other bridges. But when they sat down for break, the office radioed to tell them to stay put, that there was a sheriff's deputy coming out to talk to Henry. Henry was telling Nate why. "I'd pictured the worst already," he was saying-his expression almost inexplicably calm-"and my mind was racing when I went in there. I was trying to drum up some sensible explanation, you know, something innocent for why Roger Carr could possibly have his junky truck out hidden behind the mower building." Inside the house, Henry could hear the television; it was loud and explosions echoed through the house as if the place were under siege. Everything was dark because the house didn't have many windows to let in what light was left outside. But he knew the place by heart. He closed the screen door behind him lightly and walked toward the noise. Down the hall and left, and there he could see the flicker of the television. Only it wasn't the actual television, but its reflection in a mirror hanging at the end of the hallway. "The TV was so damned loud," he told Nate, as if this were the problem. When he came into the living room-Trish's family called it the den-he saw bodies stirring, and then a noontime shot of California flashed on the TV. It was Beverly Hills Cop, he knew, because he'd seen it listed in the HBO guide earlier-and Eddie Murphy was strutting down a sunny street. Henry could see everything clearly then, and here was Trish with her shirt off, trying to cover herself with her thin white arms, and there was Roger Carr with just a T-shirt on-no socks, no underwear, not even the Reds hat you could always find on his head. Just the shirt. "Butt naked," Henry said. "Or near enough." "I didn't know what to do," he said. "I turned around and was going for the door. That's what I should've done. I was thinking: that's fine. Just get out of here and let it be. But then I thought, You're engaged to that little tramp, and I turned right back around-and I don't know why I felt like it was his fault-I knew it wasn't-but I went for him anyway." Trish was trying to find her shirt, he said, and he was laying into Roger Carr's head. Henry's dad had made him take judo and boxing and karate when he was younger-and also piano, and, for one year, dance, because it was supposed to make him more agile-none of it to much effect, really, except that Henry knew how to pack a punch now and could play several university fight songs on the piano. Roger Carr was bigger and probably stronger and quicker. But Henry was a better fighter and angrier; the latter is all that likely mattered in the end, because Roger Carr's face (which Nate saw at the basketball court a week later) was the closest thing to true purple he'd ever seen on a human. When Henry thought Roger had had enough, he just got up and started for the door. Trish was crying on the couch, her shirt finally on, backwards. "'There you go,' I told her," Henry said. "I don't even know what I meant by it." He walked back out toward his own truck, but on the way, he went back to Roger's and kicked off its side-mirrors and then kicked in the driver-side window. He told Nate he was going to get inside and just tear the thing up. "I thought about grabbing the hacksaw from behind my seat and taking his gearshift down to the floor," he said. But then something happened, and the calm he'd felt beforehand returned. Then he got back into his truck and drove to town and went downstairs at his parents' house where he watched the rest of Beverly Hills Cop before going to bed. *** It was quiet for a very long time, just the noise of the stream trilling over a few rocks below them. Nate was full of questions, but knew not to ask them, and the two of them just sat there dipping some Skoal. "Jesus," was all Nate could say, and he said it a number of times. "Look at that," Henry said, pointing to three large turtles swimming upstream. He got up off the tailgate. It was then that Nate first heard the grunting whine of an automatic transmission down-shifting somewhere in the distant hills. Henry was already skidding down the steep embankment to the creek, though, and soon, he was sitting on the ground, yanking on his boots, and then his socks. Nate got up and took a step toward the old steel frame of the bridge, to a place where he could see him better. "Henry," he said. "Snappers, ain't they?" "Yep," Henry said. He was already in the water. "Think so." This spot on Bremen Creek was in a wide valley and you could see, to the north and south, the hills rising out of it, their hardwoods overtaking the soy and corn of the bottomland. The car, Nate could tell by then, was coming from the south, which was the direction of town. Carmichael Road was gravel-actually gravel and liquid asphalt mixed, but it still made things dusty-and he could see dust rising from the hills, where the car had lifted it. In the creek, the turtles were swimming along leisurely-twenty feet or so upstream from the bridge now-as unaware of the coming commotion in their submerged state as they likely were of any number of other dry land events. By then Henry was splashing toward them, though, running with his legs high, as if through a ropes course, stumbling over rocks and dead branches. It didn't take much of this to cause the turtles to react, and then they were off too. They split up and fanned out in three directions, like airshow fighters, swimming as fast as Nate had seen minks swim. They looked so graceful and powerful. Nate didn't want to even think about what was going to happen if Henry caught up with one. "Car coming," Nate yelled, but Henry seemed not to hear him at all, or not to care. The car was visible now to the south, maybe a half mile off across the valley. It was black, its chrome glistening. The turtles started digging into the sand on the bottom of the creek, looking for crevasses and large rocks and fallen trees-anything that they could get under. The two that had gone to either side found cover under large sandstone boulders, and they disappeared from view, miraculously, it seemed, for these were not small turtles; their backs were the size of serving plates. "Come 'ere, you heathen," Henry yelled at the animal he was after-the one in the middle; he was laughing now. The turtle was panicking, zig-zagging. Finally, Henry was right above it, and he reached down into the water with his left hand and with one reckless swipe pulled that turtle out by its tail. He stood up again and held the turtle away from his body, and almost immediately the turtle was extending its long neck, craning to get at Henry's hand, but it couldn't quite reach him and it struggled in vain. By this time, the car was close enough to see. It was the sheriff's deputy, sure enough. Henry turned to show Nate the writhing turtle. Nate wanted to alert him to the car because Henry could not see out of the channel, but it was becoming clear that it didn't matter to Henry how many sheriff's deputies came. "Look at that guy," Henry yelled up to him. He was as proud as Nate could imagine anyone being, like he'd just caught his first fish. Nate was bolstered by Henry's audacity and he wanted badly then to get into the act, and he found himself needing to marshal the will not to do a thing he would regret. He briefly considered jumping off the bridge and into the creek-a show of support, for lack of a better way of thinking about it. The fall was not so far that he would be seriously hurt, maybe fifteen feet; in fact, there was a better than average chance that he would not be hurt at all. But he controlled the impulse and instead he cheered Henry and his turtle from the bridge, whooping and then howling, coyote-like. Something made Nate envy Henry down in the water. It was the beginning of things, maybe, that first kiss or that initial down of football, when you're so nervous about what it's going to be like. And then the thing happens and no matter how that first part goes, you're just relieved that it's underway. Not a month out of school and Henry had already made his very own choice-the first, surely, of many-and if he had to pay some for that, it was probably worth the satisfaction of knowing he had made one. It was a strange sort of courage, and Nate knew that it was really nothing to admire. But he did admire it and was emboldened by it and he wanted to find the same thing somewhere inside himself. For that long moment before the deputy pulled up on the bridge and got out of his car with his paunch hanging prominently over his belt-buckle, it was as if Henry had done something much more noble than he in fact had, as if he had faced down one of life's supreme difficulties. And here he stood in the water holding the snapper, which writhed still, as if to say to the world, Who's Next?