Turtleface and Beyond (4 page)

“Did anyone feed the cat?”

“Which cat?”

“The yellow one.”

“We don't have a yellow cat.”

“Yes, we do!”

“Who put wheat germ in the toilet?”

I was lazy, but not the laziest. I'd stumble into the kitchen and the fire in the woodstove would be out and all the dishes would be locked in a frozen puddle in the sink.

“What the fuck?” I'd yell.

“Be quiet,” someone would say, from under their covers.

It was my feet that were the coldest. I don't know why I didn't invest in sensible socks that year, or at least a good pair of slippers. What were we doing out there in the hinterlands anyway? We should have been seizing the day somehow, making our mark, but instead we stayed frozen in our inertia, justifying the fact that we couldn't get out of bed with our back-to-nature rhetoric. We were protecting the earth! By doing nothing!

I had a friend named William, an older man whom I admired because he lived an even more stark existence than we did. He was a hermit. His home was a one-room shack out in the woods and he had no electricity or running water. He spent most of his time loading firewood into his woodstove and drying socks on a clothesline hung across his ceiling.

That winter, one of William's relatives, concerned about his advancing age, had given him an electric generator and a small black-and-white television set. The hippies in my home wouldn't allow televisions, so I liked to venture out to William's shack in order to watch basketball games at night. That was my main social activity.

The TV set was tiny and got spotty reception, but on clear nights we could pick up the Boston broadcast of the Celtics' games. Previously, William had listened to the games on his transistor radio, but ever since the arrival of the TV he noticed that the Celtics began to win more often. He kept a chart on his wall calendar on which he noted the correlation between certain variables in our viewing habits and the scores of the games. For instance, if I sat on the wooden chair by the door and held on to the wire hanger which served as the TV's antenna throughout the fourth quarter, the Celtics outscored their opponents by five or more points. Likewise, the volume had to be turned down for the second quarter or they would find themselves behind at halftime. Whenever things seemed to be going badly for our team, William would rearrange our positions.

“Hold your arm up higher,” he would tell me. “Both arms now, spread your fingers!”

The general rule was: the better the TV's reception, the better the Celtics played. As that long winter progressed we both became certain that the outcome of their season depended entirely upon our mastery of the rituals surrounding the use of that television set.

There was an outhouse next to William's shack and using it was an unspeakably cold endeavor. The wind would whip up though the hole and bite you in the ass. William had been a heavy drinker in his youth and one winter he passed out while sitting in that outhouse. When he woke up the cheeks of his exposed rear end were black with frostbite and later at the hospital they had to remove the dead tissue, leaving two divots in his posterior. The term “freezing my ass off” rarely means what it actually claims, but old William was a person who could rightfully say that he had done such a thing.

One stormy night I showed up at William's place a little late and he was upset.

“You've thrown the whole thing off!” he told me. “I can't get any reception. We're already down by fifteen points, you son of a bitch.”

“I'm sorry, William,” I said.

I took my seat and held on to the wire-hanger antenna. The picture on the TV flickered in and out. The sound crackled but made no sense.

“What are we watching?” I asked. “I can't see anything.”

William stomped about in a rage. He had a short temper and low tolerance for the presence of other people. This was, perhaps, the reason he was a hermit. He put up with my being there mainly because of the perceived impact on the TV's picture quality. Finally William sat down on his stool and grabbed my hand. It was an emergency move, a connection of bodies that sometimes aided in the TV's reception. All we could see now were little shadows dancing about on the screen. The sound was scratchy and hard to decipher. We sat like this for ten minutes perhaps, my soft, lazy, hippie hand gripped in his rough hermit paw. Eventually the wind outside shifted and the picture and sound became more clear.

“What is this?” said William. “What are they saying?”

The announcers were speaking French. This wasn't a basketball game after all. We were watching a hockey game broadcast from Montreal.

“Well, fuck,” said William.

We scrambled to find the right station but by the time we did the Celtics were hopelessly behind. William sighed and settled into his chair, resigned to defeat. I loaded more wood into his woodstove. This chore had become more difficult for him recently. He seemed always out of breath. The hermit life was catching up to him.

“Can I use your outhouse, William?” I asked. He had a rule about not using it during the games, but since this one appeared beyond repair I thought it would be okay.

“Take a flashlight,” said William. “Look out for the porcupine.”

“The porcupine?” I asked.

“Right,” said William.

William explained that he had been battling a porcupine that winter. It liked to gnaw on the wood underneath his home and outhouse. He'd attempted to shoot it, but had missed several times, and now he was worried the creature was out for revenge.

“I caught him waiting for me under the outhouse a few days ago,” said William. “He was plotting to slap me in the ass with his spiky tail when I sat down.”

I told William I thought this was pretty unlikely, but I took the flashlight out there all the same.

When I returned, the game was over and William sat gazing at the staticky image in front of him. He announced that he wanted the TV gone from his residence.

“The currents are ruining my thinking. It's too much information,” he told me.

“So turn it off,” I said.

“I can't,” he replied. “It's stuck.”

I didn't understand what he meant by that and I tried to click off the knob myself. It really was stuck. It wouldn't turn. I found a set of pliers and accidentally snapped the knob right off.

“Well done,” said William.

The TV sat there blaring at us.

“Let's unplug it,” I suggested.

“I already did,” said William.

It was true, the set was unplugged, and yet the pictures and sound were still coming out.

“Well, that's unusual,” I pointed out.

“Just get it out of here,” said William. “I'd like to go to sleep.”

So I took the set back to the farmhouse. It sat next to me on the passenger seat of the car as I drove, still chattering away. I carried it inside the house where the hippies were all gathered around the woodstove. They looked up at me like I'd brought a rotting carcass into their home.

“It won't turn off,” I explained.

I wandered upstairs, set the TV on a stool in front of my bed, and got under the covers. I watched the evening news and a wrestling match and a French Canadian movie about a female detective, or insurance agent, I couldn't tell which.

A woman named JoAnne came into my room and asked if she could watch the TV too. We huddled together under my heap of blankets, staring at the flickering TV in my otherwise dark room.

“Your feet are so cold,” she told me.

“I know, I know,” I said. “They've been like that all winter.”

JoAnne got out of bed and returned with a big pot of steaming hot water. We both put our feet inside it and it felt very good. It was the warmest my feet had been in months, maybe years. She was a compelling woman, this JoAnne, with short-cropped hair and dark freckles on her cheeks. We hadn't spoken much since she'd moved into the house a few months before. I had a feeling she was with someone else, but I invited her to stay in my bed that night and when she did I was grateful for the company, and warmth.

In the morning when I woke up the TV was just a quiet, dim flicker. Then it died and went silent. The pot of water where we had warmed our feet now had a thin layer of ice on its surface. I slipped out of the bed, where JoAnne was still sleeping, and I jumped up and down to get blood flowing to my frozen toes. The TV toppled off the stool and hit the floor with a crash. A pile of silver batteries spilled out of a compartment in the back. JoAnne woke up then and smiled sleepily.

“It was the batteries,” I told her. “That TV wasn't magic after all.”

“I knew that,” she said.

Roger, a hippie from England, walked into the room, wide-eyed and wrapped in a blanket.

“Did I hear a crashing sound in here? Is he trying to hurt you, JoAnne?”

I was naked and growing cold. “It was the TV set,” I told him. “It fell on the floor.”

“Nevertheless,” said Roger, “I'm confused by this situation.”

I had been correct in thinking JoAnne had arrived at the house with a partner. It was Roger. My claim of ignorance was unconvincing.

“Go back to bed, Roger,” said JoAnne.

“I shall not,” said Roger.

JoAnne rolled over and covered herself in the blankets, leaving Roger and I standing there together. I didn't like being naked in front of him and couldn't find my clothing. I decided the best course of action was to get back into bed. JoAnne recoiled at the coldness of my body, but didn't object otherwise. Roger stayed in the room huffing about for an unreasonably long period of time, but then he finally left.

We got out of bed at noon and I drove JoAnne into town to buy her an egg-and-sausage breakfast. On the way there we warmed our hands in front of the car vents, which blew hot air from the engine.

“Ah, this feels good,” said JoAnne.

The vents underneath, the ones which were supposed warm our feet, were broken, or blocked somehow. JoAnne took off her boots and lifted her feet onto the dashboard so as to make them warm as well. I wished that I could do the same, but I was driving, and assuming such a position would have been unwise.

After breakfast, we smoked some marijuana with the college kids in town and then it started to get dark. Up there in Vermont, in the winter, it got dark before 4:00 p.m.

“We lost a whole day,” said JoAnne.

I realized that the Celtics were playing another game that night and wondered if William wanted his TV back. Perhaps he'd made a rash decision the night before and now regretted it. JoAnne and I returned to the farmhouse and discovered all of our belongings strewn about the front yard in the snow. Roger had done that.

We gathered our clothing and books as best we could and placed them in the trunk of my car. The TV set was out there too, cold and wet, but otherwise undamaged.

“I wonder if it still works,” I said.

“I'll bet you it does,” said JoAnne. She examined it closely and managed to fix the knob I had broken the night before. She was very handy.

“William will be pleased about that,” I said.

We drove to William's place, way out in the woods. I asked JoAnne to wait in the car while I knocked on his front door. I didn't want to surprise him by bringing a stranger into his house. He was shy around women as well.

When I knocked on the door there was no answer. I thought this was unusual since William didn't drive and was always home at night. I peeked in the door and found that the house was warm and lighted but William was nowhere in sight. I thought for a moment he had disappeared into the wilderness, in search of that wily porcupine perhaps, but then I realized he was simply relieving himself in the outhouse. I could see the glow from his flashlight between the holes which the porcupine had gnawed in the lower walls.

I had then what I thought was a very clever idea. I grabbed the stiff broom that William used to sweep the snow off his front porch and snuck behind the outhouse. I made a sign to JoAnne to keep waiting in the car. I was in a hurry because I didn't want William to finish before I made my move. My plan was to stick the whisk end of the broom up through one of those porcupine holes and give old William a spiky poke in the ass. I figured the straw ends of the broom would feel somewhat like a slap from the quilled tail of a porcupine. The problem was, once I got close I saw that the holes in the outhouse walls were too small for the head of the broom. I considered sticking the narrow end of the handle up there but judged this to be too un-porcupine-like. I was in a hurry, so I made a snap decision to reach my hand up there in the hopes of jabbing William's buttocks with my outstretched fingers. Perhaps they would feel like quills?

I pushed my arm through and grasped about in the darkness until I found my mark. There it was, William's skinny, divoted ass. I'd meant to jab it with my fingertips, but the angle was wrong and the motion was more of a tickle than grab. My expectation had been that William would leap up and fly out the door in terror while I chuckled away and quickly informed him of my witty ruse. What happened instead was William sat still for a moment while I timidly gripped his bony posterior. Then he calmly rose up, and as I struggled to remove my arm from the hole where I'd wedged it, he unloaded both barrels of his shotgun into the outhouse toilet.

“Hey!” I yelled. “William! Hey!”

I was lucky, because William used an old-fashioned gun meant for hunting rabbits and squirrels, and, even in those close quarters, his aim was poor. But still, the result was my hand got riddled with shotgun pellets and at first felt numb, but then began to sting and bleed profusely.

William, fairly confused, stepped out of the outhouse just as JoAnne came dashing out of the car and, like a superhero, tackled him into the snow.

“Wait!” I yelled.

JoAnne deftly removed the gun from William's hands and smashed it against a tree.