AN INCISION IN THE REEDS by Daniel Mueller
Not long after I turned seven, the world went dark at the edges and my face fell into my bowl of Lucky Charms. I inhaled milk, marshmallow shamrocks lodged in both nostrils, and I might’ve suffocated if not for my father carrying me to the couch in the living room and phoning an ambulance. All I know for sure is that when I regained consciousness, I was in Fort Hood’s Darnall Army Hospital where my father practiced as a medical officer. On a gurney in a bright, white room filled with clanging steel and people barking orders at one another, I looked up at my parents as they looked down at me.
“Don’t move,” my father said. “If you do, you could wind up paralyzed from the neck down.”
I nodded, and my father frowned. “I told you not to move.”
My mother explained to me that I had been given a spinal tap. “A spinal what?” I asked.
“Tap,” my father said. “The drawing of fluid from your spinal column into a syringe, sometimes called a lumbar puncture.”
“The doctors had to find out what’s wrong with you, honey,” my mother said. “It was the only way. The good news? You’re going to be okay.”
“Of the types of meningitis you could have,” my father explained, “it’s not the worst. Your body will fight it off on its own, but you’ll have to lie still for as long as it takes your lumbar puncture to heal.”
“How long will that be?”
“Three or four days.”
“Three or four days?”
“To be on the safe side.”
“It’ll go fast,” my mother assured me. “You’ll see.”
“Look,” my father said, “comic books,” and fanned a dozen in the air in front of me – The Green Lantern, Captain America, Hot Stuff, Archie.
Though he’d likely purchased them in a hurry from the hospital gift shop, I imagined him selecting each with care from the magazine rack at the PX where once, while waiting with my mother in the checkout line, I’d been stupefied by a soldier riffling through one from the X- rated shelf, on the cover of which a nude, four- breasted superhero named Hestia the Beauteous had ensnarled evil industrialists in floods, magma, tornadoes, and avalanches erupting from her four nipples.
“For when it’s safe,” he said.
In Greeley, Colorado the year before my father was drafted into the Army, a kid I knew from Vacation Bible School fell off the roof of his house and broke his neck. Why he’d been up there at all, I hadn’t a clue, but after the hospital released him, ladies from the church, my mother among them, met twice a week at his home to help with his physical therapy, and one June morning I went with her.
When we got there, Joel was laid out on a gurney on the patio, and while one church lady massaged his temples, the others maneuvered his limbs, bending his legs at the hips, knees, and ankles, his arms at the shoulders, elbows, and wrists, trying, my mother had explained to me on the drive there, “to help his brain remember how his body works.”
Feet shorter than the elevated bed on which he moaned, I could see little more of him than the appendages that flopped about the waists of the women cradling his calves and forearms, but I remembered him sitting in the churchyard as our pretty teenaged counselor read to us about baby Moses being left by his mother beside the Nile in a basket of pitch and tar and how annoyed I’d been by Joel’s deviated septum, overbite, and the barrage of questions with which he drove my beloved Meg to distraction, such that she slapped the picture book shut on the crabgrass and declared, “I don’t know about any of you, but killing all the boys makes sense to me.”
The next time I went with my mother to Joel’s house, I brought my periscope, a toy made of cardboard and shaped like a Z with rectangular mirrors inserted into the joints, which enabled clandestine viewers to look around the corners of buildings without being observed and over the heads of adults blocking scenes of potential interest. As the church ladies worked on Joel, I turned the spotter’s wheel until his yawning nostrils appeared in the crosshairs. He raised his head, and the pupils capping his sky- blue irises bore into my one, magnified to thrice its size, floating in a box over my mother’s left shoulder.
I hadn’t meant to scare him, or maybe I had, but Joel screamed as if he’d seen the eye of God.
In Greeley, we’d lived in a square, red brick house on a corner lot, and in the backyard next to a redwood fence that followed our property line my father had planted corn. The stalks, I knew from the previous summer, would grow until they hid the steeple of the Methodist church we attended. In the same spirit, he’d ordered a yard and a half of manure from the stockyards east of town and spent a Saturday in hip- waders spreading the hovel- sized heap over the lawn, front, back, and sides, with a pitchfork. “Ours will be the greenest grass in Greeley,” he exclaimed upon returning from the clinic each evening, assuring us we’d get used to the smell.
My mother indulged him with acquiescent nods, but during the day she cursed him, always under her breath lest I understood more than I let on, for an odor that had only briefly offended the olfactory when the breeze blew from the east now assaulted all five senses without remission, the methane a battering ram to the face and head. You breathed it in and nothing tasted right afterward.
One gray day, I stood inside our screened- in porch with our boxer Duchess when a lady in mourning passed by on the sidewalk. Resentful of the rain that prevented me from playing outdoors, I whispered to Duchess, “Fuck her,” pointing at the lady in black who appeared to float beyond the plain of decomposing cow shit, her veil no protection against a stench that spread through the sinuses like a poisonous tide, searing optic nerves and pushing tears from their ducts. “Fuck her, Duchess,” I said. “Fuck her.”
The dog leapt onto its hind legs, stubby tail wagging, front paws scraping the screens, barks sharp as rifle blasts. My mother materialized behind me. “What did you just say?” she asked.
“Fucker.”
In her grip my shirt collar was a noose, my five- year- old body a stiff she yanked into the house. “We don’t use that word in our home. We don’t use that word anywhere.”
From my mother’s grumbling I gathered the woman in black had lost her son in the war. From the hall closet she produced a fresh bar of Dial, and in the bathroom, she dropped the wrapper in the wastebasket. She stood me before the sink, where above the tap and hot and cold- water cranks her neck quivered in the mirror. Below them lay my buzz cut, blond stubble as well kept as a putting green by my father and the electric shears he produced every other Sunday after supper from a shelf in our unfinished basement.
“Where did you hear it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where?”
“Don’t know.”
She turned on the water and held the soap in the stream. “You heard it somewhere. Where?”
I didn’t know where I’d heard it, if I’d heard it from her or if I’d ever heard it before. I’d been trying to tell Duchess to sic the lady when the word bubbled up from deep inside me as if it had been there since birth and always would be and no amount of soap would ever remove it.
The hardest part about remaining still was the haunting visions from my past, each an unbidden conviction replete with a death sentence. Yes, I’d taken pleasure in the suffering of a kid I despised. Yes, I’d delighted in the prospect of Duchess attacking a grieving mother. Yes, I’d shot and killed a robin with a slingshot. Yes, I’d gussied myself up in my mother’s clothes, makeup, and jewelry and danced around our empty house singing “Getting to Know You” as if I were Anna Leonowens in The King and I, as oblivious to my father canting up the walk with his fly- fishing rod and creel as she was of the King of Siam listening to her from his bed chamber.
And yes, just the week before I’d stolen a snapping turtle from its owner’s back stoop, having crept on my belly beside the oak panels of his family’s Pontiac Safari, which was parked in a carport identical to our own, until the white plastic pail in which the creature was housed loomed but a few feet away, at the bottom of the concrete steps that led to the kitchen. From the moment I’d first seen it, I knew it would be mine – in the same white bucket strapped with bungee cords to the rear carrier of the bicycle the kid who’d found it pedaled up and down our street as if to taunt me. As soon as I had it in my hands, it was mine – the cold scutes of its plastron at rest in my fingertips, its carapace sandpaper under my thumbs, the thing itself a football nested in my forearms and shoulders.
The sun barely risen by the time I returned to my house, I yelled to my parents to come outside and see what I’d found by the swamp that buffeted our Fort Hood neighborhood to the west. “It was just crossing the street,” I said. “I’m pretty sure it’s a snapper.”
I held it aloft, displaying its craggy head, its eyes inkblots caught in amber, its lips pincers. Beyond its hind legs and tail, my father, knuckling a cigarette in the hand that held his coffee, examined it through the smoke and steam.
“That’s quite a specimen,” he agreed.
My mother, less impressed, made a face and returned to the kitchen where silver dollar pancakes and sausages sizzled on the stovetop. Any joy they’d taken in each other they’d left behind in Colorado, and though they’d spoken to me about the baby that in months would turn us into a family of five, my mother couldn’t make it through a day without crying. My father, perhaps sensing an onslaught of tears, opened the storage compartment at the far end of our carport and unearthed from it an old minnow bucket from the days when he’d fished for crappies in Wisconsin as a boy.
“Now your mother’s right,” he said loud enough for her to hear.
“It’s important that you wash your hands after touching it. You don’t know where it’s been or what diseases it might carry.”
The snapping turtle didn’t look sick, but that it could be, and that it could make others sick as well, lent gravity to my role of caretaker, and for this I loved it all the more.
“And keep your fingers away from its mouth. You don’t want to lose the tip of one.”
This stoked the fires of my heart, for I was in possession of a creature with the jaw strength to snap a digit off at the joint, and I imagined the awe it would inspire among kids in the neighborhood, the carrot sticks and celery stalks with which we’d provoke it, the beetles and grasshoppers we’d feed it, the toads and frogs. In it, I saw an emblem of myself: a kid who, for as long as I could remember, needed to retract into his shell, his room, to read, draw, and listen to music, if he was to play well with others. The snapping turtle and I were alike, and it was mine, and as I showed it first to the Spenser twins, Hugh and Merle, with whose family my family shared a driveway, then to Jack and Jim Kraft, brothers who lived across the street from us, I didn’t think about the crime I’d committed or the lie I was perpetuating with each retelling of how it had come into my possession.
“What were you doing down by the swamp?” Hugh wanted to know.
“Looking for snappers,” I replied. “What do you think I was doing?”
“But it was early, right?” Merle said. “Before sun- up?”
“At daybreak,” I replied, “when living things are on the move, before they go into hiding.”
“Can you show us where you found it?” Hugh asked, and I told him sure, that we’d go there on bikes the next morning at sunrise and, if God smiled on us, maybe they’d find one of their own. Not until I’d told the story again to Jack and Jim Kraft, adding to it the armadillo I’d spotted along the way and how the snapping turtle had first appeared in the darkness as a shadow among shadows, inching across the asphalt like a shifting puddle of motor oil, did the fiction supplant the truth, and when the kid from whom I’d taken it set his bike on Jack and Jim Kraft’s lawn and sauntered over to us like someone searching for his lost pet, I could look him in the eyes without flinching.
We were feeding it salami with a fork, delighting at the tings! of its beak against the tines, when he said, “Howdy!” and introduced himself as Raymond Calhoun from Florence, South Carolina. New kids were always arriving to take the place of kids who’d left, whose fathers had finished their two- year stints of duty as medical officers and were free to return to wherever they’d come from or set out for somewhere new, the consensus being that anywhere was better than the pit of hell known as Fort Hood. But I liked the place, and one of the things I liked about it most was that all of us were the same. “Gastroenterology,” he added.
“I’m Hugh, this is Merle. Boston, Mass. Maxillofacial Surgery.”
“Jack and Jim Kraft. Eureka, California. Radiology.”
I told him my name, said, “Greeley, Colorado. Obstetrics and Gynecology.”
Our introductions made, Raymond glanced at me askance, as if he could see me better through one eye than two. “If I could be any kind of doctor in the world,” he said, “I’d be what your dad is,” and whistled in the way soldiers had at my mother until her pregnancy was what they noticed about her first and the whistling ceased.
I said, “He delivers babies, big whoop,” which was as far as my father had gotten in explaining his profession to me.
“That’s half of what he does,” Raymond corrected me. “The Obstetrics part. And a mighty admirable part it is, too. Bringing life – human life! – into the world. But then there’s the other part, the Gynecology part. That’s the part I believe I was cut out for.”
Jim, two years older and a head taller than the rest of us, laughed, and we laughed, too, not wanting to be the butt of the joke we feared was coming, but Raymond spared us by saying, “Handsome snapping turtle you got there,” and the Spenser twins recounted the story I’d told them, omitting the poetry with which I’d intended to quell their doubts and paring it down to its unlikely facts.
“So, you got up before sunrise,” Raymond said, “with the intention of catching a snapping turtle and, lo and behold, there one was, crossing the street, down by the swamp?”
“You calling one of us a liar?” Jack asked, tougher than the rest of us because of the older brother with whom he had to contend, but when it came to standing up for one another, we first graders were all for one and one for all.
“Nah.” Raymond grinned. “We all know the Lord works in mysterious ways. It’s just that yesterday I caught a snapper myself.– I showed it to you, remember? On my bike?” he said to me. “And today it’s gone. Like overnight it either grew wings or built a ladder.”
Merle asked if he thought mine was his, if I could’ve found it after it had gotten loose. “Doubtful,” he replied. “But there is one way to find out.”
“What’s that?” asked Hugh.
“Flip it over,” Raymond said. “I wrote my initials on its underside with a blue marker. RC, same as the cola.”
I braced myself for the reckoning, his initials his title of ownership, but when Jim nudged the snapper onto its shell with his tennis shoe, its neck curled like a horseshoe and mouth clamped onto a loose shoelace, its underbelly was free of human marks. I’d been wholly prepared to give the turtle back to Raymond, perhaps receiving commendation for catching it before it could return to the swamp, but he’d lied about tagging it just as I had about where I’d found it – and all, I understood, to let me know he knew I’d stolen it. Maybe he’d even seen me through his kitchen window scampering off with it.
“Told you,” he said and winked at me. “Not the same snapper. But it don’t matter none. There’s plenty more where it came from. You just have to know how to catch ’em.”
“Everybody knows how to catch ’em,” Jack said. “You see ’em and you pick ’em up, careful not to get a finger bit off in the process.”
Everyone snickered, including me. “I mean from the swamp itself,” Raymond said. “With a hook and line. Go get your bikes, I’ll show you.”
And that’s what we did. I put the snapper back in the minnow bucket, set it by the stoop to our kitchen, and the six of us rode on our bikes to the beige duplex at the end of Marshall Street, this so Raymond could gather his tackle. I clung to the rear of our gang so as not to be the first to turn into his driveway and thereby incriminate myself, deluding myself that as long as Raymond kept my secret, I could ignore, and maybe even forget, what I’d done under the spell of jealousy.
At the swamp, our bikes on their sides like deer asleep in the horsetails, Raymond distributed silver five- aught hooks with the solemnity of a priest, then measured out six arm- lengths of nylon kite string. He showed us how to thread the twine through the eyelet, wrap it around the shank, thread it through the loops, and tighten it into a knot that would hold against a turtle’s struggle for freedom.
“You bait it like this,” he said, dipped his hand into a freezer bag of viscera removed, it seemed, from animals his mother had cleaned in their kitchen, and in his slick palm lay, for all I knew, an eyeball. As he ran a hook through it, careful not to prick his finger, the membranous flesh resisted, gave, and resisted again until the barb burst from the other side like a worm from a grape. He held the baited hook aloft, then twirled the line at his side like a lariat and sent it arcing over the wound- shaped slough. Fluorescent with algae, it languished in the Highway 190 drainage ditch, and through the center of it, thirty feet away, rose the twelve- foot- high chain- linked fence topped with razor wire that surrounded Fort Hood. Raymond’s bait plopped just shy of the leaves and trash trapped in it, and the splash rippled outward, jostling lily pads.
“Snappers ain’t picky about their cuisine,” Raymond said. “They’ll eat just about anything. Now go ahead and bait up.”
None of us wanted to stick our hands into entrails that lay like an incision in the reeds, but when each of us had, we spread out along the bank and tossed our lines out into the muck. Merle caught the first one. “Bring him in slow and steady,” Raymond called to him. Then Jim and Jack and Hugh each caught one. A couple of the snappers were a little bigger than the one I’d stolen, a couple a little smaller, but if all were together in a tank, I wouldn’t have been able to tell mine from the others.
And for this I had risked my immortal soul?
In my hospital bed I lay motionless for one day, two days, three, terrified that if I moved at all I’d wind up paralyzed, but also terrified that by remaining still I couldn’t know for sure that I wasn’t paralyzed already. My father visited before and after his hospital rounds, my mother in the late afternoons pregnant and toting my sister Elaine by the hand, and I was grateful for company that, for fifteen minutes or half an hour, brought relief from the litany of indictments I brought against myself. Except when I had visitors, the nurses who fed me and changed my catheter, the doctors who called me “Sport” and “Champ,” I was a spectator at my own trial, I, too, the defendant, prosecutor, judge, and jury, and as much as I wanted to proclaim my innocence, no one knew better than I what I’d done and why.
I imagined growing old without leaving my bed, my arms and legs wizening as they atrophied, whiskers sprouting from my cheeks in adolescence Rip Van Winkling into a beard, eyes wise from what they’d gleaned through windows and television screens, the vicarious experiences of visitors, and the books they’d read to me. I prayed to God for use of my limbs even as I knew all the reasons He had for denying my request and over time I reconciled myself to my fate. If Raymond Calhoun, a boy of eight, had seen through my subterfuge, how could I escape the all- seeing eye of God?
It was then, on the afternoon of the third day, that the doctor who’d performed the lumbar puncture told me that my spine had had the time it needed to heal and it was time for me to move my arms and legs. But by then I had thought about all I would miss in life, the earth and her wonders, the world and its mysteries, and decided that I preferred being quarantined. At least then I would be protected from temptations I couldn’t, at seven, even begin to fathom.
I wagged my head, and he said, “See? You’re fine.” He reminded me that on my nightstand lay comic books, still in their cellophane. “Grab one,” he said. “You know you want to.” He dangled one in front of me. “It’s safe now. You have absolutely nothing to fear.”
Daniel Mueller is the author of two collections of short fiction: How Animals Mate (Overlook Press, 1999), and Nights I Dreamed of Hubert Humphrey (Outpost 19 Books, 2013). His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, The Cincinnati Review, Story Quarterly, and Mississippi Review.