Snapper Read Online Free PDF Page A

was its custodian for a while.
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “Cool,” said Eddie.
    “You guys wanna get some food and stuff?” said Shane.
    “Can you guys get beer?” said Eddie. He meant did we have fake IDs, but we didn’t. Still, Eddie managed to score some Camels from the unquestioning cashier at an isolated gas station after Shane and I had paid for our Twinkies. I was impressed. The thrill expired when we were back on the road and we discovered that none of us had a lighter.
    “How’d you guys hook up?” I asked.
    “Eddie just moved in two doors down from us,” said Shane.
    “Three,” said Eddie. “It’s cool.”
    Essentially Shane was being polite. It’s one of his great failings. He pushed a cassette in: it was the Clash or the Jam or some other English band that nobody in a hundred-mile radius except us listened to.
The U.K
. in Southern Indiana invariably means the University of Kentucky.
    Eddie was a little sniffy about it. He wasn’t directly critical but he said he didn’t know anything about English bands.
    “You’re wearing a Led Zep T-shirt,” I said, and that was probably my first mistake. He didn’t say anything, just sulked, but it was the first thing he hadn’t found cool. I wasn’t trying to be superior.
    We were on a gravel road by then. Shane and I found an abandoned puppy in the middle of it at dusk one time—a black lab crossed with a beagle, we thought. Shane tookhim home and called him Bear. Shane was with him when he died on the bathroom floor sixteen years later, and to this day can’t bring himself to get another dog. That is neither here nor there. Bear wasn’t with us that day, and I don’t know why. Things would have turned out differently with Bear along. Once when I was kissing Shane’s sister Bear got very upset because I should have been kissing the other sister, and he knew it. He knew people. But it is an unfortunate fact that Bear was not in his accustomed spot in the flatbed choking on gravel dust as we rolled along.
    “What do you guys do out here?” asked Eddie.
    “We got a boat,” said Shane.
We talk about poetry
would have been asking for trouble.
    “That’s cool. I coulda brought my old man’s whiskey if I’d known. Maybe next time.”
    “Maybe next time,” said Shane. “That would be cool.”
    “Cool,” I agreed. Suggesting a next time was probably Eddie’s first mistake.
    He picked up a ball of twine off the floor. I don’t know why it was there or why he picked it up, let alone why he brought it with us into the woods. Boys are like that. I have a boy of my own now, carries things around all day: a book of matches, an extension cord, a stick. I always carry a pocketknife. Maybe centuries of carrying clubs and swords have imprinted themselves so that at last the middle-class white Midwestern man is never without his Victorinox.
    Scratch that. Half of us carry guns.
    What I am getting at is that Eddie carried that ball of twine into the woods. Maybe his ancestors were hangmen or slave traders or mule skinners; maybe he had some deep need for a length of rope.

    A snapping turtle, if you have never seen one, is one of the most hideous and magnificent creatures on earth. It is a stone gargoyle with an aquiline beak and stern hunter’s eyes, a spiny ridge over its granite carapace and down its tail, and long dagger claws at the end of each leg. It can’t walk very fast, and it is not a swift swimmer as far as turtles go. What it can do is lurk, often for so long that it becomes encrusted with aquatic gunk and indistinct from its background. When an unsuspecting fish wanders past it strikes with its neck and jaws faster than any rattlesnake and with more force than any crocodile. In the Southern Indiana version of Aesop’s fable it eats the hare.
    The specimen we found sunning itself was somewhere between two and three feet long from beak to tail. It had come some distance from the water to perch on a flat sun-drenched stone. It was Eddie who