Key Grip Read online

  “Back off, or else!” I ordered.

  Treating me as if I were a mere inanimate object, like a rock, the creature came within two feet of my feet before it suddenly swerved—hurtled, really—to my right, like a running back eluding a tackier. I jumped in front of it, but the turtle’s hind legs thrust relentlessly, its forelegs countering my every move. Head lowered, mouth agape, it backed me toward the pond. With its low center of gravity, the turtle seemed to own the horizontal plane; my height meant nothing. I don’t know what it wanted more—water, or the taste of some species that lived in water—but it wanted it on some ultimately inarguable level. This wasn’t going to be about negotiation. This turtle, with no respect for boundaries, no inkling that I held title to this land, no sensitivity to the anger that had built up in me long before this moment arrived, kept coming at me—until, that is, I brought the edger down one inch in front of its bluntly jutted nose.

  The big advantage of being a turtle and having a shell, I had thought, was that you could hunker down and hide until your enemy went away. Or until your enemy lifted you gently by your shell, placed you in a cardboard box with air holes in it, and took you to an animal shelter, or someone else’s pond—or a swamp. But this turtle took one look at the edging tool half sunk in the dirt in front of its nose, and rather than demonstrate surprise or shrink from the blade, it affected a curmudgeonly expression. With its downturned mouth and its too-steady gaze, it looked more pissed off than a bass.

  Then, it bit the edger.

  It isn’t possible, of course, that a snapping turtle’s beak could produce a clang by chomping on a half-buried piece of steel, but clang is what I heard, as surely as if two broadswords had clashed midair. The turtle removed its beak from the steel, but much too slowly, confirming those childhood prophecies and deciding for me what I could not decide for myself: that this was my job, that the buck stopped here, that to transport a creature with this kind of behavior to anyone else’s pond or lawn or swamp would be irresponsible.

  “That’s it,” I said. Realizing the implications of this standoff, I assigned the turtle a gender. “That’s it for you, old boy.”

  Knowing what I had to do, however, was different from choosing the specific method. Should I drive the edger through the turtle’s shell, or should I decapitate the beast? His shell resembled Godzilla’s hide—dense and hard, as if tempered in a forge and capable of withstanding bazookas and rockets. His spiked prehensile tail seemed equally formidable. His neck, as thick as a chicken’s, was a different matter. The tight skin, gray with a yellowish tint and encrusted with tubercles, appeared vulnerable. The trouserlike skin on his legs looked much the same.

  But where was the turtle’s heart? I didn’t know.

  I poked his shell with the edger. His neck lengthened, and he scowled at me, his visage suddenly shape-shifting to that of a rattlesnake, then a hawk, then back to turtle again. Then he just got downright impudent, like a homeless man I had seen in Central Park during my last trip to the city. The fellow, upon discovering me sitting on his favorite bench, reached into his sweatpants, grabbed his balls, and shook them at me. When the turtle shook his balls at me—biting the steel once more, and this time hanging on—I yanked the edger free and tested his neck with the steel.

  There comes a time when you don’t need more information. I, having arrived at this juncture, knew enough. The snapper, in his stillness, also seemed to know enough. His head drew back into its sheath like a penis into its foreskin. His yellow eyes, encased in wattles, stared out at me with a beady terror. I raised the blade like a guillotine and waited for him to offer himself up.

  I can’t say whether the tears commenced at that moment—as he began to present his neck—or as the edger actually started to descend. But I can say that when I plunged the rusty, cleaverlike blade down onto the turtle’s neck, a cry of anguish escaped my mouth. Everything I thought I knew about myself—that I owned land, that I’d landed on my feet, that despite a decade of low-life behavior, I’d finally achieved some dignity—all that brittle artifice shattered with the first blow.

  Looking down, I saw that the edger’s dull blade had grazed the turtle’s flat reptilian head, scalping him deeply. A hunk of bloody skin hung from his face like a wood shaving from a vise. “Oh, God,” I moaned, seeing what I’d done—and what I still had left to do. Twice, three times, I sucked in air, phlegm rattling in the back of my throat. Words of some kind struggled to break through and express remorse, but they came out strangled, as once more I raised the blade and brought it down, slamming it this time onto the shell, to no effect at all.

  Desperate, I tried using the edger the way it was meant to work on grass—positioning it first, then stepping down hard on it to make the cut. But the snapper would not sit still for that. I stepped back, needing time to think. When I moved forward again, the turtle strained his bloody neck and stared up at me, one eye still intact. And that’s when I saw past his affect, past his “arrogance” and “impudence,” past what I was projecting onto him, and I saw instead an ancient and, so help me God, wise creature. Suddenly, I saw whose place this was originally—whose lawn, whose pond, whose woods, whose dignity. And I just couldn’t believe what I’d done.

  I finished him off, the old boy. I was pathetic in the process, sobbing, moaning, gagging. He looked a mess at the end. He crawled about without a head, his old heart, wherever it resided, sustaining him nearly until dusk. While he was still kicking, I placed him on a large granite boulder, which had been hauled from the earth when the house on that land was built, back in 1710. Eventually, he ceased all movement, and I carried his carcass across the road on a coal shovel, dumping it where I wouldn’t have to be constantly reminded of this encounter.

  When I think of him now, my snapping turtle, I remember his beseeching eye, wincing with each whack but recovering enough between blows to communicate this to me: You’re mine.

  4. The Pipe

  The observer’s choice of what he shall look for has an inescapable consequence for what he shall find.

  —JOHN ARCHIBALD WHEELER

  ONE SUMMER DAY in 1979, my father called me and asked if I could help him find the well that supplied the rusty old water spigot located in the middle of his studio garden. His studio had no interior plumbing and sat quite some distance from the well next to the main house. With no water pump in or around the studio, the water source for this isolated but still-working spigot had long been a family mystery.

  “It’s time we got to it, don’t you think?” my father said.

  “I’ll give it a whirl,” I told him, and the following weekend I showed up from New York City with my tools in hand: a plastic divining rod and a stainless steel pendulum attached to a bit of string.

  I was, at the time, a thirty-nine-year-old drunk. When I wasn’t working on a movie set, I could usually be found at my local bar on the Upper West Side, drinking Jack Daniel’s from a beer mug and sucking on Marlboros. Psychiatric literature would probably have it that I was medicating my pain. I prefer to think that I was agitating it. In any case, the pain I was either medicating or agitating was rooted in such profound self-ignorance that getting shit-faced just made things more interesting. At home, I smoked dope and rolled the I Ching coins nightly. I snorted large amounts of cocaine, managing to induce periodic nervous breakdowns, from which I would then recover—with the help of hatha yoga and homegrown alfalfa sprouts—so that I could resume the agitation again. The deeper I wandered into the alcoholic fog, the more convinced I became that I was about to encounter my true self. I pored over books on ESP, astrology, and pyramids. I became obsessed with alchemy and the idea of turning lead into gold. Which is how I began to practice the art of divination.

  My relationship to the truth was both tenuous and self-serving. I knew it even then, the way all drinkers do. I championed any evidence that supported the paranormal—that confirmed my own divinatory powers—and I ignored my many failures, as well as any evidence that suggested such stuff w
as pure bunk.

  I offer this confession as a disclaimer. Even after giving up booze, drugs, and cigarettes, I remain steadfastly unreliable as a scientist. I am not an impartial authority on divination. If you don’t already trust that a dowsing (divining) rod is a Y-shaped instrument that sometimes reacts with what feels like an otherworldly force, in response, say, to a search for water; or if you aren’t aware that the age-old practice of dowsing is still prevalent in rural and Native American communities, as well as in parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa; or if you simply cannot buy the idea that a pendulum, when suspended over a map, can be used to locate objects or minerals buried in the area the map depicts, then there’s just no helping it: I’m not the one to present the subject for your consideration. If something happens only once, that’s proof enough for me. If I am the only witness to it, that too will do. I’m a big fan of anomalies.

  That said, let me attest that before visiting my father that weekend, I’d been having some success with the dowsing rod. Though I missed at least 50 percent of the time, I’d been able, occasionally, to find things. Like the time my girlfriend lost an earring at my place and I detected its presence not in the jumble of bed sheets or in the creases of the sofa, but in the hallway, stuck to her woolen scarf, which she’d stuffed into the sleeve of her overcoat.

  Not impressed?

  How about the time I was sitting at a bar with a prop man, after a long day filming a commercial? The guy was telling me about his plans to purchase a certain building lot in Brewster, New York. I happened to be idly dangling my pendulum over the bar, when suddenly I felt a shift in the way it swung. “Don’t buy that land,” I warned. “There’s no water on it.” This prediction was confirmed a few months later by some unfortunate person who did purchase the land. I never had to pay for my drinks in the prop man’s presence again.

  Still not impressed?

  How about the time—six months after this story takes place—when I participated in a search for a young couple who were said to be one month behind schedule on their sailing honeymoon? Using a world map, a photograph of the couple, a sample of the woman’s handwriting, and a pendulum, I concluded (correctly, as it turned out) that their forty-foot sloop had gone down off the coast of Libya, and that the couple had died.

  I know. The practice of divination does not stand up to rigid examination; it is boneless, slippery stuff.

  …

  My father’s outdoor spigot would be my first field test with the pendulum—a device that can be used outdoors only on a windless day. We knew where the spigot was, and we knew water fed it from somewhere —a nice set of givens. If my dowsing efforts failed, I could always dig straight down from the spigot, then follow the feeder pipe out to the source. But that would be a messy, exhausting alternative.

  With my father standing nearby, I positioned myself at the spigot, dangled the pendulum out in front of me, and said to it, “Please point me in the direction of the water pipe.” The pendulum, after an erratic start, began to swing steadily on a north-south axis. Since the studio was located just north of the spigot—at my back—I began walking south, checking my path with the pendulum every ten feet or so, the way one might navigate with a compass in the woods. When I came to a stone retaining wall, I climbed it and continued on.

  Within minutes I was standing at the edge of the small pasture—an acre of fallow land that separated my family’s house from adjacent county land. Back in the 1940s, my younger sister had grazed her pony in that pasture. I’d dug foxholes there, imitating scenes my father had painted in Normandy, after the invasion. My pals and I had fired BB guns, shot arrows, and heaved sod hand grenades at one another out there in the center, where a clump of honeysuckle now grew. When I was a teenager, I’d mowed and raked that field with haying equipment borrowed from a neighboring farmer.

  “Remember that?” I asked my father. “Remember that beat-up old Allis-Chalmers tractor and the rusty old hay rake you had to sit on to operate it?”

  “I do,” said my father.

  “Who mows it now?” I asked.

  “Someone bush-hogs it,” he said.

  I looked toward the main house, the nineteenth-century, flat-roofed dwelling I’d grown up in. My mother stood at the kitchen window, watching us.

  “You know,” I said, “this seems an unlikely reach for a simple run of water pipe. But it is downhill from here to the spigot.”

  “Gravity fed, you think?” asked my father.

  I shrugged.

  It felt good to be talking with him like this. Our relationship had been strained for years, as long as I’d been drinking and using drugs. I deferred to the pendulum again: “Tell me, am I still on the path of the pipe?”

  The pendulum began a very distinct clockwise rotation (this means “yes” in pendulumese). I steadied its swing.

  “The answer is in the question,” I told my father, trying to give the process some dignity. I held out the pendulum again and asked: “Should I continue in this direction?”

  “Oh, yes!” said the pendulum.

  I took small steps now, trying to focus on the water pipe. My childhood memories of the pasture were interfering with my dowsing instincts. I fought a growing suspicion that something other than the water pipe was drawing me toward that clump of honeysuckle in the center of the pasture, a hundred feet away. Was this path a transparently emotional journey? Did I maybe just want to dig in the earth again, get down in it and hide, like a child playing soldier?

  I stopped, took a deep breath, told myself to focus on the project at hand. I did my best to silence metaphorical thought. The most successful dowsers, I’d learned, were simple folk, uncomplicated by personal agendas, ulterior motives, or financial gain.

  I began again, having convinced myself that I had nothing invested in this search—not the approval of my father, not some larger abstract meaning, not even an emotional lift. All I wanted was the simple truth: the source of water in my father’s garden. To get there, I told myself, I must locate the water pipe. My search might end right here, or in the next town over. I was open to any answer, without preconception.

  My father, who’d been standing at a respectful distance, struck a match on his jeans and lit his pipe. I could hear the tobacco sizzle as he sucked the flame toward it.

  “I have no preconceptions,” I said out loud.

  “Think pipe,” suggested my father.

  “Shhhh,” I said. “Every search begins in darkness. I have no preconceptions. I am looking for the water pipe, the water pipe, the water pipe, the water pipe . . .”

  This mantra worked for about fifteen more steps. Then I was interrupted by the thought of making a fool of myself in front of my parents. I’d carried this too far, and I was going to wind up at the honeysuckle—a middle-aged prodigal come home to slobber over his roots.

  I took a deep breath and started walking again. Abruptly I stopped. The pendulum had begun swinging wildly.

  “What?” asked my father.

  “Wouldn’t we have seen some evidence of a well out here, years ago?” I asked. I was stalling, though, to give myself time to think. I’d ceased walking because it had suddenly occurred to me that if water was symbolic of life, then I was out here in this pasture asking for the source of life—specifically for the source of the artist’s life. My hidden agenda, then, was not so much to revisit my childhood as it was to discover a way to begin again, to change the direction of my life. What will it take to begin again? My silent question had provoked the pendulum in a way I’d never felt before. I’d lost all control. Embarrassed, I cupped the device in my fist.

  My father took a few puffs, his brow furrowed in puzzlement. He was up for this, and I liked him for it.

  “Ask it,” he said, pointing at my closed fist.

  The sun was high and hot, the air as still as in a windowless room.

  I released the pendulum to dangle from its string.

  “Tell me,” I said, my mind struggling unsuccessfully to exclude my silen
t question, “am I still on the path of the pipe?”

  An immediate clockwise rotation.

  “Am I standing directly over the pipe?”

  “Yes.”

  “I mean, seriously, am I standing over the goddamn water pipe right now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” I said, “we’ll see about that.” I planted both feet on the spot, nodded to my father. He fetched the pickax and spade from the garden.

  While he watched, I dug. The earth was relatively soft, punctuated with small stones. It felt like heaven to be penetrating this ground. At a depth of about two feet, I began digging more gently, to protect the pipe from damage, should I hit it. The soil had changed in color from black to brown. The stones were bigger, harder to extract. I removed my T-shirt. My father seemed amused at my sweaty labor.

  “You laugh,” I said.

  At a depth of three feet, I took a breather and asked the pendulum: “Are you sure the water pipe is here?”

  “Quite sure,” came the answer. And again the silent question, unbidden, loomed large in my mind: What will it take to begin again? The pendulum swung so hard, it nearly flew from my fingers.

  “I’ll go down another foot,” I said, “to get below the frost line.”

  Then, just as I plunged the spade into the soil, I felt something softer and less resonant than rock. I lay down on my stomach, reached into the hole, and began scooping out loose earth with my bare hands. Working carefully, I exposed an inch or two of corroded water pipe. I could hardly believe it. When I began digging beneath it, it came loose from the dirt—not the imagined feeder pipe, leading from a well to the spigot. Not the logical conclusion to our search. Just a busted-off scrap of water pipe, about five inches long, with an elbow fitting at one end. An old-fashioned hunk of plumbing, attached to nothing at all, out in the middle of nowhere, with no explanation—or instructions—attached.