This was the wallowed-out year I kept working at the fish lab nights after high school; a zookeeper pretending to be a scientist : feed the writhing carp, get out the dead ones, measure, weigh them, get rid of them somehow. It was suggested I walk out and throw them into the woods and let the possums eat ‘em. That was part of the problem : cartilage instead of bone, no Americans knew how, or even wanted to, eat them. Too hard to cook, they propagated from Asia and were polluting their way up the Mississippi, like fluttering aluminum trash in the circular night of the holding tanks.
My supervisor deserved better than me and deserved better than to work there and didn’t know it, a big wild-eyed, animated guy, who would do snake-handling shows (purely secular) for the kids at science camp every year - He was a shambler, a shambler with vigor, beard alternating length with the seasons, piping maxims like “Dark chocolate M&Ms? Good - AND good for you!” I don’t know how he got all the snakes, he ran an animal shelter in Clinton and I suspect that had something to do with it, but I can’t exactly envision Janet in her SUV showing up with a poor little garter she found in the garage. But they all came from somewhere, and he collected other critters, and put them up in the laboratory somewhat extralegally on the side.
To this day the thought of a pillowcase writhing around, unbidden & internally serpentine, makes my skin crawl similarly.
In any case he took good care of me and I was therefore charged with bumming around a low-maintenance greenhouse with tubs full of algal muck and snails and one of his rescues in a low flat terrarium with a long-necked turtle missing an eye, The Major. I saw a lot of stuff in that eye. He had a way of cocking his head up and swinging his neck so in an “S” that was very attitudinal and judgmental, for a turtle, offset by his wound received in a failed traffic crossing giving him an honorable air, looking at me very expectantly for the next round of fish pellets, but also somehow indicating that it was not only an order but the just the right thing to do. Thus the name I gave him. I a regiment of one in a platoon of one. Morale & manpower both being low in the greenhouse necessitated The Major being my equal. In other times he would have been glorious, spiritually commanding my charge off a bluff as the Yanks came down the river to try their foolishness again. In other times I blasted a hole in another damn ironclad and went home to tell the starving kids about it, trying and failing to demonstrate the size of cannon shot that had made an impact, smoke streaming out of the barrel and joining a cloud to make an oblong shape with a neck and pointed head. The curve of his neck matched the S in the river that would be an oxbow but didn’t know it yet. His good eye the low sun and the bad one the crack in the roof of the shack.
In the current time I stayed late when I didn’t want to go home and put up my feet and read books in the greenhouse til it was inexcusable with the fluorescent lights on so long. Another guy came out and was rumored to do naked taxidermy on the weekends. Greenhouse constancy was what drew me & kept me there, always muggy and almost eye-suckingly green, the noise of the fans and bubbling of aerators, filters, the silence of underwater snails.
Out in the parking lot after a rotted board of a day I crawled out to the edge of the world and looked down to say hello to The Major, head cocked up with his good eye on watch, void eye matching void, meeting his maker. He kept the disc of the earth spinning like a circus performer on a tiny spindle of a cross, plate smooth and polished all twirling like a top. You could only catch sight of it in the empty concrete tanks they kept out front that gave mosquitoes all the real estate they needed to eat you alive. When you slap a mosquito off your skin and you see your own blood you’re reminded of the both of you being born.
There was a chill outside but the greenhouse kept us safe. My shaggy boss left a while ago to play Santa as a volunteer - my key had a green rubber cap on it to keep track. “Merry Christmas, Mr. Major,” and gave him a few extra pellets.