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fathered three fine children and two months ago he even had a poem published in
The Southern Review
.
    The reattachment, though, is an eternal testament to the quick reflexes and clear thinking of Eddie. I have no memory of these events and Shane was in no state to notice. It seems, however, that Eddie lunged over my inert mass to hoist Moe by the tail from the floor where Shane had dropped him, and where, Eddie said, he was eyeing the severed thumb hungrily. He dropped Moe over the side—surely the temptation was to fling him as far as possible—and smoothly shoved me toward the bow without upsetting the boat—all, again, in practically the same motion. In seconds his Led Zeppelin T-shirt was wrapped and knotted around Shane’s hand. The doctors commended him for this in particular—he saved Shane a lot of blood. Shane looked terrible anyway, though: his arm was red to the elbow, his chest and face were splattered, and the bottom of the boat was stamped with bloody boot prints. Shane thinks Eddie asked if he was all right—and surprisingly, he was, until the pain hit a few seconds later and he began to yowl. Eddie rowed for shore and I woke up, asking what had happened. When he told me, shouting over Shane, I nearly fainted again. We beached and helped Shane out; Eddie went back for the thumb. I wouldn’t have thought ofthat. He wrapped it in my T-shirt. Shirts off, I am sure we looked like a couple of vain hayseeds who had an accident with a knife or a gun after too much beer. The difference was Eddie. We made it to the truck as quickly as we could and Eddie drove like hell: if there is any native advantage to being a Hoosier it is in the ability to drive on bad terrain at unsafe speeds and through town at greater speeds and in violation of every known traffic law yet arrive safely in one piece. Or in Shane’s case, two.
    We were in the papers the next day, along with a few precautionary words about snapping turtles. Moe, it seemed, was an alligator snapper, larger and less aggressive than the common snapper, and rarely found this far north. The alligator snapping turtle takes its name, incidentally, from a habit of eating baby and juvenile alligators, though Moe was probably not big enough for that yet.
    Obviously, we saw Eddie now and then after that—in the hallways at school, and later at bars and pool halls and so on. Shane tried to hang out with him once or twice just to say thanks, but really, we never talked to him again. Shane described one afternoon he spent with him: all “heavy metal, handguns, and dirty magazines.” For all I know he was talking about the church group. He could have been describing half the bedrooms in Evansville. Either way Shane couldn’t go back.
    Shane still won’t hear a word against him, though. When Fast Eddie’s ran an Ass Wednesday contest before Lent Shane’s dad was very upset. This was twenty years on and 150 miles away. Shane said his old man just didn’t get it. I think they didn’t talk for a couple of days.
    Then again, Shane won’t even hear a word against Moe. It’s not as though the turtle is actively prejudiced, acting outof malevolence, he says. That’s because he’s a turtle, I say. We speak of him in the present tense in deference to the longevity of his kind. In truth that twine must have snagged on something long ago and left him drowning, baffled. I picture him sinking into the mud and even in death accumulating an impenetrable disguise.

III

Box County
    Uncle Dart and Aunt Loretta didn’t just come from Texas, they brought it with them. Dart would have put longhorns on the Cadillac if Loretta had let him. He smoked Lone Star cigarettes, and he had nineteen Stetsons that Loretta used to hide “to learn him they need to stay in one place.” He was sixty-two but still lean and swaggering. Loretta was the same age but her hair had gone white before she reached thirty. She always stayed the same after that, just got a little more wiry each year.