Tort World
Thirsty again, Taggard unscrewed the cap on his canteen and took another long swallow of the now warm water. Still, it tasted good. He poured some into his hand splashed it across the back of his neck. It was not even eleven o’clock and already the desert heat was stifling. His shirt and Padres baseball cap were soaked with sweat. His brown boots so covered in sand they were almost white. He screwed the cap back on his canteen and glanced up at the sun, hoping a cloud would appear to cover it up for a little while.
Not likely, he thought, continuing to trudge across the rocky desert.
Taggard was one of eight volunteers under Dr. Edward Milford, a biologist at the state university, who came to the White Dunes Habitat to search for and inventory desert tortoises. This was the second day of their search, and they still hadn’t spotted any.
“That’s not that unusual nowadays,” Dr. Milford told them before they set out that morning. “I’ve walked close to a week before I ‘ve seen one.”
“Welcome to ‘tort world’,” one of the more experienced volunteers teased.
As the population of desert tortoises has declined so significantly over the past couple of decades, Milford explained, concerned citizens began to track and inventory the reptiles to determine if they should receive endangered species status. The so-called “turtle counters” would walk long distances in search of tortoises that prove very difficult to see because they blend in so well with the bushes and rocks in the desert. They also spend much of their time tucked away in burrows to escape the heat in summer and the cold in winter and seldom travel more than six hundred feet a day when they are above ground.
“They move so slowly,” Dr. Milford noted, “that they can easily be mistaken for small boulders.”
As he trudged up a steep slope littered with actual boulders, Taggard felt as tired as he had all morning and was tempted to stop and sit down for a moment but he pressed on because he didn’t want to fall too far behind the other volunteers. He was thirty-four, younger than half the others, but he clearly lacked their endurance. He realized now he should have prepared better and gone on some long walks in his neighborhood before he signed on as a turtle counter. He doubted if he was much faster than any of the turtles he was hoping to see.
“How are you doing, Glenn?” Brodie, a veteran counter, asked as he waited for Taggard at the top of the slope.
“I’m a little winded but I’m all right.”
“We’ll probably be taking a protein break in a couple of minutes.”
Brodie pressed a hand on Taggard’s left shoulder which caused him to wince a little.
“Are you all right, Glenn?”
“My shoulder is just a little tender,” he said.
“Did you fall on it?”
Not wanting to tell him what really happened, he said, “I slipped on a patch of oil at a service station a while back and fell on it.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Just taking a little longer to get better than I thought.”
After the food break, Taggard again found himself lagging behind the others despite his effort. Clearly, he was the tortoise of the group. But then, a few minutes later, he caught up with another seasoned veteran, Marla, who was kneeling next to a creosote bush. He wondered if she was as tired as he was but then noticed a small hole in the ground beside her right knee.
“Did you find a tortoise?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered.
Quietly he stepped behind her as she removed from her belt bag a small cosmetic mirror and slipped it inside the hole. “Nope.”
“Nothing there?”
“Nothing,” she said, disappointed, as she put the mirror back in her bag.
“Bringing that mirror along, that’s pretty clever.”
She smiled. “An uncle of mine once said, ‘You’re as handy as a pocket on a shirt.'”
“I can see why.”
“Sooner or later, we’re bound to come across one,” she said, speaking to herself as much as to Taggard.
“I hope so,” he said, trying to keep up with her as she headed toward another slope.
That evening, seated around a campfire, the volunteers shared their disappointment about not finding a single tortoise so far.
“Really, folks, that’s not a surprise,” Dr. Milford assured them. I’ve walked this desert for days before I spotted one.”
“Is that because they’re underground so much of the time or because they are so well camouflaged?”
“Both are plausible reasons but I hate to say it: there’ s probably a more likely reason.”
“What’s that, doctor?”
“There are just not that many desert tortoises anymore. Once there were hundreds of them but that was quite long ago.”
“Are they an endangered”
“Well, they are definitely a threatened species that are well on their way to becoming endangered. They’re practically invisible above ground and people out driving in the desert often run over them. Some years back, it was common to see large numbers of crushed tortoises,” he said, staring at the flames of the fire. “And, as more and more people encroach on their habitat, they become susceptible to various bacterial infections that ravage them.”
Taggard, half listening to the biologist, scooted closer to the campfire. Before he came here, he was told that the desert could get cold at night but he didn’t realize how cold until tonight. He was concerned about his sore left shoulder and knew if it didn’t get warmer it would throb all night, just as it had all those days he spent in the hospital. He doubted he’d ever get any sleep.
2
Taggard celebrated Saint Patrick’s Day with some old high school friends at Cronin’s, a riverfront bar owned by another one of their classmates. This year it was his turn to serve as the designated driver for the group. As he left the bar to get his car, he heard a popping sound.
“What was that?” another patron asked as she started to enter the establishment.
“Sounds like fireworks.”
His car was parked on the opposite side of the street, just around the corner, and as he headed toward the crosswalk, a battered blue Toyota appeared alongside of him and, suddenly, he fell to the ground with the sound of more fireworks ringing in his ears. The moon was almost directly above him so bright it hurt his eyes.
“He’s been shot!” someone behind him shouted.
Who has? he wondered, as he struggled to get back on his feet.
“Stay down, mister,” someone else said. “An ambulance is coming.”
Taggard felt a searing pain in his left shoulder and realized he was the one who had been shot. He couldn’t believe it—not shot, not him. He must have had too much to drink tonight and blacked out, tripped on a crack in the sidewalk and fallen on his shoulder. That was what happened he was certain.
Late the following morning, Taggard awoke in a hospital room as bright as the moon last night. A nurse told him how fortunate he was that the bullet had passed through his shoulder without hitting any bones, blood vessels, or nerves.
“You don’t remember?”
“I don’t.”
She offered him water through a bent straw. “Your wound could have been much worse. Gunshot wounds cause extensive nerve and muscle damage that can be permanent at times. Dr. Wilhelm will be in to see you in a few minutes, and he can go over the extent of your injury. If you need anything, just buzz and I’ll be here in a jiffy.”
“Thank you,” Taggard said.
As he waited for the physician to arrive, he stared at his bandaged left shoulder. He couldn’t feel it at all because of all the painkillers he had received. Still, he found it hard to believe he had been shot, something like that didn’t happen to someone who taught fifth grade. Not in this town anyway.
A few minutes later, there was a knock on his door, and as he tried to rise in his bed, a lanky man in a sports jacket entered the room.
“Hello, doctor.”
“I’m not a doctor, Mr. Taggard,” he said removing a small spiral notebook from his jacket. “I’m Detective Strata out of the Eighth Precinct. If you’re up to it, I’d like to ask you a few questions about the shooting last night.”
“Of course.”
“Did you see who shot you?”
“I didn’t. All I remember is a blue car pulled up alongside of me and, before I knew it, I was on the ground.”
The detective wrote in his notebook.
“Did you see the license plate number?”
“No.”
“Do you have any enemies, Mr. Taggard?”
“I teach fifth grade so the only enemies I have are ten-year-olds who receive a bad grade on their report cards.”
Strata closed his notebook and put it back in his jacket.
“Any idea who shot me?”
Strata folded his arms. “If I had to guess I’d say it involved some kind of initiation.”
“I don’t understand.”
“New recruits to gangs often are required to demonstrate their loyalty and sometimes this is done by attacking someone who isn’t a member of the gang.”
“Something like this really happens here?”
“It does, I’m afraid, more often than you might think.”
“Let’s do some walking,” Ramona, his physical therapist, suggested after Taggard finished sliding his left forearm back and forth ten times.
Nodding, he stood against the wall of the therapy room and, with his elbow straight, used the fingers of his left hand to crawl up the wall as far as possible.
“Now hold your fingers there for twenty seconds,” she instructed him.
He did despite a nagging pain in his left shoulder.
“Relax,” she said, after she counted to twenty, and he did, letting his fingers drop to his side.
He met with Ramona who turned out to be sweet and understanding but as demanding as a drill instructor. Twice a week, for almost a month, he performed a series of exercises under her guidance. His shoulder was very sore at first, but, gradually, the pain dissipated, and his shoulder began to feel as strong as it had before he was shot.
At their final appointment, after complimenting him on how hard he had worked, Ramona urged him to continue to do the exercises she had taught him.
“You want to keep your shoulder flexible,” she said, “and not let it atrophy. Keep active, Glenn, not only with your shoulder but your entire body. Don’t think that because your shoulder is healed you don’t have to take care of it and can sit on a couch for hours at a time.”
“I know but I’ve never been a person who ever did much exercise of any kind.”
“You have to start now, if only to walk around a block a couple of times a day.”
As he started to leave the room, she stepped in front of him. “I have an idea you might consider doing.”
“What’s that?”
“Volunteer to count tortoises in the White Dunes Habitat.”
He grinned. “Are you putting me on?”
“I was a volunteer a year ago and it’d be good for you. Not only would it get you out of the city for a while but the walking would do wonders for your health.”
“I don’t know a thing about tortoises.”
“Neither did I but the folks in charge of the project will provide you with all the information you need.”
“I’ll think about it.”
3
His fourth morning in the desert began with Taggard popping a dime-sized blister on his big left toe. To be Ramona had said he’d be doing some walking as a volunteer but he had no idea the amount of walking involved. Not even as a kid had he ever walked as much in a day as he did as a volunteer turtle counter.
“Ready to saddle up?” Dr. Milford asked as he approached the clutch of volunteers after they were served coffee and croissants.
They nodded.
“Let’s get to it then.”
They headed out in different directions, with Taggard tagging beside Brodie, who was in his early fifties but had the stamina of someone half his age. It wasn’t too long before Brodie was several yards ahead of him, and though he tried to keep up with him, he realized it was impossible, so he relaxed and proceeded at his own slow but steady pace. He might well be the slowest of all the volunteers but he was determined not to quit. He had agreed to be out in the desert for a week and would fulfill his obligation however many blisters he got.
Half an hour later, as he walked around some shrubs, he saw Brodie not more than ten feet ahead of him on his knees beside a tall cactus plant.
“You find one?”
“Could be.” He pointed at some disturbed sand next to the cactus.
The hole was so small Taggard could not imagine a tortoise could fit inside it.
In another moment, Brodie slid back on his knees until he was flat on the ground then, with the palm of his right hand, he thumped the area near the entrance of the hole. Crouching directly over the entrance, Brodie whispered, “Anyone down there?”
For nearly a minute, nothing happened then there was a faint rustling sound and immediately Brodie reached into the hole and pulled out a tortoise that was about the size of a football. Its head was tucked inside its moss brown shell.
Taggard was excited. “You got it!”
Brodie set the tortoise on the ground so he could stick an identification number on its shell. “Years ago, when I first became a volunteer, you’d come across one every few minutes but now you’re lucky to see one in a day.”
“I suppose they don’t have a very long lifespan.”
“Actually, they do,” he said, rising from the ground. “Some can live as long as eighty years.”
Silently, the two volunteers resumed their hike across the desert, neither very confident they would see another tortoise. So, after close to two miles, they were surprised to see Marla kneeling on the ground beside a spindly Joshua tree
Immediately the two men walked over to her.
“You spot one, Marla?” Brodie asked, half a step ahead of Taggard.
She shook her head. “No, but I found something else.”
She leaned back from the tree to reveal a cluster of bleached bones on the ground.
Surprised, both men were silent as she placed the bones into her belt bag.
“Coyote?” Taggard asked.
“They’re much too large,” Brodie said. “They’re human remains.”
Marla nodded.
“The rest of them are probably scattered around here somewhere if we look hard enough.”
“I also found this,” she said, holding up a spent shotgun shell.
Brodie took it out of her hand and held it up in the sunlight.
Taggard stared at the shell. “What happened?”
“Nothing good. That’s for damn sure.”
Taggard wasn’t surprised that something bad could happen anywhere these days—even in the middle of a desert. Stepping back from the tree, he began to massage the scar on his left shoulder.
© T.R. Healy
T.R. Healy was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest and recent stories of have appeared in Freedom Fiction, Jimson Weed, and Polaris.
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