1.
In Tortoise Town, Elmer Fudd scrambled away from his lettuce and pushed up against the cyclone fence enclosing his habitat. The zoo-keeper unlatched the gate into Tortoise Town and a few older people with small children entered. The visitors approached the tortoises and rapped on their shells. Although it was forbidden, a couple of kids gingerly stroked the rear feet of the tortoises. According to the Rules of Tortoise Town, posted on a bulletin board next to the gate, visitors could pet the tortoises on their shells, but not touch their legs or feet or heads. Heads were out of the question, in any event, because the animals kept them retracted into their shells. Although the tortoises were said to be friendly, all had withdrawn as far as possible from the gate and the visitors entering there, sheltering against the cyclone fence or hutch walls. Children’s voices babbled and adults admonished them, uttering warnings and commands, and, in the distance, the calliope at the circus-animal carousel on the high ground chirped and bubbled. Elmer Fudd and his fellow prisoners were silent.
Jeremy Delacroix, a zoo volunteer, pushed his wheelbarrow through the access gate. He was equipped with a shovel and a rake. The five tortoises in the habitat didn’t all eat at the same time and, indeed, sometimes the big creatures wouldn’t graze at their carrots and lettuce for days at a time. Jeremy swept up the uneaten fodder with the black and moss-green splatter of tortoise droppings. The animals waddled into the corners of the caged enclosure when visitors were admitted to Tortoise Town. They pressed themselves against the chain-link fence with their tails to the gate. One of them, old Aldebran, hid under a big plywood panel stacked at an angle against one of the hutches. The others rested in a row against the fence, surveying the grove of evergreens that ran along the fence-line. The tortoises were green and grey with elegantly armored shells and their feet bristled with crooked amber-colored spurs. The sun glistened on the carapaces of the turtles, marking them with salmon-colored highlights, and the animals looked like flattened boulders polished for centuries in the river flowing nearby, beyond the palisade of evergreens.
When Jeremy had finished cleaning up after the tortoises, he pushed the wheelbarrow to the side of the gate, removed a folding metal chair from the shed, and sat across from the animals huddling against the fence. In the old days, he used to smoke a cigarette as he admired the turtles, but this was prohibited by Chahinkapa Zoo’s present rules. When children reached around the front of animals’ shells to touch their ancient beaked heads, or when they were too aggressive about kneading the turtles’ legs and feet, Jeremy politely told them to be more careful about petting the animals. He used a soft voice and children always obeyed him. Adults were usual;y more aggressive and rude, more self-assured about violating the rules. Jeremy thought that someone should be assigned the task of watching over the turtles at all times. The people who seriously molested the turtles always came at night, scaling the fences or cutting through them after dark, and, someone had carved initials and a date into old Aldebran’s carapace – a drunken kid, Mr. Delacroix imagined, but, nonetheless, a cruel thing because tortoises have nerves in their shells and can feel when they are being touched on their hard jigsaw carapaces.
When he was a young man, sentenced to work as a zoo-volunteer due to some misdemeanors he had committed, the keeper showed him how to feed the tortoises and clean up their droppings and maintain the enclosure spic-and-span. The previous keeper responsible for Tortoise Town was an old drunk and he smelled like kerosene and chain-smoked so much and so negligently that Jeremy was afraid that the man would set himself on fire. The tortoises knew his voice and, when he spread carrots and lettuce with chick-peas and raw bran, the beasts came to him and would sometimes take the food from his outstretched hand. Jeremy remembered that the old keeper, dead now for twenty years, had told him that the shell doesn’t enclose the turtle, but, rather the turtle is its shell and inhabits that hard carapace and that the animal senses the world through those interlocked, armorial plates just as readily as you might feel the sun on your forearms or a mosquito biting you on bare leg or cheek.
The shadows were lengthening. A young man and woman in zoo uniform bumped along the pedestrian paths in a golf cart. Chahinkapa Zoo was closing. The last patron, an elderly man with a couple of great-grandchildren in hand departed through the gate opening into Tortoise Town. Mr. Delacroix stood up and whistled to the tortoises that it was all clear. The importunate visitors were gone. The tortoises slowly backed away from the cyclone fence and the row of evergreens and, approaching Mr. Delacroix, nudged their snouts against his calves. Old Aldebran waddled out from under the plywood lean-to against the shed and came toward Jeremy.
Jeremy Delacroix looked around to see if anyone was watching. Then, he sat down on the dome of Old Aldebran’s disfigured shell. The world is a kind of turtle swimming in the celestial sea. Pillars of tortoises are the foundation of the earth. Mr. Delacroix felt that he was seated on a kind of round, sturdy throne at the center of the universe.
After a few minutes, he got up, pushed the wheelbarrow through the gate, and, then, latched shut the entrance to Tortoise Town.
2.
“Chahinkapa” is Lakota for “confluence of waters”. The word originally designated a Sioux village and, then, a pioneer town built on the level sod terrace above the place where the Otter Tail and Bois des Sioux rivers flow into one another. This territory is dry for most of the year and the rivers flow as placid, muddy streams in shallow beds shaded by old, ragged cottonwoods. The trees are frayed because each Spring the rivers flood with run-off from melting snow and April and May rains. Similarly, the meadows around the meeting of the waters are cluttered with driftwood and mostly barren. It was easy for the settlers to build their town at the junction of the rivers because tall timber didn’t have to be cleared from the plat. But, as the pioneers discovered to their grief, their townsite was under water for three months of the year and the village had to be moved several times to higher ground. The Sioux didn’t have this problem – their encampment was portable.
After the town was established on relatively dry terrain, the confluence of the rivers was a half-mile away and so the village was renamed Traverse des Sioux for the ford a mile to the north – a broad place in the stream-bed with a stony bottom marked with a couple of red boulders with circles and zigzags pecked into the rock. At this point, the two rivers had become one and the result was the Red River of the North. As its name implies, this river flows north as the border between the states and, ultimately, disgorges into Hudson Bay in the Arctic tundra. An iron bridge was built over the ford to the companion village on the Minnesota side of the river. Later, when the two states partnered to replace the old bridge with a modern span supporting concrete decking, the incised boulders were hauled away and, apparently, crushed into ballast rock for road construction. You can see a half-dozen photographs of the pictographs on the rocks in a small museum in Traverse des Sioux. For a few years, members of the local Sons of Norway claimed that the patterns chipped into the boulders were Viking runes, but this theory was advanced only half-heartedly and, after some consultation with the State Historical Society, abandoned.
The Great Northern maintained stations on both sides of the river, wooden sheds and masonry platforms connected by a trestle over the Red River of the North. The town didn’t exactly flourish but it grew slowly and by the mid-fifties in the Twentieth Century, there were round steel grain elevators forming a parapet along the railroad tracks, five large brick churches, many taverns and cafes, and an enormous sugar beet refinery with towers and two brick smokestacks rising twice the height of Traverse des Sioux’s Lutheran and Catholic steeples.
The soils in the Red River’s flood plains, expanses of flat land stretching to the horizons, were alluvial and very rich. People compared the terrain to the Nile valley in Egypt and said that the land’s fertility was a gift bestowed by the rivers. The owner of the sugar beet factory, Hans Hanson, the son of Norwegian immigrants, named his enterprise Memphis Sugars after the city in Egypt and he was so wealthy and powerful that people called him the Pharaoh of the North. Hanson had been on safari in Africa and he imported several old lions, a Cape Buffalo (“the most feared animal on the Dark Continent”), a rhinoceros, and several ostriches for a private menagerie that he maintained on an oxbow-island between two channels of the Red River. The Pharaoh of the North called the private zoo Chahinkapa and allowed groups of school children to visit his animals on the island.
After a few years, the Pharaoh’s menagerie included a tiger, some eagles with ruined wings, a sickly-looking grizzly bear, and Old Aldebran, the tortoise, with a harem of three females named Liz, Priscilla, and Annie Mae after the sugar beet baron’s three ex-wives. After the Pharaoh’s first heart attack, he offered to deed the menagerie on the island to the City if Traverse des Sioux would agree to build and maintain a bridge replacing the ramshackle wooden span that Hanson had built. The City took over operation of the zoo and charged visitors a dollar apiece to visit. The new bridge was duly constructed and the City acquired from Pharaoh Hanson a quarter-section on the west bank of the Red River across from the menagerie where a golf course was built along with a spacious park with some picnic shelters and a band-shell.
The zoo expanded and acquired additional animals: a family of spider monkeys, an orangutang, and several zebras. The Pittsburgh zoo sponsored a snow leopard breeding program and the City purchased an old female no longer useful for that program. Cages were small and the island was cramped with narrow sidewalks between bell-shaped iron cages. Some of the visitors thought conditions inhumane and an architect was commissioned to plan a more spacious facility on the west bank of the river. Transfer to the new premises was accelerated by a great flood that swamped the zoo-island, drowned several animals, and swept away kiosks and sheds and, even, some of the iron grillwork confining the beasts. The habitats were enclosed by temporary cyclone fences while new concrete barns were built on the terrace above the river. The renovation of Chahinkapa Zoo on the North Dakota banks of the river was complicated by the construction of a carousel in a big octagonal pavilion on higher ground at the edge of the menagerie. The Pharaoh’s daughter, Emily, died unexpectedly and the Sugar Beet baron recaptured some of his property granted long ago to the City to build the carousel in her memory. As it happened, a carousel with wooden circus animals on a boardwalk in New Jersey had been badly damaged in a hurricane. The Pharaoh’s agents bid on the animals and some of the running gear and was able to purchase the ruined components of the merry-go-round for the cost of salvage. The Traverse des Sioux Lions Club raised funds for restoration of some of the animals: volunteers cleaned the wooden beasts, scraped off the paint, mended cracks and broken parts, and, then, re-painted the animals. Some of the mounts couldn’t be salvaged and, so, several new ones were carved and painted: a chariot with Viking warriors in bas relief on its sides, a tilted toboggan, and a big wooden tortoise wearing an elaborate Spanish saddle. As it turned out, there was not enough money in all the world to create the commemorative carousel that the Sugar Pharaoh desired for his dear, dead daughter and restoration work stalled, and, before the project was complete, the old man died. At first, it was thought that the carousel would have to be abandoned but the City Council said that they had come too far to fail now with respect to this work and, so, more donors were found and local children sold chocolate candy-bars to raise money and wealthy families were given naming rights for some of the circus animals and, finally, a world famous drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinic (Emily had succumbed to an overdose) agreed to underwrite the purchase of a Wurlitzer organ from an amusement park near Cleveland to serenade riders as well as additional mechanical equipment necessary to turn the merry-go-round on its iron axis. Because the climate is cold, a utilitarian metal shed was built around the carousel and, at last, the ride was opened to the public with great fanfare – several drum and bugle corps performed and the symphony orchestra from Fargo appeared to play rousing versions of John Philip Sousa marches and there were fireworks that terrified the beasts in the zoo crouching in their cages below the carousel on the hill. An entire wall in the octagonal shed was lined with brass plates identifying donors to the merry-go-round project and there were two large photographs displayed next to the admission kiosk showing Emily. In one of the pictures, Emily is a small blonde child and she is shown riding a unicorn on a carousel, apparently, the inspiration for the project. In the second portrait, Emily is now a beautiful young girl, vibrant with promise, still blonde and smiling to display her white and orthodontically perfect teeth.
After the great flood that drowned the zoo island, a shell of grassy embankments was built around Traverse des Sioux and big diversion canals with sod-covered sides were trenched into the river banks. These flood-control dikes and moats enclosed the zoo and the carousel and the golf course as well as the innards of the city, the main street with its bars and dry-goods shops, the small office buildings with lawyers offices and insurance agencies and realtors’ businesses, the court house square and the churches and the Indian School on its old wooded campus next to the more modern community college. The city was protected by its carapace of dams and canals from the confluence of the rivers around which the town had been built and, because of the height of the embankments, citizens could live in Traverse des Sioux for fifteen years without ever seeing the two streams that joined to make one river unless they strolled along the top of a dike or drove over the bridge at the state line and, then, when people glimpsed the river, just a brown thread of water flowing between turf banks, they wondered what all the fuss was about, why these parapets and canal trenches were necessary to defend the village from this trickle. But make no mistake about it: the Red River is one of those rare waterways that flows north from relatively temperate climes into the icy fogs and blizzards of the Arctic and, when the snow is deep and, then, melts off to form great torrents feeding into the river, and when there are thunderstorms lavish with rains that sweep over the prairie still locked in frost, and, when it is early Spring, and ice st dams the river in Canada and its channels there are all frozen, then, the water is impounded and spills across the country and, as far as the eye can see, there is nothing but a vast lake, staked here and there by telephone poles or high voltage towers and the roads that are not drowned run atop causeways over the flat, flooded land.
3.
Mr. Delacroix got into some trouble when he was young. With a couple of buddies, he stole a car and, while joy-riding, smashed up some parked cars downtown. The police gave chase and there was another wreck: the cops nudged the stolen vehicle off the road and it rolled into a corn field. The drive was killed and Delacroix limped into the tall corn with a fractured ankle. The corn was tall and spooky in the moonlight and the field had just been fogged with some kind of herbicide that burned his eyes and made him weep uncontrollably. Big insects flared up against his face and bare chest (he had tied his tee-shirt around his broken ankle) and mosquitos swarmed him. The police sprayed the field with raking beams of light but knew from their own experience that it was profoundly unpleasant inside the corn and they weren’t about to thrash around in those spears and lances of vegetation. The cops waited for back-up with a police dog and, when the canine was unleashed, Delacroix heard the German Shepherd barking and snuffling and growling and, then, the dog, as big as a wolf, lunged out of the stalks of corn and took hold of his broken ankle so that he screamed and, then, tore free, hopping on one foot, then falling, then, hopping and hopping and hopping until the cops surrounded him with their clubs and fists, knocking him down next to the overturned car and the blanket-draped corpse of his buddy. As he was handcuffed, the big dog stood next to him, wagging its tail. Mr. Delacroix could have been charged with felony murder because the driver of the car had been killed in the crash, but he was pretty young, just a year out of high school, and so the Judge thought that leniency was the better course and sentenced him to 3 years in prison.
Mr. Delacroix served his time without incident and, in fact, learned a trade in the penitentiary. He was released with a Class Two Boiler Operator License and found a job as a janitor at the Indian School. There was a senior maintenance man, also with boiler license, and Mr. Delacroix was told that, when the old man retired, he would be entrusted with the inspection and repair duties that his boss performed. But the old man needed the money from his wages and, despite health problems, he didn’t retire and, then, the Indian School received federal funds to revamp its physical plant so that the archaic boiler was replaced with an electrical base-board heating system. Mr. Delacroix didn’t like the janitorial work at the Indian School. The inmates were unruly and they vandalized the place, breaking out windows and plugging up toilets with sheets and towels and, although Delacroix didn’t know that he blamed them, he was fed up with cleaning up after their sabotage. After working about ten years at the Indian School, Delacroix found another job driving truck for the sugar beet operation. But he lost that position when he was convicted of drunk driving. (After this conviction, Mr. Delacroix worked off his sentence, laboring for a few months at the zoo where he cleaned the Tortoise Town habitat.) The boss at the sugar beet plant liked him and he was hired to help unloading the beets that sometimes were frozen together, hanging like big shaggy grapes, from the bed of the trucks. It was winter work, outdoors under the flare of steam rising from the boiling molasses vats, the air so thick with vapor that his glasses were fogged with a sticky sugar-syrup residue. One afternoon in February, Mr. Delacroix was working with a hoe to hack clumps of sugar beets from an inclined truck bed, when, suddenly, hydraulics on the dump failed and the iron box dropped like a bomb so that he was hurled up in the air by the impact. Mr. Delacroix landed on his back and broke several vertebral bodies and, in fact, was paralyzed for six weeks and had to re-learn how to walk. To stabilize his shattered spine, Delacroix was put in the hard shell of a plaster body-cast and had to wear that carapace around his ribs and belly for almost eight months.
The spinal injury was painful and Mr. Delacroix was prescribed opiates. In those days, doctors thought that the more opiate painkillers, the better. This regimen lasted for several years and resulted in him becoming addicted to oxycodone and its variants. Then, the medical profession decided that oxycodone addiction was as bad, or worse, than the pain it was intended to control and, so, Mr. Delacroix’s doctors first reduced his opiate dosage and, then, cut him off entirely. Fortunately, by this time, Mr. Delacroix had other sources for his heroin and, so, he continued using and, in fact, supplemented his income by dealing drugs to others who were similarly situated. No one cared much so long as the junkies sold drugs to other junkies and the whole enterprise was pretty much below the radar. But, then, Mr. Delacroix, or, perhaps, someone like him, sold some fentanyl, a new product on the market, to some addicts with family connections, and, when the inevitable fatal overdoses occurred, the drug task force intervened and shut down the business. (One of Mr. Delacroix’s regular customers was an attractive blonde girl who was always either in and out of rehab programs. Addicts are most prone to overdose when they have just completed rehab and, therefore, lost their tolerance and, when the blonde girl decided to have one last binge after her release from the program and before embarking on her new “clean and sober” life, she miscalculated the dose, mixed her Fentanyl cocktail with Seconal, and ended up in a coma from which she could not be revived.) Mr. Delacroix was arrested and the cops beat him up, but they couldn’t prove anything except that he was just a poor junky himself and, so, he was released from lock-up, compelled to attend Narcotics Anonymous classes, and, in fact, managed to get clean.
The bosses at the zoo knew Mr. Delacroix and believed that he was a reliable worker and, so, he was hired full-time as a veterinarian’s assistant. The zookeeper primarily responsible for Tortoise Town went moonlight swimming in the Red River a few weeks after flood-stage, an activity that is strongly discouraged, and he cramped-up and drowned. So Mr. Delacroix, by default, was assigned to managing the tortoises. Behind his back, people said that it was an excellent appointment for the middle-aged man because he was slow-moving himself, silent, with beady dark eyes and a flat face with a little beak over his jaws. Sometimes, he had to wear a stiff corset because of instability in his back and he grunted a little when he walked. The other workers at the zoo said that Mr. Delacroix was half-tortoise himself, kin to the creatures for whom he cared.
4.
Mr. Delacroix was serving time when Traverse des Sioux flooded. The Winter had been snowy and, then, the thaw was sudden so that five- and six-foot drifts melted into water overnight. A gentle rain carved the ice into puddles and the rivers all overran their banks. These things happened on the outside, the real world where events occur and there is weather and the inmates weren’t aware of the catastrophe until buses came to take them as chain-gangs to the sandbag embankments. Mr. Delacroix wasn’t conscripted to work at Traverse des Sioux, but, rather, at the city to the north of his hometown. The river shot through a sluice between dikes like a railroad locomotive, held within walls of soggy sandbags, and the inmates labored with shovels to put sand in the burlap sacks, not filling them because that would make the bags too heavy, but slipping in exactly five shovel-fulls, then, clipping off the sacks, and dragging them by wheelbarrow over slippery planks in the mud to the embankment. It was hard work and, as far as Mr. Delacroix was concerned, Traverse des Sioux had done him wrong and it could drown for all he cared.
Both the Otter Tail and Bois des Sioux were high, well-above flood-stage, and the current, beyond the confluence, was swift and destructive. The river ripped away parts of the island on which the zoo was, then, located and the cyclone fencing was undercut and slumped into the water. It was obvious that the river was going to be submerged in the flood and, so, the zoo-keepers with volunteers worked frantically to evacuate the animals. The lions were enraged by the torrent roaring past their cage and they clawed at the bars and pranced in swift, desperate circles around the pen. Lured to the open cage-gate with bloody chunks of beef, the zookeepers shot one of the lions with a tranquilizing dart. The beast fell over on her side and, then, a young man studying veterinary science at the University, injected the animal with more medication to keep the lioness unconscious as she was hauled from the island. The male lion, panicked by the hissing flood waters, lunged at the vet and zookeepers and, then, jumped over them, running wild on the island. The other volunteers, terrified by the animal, jumped into the pick-up trucks that were being loaded with the anesthetized grizzly bear, an old wolf, and some of the monkeys. The lion made a circuit of island, found the wooden bridge leading to town, and raced over that causeway, vanishing into the drizzle and lagoons. The volunteer vet student had miscalculated the dose of tranquilizer in his syringe, apparently not taking into account the medication in the dart fired into the flank of the lioness, and the animal died later from an overdose.
A National Guard High-Water vehicle plowed through the water flooding the river-side road and, then, cautiously crossed the frail-looking bridge leading onto the island. The tactical vehicle had huge wheels and it was very heavy and the driver wasn’t sure that the bridge would support its weight. The zookeeper and some volunteers brought some sheep from the petting barn and four goats to the High-Water vehicle. Then, a couple of workers put a collar on the old orangutang and led him to the rescue truck. The orangutang looked weary and his eyes were watery as if he had been weeping and, sometimes, he spit and showed his long yellow teeth. But the beast was philosophical about the flood and sat stoically in the corner of the High-Water vehicle’s cargo bed as the driver maneuvered the truck to the bridge. The river was full of floating bergs of ice and some of them had smashed into the bridge supports like piledrivers and the guard rail on the downstream side of the span had been flexed loose and was trailing down into the current. The driver started over the bridge and, as some of the supports below collapsed, he gunned the engine and skidded across into the mud on the other side of the stream.
“We have to go back and pick up the turtles,” the zookeeper said as he met the High-Water vehicle near some canvas tents set up on higher ground overlooking the torrent.
“The bridge won’t hold,” the National Guard soldier said. “The LMVT weighs almost 30,000 pounds and the ice is undermining the structure.”
“But what about the turtles?” the zookeeper said.
“You’ll have to go across by foot and herd them over to the other side.”
“You can’t make them go anywhere they don’t want to go,” the zookeeper said. “They’re stubborn.”
The sheep and the goats in the back of the truck were bleating. The old orangutang was shuddering with cold. Sometimes, he lifted his huge black hands and covered his eyes.
A couple volunteers were dragging two wheelbarrows over the bridge. In one of them, there was a crippled peregrine falcon and a soggy bald eagle. In the other, a pair of spider monkeys, knocked-out by the veterinary student, were lying on top of one another like rag dolls.
After the volunteers with the wheelbarrows crossed the bridge, a soldier was sent on foot to make sure that there were no other people on the island. Some of the kiosks and cages were already flooded in black hip-deep water. The people at the canvas tents heard the soldier shouting to see if anyone remained on the island. His high tenor voice rang out over the idling engines and the rushing sound of the waters. He hustled back across the bridge and, then, a great wedge of floating ice slammed into one of the pylons and the span tilted sideways, caught the river in its embrace, and, then, tore free.
“What about the turtles?” the zookeeper said.
“They’re turtles,” the National Guard commander said. “They’ll have to swim to safety.”
“No, no,” the zookeeper said. “They’re desert tortoises. They don’t know anything about water. They can’t swim.”
The National Guard commander knew that a hospital was flooded to the extent that its power-generator in its basement was underwater and had failed. There were two nursing homes, one of them called “River View,” huddled behind soggy leaking piles of sand bags.
“There’s nothing I can do,” the National Guard commander repeated. “They will have to swim to safety.”
The zookeeper turned away and walked out of the tent toward the troops that were removing the animals from the High-Water vehicle. Someone had put a raincoat over the old orangutang and, as people walked by, the animal extended his hand as if he wanted to shake with them.
5.
Chahinkapa island was under water for several days. When the flood waters receded a little, the island re-emerged from the river. All of the cages and sheds and barns were gone. The island was a bare knob in the river covered with a foot of brown-grey river ooze.
Of course, the tortoises were nowhere to be seen. Liz, Priscilla, and AnnieMae as well as their mate, Old Aldebran, were missing and presumed drowned. The three female tortoises were never recovered. But, about four weeks after the great flood, a worker at the Sugar Beet refinery found Aldebran in the corner of a shed next to the molasses vats. There was an slime of syrup puddled on the shed’s floor and the big tortoise was near the spill, presumably lapping up the molasses. Someone had carved a swastika into Old Aldebran’s shell, gouging out the new mark next to the old initials and dates cut into the creature’s carapace.
The zookeeper with a couple workers came to the shed with a bag of romaine lettuce. It’s not easy to move a 300 pound tortoise. They measured the animal and, then, bought some two-by-fours and plywood to construct a box to Old Aldebran’s dimensions. The box was big enough for the tortoise to move his feet, but otherwise fit snugly around the animal. While the wooden box was being constructed, the tortoise remained in the shed at the sugar beet plant. On their breaks, workers crowded around the tortoise in the shed and some of them fed him lit cigarettes. The zoo workers returned to the plant, lured the tortoise into the box with lettuce, and, then, drove him to the river-bank overlooking the ravaged island. A new zoo was under construction and the surviving animals were confined in small chicken-wire cages.
After a few months, cages for the larger animals with concrete floors and iron bars had been built. The orangutang had a metal tree in his habitat and he hung from its heights for hours as if trying to keep his feet dry. The last exhibit constructed was Tortoise Town. Giant tortoises aren’t rare. At that time, just about every arboretum and ornamental garden in the country had a couple of peacocks and a giant tortoise. Three females were acquired to replace the turtles named after the Pharaoh’s ex-wives – the zookeepers called the replacements Saturn, Neptune and Pluto. Elmer Fudd had been patrolling a mom and pop brewery garden in St. Louis for a decade or so, but the place was acquired by a conglomerate, and, so, a new home had to be found for the tortoise. The Chahinkapa Zoo bought him for Tortoise Town, a popular attraction and cheap to maintain, since giant tortoises don’t require much in the way of care and fodder.
The old Zookeeper retired a couple years after the flood. A graduate student, interning at the zoo, researched the history of the place for its 50th-year anniversary. She discovered that Aldebran was, indeed, very old. According to records maintained by Pharaoh Hanson, the tortoise had been purchased from a small menagerie formerly maintained in the gardens around the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs. Newspaper reports in the historical society in Denver established that the tortoise had once been an exhibit in P. T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan and Hippodrome. Barnum promoted the tortoise as already ancient when he acquired the beast. According to his pitch, the tortoise had been hatched in Philadelphia around the time of the Revolutionary War and there were said to be accounts of George Washington straddling the turtle when the Continental Congress convened. Barnum commissioned a lithograph of this scene, the great man perched incongruously on Old Aldebran’s steeply domed shell. “Aldebran is as old as our noble Constitution,” the showman proclaimed on advertising circulars. But P. T. Barnum was known to be unreliable and a notorious liar.
7.
When the next flood occurred, fifteen years later, Mr. Delacroix was working at Chahinkapa Zoo. At first, everyone said that it was a good thing that the zoo was no longer on the island because as the snow melted and, then, torrential rains scoured the land, the dunes in the river where the islet had once been located vanished immediately under the waters. Squalls and gales of rain continued unabated and the ground was frozen so the water wasn’t absorbed but drained into the rivers and, then, the Bois des Sioux gnawed through its levee and a brown-green bore of icy water advanced down Main Street pouring into the taverns and law offices and insurance agencies. The Otter Tail River also jumped its banks and turned the residential neighborhood behind its embankments into a lagoon. Because of the dikes, the water was impounded in the neighborhood and the National Guard had to make rescues using motorized pontoon boats. The Law Enforcement Center flooded and the prisoners in the County lock-up had to be released, although most of them were already working to fill sandbags and maintain the dikes protecting the Court House.
Ponds of water as big as lakes isolated the Zoo. The rain kept falling and the lagoons were white and tremulous with the downpour. Again, National Guard High-Water vehicles surged through the water, great frothy fountains churned up by their big tires, and the larger mammals were knocked-out with tranquilizers and loaded onto flatbed trailers brought onto zoo grounds for exactly this contingency and, then, evacuated to higher ground. The sidewalks in the zoo were canals streaming with muddy water two or three feet deep and the empty cages on their concrete pedestals stood as islands in the deserted park.
Mr. Delacroix met some National Guardsmen next to the gate into Tortoise Town. The river had come through the colonnade of evergreens along the edge of the habitat and the concrete pads were underwater. The plywood panel leaned against the shed where Old Aldebran sheltered when visitors entered the caged enclosure was afloat and a mess of lettuce and chopped carrots borne by the flood turned in a slow, dismal vortex above one of the drains on the site.
“We have to move the tortoises to high ground,” Mr. Delacroix said to the troopers.
“Why? They’re turtles,” the commanding officer said. “They can just swim here in this water.”
“No, no,” Mr. Delacroix said. “These are desert tortoises. They can’t swim.”
“Well, I’ve got a truck full of monkeys and a gorilla – “ the soldier said.
“That’s not a gorilla,” Mr. Delacroix interrupted. “That’s an orangutang.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have any of these animals here in the first place,” the soldier replied. “It’s inhumane.”
“Please come back with the truck to save the tortoises,” Mr. Delacroix said.
The soldiers got in the truck and it sprayed water in all directions as its big wheels found traction in the mud.
Mr. Delacroix sat on a bench. Some garbage floated by. He saw a coyote dog-paddling in the water. The Zoo didn’t own any coyotes and, so, he assumed the creature was a wild animal. The water rose above his ankles. The National Guard truck didn’t return. The water rose above his calves. The truck didn’t return. The water came to the level of his knees. The truck hadn’t come back and it was now obvious to Mr. Delacroix that no one was coming to rescue his tortoises.
A small metal pole-barn shared a wall with the public toilets across the zoo parking lot. The restrooms and shed were built on a terrace below the knoll crowned by the carousel enclosed in its octagonal pavilion. Mr. Delacroix recalled that there were several battery-powered golf carts in the pole-barn and that they were powerful enough to tow flat-bed trailers heaped with fairway sod or sand for the traps on the course. Sheets of water were streaming across the parking lot near the toilets. A young man with a soggy mullet was standing at the carousel pavilion door. Mr. Delacroix recognized him as the kid who swept the floors and mopped up around the carousel. He waved to the young man, gesturing that he should come down to assist him. The kid with the wet mullet was wearing a hooded sweatshirt labeled Alcatraz and there were rubber boots on his feet.
“The power’s gone out up there,” the young man said. “I tested the electricity and the generator’s not working either.”
“Figures,” Mr. Delacroix replied.
He told the young man that they had to act quickly to save the tortoises.
“Can’t they just swim around in the water?” the young man asked.
“No, they come from the desert,” Mr. Delacroix said. “The water will drown them.”
“I thought they were turtles,” the kid replied.
“Not all turtles know how to swim,” Mr. Delacroix said.
The shed was padlocked but Mr. Delacroix knew that there was a key in the ticket kiosk. Water was surging over the apron of cement near the kiosk and the current was so strong that it almost knocked him off his feet. The kid waited behind him in the partly submerged parking lot. Mr. Delacroix found the key, forded the swift stream gushing over the sidewalk, and, then, opened the tool shed. With the young man, he hitched a flat-bed trailer to the back of the golf cart and, then, drove through the service gate into the zoo grounds.
Because it was foreseeable that the tortoises might have to be transported to an off-site veterinarian, several large wooden crates had been built for the animals. The crates were stacked like caskets beside the bins of lettuce and carrots in the little concrete-block supply bunker in Tortoise Town. Mr. Delacroix dragged the crates through the mire and tugged the females into the boxes. The tortoises were heavy and inert, but, working with the young man, Mr. Delacroix was able to nudge them into their crates and, then, skid the boxes through the mud and onto the flatbed. The work was hard and Mr. Delacroix felt the rods and screws in his spine shifting so that his back felt weak and unstable. Shooting pains, like jolts of electricity, coursed down the rear of his left leg. Sometimes, the shocks were so severe that he felt faint and thought that he might topple into the mud.
Mr. Delacroix wasn’t sure that he could pilot the golf-cart, particularly with the heavily loaded flat-bed that seemed off-balance and threatened to topple over onto its side. The kid seemed confident that he could drive the cart and, so, Mr. Delacroix yielded to him and they made a zig-zag way, avoiding potholes brimming with water, passing through the zoo and up the slick slope to the carousel pavilion. They unloaded the crates and, then, drove back to Tortoise Town.
Elmer Fudd was trudging wearily along the side of the cyclone fence. Beyond the wire, the river was full of rafts of ice that rolled over like logs in the torrent. The icebergs crashed together and water spurted up between them as the rafts collided and the river made a sound like a giant milling machine. The young man with the mullet and Delacroix each took hold of one of Elmer Fudd’s spurred rear legs and dragged him to a crate, now floating in eight inches of cold water. The tortoise was too large to fit in the crate and, in any event, he scrambled away from the box, digging his feet into the mud as if he intended to burrow away from danger. The pain in Mr. Delacroix’s low back increased and, sometimes, when he panted, took his breath away. Somehow, they hauled the tortoise onto the flatbed and covered the animal’s head with Mr. Delacroix’s overcoat. The rain splashing onto Mr. Delacroix’s skin was very cold and he shivered.
They prodded Elmer Fudd off the flatbed and skidded down the hill and through the zoo to find Old Aldebran. As Mr. Delacroix expected, the ancient tortoise was sheltering against the shed in Tortoise Town. The turtle’s head was hidden and his feet retracted and, so, the animal sat in the water like a stone, his scarred green-grey dome of plated shell exposing a spiked tail motionless in the mud. Mr. Delacroix seized Old Aldebran’s tail and pulled him toward the flatbed. The animal extended his feet and began to claw at the mud and his tail was wet and slipped through Mr. Delacroix’s hands. The plywood lean-to sheet had floated up against the side of the hutch. The kid with the mullet dragged the plywood panel in front of the tortoise and, then, stomped down to hold it under the water. They pushed the tortoise forward and he clambered onto the fallen panel of plywood. Then, Mr. Delacroix and the young man took hold of the splintery edges of the plywood sheet and yanked it toward the flatbed, dragging the tortoise as if he were on a travois. They managed to tilt the wood panel up onto the trailer and this time, the kid, pulled his hooded sweatshirt over his head and draped the wet garment over the opening in the tortoise’s carapace hiding the animal’s snout and jaws. Mr. Delacroix saw that there were wood splinters driven into the webbing between his fingers and thumb and he was bleeding. On the way up the slope to the carousel pavilion, the golf cart’s traction failed and the vehicle fishtailed and, then, began to slip backward. Mr. Delacroix jumped out of the cart and stood next to the trailer pushing as hard as he could. The tires caught on the hillside streaming with water and the cart and trailer lunged forward almost knocking Mr. Delacroix down. The plywood sheet on which the tortoise was riding began to slide backward and, just as they reached the pavilion, the panel slipped off the flatbed and broke in two, dropping Old Aldebran on the winter-killed grass. They seized the tortoise’s front legs and dragged him forward, out of the rain and into the cold darkness inside the pavilion. Then, they pulled the other tortoises in their boxes into the shelter. Elmer Fudd followed under his own power, swinging his head back and forth as he lumbered through the door.
The kid with the mullet shut the double-doors and it was very dark in the pavilion. Rain drummed on the roof overhead and wan light shown through the skylights and, as their eyes adjusted, Mr. Delacroix and the young man could see the tortoise crates and Elmer Fudd ponderously exploring the shadows along the edge of the wall and old Aldebran motionless next to the entrance and carousel ticket booth. Mr. Delacroix dropped to his knees and, then, couldn’t stand. The kid helped him up. The circus animals were painted in bright, shiny colors and the eyes of the steeds showed white around their edges and there were silver and gold saddles on the horses that reflected the watery pale light cast through the skylights. Each circus horse was impaled on a steel rod and reflections of light ran along the lengths of those poles under the carousel canopy.
Mr. Delacroix felt faint. He limped across the cold floor and climbed onto the deck of the carousel. His feet felt very cold and heavy. The chariot-shaped wagon with Viking decorations had a bench seat and Mr. Delacroix sat on that bench, pressing his injured back against the metal support and, for a time, he was unconscious because when he opened his eyes again, the skylights were dark and the pelting rain had ceased.
8.
He had to urinate and, so, he stood between the benches facing one another on the chariot. It was a long step from the carousel deck down to the concrete floor and he almost fell. The tortoises were motionless bumps in the darkness.
Mr. Delacroix looked across the flood. It was very dark and humid, warmer than before, with orangish flashes of lightning on the horizon. A featureless level plane of water stretched away from the carousel in all directions. Underneath the water, rivers were flowing but they were hidden and Mr. Delacroix recognized their presence by lateral swaths of white water churning on the surface of the vast lagoon.
A small boat, perhaps, inflatable, approached the knoll. Mr. Delacroix limped down to the edge of the water. There was an old man in a long coat seated in the boat next to a blonde girl who seemed familiar to Mr. Delacroix although he couldn’t see her very well in the darkness.
“Are you safe?” the old man said.
“Yes, for the time being,” Mr. Delacroix replied.
“What about the terrapins?” the old man asked.
Mr. Delacroix wondered how the old man knew about the tortoises. “They’re all saved,” he said.
“We are making rescues,” the old man said.
The old man seemed to have something wrong with his mouth, ill-fitting dentures perhaps, and he was wearing a powder-white, ill-fitting wig.
The young woman was silent. The old man took some bottles of water and pitched them to Mr. Delacroix.
“Drinking water,” he said. Mr. Delacroix thanked him and put the bottles of water down.
“Be steadfast. Help is on the way,” the old man said. He reached down between his legs and lifted a flashlight that he aimed in front of the rubber raft. The beam searched the dark water and found nothing.
Mr. Delacroix limped back into the carousel pavilion.
“I heard you talking to someone,” the young man with the mullet said. His face looked pale in the darkness, almost ghostly, and the soggy mullet over his shoulder was like a drowned animal.
“There was some old guy,” Mr. Delacroix said. “He came on a raft. With bottles of water.”
Mr. Delacroix looked around for the water but couldn’t recall where he had put the bottles.
“It’s too late for me,” the young man said. “I’ve been drinking flood water.”
“That will make you sick,” Mr. Delacroix said.
“I know.”
9.
When the sun rose, the flood waters had receded to some extent. Muddy strips of terrain, trampled it seemed by the dark water, emerged from the pale lagoons. The habitat buildings at the zoo stood on slimy mud-brown pedestals. In the distance, a bridge rose from the water, spanned water, and, then, sunk back into the lagoon.
The water was still deep around the carousel pavilion. In the distance, small skiffs ferried people from second story windows to reefs of sandbags. Far away, a row of heavy trucks was lined up at the edge of the flood.
Mr. Delacroix was sitting on the circus chariot when, suddenly, the power snapped on. The carousel shuddered and, then, lurched forward and the wooden horses bounded up and down on their poles. Calliope music bubbled overhead: “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
“Whoa! Whoa!” the young man with the mullet cried out.
The tortoises seemed to be hibernating.
“I don’t know how to shut this thing off,” the young man said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Mr. Delacroix said. “I’ll ride for a while.”
The carousel carried him in circles. On one of the walls, Mr. Delacroix saw two pictures. One showed a little girl riding a white unicorn on a carousel similar to the one on which he was seated. The other picture was a portrait of an attractive young woman with blonde hair. Mr. Delacroix thought that he had met her once. Perhaps, she was someone that he knew from Group when he attended Narcotics Anonymous. The carousel carried him past the picture of the young woman over and over again.
10.
A few weeks later, it was a bright day and the sun was warm. Mr. Delacroix was cleaning Tortoise Town with his shovel and rake and wheelbarrow. Elmer Fudd and the three females had their necks extended like swans, pointing their heads upward in the direction of the radiant sun. Old Aldebran had shoved himself under the lean-to made by the plywood tilted against the shed.
Mr. Delacroix admired the tortoises worshiping the sun. They seemed to exude well-being.
Then, the gates to Tortoise Town was unlocked. Elmer Fudd and the females scrambled toward the cyclone fence turning their backs to the visitors. But Old Aldebran emerged from under the plywood lean-to and waddled toward a man with two little girls standing by him. The children were frightened by the old tortoise and backed away from him. But when Old Aldebran halted and extended his neck, lifting his head to sniff the air, the girls were emboldened to approach him. One of them was holding a bouquet of pink cotton candy and she extended the spun sugar in the direction of the tortoise.
“No, no,” Mr. Delacroix said, “that would be bad for him. He’s very, very old.”
The man with the little girls seemed to take offense.
“These are weird-looking animals,” the man said to Mr. Delacroix. “How do they manage to mate?”
“I don’t know,” Mr. Delacroix said. “ Dude, how do you manage to mate?”
The man grinned at him. He pointed at the initials and swastika carved into the tortoise’s shell.
“That one’s a Nazi,” the man said.
“He’s not a Nazi,” Mr. Delacroix said. “He was hatched on a desert island. He’s not even German.”
