Snapping Turtles

‘There’s this fellow I know, said the man in the hat,’ who keeps snapping turtles in a child’s play pool in his backyard’. ‘He feeds them creepy-crawlies and larva, and June bugs with the wings flattened out, easier to digest, I suppose, and something that looks like intestinal offal. I caught him swimming in the child’s pool once, one of those old-fashioned men’s bathing suits on, the ones with stripes and long legs, and a swimmer’s hat with earflaps and a toggle-strap round the chin. It reminds me of the cowboy hat I had as a kid, with a whistle and a playing card in the Stetson band’. The man in the hat was once the boy in the hat, a straw cowboy hat with a cheap plastic whistle and perforations that kept the heat in and the coolness out. He was the kid who always got the plastic moustache in the box of Cracker Jacks, the one that pinched your nose and made your eyes water. He knew a kid who swallowed the plastic whistle, a fate worse than urogenitalitis or chancres. ‘I saw a turtle with a hat---yes a hat---trying to hunker its way out of the pool, its tiny head popping in and out of its neck like a sock or a cock’s wattle. The fellow, the fellow in the old-fashioned bathing suit, was too busy trying to cinch the toggle-strap round his own neck to notice that the turtle in the hat was impaling itself on a child’s flotation device, a red one with prickles and spikes on it. I called the police, swiftly I might add, and that was that.’