Good Old Boys

My brother collected box turtles. It started the summer of my sophomore year. He had spent time in Arkansas with our uncle Wally and by the time he returned to us in August, he had become feral. His face seemed perpetually dirty and I swear there were always full pieces of gravel under his fingernails. He wore the same clothes for days, a smell of sour milk sweat, mixing with his unique brand of body odor.

He had cut the sleeves off of every t-shirt he owned and I got so used to seeing his nipples during meal time that I started angling my chair towards the kitchen. His shorts were likewise cut with a pair of my mom’s garden scissors and after a couple weeks of pond swimming, adventuring in the woods behind the house and riding around town on his old silver Huffy, had become a mess of stains and blood. He had picked up“ain’t” and added it to almost every sentence, even when it was clear he didn’t know quite how to use it well.

Given another month, I was pretty sure he would have had the southern drawl of an 87 year old from Shreveport. He rarely wore shoes when he went outside and of course this led to a yellow brick road of grime and dust to be tracked in from the kitchen door, through the living room and down to his bedroom in the basement. I followed the path one day with the handheld vacuum, after our mother seemed about ready to send him back south and that’s when I discovered the turtles.

They were living in a glass fish tank and when I looked closer, I noticed that he had dressed each of them in modified Barbie clothes, that he had clearly swiped from our sister’s room. Their shells had been painted a kaleidoscope of colors and patterns and I was not surprised to see that one had been painted like the General Lee from Dukes of Hazzard.

I had gotten the toy for Christmas in 4th grade and had played with it everyday until my friend Bill suggested we soak it in kerosine and send it down the hill next to the school. What we didn’t expect was that the flames would turn it into a sticky pile of flaming plastic before it even had gone three feet. We watched with a mix of horror and pre-teen glee as Bo and Luke died horrible deaths, melting into the front seats,

Bill looking over at me with that dumb grin on his face and whispering “Not good ol’ boys anymore…”