The Music Man

My brother does this weird thing with turtles. For about five years now, he’s been using their shells to make music on. He’s got a bunch of them superglued to some PVC piping like a redneck xylophone. He went into the Huxxawatchee Swamp with a net while wearing a freaking pith helmet. He tried eating the meat from the first one he caught but then told me “Don’t believe that old wive’s tale that they taste like chicken” and has since fed them to that mangy mutt of his. That dog will eat anything; my brother had to have its stomach pumped once when it chewed in half an antique lead toy soldier that had belonged to uncle Lester and swallowed the damn thing.

My brother’s got a lot of turtle shells, more than he really needs, but a lot of them don’t fit neatly into Western music’s tonal scale (he’s dinked around with trying stuff from the Chinese music scale but, between you and me, I don’t think Chinese musicians have anything to worry about). He’s got most notes in the middle and upper ranges of the Western scale but only seven in the bass range so there are some songs he can’t play. Those seven were from those big snapping turtles that the Huxxawatchee is famous for. His luck ran out on the eighth, which snapped off about a half inch of his left pinky. My brother freaked and shot it with that Beretta 9mm he always carries. Probably saved himself a few fingers that way, but a turtle shell with two bullet holes in it has lousy acoustics. He gave up trying to hunt for more snappers but has been trying to find more big shells on Craigslist, but for now he’s limited to just seven low notes.

If he’s able to find it there or on eBay, he won’t have trouble paying for it. His wife may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but you’ve got to admit that she’s a luck magnet. Like that time she won $100,000 from a lottery ticket she picked off the ground in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot or when she found a diamond bracelet in the back seat of a rental car. That woman has a guardian angel. She seems to have gotten all the good luck allotted to her family. She’s only, what, 31 or 32? But out of the five kids that her parents had, she’s the only one left. Two died from alcohol-related car crashes, one from an aneurysm, another when his truck got hit by an RPG in Afghanistan.

My brother swears that his life was spared by some of that luck rubbing off on him that weekend in Duluth. They’d been walking down the sidewalk on London Road just north of the harbor when he stopped to tie his shoe. Moments later a large chunk of the cornice from a nineteenth century building crashed onto the sidewalk just ahead of him. He swears that some of his wife’s luck rubbed off on him that day, but I don’t think it works that way. For all he knows, that chunk of cornice wouldn’t have even hit him, it could have just as easily hit her. So it was still basically her luck without any rubbing off. But he’s a bit self-centered so, in his mind at least, he’s the one who got lucky.

Pixabay photo