By Charles Clifford Brooks III.
Once upon a time I hit a turkey during my summer break. I was a member of the maintenance crew on the Big Canoe Golf Course which was built in a posh mountain community in the beautiful mountains of North Georgia . This particular morning I was driving a Cushman, which is like an industrial go-cart with a truck bed, down the steepest hill anywhere in the state. Now, the boss told all of us to never do this due to the fact that the Cushman was a very heavy piece of equipment, there were no seatbelts, and if you were to hit a millionaire golfer on a blind curve it would evaporate him right out of his six hundred dollar shoes.
But what the hell? I had a problem with authority, it was six in the morning, and no golfer (or the boss) was anywhere near this isolated part of the course. My adrenaline was beginning to override the receptors in the brain that controlled fear and I was daring myself to beat terror and make it back to the golf shop in record time. It was one of those events that everyone has that makes you cringe later as you realize, ‘Holy shit, I could have died!’
As my speed grew to the point of breaking the sound barrier, I started to have images of a gruesome death and a little voice in the back of my head developed into a screaming, “SLOW DOWN!”
And then, as if it were a speed bump placed in my way by an exhausted guardian angel, I hit something the size of an eleven-year-old child. I jolted forward, tore into the grass, slicing a huge ‘U’ pattern into the meticulously manicured fairway and then slammed on the brakes before my chariot nearly plummeted into the forest.
After catching my breath, I looked back to the cart path and saw this enormous mass of feathers lying there. What in the name of Odin was that? Is it going to get up and seek revenge? I then focused on the damage I had caused to the course and had an epiphany that the boss was going to hand me my ass when he saw this rut in the fairway.
I calmed down and decided that I could cover this whole thing up. There had to be a way. I had been in bigger scrapes than this and snuck out before ‘The Man’ arrived. Yet, I had to see what I hit, unquenchable curiosity being another bad habit of mine right behind smoking cigarettes.
So I drove up to the unmoving mass of feathers at a crawl and saw that it was a turkey. I had no idea those damn things got so big. Taking in its girth and the talons on its feet I had a new respect for the turkey and I understood why Ben Franklin suggested this bird be our national emblem instead of the bald eagle.
It was a formidable opponent, but what was I going to do now? How do I deal with this? Was there a law against plowing over this bird?
I couldn’t get my arms around the beast to pick it up and it was too far from the woods to drag it. I had equipment in the back of the Cushman that would take too long to unload, pack in carcass, dispose of the evidence, then reload all my stuff and get on my merry way before someone came along. Truth be told, I was also nervous the creature wasn’t deceased and might not be so pleased to wake up and find me attempting to get it in a bear hug.
Since I am a prankster by nature, I left the turkey in the cart path. Either a golfer would come along and shit himself over this site, or one of my redneck coworkers would return to the maintenance shed and demand help to get it back to his car. Let the chips fall where they may.
Then I realized that I still had the damage done to the fairway behind me to account for. I looked at what I had done and frantically began to run excuses through my head if questioned by my boss. I decided that I would disavow all knowledge of the subject and keep my resolve under the most hard-nosed interrogation. No one would think of me first since I was still relatively new and none of my coworkers thought me capable of doing this and not turn myself in.
I knew that my charade wouldn’t last long if I had intestines on the front of my ride so, at a watering station, I washed off the entrails and plumage from the front of my Cushman before I drove back to base. I also had to put on my “straight face” due to the fact that if I did not give a good reason for laughing to myself the boss would think I had snuck off earlier to smoke pot.
At the shop I filled my weed-eater with unleaded gasoline without saying a word to anyone or even acting out of character. Soon I received new orders to weed-eat another section of the course and I was happy to oblige. Driving away I was giggling.
The morning passed and lunch time arrived where all of us converged back at the maintenance barn. More than the food, or respite from the heat, lunch was always fun due to the jokes and stories the old-timers would share. Those tough, leather-skinned men took no back-talk off anyone and were always ready to tell a story which came with a life-lesson attached.
I had finished my ham sandwich, almost convinced it would be another day before the turkey was discovered, when the most high-strung member of our maintenance family, Travis Grum, came into the lunch area out of breath. Travis was positively beside himself, his excitement probably more kin to the fact he snorted enough cocaine to keep Columbia’s economy in the black than due to his discovery on the back nine.
Travis made me nervous. He spent most of his time intoxicated one way or the other, was an avid cock fighter, and seemed to violently dislike anyone he called “city boys”. (I fell into this category even though we were all from the same small mountain community.) Travis was about a foot shorter than I, but the combination of booze and narcotics made him unpredictable. No matter how badly I wanted to bash his face in with a shovel, I knew Travis was one of those miscreants who would burn my mother’s house down while she was sleeping inside.
“Some of yuns need to get in my truck and help me out with this turkey dead on the back nine!” Travis could barely get the words out. He had a mullet and an eighth grade education.
“What are you squawking about, Travis?” Raymond McMurty asked through his tomato sandwich. Raymond was one of those bosses who worked well with those willing to do their best and a horror on those who weren’t.
“Serious, Raymond! There’s this huge turkey deader-than-hell on the back nine! Someone must have hit it because it wasn’t shot with nothin’!” Travis was hopping up and down now.
“C’mon then! Let’s get it up before some rich old lady gets her panties in a bunch while trying to play through!” Raymond took a sip of his RC Cola before leaving the table and getting into the passenger side of Travis’s Ford Broncow which Travis had named ‘Lucy’ after his favorite Playboy pin-up.
“You think Travis is telling the truth?” Danny, another of the ancient employees asked the rest of us.
“No idea,” came the answer, “If he is jokin’ around Raymond will beat the snot out of him for dragging him away from his food.”
As the room settled into its usual chewing and slurping I looked beside me at a Joe Armit, one of my best friends from high school, who was staring right at me.
“He knows!” I thought. Joe could always tell when I was involved in something. I shot my eyes back down the bag of chips in front of me and tried to fight back a smile.
“How in the hell did you manage to hit a turkey?” Joe whispered.
“It was an accident!” I tried to keep my voice down.
“Are they big?” He asked.
“This one was a dinosaur! If you were hunting it you sure as hell better kill it with the first shot!” I remembered the talons I saw on its feet.
“Was it a boy or a girl?”
“Dude, I have no idea. I didn’t look!” I laughed, trying to keep the noise to a minimum.
Soon thereafter Raymond and Travis returned with the turkey. Joe couldn’t believe the magnitude of the feathered brute and laughed harder realizing that I was lucky not to have died in the crash. I waited nervously for eyes to land on me, but the group seemed willing to believe a golfer hit the turkey and then sped off after they saw what they had done to the fairway. Raymond was wicked pissed about the damage “some idiot golfer” did to his course.
I am in the picture they took of the event; one I am sure Travis tells his drunken comrades which has been embellished with the claim that he killed the animal with his bare hands. The affair is galvanized in that photo which is still on the maintenance shed’s cork board. I am in the back rear corner of the snapshot, smiling like someone who knew more than he was saying. I was the city boy who did the impossible and lived to tell about it.
The murder is still unsolved. The family of that turkey needs closure, but I cannot sacrifice myself for the team. Those are the breaks. But you better bet your sweet backside I never tempted fate and sped down that cart path again.
Live and learn. Live and learn.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charles Clifford Brooks III is a freelance writer from Jasper, Georgia USA, currently represented by Mark Straley of the Writers in the Sky Literary Agency.
