Return of the Turtle - On The Other| David Scribner's column from the Berkshire Other

Return of the Turtle

By David Scribner

I met Light Cream Guy today. He hustled into Digital Blend for his hit of half and half, and glanced in my direction as he rushed for the coffee urns, bent forward, graying hair pulled back into a short pony tail, as if bucking a stiff wind.

In this encounter, furtive as it was, I felt I had made his acquaintance. After he scurried out the door, the woman behind the counter commented, eyes rolling ceilingward, how thankful she was the canister of cream was filled. She called him Light Cream Freak. He would have pitched a fit if it had been empty, she said. But he's not a freak. He's one of us.

I've seen Light Cream before. In summer, I used to hang out at night by the doorway of a costume shop on my town's main drag, talking with manikins and watching the scene.

Light Cream was there on his bike each night. About one in the morning, he'd be pumping up the middle of the street, pedaling the mile and a half to the south end of town, then back again, his long gray hair streaming in the halogen haze, his tires a whisper on asphalt. He wasn't alone: There was Smokeman, the Mad Watchman, Stapler Head, Kokopelli Man, and Golden Androgyne whom I once spotted hand in hand with Truman Capote in Black.

Light Cream doesn't ride anymore and his hair is shorter. He's got a car, and he bought a house, so I'm told. And I'm not at the costume shop.

I'd go downstreet after work at the newspaper. I'm not at the newspaper anymore either, and one reason is this cast of night-trippers. They're not a bad bunch but they take some getting used to.

Late one night, before I left the newspaper, I was working late on the news desk when I had a call from a guy.

"You're writing about it, right?" said a male voice, breathless and low.

"What?" I said.

And he said, "The Turtle. You must know about it, you're the editor. It's the $20 million antiterrorist machine they unloaded in the middle of the night outside City Hall. It takes $50 in gas just to start it up. I saw it from my apartment, as they rolled it off the flatbed. Huge. It's top secret and they're covering up the evidence. There's a bunch of guys going behind it repairing pavement. They put it in the basement of the police station."

I thought to myself, maybe I know this guy. He must be the guy with the camouflage outfit who goes up and down the street checking sewer drains.

A few nights later I was at the costume shop doorway again talking with some friends, and I told them about the Turtle. They believed it, so I said to myself, maybe it's true.

But I needed more evidence than just a crank phone call. I needed something persuasive, like TV news footage.

So I had a couple of college students bring up their video equipment, and we went over to City Hall and the police station. They recorded while I searched for signs of the Turtle.

There may have been some: Scrapes on bricks; a broken planter; a damaged curb by the adjacent church parking lot; and the outline of a huge doorway recently filled in. Could be, could be. I'll put the video on the Web, if you like.

Still, it seemed improbable -- an anti-terrorist machine in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in the bucolic Berkshires? Whatever for? The answer would not come for months.

I had put the whole incident out of mind - summer was coming on - until I encountered my friend Steve in Digital Blend one morning. He's a beat cop, and on a whim I related the story of the Turtle.

"We got that call," he said quickly - and quietly.

He took me aside. "And so did a City Councilor," he said, and looked about as if someone might be overhearing us. "The caller wanted to know whether the Turtle would be in the Fourth of July Parade. Well, Emergency Management got wind of it, and they decided not to take any chances. They had a SWAT team on the roofs overlooking North Street and undercover agents deployed on the sidewalks during the parade, just in case of trouble."

"You've got to be kidding," I said.

"Truth," he replied, and went out the door of the coffeehouse.

I should have left it at that, should have let Homeland Security personnel take care of it, should have. That's what they're getting the big bucks for, but no, I was going on vacation and I had a column to write. It was just too delicious to resist.

Among other column items, such as a cookie recipe, I recounted what I knew of the Turtle. And I ended the piece with, "And now I feel safer, don't you?"

Then I left for LA to hike mountain trails, swim in the Pacific, scout out Topanga Canyon, bike down the beach to Venice, see some old acquaintances - and all the while enjoy the loving companionship of a beautiful friend. Sounded like a plan.

When I returned to the Berkshires a week later, rested and exhilarated with the news that I'd had a short story accepted for publication, I was hauled into the publisher's office.

Among other complaints, he was not amused by the previous week's column. In fact, he was outraged, or pretended to be. It was hard to tell with him.

He took the matter of homeland security seriously, he intoned. His father had been in the Air Force. He was from Texas. He cropped his white hair short.

"You can't be disrespectful on the subject of terrorism," he fumed. "It's too important an issue. It's like crying fire in a movie theater. People are really afraid, here in the Berkshires, and for good reason."

To reassure the populace, he continued, he had taken it upon himself, since I was gone, to order a reporter to visit the police station to verify that the Turtle wasn't hidden there.

I could have predicted the outcome of that investigation - and its consequences for me. Even if they had found the Turtle, looked beyond what the police captain was willing to unlock, it would have turned out the same way.

That was my last day at the newspaper.

This could have been the end of the story but many months later, at the Beaux Arts Buffet Artists' Brunch at the Bombay Grill, the Turtle came back to life. Maybe it was the ambiance - the array of foreign dishes, praranbham, maamsahari tarkai, chawal and roti, chutneys and mitai, flagons of aam lassi.

A woman I knew as a library trustee and from her work in local journals of commerce joined several of us who were discussing the presidential election.

I had just finished congratulating two women acquaintances on their recent marriage to each other when the newcomer interrupted our conversation to announce there were al-Qaida terrorist cells in every city in America, large and small, even here, in the Berkshires.

"It's only a matter of time," she declared, "before we get hit. But Pittsfield does not have its head in the sand. The city is going to put an anti-terrorist tank in the basement of the library, the Athenaeum. It's been approved."

She couldn't tell us when; that was a secret.

Her revelation brought conversation to a halt. She seemed in deadly earnest, her belief in the threat palpable in her eyes.

I should have felt vindicated. Instead, I went to the library, camera in hand.

Sure enough, the building does have a largely empty garage, with two large doors probably tall enough to admit a substantial military vehicle.

I peeked in. The space was mostly empty, except for stacks of books here and there, easily moved. And I wondered just when, in this nation's evolution, faith in the power of learning and knowledge, of intelligence and imagination, had been replaced by worship of the talisman of war.