The Bone Bed

blood flowing is like the roaring of a river or a rushing wind.
    “Normosol to replenish his electrolytes.” She tears open the packet of a solution set, a twenty-gauge needle attached to an IV line. “Ten drops per one mil. He’s stressed.”
    “Well, I would be, too. He’s probably never been around humans before,” Klemens observes, and I’m aware of the weird familiarity I feel that isn’t about him.
    A sad curiosity runs through me like a low-voltage current, then is gone, and I imagine my father seeing such a marvel. Sometimes I wonder what he’d think of the person I’ve become.
    “They say a turtle like this one’s been on land only once in his life. Right after he was hatched on some beach halfway around the world and crawled across the sand and into the water. And he’s been swimming ever since.” Klemens talks expressively with his hands the way my father did until he was too weak from cancer to lift them from the bed. “So he’s not happy resting on top of something, in this case, the platform. Not to be crude about it, but the only other time he’s got something under him is when he mates. What do you want to do about her?”
    He looks at the heaving water where the large yellow sausage fender bobs, which strikes me as quite odd, and I say so.
    “You think it’s attached to a conch pot or cinder blocks?” I point out. “Why?”
    “When they were pulling the buoy line close with the grappler to cut the fishing line and get the turtle on board?” he says. “For a couple of minutes the body was at the surface. Her head was.”
    “Jesus. I hope we’re not going to see that on TV.” I look up at a second helicopter that has moved in, hovering directly over us, a white twin-engine, with what appears to be a gyrostabilized camera system mounted on the nose.
    “I think all they’re interested in is the turtle and got no clue what else is on the line.” He follows my gaze up. “The first chopper got here just as we were pulling him on board, so I don’t think they filmed the body or know about it. At least not yet.”
    “And what’s gone out over the radio?” I ask.
    “Not a distress call, for obvious reasons.” He means any calls about the dead body didn’t go out over the usual channels that might be monitored by mariners and the media.
    “Did anybody touch it with the grappler or disturb it in any way?”
    “Nobody got anywhere near it, and we recorded the whole thing with our onboard cameras, Doc. So you got that if you need proof in court.”
    “Perfect,” I tell him.
    “When the body was just at the surface you could barely make out the shape of a wire mesh pot about four foot square, I’m guessing.” He continues staring at the sausage buoy, as if he can still see the pot he’s describing. “It’s attached by maybe twenty, thirty feet of rope and obviously has something in it that’s heavy as hell. Rocks, cinder blocks, I couldn’t tell.”
    “And the body’s tethered to this line? We’re sure it still is? We’re sure there’s no way it got loose when they were pulling the turtle in and cutting him free?”
    “I don’t think it’s possible that poor lady’s going anywhere. Tied around the lower part, possibly the legs, the ankles.” He stares at the yellow bumper moving brightly on the water and the yellow line dropping taut and straight below it, disappearing into the dark blue bay. “An older woman with white hair is what it looked like to me, and then when they got the turtle cut free, she dropped below the surface again, the weighted conch pot pulling her back down.”
    “She’s tethered to the buoy line, which is tied around her legs, possibly? Yet she’s upright?” I’m having a hard time envisioning what he’s describing.
    “Don’t know.”
    “If her head appeared first, she’s upright.”
    “Well, she definitely was headfirst,” he says.
    “If the conch pot, the body, and the buoy are all part of the same line or rig, I find that very curious,” I insist. “It’s contradictory. One is pulling her down while the other is pulling her up.”
    “I’ve got everything on video if you want to duck into the wheelhouse and take a look.”
    “If you could get me a copy, I’d really appreciate it,” I reply. “What I need to do now is to take a look at the turtle.”
    It isn’t mere curiosity on my part. From where we are on the upper deck I can see a wound near the leatherback’s black-and-grayish-white mottled neck, on a