by Gail Godwin
“You go on, Marcus. I’ll stay here till you come back and make calls to volunteers on my mobile. We should probably go ahead and set up the sound system and shovel the path. If I’m right, there’s a backup of hatchlings under there right now, waiting for the sand to cool. It’s exciting, isn’t it?”
“What’s a tub?”
“What? Oh, the jeep you mean. See the bottom frame that rides above the wheels? When it’s sitting by itself on the ground it looks like a tub. Lachicotte was after me for fifteen years to put in a new one. But I was afraid if I replaced it I’d lose my direct connection with the past. As it turns out, all I lost was a lot of rust.”
***
Dear Aunt Charlotte,
I will be down at the turtle clutch. Tonight may be the night! They usually come up after sunset as soon as the sand cools down. Chicken salad and cucumber salad in fridge, also a tomato from L’s garden that I cut up in wedges for you. Uncorked bottle in the usual place.
Marcus
I wondered if some subtle change in my behavior would give me away as having “told on” Aunt Charlotte the next time she laid eyes on me.
I left the note on the table. I had considered shoving it under her door in case she decided not to come out to eat. After all, I had said I would let her know if the turtles showed any sign of boiling up. But what if she were to see it as soon as I slipped it under? (“You can always knock, Marcus. You don’t have to go creeping around sliding notes under doors. What’s the guilty look for?”)
I had anticipated having the next hour all by myself with the turtles. Just me and the peaceful fading light and the wash of the ocean and a more or less empty beach. I was going to be the herald of the long-awaited event, the lone witness to that first little hole in the sand. I might even see a little head pop up, decide it was still too early, and disappear. And then the other volunteers would eventually gather in the cooling dusk, one or two at a time. In my scenario Ed Bolton would be the first to return. He would announce to each new arrival: “Marcus here’s been watching this nest like a hawk. As soon as he spotted that hatchling scout, he phoned my beeper and I was on my way. Marcus actually saw the little fellow poke his head up, look around, and go back to tell the others it wasn’t time yet!”
But during the short time I had been up at the house, Ed Bolton must have been working his mobile nonstop. Because very soon after he had headed away in the jeep to collect digging tools for the hatchlings’ path to the sea, other volunteers started appearing over the dunes. They must have parked their vehicles near our house. Yet it was still daylight, no sand had collapsed inward, nothing out of the ordinary had sent me rushing off to the house to telephone Ed’s beeper. Some of the volunteers said Hello, or Hello, you must be Marcus, but most of them went straight to their tasks, which must have been prearranged. They were mixed in age: retirees like Ed Bolton; middle-aged ladies in knee-length shorts; younger men, some still in work clothes; and a sprinkling of teenagers.
Two ladies carefully pulled out the wooden stakes and rolled up the orange plastic fence surrounding the clutch. A man knelt near the nest and inserted something down in the sand while another man set up an amplifier on a pole. The teenagers were marking out a path for the hatchlings’ crawl to the water.
“But what if it doesn’t happen tonight?” I asked the friendlier of the two ladies, one of those volunteers who had greeted me by name. “Then you’ll just have to put the fence back up again.”
“Oh, Ed has a second sense about these little guys. He said the temperature was way up within the last three hours and there’s likely a backup of them under there right now. Here comes Ed now, you can ask him.”
The sun had just set and a pinkish haze was forming to the north out of which the jeep was bouncing toward us. At first, I took the waving straw sticking up on the passenger side as some kind of broom, a tool Ed was bringing to scoop out the turtles’ path to the sea. But as the jeep came closer, I saw it was the straw-colored hair of a person. Not till I saw him slide out of the jeep did I see it was a boy, taller than I was, light hair cut short on the sides with a fringe swept over the forehead. He wore an orange T-shirt with a large white paw print on the chest, khaki cargo shorts, supersonic-looking gray-and-orange sneakers, and a huge black watch on his wrist. His face was sunburned; the rest of him, not so much.
“Marcus, this is Pickett, he’s staying with his grandparents, our neighbors, until his school starts. Pickett, this is Marcus, who lives in that cottage behind the dunes. Marcus, I’ve told Pickett to stick close to you and you’ll fill him in on our drill.”
Pickett did not strike me as the kind of boy who would stick close to anyone, or pay much attention to a peer “filling him in” on anything. So far he hadn’t looked at me once, but when I said “Hi” he echoed it, looking me over with a languid glance.
“You two could help shovel out the path,” suggested Ed, “if you’re so inclined. Pickett, go and get that rake and scoop shovel we brought.”
“What grade you going to be in?” I asked as we set to work. I had offered to take the shovel and let Pickett follow along with the rake.
“My school doesn’t have grades. I’ll be in second form. That’s eighth grade.”
“Oh, so will I!”
“Funny, you look younger.”
“Well, I skipped a year.”
This earned no comment. “How wide am I supposed to rake this path?”
“Maybe a little wider? But leave a little mound on each side so they won’t be wandering off.”
“Such a big deal for a few turtles!”
“It’s hardly a few. There are a hundred and ten eggs in this one nest. Loggerheads just happen to be the world’s largest hard-shelled turtle and they’re threatened with extinction. They’ve been doing this race to the sea for forty million years. We’ve only been around for the last two hundred thousand.”
He heard me out, grinding the toe of a sneaker into the sand. “So what did they do for all those million years before we were on the scene to rake their paths for them?”
“They were on the way to extinction before this conservation thing got going. People were eating their eggs for breakfast and making jewelry out of them, and…”
“Just kidding,” he said, like you would to a child who had gotten overemotional about something. “You live here all year round?”
“I live with my great-aunt. My mother died last winter.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“Why did you want to come, if I’m not being rude.”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, you don’t seem very interested in seeing them hatch.”
“Oh, the turtles. Ed said I might enjoy it. And I might. The grandparents don’t exactly rock. He’s glued to the presidential race, she’s in the kitchen dreaming up another spicy dish, and by midafternoon they’re both in the bag.”
We dug and raked in silence for a bit, each thinking our own thoughts. I could not imagine what his were, and didn’t want to try. At my new school there would certainly be a Pickett or two: shifty, withholding, sizing you up, putting you down. The whole ordeal of assessment starting all over again.
It may have been my disappointment, but all the other volunteers seemed wrapped in a congenial bubble, calling to one another, all working toward the same purpose, while Pickett and I were outside the bubble, deadlocked in a contest for—what? Supremacy? Survival? Why had Pickett been foisted on me? Ed Bolton had been my friend and mentor: through him I had grown to love the turtles. And now, because he thought the grandson of some neighbors might “enjoy it,” he had separated us from the turtle community. Was his ache for his dead pilot son so enduring that he went around collecting boys to be nice to?
The light faded from the sky, except for the new crescent moon on the rise. The volunteers became vaguely distinguishable figures moving about in the gloaming. The lingering quality of the not-quite-darkness reminded me of that morning when daylight held itself back until I could reach Grief Cottage and see
the ghost-boy braced in the doorway, waiting for me to make the next move.
Then the tempo of activities increased; voices rose, calling back and forth. Volunteers gathered around the base pole where the amplifier was set up. A woman snuggled belly-down beside the nest and stuck her face in the sand.
“Listen,” said Pickett, “I need to use your bathroom.”
“Why don’t you just go behind the dunes?”
“I need to take a dump.”
“Can’t you wait? I think the boil is about to start.”
“No, I can’t.” He was holding his gut. “Just tell me where your bathroom is in your house and I’ll make a run for it.”
His going alone was out of the question. What if Aunt Charlotte was in the kitchen and this strange boy barged in, demanding her bathroom?
“No, come on, I’ll show you. Let’s hurry.”
As we were running up the boardwalk steps, Ed Bolton cried after us: “Boys! Where are you going? It’s about to happen!”
“He needs to—we’ll be right back!”
“Oh, freaking Christ, I’m not gonna make it,” moaned Pickett.
“Go straight through the kitchen and turn left. The bathroom’s at the end of the hall.” I pushed him ahead, and he wobbled as fast as he could with his ass tucked in. The back of his orange T-shirt said Clemson Tigers. If he hurried, how much could we miss? Wait, little turtles, hold on till we get back.
My note to Aunt Charlotte was still on the kitchen table. The bottle of wine was gone.
“Go!” I said. Immediately following the slam of the bathroom door a violent explosion resounded. I could envision its far-flying brown discharge hitting every nook and cranny inside the toilet bowl. In my mind I was already cleaning up: toilet brush, Mr. Clean for the splatters, followed up by Pine-Sol to cover the odor.
The toilet flushed, and then reflushed. Water ran. Pickett emerged, having taken the time to wet-comb his bangs. “Sorry about the stink in there.”
“It’s okay. Go on back to the beach.”
“Aren’t you coming?”
“There’s something I need to do. Go on ahead.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah, I’ll be out in a minute.”
The cleaning scene followed. It was like having a nightmare turn into an exact replica of the way you had imagined it ahead of time.
My eyes had to readjust to the dark of the beach after staring at the white toilet bowl under bright light. The volunteers, most of them squatting, had spread out on either side of the path Pickett and I had helped to make. By the time I reached the group, my night-vision had kicked in and I could see a swarm of dark little creatures scrambling over one another and racing toward the ocean as fast as their flippers could carry them.
A hand gripped my shoulder. “Ah, Marcus, you missed the boil,” Ed Bolton said sadly.
“I know. But I had to.” A tear slid down my cheek but it was too dark for Ed to see.
“Well, don’t worry. There’ll be another one next year.”
“How many came out of the nest?”
“We’ve counted ninety out of a hundred and ten. That’s a good crop. Some don’t make it. They get out of the egg before they’ve absorbed all the albumen and then they’re too weak to survive. Why don’t you go join Pickett—he’s over there helping to guide the strayers. Just the gentlest touch with the back of your fingers to get them back on track. Like this.” Ed Bolton demonstrated, lightly pressing his fingers against my cheek.
The last person in the world I felt like joining was Pickett, who was absorbed in preventing would-be delinquents from scuttling up the sandbanks on either side of the path. The titanium dials on his wristwatch glowed in the dark as he knelt in the sand, conscientiously rerouting the scuttling little newborns back onto the path.
“Aren’t they awesome?” he exclaimed as I sank to my knees beside him. “Look at them haul ass! A minute ago they were crawling out of their hole. I actually saw the first one come out—the scout. Its little flipper broke through the sand first, then its little head, then the other flipper, and I swear it looked like it was scoping things out—and then it scooted off for the ocean. Then all of them just started pouring out, this living mass of prehistoric creatures. It was totally awesome!”
XXXIV.
“Marcus, are you okay?” It was morning and Aunt Charlotte was outside my bedroom door.
“Uh-huh.”
“May I come in?”
“Yes.”
She hopped in and leaned against the door frame. “Were you sick last night?”
“You mean the smell in the bathroom?”
“No big deal. It happens to all of us.” The whites of her eyes were netted with little red veins and she looked haggard.
“It wasn’t me. It was this boy. We were down on the beach with the Turtle Patrol waiting for the boil and he said he couldn’t hold it any longer.”
“I saw your note. Did the boil happen?”
“Yeah, but I missed it.”
“You missed the whole thing?”
“No, but I missed the boil, when they’re bursting through the sand. Pickett said it was awesome. When I got back, I helped escort some of them down to the water.”
“Pickett, I take it, is the boy.”
“Ed Bolton brought him. He’s staying with his grandparents.”
“Wait a minute. How is it that Pickett saw the boil and you didn’t?”
“Because—” I turned away from her to hide my distress. “I needed to stay behind and clean the bathroom. It was pretty awful.”
“Oh, Marcus, I am so sorry. Look, would it be all right if I sat on your bed?”
“It’s your bed, but sure.”
She hopped the necessary steps and I felt the mattress sink with her slight weight. “Damn it, Marcus, I am just so sorry.”
Tears trickled unseen into my pillow.
“You were looking forward to it, I was so excited on your behalf that you were going to witness this amazing thing in nature. You waited for it, you tended their nest so faithfully, I would look out my window and there you would be, sitting down there on the sand, hugging your knees, like you were encouraging them to grow—and then because you cleaned up after a stranger you missed the boil. No good deed goes unpunished, does it?”
I couldn’t answer because I wasn’t in control of my voice.
“Oh, Marcus.” Her uninjured left hand fastened on my turned-away shoulder. “What are we going to do with you? You are too thoughtful for your own good. How am I going to protect you?”
I held my breath and bit down on my lower lip to keep from losing it completely.
Then she withdrew her hand and expelled the dry Aunt Charlotte-y rasp that served as her laugh. “They must have been beyond malodorous,” she said.
“What?”
“Pickett’s awful leavings.”
“They were pretty bad.” I giggled and she went into another rasp. “What time is it?”
“After ten. Which is late for you. I was starting to worry. I’ve got a nasty headache. I overdid it last night.”
“On your project?”
“No, on the Cabernet Sauvignon. When you go to the store will you pick up another bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol? I seem to have run through the last one.”
***
She had mentioned the wine herself. Would Lachicotte count that as a “change for the better”?
I felt really bad as I rode my bike to the market. It was over, the thing I had looked forward to all summer—and I had missed it. “You waited for it, you tended their nest so faithfully … and then because you cleaned up after a stranger you missed the boil.” “You’ll never believe what I saw,” Pickett would tell the “second form” kids back at his school. “These awesome little turtles … they’ve been doing this race to the sea for forty million years, while we’ve only been here for the last two hundred thousand.” Aunt Charlotte had looked out her window and watched me sitting in the sand. Somehow I had n
ever imagined her stopping her work to look out the window at me, but she had: “And there you would be, sitting down there on the sand…”
“How am I going to protect you?” She had sounded like someone aching on my behalf. In all the time I had lived with her, she had laid a hand on my shoulder exactly twice. But now I considered the possibility that we would maybe end up protecting each other.
My photos were ready. Before I did the shopping I went back outside to the bench and looked through them. The ones taken from the beach were okay. Aunt Charlotte would see the cottage at a distance in its early morning light, and then in gradual stages approach its present day wreckage. She could pick and choose her level of disintegration: picturesque abandonment or hazardous finale, or somewhere in the middle. The ones I had taken on the porch were poorly lit but distinct enough to remind me if I came across these photos in my future that I really had seen the ghost-boy braced in that doorless doorway.
The interior shots were a huge disappointment. Every picture I had taken inside the house was murky. You couldn’t even make out the original fireplace whose mantel had been stolen, and Charlie Coggins’s sky-blue paint to ward off Ole Plat-eye showed up gray. The picture I took of the upstairs room he wouldn’t let me go into seemed to have suffered a double exposure. It was also on the murky side, except for a slash of light cutting right through the center of the boarded-up south wall. I was glad I hadn’t ordered duplicates: the realtor wouldn’t show these to anybody.
I looked for a little present to take to Coral Upchurch later today. There was a souvenir section in the market, but the only thing that caught my eye was a plastic ashtray with a picture of a pelican sitting on a pier. But who wanted to extinguish their cigarette in the middle of a pelican?
***
“You look very nice,” I told Coral. She really did. She wore a white dress with a white lace shawl that matched her freshly-styled white feathery hair. Her nail polish matched her coral necklace. A fragrance that I guessed was her perfume floated subtly in the air.
“Thank you, Marcus. It’s a special day.”
