by Mark Bouman
At some point Dad had brought home an ornamental cement fountain, and now it sat beneath a good-sized poplar tree. We’d never used it for anything, apart from the times Jerry and I hid behind it while playing army, and Dad had never shown any interest in it, so I figured it was fair game for me to use. I knew it wouldn’t hold water because there was a hole in the bottom, probably where a pipe was supposed to run, so I rummaged around in Dad’s shed until I found a container filled with sticky white goop that seemed like it would seal the gap. After slathering the goop in the hole, I spent the next ten minutes searching for some large rocks to place at the center of the fountain. Then I connected two garden hoses together, set the open end beneath one of the rocks, and raced to turn on the tap. While water poured into the enclosure, I grabbed the turtle from my room. Back at the fountain, I carefully set the turtle down on the rock pile in the center, stepping back to survey his new home as it filled with water.
“Okay, little turtle, this is your home now,” I said.
He extended his neck toward the splashing hose, as if to get even closer to the water. My gaze traced the thin, red lines arcing above his eyes and back onto his neck, continuing up the curve of his shell. His shell was only about an inch across, though his neck seemed nearly as long as my thumb. Over the sound of the running water, I heard a sort of click. It took me a moment to find the source: a beetle had fallen out of the poplar above, landing shell down on one of the rocks. The beetle struggled for a few seconds, legs waving in the air, and then it rolled down the side of the rock and disappeared into a crack. My turtle had been watching as well, and it followed the beetle down into the damp darkness, vanishing from my view.
“Enjoy.” I grinned. “I’ll see you soon.”
My turtle filled my imagination at school. I pictured what he was doing without me, and I could almost feel like I was there with him at the fountain. Algae and moss had begun to grow in the water, green stains competing with the bright orange color so familiar from our hard water. My turtle loved to leave one of his feet in the water while he sunned on a rock, and when he dived, he always spun toward the side of that trailing foot. His tiny head, no bigger than one of my fingernails, lanced across the water at the point of a wide, expanding V, sometimes disappearing completely before reappearing, seconds or even minutes later, in some other part of the pool.
When I wanted to hold my turtle and speak so it could understand me, I would find a beetle and hold it in the water, and more often than not the ripples would attract him. When he swam close enough, I’d slip my hand into the water behind him, scooping him in a motion so smooth that his legs continued to swim the air, even as his head retracted in surprise.
“It’s okay, it’s okay. I just want to say hello. You’re safe.”
I would have been content to stay inside those memories from the homeroom bell to the release bell, but school knew the trick of lifting me back into reality. It always started with the sound of my name.
“Mark, where is your homework?”
“Forgot your gym clothes again, Mark?”
“Why does Mark have to be my partner?”
My name became a synonym for something unwanted, unpleasant, and all I could think about was how to escape. I had grown up hearing the story of a hunting trip Dad and Mom had made to Montana. Dad had shot a black bear and two mule deer, and for the trip home he tied the bear to the hood and lashed one deer to each door. When they stopped for fuel and a restroom break, they were forced to climb in and out of the windows. I imagined what it would be like to escape to such a place, a wilderness filled with animals. A place of endless trees where my name was never spoken.
As the school weeks stumbled past, my daydreams began to coalesce around the very place where my parents had traveled. One day during social studies, the word Montana took on an individual and urgent voice, walking into my head and whispering of endless forests and vast lakes, isolated places where I could wander forever without hearing the syllable of my name pronounced. In Montana I could choose my own name, maybe, a new name that would make me a new person. And there were turtles there just waiting for someone to find them.
“Mark? Isn’t he the weird one?”
“Mark always gets the worst grades.”
“This seat’s already taken, Mark.”
Time and time again I was called back to a classroom or a locker room or a lunchroom filled with kids who were smarter and faster and cooler, while I was stuck being Mark, living on a hill of sand with a bookworm brother, a kid sister with a ton of friends, a dad who smiled before he hit me, and a mom who seemed powerless to stop him—and no amount of imagining was going to get me to Montana.
One day Sheri announced that she’d won a goldfish at school—which drew an apathetic grunt from me—and then she said that she had put the goldfish into my pond. “Now your turtle can have someone to play with,” she gushed.
That elicited an outraged grunt, along with a half-shouted, “He doesn’t want someone to play with. He has me.”
“But you can’t swim with him, dummy. He wants to have another creature to swim with.”
I could feel the anger rising. “You’re the dummy, and your fish is even dumber. I hope my turtle eats it!”
Sheri giggled. “He can’t eat my fish—my fish is almost as big as your tiny little turtle!”
She ran off while I raced down to the pond, fuming. Every so often I caught a glimpse of my sister’s fish, a quick flash of bright orange and a tiny ripple in the surface of the water. My turtle was sunning on the largest rock in the center.
“C’mon, boy, don’t you want to go get that stupid fish?”
Either my turtle didn’t hear me or it didn’t care. But I did. My sister’s fish was an intruder. I’d created the pond for my turtle so it could be safe and happy and do what it pleased. I didn’t want it to have to compete for space or fight for survival. I wanted the pond to be a place of solitude—and now Sheri was horning in on it without even asking me. A goldfish was a little girl’s pet. It made my pond feel like a toy. The turtle pond was my slice of riverside, my reminder of the peace that I’d discovered during the summer. The only times I’d been content since coming back from the river were when I spent time with my turtle. I hated school, and I hated how there was nothing to do in my room and how everything in the house seemed to be broken or breaking.
Just recently Dad had walled off part of the living room to make the master bedroom bigger, and since that blocked off the entrance to the living room, he used a power saw to cut a new doorway in the kitchen wall, directly through the middle of the cabinets and the counter. Worse, Dad discovered a bunch of pipes on the floor, across his new doorway, and decided they would be too much trouble to move. His solution was to toss a small, dirty carpet over them and tell us to “get used to it.” I didn’t have to think about that kind of thing when I was with my turtle. I could sort of shut down my brain and just sit without thought or worry or fear.
I tried to calm down, hoping everything would get back to normal soon. The fish was bound to die. I studied my turtle’s shell, which still carried a faint shine from the last time he’d climbed from the water. After several minutes of sunning himself, he turned and slipped back into the water. He could go anywhere and do anything—which at that moment, sadly, did not appear to include attacking and killing my sister’s fish. I decided to feed the turtle, and after a few minutes of searching the nearby trees, I discovered a praying mantis perched on a twig. I pulled off its wings, carried it back to the pond, and set it afloat on a leaf. My turtle slipped off the rock and disappeared beneath the water, and a moment later he reappeared beside the mantis, pulling it into the water and devouring it.
School didn’t get any better with time, and home—apart from my turtle—was how it always was: moments of fun, moments of terror, and lots of sitting around waiting for time to wander past.
Jerry and Sheri seemed like they were each on a raft, and both were drifting away from me in different directions, while I
was stuck on an island. I knew what life was like on that island, and I knew they might end up somewhere better than me, but I just couldn’t seem to move.
Sheri had a whole pack of friends, and she was constantly at a sleepover or a fair or a restaurant with one girl or another. Jerry seemed like he was digging deeper into his books, finding a place to escape that eluded me. None of us understood what was happening at home, like what it meant when Dad would choose one of us to teach a special lesson to, or why we could never afford new clothes. What could we say to one another? What could we do for one another? It seemed the only thing that worked was to put our heads down and try to live in a world of one.
The kids at school knew who my father was, and plenty of them would have been first in line to come over and ride the tank or shoot guns, but that idea terrified me. Dad might be fine, but he might not be. It was safer to never invite anyone over and safer still to never speak about what happened at home.
I had plenty of time to think while riding the bus to and from school each day. I’d imagine my way inside the houses we passed, watching kids sit at clean kitchen tables, watching fathers announce their arrival home from work with hugs and questions about school, watching mothers fold fresh laundry and bake cookies. When we left the neighborhoods behind and drove through the countryside, I’d imagine I was standing on an expanse of black steel and an unseen force was pushing me toward the edge of an abyss. Closer and closer, yet I never quite fell in. And so my thoughts would turn to my turtle—the closest thing I had to a friend, though it didn’t seem like much.
One afternoon, home from school, I noticed the water level was dropping in my turtle pond, so I hooked up the hoses and draped one end over the rim.
It wasn’t until the next morning, when I stopped to watch my turtle on the way to the bus stop, that I discovered the hose was still running. Water was slowly pouring over the rim, and while Sheri’s fish was still swimming, my turtle was nowhere to be seen. I dropped to my knees on the downhill side, where the sand was wet, hoping to discover the telltale tracks I knew so well from the hours of stalking up and down the river. Seeing nothing, I ran in circles, wider and wider, scanning the ground for any sign.
Nothing. My turtle was gone. Panting, not knowing what else to do, I turned off the hose. I could hear the bus coming, and I ran. The whole trip to school, my chin kept wanting to shake, and I wove my fingers together to keep them still. Dad was right: it really was pointless to waste good stuff on us kids, since we’d lose or break it anyway.
That week I replaced my missing turtle by stealing David Visser’s. He had brought his pet for show-and-tell, bragging about his fancy aquarium with its fake island and its heat lamp while the whole class oohed and aahed.
“Well, wasn’t that just delightful and so fascinating,” chirped Mrs. Woolerth. “If you have any more questions for David, you may ask him at recess. Class dismissed—except for you, Mark.”
I sighed and sat back down while everyone else poured out the door, laughing and shouting. I hadn’t completed my homework, again, and my teacher decided that keeping me inside would teach me a lesson. Left alone in the classroom, silent except for the playground noise that seeped in through the windows, I couldn’t take my eyes off the turtle. And when it turned its head to look at me, I quickly walked to the front of the room, grabbed it out of the aquarium, and jogged back to my desk with the turtle in hand. I shoved it deep into my desk, pushing my cupped hand past crumpled papers and books and pencils before releasing the creature as far away from the opening as I could.
I was just in time. Mrs. Woolerth opened the door and held it wide while the rest of the class trooped back inside. David Visser hadn’t been in the room more than ten seconds when he freaked out.
“My turtle is gone! My turtle is gone!” He was hopping up and down at the front of the room, his hands flapping at his side like bird wings.
Mrs. Woolerth knew exactly what had happened. “Mark Bouman, did you take David’s turtle!” It wasn’t really a question.
“No,” I shot back, “I didn’t!”
“I don’t believe you. You give David his turtle back this instant!”
Why had I said I didn’t take it? I was dead meat. Before I could decide what to do, Mrs. Woolerth decided for me.
“Dick, Michael, check Mark’s pockets, then check his desk—I want that turtle back!”
The boys had seen enough episodes of Adam-12 and Dragnet to do a pretty thorough job of frisking me, and when I came out clean, they moved to my desk. I was going to get caught for sure. It wouldn’t mean any trouble at home, because Mom and Dad would never find out, but it might mean trouble for me at school. David Visser had a lot more friends than I did. As I backed away, pulling my chair with me, the teacher’s two lackeys crouched down and peered inside my desk.
It was a pit. I probably had the messiest desk at school. Looking into my desk was like trying to see through pea-soup fog, so the boys began to fumble around with their hands, gingerly, as if they didn’t want to get cooties from all the junk. When that didn’t reveal a turtle, at Mrs. Woolerth’s urging, they began to lift things out and set them on the floor. All the while David Visser sat crying at his desk, surrounded by a sympathetic knot of kids who were trying to console him by patting him on the back and whispering insults about me.
“Teacher, there ain’t no turtle in here—we checked!” complained Michael, and Dick nodded his agreement.
“Everyone sit at your own desk. Now!” snapped our teacher. She looked like she wanted to strangle me.
I sat down and began to refill my desk, wondering where in the world the turtle had gone. Two rows up on my left, I could see David Visser’s head was slumped on his arms, and his shoulders were heaving up and down. Mrs. Woolerth gave us the angriest, fastest history lecture in the history of the world, then told us to write an essay until the next bell rang.
Thirty minutes later I dared to reach one arm into my desk, aiming for the spot where I’d placed the stolen pet. Ever so quietly I felt around, until—at the very end of my reach—my fingers brushed the familiar edge of a shell. Soon I had the turtle in my pocket, and the minute the bell rang I walked out the door, head down, feeling the burn of Mrs. Woolerth’s eyes and hearing the fresh sobs of David Visser.
Back at home that afternoon, I left the turtle in my pocket while I went inside and grabbed a piece of Wonder Bread and a cup, then returned to the pond. After I ripped off some bits of bread and sprinkled them near the edge, I took the cup in my left hand and a fist-sized rock in my right. When Sheri’s goldfish came for the bread, I scooped it up in the cup and then tipped it onto the cement rim of the pond. It flopped and flapped for a second or two, and then I brought down the rock on top of it.
I was elated. My turtle, my pond, and nothing to interfere. I took my new turtle from my pocket.
“Here’s your new home.”
I slipped my hand into the water and opened my palm, and the turtle slid off and swam away. I watched it circle once, twice—magic in motion—and then it climbed onto one of the rocks. I stared at it for a long time.
Then I looked down at the body of the goldfish. I had been wrong to kill it. Not just wrong. Evil. I’d wanted to protect my turtle, to have my pond all to myself, but I’d killed something defenseless. I quickly flicked the fish’s body into the water, feeling my throat tighten.
I heard the rumble of Dad chugging up the driveway, and I shivered. I had acted just like him.
25
DAD MARKED MY BODY with his belt and his hand more times than I could count. So often it began with a phrase from which there could be no escape.
“I thought I told you . . .”
He went to great lengths to force an answer from me, widening his eyes like he was waiting for my response, or asking again and again, “Well? Well?”
The moment I opened my mouth—wham!—my words were slapped away. I tried to spread my legs wide enough to withstand the coming blow, but Dad was simply too p
owerful. My head would bounce off the fridge, the door frame, or even Jerry or Sheri if they happened to be standing near.
Dad’s words were powerful too, and they seemed to be seared on my soul with a branding iron. How long did it take for the worst bruise to fade—a week? But I could still hear every name, loud and clear, that Dad had ever called me.
Imbecile.
The village idiot.
Good-for-nothing.
Any moment of the day—on the bus, slouched at my desk in school, on my back in bed—I could picture Dad standing over me, hands on his hips, declaring the truth.
Not very smart, kid.
Often after a beating, he would say, “I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it.” That wasn’t a figure of speech—Dad was stating a fact. I was completely powerless.
Dad even had the power to turn me against Jerry. We were brothers in suffering, and if we never said it out loud, it was because we both knew it: we were on the same team. Dad’s worsening temper, along with our differing reactions to it, had made us more isolated. Still, we were the closest thing to a friend either of us had at home, and we never forgot that.
It was always different with Sheri. When she was younger, she spent more time with Mom, more time playing inside with her dolls and her Easy-Bake Oven instead of tramping through the woods—and sure, more time being pushed around by me and Jerry. As she grew older she became a social butterfly, making countless plans and dates with her friends. The biggest difference between her and us, though, was her relationship with Dad. It became obvious that Dad was hurting us boys more and Sheri almost never. He needed no excuse to slap or beat us, whereas Sheri could sometimes get Dad to back down.
If he looked like he might be warming up to spank her for leaving the laundry unfolded, she might shout back, “Well, you didn’t give me enough time to do it!” Jerry and I would cringe, picturing what would happen if we even thought that, and meanwhile Dad might stalk off, muttering to himself, allowing Sheri to escape scot-free.
