Kealan Burke: The Turtle Boy

“Good night, Dad.”

“Good night, kiddo. I’ll see you in the morning.” He walked, Coke in hand, to the door. “Have sweet dreams now, you hear me? Don’t go wasting any more time and energy on ghosts and goblins. Nothing in the dark you can’t see in the daylight. Remember that.”

Timmy smiled weakly. “I will. Thanks.”

His father nodded and closed the door, but just as the boy had resigned himself to solitude and all the fanciful and awful ponderings that would be birthed within it, the door opened again and his father poked his head in.

“One more thing.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t want you going back to the pond for a while. You know, just in case there are some odd folk hanging around down there.”

“Okay.”

“Good boy. See you in the morning.”

“See you in the morning too.” His father started to close the door.

“Dad?”

A sigh. “Yes?”

“Do you think there are turtles back there? Like, big ones?”

“Who knows? I’ve never seen them but that isn’t to say they aren’t there. Now quit worrying about it and get some sleep.”

“I will.”

“Goodnight.”

The door closed and Timmy listened to his father’s slippers slopping against the bare wood steps of the stairs. It was followed by mumbled conversation and Timmy guessed his mother was being filled in on The Turtle Boy story. Her laughter, crisp and warm, echoed through the house.

Timmy turned his back on the aquatic renderings and stared at his Hulk poster on the opposite wall. As he replayed moments from his favorite episodes of the show, he found himself drifting, edging closer to the bank of sleep where he sat among ugly children with wounded feet and burst stitches for smiles.

The next morning, he called for Pete and found him in his sun-washed kitchen, hunched over a bowl of cereal as if afraid someone was going to steal it.

“Hi Pete.”

Pete looked positively bleached. Except for the angry purple bruise around his left eye. “Hi.”

“Ouch. Where did you get the shiner?”

“Fell.”

“Where?”

Pete shrugged but said nothing further and while this wasn’t unusual, Timmy sensed his friend was still shaken from their meeting with Darryl the day before. He, on the other hand, had managed to convince himself that they had simply stumbled upon some sick kid from one of the neighboring towns who had ventured out of his camp to see what the city had to offer. Pete’s father had once told the boys about the less prosperous areas of Delaware and warned them not to ride their bikes there after sundown. He’d frightened them with stories about what had happened to those children who’d disobeyed their parents and ventured there after dark. They had resolved never to step foot outside their own neighborhood if they could help it. Of course, they couldn’t stop people from coming in to their neighborhood either and after much musing, Timmy had decided that that was exactly what had happened. Nothing creepy going on, just a kid sniffing around in uncharted territory. No big deal. And though he’d been scared to stumble upon the strange kid with the mangled foot, the fear had buckled under the weight of solid reasoning and now he felt more than a little silly for panicking.

It appeared, however, that the waking nightmare had yet to let Pete go. The longer Timmy watched him, the more worried he became. It didn’t help that Pete was accident-prone. Every other week he had some kind of injury to display.

“You all right, Pete?” he asked as he slid into a chair.

Pete nodded and made a snorting sound as he shoveled a spoonful of Cheerios into his mouth. A teardrop of milk ran from the corner of his mouth, dangled from his chin, then fell back into the white sea beneath his face. A smile curled Timmy’s lips as he recalled his mother saying: “If you ever eat like that kid, you’d better be prepared to hunt for your own food. Honestly, you’d think they starve him over there or something.”

When Pete finished, he raised the bowl to his lips and drained the remaining milk from it, then wiped a forearm across his lips and belched softly.

“So what should we do today?” Timmy asked, already bored with the stale atmosphere in Pete’s house.

Pete shrugged but the reply came from the hallway behind them.

“He’s not doing anything today. He’s grounded.”

Timmy turned in his chair. It was Pete’s father.

Wayne Marshall was tall and thin; his skin brushed with the same healthy glow nature had denied his son. He wore silver wire-rimmed glasses atop an aquiline nose. Thick black eyebrows sat like a dark horizon between the sweeping black wings of his bangs. He was frightening when angry, but Timmy seldom stuck around to see the full force of his wrath. Right now it seemed he was on ‘simmer.’

“What were you two boys doing back at Myers Pond yesterday?” he asked as he strode into the kitchen and plucked an errant strand of hair from his tie. From what Timmy had seen, the man only owned two suits — one black, the other a silvery gray. Today he wore the former, with a white shirt and a red and black striped tie.

He looked at Pete but the boy was staring into his empty bowl as if summoning the ghost of his Cheerios.

Timmy swallowed. “We were looking for something to do. We thought we might go fishing but our poles are broken.”

Mr. Marshall nodded. As he poured himself a coffee, Timmy noticed no steam rose from the liquid as it surged into the cup. Cold coffee? It made him wonder how early these people got up in the morning. After all, it was only eight-thirty now.

“The new Zebco pole I bought Petey for his birthday a few months back, you mean?”

Timmy grimaced. “I didn’t know it was a new one. He never told me that.”

The man leaned against the counter and studied Timmy with obvious distaste and the boy felt his face grow hot under the scrutiny. He decided Pete had earned himself a good punch for not rescuing him.

“Yeah well….” Pete’s father said, pausing to sip from his cup. He smacked his lips. “There isn’t much point going back to the pond if you’re not going fishing, is there? I mean, what else is there to do?”

Timmy shrugged. “I dunno. Stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

Another shrug. His mother had warned him about shrugging when asked a direct question, and how irritating it was to grown-ups, but at that moment he felt like his shoulders were tied to counterweights and threaded through eyehooks in the ceiling.

“Messin’ around and stuff. You know…playing army. That kind of stuff.”

“What’s wrong with playing army out in the yard, or better still in your yard with all the trees you’ve got back there?”

“I don’t know.”

The urge to run infected him, but his mind kept a firm foot on the brakes. He had already let his yellow belly show once this week; it wasn’t going to happen again now, no matter how cranky Mr. Marshall was feeling this morning. But it was getting progressively harder to return the man’s gaze, and although he had seen Pete’s dad lose his cool more than once, he wasn’t sure he had ever felt this much animosity coming from him. The sudden dislike was almost palpable.

Mr. Marshall’s demeanor changed. He sipped his coffee and grinned, but there was a distinct absence of humor in the expression. His smoldering glare shifted momentarily to Pete, who shuffled in response. Timmy felt his spine contract with discomfort.

“Petey was telling me about this Turtle Boy you boys are supposed to have met.”

At that moment, had Timmy eyes in the back of his head, they would have been glaring at Pete. He didn’t know why. After all, he had told his father. But his father hadn’t blown a gasket over some busted fishing poles, Zebco or no Zebco, and had waved away the idea of a ghost at Myers Pond without a second thought.