“Menu-wise, it might not hurt you to branch out a little,” my mother once said, in reference to my captive luna moth. It was the size of a paperback novel, a beautiful mint green, but not much interested in ground chuck. “Maybe you could feed it some, I don’t know, flowers or something.”
Like she knew.
The best-caught creature belonged to Shaun’s younger brother, Chris, who’d found an injured flying squirrel and kept him, uncaged, in his bedroom. The thing was no bigger than an ordinary hamster, and when he glided from the top bunk to the dresser, his body flattened out, making him look like an empty hand puppet. The only problem was the squirrel’s disposition, his one-track mind. You wanted him to cuddle or ride sentry on your shoulder, but he refused to relax. I’ve got to get out of here, you could sense him thinking, as he clawed, desperate and wild-eyed, at the windowpane, or tried to squeeze himself underneath the door. He made it out eventually, and though we all hoped he’d return for meals, become a kind of part-time pet, he never did.
Not long after the squirrel broke free, Jean took her boys and me for a weekend on the North Carolina coast. It was mid-October, the start of the sixth grade, and the water was too chilly to swim in. On the Sunday we were to head back home, Shaun and I got up at dawn and took a walk with our nets. We were hunting for ghost crabs, when in the distance we made out these creatures moving blockily, like windup toys on an unsteady surface. On closer inspection we saw that they were baby sea turtles, dozens of them, digging out from under the sand and stumbling toward the ocean.
An adult might have carried them into the surf, or held at bay the predatory gulls, but we were twelve, so while I scooped the baby turtles into a pile, Shaun ran back and got the trash cans from our hotel room. We might have walked off with the whole lot, but they seemed pretty miserable, jumbled atop one another. Thus, in the end, we took just ten, which meant five apiece.
The great thing about the sea turtles, as opposed to, say, flying squirrels, was that they would grow exponentially—meaning, what, fifty, a hundred times their original size? When we got them, each called to mind a plastic coin purse, the oval sort handed out by banks and car dealerships. Then there were the flippers and, of course, the heads, which were bald and beaky, like a newly hatched bird’s. Since the death of a traumatized mole pried from the mouth of our cat, Samantha, my aquarium had sat empty and was therefore ready for some new tenants. I filled it with a jug of ocean water I’d brought from the beach, then threw in a conch shell and a couple of sand dollars to make it more homey. The turtles swam the short distance from one end of the tank to the other, and then they batted at the glass with their flippers, unable to understand that this was it—the end of the road. What they needed, it seemed, was something to eat.
“Mom, do we have any raw hamburger?”
Looking back, you’d think that someone would have said something—sea turtles, for God’s sake!—but maybe they weren’t endangered yet. Animal cruelty hadn’t been invented either. The thought that a non–human being had physical feelings, let alone the wherewithal to lose hope, was outlandish and alien, like thinking that paper had relatives. Then too, when it comes to eliciting empathy, it’s the back of the line for reptiles and amphibians, creatures with, face it, not much in the way of a personality. Even giving them names didn’t help, as playing with Shelly was no different from playing with Pokyhontus; “playing,” in this case, amounting to placing them on my desk and watching them toddle over the edge.
It was good to know that in the house down the street Shaun’s turtles weren’t faring much better. The hamburger meat we’d put in our aquariums went uneaten, and within a short time it spoiled and started stinking up our rooms. I emptied my tank, and in the absence of more seawater, I made my own with plain old tap water and salt.
“I’m not sure that that’s going to work,” my mother said. She was standing in my doorway with a cigarette in one hand and an ashtray in the other. Recent experiments with a home-frosting kit had dried out and broken her already brittle hair. What was left she’d covered with a scarf, a turquoise one, that looked great when she had a tan but not so great when she didn’t. “Doesn’t ocean water have nutrients in it or something?”
“I dunno.”
She looked at the turtles unhappily dragging themselves across my bedspread. “Well, if you want to find out, I’m taking Lisa to the library this Saturday.”
I’d hoped to spend my weekend outside, but then it rained and my father hogged the TV for one of his football games. It was either go to the library or stay home and die of boredom, so I got into the car, groaning at the unfairness of it all. My mother dropped my sister and me downtown, and then she went to do some shopping, promising to return in a few hours.
It wasn’t much to look at, our public library. I’d later learn that it used to be a department store, which made sense: the floor-to-ceiling windows were right for mannequins, and you could easily imagine dress shirts where the encyclopedias were, wigs in place of the magazines. I remember that in the basement there were two restrooms, one marked “Men” and the other marked “Gentlemen.” Inside each was a toilet, a sink, and a paper towel dispenser, meaning that whichever you chose you got pretty much the same treatment. Thus it came down to how you saw yourself: as regular or fancy. On the day I went to research turtles, I saw myself as fancy, so I opened the door marked “Gentlemen.” What happened next happened very quickly: Two men, both of them black, turned their heads in my direction. One was standing with his pants and underwear pulled down past his knees, and as he bent to yank them up, the other man, who’d been kneeling before him and who also had his pants lowered, covered his face with his hand and let out a little cry.
“Oh,” I told them, “I’m sorry.”
I backed, shaken, out of the room, and just as the door had closed behind me, it swung open again. Then the pair spilled out, that flying-squirrel look in their eyes. The stairs were at the end of a short hall, and they took them two at a time, the slower man turning his head, just briefly, and looking at me as if I held a gun. When I saw that he was afraid of me, I felt powerful. Then I wondered how I might use that power.
My first instinct was to tell on them—not because I wanted the two punished but because I would have liked the attention. “Are you all right?” the librarian would have asked. “And these were Negroes, you say? Quick, somebody, get this young man a glass of water or, better yet, a Coke. Would you like a Coke while we wait for the police?”
And in my feeblest voice I would have said, “Yes.”
Then again, it could so easily backfire. The men were doing something indecent, and recognizing it as such meant that I had an eye for it. That I too was suspect. And wasn’t I?
In the end I told no one. Not even Lisa.
“So did you find out what kind of turtles they are?” my mother asked as we climbed back into the car.
“Sea turtles,” I told her.
“Well, we know that.”
“No, I mean, that’s what they’re called, ‘sea turtles.’”
“And what do they eat?”
I looked out the rain-streaked window. “Hamburger.”
My mother sighed. “Have it your way.”
It took a few weeks for my first turtle to die. The water in the tank had again grown murky with spoiled, uneaten beef, but there was something else as well, something I couldn’t begin to identify. The smell that developed in the days after Halloween, this deep, swampy funk, was enough to make your throat close up. It was as if the turtles’ very souls were rotting, yet still they gathered in the corner of their tank, determined to find the sea. At night I would hear their flippers against the glass, and think about the Negroes in the Gentlemen’s room, wondering what would become of them—what, by extension, would become of me? Would I too have to live on the run? Afraid of even a twelve-year-old?
One Friday in early November my father paid a rare visit to my room. In his hand was a glass of gin, his standard after-work cocktai
l, mixed with a little water and garnished with a lemon peel. I liked the drink’s medicinal smell, but today it was overpowered by the aquarium. He regarded it briefly and, wincing at the stench, removed two tickets from his jacket pocket. “They’re for a game,” he told me.
“A game?”
“Football,” he said. “I thought we could go tomorrow afternoon.”
“But tomorrow I have to write a report.”
“Write it on Sunday.”
I’d never expressed any interest in football. Never played it with the kids on the street, never watched it on TV, never touched the helmet I’d received the previous Christmas. “Why not take Lisa?” I asked.
“Because you’re my son, that’s why.”
I looked at the holocaust taking place in my aquarium. “Do I have to?”
If I were to go to a game today, I’d certainly find something to enjoy: the food, the noise, the fans marked up with paint. It would be an experience. At the time, though, it threw me into a panic. Which team am I supposed to care about? I asked myself as we settled into our seats. How should I react if somebody scores a point? The thing about sports, at least for guys, is that nobody ever defines the rules, not even in gym class. Asking what a penalty means is like asking who Jesus was. It’s one of those things you’re just supposed to know, and if you don’t, there’s something seriously wrong with you.
Two of the popular boys from my school were standing against a railing a few rows ahead of us, and when I stupidly pointed them out to my father, he told me to go say hello.
How to explain that looking at them, even from this distance, was pushing it. Addressing them, it followed, was completely out of the question. People had their places, and to not understand that, to act in violation of it, demoted you from a nature nut to something even lower, a complete untouchable, basically. “That’s all right,” I said. “They don’t really know who I am.”
“Aw, baloney. Go over and talk to them.”
“No, really.”
“Do you want me to drag you over there?”
As I dug in, I thought of the turtles. All they’d ever wanted was to live in the ocean—that was it, their entire wish list, and instead I’d decided they’d be better off in my bedroom. Just as my dad had decided that I’d be better off at the football game. If I could have returned them to the beach, I would have, though I knew it was already too late. In another few days they would start going blind. Then their shells would soften, and they’d just sort of melt away, like soap.
“Are you going over there or aren’t you?” my dad said.
When the last turtle died and was pitched into the woods behind my house, Shaun and I took up bowling, the only sport I was ever half decent at. The Western Lanes was a good distance away, and when our parents wouldn’t drive us, we rode our bikes, me with a transistor radio attached by rubber bands to my handlebars. We were just thinking of buying our own bowling shoes when Shaun’s mother and father separated. Hank took an apartment in one of the new complexes, and a few months later, not yet forty years old, he died.
“Died of what?” I asked.
“His heart stopped beating” was the answer Shaun gave me.
“Well, sure,” I said, “but doesn’t every dead person’s heart stop beating? There must have been something else going on.”
“His heart stopped beating.”
Following the funeral there was a reception at the Taylors’ house. Shaun and I spent most of it on the deck off his living room, him firing his BB gun into the woods with that telescopic look in his eye. After informing me that his father’s heart had stopped beating, he never said another word about him. I never saw Shaun cry, or buckle at the knees, or do any of the things that I would have done. Dramawise it was the chance of a lifetime, but he wasn’t having any of it. From the living room, I could hear my father talking to Jean. “What with Hank gone, the boys are going to need a positive male influence in their lives,” he said. “That being the case, I’ll be happy to, well, happy to—”
“Ignore them,” my mother cut in. “Just like he does with his own damn kids.”
And Jean laughed. “Oh, Sharon.”
Eighteen years passed before I learned what had really happened to Shaun’s father. By then I was living in Chicago. My parents were still in Raleigh, and several times a week I’d talk to my mother on the phone. I don’t remember how the subject came up, but after she told me I was stunned.
“Did Shaun know?” I asked.
“I’m sure he did,” my mother said, and although I hadn’t seen or spoken to him since high school, I couldn’t help but feel a little betrayed. If you can’t tell your best friend that your dad essentially drank himself to death, who can you tell? It’s a lot to hold in at that age, but then I guess we all had our secrets.
It was after talking to my mom on the phone that I finally went to the library and looked up those turtles: “loggerheads” is what they were called. When mature, they can measure three and a half feet long. A female might reach four hundred pounds, and, of all the eggs she lays in a lifetime, only one in a thousand will make it to adulthood. Pretty slim odds when, by “making it,” you mean simply surviving.
Before the reception ended that day, Shaun handed his BB gun to me. My father was watching from the living room window and interceded just as I raised it to my shoulder.
“Oh no, you don’t. You’re going to put somebody’s eye out.”
“Somebody like a bird?” I said. “We’re firing into the woods, not into the house.”
“I don’t give a damn where you’re aiming.”
I handed the rifle back to Shaun, and as he brushed the hair from his eyes and peered down the scope, I tried to see what I imagined he did: a life on the other side of this, something better, perhaps even majestic, waiting for us to grow into it.
If I Ruled the World
If I ruled the world, the first thing I’d do is concede all power to the real King, who, in case you don’t happen to know, is named Jesus Christ. A lot of people have managed to forget this lately, so the second thing I’d do is remind them of it. Not only would I bring back mandatory prayer in school, but I’d also institute it at work. Then in skating rinks and airports. Wherever people live or do business, they shall know His name. Christ’s picture will go on all our money, and if you had your checks specially printed with sailboats or shamrocks on them, too bad for you because from here on out, the only images allowed will be of Him, or maybe of me reminding you of how important He is.
T-shirts with crosses and apostles on them will be allowed, but none of this nonsense you see nowadays, this one my neighbor has, for example. “Certified Sex Instructor,” it says. He claims he only wears it while mowing the lawn, but in the summer that’s once a week, which in my book is once a week too often. I mean, please, he’s seventy-two!
Jesus and I are going to take that T-shirt, and all the ones like it, and use them as rags for washing people’s mouths out. I normally don’t believe in rough stuff, but what about those who simply refuse to learn? “Look,” I’ll say to Jesus, “enough is enough. I suggest we nail some boards together and have ourselves an old-fashioned crucifixion.” It’s bound to stir up a few bad memories, but having been gone for all that time, He probably won’t know how bad things have gotten. “Just turn on the radio,” I’ll tell Him. “It’s the thing next to my ferret cage with all the knobs on it.”
Jesus will tune in to our local so-called music station, and within two minutes He’ll know what I’m talking about—music so rude it’ll make His ears blister. And the TV! I turned mine on the other morning and came upon a man who used to be a woman. Had a little mustache, a potbelly and everything. Changed her name from Mary Louise to Vince and sat back with a satisfied smile on her face, figuring she’d licked the system. And maybe she did last year when they did the operation, but Jesus is the system now, and we’ll just have to hear what He has to say about it.
The creature on TV—I can’t say male or fema
le without bringing on a stomachache—said that when it was a woman it was attracted to men and that it still is. This means that now, on top of everything else, it’s a homosexual. As if we didn’t have enough already, some doctor had to go and make one!
Well, to hell with him—quite literally—and to hell with all the other gays too. And the abortionists, and the people who have had abortions, even if they were raped or the baby had three heads and delivering it was going to tear the mother to pieces. “That was YOUR baby,” I’m going to say to Jesus. “Now, are you going to just sit there and watch it get thrown onto some trash heap?”
And Jesus will say, “No, Cassie Hasselback, I am not!”
He and I are going to work really well together. “What’s next on the agenda?” He’ll ask, and I’ll point Him to the Muslims and vegans who believe their God is the real one. The same goes for the Buddhists and whoever it is that thinks cows and monkeys have special powers. Then we’ll move on to the comedians, with their “F this” and “GD that.” I’ll crucify the Democrats, the Communists, and a good 97 percent of the college students. Don’t laugh, Tim Cobblestone, because you’re next! Think you can let your cat foul my flower beds and get away with it? Well, think again! And Curtis Devlin, who turned down my application for a home-improvement loan; and Carlotta Buffington, who only got her job because she’s paralyzed on one side; and even my grandson Kenyan Bullock. He just turned five, but no matter what Trisha says, this is not a phase—the child is evil, and it’s best to stop him now before any real damage is done. And all the other evil people and whores and liars who want to take away our freedom or raise my taxes, they shall know our fury, Jesus’s and mine, and burn forever.