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.”