The Turtle Boy

hedges reared high, the tangles of weeds and switch grass occasionally gathering at the base of gnarled trees upon whose palsied arms leaves hung as an apparent afterthought. In the field beyond, high grass flowed beneath the gentle caress of the slightest of breezes. The land was framed by dying walnut trees, rotten arms severed by lightning long gone, poking up into the sky as if vying for the attention of a deity who could save them. A killdeer fluttered its wings in feigned distress and hopped across the gravel path in front of the two boys, hoping to lead them away from a nest it had concealed somewhere nearby.

“Think we should follow it?” Timmy asked in a tone that suggested he found the idea about as interesting as trying to run up a tree.

“All I can think of is the pond,” Pete muttered. “We could go fishing.”

“My pole’s broken. So’s yours, remember?”

Pete nodded. “Oh yeah. The swordfight.”

“That I won.”

“No you didn’t.”

“I sure did. I snapped yours first.”

“No way,” said Pete, more alive than Timmy had seen him in days. “They both snapped at the same time!”

“Whatever.”

“’Whatever’ yourself.”

They walked in silence for a moment, the brief surge of animosity already fading in the heat. A hornet buzzed Pete’s ear and he yelped as he flapped a hand at it. Timmy laughed and once the threat had passed, Pete did too. The echoes of their mirth hung in the muggy air.

They came to a bend in the path where the ground was softer and rarely dry even in summer. The passage of the construction crew had made ridges in the earth here, an obstacle the boys tackled with relish. This in turn led to a crude wooden bridge which consisted of two planks nailed together and flung haphazardly across an overgrown gully. Beneath the bridge, a thin stream of dirty water trickled sluggishly over the rocks and cracked concrete blocks the builders had tossed in to lighten their load.

Myers Pond — named after the doctor and his sons who’d built it one summer long before Timmy was born — had managed to remain unspoiled and unpolluted thus far. It was a welcome sight as the boys fought their way through grass that had grown tall in their absence.

The boy already sitting there, however, wasn’t.

Pete paused and scratched furiously at his shoulder, waiting for Timmy to say what they were both thinking. They were standing where a wide swath of grass had been trampled flat, the slope of the bank mere feet away. A dragonfly hovered before the frail-looking boy on the bank as if curious to see what this new intruder had in mind, then zipped away over the shimmering surface of the pond.

Timmy looked at Pete and whispered: “Do you know that kid?”

Pete shook his head. “Do you?”

“No.”

The pond was shared by many of the neighborhood kids, a virtual oasis in the summer if you were brave enough to stalk forth amongst the legion of ticks and chiggers, but few people swam there. The story went that when Doctor Myers built the pond all those years ago he’d filled it with baby turtles, and that now those babies had grown to the size of Buicks, hiding down where the water was darkest, waiting for unsuspecting toes to come wiggling.

Had it been another boy from the neighborhood, Timmy wouldn’t have cared. But this wasn’t any kid he had ever seen before, and while it was common for other children to visit their friends around here, they seldom came this far from the safety of the houses.

And this kid was odd looking, even odder looking than Pete.

He sat so close to the water they could almost hear gravity groaning from the strain of keeping him from falling in. He didn’t wear shorts as the burgeoning heat demanded but rather a pair of long gray trousers with a crease in the middle, rolled up so that a bony ankle showed, the rest of his foot submerged in the slimy green fringe of the water, bobbing up and down like a lure.

His impossibly large hands — adult hands, Timmy thought — were splayed out behind him, whiter still than the chalky foot and even from where Timmy stood he could see those fingers were tipped with black crescents of dirt.

He nudged Pete, who jumped as if bitten.

“What?”

“Go talk to him,” Timmy said, a half-smile on his face, knowing his friend would balk at the idea. Pete raised copper eyebrows and scoffed as quietly as he could.

Not quietly enough, however. For the kid turned and spotted them, his eyes like bullets gleaming in the sunlight as he appraised them. His hair was shorn away in patches, contrasting with the long greasy brown clumps that sank beneath and sprouted from the collar of his ripped black T-shirt. The exposed patches of scalp were an angry red.

“Who are you?” Timmy asked, stumbling out of his amazement and horror at the appearance of the stranger and composing himself, ready at a moment’s notice to look tough.

The chalk foot bobbed. All three boys watched it and then the kid smiled at them. Pete actually backed up a step, a low groan coming from his throat like a trapped fly, and Timmy found he had to strain to avoid doing something similar. If someone had whispered an insult to his mother into his ear, he wouldn’t have been any less disturbed than he was by that smile. It was crooked, and wrong. Something pricked his ankle. He looked down and hissing, slapped away a mosquito. When he straightened, the boy was standing in front of him and this time he couldn’t restrain a yelp of surprise.

Up close the kid looked even more peculiar, as if his face were the result of a shortsighted child’s mix-n’- match game. His eyes were cold dark stones, set way too far apart, and reminded Timmy of the one and only catfish he had ever caught in this pond. He wondered if there was something wrong with the kid; maybe he’d gone crazy after being bitten by a rabid squirrel or something. Stuff like that happened, he knew. He’d heard the stories.

The kid’s head looked like a rotten squash beaten and decorated to resemble a human being’s and his mouth could have been a recently healed wound…or a burn.

Instinct told him to run and only the steady panting behind him told him that Pete hadn’t already fled. A soft breeze cooled the sweat on the nape of his neck and he swallowed, flinched when a bug’s legs tickled his cheek.

The kid’s eyes were on him and Timmy couldn’t keep from squirming. It was as if his mother had caught him looking at a girl’s panties. His cheeks burned with shame.

And then the kid spoke: “Darryl,” he said in words spun from filaments of phlegm, making it sound as if he needed to clear his throat.

It took Timmy a moment to decipher what he’d heard and to realize it wasn’t a threat, or an insult, or a challenge. The last thing he had expected from the creepy-looking boy was a simple answer. He felt his shoulders drop a notch.

“Oh. Hi. I’m…uh…Timmy.” The moment the words crawled from his mouth, he regretted them. Without knowing why, he felt more in danger now that he’d revealed his name.

The boy stared back at him and nodded. “This your pond?” he asked, cocking his strangely shaped head towards the water.

Timmy’s mind raced, quickly churning possible responses into something coherent. What emerged was: “Yes. No.” Aw crap.

The boy said nothing but grinned a grin of ripped stitches and turned back to look out over the water. Pine and walnut trees clustered together on the far side of the pond and some distance beyond them lay the train tracks. Timmy found himself wondering if the kid had been traveling the trains and jumped off to see what trouble he could cause in Delaware. He sincerely hoped not and was all of a sudden very conscious of how far away from the houses they were. Would anyone hear a scream?

A sudden gust of wind hissed high in the trees and a twisted branch overhanging the pond dipped its leaves into the water as if checking the temperature.