The Back of the Turtle (11 page)

WHEN SONNY GETS UP THE NEXT MORNING, THE DOG IS GONE.
But what a wonderful time the two of them had.

Wham-wham.

When Sonny first saw the dog standing on the patio by the pool, he was concerned, for Dad has spoken of dogs on numerous occasions.

Don’t throw food to dogs.

Dogs vomit a lot.

Dogs have mighty appetites.

Sonny tries to remember if Dad has had anything good to say about dogs. He’s sure that if Dad met this dog, he would feel differently.

First, this dog is a good listener. Sonny told him all about the motel and the town and the turtles and the tourists who don’t come to Samaritan Bay anymore, and the dog did not interrupt once.

Second, this dog is a good swimmer. Sonny and the dog braved the cold water, jumped in the pool, and swam laps, and Sonny won five out of seven times. Sonny the winner!

Wham-wham, hammer-hammer.

Third, this dog knows stories that Sonny has never heard,
strange stories about women who fall out of the sky, about creatures similar to dogs who can change their shape, about birds who steal fire, and hero twins who fight monsters.

Some of these stories sound like the stories that Dad tells, but most of them don’t.

After they got out of the pool and dried themselves, Sonny showed the dog the nails that were popping out of the siding on the motel and how fast he could hammer them flush with the wood.

Wham-wham.

Watch Sonny, he would tell the dog, and then Sonny would snatch the hammer from his tool belt, line the nail up, and sink it with one swing.

Watch Sonny again.

Sonny could tell that the dog was impressed with Sonny’s strong stroke.

Snatch, line, swing. Snatch, line, swing. Until all the nails had been driven home.

Wham-wham, hammer-hammer.

And, when he ran out of nails, Sonny showed the dog how easy it was to hammer other things. Afterwards, he lay on the lounge chair with the dog curled up at his feet. They watched the stars together, and, for the first time in a long time, Sonny did not feel lonely.

BUT
now it is morning and the dog is gone. Sonny is sad. He liked having a friend, and if the dog were still here, Sonny would suggest that they go to the beach. They could run up and
down the shoreline, chasing each other, searching for salvage, doing the things that Sonny has seen good friends do on television.

But when Sonny stands up and looks around, he sees the problems that can come from high times. Hasn’t Dad told him that virtue is more important than fun, and that only fools think simply of having a good time?

More than once.

Wham-wham.

The EverFresh vending machine doesn’t look so good. The plastic face of the machine has been cracked in several places, and a number of the dispenser doors have been broken.

Was Sonny too energetic with his hammering? Was he trying too hard to impress the dog? Is this what happens when Sonny runs out of nails to hit?

How is he going to explain this to Dad? How could he have been so imprudent?

“Hello, Sonny.”

Sonny doesn’t think that this voice belongs to a tourist come to rent a room. He doesn’t think this voice belongs to the naked guy on the beach. He doesn’t think this voice belongs to the Indian woman in the yellow house.

He knows this voice.

“Business still adrift in the latitudes, I see.”

Sonny spins around, snatches the hammer from the belt, and looks for a nail to hit.

Wham!

“Peace, lad, for I’ve not come to run ye aground,” says Crisp, and he hoists the trunk off his shoulder. “I’ve brought ye a gift, a
bit of salvage what washed up and buried itself deep in the shore.”

Sonny glances at the Lava Java machine. It has hammer marks on it as well.

“It’s your beach, of course, and I’m only about a small service in bringing it to you along with an invitation.”

Sonny holds his hammer at the ready and tries to look calm and fierce.

“As ye know,” says Crisp, “tonight’s my birthday, and I’m to celebrate it with a small gathering of friends at the springs.” He pauses and waits. “I’m hoping that ye might slip your anchor and join us, for there’s nothing so fine in the known world as firm friends and warm water.”

Sonny looks at Room Number One, and he hopes that Dad will hear the commotion and come out to see what’s wrong. Dad will know how to deal with this predicament. Dad will know what to say. Dad will know what to do.

Dad will have extra nails.

“All right, then. I must be off.” Crisp takes one step back into the shadows. “Think on the offer, lad, for I’d like us to be the friends we once were.”

Sonny waits until he is sure that the predicament has left. That was close. That was very close. However the trunk is still here. The predicament didn’t take the trunk with him, and when Sonny looks at the chest closely, he recognizes it.

This is the trunk he had found. The trunk with the martial-arts writing on it. The trunk that was stuck in the sand on his beach.

This is his trunk.

Sonny carries the trunk to the pool. He puts it on the table with the pop-up umbrella, carefully removes the bent rod from the weathered hasp, and takes a deep breath.

Then he opens the lid.

MARA HAD GOTTEN UP BEFORE FIRST LIGHT AND SET THE
water to boil. The sun was shining, but she knew this wouldn’t last. These were the days when the fog came and went as it pleased. She debated packing a lunch, in case she stayed on the reserve longer than expected. Not that she could afford an extended visit. She needed to get back and finish the portrait.

Tomorrow she would start the underpainting for the others.

MARA
had always dreamed of going to Paris to study art. The Samaritan Bay library had had several books on the city, and she had devoured them. The galleries, the cafés, the parks, the monuments. Everywhere she had looked, history had looked back.

One of the books had a fold-out map. She and Lilly had followed the streets past La Conciergerie, where the Revolutionary Tribunal had sent thousands to the guillotine during the French Revolution, and had traced out the borders of the Place de la Concorde, where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had been beheaded. There had been a picture of the Arc de Triomphe, the monument that Napoleon commissioned to commemorate
French soldiers fresh from their victory at the Battle of Austerlitz, and another of the Seine as it flowed under Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge in the city.

Mara had been mesmerized by the images of the Crypte archéologique, the third-century Roman ruins that lay beneath Notre Dame, and she had promised Lilly that, when she got to Paris, she would send her a photograph of the Pont des Arts with the thousands of locks that desperate lovers had fastened on the wire fencing to celebrate their grand romance.

“They leave locks on a fence?”

Mara had opened the book to the page. “It’s about love.”

Lilly had spent several minutes looking at the photograph.

“So, what do you think?”

“Dead bodies? Love locks?” Lilly had rolled her eyes. “If you ask me, Paris looks kinda creepy.”

THE
school bus was still parked in front of the entrance to the reserve. Mara didn’t know why someone hadn’t driven off with the vehicle. So far as she knew, it was operational. Surely the authorities hadn’t pulled the motor out and left a yellow shell to guard the entrance to the townsite.

All of the tires were low. Two of them were completely flat, but anyone with a pump could fix that. Maybe the bus had just been forgotten.

But having asked the question, Mara had to see for herself. She released the locks and raised the hood. Indeed, the motor was still there. So it could be driven. Now that would be a sight. The old bus with its panels covered with graffiti, proclamations,
and warnings come floating down Station Street, looking for the world like a ghost ship out of a horror novel.

The Bus.

Mara pulled the doors open and stepped inside. It looked like the same bus that had taken her and Lilly to the school in town. The two of them had sat near the front, Lilly at the window, Mara guarding the aisle, fending off Eddie Bull and Leo Thom with their quick smiles and stupid jokes.

Two of the bench seats were missing. The metal around the support bracket was shiny and raw, as though the theft had been recent. If anyone was going to drive off with the bus, they had better do it while it still had most of its parts.

Mara eased herself into the driver’s seat and worked the wheel back and forth. She stepped on the clutch and tried to pull the shift into second. Yes, she thought. It would be fun to drive the bus into Samaritan Bay. She could paint her face in morbid colours and designs, hold a flashlight between her thighs so that the light caught her at a creepy angle, roll down all the windows, and shriek and shriek and shriek as she careened through town.

Not that anyone would hear her. The Bay was almost as deserted as the reserve.

Or she could drive the bus across the headlands and send it plunging over the cliffs into the ocean. That had appeal as well.

Instead, she stepped off the bus and shut the doors. Another time. Another time for that.

MARA’S
mother and grandmother had been guarded about her plans to go to Paris.

“You don’t speak French,” her mother had told her.

“I’ll learn.”

“If you want to marry a French guy,” her grandmother offered, “try Quebec. I hear the place is lousy with them.”

“I don’t want to get married. I want to study at the École des Beaux-Arts.”

“You should go to Vancouver and become a nurse.”

“I don’t want to be a nurse.”

“Your auntie Belle is a nurse in Victoria,” her grandmother told her. “You should talk to Belle.”

“Who’s going to look after the river,” her mother had asked.

“I’ll come back.”

“That’s what everyone says,” said her grandmother.

Lilly had been more supportive. “If you want to go to Paris, go to Paris.”

“You said it looked creepy.”

“It does,” Lilly had said, “but that’s no reason not to go.”

Mara had stopped by the Blue Skies travel agency and asked Mr. Webster about the cost of airfare to Paris.

“France?”

“Yes,” Mara had said.

“You’ll have to go to Toronto first.” Mr. Webster gave her several brochures. “From there you can fly to Paris.”

“Okay.”

Mr. Webster had written the airfare on a yellow sticky. Mara had taken it home and stuck it to the wall of her bedroom.

That afternoon, Lilly had come by and they had sat together on Mara’s bed with the brochures spread out between them.

“Course, you don’t
need
to go to Paris,” Lilly told her. “You’re already a good artist.”

“I want to be better.”

“That drawing you did of the weasel was really good.”

“I don’t want to draw weasels the rest of my life.”

“We got lots of turtles.” Lilly had pushed the brochures out of the way and flopped back on the bed. “Why don’t you draw turtles?”

THE
reserve was wrapped in fog. The water tower had vanished somewhere in the weather, but her grandmother’s house was waiting for her.

In the first year after the spill, vandals had invaded the reserve and had taken anything they could carry, anything of value, anything that could be sold as macabre souvenirs to the sick and the wealthy. Her grandmother’s quilts, the cedar hope chest that her grandfather had finished just before he died. The family photographs that had sat on her mother’s dresser. The trash container from the kitchen.

Who would steal a trash container?

All gone.

Except for the orange plastic chair with its bent leg and the thin crack in its seat. Mara’s grandmother and mother had reserved this chair for special guests, for government agents, school officials, and other people who came at them sideways. If you didn’t know about the chair and weren’t careful, you’d get a nasty pinch when you sat down.

“Serves ‘em right,” her grandmother would say. “They’ve always been a pain in the butt.”

The orange chair had sat in the corner of the room for as long as Mara could remember, and now it was the only thing that remained.

MARA’S
mother had rescued a five-pound Tenderflake lard pail from the community-centre garbage, and Mara’s grandmother had stuck a piece of tape on the side with the word “Paris” printed in capital letters. Whenever they could, the two women would throw change into the pail. They called the container the “bank,” and the rule was that once money was deposited, it could not be withdrawn.

Mara found part-time jobs waiting tables at the Tin Turtle and stocking shelves at the Co-op. You couldn’t see how much money was in the lard pail, but that didn’t keep Mara and Lilly from guessing.

“Got to be at least a couple of hundred by now.”

“More than that.”

The pail had sat on the bookshelf gathering dust and collecting cash. Every so often, when her mother and grandmother were off playing bingo, Mara would take it down and shake it gently, just to listen to the coins shuffle against the paper money.

The day after she graduated from high school, Mara opened the yellow and blue container and spread the money out on the table, so she and Lilly could count it. Then they counted it again.

“Okay,” Lilly had said, finally breaking the silence. “Now what are you going to do?”

MARA
went to the kitchen window. The fog was swirling in off the headlands, smouldering between the houses like smoke, and, for just a moment, she thought she saw something. A figure moving quickly in the greyness.

Mara waited.

It had been a girl. Mara was almost sure of that. But the longer she looked into the fog, the more she began to doubt that she had seen anything except shifting shadows.

She zipped the jacket up to her neck and went outside. Crisp said he had seen smoke. Maybe he had. Mara had always expected that there would be problems with squatters, but so far the grisly stories that had attached themselves to the reserve had kept everyone away.

Except the looters, of course.

But those ghouls had already picked the place clean. Mara searched the fog for a sound, for a smell.

Squatters?

The rage was sudden and unexpected. She had been calm one moment, and now she was furious. The stripping of the homes had been bad enough. She had been helpless to do anything about that. But she’d be damned if she was going to allow the land to be stolen as well.

After the spill, the government had forced the surviving families off the reserve. For their own safety, the officials had said. And for their own safety, the families had been relocated to Saskatchewan and Manitoba, to communities as far away from Samaritan Bay as possible.

But the reserve was still band land. The families would return. Over time, they would find their way home. Mara was
sure of this. And when they did, their homes weren’t going to be occupied by a bunch of cowboys trying to rustle free real estate.

Not if Mara could stop it.

She’d come back when the fog lifted and search the houses. Maybe she’d bring Soldier and Gabriel with her. The dog looked fierce enough. And, if that didn’t work, she’d get Gabriel to take off his clothes.

Again.

That would scare anyone out of Dodge.

The fog had thickened. Someone else might have gotten lost, but Mara’s feet knew the path. Even in the dark, she could travel the land on the rhythms of the ground and find her way there and back.

The bus was still parked in front of the fence. Here, the fog began to disperse and the air was warmer. She unzipped her jacket and started jogging down the trail, setting an easy pace. And when she arrived on the beach, she was once again in sunshine.