A Phantom Herd

Then death entered our lives due to our own foolishness.

  Here I am speaking of the death of a pet turtle from Woolworth's. Flower, as we named her, crept around her plastic bowl patiently enduring her life spent underneath a shell painted red with a pink rose. While planning to give her an overdue bath one day in June, we innocently sprayed her with a garden hose. That hose had spent several hours in the damn frying sun, and water straight from such a hose shoots out in a scalding state. Flower died screaming silently.

  We buried her in a green shoebox. It was a well-attended service in the alley, and afterwards we played wagons to get our minds off the terrible thing we had done to poor Flower. I don't know if Blaine Newton attended the funeral or if we accidently told him what had happened while dragging wagons around with him. He lived up the street nearer the park, which was pretty far away, though, and I don't remember anything about him or about the rest of his family and could believe that he lived on his only wholly, if I didn't know that it was improbable for an eight year old to have no kin.

  But with dusk on the evening of our murderous accident came the ominous tap, on the backdoor and into our hearts full of guilty remorse. Mother who was always in the kitchen at night, and was tending a roast and some peas, stepped into the den that we had enclosed and looked out under the sash of the window in the back door.

  Blaine stood on the back step, looking pious and innocent. He was thin, pale, shaved-headed, and had deeply sunken eyes. We knew him to be entirely evil.

  Oh, Mother, draw back from the door and turn out the porch light! Make Blaine go away, please. If my writing is plastic, the least I can do is not repeat what Blaine did to us. But I must. I can't forget this story as much as I want to. This story will not leave me; it remains to haunt and torment.

  "Can I help you?" Mother asked him as he stood on the same porch landing where I had toddled as a child, watching Mother hang out clothes when the scorpion almost killed me.

  "I have a message for your kids," said Blaine. I think he realized after these words came out of his mouth that the tone was wrong. He didn't sound friendly or interested in us. He sounded down-right hostile.

  "Well, we're about to eat," said Mother dubiously. At least she read him right the first time he spoke.

  "An important message," implored Blaine. This time he made his voice sound like he was our friend and he needed to tell us something vital. "They're gonna want to know what I know. It's something good."

  "Oh. All right then. Meredith, there's a little friend here from up the street. He wants to tell you something good, he says."

  We followed Meredith out of the kitchen, to the door at the back of the enclosed garage. We crept out and closed the door behind us.

  The Sunday evening alley and sky cloaked itself in varying intensities of an indigo darkness. Palm trees and cypresses donned shaggy black overcoats; I could see them shaking in the breeze. There was barely any yellow light besides the merest hint of the setting sun and the cone from the porch light, forming a golden bell jar around us. The hot air hugged us as it always did in June. We should have been happy because school was ending in another week, but having killed our turtle that day, our thoughts were still thoroughly morose.

  "What do you want?" asked Meredith sullenly to the boy who was younger than her.

  "Hey, I've got some great news for you!" he said. He looked crazed when he said it. What was crazy was the way his voice quivered with excited evil and the way he tilted his chin up.

  "We don't want any news from you," said Jack belligerently.

  "What? You don't want good news? Great news?"

  "What news is this?" said Meredith suspiciously. Her eyes which usually squinted at people were nothing but slits when they aimed at Blaine.

  "Guess what?" said Blaine hollowly, "Your turtle isn't dead after all. You buried her alive. I went out in the alley a few minutes ago and I dug her up outta that little green Thomas McCann baby shoebox you buried her in and if you want her back you have to give me a quarter." His face beamed with pride at the just nature of his request. As only the truly evil do, he realized happily that our guilt about what had happened to our turtle could be used against us to put us into a tight bind. We wanted our turtle alive and would be vulnerable to anyone claiming that she was alive. The absolute power he had over us enthralled him.

  Meredith, Jack and I looked at Blaine with absolute horror. We never thought to tell him to show us the now-living, dug-up turtle. We believed his lie. And this was where I realized that Meredith's wisdom had limits. We were stunned because we had buried her in exactly such a shoebox. The detail confused us, since we believed he hadn't been at the funeral.

  "How's that?" asked Jack.

  "Where's she?" asked Meredith. She neglected to say show her to us and you'll get your quarter.

  "I got her. I got her all right. At my house. Pink rose on its back. Red shell. Just how you bought her at F.W. Woolworth's, except she's live again. She ain't dead anymore. Bring me out a quarter and I'll give her back to you. Otherwise, you lost her."

  The description was apt. How did he know that the turtle was buried in a green shoebox unless he dug her up? Was one of our friends who had been at the funeral an evil person secretly? These confusing thoughts clouded our judgment. We never thought of him digging up the dead turtle and lying about it being alive.

  "Wait here," said Meredith urgently.

  She and Jack went inside. I somehow stayed on the step to see the horrible eager evilness of Blaine Newton, the awful avarice of humans, even small humans with small scale plots against their fellow man. The glee they feel when hurting others and the sneaky thoughts they have about the tragedies of others and how those tragedies can be turned to benefit the onlooker play across their faces. All of that showed on Blaine's long, paddle-like face. Even his freckles seemed evil to me. If you connected them across his features, I thought, you'd have an icky-looking dirty old spider's web. He was Huck Finn gone horribly, horribly wrong.

  It is a writer's job to stay on the step with the Blaines of the world and face them down. You've got to get in with the worst of human nature and see it for what it really is. No amount of religion would change a person like Blaine. He was being born every day all over the good earth's continents. There were hundreds of millions of Blaines. I guess you could respect them for their ability to calculate how to benefit off of another person's agony. In a charitable view he taught us a good lesson.

  "How do we get our turtle back?" Meredith asked once she had handed over the quarter.

  Blaine took the quarter and dropped backward off the step with a happy hitch and a leap. He ran from us in a sort of kicking gleeful, joyful scramble, loose, wild, uninhibited and evil.

  "Where's our turtle?" cried Jack.

  "Ha, ha, I was fooling you!" Blaine shrieked. We couldn't see him, thank goodness. He was running with our quarter toward the dark alley.

  When he was almost around the patio wall, he shouted back at us: "Your turtle is really dead! I fooled you!"