“Look at this,” President Bob said. “Look at it closely. I suspect that it is the upper palate of an extinct species of deep water fish.”
Mom took it from his hand and looked at it and said, “Dolphin tooth.” She put it back down and walked to the sink where she continued right on with washing up the dishes. She automatically handed me a towel to dry.
President Bob studied the dolphin’s tooth and said to Mom, “Are you sure?”
She smiled and nodded.
“Quite sure?”
She nodded.
He asked once more, and she nodded again. Then he began poking through his collection again and came up with another piece. He beckoned to Mom to look at it closer, and she dried her hands and did that.
“Shell,” she said
“Oh, I beg to differ with you,” he said.
“Shell,” Mom said, looking down at it, not bothering to pick it up.
“Are you sure?”
She nodded.
“Quite sure?”
She nodded again, and I came over and picked it up off the table and held it up and broke it in two. I thought that President Bob was going to arrest me. “A piece of fossil that thick wouldn’t break that easy. It’s a sure test,” I said.
“There are fragile fossils, I’m sure,” President Bob said.
“I suppose so,” I said. “But that shell ain’t fossilized. Piece of fossil that thick wouldn’t ever break that easy.” I could see that you had to repeat yourself with President Bob. “That shell ain’t fossilized.”
“Ain’t is considered very bad manners up North,” President Bob said.
Shoot! Bad manners are considered bad manners down South, I thought. But I didn’t say anything. President Bob kept sorting through his bag of stuff, studying on it so hard that his eyes winched up and made his bottom jaw drop open.
Mom finished washing the dishes, and I finished drying, and we asked if we could be excused, and President Bob told us (in our own kitchen, mind) that it was perfectly all right, but would we please fetch him a glass of ice water before we left. We fetched it. He said, “Thank you. You may go now.” I suppose that up North it’s good manners to give people orders in their own house if you do it with please and thank you and no ain’ts.
It rained on Monday and it rained again on Tuesday, so I didn’t see President Bob again until Wednesday after school. He was waiting for me at the end of the dock with his plastic sandwich bag already partly full. “Well,” he said, “I guess I got a bit of a head start on you today.”
I looked close at his bag and saw that he had a couple of nice ones—not trophies—but nice.
“I have homework,” I said. “I can’t walk the beaches with you today.”
“What subject?”
“Math.”
“Maybe I can help you. Did I tell you that I was president of a college?”
“Really?” I said in my fakiest voice. “I think I better do my homework by myself.”
“I’ll wait for you,” he said. “I promise I won’t hunt for anything until you come back out.”
“It’ll probably take me the rest of daylight to do it,” I said.
“Math must be hard for you,” he said. “Always was my strongest subject.”
“It’s not hard for me,” I lied. “I just have a lot of it.”
“Let me show you what I found today,” he said.
“I don’t think I have the time.”
“Just take a minute.”
Before I could give him another polite no, he had spread the contents of his bag over the railing of the dock. I looked things over real good. I knew he was watching me, so I wouldn’t let my eyes pause too long on any one thing in particular. “Very nice,” I said. “I’ve got to go now.”
As I turned to walk back to our house, he called, “See you tomorrow.”
The next day I didn’t even walk to the dock. Instead I walked around to the side door of our house and threw my books on the wicker sofa on the screened porch and went up to my room and changed into my cut-offs. I had a plan; I was going to go back out the side door and walk a bit to the north before crossing the highway and climbing over the dunes onto the beach. I knew a place where a sandbar often formed, and Mom and I sometimes went there. When I was little, she’d put me in the sloop behind the sandbar, like at a wading pool at a regular Holiday Inn. As I got older, we’d go there on lazy days and take a picnic lunch and sift through the coquina of the sandbar. We’ve found about four trophies there. Not about, exactly four. Of the four, the first one was the most fun because it was the one we found by accident.
I felt if I could get out of the house and head north, I could escape President Bob and dig up some trophies that would make him flip.
But I didn’t escape. When I came downstairs after changing my clothes, there he was sitting on the wicker sofa, his blueberry ripple legs crossed in front of him. He was leafing through my math book.
I told him hello.
He smiled at me. “Yes, yes, yes,” he said, “I know exactly how it is to have to sit in school all day and have to hold your water. I am quite used to the habits of young men. I was president of a liberal arts college in Michigan.” He noticed that I was wearing my cutoffs, my usual beachcombing outfit, so he slapped his thighs and set them to shimmying like two pots of vanilla yogurt. “I see you’re ready. Let’s get going. The tide’s halfway out already, and as they say, ‘Time and tide wait for no man.’ Tide was better a few hours ago. I found a couple of real beauties. Locked them in the glove compartment of my car.”
I walked with him to the beach, and we began our hunt. He wasn’t bending over for falsies very much anymore. Each time he bent over, he yelled, “Got one!” and then he’d hold it up in the air and wouldn’t put it in his bag until I nodded or said something or both. President Bob ended up with about twenty teeth, one vertebra bone, and of the twenty, one was a real trophy, an inch long, heavy root and the whole edge serrated with nothing worn away. A real trophy.
I found eight. Three of them were medium, four of them were itty-bitty and one had the tip crushed off.
I got up early the next day and checked the tide; it was just starting out. Good, I thought. I crossed the road and ran out onto the beach, rolling up my pajama bottoms as I walked along. The tide was just right; it was leaving long saw-tooth edges of coquina, and I managed to collect eight decent-sized teeth and one right-good-sized one before I ran back home and hosed off my feet and got dressed for school. I stuffed my collection into the pockets of my cut-offs. I had to skip breakfast, a fact that didn’t particularly annoy me until about eleven o’clock. That afternoon, for every two times President Bob stooped down and yelled, “Got one!” I did it three times.
On Friday I didn’t want to skip breakfast again, and my mother for sure didn’t want me to, so President Bob was way ahead.
On Saturday I got up before dawn and dressed and sat on our dock until I saw the first thin line of dawn. Dawn coming over the intracoastal is like watching someone draw up a Venetian blind. On a clear day the sky lifts slowly and evenly, and it makes a guy feel more than okay to see it happen. But on that Saturday, I sat on the dock just long enough to make sure that daylight was to the east of me before I crossed the highway and began heading north. Shoot! I think that if the Lord had done some skywriting that morning, I wouldn’t have taken the time to read it, even if it was in English.
Finally, I climbed to the top of a tall dune and walked up one and down another. I was heading for a place between the dunes about a mile to the north. I knew that during spring, when the moon was new, there was a tidewater between two of the dunes. Sharks’ teeth got trapped in it, and sometimes Mom and I would go there if there was a special size she was looking for to finish an arrangement. You had to dig down into the coquina, and it wasn’t much fun finding sharks’ teeth this way instead of sauntering along the beach and happening to find them. But sometimes it was necessary.
I dug.
I
dug and I dug and I dug.
I put all my findings into a clam shell that I found, and I dug, and I dug, and I dug. I felt the sun hot on my back, and I still dug. I had my back to the ocean and my face to the ground and for all I knew there was no sky and no sea and no sand and no colors. There was nothing, nothing and nothing except black, and that black was the black of fossil teeth.
I had filled the clam shell before I stopped digging. I sorted the teeth and put the best ones—there were fourteen of them—in my right side pocket—the one with a button—and I put all the smaller ones in my back pocket and started back toward home, walking along the strand. I figured that I had a good head start on the day and on President Bob. I would pepper my regular findings with the ones I had just dug up. I’d mix the little ones in with the fourteen big ones. But, I decided, smiling to myself, I’d have a run of about eight big ones in a row just to see what he would do.
My back felt that it was near to burning up, and I looked toward the ocean, and it looked powerful good. The morning ocean in the spring can be as blue as the phony color they paint it on a geography book map. Sometimes there are dark patches in it, and the gulls sweep down on top of the dark spots. I decided that I needed to take a dip in that ocean. I half expected a cloud of steam to rise up off my back. I forgot about time and tide and sharks’ teeth and ducked under the waves and licked the salt off my lips as I came back up.
I was feeling pretty good, ready to face President Bob and the world, and then I checked my pockets and found that about half the supply from my back pocket had tumbled out, and I had lost two big ones. I was pretty upset about that, so I slowed down on my walk back home. I crouched down and picked up shell pieces, something I thought that I had outgrown, but that is about how anxious I was not to let anything get by me. I found a couple of medium-sized ones and put them in my back pocket and began a more normal walk when my trained eye saw a small tooth right at the tide line.
I reached down to pick it up, figuring that, if nothing else, it would add bulk to my collection the way they add cereal to hot dog meat. I didn’t have any idea how many baby teeth I had lost out of my back pocket.
When I reached down to pick up that little tooth, it didn’t come up immediately, and I began to think that maybe it was the tip of a really big one. I stooped down and carefully scraped away the wet sand and saw that there were several teeth together. The tide was rushing back up to where I was, so I laid my hand flat down on the ground and shoveled up a whole fistful of wet, cool sand.
I walked back to the dune and gently scraped away the sand with the forefinger of my other hand, and then I saw what I had.
There were several teeth, and they were attached to a piece of bone, a piece of jaw bone. There was a space between the third tooth and the fourth, and the smallest tooth, the one on the end that I had first seen, was attached to the jaw bone by only a thin edge.
I had never seen such a trophy. I felt that the spirit of the Lord had come mightily upon me, like Samson. Except that I had the jawbone of a shark and not the jawbone of an ass. And I wanted to smite only one president, not a thousand Philistines.
I didn’t run the rest of the way home. I was too careful for that. I walked, holding that trophy in my hand, making certain that it didn’t dry out before I could see if the weak tooth was fossilized onto the bone.
I called to Mom when I came into the house and when she appeared at the door to the screened porch, I uncurled my fingers one by one until the whole bone and all four of the teeth were showing. I watched Mom’s face, and it was like watching the dawn I had missed.
“Ah, Ned,” she said, “it is the Nobel Prize of trophies.” We walked into the kitchen. She wet a good wad of paper towels and lifted the jawbone carefully from my hand and put it down on that pad of paper. And then we sat down at the kitchen table and I told her about how I found it, and I told it all to her in detail. Dad came in and Mom asked me to tell him, and I did and she listened just as hard the second time.
We ate our breakfast, and afterwards, we wet the paper towels again and moved the trophy onto a plastic placemat on the kitchen table. Mom looked at it through the magnifying glass and then handed me the glass so that I could look at it, too.
While we were studying it hard like that, President Bob came to the screen door and said, “Knock, knock.”
Mom nodded at me, her way of letting me know that I was supposed to invite him on in.
“Well, well,” he said. “Are we ready for today’s treasure hunt?”
“I guess so,” I said, as easy as you please, moving a little to the left so that he could catch a glimpse of what Mom and I were looking at.
He gave it a glance and then another one right quick.
Mom and I looked at each other as he came closer and closer to the table. He studied that trophy from his full height and from behind a chair. Next thing, he moved in front of the chair. And next after that he sat down in the chair. And then, not taking his eyes off that trophy, he held his hand out for the magnifying glass and Mom took it from me and gave it to him.
The whole time he did this, I watched his face. His eyes squinched up and his jaw dropped open and his nostrils flared. It was like watching a mini-movie called Jealousy and Greed.
I could feel myself smiling. “Found it this morning,” I said.
Then I didn’t say anything anymore. And I stopped smiling.
I thought about his face, and that made me think about mine. If his face was a movie called Jealousy and Greed, I didn’t like the words I could put to mine.
I gently pushed the placemat closer to President Bob. “Look at it,” I said. “Look at it good.” I waited until his eyes were level with mine. “It’s for you,” I said. “It’s a present from me.”
“Why, thank you, boy,” he said.
“Name’s Ned,” I answered as I walked around to the other side of the table and emptied my pockets. “Do you think we can make something pretty out of these?” I asked Mom.
She gave me a Nobel Prize of a smile for an answer. President Bob didn’t even notice, he was so busy examining the jawbone with which he had been smitten.
The Catchee
by Avery
When I was six years old, my brother Orville was twelve. Orville was a schoolboy patrol. He wore a day-glo red hat and a day-glo red strap that zagged across his chest and carried a pole with a day-glo red flag at the end of it. There was probably nothing doing at school that Orville enjoyed more than schoolboy patrolling. He would stand at the corner and wait for the light to change, and when it did, he would walk out into the street and hold out the pole until everyone who should have crossed the street had. That was his duty. I would stand on the curb and wait for him. That was my duty. My mother had put Orville in charge of my transportation to and from school. Our transportation then was walking, and I wasn’t allowed to cross the street without him.
Sometimes Orville stood on the corner long after everyone had emptied from the school building, and he’d walk home with me and with his pole with the day-glo red flag on the end of it. He’d walk over to the big industrial park that was growing up behind where we lived. Orville would pick a building and direct the people coming out.
There were no red lights in the industrial park. There were signs that had eight sides and some that had three. Orville would line up with one of the eight siders, and he’d lower his pole with the day-glo red flag at the end of it and allow people to cross the street in front of him. They’d come out like popcorn: nothing for a long time, then one and two at a time and then they’d come out a whole hopperful at a time. Most of the people coming out of the office buildings were girls. A lot of them smiled at Orville, and next to schoolboy patrolling, Orville liked those smiles best. He was twelve; he had begun liking girls when he was eleven. I would stand on the curb and wait for Orville.
Orville had tried most of the buildings in the industrial park. Remington became his favorite, and he always went back to it.
One da
y Orville was waiting outside the Remington. There was a little breeze that day, and that was another thing Orville liked a lot because the breezes would blow the girls’ skirts up, and when I asked Orville why he enjoyed that so much, he answered that he could see Schenectady. I didn’t understand what he meant then, when Orville was already twelve, and I was still six.
Orville was at the best part of his patrolling that day, the part where the girls came out in twoses and threeses, that being the part where he got the most smiles, when he told me that he had to go to the bathroom. I was surprised. Because Orville didn’t usually have to do ordinary things at inconvenient times. He told me to step off the curb and hold the pole with the day-glo red flag while he visited the bathroom in the Remington.
“You can’t go in there,” I said.
“Well, I sure can’t go out here,” he answered.
So Orville marched into the Remington, and for the first time I stood off the curb all by myself. I held the pole across the street, and the cars stopped, and the people crossed. I began to see why Orville enjoyed schoolboy patrolling so much. I was enjoying it pretty much myself. Although it didn’t matter to me whether it was boys crossing or girls.
I had raised the pole once and let it down again when I felt someone tap me on my shoulder. I thought Orville was finished and wanted me to give him back his pole. I wouldn’t turn around. I felt the poke on my shoulder again. I lowered the pole and stiffened my shoulders. “Listen,” I snarled, “I’ll give it back to you after the next batch crosses.”