The Troop

He reeled back and nearly tumbled face-first into the water. The turtle went back to flinging itself at the rock. Max was breathing heavily through gritted teeth. Water hissed between the chinks with harsh hsst! sounds. The bitter tang of fear washed through Newton’s mouth. This situation had developed horrible potential, though he wasn’t quite sure how that had happened.

“You grab one flipper,” Max said, his eyes squeezed down to slits. “I’ll grab the other. We’ll get it up on shore. It won’t be so tough on land.”

They took hold of its back flippers and dragged it out. The turtle’s front flippers paddled in useless oarlike circles. Its head thrashed, sending up fine droplets of water. Max’s whitened lips were skinned back from his teeth—more a funhouse leer than a smile. A look of horrible triumph had come into his eyes.

They heaved the turtle up onto the sickle of rain-pitted sand. It tried to scuttle up the beachhead but it was hemmed in by steep shale. The boys hunched over with their hands on their knees—their kneecaps chapped red with cold—to collect their breath. The sky had gone dark: an icy vault pricked with isolated stars. A fingernail slice of the moon cast a razored edge of brightness over the sea.

“We should build a fuh-fuh-fire,” Newton said, his teeth chattering.

“First we have to kill it.”

A painful tension had sunk into Max’s chest: the pressure of a huge spring coiled to maximum compression. He was angry at the turtle for its mute will to survive and for its defiance of his own needs. He was frustrated that the turtle had scared him. He’d have to kill it for that transgression alone.

The turtle turned to face them. Its head was tucked defensively into its shell. It struggled forward on its front flippers, aiming to return to the tide pool.

Max stepped in front of it. The turtle’s head darted out to snap at his toes. Max pulled his foot away with a strangled squawk. The turtle had taken a V-shaped bite: the wound went a quarter inch into his toe, almost to the nail.

Max felt very little—his toes were still numb and his system was awash with adrenaline—but as his blood pissed into the sand he sensed all the threads inside his body gathering up, tightening, and committing themselves to a steely purpose.

He’d kill this thing. He wanted it dead.

Max found a bit of driftwood and hooked it under the turtle’s shell. It wheeled and snapped off three inches of bleached wood. Max jammed the remaining portion under its front flipper and levered it up savagely.

The turtle flipped onto its back. It uttered a pitiful squall that sounded too much like the cry of a human infant for Newton’s ears.

“There.” Max’s chest heaved. “There, you fucking tough guy—there you go.”

With one trembling finger, he flicked open the largest blade of his Swiss Army knife. Moonlight lay trapped along its honed edge. His anger and fear helixed into each other. Things were speeding up and yet everything was held in a bubble of crystalline clarity: the tide swelling over the rain-pitted sand and smoothing everything with a layer of silver; the shriek of gulls overhead that seemed to urge him toward an act of savagery he’d already settled his mind around.

Max pressed the knife to the turtle’s stomach, which was the off-beige color of the rubberized mat in his bathtub at home. The tip slipped into one of the grooves in the turtle’s shell as if guided by its own inner voice.

Max had never killed anything. Oh, maybe bugs—but did they really count? He’d never stabbed anything, that was for sure. Newton stared at him with eyes that shone like cold phosphorus. Max wished he’d look away.

He bore down, unsure at first but steadily applying more force. The blade slipped and skittered along the turtle’s belly, leaving a milky scratch on its shell. The turtle mewled. Its flippers oared in crazy circles. Its helplessness made it look stupid, comical. Max could do whatever he wanted to it.

He refolded the knife and pulled out the leather awl: just a simple metal spike. He held the knife in both hands as if it were the T-handle on a TNT detonator box. He took a rough guess at where the turtle’s heart might lie, then hunched his shoulders and bore down with all his weight.

The spike pierced the turtle with the sound of a three-hole punch going through a thick sheaf of paper. Blood poured from the perfectly round hole, darker than Max had ever imagined. The turtle’s back flippers clenched and unclenched spastically. Something dribbled out between those flippers: pearlescent roe that had the look of delicate soap bubbles.

Max punched the leather tool through a second time. The turtle’s body compressed under Max’s weight, its chest buckling like when you press down on a plastic garbage can lid. Its flippers beat helplessly at the air. Blood burst out of the wound in a startling syrupy gout. The smell was profoundly briny, as if the turtle’s organs were encrusted with salt.