The Troop

Max punched the spike through again, again… again. The turtle gurgled, then made a fretful stuttering sound: icka-icka-icka, as if it had a bad case of the hiccups.

Max moaned and sawed his arm across his eyes—he’d begun to cry without being aware of it—and stared at the turtle with eyes gone swimmy with tears. Blood was coming out of it all over. It rocked side to side frantically. A low venomous hiss came out of the punctures; it was as if the turtle’s organs had vaporized into steam that was now venting through those fresh holes.

“Please,” Max said. He punched the spike through again. It went in so goddamn easy now, as if the turtle’s skin had relinquished its prior rights of refusal. “Please won’t you just die.”

But it would not. Stubbornly, agonizingly, it clung to life. Its head craned up to take in the bloody wreckage of its own body. Its eyes were set in nets of wrinkles, inexpressive of any emotion Max could name. Its will to live was terrifying, as it rejected the notion of an easy death.

Why had he done this—why? Jesus, oh Jesus.

On TV it was always so quick and easy, almost bloodless: the detective shot the murderer and he collapsed, clutching his heart. Or the knife slid in soundlessly and some guy went down clutching his stomach, venting a sad sighing note—“Eeoooogh…”—before he died. But it didn’t work that way in real life. Suddenly Max understood those awful stories he’d seen on the national news, the ones where a reporter grimly intoned some poor person had been stabbed forty times or whatever. Maybe the stabber would have stopped after a single stab if that was all it took. But most living things don’t want to die. It took a lot to kill them. Events take on a vicious momentum. All of a sudden you’re stabbing as a matter of necessity. You’re hoping that if you just put enough holes into a body, the life will drain out and death will rapidly flow in…

“Newt,” he pleaded. “Newt, please.”

The boys knelt in the sand, wet and shivering. Sand stuck to the pads of their feet. Max was shaking and sobbing. He could never, ever be hungry enough to kill something if this was what it meant. The turtle was still hiccuping, but now those sounds were interspersed with frantic peeps, like a baby bird calling from its nest.

Newton grabbed blindly for the turtle’s head. He slashed wildly with his knife, trying to hack through its throat. But the turtle withdrew into its shell and Newton’s knife only cut a deep trench around its jawbone. WWAMD? Not this. Alex would never have done this. Newton burst into a freshet of tears.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his chest hitching uncontrollably. “I thought that might be the quickest way. Y’know, cut its head off. Like a guillotine. A terrible thing to do but still better than…”

The turtle peered out from the leathery cave where its head now resided. Its eyes blinked slowly. Its mouth opened and closed like a man at the end of a long run. Blood filled the lower hub of its shell and dripped onto the sand. It kept peeping and peeping.

The boys knelt with their shoulders bowed as the turtle bled to death. It took so, so long.

At one point, its head poked out of its shell. Its blood-slicked eyes stared around as if in hopes that its tormentors had grown bored of their sport and left it alone. Maybe it thought it could still return to the tide pool and be carried back into the ocean. Animals never gave up hope, did they? But its glazed eyes found them, blinked once, and resignedly returned to the darkness of its shell.

The great wave of the tide moved farther inland. The water lifted. The surf sucked at the boys’ bare feet. The turtle’s flippers went stiff all at once, then relaxed. Tiny translucent creatures that looked like earwigs crawled out from the deep folds of its skin to trundle over its cooling body. Aquatic parasites looking for a new host.

“I’m not huh-huh-hungry anymore,” Newton said.

“Me neither.”

“My muh-muh… my muh-muh… my mother says you can’t really love yourself if you hurt animals.”

“I didn’t mean to. Not like this. If I’d known—”

“I know. It’s over now anyway.”

The water lapped at their feet with a dreadful languidness. The gulls hurled down shrill shrieks from high above. The wind whispered in a language they could not name.

They buried the turtle in the forgetting sand of the beach.

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