Turtle Moon

by

Alice Hoffman

Berkley Publishing Group

Copyright 1993

ISBN: 042513699X

PART ONE.

The last major crime in the town of Verity was in 1958, when one of the Platts shot his brother in an argument over a Chevy Nomad they had bought together on time. Usually it's so quiet you can hear the strangler figs dropping their frilit on the hoods of parked cars, leaving behind pulp and tiny black seeds. Since Verity is the most humid spot in eastern Florida, local people know enough to drink their coffee iced in the morning. The air all around the town limits is so thick that sometimes a soul cannot rise and instead attaches itself to a stranger, landing right between the shoulder blades with a thud that carries no more weight than a hummingbird.

Charles Verity, who founded the town, after killing off as many native people as he could, is said to have discovered this the hard way. He couldn't get rid of the spirits of all the men he'd murdered; they perched up and down his spine and on top of his cookstove, until he caught them in a sugar bowl, then tied the lid closed with thick brown string so they couldn't escape. Charles Verity swore he would live forever. Every night he drank a bitter tea made from the bark of the paradise tree to ensure his good health, but as it turned out he was eaten by an alligator up by the pond where the municipal golf course was later built. Each year, on Charles Verity's birthday, children parade down Main Street to the parking lot of the medical center, where a mud pit ringed with ropes is set up. For ten dollars, anyone can wrestle a papier-mache' alligator and raise funds for the burn ward.

Up until the early sixties there were alligator farms all around the outskirts of Verity. At least once a year there would be a big escape, and Half Moon Road, which is now part of the Interstate, would be green and slithery for days, until a posse went out with shotguns and fishing nets. When breeding for profit became a federal offense, Verity turned its past around to suit itself, naming the high school football team the Gators, and featuring Alligator Salad in most restaurants, a mixture of spinach, green pepper, avocado, and chopped egg tinted with green food coloring.

People in Verity like to talk, but the one thing they neglect to mention to outsiders is that something is wrong with the month of May.

It isn't the humidity, or even the heat, which is so fierce and sudden it can make grown men cry. Every May, when the sea turtles begin their migration across West Main Street, mistaking the glow of streetlights for the moon, people go a little bit crazy. At least one teenage boy comes close to slamming his car right into the gumbo-limbo tree that grows beside the Burger King. Girls run away from home, babies cry all night, ficus hedges explode into flame, and during one particularly awful May, half a dozen rattlesnakes set themselves up in the phone booth outside the 7-Eleven and refused to budge until June.

At this difficult time of the year people who grew up in Verity often slip two aspirins into their cans of Coke; they wear sunglasses and avoid making any major decisions. They try not to quit their jobs, or smack their children, or run off to North Carolina with the sertticeman who just fixed their VCR. They make certain to stay out of the ocean, since the chemical plant on Seminole Point always leaks in the first week of May, so that the yellow film float to the surface, bringing sharks closer to shore. In the past few years, there has been an influx of newcomers, lured by the low rents and wild hibiscus. As a result, Verity is now home to more divorced women from New York than any other town in the state of Florida.

None of these women had any idea of the sort of mess the month of May in Verity could make of their lives, any more than they knew what daily exposure to cMorine could do to their hair. There were now dozens of green-headed women all over town, all addicted to Diet Dr. Pepper, and each and every one of them was shocked to discover that in Verity mosquitoes grew to the size of bumblebees and that the sea grape, which grew wild along the beach, could pull their children right into the thicket if they didn't keep to the wooden paths.

After midnight, when the heat was almost bearable and anole lizards ran fearlessly across quarry tile floors, these women never wept but did their laundry instead. While the bleach was added to the white wash and the laundry softener doled out, it became clear that although some of the children these women had transplanted were doing well, most were not. There were toddlers who called out for their fathers in the middle of the night, and boys who dreamed so deeply of the houses where they grew up they'd wake damp with sweat, smelling of cut grass. There were sullen teenage girls running up astronomical phone bills, and babies so accustomed to ranch houses they got hysterical at the sight of an elevator.

At 27 Long Boat Street, just off West Main, in a pink stucco condominium facing the flat blue bay, there lived a twelve-year I old boy, a mean little Scorpio named Keith Rosen, who would have liked nothing better than to knock someone's block off. He was so mean he could cut his own finger with a serrated steak knife and not flinch.

He could drop a brick on his bare foot and not cry out loud. Last week, when his only friend, Laddy Stern, dared him to pierce his ear with an embroidery needle, Keith didn't even bleed. The following afternoon he stole an earring shaped like a silver skull from a jewelry concession at the flea market over at the Sunshine Drive-In. He has never been a particularly good boy, but after eight months in Florida, he is horrid. Already, he has been suspended from school three times.

He is willing to steal almost anything: lunch money, teachers' wallets, birthstone rings right off his classmates' fingers. He keeps everything in a secret stash in the laundry room down in the basement, inside a hole he punched into the plaster behind a washing machine.

Punishments are pointless. They don't work with him. He is no longer allowed to see Laddy Stern, not since they were caught cutting school and drinking KaMtia and Coke, but who can really stop him? Laddy's mom is the hostess at the yacht club restaurant, and she works odd hours, so Keith still goes over to their condo whenever he pleases. That is where he spends most of the first day of May, and by the time he leaves, after a vicious argument that has left Laddy with a bloody nose, it is already ninety-nine in the shade, although where he bicycles, on Long Boat Street, there is no shade. He's dizzy from the Miller Lites he drank and the half pack of Marlboros he chain-smoked, and it isn't so easy to avoid the smashed turtle shells. Hard green globes the size of Scooter Pies line the asphalt and clog up the sewer traps. There is no point in Keith's trying to talk to his mother.

Most days he sneaks out of the apartment while she is getting dressed for work, or he waits in bed until he's sure she's left, so he won t have to see her and pretend to be normal or cheerful or whatever it is she wants him to be.

He bikes as fast as he can, through the heat waves, past the surfers at Drowned Man Beach.

He keeps at it until his lungs hurt, then he rides over the curb and into the park at the corner of West Main and Long Boat, where he pulls out the cigarettes and matches he stole from Laddy.

It isn't his parents' divorce that bothers him. He could have lived with that. It was the way things just happened to him. He wanted to live with his father, but who asked him? His parents argued with each other until they came to a decision, and now his mother is stuck with him, when everyone knows they have never gotten along.

He never climbed into her lap or held her hand.

He knows he was a difficult child, he's been told often enough. He threw off his blanket, rattled the bars of his crib, bit baby-sitters so hard he left teeth marks in their flesh. His mother can pretend to want him all she likes, but the only thing he wants is to go back to where the heat doesn't make you break out in red bumps, and every restaurant doesn't serve grits and Alligator Salad, and some people have fathers.

Keith balances his bike against his hip, then lights a cigarette, which he keeps cupped in his palm, the way he's seen the high school boys smoke, even though the embers burn his skin.

Nothing ever happened in Verity. That was a fact.

He could die of boredom, right now, his heart could give out and he'd shrivel up in the heat and turn purple before anyone thought to look for him. He'd probably fossilize before his mother reported him missing. When his heart doesn't stop, Keith props his bike up against a trash can, then flings himself on a wooden bench so he can blow smoke rings in the air. The smoke rings just hang there, dangerous white clouds going nowhere. School won't be out for another fifteen minutes, but at the far end of the park some teenagers, playing hooky, toss a Frisbee around.

As far as Keith is concerned, anyone down here who is capable of enjoying himself is an idiot.

The high school boys are so busy diving for the Frisbee and pounding each other on the back they don't notice the patrol car in the parking lot, idling beneath an inkwood tree. Keith sits up, interested in spite of himself when he sees on the side of the car. They don't allow dogs at the condominium where he lives. If the super discovers that you have even a guinea pig you're out forever. There's a list of rules three pages long you have to agree to before you move in.

That way there's no argument when they insist you take a shower before you swim in the pool, and you can't even swim alone without an adult until you're thirteen. If Keith could have a dog, it would be just like the one in the patrol car, a big German shepherd that sits perfectly still, eyeing the boys playing Frisbee. He would love to see what the super had to say about a dog like that; just let anyone try to give him orders if he had a monster like that on a leash.

When the cop gets out of his car, Keith hunkers down on the bench. He was suspended yesterday, and technically he's not required to be in school. Still, he hasn't informed his mother of the suspension, so he figures he's guilty of something. The cop has a mean scar across his forehead and black hair that reaches over the collar of his jacket. He looks like he could pick you up and toss you, a long way. Plus he has that dog, just the turn of a car handle away. They didn't have cops like this back in Great Neck, where Keith grew up. You never saw a pickup with a gun rack attached, or dead turtles in the street. As Keith watches, the cop approaches the high school boys; before he can reach them the boys take off through a grove of cabbage palms, leaving their Frisbee behind. The cop picks up the Frisbee, then goes back to his car to let his dog out. The dog circles around the cop's legs, banging its body against him, until the cop lets the Frisbee fly. Then the dog takes off like black lightning, scaring the red-crowned parrots in the palms until they scream and take flight. Beneath a cloud of birds, Keith grabs for his bike, then hops on and races out of the park, toward West Main. He's sick to his stomach from his last cigarette, but he's also completely charged. This was almost dangerous. The cop could have turned and spied him; the dog might have attacked. You can get addicted to trouble if you're not careful. You can feel like you're flying, when all you're doing is pedaling through the Florida heat. Instead of heading straight home, Keith turns into the driveway of the Burger King, where he isn't allowed to stop before supper. As he walks inside, he reaches in his pants pocket for the money he stole out of a classmate's locker just yesterday. It's there, every cent of it, and Keith feels a wicked surge of elation. Sooner or later, he's going to get caught.

Julian Cash slouches down behind the wheel of the patrol car as he passes by the Burger King.

Through the plate-glass window, he can see the little truant from the park devouring a burger and fries. Julian has seen dozens of these hotshots, boys who pretend to be fearless and dare somebody to prove them wrong. Julian himself isn't scared of much, but he avoids the Burger King. He doesn't care what anyone says, he knows the truth about the gumbo-limbo tree that grows at the edge of the parking lot.

On the night of his seventeenth birthday he crashed into it, and twenty years later he still has the scar to remind him. The plain truth is, he would rather confront a psychopath hopped up on drugs than be forced to pull up to the Burger King's drive-in window.

Twenty years ago the Burger King didn't exist, and in its place was a stretch of gumbo-limbos.

Julian used to park there with Janey Bass until dawn, then drive her home and watch as she climbed up the drain pipe to her bedroom window.

Back then, there were still islands in the marshes around Verity, although some of them u weren't any bigger than half a mile across, home to little more than cottonmouths and foxes. The town expanded slowly, embracing the marshes with a Winn Dixie and a Mobile station, and now all the islands are connected to each other by roadways that funnel over the creeks and into the Interstate. There aren't any more coral snakes in the branches of the mangroves and you can get USA Today and The New' York Times as well as the Verily Sun Herald over at the general store, and at Chuck and Karl's diner they now serve croissants along with their hickory-flavored coffee. The first time Julian was apprehended, two weeks after his seventeenth birthday, he was standing outside Chuck and Karl's, waiting to be caught. He had a bowie knife hidden in his left boot and a hundred and fifty dollars in quarters, which would have seemed suspicious even if all the parking meters on West Main hadn't just been smashed open with an axe. It was May of course, and the temperature hadn't fallen below one hundred for days, and before June came around, Julian would be apprehended five more times, although he was never officially charged with anything.