I’m going to tell you right now, chasing women’s clothing around the dooryard is what it’s come down to. All on account of four turtle eggs.
I work for Leon because social security ’ll only go so far, plus Leon’s seventy-five years old with more money than brains and fingers itching to get into every hole they can find, even when there ain’t a hole. That’s what his girlfriend Janey told him just before she drove her RV off to California.
Leon set himself up to the cabin for a couple of beers and aggravation. Thinking about Janey leaving him in Maine gets him hot and miserable until he spies this mother turtle dig a hole and bury a sprawl of eggs.
Then he’s huffing and blowing for me. “We got to fence them eggs. These guys,” he means his son and grandson that also live on the place and benefit from his money without working, “they get to drinking and running the four-wheel gators around, they’ll trample the eggs.”
I put thirty-five dollars worth of fence around the turtle eggs, which don’t satisfy Leon because it ain’t but four feet high.
“They’ll miss it,” he says. You got to put yellow tape on it.”
Before long we, meaning I, got the place looking like a crime scene.
But ever since Janey did her own wishes and left, the only pleasure Leon gets is sitting at the cabin with a beer waiting for them turtle eggs to hatch. Which they ain’t going to until maybe August.
“They ain’t going to hatch at all if I don’t keep an eye on ’em,” he tells me like he’s just discovered the secret of life.
Hottest day we’ve had, he’s sitting in the truck, AC going full bore, while I’m soaking the ground in sweat digging for turtle eggs. He yells for me to go deeper.
“Leon,” I say, “I’m down over four inches. It’s a turtle, not an excavator.”
After an hour I find the eggs and make up my mind that’s the last of this caper.
“They’ll never make it to the pond,” he says. “The crows will get them.”
We—meaning I—dig a new hole, closer to the pond but in eyesight of the cabin, fill it with special sand at twenty bucks a bag, and surround it with a four foot fence blazing yellow so Leon can sit in his Adirondack chair, drink beer, and watch for baby turtles.
A month goes by, and he’s left Janey alone long enough that she says she’s coming back from California. But just like I knew, he can’t leave those turtle eggs alone. He has me digging again, and we spend half the afternoon down at the barn setting up a basket in the trash trailed back of a gator with a droplight hovering over them.
I didn’t tell him these eggs in the basket was long past hatching. “Janey’s arriving tonight,” he says. “And I’m going to kick her ass if she don’t pull her own weight around here.”
“I’m going home,” I says. “If I hear anything on the scanner, I’ll come up.”
Next morning I see the droplight hanging lonesome in the barn. Soon as Janey drove in last night, Leon laid two or three commandments on her, so she got up early, filled the trash trailer right to the brim, and drove the gator over to the dump. Them eggs are incinerating even as he’s telling me. Next he’s in the upstairs window throwing Janey’s clothes in the air, and I’m in the yard picking’ em up at the rate of twelve fifty an hour.
When he comes out the front door, I hand him an armload of bras and slacks and such. I says, “Janey done you a favor. Them eggs wa’n’t ever going to hatch. She spared you looking at the dead bodies.”
I take my pay and leave to drive my wife to the cancer center for her chemo. Thank God for Medicare, or I’d’ve eaten them turtle eggs myself.
Merle Drown is a freelance writer and editor. He has published three novels, Plowing Up a Snake (The Dial Press), The Suburbs of Heaven (Soho Press), which was chosen by Barnes and Noble for its Discover Great New Writers series, and Lighting the World (Whitepoint Press). He has also published over 40 short pieces of fiction and received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Hampshire Arts Council. He is working on a collection titled Shrunken Heads: Miniature Portraits of the Famous Among Us.