Not a book excerpt yet, but a short story from my collection entitled Throwing Tarts at the King and Other Stories. This was written over twenty years ago in a writing workship while I attended the MA program in English at the University of Cincinnati.

Loggerhead

On the morning of their last day at the beach, Tucker followed his daddy and uncle through the parking lot of condominiums and gray cedar beach houses, past the fishermen gutting and scaling their catches. The two men, skin tanned the reddish-brown color of strong tea, wore bright purple and orange swim trunks. They moved slowly in the late morning heat, but even so, Tucker, white hair buzzed close to his head, had to run to keep up with them. Daddy carried a few folding chairs and pulled a cooler on wheels that he had to lift when they reached the sand. Uncle Jay hauled a blue and white striped canopy and some blankets. When they reached their preferred spot, before they even dropped their gear and gasped for breath, Tucker asked, “Will you play with me now, Daddy?”

“Not now, Tucker. I told you. We gotta set up this tent.”

Daddy and Uncle Jay spent the next half hour connecting aluminum pipes and erecting the canopy. During this time Tucker asked the same question three more times. When at last they’d secured the canopy against the constant wind, Uncle Jay and Daddy dug small ditches in the sand for their chairs. They spread the blankets. Tucker’s uncle opened the cooler to get beers. The two men sat down with profound relief. 

“Don’t get much better ‘n this,” Uncle said.

“Come in the water now, Dad!” He had already built a sandcastle–a cone-shaped mound surrounded by a shallow moat.

Daddy moaned a little. “Not now, Tucker.”

“But you said…”

“Tucker, what’d I say? I said at eleven you could have Frookie Cookies. It ain’t eleven yet. Why don’t you find someone to play with?”

Tucker ran away and the two men chortled deep in their throats.

Frothy water rushed up to grab Tucker’s toes. He shrieked and ran again, around and around in the sand on this hazy hot day, the sun burning through clouds, through the rarely still air that felt like a blast furnace. Ain’t rained but once, and that was at night when Tucker was asleep, Daddy said. You could hardly even tell in the morning. 

Tucker slowed down and passed people sitting on blankets and chairs under umbrellas. He passed the sand-coated limbs of children younger and smaller than him; they reminded him of sugar doughnuts. Then there were fewer people. Tucker’s feet had grown used to being scalded, but now he ran toward the damper sand at the water’s edge that felt cool, like cookie dough. He hesitated, then went a few steps further into the trail ends of waves lapping the beach and screamed again, the water was so cold. But then it felt good. He splashed along the shore and looked back toward their canopy. He could see the blue and white striped tent far away, and waved. 

Eleven o’clock came and went and Tucker forgot he was to have cookies. He thought of his mother and aunt out shopping at the stores. They never went in the water, anyway. Sometimes Daddy fished. Everyday Tucker asked them to play with him, but after the first few days they waved him away and made him wait longer, and a little longer. Suddenly somehow the day was always over, everyone packing up, the canopy coming down, and Daddy and Uncle Jay had left what looked to Tucker like a treasure nest of silver eggs, but which were actually about twelve crushed beer cans piled in the sand. 

“You just found you Blackbeard’s Treasure,” Uncle would say every time, handing Tucker a plastic bag. Uncle and Daddy let Tucker put the cans in the bag and carry it to the recycling bin at the cabana.

Thirsty, Tucker slowed to a trot and plopped down at the edge of the waves. A few surfers, slick and black beyond the sandbar, bobbed on their boards. Tucker swallowed. Something stank. Like the garbage dumpster full of fish heads out in the parking lot, but worse. Tucker turned and looked up the beach. A big rock rested against the dunes. He looked back again at the dots of rainbow colored umbrellas and imagined Daddy standing with a hand to his sunburnt forehead to shield his eyes, looking for him.

The closer Tucker came to the rock, the stronger the smell grew. He would climb it, jump from rock to sand, and climb the dunes. He might hide in the tall grass, make them find him. By the time Tucker neared the rock the smell had become so strong he held his nose and stopped running. He narrowed his eyes to squint. The rock now appeared to be something else, and more colors than just black. Parts of it looked green, some parts orange. Some parts torn away. A turtle! A big, dead turtle! Its head, or a stiff leg, half chewed off.

“Pee-yew!” Tucker shouted. He circled the turtle once. Then, dunes forgotten, he ran back toward Daddy and Uncle. 

They were still sitting in their chairs. 

“Dad!” Tucker dropped to his knees on a blanket. 

“Tucker, where you been?”

“Dad! I saw a big, dead turtle!”

Tucker’s Dad rooted in the cooler. He tossed Tucker his cookies and a carton of juice. 

“You gotta come see!”

“Aw, Tucker,” Daddy scowled.

“It smelled real bad,” Tucker begged.

Daddy crushed his beer can and handed his binoculars to Uncle Jay. He rose to his feet but remained a little bent at the waist. 

“Hold down the fort,” he told Uncle. “How far is it, Tucker?”

Not far. I get there fast.”

“Point to it.”

Tucker pointed to a black dot in the sand far up the beach. “There.”

Daddy put his right arm on his lower back, bent backwards, and rubbed. He straightened up. “I don’t see nothin’.”

“There, there,” Tucker insisted. Daddy grabbed the binoculars from Uncle Jay. “I don’t see anything.” He sat back down with a sigh.

“It was alive,” Tucker said softly. A seagull screamed and crash-landed on the sand near Tucker, glassy eyes riveted to his cookies.

“Aw, Tucker. Now you’re lyin’.”

“I am not, it was alive!” Tucker began to run back toward the turtle, waving his arm for his father to join him. He looked back once. “Come on!”

Tucker knew he was close when he smelled the turtle again. He felt dizzy from the heat, and from the ocean’s movement alternately toward and then away from him and the land. It made him feel like he was running in place. What would it be like to float out with the rush of tide that came in faster and more furiously, forcing him to run closer and closer to the dunes? Tucker stopped, looked up at the bleached mounds of sand, tall grasses swaying against the now clear blue sky. He listened to the surf tumbling shells like pieces of glass or tiny bells, and felt so suddenly sleepy he almost fell down. But then something caught his eye. Was it wind kicking up sand near the turtle? Gulls hovering close above careened like a pretty white mobile, crying. Tucker ran closer. What looked like seashells or wet rocks moving were the glistening shells of three newly hatched baby turtles digging their way out from under the carcass. Sand coated their sticky claws as they crawled, making slow, deliberate strides toward the sea. Two gulls swooped down, claiming the same turtle, each by a different limb, and tore it in two. Tucker howled and rushed at the birds, but not before another gull soared off, a second turtle briefly silhouetted against the sky, dangling from its beak. 

One remained. Tucker hovered over the baby turtle and shooed away the relentless gulls by waving his arms as they screeched and laughed at him. The last baby loggerhead turtle finally reached damp sand, hesitating just beyond the surf’s grasp, when Tucker saw Daddy trudging toward them. 

“Hurry, hurry!” Tucker cried, hopping up and down like he sometimes did when he needed to pee real bad.

A wave washed up, flipped the turtle, and rolled it over a few times before sucking it into the first shallow swell of ocean, where it disappeared.

“That sure is a big, dead turtle, Tucker.”

Tucker, throat parched, croaked, “It was alive once, right Daddy?”

“I guess. Don’t smell like it ever was.”