My cousin can be brutal.
Mr. Tile left a voice message saying I should go online and read an article that appeared in the Pensacola News Journal just a few days after we left Walton County. Check out the headline:
Anonymous Donor Honors Fallen Marine
The story said an unknown person had opened a scholarship fund at Northwest Florida State College in the name of the late Earl Talbo Chock, a young Marine corporal killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.
What made the donation curious was the odd amount—$9,720—and the fact that it was all cash, delivered by the postal service in a plain shoe box along with a short handwritten note of instruction.
According to the newspaper, Talbo Chock’s mother and father were eager for the mysterious benefactor to come forward so they could properly thank him or her for the generous memorial. They said a tall homeless man had recently been observed at their son’s gravesite, standing ramrod straight, saluting the plain white cross. When a cemetery worker approached him, the stranger made a “crude gesture” and limped away.
Talbo Chock’s parents wondered if that was the same person who’d sent the shoe box full of cash to the college, and they asked for the public’s help in identifying him.
I tried calling back Mr. Tile at least half a dozen times, but his phone went straight to voice mail. He had nothing more to tell me, I guess. He just wanted us to know Skink was all right. I printed out the article and gave it to Malley when we went on one of our turtle walks.
The three-quarter moon looked like a ripe peach coming up over the ocean. I’ll never forget the color of the sky because that was the first night my cousin and I found a mother turtle on a nest.
We’d walked less than a mile before we spotted fresh flipper tracks leading from the edge of the surf to the dune line. There, an enormous barnacle-backed loggerhead had dug out a pit as wide as her shell. When I shined the light down the hole, we could see her eggs dropping softly.
The turtle didn’t snap at us or try to crawl away. She just blinked her big moist eyes and took short raspy breaths, a tired old momma with a job to do.
She’d been there before, and her female hatchlings that survived to adulthood would return to the very same beach, the very same time of the summer, to lay their own eggs. It is a ritual that’s only been going on for about a hundred million years. Incredible but true—loggerheads, greens and hawksbills were swimming the seas back when T. rex was roaming the forests.
Malley and I took photos of the mother turtle, but we didn’t post them on Instagram. Instead we called a state wildlife hotline and gave the location of the mound. Tomorrow there would be bright stakes hammered down, and a warning sign. With any luck, Dodge Olney was still locked up in jail.
We didn’t want to attract a crowd that might disturb the momma loggerhead, so we kept walking. Every so often we’d find a scattering of crispy egg fragments where other nestlings had hatched, a stampede of little hockey pucks toward the surf. Some of them had made it, and others had been gobbled by gulls or raccoons. That’s the natural food chain, but Malley and I still always root for the baby turtles.
At each marked nest I paused to aim my flashlight at the dig marks inside the bright pink ribbons. A few times I dropped to my knees because I thought I’d spotted something out of place, but I hadn’t.
During these odd stops of mine Malley never got impatient or even slightly sarcastic. It was something I’d been doing on our beach walks ever since we’d returned from the Choctawhatchee, something I’ll probably be doing the rest of life.
Looking for a soda straw sticking out of the sand.
Skink--No Surrender Page 21