Sweet Pea McCracken
by Kate White
Bernadette and I stood in the parking lot trying to recruit other parents as they came to pick up their children. These children were no ordinary children and I was no ordinary father. My daughter, Bernadette "Keep on Truckin'" McCracken, was my stoic five-year-old Red RockRidge racing turtle. She was a humdinger at 22 pounds, a fine looking dame. Bernadette won most races, but she was getting long in the tooth for a RockRidge racer and that's where my new baby came in. Sweet Pea McCracken was barely a year old, but had stars in her eyes and fire in her belly. She was a born winner and damn it, was she beautiful. Fast like a gorilla with its ass on fire, she blazed through turtle match heats, trained hard, and earned her racing t-shirt. It said in puffy silver glitter letters, "Eat My Dust" on the back of the baby chick yellow cotton shirt.
Bernadette and I were here with the other racing turtle's parents at the entrance to the Low Down Dirty Balls Out Summer '06 Turtle Triathlon. I wanted to introduce my new gal to the circuit and get the crowd on her side. I needed everyone to know Bernadette was fine with hanging up her racing duds and passing on the torch to Sweet Pea. My baby turtle raced ever harder and moved faster than hardening oatmeal when she sensed a crowd was on her side, chanting her name, their fists pumping in the air in rhythm to her muscular legs blazing down her race lane. I wanted the other parents who were here early, picking up their turtle offspring from their hired professional trainers for some last turtle words of encouragement and disbursement of power pellets, to meet Sweet Pea. If they met her, they couldn't help but to love her and to want to cheer her on. She was entered in three competitions today: the one-foot run, the two-yard long haul, and the beast of them all, the Tri-Turtle - the mile swim, the half-mile hurdles, and the flash one-foot dash.
Everyone knows this is the Olympics of turtle racing. And my Sweet Pea was going to be the Olga Korbut of 1996. Fuck Mary Lou Retton, that squished face looking Wheaties hustler. Sweat Pea was classy: from the tip of her mossy green nose to the point of her turtle nub tail. She was a Pryobastian Berry Shell and that meant she had a mild purple glint to her dome, like if a turtle had a turtle baby with a blueberry. That's my Sweet Pea, a turtleberry.
Turtles came from all fifty states for the Low Down Dirty Balls Out Tours and that ringer, Fast Frannie Foppler, was even flown in from Canada. She was a fatty at 32 hulking pounds of wily gargantuan, completely over the weight limit. Mean rat bastard, she would charge the other turtles and knock them out of their racing lanes. The tumbled turtles would land belly up with their shrunken dinosaur-like legs flailing. Disgraceful whore. It was rumored she wasn't given carbs for a week prior to meets just to make weight. This was the year Foppler was going down like Britney Spears on a back-up dancer. Sweet Pea would see to that.
I peered into her box and my chest swelled with pride. Sweet Pea had worked so hard this past year and it was about to pay off; it was almost time to walk into the Turtle Dome for her pre-race massage and pep talk. I recognized the look in Sweet Pea's eyes. It was the same champion spunk Bernadette once shown and due, in part, to Bernadette. She had really helped to push her along until Sweet Pea's fighting spirit took hold. And how. Ultra-competitive, Sweet Pea took no prisoners. I softly petted her blueberry dome and smiled at her. Sweet Pea looked up at me with a steely determination in her eyes and a roguish badass sneer. The sun glinted off her tiny turtle teeth and I knew. It was time.
Just Standing
by Rachael Webster
Bernadette and I stood in the parking lot trying to recruit other parents as they came to pick up their children. It was hot, too hot for any regular September, and the rubber soles of our shoes melted like gum on the asphalt. Neither Bernie nor I complained as our shirts were overtaken by an empire of perspiration or as tiny beads of sweat joined into salty streams that stung our eyes, but our silence was not rewarded with reprieve. The sun just got hotter even as it sunk in the sky. It didn't matter how hot it got, though, because we couldn’t leave. We could only stay and hope that someone would be willing to forgo the relief of air conditioning long enough to hear our words.
Lots of parents had stood in this lot before, wanting us to sign their petitions to stop frog dissection in the classroom or force the cafeteria to switch to kosher hot dogs because not doing so would be disrespectful to the new neighbors. Bernadette and I always stopped and listened and almost always added our back-slanted signatures to the bottom of of the list. The petitioners would smile, fill their wide eyes with honest appreciation and insincere fraternity that canceled each other out. If you ever need anything, I'll be the first to sign. We never thought we'd have to test the veracity of those words. We weren't believers; we weren't protesters. We lived penciled in the margins of our own unread stories and we were satisfied that way. Then our daughter didn't save a boy and our private smudges were inked forever across the front page.
When Penny came home that day, she didn't tell us that anything had happened. There was no telltale halo of despair floating above her head to tell us that she had just watched a boy die. We lived a normal evening while anxiety wrapped a rubber band around Nelly Simms' chest because her son hadn't returned. We watched reruns of Seinfeld and ate chicken fried chicken while Ray Simms retraced his son's daily routine, shouting his name with increasing desperation. Bernadette helped Penny with geometry while a stranger dialed 9-1-1 to report the body in the Ed Hardy t-shirt that the current was smacking into the hull of his houseboat. We were in bed when Nelly bloodied her knees on the sidewalk after the police told her that Jeff was dead.
We finally found out about Jeff the next morning on the local news. Penny was in the shower and Bernadette rushed into the bathroom to choke out the terrible story. Penny didn't even poke her head out of the curtain when she said “I know. I watched him die.” Bernadette slipped back, shocked, broke the mirror with the back of her head before she slipped down the wall. Penny didn't even grab a towel before she tried to help her mother; she was out of the shower in a flash and hovered wet and naked over Bernadette, trying to stop the bleeding with her dripping hands. When Bernadette and I began to question whether Penny had lost her soul, it was that moment that we clung to.
The next few weeks are worn thin in my memory. I've gone over the events so many times that they've disappeared, but they've left a stain of condensed emotion that I can't erase or stop feeling. The thing I know for sure is that throughout the interrogations, incarcerations, threats and releases, Penny remained stoic while Bernadette and I dissolved. There were moments that I feared that the shame would press Bernadette into oblivion, leaving me to shoulder our daughter's guilt alone. But as overwhelming as humiliation and despair feel as they encompass you, they remain intangible and unable to snuff you out. You suffocate slowly on them until you feel life begin to slip away, but just before the sweet release, they retreat and leave you to mend the life you've watched fall down around you.
The legal ramifications of Penny's inaction were few, but a small town doesn't let the court determine the end of the affair. We were pariahs, exiled from within. We sent Penny away before someone killed her; she didn't seem to care. We watched reruns of Seinfeld and ate chicken fried chicken for dinner and we lived like people who didn't have a daughter until Bernadette came to me with a road map to absolution.
Bernadette and I stood in the parking lot trying to recruit other parents as they came to pick up their children. Nobody wanted to hear what we had to say, but we remained. Eventually, perhaps because they thought it would make us go away, they stopped to listen. I told them about the community center we hoped to open in Jeff's name, the bill that we hoped to have passed in his memory. Heads nodded, tears were shed, but no names were ever added after Bernadette's and my own. People don't want to hand out redemption when a boy is in an urn. Standing filled our days, though, and shin splints provided the absolution we'd been seeking for the sins we didn't commit, so we stayed.
