A row of turtles are sunning themselves at Miletus Marsh Park. Lined up head to stern on top of a partially submerged log with their lizard-like necks fully extended, and still as stones. The big one, with his back to us has a warm brown crumbling log to himself. Looks like a smooth round river-rock, the carapace shiny and wet, his small hind legs warming.
“That’s one, two, three, four …” Daisy counts seven turtles together on the log and points out two more swimming nearby in the sunny water that looks like rich creamy café aux lait.
“Are they snappers?”
“I think there are snappers in here. Those are Northern Painted Turtles.”
“That one has spots.”
“Yes, and you know what they’re called?
“Tell me.”
“ Spotted Turtles”
“Naaaaaaa …”
I can see a figure up ahead leaning back on a bench in his brown overcoat. He holds it open to the sun with his hands in the pockets. His straight red hair falls over his ears, and over the collar riding high on his neck against the cold breeze.
We walk on past the remains of a beaver lodge overgrown with grass and leafless bushes a few yards out in the bog.
“Look at that guy there. Isn’t it …?”
“Fred, it’s Theo Tinderbrush.”
“What is the professor doing out here by himself on a week day?”
He doesn’t notice us. He is looking out across the marsh towards the herons standing in the far shallows.
“Hi Theo.”
For a moment he looks around towards us, now only a yard away, and looks back, straight ahead. Pulls a hand out of his pocket to wave in a lazy salute. Daisy steps towards the bench and sits next to him.
“You got room for two on here?”
He pulls his hands together in the pockets, gathering his coat around him as if to make room. Though Daisy finds her place easily.
“What a great fall day Theo!”
“Yeah, sun’s out.”
The professor seems uninterested and keeps staring out towards the unmoving herons. The breeze sends ripples across the shaded light brown water in front of us. I remain standing. I didn’t know Daisy was on such close terms with Tinderbrush.
“Theo, are you still thinking about it?”
“Yeah, still thinking. Is that why you came out here all by yourself?”
“Oh, probably.”
I don’t know what she is referring to, but sense it might be confidential, so I walk on a few yards out of earshot around the other side of a thicket to see where the red wing blackbirds that just flew over us had landed.
“Fred! Hey there, where are you going?”
Holding on to her black bowler with yellow sticker in the band, Daisy shouts into the breeze, which dies down at that instant, and her voice is unexpectedly loud. I walk back around to see her beckoning me back. She pats the bench boards next to her.
“Here Fred, come sit down.”
Tinderbrush comes around from his preoccupations, and interrupts what he is saying to Daisy.”
“How you doing Fred?” Daisy turns to me as I sit down in her designated spot.
“We have been discussing Boyd.”
“Yeah, we and the rest of Fauxmont as well. Seems like I am the subject of endless speculation and gossip. I am expecting to see my picture in a supermarket tabloid.”
“Why?”
“Fred you must be the only one in Fauxmont who doesn’t know!”
“Know what?”
Tinderbrush pulls a wad of paper towel out of his coat pocket, wipes his nose, and sticks it back in his pocket scrunched in his fist.
“Fred, Boyd is demanding a DNA test to find out if Theo is his real father.”
“Why?”
“Because I was fooling around with his mother, back when ever it was, and nobody was supposed to know, ha ha.”
“You mean you and Lark?”
Tinderbrush is laughing.
“Fred, you need to catch up on your gossip my man.”
“It was when Lark was Theo’s teaching assistant up at P.U.”
“I thought she went to Glamour College with Diddlie?”
“She did Fred but after marrying Harper Nightingale she did some graduate work at P.U. with Theo.”
“Yeah, she was hot too. Too hot for P.U.”
“Theo, she dropped the course to have the baby.”
“Maybe …”
“Ouch! What do Lark and her ex have to say?”
Tinderbrush belches after draining a cup of coffee that was on the bench next to him.
“Nightingale is out of town, as usual and not answering my calls. He’s got his nose so far up USAID’s ass he’s found his anaerobic home in the bureaucratic bowel, in all that shit.”
“Theo, will you please calm down! Harper never does answer his old friends from here.”
“This is as embarrassing as hell, Fred. Lark and I have been kind of talking thanks to Daisy here.”
“Kind of talking, I thought you were …”
“Daisy, Lark is just blowing the whole thing off, just the way she blew that kid off from the start.”
“She told you Boyd wants a test. That’s why she called you. She didn’t just blow him off Theo!”
“She did, that Hispanic woman brought him up. What’s her name? You know, the one who disappeared from Trip’s place.”
“It was Juanita Ted, you are being unfair, and you don’t get it.”
“She and Boyd never talk Daisy. How did she know anything about a test?”
Tinderbrush laughs again, and mumbles to himself and the wind.
Daisy ignores him.
“Fred, have you seen Boyd since he grew his hair?”
“No Daisy, not since the fourth of July.”
“Well, he looks just like Theo.”
“He’s wearing it in the same style as mine too, if you can call it a style, when you wait four months between haircuts.” Tinderbrush runs his hands through the long hair above his ears. He gets out his phone and starts texting.
“What made Boyd get into it now?”
“Fred, when Boyd and I were together we talked about his doubts.”
“His doubts about his sexual orientation you mean?”
“About his paternity. I think it is part of his coming out and moving in with Albrecht.”
“But those are two completely different things, paternity and coming out.”
“Right, I know, but it was on his mind when we broke up. He never stopped talking about Albrecht, and he was mad at his mother because she wouldn’t discuss the question about his real father.”
Tinderbrush finishes texting and gesticulates with the phone still in his hand.
“Well, I should have talked to him before. You know I wasn’t sure anyway. I never thought about it much. Lark was sure he was Harper Nightingale’s. I had a lot of other things to think about. I don’t know how the hell she knew. How could she tell? Harper was hardly ever around, then … or now. Anyway, last month the kid texted me when I was out of town. We met over at the H Bar when I got back. Hadn’t seen him for ten years, or more probably. I mean I just remembered this weird kid with short hair.”
“You never told me that Theo!”
“No, it was a short meeting.”
“How short?”
“He came up to me and started telling me I ought to be carrying a gun. I told him he was nuts. Then he got the thing out and showed it off. Right in the H bar! What stupid thing to do! That was embarrassing.”
“Did you tell him to put it away?”
“I told him to zip it up, Daisy! He didn’t catch my Freudian drift. So I told him if he had any sense he’d throw the damn thing in the Potomac. Then he walked away and I didn’t follow.”
Tinderbrush gets up and walks over towards the thicket. The red wing black birds rise out and fly over toward the herons, reflecting white as fallen Kleenexes in the water.
“Don’t you think he was trying to impress you?”
Tinderbrush showed no sign of hearing Daisy’s question.
“Where are you all going? Stick around birds! You might learn something!”
He has his hands back in his coat pockets holding them out. Opening his coat like an obscene flasher.
Daisy gets up. “You want to walk around some Theo?”
“Oh why not?”
We walk over to the boardwalk, which takes us out into the middle of the marsh. The cattails look like fat cigars malting. Their fluff blows off like cotton smoke. Daisy leads the way, pulling Tinderbrush along with her arm in his. She is as tall as he is but he is heavy set and his coat makes him look even bigger next to Daisy, with long legs in tight blue denim that look as thin as a heron’s. I lagged behind to read the information on an illustrated text identifying cattails, and rose hips, barred owl, fox, beaver and other critters who aren’t showing themselves, and nothing about turtles. When I catch up, Daisy grabs my arm. So she now has Theo and me in tow, and we take up the whole width of the boardwalk.
“I need to book a flight to Australia.”
“Don’t be such a coward Theo.”
“No! I have friends there and the Atheists in Sydney invited me to lecture.”
“Theo, you have obligations right here.”
“I know but I am pissed off with the whole thing! Why is this mixed up young political fanatic coming after me now?”
“Well at least you’re not using anti gay epithets.”
“Daisy, I would never do that, and you ought to know it.”
“I thought I knew you Theo. That you would agree to the test, and help Boyd figure out who he is.”
“Its embarrassing, I mean I didn’t know I had a kid. What is he to me?”
“Yeah Theo, what does he mean to you.?
“A lot of trouble!”
“Maybe you should think about it.”
“Maybe … Enough of this shit Daisy!”
Tinderbrush breaks away and lumbers off back the way we came.
His big bones make a heavy tread, vibrating in the boards, and his red hair streams to one side in a sunbeam as the wind picks up.
“God! Fred, I never thought he would react that way.”
“There goes his coffee cup blowing across the water.”
“Fred, I think he’s still in love with her.”
