Snapper by Felicia Zekauskas, Peter Maloney

drive.
    That Isaac was only eleven didn’t trouble him. The boy’s legs were long enough to reach the pedals and he was tall enough to see out the windshield. Nor did Owen worry about the police. Cops were few and far between once they got out of Paterson. And once they were up in the mountains, they were even rarer.
    “So now what?” snapped Wilhelmina.
    She was beyond exasperation.
    “First you lose your hand, and now you’ve lost your mind!” she said, practically screaming at her husband. “Letting Isaac drive is against the law. And it’s not just your life you’re risking now, you’re risking his, too.”
    Owen hardly heard a word of what Wilhelmina was saying. In matters where he knew they would never see eye to eye, he had learned to tune her out. All Owen heard, as his wife chastised him, was the driving rain lashing against the window.
    For Isaac it was different. Isaac had no choice but to go along with his dad. His mother might think that he was taking sides, but he wasn’t. His parents’ battles were not his. He was merely a recruit, a foot soldier, impressed into service.
    “Don’t worry,” Isaac told his mom when his father was at work. “Driving’s easy. There’s nothing to it.”
    Wilhelmina could hardly believe there could be “nothing” to something that she herself had never learned how to do.
    In the end, Wilhelmina’s objections were simply ignored. One Friday afternoon, when Isaac arrived home from school, he saw his father waiting for him by the car in the driveway.
    “Ready to roll, Isaac?” said Owen.
    “I’m ready,” said Isaac.
    And off they went, with Isaac at the wheel and Owen calling out lefts and rights as needed.
    The last few miles they drove in the dark, on bumpy dirt roads that tunneled under overarching branches of leaf-laden limbs. Finally, Isaac pulled around one last bend and their headlights illuminated the clearing where the foundation of their cabin stood. They got out, gathered wood, made a fire, and ate. After eating, Owen pulled out the large sheet of paper that was curled up inside the cardboard tube he’d been carrying pinned between his ribcage and what was left of his right arm. He tried spreading the sheet flat on the ground, but it kept rolling back up into a tube.
    “Isaac,” he said. “We’ll need four good size rocks to weigh down the corners. Do you think you could find some?”
    Isaac knew exactly where to find rocks: down along the shoreline by the lake.
    “Sure, Dad,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
    Isaac walked down toward the lake. During the ride up, his father had tried to allay his son’s fears.
    “Don’t worry about that turtle,” he’d said. “Turtleback Lake is a big body of water. The odds of that snapper showing up in the same spot twice are next to none.”
    Still, Isaac was nervous. He tried to calm himself by breathing deeply and focusing on his task: finding four good-size rocks.
    Isaac was cradling three large rocks in his arms and bending down to pick up a fourth when suddenly the rock he was reaching for moved! Isaac’s heart skipped a beat. He dropped the three rocks in his arms and was spinning around to run away when he abruptly stopped and started to laugh. What an idiot he was being! The “rock” that had moved was a turtle – a harmless box turtle. Isaac had brought dozens of them back home to Paterson where he’d given them to friends or let them roam free in the confines of their fenced-in backyard.
    Isaac picked up the rocks he’d dropped, found a fourth, and headed back to the clearing.
    “Put one on each corner,” said his Dad.
    The woods around them were pitch black. The only light in the forest came from their campfire. Its flames hissed, snapped, and popped while casting a flickering light on the large sheet now spread out flat on the ground. The sheet was the size of an architect’s blueprint and was filled with elaborate, precisely rendered diagrams and notations. They reminded