CHAPTER 49

Questions and Answers

When Sergeant Caleb turned up at the Rolling Doughnut, he was not wearing his crisp marine uniform. He was not wearing the plain nondescript clothes he wore when I met him as Melvin the shaman. He was wearing a red and black striped sweater, black and white shoes, and a little black cap with a red pompom on top—also big sunglasses with black plastic frames. He got four jelly doughnuts, and four coffees, and carried them to the picnic table where Seamus, Iggy, and I were sitting, waiting for him.

“I got Bismarcks for everyone,” Sergeant Caleb said.

“Bismarcks?”

“Named for Otto von Bismarck, born 1815, died 1898, prime minister of Prussia from 1862 to 1873, and the chancellor of Germany from 1871 to 1890. I don’t know what he had to do with jelly doughnuts—maybe he liked them.”

Before this, we had ordered plain doughnuts at the Rolling Doughnut. We bit into the Bismarcks and they squirted jelly, into our mouths and down our chins. They were all right, but I didn’t think I would be switching to them on future visits.

“Archaeologists have found petrified doughnuts in prehistoric ruins in the Southwest,” Sergeant Caleb said. “No one knows how far back they go. The Dutch made olie-koecken, or oily-cakes—the Puritans ate them. Some people credit the modern doughnut to the mother of Captain Hanson Crockett Gregory, a sea captain—his mother used to make them for him to take on his voyages. Captain Gregory claimed to be the first person to knock a hole in the middle of an oily-cake.”

“That’s very interesting,” I said. “But we wanted to talk about—”

“There’s more,” Sergeant Caleb said. “In the 1920s, a Russian immigrant living in New York, named Adolph Levitt, invented a doughnut machine—probably just like the one here at the Rolling Doughnut. Machine-made doughnuts were a sensation at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1934, and Levitt made millions selling doughnut machines.”

“Are you actually a real shaman?” I asked Sergeant Caleb.

“I am a retired sergeant in the United States Marine Corps,” Sergeant Caleb said. “And a shaman, but I don’t practice.”

“Are you really a Navajo Indian?” I asked, quickly, before he could shift back to the history of doughnuts.

“Everybody who knows me says I am,” Sergeant Caleb said. “You can ask anyone.”

This was sort of a twisty answer—but to press the question would have been impolite, as if I were accusing him of posing as a Navajo. I decided he wasn’t, but I didn’t know what that might mean one way or the other.

Seamus Finn abandoned specific questions and tried another approach. “Tell us everything about the turtle.”

“It’s very old,” Sergeant Melvin Caleb said. “No one knows for sure how old.” He took a sip of his coffee. Then he sat there silently. He was good at silences.

Back to direct questions, I asked, “Does it have special powers? Magical ones?”

“Yes.” Melvin was ready to tell us the whole history of the common doughnut, but getting him to talk about what we wanted him to talk about was a heavy struggle.

“Where did you get it?” Iggy asked.

“I got it from another shaman,” Melvin said.

“Another shaman?” Iggy followed up.

“Yes.”

“What was his name?” Iggy wasn’t going to quit.

“Ed.”

“Ed? His name was Ed?” Iggy sounded calm, but she was tapping her basketball shoe under the table.

“Yes. Ed the shaman.”

“Do I have to ask where Ed the shaman got it?”

“From another shaman. I think her name was Susie.”

“So, are we correct in assuming the turtle has gone from shaman to shaman for a long time?” Iggy asked.

“That’s right,” Melvin said.

“And why did you give the turtle to Neddie?” Iggy asked. “He’s not a shaman.”

“You don’t know that he’s not,” Melvin said.

“I’m not,” I said.

“You don’t know that you’re not,” Melvin said. “People are shamans before they know they are—so you could be. And the reason I gave the turtle to Neddie was that I was told to.”

“Who told you to, another shaman?” Seamus asked.

“Maybe. Maybe it was another shaman. Maybe it was a whole lot of shamans. Most likely it was the turtle itself. Anyway, I knew I was supposed to give it to him.”

“The turtle itself told you to give it to me?”

“More or less.”

“Do you know why you were supposed to give it to me?”

“You realize this is official shaman stuff we’re talking about, and technically I’m not supposed to discuss it with anybody,” Melvin said. “But to answer your question, not exactly. I suppose because you were the next step in the turtle’s destiny—but I’m only guessing.”

Iggy was waving her hand in the air as though she were in class. “Oooh! Oooh! What is the turtle’s destiny?”

“Every so often . . . not very often, really . . . every hundred years, or several hundred years, there’s a kind of . . . thing that happens.”

“Thing? What kind of thing?”

“Well, like an eruption, or an earthquake, but not exactly. It’s not just like this, but it’s sort of as if there were very old powers, underground, sort of, and they are dead, only they aren’t. Once in a while they wake up and try to come back, and if that were to happen everything would go topsy-turvy. Imagine if all of a sudden there were dinosaurs again, or saber-tooth cats, things like that.”

“I might like to see that,” Iggy said.

“Not close up, you wouldn’t,” Melvin said. “Anyway, the turtle plays a role when that happens—it helps keep things from getting out of order. Sort of stabilizes things—up is up, down is down, alive is alive, and extinct is extinct. Turtle is very important. Sort of an evolutionary compass.”

“Uh-oh,” I said.