La Tortuga: Terrence the turtle.

 A proprietary design perhaps, to perhaps codify and copyright the very voluble encoding of the night itself, how it seems something to be dismembered and moved about it in great chunks, yet it is still, voluminous, but insubstant, like the very air itself.

The intellect then, these ideas we rally and cajole over.

If they could have even noticed it, they might have went about doing the necessary dreamwork, the reverse-engineering of so many natural things, but instead, they digged gold, or digged in hopes of finding gold, to hit, to have, to make the big score they quested, always coming home tired, every near morning, with empty hands, no gold, and their dreams all but forgotten, no longer fueling their exhausted bodies, in time to have two hours of sleep and have their absence not noticed.

Nevermind that Doodle had sand in his bed in the mornings, and Diddy would yawn all die, such that Clarissa would tell him, "lie with me", and he was thinking of Joseph and Potiphar, the well-laid trap for the slave clerk, and he would have none of it, as it rested the very enjoyment out of sex with the old lady.

"Lie with me."

And they roamed the night with shovels.

One night they found the baby doll with the burned face, the neighbor girls offer to Doodle, that they have an imaginary child in play.  She even went through the motions of hiding it under her shirt, he belly looking like a horror of twisted limbs, random juttings, and she turned and removed the plastic baby doll.

Doodle had burned its face with his trusty gas lighter and presented it back to her.

And in the night, they digged and digged, in service to the dream.

They had found a skull and tossed it into the woods.

Diddy held a hope, a very real hope that fueled him well, that they would find a cash box filled with gold coins, one from some old regiment, something from 1863 when the Civil War frontage swept through the area.

And one night a shoplifter had ran into the scene, from the Citgo, through the woods, past the bottoms, into their scene, and unseeing in the dark, he fell into a hole, knocked immediately unconscious by the hardpack and back wrenched too, awkwardly, and as he painfully fever dreamed, Diddy had diarrhea, and bent over the treasure hole at the edge of the field, and unknowingly shat on the man, into the hole, not seeing, but not caring either.

The smell was such that they did not last long before the covered the whole up in disgust, in the unseeing dark actually burying the petty criminal alive; some pagan stuff, that was, a twisted owl or giant beetle whispering to his angels that the shoplifter was guilty of other stuff too, and thusly deserved to die that death of anonymity, that unknowing denied catharsis.

No resolution for the wicked.

And after Potiphar's house, Joseph in the good book was put in charge of all the jailed, as a jailed himself, one from among the stacks operating for their charge, and it was the blessing, that if he were jailed, God's blessing still worked for him, anyway, and as a convict, he was the bestest most well liked and most powerful, he was the golfer of the final row of the trailer park, or the lottery winning one in public housing.

"Lie with me", Potiphar's wife had said.

And as they stayed overlong at the would-be treasure pits, the turtle came, something at his nose: that human skull, again, come back the way a particularly nasty bad dream resurfaces.

Diddy rolled it like a small bowling ball into the pitch dark of the woods.