Once the Shore

by Paul Yoon

  Bey folded the map and stood beside the starboard rails, watching the sun distance itself from its reflection against the waves. The albatross hovered above him. The boat’s low hum reverberated against the soles of his bare feet. He slipped his fingers through his beard as if sifting through sand. To his left, on deck, his wife sat and braided her hair.

  He went into the cabin to retrieve a tin box and then filled a cup with cold barley tea from a bucket. The boat rocked against a wave and he steadied himself against the wall, discolored from the humidity. He returned outside and Soni took the cup with both her hands, bowing her head to thank him. He sat beside her and opened the lid of the box. Inside there were dried squid, flattened, in the shape of spears, stacked on top of each other and the color of dust. Bey lifted one out of the tin and tore it in half, giving one side to Soni. They pulled off the tentacles, one by one, and ate in silence. It tasted sweet at first, then bitter, its texture elastic.

  The winds were heavy and smelled of salt. He watched as she dipped her fingers into the tea and then pressed them against her chapped lips. In this gesture he saw how she had aged, as if she were shrinking each and every day. He was, too—perhaps they would be whittled to the size of a pocket. He thought of death in this way. A diminishing.

  After some time, she said, “Do you think there are many?”

  Twenty boats, the salt peddler had said. Moored along the coasts. How many men were on them was hard to tell. The hulls and the masts split, consumed by a deafening fire, and he imagined the men flung up to the clouds, as though a sea creature had spit them out.

  She said it again: “Do you think there are many?”

  As many as our village, he wanted to say, but did not. He told her he was uncertain and she accepted it, taking comfort in his statement, for uncertainty was what pulled them toward an island they had never seen before.

  “He could have been inland,” she said, more to herself as she continued to look out at the sea. There wasn’t another boat in sight or the sound of a plane again, the roar, which was a sound that encompassed and paralyzed and forewarned. There was instead the blue of peace, the logic of seabirds.

  It was possible. He could have been inland. Bey thought it as well. Who would not? Karo was prone to wandering. He liked to dock and see the town where he and his fellow crewmembers delivered fish. He brought back stories and souvenirs for his parents: some fruit, simply because it had grown elsewhere; woven bracelets for his mother, one she wore now, made from a strip of tanned leather; for Bey, a bamboo cane that he hung up on a hook, refusing to use it.

  They began to call him sailor and waited for him along the river when he returned. “Sailor, what land have you seen?” they joked with him as he disembarked from his boat. “What gifts do you bring?” And he would say, “I have come from the stars, Mother, I have seen the planets.” He bowed and they embraced him, his hair smelling of foreign coasts and Bey touched his son’s face and pulled on the young man’s beard, thick and dark.

  He had grown taller than both of them. There was about him a calm, as though he took with him the flat surface of the sea in late afternoon and wore it like a coat.

  Sitting beside Soni, Bey inhaled the air, breathing deeply. They would arrive soon, he kept telling himself. But stillness turned into immobility. It seemed the boat had stopped altogether, with equal parts of the ocean in all directions. He stood and walked up to the helm. No, they were moving, albeit slowly, and they were on course. He listened to the boat’s engine. They were traveling as fast as it could go. He descended again. He thought of his son’s calm and hoped it had remained with him until the very end. He kicked the floor of the deck. Soni didn’t turn; or perhaps she did. It did not seem to matter.

  The cabin windows were stained with dirt. Bey wrapped an old shirt of his around a stick and then plunged it into the ocean. His muscles strained as he lifted the stick, the old shirt darker and dripping. He wrung it. He worked methodically, like someone who had dipped a shirt into the sea a thousand times before. And then with the shirt he wiped the windows, all of them, leaving streaked arcs. When he finished he squinted at his reflection. He lifted his hands up close to his eyes, close enough so that he could see the lines of his palms. He had lately found himself doing this often, guessing the distance of his hands to his face and wondering whether it was lessening. There were times when he thought he was losing his vision. He stared at his palms and saw the geography there, the rivers and the roads and the paths. He stretched his fingers. Between them he saw blue.

  The night before he had spent hours attempting to recall his son, to distinguish his face. It was vague to him, out of focus. Bey lay on a worn blanket on the floor, which he halved so that a part of it could cover his body. Soni lay beside him. The room smelled of sesame oil. The window was open and he heard the wind. He shut his eyes; opened them. The light of evening splayed through the window. He could not clarify. He could not recall the last thing they spoke of, some final words.

  At first he did not want Soni to go with him. She persisted. He urged her not to come. She called him selfish, a coward. She stood in the corner of the kitchen, her eyes ablaze like some demon. She made a fist and hit her stomach, saying, “He is mine,” and they fought because fighting did not require thought.

  Afterward, she lay in the corner of the bedroom and pressed the side of her face against the wall and said, “Karo, I am listening to your heart. I am listening to the sea. And I am scared.” Bey was across the room, looking up at the thatched roof that seemed to spread until he saw a vast network of hands extending. Karo’s hands were thick and scarred and calloused from the nets, from the war, and they were always cold and always beautiful.

  On the lip of the horizon a dark object in the shape of a thumbnail rose against the sky. Soni saw it first. She stood and leaned over the rails of the deck, as though she thought the boat could go faster by her doing so. She resembled an eager child in this position. “Hurry,” she called to Bey, and although it was impossible for the boat to go any faster, it did seem that their speed was increasing. The island grew taller and wider until its shape began to morph, sharp angles appearing that could have been trees or the back of a mountain. But the longer Bey concentrated on the image he grew more certain that it wasn’t their destination. Perhaps it was a surfacing whale, swimming toward them.

  But no, it was not a whale. Less fluid, less mobile. The shape of it was now fixed. It moved while being still. It shone metallic under the sun, which was now directly above them. A drop of sweat caught in Bey’s eyelashes and he blinked, wiping his forehead. When he looked up again he saw what it was and he felt a tightening and the beat of his heart and he grew afraid.

  “Seek cover,” he told his wife.

  He took her by the shoulders. Gripping the rails, she walked with care against the urgency of his palms. “Bey,” she said. “Don’t hold so tight.” They exchanged a brief smile and he relaxed his grip.

  In the cabin, underneath a mat, lay a door leading down into a storage compartment below the floor, a small room he never used. He lifted open the door and a stale, humid scent enveloped them. He held her hand as she descended and only when she was fully lowered did he let go.

  Daylight stopped at the edge of the entrance. Soni’s face was shadowed and her eyes were bright, like the eyes of the hares in the island’s mountains. “You stay until you hear me say your name,” he told her. “Or you stay until you hear nothing. You wait for the engines to fade.” He said all this as though he were speaking from afar.

  “Bey,” she said. “I will be fine.” She lifted her hand and waved. He pushed the door and watched whatever light was down there close like a shell. She was still waving. He replaced the mat. He looked about the cabin once more. He checked the closet that held his son’s spare fishing gear, which he had never used. With the cup he took some of the barley tea and poured it over the net and the pole.

  The engine he heard was much louder than his trawler; it sounded as if a crowd
were clapping, sharp and rapid. He stepped out onto the deck.

  The patrol boat was American. He noticed the colors and the design of the small flag folding in the wind. The boat, still rumbling, slowed as it approached the trawler. A soldier sat astern on a chair. In front of him was a long barreled rifle on a stand which the soldier panned, back and forth, across the length of the trawler, until it settled on Bey. Another gun stood at the bow, manned by a boy, it seemed, the chair larger than the width of his shoulders and chest. Bey counted the visible men: six.

  He cut the engine. He placed his hands on the rails, where they could be seen. The patrol boat turned so that its port side ran parallel to Bey’s starboard. There were words painted white onto the side. The two boats were five, six meters within each other. He could see the men’s faces now, their flushed skin, their thick forearms. One of the men, however, was a mainlander, young, perhaps in his thirties. Through a megaphone he spoke in their language, translating the Americans’ words.

  They wanted to know where he resided. What his purpose was in the seas. His destination. How long he expected to be out here.

  Bey ran his fingers through his beard. Where his bare feet touched the deck seemed fragile, unstable, as though the floor would soon collapse. He concentrated on Soni’s silence, willed it, and wondered whether her eyes were open or shut. He looked down to see that he was on his toes, straining. He answered them with brevity, attempting to mask his island’s dialect as much as he could.

  He told them he lived in Udo. He was fishing. For leisure. “And the boat?” the translator said, his voice hollow through the speaker. “That’s your boat?”

  “Yes.”

  The man lowered the speaker and spoke to whom Bey assumed was the captain. The others continued to aim their guns at him.

  The translator and two soldiers were going to board. The boat floated closer and the three of them hiked their legs up over the rails and stepped onto the trawler’s deck. They wore black boots, laced up. He had never seen boots before. And the men: they were tall and their skin was peeling around the bridge of their noses; their eyes appeared bored, although their hands were alert, gripping their weapons.

  The translator approached Bey. “There are smugglers,” he said. “From the mainland to Solla. Do you know anything about this?”

  Bey shook his head. He lived in Udo, he repeated, not Solla.

  “Yes, you’ve said that.”

  The Americans searched the boat. They wanted to know where his fishing equipment was. In the cabin, he said, in the closet. He took a step forward but was pulled back by a hand. The translator’s fingers were warm and he felt each finger against his skin. He hadn’t started yet, he called to the men now searching the cabin. He hadn’t caught anything. He heard the clinking of tin.

  “You’re heading east,” the translator said. “Toward Japan.”

  “Not that far,” Bey said. “Far enough for quiet.”

  He heard steps, a shifting. The rattle of their weapons clanging. He felt the breath of the mainlander behind him and judged the distance between his own body and the man’s rifle. He thought: if he heard the groans of a door he would go for the gun. He concentrated on how he would move his arms and his hands. He would use his elbow on the man first. He did not think of the men with the weapons as large as swordfish. He thought of a single man and a single weapon and shut his eyes. He waited for the door. He thought he would never know whether their son had survived, and he bit his lip and tasted the blood and breathed through his nose and convinced himself that he was forty years younger, with the strength of a bull. He formed a question and repeated it in his mind: What are these things you drop from the sky?

  No sound came; the door remained shut. The soldiers returned to the deck, carrying a small tin box, which reflected the sun. They opened it, revealing the remaining squid.

  “They want to know whether they can have one,” the translator said.

  “Of course,” Bey said.

  “Protein,” the translator said. “They’re lacking.”

  The two soldiers lifted a squid and raised it like a flag so that the others on the boat could see. Then they climbed back over to their boat. The translator followed them, but with one leg over the rails, he paused to look at Bey. He seemed amused. He said, “Old man, you are far away from home.”

  And then, as fast as they had appeared on the horizon, the patrol boat departed, leaving a wake that caused Bey’s trawler to tilt. He steadied himself against the outside of the cabin wall. They sped away and the guns swiveled and angled up toward the sky. In the distance, under the light of the sun, he watched them tear the flesh of the squid and open their mouths and taste. One of them shook his head and spat a tentacle overboard. What remained uneaten the men tossed as well, flinging their arms, and the limp pieces arced up into air and fell and then vanished.

  Although it seemed like less, it had been two years since Bey and his son had walked to the river to repaint the boat. It was the end of the war and Karo had returned bearing gifts in the form of unopened paint canisters. He had found them in a trash receptacle on the docks of a port on an eastern island, where he had spent the majority of the years, imprisoned. He had refused to fight for Japan. In a cave they took their time, inserting splinters underneath his fingernails, letting him bleed.

  When he was set free and the prison camp abandoned, he took the canisters of paint, unaware of the color it contained. Altogether they had six tins, each carrying about two liters of paint, and they placed them on a wheelbarrow and pushed them along the trail that led to the river.

  The Americans had by then occupied the island although in their village their presence remained unfelt, save for the occasional MPs that passed through in their Jeeps. They kept their distance, however, and it was as though there were two villages within one, brushing against each other on occasion. There were reports of violence in the central areas of the island but here the villagers’ lives remained unchanged.

  It was morning. The day was fine and the winds were slow. The trawler lay up on the riverbank, the same as when they saw it last. They had waited weeks to make sure no one took it. Far from the ocean it looked ancient and awkward, its paint dull and faded, chipped in some places to reveal rust. It had been his son’s idea to claim it. They would take trips. They would take his mother.

  With a knife they pried open the tins, anxious and eager to see the mysterious color. They had agreed that whatever it was they would use it. White, Karo had guessed. Green, his father said. Like the leaves. They bet a jug of wine. They squatted and huddled over the tins.

  What they saw was white, a pool of milk. Bey was not surprised. He reached for his son and patted his arm. He said, “Sailor, you were correct,” and he loved him and saw how much he had physically changed: his thinness, his eyes deeper and heavier; his fingers, the nails discolored, some of them still re-growing.

  Karo never spoke of it. “We’ve missed years,” was all he said. “But no longer.” And Bey accepted this, as he accepted the seasons.

  His son rolled up his shirt sleeve and, with his hand formed in a fist, dipped his arm into the paint canister. The paint leaked out onto the grass, and it engulfed his forearm just below the elbow. Slowly, he rotated his arm. Soon, dark lines began to spiral within the milk white and the lines grew thicker and the white faded, folding, until the paint turned blue, dark, the color of winter. He then lifted his arm and the paint dripped down his skin and his knuckles like dozens of rivers falling into the sea.

  The project took several days. Throughout it all Karo painted with a blue arm. Sometimes he pressed his hand against the hull and from a distance Bey was unable to distinguish between the limb and the steel and his son said, “Father, I have lost a hand, I have lost an arm, I am slowly turning into this boat,” and he laughed but Bey did not, although he smiled and let him know that he had heard. He watched daylight bend behind the trees and the current retreat and Karo fade. The following morning he was returning to the
sea, to earn his living.

  They did not see him again for six weeks. When he returned, he taught Bey the functions of the trawler and pointed to certain areas of the boat and named them as though they were countries. They could have stayed there all day and evening. It was what Bey wanted. But Karo grew restless. “Next time,” he always said, patting his father’s shoulder. “Next time.” And Bey watched from the boat as his son headed to the village, where his mother was expecting him.

  They were not often seen together, the three of them. He was either with his father by the river or with his mother in the village. During meals, Bey and Soni spoke to him and not to each other. Bey did not know what they spoke of when she was alone with him. Marriage, perhaps. His unwillingness. Whatever words they exchanged with Karo they each took and kept private.

  For every visit he promised to take them out to sea, on the trawler, but he never did. He kept promising. His work in the fishing crews lasted longer, sometimes for entire seasons.

  One evening, when Bey and Soni were alone, he wondered out loud when their son would return and she responded, “It is nice to hear your voice again.”

  He almost hit her for that. The thought occurred to him, of swinging his hand across her face, of his flesh against hers. He was unable to look at her, shocked and afraid. He heard her undo the braid of her hair.

  He left her and sat on the steps of his house, facing the trees. In the mountains behind the village, the engine of a truck groaned. The pigs shifted in the pen. Moonlight settled over the barley fields. The sky was clear and vast and the stars were pulsing like beacons. He had lived here for all his years. It was a life. There was love he was capable of and love that was desired. His wife he had stopped knowing. His son, it seemed, was gone before he could know him. He wondered then where all the lost things in this world lay. And who, if anyone, ever found them.

  They had been at sea for three hours when the first of the debris began to float by them. They were small pieces of wood, some of them trailed by shreds of fabric. Over the starboard rails Bey and Soni watched them bob and hit the hull before they were swallowed by a wave only to resurface and approach once more.