“Miss. Make us go. Please. I want to see how you count dolphins. I want to be a scientist like you. And it will be the last place to look. I swear. After that I know Gramps dead. Please. Then I find Black Crab for you.”
There was a silence. Lloyd hoped the credit on the cell phone would not run out. He was about to ask Jules to call him back, when she said, “Where are you?”
“Gray Pond beach.”
“I had a trip planned for tomorrow morning. From Treasure Beach. Leaving Kingston in an hour. Can I talk to your mother? I don’t want to take the responsibility for taking you with me without her permission.”
Lloyd thought quickly. He needed a woman who would pretend to be his mother. “Awright, Miss. She sellin. Me will call you back and you can talk to her.”
He went inside to Miss Violet. “Me know where him is Miss Vie! Me know. That woman, the one who study the dolphins, she go take me. But she want talk to my mother, you know how uptown people stay. You talk to her. Tell her you is my mother and is okay for me to go. Please. I am beggin you.”
Miss Violet looked at him without expression. She wiped her face. She opened her mouth to speak and Lloyd interrupted her, “I know is a long time him gone. Don’t tell me is a long time!”
“Aah, Lloydie. Not that me going say. Me going ask you if you sure you want find out what really happen.”
“Of course me is sure! What kinda question that? Miss Vie, you know Gramps. Him is a tough old man. Him not go dead so easy. You know that.”
“Man is just flesh and blood, Lloydie. Man is cruel. Life cruel. The sea cruel. It easy to die.”
“Please, Miss Vie. Say you is my mother. This uptown woman, she not go to sea without everything, everything—life jacket, radio, GPS, two engines at least, extra fuel, flares. Everything. You know how it to. It going be safer than what I do every day of life.”
Miss Violet considered. And then she said, “What she name?”
Jasmine had a son after a short sharp labor in the house in Great Bay attended by a midwife from Black River. We named him Vernon, after her father. She lost interest in me. The two women still fought and the house closed tight around us, unpleasant with Vernon’s bawling and his smells and needs. I was not needed. We were living on what Luke brought in from dynamite fishing and I was not going to sea.
Luke quickly learned that our first efforts at dynamite fishing had been done all wrong. You were supposed to go at dusk on a calm day. You did not go to a random spot over the coral reef and take what floated up. You went to a place where fish schooled and you attracted them with bait or chum, and then you threw the dynamite. Luke became expert. I did it that one time only and ever after we were divided, almost enemies. Yet still I ate Luke’s fish.
We never talked about the day we first threw explosives into the sea, but when Vernon was six months old, Jasmine, the baby, and I left Great Bay and moved to Kingston. She had a cousin in Gray Pond, a fishing beach just like Great Bay, she told me, although she had never seen it, with a pond like ours. I could not imagine a fishing beach in a city. Perhaps I would get construction work.
When we packed up all we owned I was surprised how small a pile it was. I said good-bye to Luke on the front steps of the house I had grown up in; Cordella was in the kitchen and did not come out. I knew she was glad the house would be hers alone. Maas Leroy took us in his taxi to Kingston and I looked back at the coastline only once at the top of the escarpment. I lived on an island and the sea would always be there, and it would always be the same sea, whether or not I was a fisher. I was twenty-five years old.
31
Jules shook her head when she saw Lloyd, sitting on the sidewalk of Windward Road, waiting for her. He had not been home. “Lloydie,” was all she said. She handed him a plastic bag full of sandwiches and an icy Pepsi. He ate the sandwiches—bully beef, with just the right amount of pickapeppa sauce and Scotch bonnet—and he found every leftover crumb with his tongue. “Stretch out in the back,” Jules said. “Go to sleep. It will take us a good three hours to get to Treasure Beach.” Lloyd crawled into the back seat, lay his head on his backpack, and was instantly asleep.
Pressure in his bladder brought him awake. He was stiff, but he felt rested and strong. He was still thirsty. The sun was setting and they were driving down a winding road, the sea ahead of them far below. The soil was reddish with rocky outcrops and the grass was rough and gray. “Miss? We can stop for a minute?” he asked.
Jules pulled over beside a large limestone rock. Lloyd got out and relieved himself against a fence post. When he had finished, he looked out to the coastline. The hill they were on fell to a large flat plain containing a huge pond. Straggly trees leaned all one way. There was a large hill on the coast to the east. He could see the small houses of a village. “Where is that, Miss?” he said.
“Treasure Beach,” she said. “That’s Pedro Bluff. And the Great Pedro Pond. The Pedro Bank is out to sea. All these places named for someone called Pedro. We leave before first light. You alright? You feel better?”
“Yes, Miss.” He caught a glimpse of what seemed to be a cave in the limestone outcrop off to one side and a faint path leading to it. He saw a small tree had sent its roots right into the rock and its roots framed the entrance to the cave. He turned his gaze to the sea. He was anxious to get down to the coast. He would tell Jules about Black Crab’s warning; of course he would. As soon as they came back from Portland Rock, he would tell her. She had been going there anyway. It would not be any more dangerous than her regular trips.
Portland Rock. A dry breeze has torn half of the tarpaulin away and I can see the other half will follow. Then I will lie fully exposed to the sun and my life will be soon over. My leg pounds ceaselessly, like the sea itself. The rocks are full of the skeletons and marks of sea creatures—will I one day become one of these marks? They are like the pencil drawings we had to do at Sandy Bank primary school so many years ago. Will some future visitor see the faint traces of a man imprinted in rocks? Despite my long determination to avoid this place I am going to die alone on the Pedro Bank.
I hear the soft breath of dolphins nearby and they are a comfort. They came after the last rain and they have stayed. A crab runs across my leg. I think of the one I ate when I was first here. It was a female—her underside held reddish eggs. I ate them all. I smashed her shell. I never caught another crab.
There are piles of human excrement nearby. My hope has been focused on them. A few were fresh when I came here, but now they have dried. Surely, I thought for many days, the person who squatted on this rock will return.
I see Hatuey in my dreams. He speaks to me sometimes and he tells me of a sea so bountiful that his people caught fish in their hands by diving in the underwater caves of Great Bay; how, then, a man who could hold his breath for a long time was a big man. He explains how to tell time with the span of a hand held up between the arcing sun and the line of the horizon. He talks about the great wave that killed his people. He tells me to lay my hand on my navel—for the dead have no navels—it is the connecting place of the living body to the living world. And I feel it, the tides of the sea in my own blood, in that beginning place of connection to my mother, but I know the tide of my blood is ebbing.
32
They spent the night at a guesthouse. Jules requested a room with twin beds, which opened onto a small veranda. There was even a kitchen and a bathroom. Lloyd wanted to explore the community, but Jules said he should stay with her. They could walk down to a seafood restaurant for supper, she said. Then they would go through her gear. If he wanted to be a scientist, he might as well start learning right away. First, though, she wanted to just sit and watch the sun go down. Lloyd sat with her on the veranda and again noticed her ability to be perfectly still. He felt his blood was fizzing. The last thing he wanted to do was watch something that happened every day without fail. He looked at the sky for signs of weather, hoping for a fair morning the next day. He could not tell what the clouds held. The wind
ceased and mosquitoes swarmed. Jules got up only when the last glow of evening died. “Come,” she said. “Let’s get some food.”
The sounds of her preparations woke him in the night. “You up?” she said and turned on the light in the kitchen. She put a kettle on to boil and poured cereal from a box into bowls. All her gear was ready from the night before. “You use the bathroom first,” she said.
Within an hour, they were at sea with Speedy, Jules’s local guide. He was neither young nor old, and like most fishers Lloyd knew, a man of few words, but there had been a short discussion about the weather—Speedy thought there was a storm coming, but it was holding off. It would be a quick trip, Jules told him. Speedy did not want to wear the life jacket Jules held out to him and she insisted. It was obviously an argument they had had before. Eventually he slipped it on but refused to fasten it. Lloyd’s life jacket was too big, but Jules cinched it tight around him.
“Straight to Portland Rock?” Speedy said.
“Uh-huh.”
“How long?” Lloyd asked him.
“Three, maybe four hour,” Speedy said. “Depend on the sea.”
The boat, Skylark, was not large, but it was new and the white paint and chrome railings shone. It was much wider than a fishing canoe with a little shade canopy over the steering wheel. There were storage lockers under the bow, which held all Jules’s gear. Four brand-new engines on the stern drove the boat through the water. There was a small seat in front of the wheel and Lloyd sat there with Jules, staring ahead into the night, waiting for sunrise.
Last night I dreamed of Jasmine and the bright round balls she wore in her hair when we were young. We did not do well in Kingston, she and I. For a while I worked on construction sites, shoveling gravel into a wheelbarrow. Carrying bags of cement. Mixing cement. Rendering cement. They called me unskilled and the pay was low. Jasmine worked at a haberdashery place on Orange Street until her boss told her she had to be his girlfriend. “No girlfriend, no job,” he said. She left, but after that she could not find work. We were behind on the rent and the landlord shouted through the locked front door at night. If Vernon woke up, Jasmine put her hand over his mouth to keep him quiet, and I remember the gleam of his frightened eyes in the dark.
He was four when Jasmine left me for a soldier and took him with her. By then the only word she flung at me was: wut’less. The only sentence: you have no blasted use.
I went back to sea. I saw my son when she came on a Sunday to pick up her money. The money was never enough. The time I spent with Vernon was never enough. As he grew, he stared at me with anger. Jasmine began wearing a wig and her nails were long and dangerous.
Once a week, I borrowed the phone at the bar in Gray Pond and I spoke to Luke at Sheldon’s Bar. We had little to say to each other, but I was glad to hear his voice. His news was always the same, times were hard, fish were few. Politics was mashing up everything. The men of Parotee near Black River fought with the men of Rocky Point and the fights continued out on the Pedro Cays. The white people who worked at the bauxite company in Mandeville bought land and built weekend houses. Calabash Bay was dying and the market was closed. The fishing beaches held many derelict and abandoned boats, once seaworthy, once cared for. There were more foreigners, and ganja was being exchanged for guns. Our brother Robert had left Jamaica for Honduras. More and more fishers built fish pots and sold them. More and more fishers were tied to land.
Luke asked me about the movie theaters and shops of Kingston but I had never been to those places.
The years passed. Luke and Cordella had no children. Luke said she was a mule. My brother had trouble remembering my son’s name, calling him Vincent by mistake. Then one Sunday night Sheldon’s son answered the phone and told me Luke was dead. Bwoy, me sorry, he said. Me sorry me have to tell you.
How him die? I asked. The dynamite kill him?
No, Sheldon’s son said. Him die out a Pedro, compressor diving. That’s where the money is now. The big thing is conch.
The Pedro Bank had claimed Luke after all.
33
Skylark headed southeast as the sun rose. The sky filled with streaks of color. Although the boat was new and modern, the hull slammed into the waves and they were all drenched. Every boat have it sea, Gramps used to say. Lloyd thought of his trip to Pedro on the Surrey, the long hours hidden under the dinghy in the dark. He smiled. Despite the heaving swells, his stomach was steady and he loved the breeze in his face. The life jacket warmed his body. Maybe his mother was wrong and he would be a fisher.
“How long now, Miss?” he asked Jules. She was wearing a wide-brimmed hat and holding a pair of binoculars in a plastic bag.
“Still a ways to go, Lloydie.” She looked at her watch, and took out the binoculars. She looked through them in a wide sweep across the sea and then returned them to the bag. She made a mark on a plastic card. She did it again, about fifteen minutes later.
“What you doin, Miss?” Lloyd said.
“You want to be a scientist, this is what we do. I’m looking for dolphins, writing down whatever I see. Conditions are bad, though. I don’t think we’ll see any until we get close to Portland Rock.”
“You write down that you don’t see anything?”
“Sometimes nothing can tell you as much as something,” she said. A big burst of spray came over Skylark’s bow and they fell silent. I am comin, Lloyd said to his grandfather in his mind.
Another dawn. This one is spectacular and I am glad to see it unfold. Sometimes sunrise is a muted affair, at other times this brilliance, this celebration. I hear the clicking noises of crabs and the calls of gulls and the boom of the surf and the smaller splashes of pelicans diving for fish. The holes in the rocks are full of seawater again and the sky is clear. There will be no more squalls, at least not soon enough to matter. My mind is sharp even as my body shrivels. It is time to face what I remember about my journey to Portland Rock.
What were the chances of finding the dolphin catchers on the wide Caribbean Sea, on this piece of the whole earth rising from the seafloor, this Pedro Bank? The odds of finding my only son must have been the size of a grain of sand, one single grain of sand among uncountable millions—yet still I found him. I found him in the deep clear water near this rock where the dolphins come to feed and play. I found him and his bredren chasing them with banging pots and splashing oars into the nets they set. I found him because Slowly had told me where to go.
I was not afraid of Vernon nor the men with him, young and strong as they were. I wanted to ram their boats, but did not want to damage Water Bird. I pulled up beside them and I shouted at them. One of their boats circled away and I watched it. I did not see or feel whatever struck the back of my head, nor did I see who struck the blow. I did not see Water Bird float away.
I must have lost consciousness, for when I opened my eyes the sun was high. It was middle day and I was gone to drift without my boat. I floated face up on the surface of the sea and at first I could not understand why. Then I realized what had saved me—the life jacket I now lie on, a small softness between me and the rocks. All my life I wore my life jacket only intermittently, but on that last morning, when I left Middle Cay to find the place Slowly told me about, the place the dolphins were captured, I pulled it from under Water Bird’s bow cap and put it on, grumbling to myself about the way it would make me hotter.
I turned in a circle, looking for boats. I was alone. I rose and fell in a shining sea with sharks all around and my blood in the water. I had never seen such clear water. I could see right down into it. The sharks were large—twelve, fourteen feet long. I felt no fear. Perhaps the blow made me lose a little of my mind. I hung in the water and tried not to move my arms and legs. Then I remembered something my father told me from his lifeguarding days—if you ever get stuck in the water with sharks roll up into a ball on the surface. You not going to look like food then and it will save your energy. Bobbing, he called it. I put my face in the water and felt the sting of salt on the bac
k of my head. I felt for the wound—it was long but not deep. If this had happened on land I would have survived. I reached for my legs and curled into a ball.
It was hard to hold on to my legs in the ball shape, the life jacket was in the way, but it did keep me bobbing on the surface. As my father had shown me in my boyhood I turned my head to one side to breathe. I held my breath for the count of ten, and then I breathed. I kept my eyes open and the salt water stung. The blood in the water began to dissipate. I was drifting fast, carried by an unseen current.
I felt the brush of the big animals in the sea and the movement of the water as they circled beneath me, around me. My son had left me here to drown or be eaten by sharks. I wondered if he had been the man to strike me, or if he had merely watched. I could not understand why they had not killed me—they must have had guns. Even a spear gun would have done the job. Maybe they had argued about it, maybe my son had begged for me, and while they were shouting at each other, I had floated away on this current. Maybe they looked around at the expanse of the sea and shrugged—I was an old man, I was injured, and the water was full of sharks. Maybe they did not have the stomach for an execution. Maybe they just wanted to resume their hunt for the dolphins.
I felt the high sun beat on my neck. It was not feeding time for sharks unless they were very hungry. My head throbbed. The waves made me seasick. It seemed pointless to keep breathing but I found I could not simply stop. Water trickled into one ear and I started to turn my head to the other side.
Then I heard a soft wet exhalation beside me and then another and I knew at once the dolphins had come. I uncurled from the ball and lifted my head and they were all around me, some at the surface, others beneath me, some close, some far. I reached out to touch them but they instantly moved out of reach. I tried to swim along with them, my legs and arms flailing, the life jacket making me awkward in the sea. I saw the dolphins were moving in the direction of a sharp black rock, and I heard the flap of a tarpaulin or a sail, and there were many birds in the sky and then the dolphins dived and were gone.
Gone to Drift Page 14
