Sea Creatures

by Susanna Daniel

  After unpacking, we walked the perimeter of the fort, weaving through the arched casements. Graham read from the guidebook. “It took sixteen million bricks to build this,” he said. “Sixteen million bricks!”

  Graham had a way of zeroing in on exactly what made history interesting. Being a tourist with him was like traveling with your best high school teacher, the one who put down the textbook and relayed some bit of trivia that brought an entire era to life. When I read a guidebook, the information lay flat on the page, details muddling. Not so for Graham. He read quickly through some parts of the guidebook’s brief history—the fort was used as a prison and once housed five of the Lincoln assassination conspirators, including Dr. Samuel Mudd, who’d reset the bone in John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg—then rested on the bricks. The fort had been erected entirely from a material that had to be hauled across miles of ocean, Graham emphasized; some ships capsized under the weight. And despite the inspired design, the place was never actually used as a fort. With the invention of cannon riflery, marine fortresses were rendered obsolete, and ships were sent instead.

  One hundred and fifty years later, the mortar was deteriorating. Bricks littered the sandy moat floor. A wide plank stretched from a beached boat to the ramparts: they were rebuilding. A worker sat drinking from a water bottle under a royal palm, and Graham stopped to ask the man where he was staying. The man described apartments in the casements, where he and his coworkers were spending a ninety-day stint. There was a small bathroom and a table and a cot, said the man. He had a roommate, another mason. There were no telephones, no television. A boat came from Key West every week with water and provisions, and the workers sent back mail and requests for alcohol, magazines, fishing supplies. Graham shook the man’s hand when we said good-bye, and we walked along the moat wall toward the campground.

  I was distracted. Would Lidia remember Frankie’s date to play with Carson that afternoon? Would she sit with him while he ate, in case he choked?

  Graham said, “Can you imagine that job? I can’t install a light fixture without making three trips to the hardware store.”

  “We’d be useless,” I said.

  “I wonder how different it is, being a bricklayer now versus back then.”

  I hadn’t been terribly interested in the fort when we’d first planned to come. I’d considered the fort, the history, a toll we had to pay before we could change into our suits and do a little snorkeling. As we’d meandered through the rows of identical casements along the fort’s perimeter, looking through the old cannon windows housed in iron that, like the bricks, was disintegrating, I’d been hungry and hot. How many times, in the decade since Graham and I had met, had I had the experience of barely registering something until he turned my head and forced me to look at it?

  This curiosity, this connection with history—this was a quality that I’d hoped he might impart to our son.

  THAT AFTERNOON WE KAYAKED TO the closest island, Bush Key. Onshore, we dried in the sun. From where we lay, we could see tourists file out of the fort and back onto the ferry, and we watched the boat shrink into the limitless blue. I was reminded of the distance we’d put between ourselves and civilization, between ourselves and our son. I commented that it would be something to see the islands from above, the neat six-sided fort and the humpbacked shoals surrounding it. I was thinking of Charlie’s intricate maps.

  Graham sat up and fished through his dry bag and pulled out a brochure. On the cover was an aerial photograph of all of the Dry Tortugas. “Voilà,” he said, and lay back down again, dropping an arm over his eyes.

  After an hour or so, we kayaked to Long Key, which was covered in scrub grasses and peppered with black-and-white frigates, their feathers shuddering in the breeze. The sun was starting to wane but the air was still hot. On the far side of the key, Graham stopped paddling and pointed: ahead, between the tiny island and the dark ocean, a round object bobbed. Graham started paddling toward it and I followed. The black shape surfaced and submerged again. When it came up a third time, we were just a boat’s length away. I could see, from that distance, the glossy flat shell was not purely black but flecked with white. And it wasn’t round, as it had seemed from a distance, but oval, with sharp creases down its length, as if it had been folded in several places and opened again. The turtle was at least five or six feet in diameter, almost as long as my kayak.

  “It’s not swimming,” said Graham.

  He was right. The creature appeared to rise and fall with the current, not moving forward at all. I was closest to its stubby rear flippers, which pushed ineptly against the water every few seconds, as if running out of power. When the meaty, oblong slab of its enormous head rose from the water, its eyes black and cold, I backed up a little. From directly across the wide carapace, which continued to dip and rise every thirty seconds, I could see the back flippers with their sluggish movements, and the thick spiked tail—but I could not see its front flippers.

  Graham nudged the turtle with the blade of his paddle.

  “Graham!” I said. The animal turned. The movement of its back flippers increased, as if in panic.

  Graham stared into the water at something I couldn’t see. “Holy hell,” he said.

  “What?”

  “There’s no front flipper. Just a stub and some blood.”

  My stomach turned. “What about the other one?”

  Graham paddled around the head, then said, “It’s here. It’s caught.”

  “In what?”

  “Some kind of line.”

  Movement in my peripheral vision snagged my attention: a dark shape on the surface of the water. When I turned to look, it was gone.

  “We should get help,” I said.

  “I’ve got a knife.”

  He dug at his feet for his dry bag. As he moved, the kayak shifted beneath his weight and thumped against the turtle’s massive domed back.

  “Careful,” I said. But the turtle didn’t seem to notice. It dipped again and stayed down a while. Graham found the knife and waved me over. When our kayaks were side by side, facing opposite directions, he started to lift himself out.

  “No,” I said, thinking of the dark shape. “Something took that flipper.”

  “He’s losing steam,” said Graham.

  The whole back-and-forth played out in my mind, the minutes of argument while the sun continued its descent and the waters darkened. There was no stopping him, I knew. Sometimes I thought that in becoming a parent, I’d morphed into an entirely different person, while he’d remained exactly the same person he’d always been. I found this bewildering. I steadied his boat with one hand and he lifted himself out, then swam slowly toward the turtle, holding his knife out of the water. The turtle surfaced again, but only barely.

  Graham steadied himself on the creature’s flank, then started hacking at the tangles of line, his face very close to the water. I couldn’t see his work, but after a breathless minute his head rose, and, several yards beyond him, a dark fin broke the surface. I stared at the spot where it disappeared.

  “Shark,” I said to Graham.

  “Where?”

  I pointed with my paddle. “Five yards, maybe four.”

  I thought he might abandon the rescue altogether, or at least rush. Instead, he said, “Keep an eye out. They don’t want me—they want our friend here.”

  “Graham, get back in the boat, please.”

  “Almost done.”

  A fin cut through the water off my port side. My God, I thought, they’ve surrounded us. Absurdly, I thought of jokes on the theme of circling sharks: lawyers, insurance salesmen, desperate older women.

  “Hurry up,” I said.

  “Look.” He pulled a knotted tangle from the water—ropey netting, maybe from a lobster trap—and ushered up a massive clawing flipper from beneath the turtle’s body. Slowly, the flipper started to move. Graham kicked away as the turtle dived. “So long, friend,” said Graham, then wrestled himself into his kayak.

 
When he was in, I let go of his boat and punched his upper arm. “Goddamn it,” I said.

  “Ow.” He rubbed his arm, panting. “You never know what will happen, do you?”

  This was something he’d said a dozen times. To be fair, it had always been more true with him than without him.

  We looked in the direction the turtle had gone. After a moment, its carapace rose, milky spots reflecting the fading sunlight, then dived again. I didn’t see another shark, but I stopped looking for them.

  “I bet that thing weighed five hundred pounds,” said Graham.

  “You are reckless,” I said.

  “Don’t say that.”

  I looked away from his lidded gaze, the heavy circles under his eyes. Begrudgingly, I said, “It’s good you saved it.”

  “What choice did we have?”

  I didn’t answer, but I knew exactly what choice we’d had. Once, months before we’d moved, a friend had told me she’d recently terminated a pregnancy at twenty-one weeks along, after an amnio revealed the baby had Down’s. The reason she gave for the decision: her living son, a healthy boy named Jeremy, who at that moment was running naked through the sprinkler, trailed closely by Frankie. Their penises bobbed and their coltish, miniature-man’s legs kicked. Their feet slapped the wet lawn. Of course she did it for him—for herself and her husband, too, but mostly for Jeremy, whose standing at the center of their universe would have inevitably slipped. I had no idea what I would have done in her position, but I told my friend I understood her decision, and it was true.

  Where was that same instinct in my husband, to protect us at any cost?

  We paddled quietly until we reached the beach. I pulled my boat ashore and sat in the sand. Graham stood above me, drinking from a water bottle.

  “I was scared,” I said.

  “You could try trusting me,” he said, and walked away.

  That night, Graham borrowed a nature guide from the young guys at the campsite next to ours—they’d caught a bucket of lobster, and cooked two for us—and thumbed through it until he came to a photograph of a massive black sea turtle. “Here’s our friend,” he said, handing me the book.

  I squinted in the firelight. The leatherback sea turtle preferred deeper waters beyond the continental shelf, but was occasionally sighted in the Keys, en route from the Gulf to the Atlantic. “ ‘Instead of scutes,’ ” I read aloud, “ ‘the leatherback has a thick, leathery skin covered in oils.’ ”

  “Less revolting in person,” said Graham.

  The fort closed to visitors at dusk, but we sneaked in under a metal chain. The starlight cast leaden shadows. I wanted to stick to the perimeter—there were park rangers on the site, as well as a crew of masons and engineers—but Graham walked straight into the open-air courtyard and I followed him. There was the feeling, with Graham, that no situation was too hairy to escape unscathed. There was the feeling that his largess—physical and psychological—sheltered me, as if my participation in any scheme was incidental. It was liberating.

  The rampart walls rose around us, blocking all sight of the sea, though we could hear the push and pull of the tide. A black lighthouse squatted above us, catching the moonlight in its curves. There was the scattered noise of conversation coming from the barracks. From a powder magazine nearby came the low, otherworldly call of an owl, then a quick rustling in the sandy grass.

  “Rats,” said Graham.

  “Let’s go back,” I said.

  The owl made its noise again. “Look up,” said Graham.

  It was late and the sky was thick with stars. Was it possible I’d never seen such abundance in the night sky? I thought of Frankie. I wondered if Lidia had remembered not to give him milk before breakfast, if she’d helped him brush his teeth. I wondered if she was having trouble understanding him, if he was having trouble being understood.

  “Magnificent,” I said to Graham.

  He pulled me in. My neck ached from looking up but I didn’t stop.

  Quietly, he said, “Just old light, that’s all.” I could hear the pleasure in his voice.

  GRAHAM WANDERED THE ISLAND WHILE I slept. In the morning, we snorkeled and ate breakfast, then headed in the kayaks half a mile southeast to Bird Key, the site of the closest shipwreck. Graham lassoed our kayaks together and dropped anchor and hoisted a dive flag. We’d read that in the mid-1800s the Keys had been populated almost entirely by wreckers and pirates, and there were a thousand documented wrecks in the area, plus a rumored U-boat that had never been mapped. What was left behind after a wreck had been salvaged was either worthless or too cumbersome to float to shore, and so skeletons remained. Graham dived to the seafloor right away, but for a few moments I stayed at the surface, my face in the water, my body lifting and dropping with the surface current.

  What lay beneath me in no way resembled a ship. I knew from the guidebook that there was such a thing as shipworms, termites of the sea, which ate away at wooden hulls, but I’d expected to see something—the slip of a keel or curve of a bowsprit, maybe—that recollected the vessel that had drowned there. Instead, there was coral of every color and shape, clumps of sea grass, fish darting here and there, and hundreds of bricks. The bricks were scattered along the seafloor as far as I could see, mustard yellow in color with etched lettering on the faces. Graham was a few yards from me, a plane of flesh along the water’s rim. I dove toward a cluster of bricks and hovered there, trying to make out the etching: EVENS & HOWARD, ST. LOUIS. There was movement in the corner of my vision, and when I turned I caught the silver flank of a fleeing barracuda. I rose and cleaned my mask and heard Graham calling for me. I kicked toward him, taking in the colors and textures of the coral as I went, the scattered bricks, the bright darting fish. When I reached him, he put his hands on my shoulders and faced me away from the island.

  “Look down,” he said.

  When I put my face in the water, I saw a massive iron propeller, each blade sheathed in toothy barnacles. There had been a ship here after all. I circled it. The act of snorkeling, to me, was like standing in a pitch-black room where you sense you are not alone, then lighting a match. It’s a pleasure, certainly, to see up close what is shrouded from land, the busy citizenry of the sea—but it’s also chilling. With the mask on, I had the feeling of wearing blinders, and each turn of my head could reveal something that had come forward from the deep, like this menacing piece of metalwork, its fat blades so stagnant that it seemed they might burst into motion if I continued to watch them. The rules of reality didn’t seem to apply.

  My heart was beating fast when I struggled into the kayak. The wind was up and the eastern sky was dark with storm. It would take half an hour to get back and haul up the boats, so it seemed unlikely that if rain was going to hit, we would get caught. But when I pulled up the anchor, Graham just sat catching his breath and looking west toward Loggerhead, a low ridge of foliage on the horizon. There was another lighthouse there, and a reef called Little Africa because of its shape. Graham wanted to go. The ferry captain had said that the island’s caretaker invited visitors to sign a guest book. It was this—signing the guest book, leaving a mark—that drew Graham, specifically. The crossing—I knew this from the woman at the kayak rental place—would be choppier than the waters between Garden Key and Long Key, with a crosscurrent that pulled straight out to sea. But not forging ahead would be, to Graham, like turning down the chance to send a memento into space.

  I said, “I don’t think we should go.”

  He arched his eyebrows and grinned at me. “Three miles, babe? We can do three miles in an hour.”

  I said, “We didn’t tell anyone we were going.”

  “I feel good. Don’t you feel good?”

  I reached across the kayaks to touch Graham’s shoulder. It was as close to him as I could get. “I feel pretty good,” I said. “But it looks like rain.”

  “We’ll beat it.”

  I looked behind us at Garden Key, so close and sheltering, then ahead at Loggerhead, which in tru
th didn’t seem so far away. Graham took my hesitation as agreement. He started to head off and I followed, matching my strokes to his. After fifteen minutes or so, my arms started to tire. Even if I got there—without being pulled out to sea—I wasn’t sure I would be able to turn around and head back. I didn’t have a watch, but I figured it was around four o’clock. The sun wouldn’t start to go down until eight; there was time. But still, as the distance increased between my kayak and the campsite, I found myself glancing over my shoulder and falling behind.

  “Graham!” I shouted. I stopped paddling.

  He waved me forward. I shook my head and he turned and came back. As he neared, waves lapped the prow of his boat, and my own boat rose and fell with the swells. If we stayed unmoving for long, we would be carried by the current.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “I want to go back.”

  He looked beyond me, gauging the distance. “It’s as far back now as it is ahead. You can do it.”

  Could I? Strength, sapped momentarily by swimming and paddling, was already returning to my arms after the brief rest. Loggerhead drifted a little: we were moving, and quickly.

  “The current,” I said.

  “We’ve got to keep moving.”

  “I’m not going,” I said.

  “Please come. I really want to go.”

  “Go. I’ll head back.”

  “I can’t go without you.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Be careful.”

  He cocked his head at me, then nodded. “You be careful,” he said. He gave me a last look, then turned away.

  Maybe a different man would not have left his wife. But I’d been sincere when I told him to go on without me; I had no illusions about Graham and the decision he would make. Graham didn’t confuse love with overprotectiveness, as so many of us do. He’d always guarded his own independence, which as far as I was concerned left me free to guard mine. He’d always believed I could do pretty much anything that he could do, and to have stayed would have betrayed a lack of faith in me. His confidence in me gave me a fresh shot of courage.