Red Sea

by Diane Tullson

  The pastor told us that in one country he went to, if you brought supplies to a village to build a new well, the bricks and mortar might end up in one family’s possession if the village deemed that the one family needed the supplies more than the village as a whole. The village is happy for the one family. In that country, the people have a different concept of need. It’s not wrong, the pastor said, just different.

  Apparently, the pirates too have a different concept of need.

  Jesse and I hated the kid’s older sister. And Jesse never did hook up with the pastor’s son. I thought it was the hardest two weeks of my life.

  Not anymore.

  “My problem,” I say, “is that I don’t know where I am, and so I don’t know where I’m going.” I look behind me at the sea. “And I’m going too slow. I need the engine. With the engine, Mom and I have half a chance.”

  For the engine, I need to clear the propeller. I have to. It’s that simple.

  I attach the tethers. I open the knife. I put the ladder down. I spit in the mask, which I remember Mac doing, I have no idea why. “Hey Mac, wish you were here.” Then I slip into the water.

  With the boat moving, however slowly, there’s an unpleasant sensation of the tether being tugged. I visualize myself hacking off the net in one superhuman swipe of the knife. Okay, maybe two.

  When I put my face in, the salt of the water feels abrasive. I ignore it. I dive.

  It is harder than yesterday, I’m not imagining it. I’m almost out of breath when I reach the propeller, barely able to attack the net before I have to return to the surface. But I’m not afraid. Today, I won’t be afraid.

  I dive again and again. There’s water in my ears. My right shoulder is especially painful, so I switch the knife to my left hand and hack away.

  The first time I feel it, I think it is strands of the net wafting around my legs. The second time I feel it, I know it’s not the net. I push off from the net ball so hard that I crack my head on the bottom of the boat. A dorsal fin has brushed the back of my legs.

  SIXTEEN

  SCREAMING UNDERWATER IS USELESS. The ensuing gulp of seawater explodes out of my nose, loosens the mask, which fills and burns my eyes as I claw myself to the surface. My foot slips on the ladder, which rakes open the sore on my shin; my arms bleat with weakness as I try to climb the ladder; but I only feel any of this instantaneously because all I’m really thinking about is that fin.

  I hear it behind me in the water, a sound I’ve heard before. It’s a popping sound mixed with a whoosh, a sound a dolphin makes as it breathes. Dolphins! I haul myself onto the swim platform and turn to see them just as they dive under the boat.

  There are four dolphins, then a set of three and another; they’re so fast it’s hard to count them. They are gray with a white banner flash on their sides, and some tip a little on their sides for a better look at me before scooting under the boat.

  We first saw dolphins in the Indian Ocean. Mom was on watch and she called to Duncan and me to come see. There was a pod of about twenty, diving in threes and fours over our bow wave, under the stern, then back to the bow. They stayed with our boat for close to an hour and almost all that time I leaned over the rail, entranced. Duncan too. We marveled at their synchronized jumps, their sleek bodies breaking the waves at the exact same time, leaping eight, ten feet in the air, then back under the water, like at Marineland but so much better because these dolphins were doing it just for themselves.

  I wanted to go forward on the bow to watch them. We have jack lines rigged all the way to the bow so we can attach a tether if we have to go forward, like how people sometimes clip a dog leash on the clothesline so the dog can run the length of the yard and not get away. Duncan said no, that there was no reason to go forward, and why take a chance on going overboard? Even with the tether, it would endanger everyone to get me out of the water.

  It pissed me off and I’m sure I told him so; there are a few words in my vocabulary I used only on Duncan. So I stomped off and went below. I was glad when the dolphins left us that day because it meant none of us was seeing them. I imagined that they left out of solidarity for me, although it took them a while.

  On one of my afternoon watches when I was alone in the cockpit, I heard a dolphin make that pip noise behind me. It was just one dolphin that I saw, and he dove under the boat and disappeared. I think he saw me and said hello, but I guess he could have been saying, “Get out of my way!”

  Today, crouched on the swim platform as I am, these dolphins are so close I can smell fish on their exhaled breath. They shoot under the water like gray arrows, their dorsal fins knifing the water into ribbons, shooting back under the swim platform so that I could touch them if I leaned out.

  In the Indian Ocean, that time with Mom and Duncan, one dolphin kept pace with us, tipped onto his side to watch our faces as we leaned over the rail. I outstretched my hand, and he veered away, then dove out of sight. I’d crossed some line of non-verbal communication and had broken the spell.

  But today when I was under the boat, one touched me. It must have meant to swim so close to me that it touched me. It wouldn’t have been accidental. Which one? I study the dolphins as they circuit the boat. I imagine the youngsters discussing it. “You touch her.” “No, you.”

  How long did they swim with me before making their presence known? Did Mom hear their pips and squeaks through the hull of the boat, through her deep deep sleep? Did she hear what I, wide-awake, couldn’t?

  The sun is hot and except for my braid dripping water down my back, I’m already dry. Part of me nags about having to work on the net. Right now I’m content to watch the dolphins.

  It doesn’t bother me so much now, the thought of diving under the boat. The dolphins seem like company. Not that I’ll jump in with them. For one thing, it’ll spook them and they’ll disappear. Then there’s that urban myth about dolphins and drowning swimmers, the one in which the swimmer is rescued by dolphins that push him in to shore. As Emma might point out, we only hear about the rescued; we’d never hear from the swimmer who got pushed further out to sea.

  If nothing else, with all this dolphin activity there’s not another fish of any kind anywhere near the boat.

  Most of the pod leaves, but three stay with me until the salt has dried white on my skin and even my hair is mostly dry. I miss them when they don’t reappear, and for a long time I wait, hoping they’ll return. When I can avoid it no longer, I climb down to the swim platform, onto the ladder, then slip into the water.

  I’m making progress on the net, but it has wreaked enormous havoc on the propeller. In full motion, the prop spun the net into a dense fat rope, then twisted the rope around and around on itself. I have to cut through the tangled strands layer by layer, the knife not being big enough, or me strong enough, to saw through the entire thickness.

  I got my hair caught in a hairbrush once, the round metal kind. I got scared when the brush wouldn’t come out and managed to snarl my hair so badly that Mom spent an hour trying before she reached for the scissors. I begged her not to cut my hair, probably promised that I’d be good forever if she didn’t. So she took me to a hair salon where two of them worked the whole afternoon to ease the brush out.

  Sorry about breaking the promise, Mom.

  I think about the dolphins and the power in their bodies that so easily challenges the resistance of the water. I don’t have it. I am a land creature and the water repels me like oil, driving me back to the surface. I’m using most of my strength just to reach the propeller.

  When the dolphins jump clear of the water, is it just momentum that carries them high into the air, or do they somehow swim through the air? Surely it’s more difficult for a dolphin to overcome gravity than it is for me to overcome buoyancy. I envision the dolphins as human swimmers, long hair streaming over smooth, strong shoulders, bodies lithe and sleek. When Mac dives, he uses just his fins to propel himself, and I’ve seen him kick with his feet together just like the dolphins, a smo
oth, undulating up-and-down motion that seems to start under his ribs and ripple from his feet. Now I see Mac as a dolphin, and I shake my head to clear the image.

  If I could pull myself down to the propeller...

  Use a jack line. The answer comes to me just like that, as if a sympathetic classmate whispered it in my ear as the teacher tapped her fingers. Use a jack line, a long line from the ladder to the propeller, use it like a handrail that I can pull myself along. I detach the tether at my end and loop it over the others so that I’m attached to the line of tether instead of the boat. The unclipped end I will have to secure at the propeller. In the meantime, I clip it at my waist so that I’m still connected with the boat. I take a big breath, then dive.

  The tether just reaches the propeller, and I loop it around the shaft and clip it onto itself. Then I pull myself back to the surface. I risk a small smile. This is going to work. Using the tether as a jack line, I haul myself easily downward to the propeller. Once there, I anchor myself with one hand holding the net and my feet braced on either side. This way I can use the knife like a saw. The diving is actually a relief. It’s the constant pressure of the knife that burns from my fingers through my wrist and elbow then radiates in my shoulder and neck. Every two dives, I switch the knife to the other hand.

  The net ball is loosening in reluctant strands. I leave these in place, pulling on them to find the path of the snarl. Sometimes a good length comes free, and I reward myself with a rest on the ladder. I can see the edge of the propeller blades now.

  The sun slips toward evening when I crawl up into the cockpit. My hands are raw from pulling on the net. I’m sore from the bottoms of my feet to the top of my head. I drain a bottle of water, then rip into the granola bar. Then I go below to check Mom. She’s out, but I talk to her as if she can hear me. “You wouldn’t believe where I’ve been,” I say as I wash her and change her dressings. “Under the boat. Remember when you signed me up for swimming lessons and I stood in the shower until each lesson was over?”

  I dump the can of chili into a pan and set it on the flame. I’m so hungry that my hands are shaking, and I don’t wait for it to get heated through. I eat it just warm, right out of the pan, then clean the pan with my fingers.

  “Dad gave me a knife. It makes me feel good, like he trusted me to use it, not just that I wouldn’t cut myself, but that I could actually use it like a tool. That I’d know what to do with it.”

  Mom is so not with me. I hold the knife out as if she is looking at it.

  “I’m not making any sense, I know. But that’s the way I see it. Dad knew I could do this. Maybe he didn’t know that I could dive under the boat, but he knew I could figure out something that would work. He gave me the cake with the file in it.” Mom’s breathing is quiet, her closed eyes a door between us. “Anyway, I need to get back to work. I don’t want to be under the boat if the wind comes up.” I rinse the chili pan with a little water. “I need to finish what I started.”

  It’s harder than this afternoon. During that brief break my muscles have set like concrete. I can barely close my hands around the knife. The tether has rasped my skin raw and when I dive, the salt water sears every tiny scratch. So that I don’t feel it, I count, sometimes backward, sometimes in French; sometimes a manic drill sergeant pounds along beside me, screaming in my ear, Hut, two, three, four, saw-the-net-and-do-some-more.

  I may be crazy, but I don’t remember when I’ve felt saner.

  Closer to the prop, the net is wound more tightly, which makes it easier to saw, almost like wood—almost. It’s more like sawing a telephone pole with a handsaw. My knife blade is wearing dull, and I have to work harder to cut through the tough fibers of the net.

  I don’t know how many times I dive down, maybe fifty, maybe one hundred. And then it’s done. A final length unwraps from the shaft, and when I drop it, spirals down, down, down and away. I detach the jack line from the prop and follow it one last time to the surface.

  SEVENTEEN

  THE ENGINE SEEMS LOUD AFTER the quiet of not having it. I lean across the cockpit bench and check the RPM indicator. I keep the throttle at about twenty-four hundred RPMS, fast enough for speed, but not so fast as to use up all our fuel. In contrast to the last couple of days, it feels like a giddy pace.

  At first when I tried to start the engine, it turned over but too slowly to catch. Then I remembered to switch to the starter battery. It was that fast, my remembering, and the engine started as smoothly as if it had just been waiting, saying, Come on, what’s taking you so long? Let’s get out of here!

  The engine means I can charge the battery, which means I can use the autopilot. I can leave a soft light on in the cabin. When I need to go below, I can take my time, prepare something to eat, check Mom. Check and check and check Mom. Sometimes her sleep seems almost normal, and I swear she stirs when I touch her. Other times, it’s like she’s dead.

  When I got out of the water after clearing the prop, I rewarded myself with a hair wash. I used the shampoo from my kit and worked it into my hair, wetting it with more sea-water, lathering it up into a good foam, then rinsed it in more seawater. Finally, I ran a couple of cups of fresh water through my hair to take out the salt. It’s dry now and feels glorious, like salon hair, everything being relative.

  I’ve put on my warm pants, and from the pocket I extract the remaining cookies in the Hobnob package. “Duncan used to love these too. At home he’d buy the kind with chocolate on one side, but it’s too hot here for chocolate. It would just melt and make a mess.” I take another bite. “His brain made a real mess, but I’m not going any further with that because I don’t want to waste my Hobnobs.”

  “Duncan used to buy these cookies at the little store on the corner.” I wave the package at my imaginary audience. “He loved that store. He said it was like all the stores used to be when he was young: friendly, small, where they knew you by name. From the woman who owned the store he bought curry paste that he’d bring home in a small jam jar he saved for the purpose. She mixed it for him the way she liked it. He cooked curried prawns once that were so hot they made Jesse cry. She actually wiped her tongue with paper towel.” I finish the cookie and dig for another. “Mac eats fries with his curry, mixes them all up together. So gross. When Duncan cooked a curry, we always had ice cream for dessert to cool everything down. Duncan loved maple walnut ice cream. I’d eat it, but only if that’s all that was left. My favorite ice cream is mint chocolate chip.” I inspect the cookie package. “There’s one left.” I offer it to the air-guests but no one bites.

  “The thing with maple walnut is that the nuts scrape your tongue, not so much if you eat it with a spoon out of a bowl, but from a cone, which is how ice cream is meant to be eaten anyway. Spoons just get in the way. With ice cream, what you’re after is total tongue contact.”

  I wonder if Jesse got her tongue stud. Maybe she just got a new boyfriend. Jesse is practical that way.

  Jesse says she can tell if the relationship is going to work the first time she kisses a guy. Not sparks, she says. That’s just physical. She says she can sense a guy’s soul through his lips.

  Maybe. I don’t know how much you can believe from someone whose longest “relationship” has been three weeks and that was only because she didn’t want to break up with the guy on his birthday. She’s a humanitarian, that Jesse.

  Ty doesn’t spend a lot of time kissing, not anymore.

  “Nothing like savoring the moment.” I empty the crumbs from the package into my mouth then fold the plastic into my pocket. My hands are stiff from hacking at the net and I rub them like those wrinkly women in the Advil commercials.

  With the engine, I can run the lights; I can see when I go below. I can run the bilge pump, which is good because with our increased speed we’re taking on some water, probably through the bullet holes in the hull. I can’t charge Mom’s handheld VHF radio because I can’t find the charging unit. I’m not sure if any of the ships I see as distant shapes would respond
to my radio call. It would be nice to try.

  Could be I lost the charging unit when I bailed in the dark. Could be my fault for that too.

  Tough to follow the trail of mistakes I’ve made. At first, Mom blamed my disasters on Jesse. She never said as much, but I could tell. It took Mom a while to abandon the idea that by being her daughter I was, by default, damn near perfect. Her first clue might have been my dumping Vanessa at the beginning of seventh grade, my best friend from even before kindergarten. My mom and Vanessa’s mom are still friends. I’d still be friends with Vanessa except Jesse doesn’t like her. Then there were the calls from the school: “Lib wasn’t in math class today.” “Lib missed her science test today.” “Lib’s in the office waiting to be picked up. She’s suspended for lighting up in the girl’s change room.”

  Vanessa doesn’t even recognize me anymore. Maybe she does, and it’s just easier for her to pretend she doesn’t.

  Then there were the guys at the mall, the ones we met last year before my birthday. Jesse had hers picked out from the minute she spotted him at the food fair. She assigned me mine, my first date, a tall guy with little pimples where his forehead met his hair. He was fairly nice, didn’t try anything in the movie. He ate all my popcorn, and Jesse’s too. She told me to hold it for her, that she’d be right back, she and the guy. I didn’t know then where she was going.

  I always wait for Jesse. Once I waited with one of her boyfriends while she hooked up with someone else in the other room. They’re always nice guys, Jesse’s boyfriends. Sometimes I almost felt bad for them.