“We wait for him here,” Jules said and she walked to the end of the dock and sat, her legs dangling over the side, leaning back on her arms. She was wearing a clean pair of jeans, a white T-shirt, and the kind of buckled sandals that you could wear in the sea and were good on boats. Her skin was dark against the white T-shirt. She stared at the Harbour and swung her legs. She seemed fine in the hot sun and Lloyd wished he was wearing shorts and an undershirt. His shoes pinched. Behind them, sailors were lined up in rows doing drills of some kind. He smelled melting asphalt. No one challenged them. Jules seemed entirely at home on the Coast Guard base.
He sat beside her, but not too close. How to talk to her? How old was she? Twenty, he thought, maybe twenty-one, but then he remembered how easily she spoke with the guard at the Coast Guard gate, and the expert way she had handled the dolphin on Lime Cay. If she was a scientist, she would have been to university. Maybe she was twenty-five. Was she from Kingston? Did she still live in the city? What was she doing with the Coast Guard and why did they know her well enough to allow her onto the base? Did she ever fish? Had she been to the Pedro Cays? Could he trust her? He had no idea how to frame his questions. He feared they might seem disrespectful and she would be offended, but he thought it would be okay to ask about the Cays. “You been to Pedro, Miss?” he said.
“Many times,” she said. “At least once a month.”
“Why? You fishing out there?” As Lloyd said it, he knew how ridiculous the idea was. A woman fishing! Women were the cleaners and sellers of fish; men were the ones who brought them out of the sea.
Jules smiled. “Sometimes, if I want to eat a fish, I catch one. But no, I’m not out there fishing. I’m taking a census of dolphins on the Bank—counting—trying to find out how many there are, what species—what kinds—of dolphins.”
“How you do that?”
“Go out in a boat. We have a big map, where we draw out squares in the sea, then we go up and down in a pattern. If we see a dolphin we take a picture of his dorsal fin, put it in a computer, so we make sure we don’t count the same one twice. Just look for them and count.”
Lloyd could not imagine the drawing of squares in the sea. “You see a lot of them?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Depends on what you mean by a lot. Not compared to the amount that was probably there in old-time days. But more than I expected to find, yes. Mostly bottlenose. Some white-sided. Seen killer whales too—you know them?”
Lloyd shook his head; he had never heard of a killer whale. They sounded dangerous, not at all like dolphins.
“You seen Free Willy?”
“No, Miss. What is Free Willy?
“A movie about a killer whale. I bet you seen a picture of one—they’re black and white, like a panda.”
Lloyd did not want to ask what a panda was but he wanted Jules to keep talking. “Why you countin up the dolphins?”
“Want to know if the population is healthy. How many animals. If they are breeding; things like that.”
“Why you don’t do it close to shore? Pedro Cays far.”
Jules nodded. “Far, yes. But not so many dolphins inshore these days, too little food for them to eat. Not enough fish. Your granddaddy probably know about that. There’s a place out at Pedro, a bare rock, deep water around, nice reefs. We see a lot of dolphins there.”
“You went to school to study about dolphins?”
“Four years,” she said. “In California.”
“Why?”
“Why did I want to study dolphins?” She shrugged again. “Grew up beside the sea in Portie. Always loved it. Saw an angry fisher spear a dolphin once, the dolphin was fooling around with his trap. I thought it was a smart animal, to try and get the fish out. So I went to college in the US to learn about them.”
Lloyd’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. He did not want to talk about dolphins. He wanted to talk about Gramps, about his fears for the old man, his fears for himself. Who would speak kindly to him if his grandfather was never seen again? Who would teach him about manhood, about life? He wished for his grandfather’s low, rough voice, telling him dolphin stories, or about how the fish-nin was good, so good, in the old days. He had thought some of his stories boring, now he wanted to hear them all, again and again.
He knew his voice would shake if he spoke and he did not want the woman to hear that. He had to be strong. He said nothing. The sun was directly overhead and he wanted to find shade but he thought of Gramps lost at sea with the sun like a hammer on his head. So he closed his eyes and saw the sun bright inside his eyelids, as Gramps would, wherever he was. And he stayed where he was, on the dock at Cagway base, keeping company with his lost grandfather.
On this rock where now I lie, the sea snails are salty but easy to pull off the rocks and crack open. I eat three every time the sun has moved the span of my hand. Then I get up and look to the horizon and think of the line drawn in my young life: the before and the after, the time before Luke went to sea and the time after.
How it go? I
