I ran to them. Luke? I said and my voice broke. I saw my mother supporting my brother; it did not seem he could stand on his own. She fed him sips of water from a cup. His eyes were closed and he did not seem to hear me. He was bird-like, skin over bones. I saw my brothers standing nearby with lowered heads. We were silent and my heart pounded as if I faced a mortal enemy. The crowd around us was jubilant and the women praised the good Lord and his son Jesus Christ and arms were lifted to the sky. People asked questions of Luke and of each other—When him reach? Who find him? What did happen? The engine fail? Other voices made their contributions—me never did trust that Donovan. You see the power of prayer?
Donovan. I looked around. Only one man had come home.
24
The security guard at Morgan’s Harbour Hotel greeted Lloyd as if they were friends. “Wha’ppen, yout’?” he said. “You come back? What you name again? For the book.”
Lloyd told him his name. He had found Jules’s business card, borrowed Maas Benjy’s cell phone, and called her. She sounded as if she had been doing something important, but she agreed to meet him.
He walked into the hotel. Jules was sitting on a low couch across from the front desk with another woman, blond haired and freckled, clearly a foreigner. The two women got up as he walked up to them and Jules held out her hand. “Lloyd,” she said. “You granddaddy come back yet?”
“No, Miss,” he said, shaking her hand, liking the way she treated him as an equal, a big person.
“You don’t hear anything from Commander Peterson?”
“No. But I did go to Pedro,” he said in a rush. “I hid on Surrey.”
“You did what?” she said.
“I did stowaway. And a man on Middle Cay tell me Gramps get involve with catchin dolphins and I want you to tell me about it.”
Jules shook her head. “You were a stowaway on a Coast Guard boat! And they didn’t lock you up?”
“No, Miss. Tell me about the dolphin business.”
“Where to start?” she said, more to herself than to him. She gestured toward the white woman. “Lloyd, this is Madison Barry. She’s from the US. She studies dolphins too, but mostly the ones that have been captured.”
The American woman held out her hand too and Lloyd shook it. She was very thin and her hair was chin length and straight, bleached by the sun. Her eyes were blue, and the skin was crinkled at the corners. Lloyd thought she looked older than she was. Too much sun, probably. She smiled and her teeth were white and straight. “Very glad to meet you, Lloyd,” she said.
“Let’s sit down,” Jules said. She led the way onto the dock. Lloyd saw that the big white boat he had noticed last time was gone but the bartender was the same man. Jules ordered and paid for drinks and they sat at the table farthest away from the bar.
“So. The dolphin trade,” Jules said. “Basically, there are people—traders—who catch dolphins from the wild and sell them to tourist attractions in lots of different countries. Madison and I are trying to stop this trade—many people are working to stop it.”
“Why?” Lloyd said.
“Why what?”
“Why you tryin to stop it?” He thought dolphins should be left in the sea where they belonged; after all, they were not eaten and he knew Gramps would not approve of the captures, but if the tourist places needed dolphins, they had to come from somewhere. And if money was to be made from capturing dolphins, there were a lot of them in the sea and many poor people would get some money.
“Well, dolphins are very intelligent animals,” Jules said. “We don’t think they should be captured and made to perform for people. They’re taken away from their pods—their families—and some of them die.”
“That going on in Jamaica?” Lloyd asked.
“The traders aren’t Jamaican—it’s illegal to catch a wild dolphin in Jamaica. The traders are from all over the world, but they come to the islands, including here, and they pay fishers to catch dolphins for them.”
“Why them don’t catch them in their own countries?”
“Because law enforcement is better there and the penalties are high.”
“What happen after the dolphins get catch?”
“They put them on a plane or a boat and sell them. A healthy, young dolphin is worth a lot of money.”
Lloyd thought of the folded bills in his father’s hand. “You know who is doin it in Jamaica?”
“We don’t know for sure,” said Madison. “We’ve heard one name, an alias—Black Crab. You know someone with that name?”
Lloyd stared at her. “Not everything good to talk, Miss,” he said.
“What?” she said, turning to Jules.
“He’s telling you that trying to find out who Black Crab is might be risky.”
Madison shrugged. Lloyd could see she felt safe in her white skin. He wondered about her life, but it was too foreign to him. He didn’t know how to explain the dangers to these two women.
He remembered the last time he had gone fishing with Gramps, a week before the old man had left for Pedro, and on that morning even he had not landed many fish—only three red snapper, the biggest one not five pounds. Maas Conrad had stared at the fish in the old cooler and said to his grandson that fish-nin was dying, that no one could make a decent living anymore.
He told Lloyd things he already knew: how the fishers had to go farther and farther out to sea to catch the same amount of fish, but how the fish were different. They were trash fish, hardly any grouper and red snapper and yellowtail and even the parrot fish were smaller and smaller. Lloyd thought of the oily fish tea that was made with the trash fish, how it tasted of fish that had been
