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
