Migrations(26)
The men are freeing the stray fish from the net and throwing them back, too.
Ennis watches the ocean quietly. Anik rests a hand on his shoulder. It’s the first kindness I’ve seen him offer.
“Just the way it goes,” Ennis says with a shrug, and Anik nods. “Let’s get the net done,” he tells the rest, who move tirelessly back to the task of untangling and recoiling the huge net.
Ennis glances at me. “Why so surprised?”
I open my mouth but no words come. Because you’re a fisherman, I want to say. I didn’t know there were limits to your hunger.
“Get some rest,” Ennis responds to my silence.
“I can help. I’ve been training.”
“You’re in the way, love. Get some rest.” He barely spares me a glance as he dismisses me.
I stand on the deck, embarrassed. I am also relieved, though, I’m so relieved for the fish, which have swum away beyond our reach, and for the birds who have already moved off to hunt the next school. And for the turtle. I think about her as I ignore the captain and join the rest of the crew. It’s her eyes I think of as I coil the corks, round and round. The look in her eyes as she hung there, trapped in the net and assuming her end had come for her.
* * *
There is grease caught under the flaps of my blisters, and nothing to be done about it, for today the engine needs my hands. Léa’s doing something with the bilge pump, whatever that is. “Pumps any excess water out of the boat,” she grunts, bent over something greasy as she always seems to be.
“And what are you doing to it?” I ask, lifting my voice over the low roar of the engine.
“Unclogging it. All kinds of rubbish gets stuck in the impeller. Pass me the wrench.”
I do so, and watch her open up the pump and shove her hand deep into it. She pulls out a mess of greasy debris that smells like crap and lumps it straight onto my lap.
“Oh. Cool.”
“Put it in the bucket and throw it overboard.”
The bucket’s right next to her; she could have dumped it straight there instead of onto me, but hey, sure. I catch her smirking as I head off to do as I’m told. I have to carry several more buckets of ripe fishy-smelling muck up to the main deck before we’re finished and with each intake of breath my stomach churns. As Léa cleans the mechanisms of the pump I watch her muscular arms work and feel envious of her strength.
“Have you always been a sailor?” I ask her.
She shrugs. “Been fixing boats for a decade. Been a mechanic longer.”
“What drew you to it?”
Another shrug.
“Where in France are you from?”
“Les Ulis, in Paris. My family moved there for my brother’s football career,” she adds.
“He’s a footballer? That’s cool.”
She shakes her head, but doesn’t elaborate.
“Where were you before there?”
“Guadeloupe.”
“What was that like?”
Léa shrugs again.
“How chatty you are.” I sigh, but actually it’s kind of nice. I’ve had Malachai in my ear for the last few days, and he could talk the hind legs off a donkey.
He grew up in Brixton with three sisters after his single mother moved them from Jamaica to London. He was obsessed with girls, and got into fishing boats in order to chase after one in particular, who was ten years older than he was and totally un-gettable, but he boasts he’s never turned down a challenge. This was obviously long before he fell for Dae and they were kicked off their last boat for wanting to be together. Daeshim’s parents left a small village in South Korea for the most bustling, liberal place they could think of: San Francisco. Dae says they had no idea what they were getting themselves into, but went with the flow and were soon encouraging him to become an experimental performance artist or a feminist philosopher if he wanted to be. He did not. In his rebellion he became a marine engineer and hopped his way onto the first shrimp trawler he could find, despite suffering horrendous seasickness, and, much to his dismay, his parents were ecstatic. Malachai’s not the only one who likes to talk—if Samuel gets even a whiff of drink you can’t shut him up, and he weeps all the time. He’s from Newfoundland and no, he doesn’t have children in every port but he does have an unreasonable number in one house. As he puts it, he has a lot of love to go around. Basil’s story is less amorous: he spent his childhood on boats and was determined not to wind up a sailor like his dad. I suspect that Dad was a hard man. Basil really was on a cooking show in Sydney but after he lost his temper he got fired and pretty much fled the country to avoid the scandal, returning to the inevitable course his life was always set on. Seafolk are always drawn back to the sea, whether they want to be or not. As for Anik, the others have filled me in on a couple of snippets here and there—he’s been on the Saghani with Ennis longer than anyone, and there’s definitely something mysterious about how they came to be working together, only no one will tell me what it is. They will say that Anik’s mother used to lecture in physics in Anchorage, while his elderly father, fabulously, still takes people on sled dog tours, and loves huskies more than he loves any humans.
Even though they are as varied as a group of people can be, I can tell they are the same, all of these sailors. Something was missing in their lives on land, and they went seeking the answer. Whatever it was, I don’t doubt for a second that they each found it. They are migrants of land, and they love it out here on an ocean that offered them a different way of life, they love this boat, and, as much as they may bicker and fight, they love each other.