I don’t want to watch this. I can’t look away. I have to stop it somehow. Of course I can’t stop it.
Basil gives a whoop of victory and I could throw up. Am I really going to stand here and watch as these creatures are slaughtered? How are they different from the birds, whose lives I might very well give my own to protect?
My eyes alight on something inside the net, a different texture from the rest. I frown and lean closer. It’s hard to see through the darkness, but it’s not a fish, I’m sure of it.
“What’s that?”
Mal and Dae follow my pointed finger and frown.
“Light!” Dae yells.
Samuel, who is up with Ennis, swings the spotlight around to where Dae’s pointing, and we all see it, clear as day. A huge sea turtle, caught in the net.
“Stop!” Dae and Mal both yell at once. “Skip!”
Ennis hears them and stops the crane. The net swings above the ocean, its magnificent weight swaying the boat. Ennis thunders down from the balcony and runs to the railing. “Loosen the purse!” he orders Basil.
“What? Boss, that’s a big catch!”
“Loosen it.”
Shock makes me grip the railing so hard one of my hands cramps. I work it quickly with the other while watching the poor creature, its flippers moving only very slightly beneath the suffocating weight of fish. Half of it protrudes out of the net and I’m frightened it will be too entangled to get free again.
The purse line begins to loosen, opening the gap at the bottom to let the fish flood out. They slap back into the water, thousands of them at once, creating a swell that rocks the boat. Many get caught in the net, wriggling uselessly. And along with them is the turtle, unable to work its way free.
“Bring it in, Sam!” Ennis calls. “Gently!”
The giant claw is swung slowly around and then lowered onto the deck. The net pools around the turtle and everyone rushes to help until Ennis roars at us to stop.
He picks his way to where the turtle is buried in reams of netting, and he lifts the spools away until the creature is revealed. My heart is in my mouth as I watch Ennis sink to its side and ever so carefully untangle the turtle’s limbs and head. She snaps at him, but he is so gentle, so wary of damaging her. I see his hand rest once on her enormous shell, stroking tenderly.
“What are you doing so far north, my girl?” he asks softly.
Her hooked mouth opens and closes, her head lifting as much as she can. Once Ennis has her untangled we drag the netting away, clearing a path to the railing. She’s a big thing, and it takes Ennis, Basil, Mal, and Dae to lift her.
I laugh in relief as she goes overboard, diving into the water with a huge splash. With the back of my hand I dash the tears from my cheeks and watch her disappear into the depths. I imagine going with her, down into the dark.
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.