The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

  After a bit, Jojo slows down and turns the engine off. The waves we’ve made calm, and the boat glides along the soft current.

  At first, it seems the dolphins have disappeared, but they reemerge, swirling around the boat, pulling off into pairs, then returning to our spot on the water. I lean over the edge, trying to follow them with my eyes as they rush under the surface. I’ve never seen anything like it. Jojo sits back in his driving seat, amused by my wonder.

  “You’ll only see them when it’s quiet like this. Once all the boats are out, they keep a low profile. They don’t like the engines.”

  “How did you know they’d be here?”

  “I know all the spots.”

  “How?”

  “I was practically born riding these waterways. My pop brought me out since I was a kid. He was a catcher. Long time ago.”

  “He was a fisherman?”

  “No, a catcher. Of dolphins. It was the business back then. There wasn’t much work around here besides deep-sea fishing. Lots of guys got involved. My father was one of the better ones.”

  “Catching them for what?”

  “In the sixties, all the aquariums decided they needed dolphins. The animals don’t just show up and volunteer. Somebody has to catch them. That’s how it used to be, anyway. The laws changed in the seventies, Marine Mammal Protection Act and all that. Just a few big companies got permits to catch now. It’s not a free agent’s game anymore.”

  “He’d just come out here and get one?”

  “Not only him. He had a team of guys. Takes lots of strong men to wrangle one from the water, maneuver the nets and such.”

  I’m silent, but it doesn’t matter. Jojo is happy to keep talking.

  “I had my own for a while. My pop made a pen for her behind the house, on the canal. I trained her to do some tricks. We were doing twenty-minute shows twice a day for a while. We got a little famous too. As famous as you can get around here.”

  “How did you train her?”

  “Same way you train anything. Even a human. Take away its food. Feed it when it does what you want. They learn.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “Oh, she was my baby. Monica was her name. We all loved her. My wife and I never had kids so she was our little girl. But a big girl. A strong girl. I nearly went broke feeding her. When my pop passed, I started to feel it wasn’t right keeping Monica, as much as we loved her. But you can’t just let a dolphin go once you got her eating out of your hand, you know. Takes time.”

  “So, how did you do it?”

  “Had to undo everything I did. Stop loving her. Stop talking to her. Stop touching her. Stop feeding her and using that dang whistle on her. Stop giving her a schedule. I put live fish in her pen to get her used to hunting her food. Even though she was in a sea pen and not a tank, she was out of shape compared with a wild dolphin. Those animals are meant to swim fifty miles a day, not bob around a pen. After a couple of months, I opened up the fence to get her to go out but she didn’t want to leave. Till one day she finally did. For a long time I wouldn’t come out here, in case she was around. She knew me and my boat. I was afraid she’d follow me back home. But I never saw her again. People tried telling me she probably died out here on her own, but I know she made it. I’m sure of it.”

  “You know I work over at the dolphinarium,” I tell Jojo.

  “You do?”

  “They say those aren’t market animals.”

  “Sure, that’s what they say now. But at least ten of their original acquisitions back when they opened came out of my pop’s nets.”

  “They say the ones they have now are rescues and retirees.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Whether they’re purchased or born captive, they’re still market animals because whoever’s got them is making plenty of cash off them.”

  When Jojo delivers me back to the dock, I hope to find Nesto waiting for me at the cottage since I know he returned last night.

  I offered to pick him up at the airport, but he insisted on taking the bus down to the Keys. I thought he’d call when he arrived, and when he didn’t, that he’d show up to see me before work, but he’s not there.

  The dolphinarium is buzzing when I get to work. Everyone is excited about the new dolphin I’m only hearing of now. I join the small crowd of trainers and techs on the dock by the new pen they’ve constructed at the end of the row of the ones that are already occupied, watching Nesto, almost chest deep in water with a scuba tank on his back, as he makes sure all the fences are securely bound to the poles that frame the enclosure.

  He sees me and waves, then goes back underwater.

  Rachel, one of the trainers, comes up beside me. She’s my age, from Tampa, with long blond hair she wears in a high bun. In a colder climate, Rachel’s complexion might be a pearly rose-gold, but the tropics have made her pink and rubbery, like bubble gum, her lips chapped and peeling and coated in Vaseline. Like most of the trainers, she was a star swimmer in college, but when they aged out of competing, they found that few job prospects could keep them in the water beyond lifeguarding or giving swimming lessons to kids.

  Here at the dolphinarium, she works with new arrivals, teaching them the ways of pen life, though Nesto says there’s not much to teach about living in a cage; it’s a process of submission, which any animal can figure out on its own.

  “I can’t wait to meet our new girl. I hear she’s a sweet thing.” Rachel is grinning and giddy.

  “Who said that?” I ask.

  “Her handlers. They sent us her files.”

  “How do you know if a dolphin’s being sweet as opposed to one that’s not?”

  “By its general attitude. The way it interacts with us. Since they got her, they say she’s been gentle as can be. And she’ll be so much happier here than in the tank.”

  It’s like she’s talking about a stray kitten, not a three-­hundred-pound six-year-old dolphin, washed up from the oil spill in the gulf off Louisiana, one of the few animals that emerged from the fields of tar sheens with a remote chance of survival.

  They took her in and named her for the lab in Biloxi where she’s been held until being transported here. Roxi from Biloxi.

  Rachel tells me she and the other trainers were assured Roxi has potential to perform and even to breed.

  “How is it you teach them tricks and flips and all that?”

  “We don’t teach them tricks. We encourage them to learn new behaviors.”

  I don’t really see how you can call getting a dolphin to beach itself on the dock, deliver a rose in its mouth to an audience member, and offer its fin for a “dolphin handshake” anything but tricks, but I keep that part to myself.

  “Okay, the teaching of behaviors. How do you do that?”

  “We practice operant conditioning.” I can tell she likes the taste of big words in her mouth. “We change or create behaviors by using positive reinforcements, like food, as a reward.”

  “Do you ever punish them?”

  “Of course not!” She laughs at my misstep.

  “What if they don’t do what you want them to do?”

  “We just don’t reinforce the behavior until they get it right.”

  “So you don’t give them food till they do what you want them to do?”

  “We don’t acknowledge them until they demonstrate the desired behavior.”

  “You ignore them?”

  She shakes her head at me. “It’s not that simple, Reina. There are decades of research behind what we do.”

  With that, she finds a reason to get away from me, and walks out on the platform extending from the dock between the new pen and the older one, holding two females, Belle and Bonnet. Roxi from Biloxi will live alone till they add her to another pen with resident female dolphins or find her a new companion.

  I watch Nesto work o
n the pen and think of when I started working full-time and Mo told me how happy the animals were. So much so that even though the fence keeping them in extends barely a foot above the water, and the dolphins can easily jump over it to get out, they never even try. Even during hurricanes, when the enclosures sometimes broke open, Mo told me, if the dolphins swam out into the gulf, they were easily coaxed by their trainer’s whistles to return to their pens the next morning.

  I remember when Carlito and I were kids, an early summer tropical storm once ravaged the local aquarium, busting open the bayside wall of the dolphin cove so the six dolphins inside were released to the open water. They were quickly spotted by people on the same bridge where Carlito and baby Shayna had both been dropped, doing their routines at all their regular showtimes, flipping and tail-walking and pirouetting, waiting for their rewards. People gathered on the causeway and adjacent beaches to watch the show. The dolphins, accustomed to the sight of a crowd, came closer to shore and it wasn’t long before the aquarium people arrived in boats to collect them.

  There was some noise about leaving them free, but the aquarium people used the footage of their routines in the wild to show that the animals were desperate to return to the aquarium. They loved performing, their minders told the reporters, and the aquarium was their home.

  That was all it took.

  Now it’s just a story that locals tell: the case of the escaped dolphins performing in the ocean the routines that humans had taught them.

  I still remember Mami’s face watching the news coverage, the way she shook her head and said it was pathetic how those dumb animals had missed their one maldito chance to be free.

  I don’t know when it happens.

  The moment when I can no longer just go about my job and walk past the dolphins in their pens, thinking of them as our gentle and docile residents.

  Maybe it’s after Jojo takes me out on the boat and I see the others swimming long straight lines, diving deep, not in shallow narrow loops like these dolphins, contained by fences.

  Maybe it starts long before, when, during my rounds, I pause by their pens, wondering about their assorted histories that usually only go as far back as their previous ownership.

  I think the point of rehabilitation is to let them go, and maybe use a place like this as sort of a halfway house on their journey back to the open ocean. But as with Rachel, whenever I ask too many questions, the trainers, techs, and vets just walk away from me, and I have to go back to my work, circulating through the facility, asking tourist families if they’re all having a good time, trying to convince them to sign up for the Swim with Dolphins program, a big moneymaker for the park, telling them how it’s a great opportunity to have “a natural experience” with the animals, just like I’ve been prepped to do, even when, if they stopped to take a look at the larger picture of all this, they’d see there is nothing natural about it.

  The trainers use the dolphins that were born at the facility, not the ones who once knew life outside these man-made lagoons. And when the hour is over, the people come out of the pen with a look of enchantment. They don’t notice it’s a one-sided solace. The dolphins are hungry, working for each reward of water-injected mackerel popped into their mouth.

  Sometimes a visitor will get mouthy on the trainers, having seen a documentary or read an article about the cruelties that can happen at marine parks or how the dolphins are stolen from the ocean, but the trainers never lose their show-grins, responding that the dolphins love their home here at the facility, and then they point the visitor to Oliver, a dolphin who washed up near Sarasota, bleeding to death after a shark chomped away half of his dorsal and fluke. A dolphin like that would never last in the wild, the trainers say. And it’s true. Here at the dolphinarium Oliver has a chance to live a safe life, even if the dolphinarium has recently received citations for not providing enough shaded areas for the animals in their enclosures, which the inspector said violates the Animal Welfare Act.

  “But if this is really some kind of refuge,” a teenager once asked Rachel, “why do you breed them?”

  “Breeding is part of our commitment to conservation.” Rachel gave her standard reply, even though the bottlenose dolphins bred here aren’t considered endangered.

  The park visitors remark what a beautiful dolphinarium this is, where the animals swim in real seawater, not in the chlorinated clear water of aquariums around the country, with concrete and glass tanks.

  Mo and the staff talk about captivity like it’s the best thing a dolphin can hope for, but that kind of talk just makes me think of Carlito and all the years he spent trapped by the routines of prison life in a six-by-nine-foot prison cell, the size of a parking space, and what Dr. Joe used to say about inmates like my brother who were also sentenced to solitary confinement: “It doesn’t have to be violent for it to be torture.”

  We are back at my cottage. Nesto is exhausted from his day on the fence, eager to shower and wash off the sweat and saltwater and rest his back before having to get up to do more of the same work tomorrow. I don’t ask why he didn’t come to see me the night before or even that morning. I only ask how his trip went but he offers few words in response.

  “It was normal,” he says. “Just normal,” adding that everyone is having as hard a time as ever and all he accomplished by going home to Havana was to refresh his ever-broken heart.

  I watch as he steps out of his jeans, pulls off his shirt, tosses them onto a pile on the floor, and walks into the shower, singing, “Parece que el ciclón ya se fue y ya se pueden ver las estrellas, parece que la vida cambió y yo cambié con ella . . .”

  When he comes out, a towel around his waist, flopping onto the bed, his eyes closing with fatigue, I climb onto the bed and straddle him over his towel, not because I missed his body so badly while he was away—I did, very much—but because I can’t wait to tell him about what happened while he was gone, how I went out on the boat with Jojo and what he told me. But when I’m through with my story, Nesto can focus only on the detail that I climbed onto a boat with a total stranger.

  “You could have gotten yourself killed, Reina.”

  If my eyes had been closed at that moment, I’d have believed it was my brother scolding me.

  “You can’t just get on a boat with someone you don’t know. It’s dangerous and irresponsible.”

  “That’s how I met you.”

  “At least we were on land. But I still could have hurt you. And this guy could have strangled you and dumped you in the ocean without any trouble. You would have disappeared and nobody would have ever known.”

  I crawl off of him and let him be. But an hour or so later, when he finally decides it’s time to eat rather than sleep, and we sit on the sofa with plates of arroz con pollo on our laps, I try to bring up the matter of the wild dolphins again.

  “You think it’s true what Jojo says? They stole them from the waters out here?”

  “Why not? In Cuba and probably in most places, when a dolphin dies, they just send people out to catch another.”

  “Do you think it’s true the animals are content in their pens because they’re fed and don’t have to worry about predators?”

  “That’s a lie they tell so they can keep doing what they do.”

  “You don’t think they lose their instincts?”

  “No animal does. That’s why they’re called instincts. Everything that is learned can be unlearned.”

  “Even if they’ve been captives for years and years?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even if they were born in captivity and have known no other life?”

  I’m thinking of the babies in the pens, born from forceful semen collections and inseminations—the babies that the dolphinarium advertises with a sign outside the entrance reading Come See Our New Additions!

  “Yes,” Nesto says with some hesitation. “Even after generations have passed and
their ancestors were the last ones to taste freedom.”

  He stands up, takes our cleared plates to the sink, and rinses them off.

  When he’s through, he goes back to the bed, collapses atop the covers, and shuts his eyes.

  A few minutes of silence pass and I assume he’s fallen asleep, but then I hear Nesto’s voice call to me one more time.

  “Believe me, Reina. There is not an animal on this earth that if given the choice between freedom or captivity, would not choose to be free.”

  Nesto sleeps and I try to sleep next to him, but wake up every hour until I finally pull myself out of bed and walk out the door to the beach. I go barefoot, which I don’t think much about until I’m halfway across the wooden floorboards that lead to the shore, noticing the planks are populated by roaches, worms, and snails out for midnight grazing. Around me, I hear the song of the night creatures, owls, the wrestling in the brush of what are probably raccoons or possums.

  I walk until I’m on the beach, sit near the water’s edge, and stare out at the murky sky, the flat sea shining like a razor under fractured moonlight.

  I feel a distant disorientation, as if I am no longer myself, living my life, but a stranger, an unknown, living in a world entirely unfamiliar to me, as if I’m watching it in pictures, snapshots from a life that might be torn from me at any moment.

  My brother wouldn’t recognize this woman sitting curled into her knees on the beach in the darkest point of night. He would only recognize me as the girl I was when he was alive, in that brown house with the bars on it, on that street where people avoided conversation with us.

  I wonder what he would think of me down here, on this island, of the sight of me out on the water, throwing myself into the ocean with only Nesto to protect me should anything go wrong. He would likely warn me not to trust him, say that I have no reason to believe Nesto would do me no harm. He would say you shouldn’t trust anyone but your own family and even then, it’s a risk.