The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

  A week or so later, two guys from Switzerland turn up at the dolphinarium and when I stop to ask if they’re enjoying the place like I’m directed to do, they start asking, not about the animals or the facility, but about my life, how I got lucky enough to end up working here, and where I’m from since I don’t look like any of the other girls around Crescent Key.

  They ask what there is to do at night around here and if I’d like to go out with them.

  “You look like you know how to have a good time,” one guy says. When I decline, they become even flirtier, playing the clown for me.

  Mo stops me on the walkway as soon as I part from them.

  “What was that all about? Looked like they were trying to pick you up.”

  “They were just asking about the place.”

  “Asking what?”

  I realize I have an opportunity.

  “About the new dolphin mostly. I guess word’s out she’s not doing so good here.”

  Mo’s empty hairline shoots up and he looks back at the Swiss guys who’ve moved onto Dottie and Diana’s pen. Mo studies them, and I know I’ve planted a seed of suspicion that will serve me later.

  It’s maintenance day. I walk over to the new dolphin’s pen and see that Nesto is already underwater, checking the bearings on the fence like he does on all the pens, and he’s doing what we agreed he’d do—instead of tightening the bolts holding the clamps to the corners and support posts, he’s actually loosening them. He works around the dolphin, still at her place along the fence. Rachel is out in the front lagoon working one of the shows. I notice Mo has followed me.

  “What do you supposed she finds so fascinating about that fence?” Mo says, though I’m not sure if he’s posing the question to me or to himself.

  “What’s on the other side. The sea.”

  He pulls his hand out of his pocket and cups my shoulder, his palm warm through the cotton of my shirt.

  “Let me explain something to you, Reina.” He points across the fence. “That out there is the gulf. Behind us is the ocean. And way down there, south of the Florida Straits, is the sea. We use the correct terminology around here. You got that, doll?”

  “Got it.”

  I don’t tell him there are no fences out there marking where the oceans end and the seas begin. It’s the same water flowing free. I read in one of the cottage magazines that a single wave can travel around the whole world before it hits shore. There are no borders, no security checkpoints to inhibit a wave’s journey. The world’s oceans are one body of life. Only land separates water, but land, too, is rooted in the ocean.

  I don’t tell him that a few nights ago, as we sat together watching a storm from the cottage veranda, lightning filling the sky like arteries over distant columns of rain, Nesto told me Yemayá’s realm in the ocean is the greatest energy conductor, able to absorb the temperature of Changó’s lightning strikes, each one hotter than the sun.

  “It’s power beyond our understanding,” Nesto said.

  Then he added that the only things we can count as truth are two prophecies of the diloggún that rest against each other:

  No one knows what lies at the bottom of the ocean.

  And the next prophecy:

  Blood that flows through the veins.

  It’s a simple plan. Nesto is slotted by the agency for a flight to Havana next weekend. We have to do it quickly or risk having to wait until he returns.

  We know we are breaking laws starting with trespassing and vandalism.

  We have a cloudy moonless night and a cold rainstorm on our side, though without wind, thunderclaps, or lightning.

  This, Nesto reassures me, means that Olódumare, the Creator, owner of the world’s secrets, who pours rain, is offering us cover.

  We’ve had Lolo’s boat for a few days after taking it out for some dives. During this time, Nesto and I practiced, running it slowly down the canal along Hammerhead, each of us suited up and jumping off, to time how long we thought it would take to undo all the clamps on two poles, for both of us to pull the sheet of fence fabric down into the sand and clear the way for the dolphin to come out. It was faster than having to cut a hole with pliers, a bolt cutter, and a saw. We’ll have our wetsuits, fins, masks, and gloves, because Nesto knows the fence is already scabbed with sharp barnacles. We won’t take oxygen though, because we know the noise and bubbles would probably make the dolphin even more apprehensive.

  The night we go out, we do ventilation patterns to open our lungs, to oxygenate, and to relax our bodies. I’ve looked forward to this night, imagining the dolphin swimming out of the pen and away from us. But the journey from our dock, around the island, under the bridge to the gulf side of the Keys, feels especially long. Nesto promises that with our lights off and rain muffling the sound of the boat’s engine, we won’t be noticed by anyone onshore.

  We’ve rehearsed aloud many times. Nesto made drawings of what the fence looks like underwater so I could memorize it because we can’t use a big flashlight and risk attracting attention. We know there is only one security guard on duty at the dolphinarium at night. We’re banking on him tiring of his rounds by three in the morning, taking shelter from the rain under one of the canopies at the front of the facility.

  As we get closer to the pen, Nesto and I try not to speak to each other. In the darkness, we rely on the silhouettes of hand gestures, touching each other, or whispering deep into each other’s ears if we have to be heard. He stops the boat about twenty meters from the pen and I lower myself into the water, cold seeping through my wetsuit. I slip my mask over my face, and as I fear, I see only blackness. We’ll have to use the tiny flashlights we’ve brought with us that only illuminate the span of a hand. I swim ahead, feeling for the fence, setting my intentions in my mind the way Nesto taught me to do whenever we approach the ocean for a dive. And because Jojo told me he learned dolphins can sense our motives, we have to make it clear to them, articulate it to ourselves so they can read it in our being, that we mean no harm.

  It’s a matter of minutes, my breath shortening the more I try to push it longer, and I struggle to keep myself from gasping loudly every time I come up for air. I work on one pole, the tiny lights guiding us through the unscrewing of bolts and clamps, cutting the fence ties with the wire cutter while Nesto works on the other, but he finishes before me and slides over to finish my part of the job. The fence begins to wobble and falls over us. Nesto warned me we’d have to back up quickly to pull it down from the top or it could pin us under.

  We’ve prepared for this in his drawings and I do as I was instructed until the fence hits the sand at our feet. I swim over to the dolphin, still in the same spot she claimed when the fence was up. I go to her, hoping she’ll smell me or see me or sense me with her sonar the way she did that first day I went into the water with her. I fear she won’t recognize me in this darkness like she did before, or she won’t follow me. But then she starts moving and I do, too, while Nesto clears out of the way and heads back to the boat.

  I swim away from the fence slowly, looking back to make sure she’s behind me. In the night I can only see the occasional gloss of her dorsal, feel the water moving around me. But then I feel the pressure of her slipstream and know she’s beside me and I swim a little faster, careful not to kick up water with my fins. We push farther out, past the boat, toward the small mangrove islands dotting the bay until it unfolds into the gulf. She doesn’t touch me, but I feel her through the water, her weight moving against the current, and then, when we are so far out that my body starts to feel much heavier, my breath even shorter, I have to let her go.

  I turn, make my way back to the boat, trusting she won’t come back with me, refusing to look behind me so she won’t think to follow. I feel something near my legs and hope it isn’t the dolphin. When I come to the back of the boat, I give Nesto my fins and he reaches out his arms to lift me in.


  We don’t speak. We don’t say a word. He starts the boat and we head back for the cottage.

  It’s only later when we stand on the bathroom tile and peel out of our wetsuits that we each take in the stunned look on the other’s face.

  I am certain we’ve done the right thing, but we can’t know until the morning if we’ve been successful. For now, we have to wait.

  I don’t know what to say to him, how to thank him for helping me do what I asked. I reach my arms around him and put my face against his chest. We don’t shower off. Tonight, we go to bed as we are, sticky, salty with the sea.

  By the time we get to work the next morning, the dolphinarium is erupting with scandal. Mo’s been calling Nesto for more than an hour already, telling him to hurry up and come in to work though he won’t say why. A local news van is parked out front, along with several police cars. The employees, from the gift shop ladies to the maintenance workers to the trainers and vets, are in disbelief. Nesto and I approach the crowd at the end of the walkway, where the curtain stood, though it’s been removed. Charlie, one of the techs, tells us the fence collapsed and the dolphin escaped out of the pen. Rachel and some of the other staff members are already out on the boats trying to find her, so far with no luck.

  Mo, the park owners, and the cops take Nesto aside, since he was the one to erect the fence and was in charge of making sure it was sound. I watch as they question him for their police and incident reports, asking him to explain the exact procedures he used to build and check the fence. Nesto tells them on his last check the fence was in perfect condition, not a screw out of place.

  Soon, Mo tells everyone to get back to work. He says he’s sure it wasn’t an accident that the fence collapsed; it’s too unlikely all the hinges would come undone at the same time and it would fall uniformly to the ground. That’s how he knows it was a deliberate breakout and not that the rain or winds pulled the fence open, or that the dolphin pushed the fence down herself.

  The only suspicious activity Mo can think of to tell the cops about is the Swiss guys who came the other day, asking questions about the new dolphin.

  “Goddamn,” he says. “They probably came here to scout the place.”

  In the afternoon, I overhear Rachel telling Mo that maybe they should try taking me out on the boat with them to look for the dolphin. They’re standing in the shade under the observation tower and don’t see me coming down the stairs behind them.

  “She’s the only person Zoe let get near her,” Rachel reminds him.

  “She doesn’t know the first thing about those animals or how to be in the water with them. We don’t need that kind of liability right now.”

  Then their talk turns to Nesto.

  “We’ll have to get someone to double-check the Cuban’s fence work from now on,” Mo says. “Got to make sure he’s not the one getting sloppy on us.”

  Nesto and I stay late that afternoon. He’s rebuilding the pen we’ve taken apart, working diligently to ease the day’s chaos, and I’m talking to the last guests to leave before closing, Iowans wondering if it’s true what the news said that afternoon, that a dolphin escaped.

  I give them what Mo said would be the official story: the fence broke open during the storm and the dolphin probably got disoriented, but will surely return to her home here.

  “They always come back,” I say, hoping that I’m lying.

  At home, Nesto and I don’t speak of what we’ve done, as if, even by admitting our culpability to each other, we’ll be discovered.

  Paranoia sets in. Nesto feels eyes on him everywhere. The police call him in to question him again and he always gives the same answers.

  The trainers still go out on the boat, believing their own tale that the dolphin has just lost her way.

  The investigation turns up no evidence. The security guard who was on duty that night swears he did his complete rounds, checked the pen several times, and didn’t hear anything unusual out on the water.

  Nesto and I float together in a strange state of hyperawareness.

  I feel no regret or pride, just relief and a quiet satisfaction, as if Nesto was right after all—I’ve begun to settle my debt, and somehow things are falling into balance.

  One morning, I see Jojo’s boat come up the canal and pass me on the dock where I sit with my legs hanging over the edge, dangling above the water. He slows down, waves to me, and cuts the engine as the boat bobs a bit closer to the dock.

  “You still working over at the dolphinarium?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I heard about the animal that got out. They recover her yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What are they saying about it?”

  “The whole fence came down. Looks like it toppled over in the rains.”

  “We’re talking about a hundred-thousand-dollar animal here. That’s the going rate for wild-caught these days. No question somebody broke her out. Maybe even stole her for another facility.”

  “But she was a rescue.”

  “It’s animal laundering just the same,” he says, touching his beard, starting the engine up again. “Secondhand dolphins are still worth a pretty penny.”

  “Where would somebody hide a dolphin?”

  “There are houses on water all over these coasts. Somebody would just need to build a pen. It’s easy. And it’s been done before.”

  He stares at me so long I wonder if my face is giving anything away.

  “They think it might have been activists,” I tell him.

  “Could be. Last summer a couple of them tried to free a dozen manatees that were stranded from the red tide and held in a pen up in Islamorada.”

  “Did they get away with it?”

  “Only two or three manatees made it out. But someone turned the folks in. They got arrested. I think they got probation and had to pay some fines. No matter. I’m sure if you’d ask them, they’d say it was worth it.”

  “I’m sure they would.”

  “There’s also the chance the animal died and they’re saying it’s stolen so they don’t have to report the death.”

  “Why wouldn’t they want to report it? Aren’t the animals insured?”

  “Sure, but they also want to keep down their official animal turnover numbers. Lots of places do that. Nobody likes hearing about dead dolphins, or wants to draw attention to the fact that captives are lucky if they live ten years, and wild ones can easily live up to fifty.”

  “How do you get rid of a dead dolphin?”

  “How you think? You wrap it in a net, drag it out on a boat, load it with big rocks and sink it far out in the ocean.” He points toward the horizon. “You’d find yourself a dolphin boneyard not too far out there if you only knew where to look.”

  The dolphin doesn’t return.

  A few nights later, I hold on to Nesto tight, put my mouth to his neck, and whisper as softly as I can into his ear, “Nobody will ever know it was you and me.”

  He nods, kissing me. Then he tells me a story, a patakí, of the Ibeyís, los jimaguas, the divine twin children of Changó and Ochún who were raised by Changó’s mother, Yemayá. The twins, a boy and a girl, were playing in the forest when they encountered the devil who set traps for humans and, after catching them, would eat them. The twins were trapped now themselves, and one of them hid while the other stepped forward and made a deal with the devil that if the child could dance longer than the devil, the child would be freed. But the devil didn’t realize there were two children, and the twins played their tambourine and danced and danced with the devil, and when one child became tired, they switched places and danced and danced until the devil grew so exhausted he had to give up. With the devil on the ground gasping, barely able to speak, the Ibeyís made him promise to stop his hunting and trapping of humans and let them roam the earth free as they wished. And so the Ibeyís became known as the
protectors of all creatures, forever revered as the two young ones who, with their cleverness, together outsmarted the devil.

  Tonight, hours before he’s due to leave for Cuba in the morning, Nesto does an ebbó to Elegguá, asking for assistance with his plan to reunite his family. I watch as he arranges four coconuts on the edge of the mattress, places a card with Elegguá’s image on the table beside the bed, and lowers his head before it, making the sign of the cross. He takes a coconut in hand, rubbing it along his body from head to foot until he’s done so with all four coconuts, asking Elegguá, controller of paths, to change his fortune and bring his family to him. Then he goes outside and I follow, watching from the veranda as he places a coconut on each of the four points of the Hammerhead property surrounding the cottage. He starts in the east, facing the ocean, smashing each coconut with a hammer until it’s a mess of meat and juice, jumping over the broken shells until he finishes the last one, and returns to the cottage, careful not to look back over his shoulder or he’ll break the ebbó. Thunder rolls over just as he passes me on the veranda, and I know Nesto is pleased because thunder is a sign from Elegguá’s friend Changó, galloping through the heavens on his white horse, that his petitions have been heard and will be answered.

  We are both at the airport in Miami, after a long bus ride up from the Keys before sunrise, about to board flights to opposite ends of the Caribbean.

  My trip was planned on impulse, another piece of restitution, the final trip my brother was never able to take to witness for one last time the first home we both knew.

  I am also leaving because I don’t want to be alone in the cottage wondering what’s on the other side of Nesto’s journey.