by Ray Cluley
“There are too many problems,” he says. “There has been revolution, earthquakes, floods. There is unemployment, poverty, a lack of education. Don’t write of those. Just write about the red gold. People will care about the animals and stop the diving, do you think? They will help the divers.”
“Maybe.”
We look at the sea rolling in, rolling out, itself a siren’s call to those who need the things Eliot has told me they lack. Tourism is growing, but it’s still nowhere near rivalling lobster fishing.
“People think different things about the name of this country, where it comes from.” His hands are in his pockets. The sun is low but not yet setting and it casts little flashes of light from the crucifix he wears. I stand close to him and look out the same way, trying to see what he sees. “Some think it means ‘surrounded by water’, which is not good news if you believe in mermaids. The one I like best is that it means ‘sweet sea.’”
I had heard the same thing. I think perhaps it was in the in-flight magazine, referring to the country’s freshwater lakes.
“When you write what you write, remember it is beautiful here. Whatever you have to write, try to get some of that in, too.”
S
Back at Eliot’s, I still can’t sleep. I stay up, sitting on the beach for a while. Sometimes I smoke. Sometimes I help myself to another drink from Eliot’s fridge. My eyes feel like there’s sand in them and I rub at them constantly. They’re gritty, but not with sand. I want to close them, but they stay open. I try to yawn, but my body knows I’m faking. I try to remember my mother how she was before, but all I get is the sickness and bitchiness.
If I can’t sleep, I can try to wake up; I go inside for a shower.
Eliot’s bathroom is a freestanding tub with a sink beside the toilet. He has rigged a shower hose to the taps of the bath and a shower curtain hangs limp on a leaning rail. I strip out of my damp clothes, piling them on the toilet seat, and step into the tub. I turn the taps and step under the spray without waiting for it to warm up.
The first blast is a shock that makes me gasp and speeds my breathing but I soon get used to it. I turn the hot off completely but even with just the cold running I feel tired. The curtain keeps clinging to my right side and I feel colder down one half of my body. Eventually I stop peeling it away. I close my eyes and lean my head against the wall.
When I open them my mother is sitting in the tub with me. She has pushed herself into the far corner, naked flesh as pale as fish belly, and her hands are curled into claws that reach into the air.
I open my eyes again, properly this time, fully awake, and turn off the taps. I towel myself dry knowing I’ll be sweating again in a few minutes.
I go back out to the beach.
S
When I go out to the lobster boats I don’t use a canoe. I’m with Officer Warner Lopez in a twenty foot launch. The sea is choppy and we bounce from peak to peak with no time for the troughs. It reminds me of yesterday’s trip in Eliot’s truck, but with the added splash of sea spray. I’m regretting the gallo pinto Eliot served for breakfast, carne asada, salad, and fried cheese churning in my stomach. I keep tasting the plantains that came after.
Eliot has not come with me and I feel relieved he has work to do. He’s told me of some trouble he’s been having with boat owners who don’t like him educating the people around here about diving safety. I have no doubt that the situation is as terrible as he tells me, and although he helped the locals open up to me I feel better about him being elsewhere. Besides, I’m with an official who will be more persuasive than Eliot with these particular locals, albeit persuasive in a different way.
We rise up out of the water and for a moment we are airborne. We don’t so much land as let the waves come up to meet us. Lopez is casual in his steering but clearly in a rush, kind enough to do a favour for Eliot but wanting it done quickly. His haste is evident in our speed, and the efficient way he handles the boat. When he speaks to me his sentences are clipped short, and his answers to questions are often a nod or shake of the head with one or two additional words if necessary. The lilt of his accent also makes his speech seem hurried, his English not quite as good as Dr. Mendoza’s.
“This boat we’re heading to,” I call over the roar of the outboard, the thump of hull against water, “is it American?”
“Americans gone now.”
“But they buy the lobsters?”
He nods once, then points.
There are many boats. The fleet expanded in the eighties and now the nineties sees a rapid expansion in lobster exports. The boats work the Caribbean and take their catch to processing plants at Puerto Cabezas, Bluefields and Laguna de Perlas. We’re heading for a boat called Rojo Tesoro. It’s a large, steel vessel the colour of dried blood. Closer, I realize this colour is rust. The entire body of the boat is a corroded flaking mess with only the faintest evidence of a blue colour beneath. The white lettering of its name is peeling where it isn’t turning brown. Other vessels nearby are much the same.
“How do they stay afloat?”
Lopez doesn’t have an answer for me. He cuts the engine and we come down hard on the surface of the sea, drifting to our destination. I can hear the calls of men working onboard. From another boat, one called Roland B, comes the sound of chanted song as men sort through their catch. Lively Palo de Mayo music fades in and out from a radio on another boat I can’t see.
One of the men on the deck of the Rojo Tesoro raises his hands and says something in Spanish with mock fright. Don’t shoot. The other men laugh and one or two imitate him.
Instead of humouring them, Lopez turns the launch broadside and tosses the man a rope. He catches it reluctantly and says something else, fast and angry, to which Lopez barks something back. The man begins wrapping the rope around a cleat.
“They do not want us onboard,” Lopez says to me, giving me a first smile. I feel like someone he has arrested, that’s the kind of smile it is. “It means I want to go onboard even more,” he says.
“I thought all this had been arranged?”
Lopez shrugs. “I take you to a boat, that was arranged. Which boat, I have only just decided.”
Great.
Lopez boards them first, quick and agile, and I clamber after him. There are about a dozen other men jostling for space here, stepping over plastic tubs of spiny lobster that fidget in their own forced crowd, or squeezing around stacked canoes and pallet racks of breathing apparatus. The masts and other beams are little more than scaffolding poles. They’ve been scraped of whatever colour they were once painted and are now metallic where they aren’t washed orange, red, or brown with rust. The hand rail I clutch when the boat lurches actually crumbles against my palm and two of my fingers press a hole into the hollow metal. Ropes crisscross the air above my head and thrum in the breeze.
The men are mostly Mestizos, mixed Amerindian and white, though a couple are African-Nicaraguan, their hair fashioned into tight cornrows. They wear grubby white vests or torn t-shirts if they wear anything at all above their long shorts. About half of them wear baseball caps. Eliot has told me it’s a popular sport here. Lopez stands out in his uniform. I expect I do, too, in my sweat and tourist clothes.
I guess that the man hurling words at Lopez is the captain. He’s tightly muscled and square-toothed around the gaps and I’m reminded of the second most popular sport in this country: boxing. He gesticulates wildly around him, and prods Lopez’s chest. I see Lopez’s hand go calmly to his gun, probably a reflex that reassures him. It does little to reassure me.
“I just want to talk,” I tell the man. It seems to get everyone’s attention except his, so I say it again, adding, “Just talk.”
The man throws his hands up to the sky and returns to hauling a rope up from the water. Lopez looks at me and turns his index finger around quickly like miming the rotor bl
ades of a helicopter. I’m either free to talk to everybody or he wants me to wind things up quickly, or both.
I turn to the closest, a brown-toothed man with a moustache that grows sporadically despite the fullness of the beard around it, and ask him if he can tell me about the mermaids. He doesn’t seem to understand what I’m saying.
“English?”
He nods, and he grins, and he looks around to see which of his friends sees him grinning. “English,” he says.
“Tell me about the mermaids.”
He nods, but doesn’t add anything to it.
Lopez calls over in Spanish and the man nods again.
“Si, si, sirena. Be-autiful demons.” He holds his hands out in front of his chest and laughs, and a couple nearby join him.
I offer him money, letting the others see. He becomes serious and takes it, but all he says is sirena again, this time refraining from the indication of breasts.
“That’s Luis, he’s an idiot, don’t give him money.”
The man who tells me this is sorting oxygen canisters. He’s looking at me and smiling around a cigarette.
“Are you supposed to smoke around those things?” I point at the canisters behind him and at his feet.
The man shrugs and returns to his task. “I can tell you what you need to know, and then you can go,” he says. The cigarette is bent and twisted in his mouth, bouncing as he speaks and dangling precariously at times from his bottom lip. The others have turned away, returning to their work, so maybe I was wrong about who’s captain.
I duck under a rope and make my way across loose boards to where he tests each tank for air.
“That’s a lot of oxygen.”
“It’s a lot of tanks. It’s not a lot of oxygen. Fifteen minutes each, maybe thirty.”
I look around for the rest of the equipment and he glances at me looking for it. He smiles to himself but offers nothing else.
“Where are the masks?”
He points briefly and I see a bundle of them in a plastic barrel. A wooden crate, the sort used for fruit or vegetables, sits beside it filled with the black tubes of breathing apparatus. They look like rigid snakes. Some are lined with tape like you’d get in a puncture repair kit for your bicycle.
“How do you catch them? The lobsters.”
He mimes a spear thrust, then confirms it. “Spears. Back there.” He only indicates where with a turn of his head. “Do you want to try?”
I’m surprised by the offer but not by the mocking tone.
“Yeah.”
He becomes as serious as Luis did when I gave him money.
“Yeah,” I say again. “Why not?”
S
Lopez comes over when he sees me shrugging on one of the canisters.
“You done this before? You have certificates?”
“Do they?”
He shakes his head, points to the box of coiled tubing.
“These are not good.” Something catches his eye and he pulls it up from the tangle of pipes. “Look.”
He is showing me the mouthpiece of a regulator which is secured only by a piece of tightly knotted string.
“We do not use that one,” says the man helping me, but his voice has that same mocking tone that suggests of course they do.
Lopez picks up on that too. He starts yelling in Spanish and the man who’d prodded him earlier hurries over. While he’s making his way to us, Lopez turns back to me. “Wait.”
I nod, but I kick off my shoes and stuff the sweaty socks inside. In shorts and t-shirt I’m wearing exactly what the locals wear when they dive.
“He worries you will meet the mermaid and he will be in trouble.” The man takes what remains of his cigarette from his mouth and offers it to me. I decline. As much as I’d like one, I’ll wait. He spits into my facemask, rubs the saliva around.
“Who’s that man?”
I’m talking about the man currently exchanging fast words with Lopez.
“That man is Pablo. This is his boat.”
“He’s the captain?”
The man shrugs. “It is his boat,” he says, and I come to understand a little bit about how it works here.
“And you?”
“I am Carlos.”
The other men are still working, but they watch us. They’re done with diving for the day and the mermaids have let them be, but now it is late and there are fewer divers and maybe the mermaids will notice a foreigner like me.
I check my pockets. I’ve already crammed what there was into my shoes, but I check again anyway as Lopez and the man exchange more than words. It’s not the blows I had feared were coming but money, Lopez taking a fistful of notes from the man. Afterwards, the boat owner, Pablo, makes the same hands-to-the-sky gesture he’d made earlier and backs away to the stern.
Lopez pockets the notes looking at me and says, “This is cheap equipment. You have no watch, no pressure gauge, no depth gauge. When you run out of air it will be sudden and surprising.”
Isn’t it that way for everyone?
I don’t say that. I give his comments due seriousness and finally nod. “I’m buying a car without brakes.” They’re words from Eliot’s email, the one that brought me here. The problem, to continue the analogy, is that the people in these small communities that depend on lobsters don’t even know a car should have brakes. They dive with shitty equipment and not enough equipment and of course the boat owners don’t tell them. It’s cheaper for them to buy bare regulators without all the other gear. It’s a violation of human rights that allows Caribbean spiny lobsters to compete with the more expensive American type, divers paying the price so the big companies don’t have to.
“Alright,” Lopez says. “So you know. You can go.”
Carlos is barefoot and bare-chested, a tank on his back. He takes a last puff on his cigarette and tosses it overboard. Then he escorts me to where a section of railing is missing.
I realize then that we should have done all this in one of the canoes, closer to the surface of the sea. That would be the usual way. Instead, I have been tricked into proving myself to a crew of poorly educated, poorly prepared, divers.
Carlos presses his facemask hard against his face, says, “Like this,” and pushes the respirator into his mouth, holding it firm. Then he steps from the boat and plunges into the sea. One moment he is there, the next he is nothing but bubbles and a dark shape, going down.
With one hand on my mask, the other holding the mouthpiece hard against my teeth, I jump down after him with little thought but for what I might find there.
S
When my mother got sick, it wasn’t sudden. She had the usual warnings from doctors first, not to mention the advertising campaigns, and then not one or even two but three strokes. The first two were little ones, but enough to scare her, and me. The third one was enough to slacken one side of her face for a little while. She stopped smoking after each one, but obviously they didn’t frighten her as much as they frightened me because soon enough she’d be sparking up again. In fact, she went from filtered to loose tobacco, rolling her own because it was cheaper. Maybe she was in some sort of rush to die; smokers triple their chance of a stroke.
I was working for a paper at the time, but managing to sell occasional features freelance to magazines. I didn’t win any awards or anything, but people read them and noticed things for a while; I made a little difference. Sweatshops in India; a stretch of road in Australia that was particularly dangerous for backpackers; a piece on the use of fossil fuel in China. My point is, I wasn’t always around. After my mother’s first stroke, I took time off to stay with her. She didn’t particularly need me, but I thought she might want me there. That was when I met Eliot. I was suspicious at first, of course, the first man not my father (especially as he looked so much the stere
otype) but it turned out he really was a priest and, what’s more, really did love my mother.
After the second stroke, I visited but I didn’t stick around. She had Eliot, and I had my work. I was also working on sorting my own love life at the time, but that didn’t turn into anything. On top of everything else it was just too much pressure.
Things between Eliot and my mother didn’t work out either. His religion meant it was never going to be anything more than good friendship anyway, but they both felt the loss of it. He’s a good man, a kind man, but eventually she managed to drive him away. It wasn’t the self-pity and bitterness she cocooned herself in that he couldn’t endure, it was that she did it because she didn’t want him around. I promised him I would take good care of her. I moved closer. I promised to visit more often. I promised I’d keep her off the damn cigarettes. I promised a lot of things, both to Eliot and to myself, even to God.
My mother died. A stroke is caused by an interruption of blood to the brain and it causes a sudden loss of brain function. Smoking narrows the arteries and it makes blood more likely to clot. My mother’s stroke was an ischemic stroke, which means it was caused by a blood clot. The same stroke that put her under water to drown in the bath one day also caused her to pull the plug from the drain by a wild kick to its chain. By the time the water had drained away, she was gone.
So, my mother died and I took up smoking. I took up drinking for a little while but wasn’t very good at it.
Everything else I quit.
S
The water is only cold for a moment, but I barely notice. I hold on frantically to my mask and mouthpiece as I plummet through the rush of bubbles I’ve made. My t-shirt rides up my chest but I leave it, too busy holding on to my means of breathing. I’ve closed my eyes instinctively, despite the mask. It will not help in my search for a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas. But the sea is not silent, not like in the poem. I can hear the pulse of boat engines, dull and heavy in the water. They beat with the same regularity of an MRI scan. Everything seems louder, like when you dunk under in the bath and let your ears fill. I can hear . . .