Sabina demonstrated. She made a mask with her right hand by pressing five fingers to her face. “The kids dumb enough to be catchers do this,” she said. She squatted, peeking through her fingers, and extended her left hand as if about to catch a pitch.
The boy actually grinned. “You’ve got to be kidding. No mask, just a bare hand?” His grin faded when Sabina lifted her front lip. There was a gap there, and her lip showed a pale scar.
“How do you think I lost my tooth?” she said. “Not that I care. It’ll grow back.”
“You’re a”—Luke was trying to picture it—“you’re a catcher?”
“Someone has to tell the pitcher what to do,” Sabina said, done with the subject of baseball. “I gave up stupid games, though. Now I write poetry. Do you like poetry?” She stored the scrub brush and stepped onto the dock.
“You write poems even if a teacher doesn’t make you?” For Luke, the concept was even harder to grasp than the idea of a ten-year-old catcher without a face mask. “That can’t be any fun.”
The girl grimaced as if offended. “Poetry isn’t supposed to be fun. It’s about love and sadness and being poor—too poor to buy new shoes or even an iPhone. In Havana, there is the most beautiful cemetery in the world. Huge, a forest of beautiful stone. My favorite poet, Dulce María Borrero, is buried there. I would take flowers to her grave and eat a sandwich. Would you like to hear one of her poems? I memorized two of them in English.”
“Maybe later,” Luke said. He eyed the cracked tagging pole as he asked, “Do they rhyme?”
“What’s it matter if you don’t want to hear them?” the girl responded. “My poems, I like them to rhyme, but poems don’t have to rhyme. I don’t think you know squat about poetry, either.”
Maribel, sensing an argument felt a familiar tension in her stomach. She tried to get back to the T-shirts. “Sabina is the artistic one. Together, maybe we could design something nice. ‘Sharks Incorporated,’ what do you think?”
For a moment the boy was interested. He started to say, “I can talk to my aunt about it…” But then his attention shifted. His gaze focused on a distant shoreline where mangroves shaded the water.
“I gotta go,” he muttered. “Pete’s up to no good.”
“Pete?” Maribel replied. “Oh, the dog.”
Luke scooped up the tagging pole, and got a gloved hand on a tackle box. “He’s been chewing the ropes off boats and towing them out into the bay. Boat owners think they’re stolen.”
Sabina followed the boy’s gaze. “I don’t see anything. You’re making that up.” As he walked away, she added, “Hey—you’re just trying to get out of hearing a beautiful poem. Or mad because I’ve caught more sharks than you.”
“I think I might make a new tagging pole,” Luke replied, his mind somewhere far off.
* * *
It was true that, so far, Sabina had been the luckiest fisherman of them all. She had landed nine of the fourteen sharks they’d tagged that week. In her diary, days ago, she had described the blacktip sharks as magníficos. The fish were silver and black. They were as sleek as rockets, and their eyes resembled those of a fierce cat. Or a mean-hearted goat.
In Cuba, both animals were common.
Thinking about her former home always caused a bout of melancholy in the girl. A few days earlier, alone in the little houseboat where she lived with her mother and sister, Sabina had written a poem entitled “Gatos con Cuernos.”
“Cats with Horns” was the title after she had laboriously translated it into English. She had done some editing to make the unfamiliar English words rhyme, then folded the poem and placed it in a secret drawer in her desk.
Today, after talking about Havana’s beautiful cemetery and her favorite poet, Sabina felt melancholy descend on her on like a cloud. Luke had snubbed her again. Maribel, of course, had taken his side. Not that Sabina cared—not really—but the boy had to be an airhead not to like poetry.
Alone, she walked to their small blue-and-white houseboat moored at the end of the dock. The space it had been assigned was far from where the bigger, shinier, more expensive boats were tied. A gate on the houseboat railing allowed the girl onto the well-scrubbed deck. Flowers grew there in pots along the outside wall of what was her family’s new home.
“¿Mamá?” she said, stepping inside, and was relieved to confirm that her mother was at work. Sabina often craved solitude. She hurried down the hall to her room and bolted the door. The room was tiny. It contained a single bed, a narrow desk, and a closet behind a curtain. Here her mind could roam privately to any place in the world she wanted to go.
She sat at the desk and opened a drawer that contained her private possessions. Inside was her diary, a candle, and a miniature doll made of woven straw. There were also strings of blue and yellow beads from her favorite shop in Havana. She had loved slipping off by herself to visit that shop. It smelled of cinnamon and incense, and the women in white—priestesses some called them—had treated Sabina as one of their own.
Also in the desk was a poem she had written the previous day. It was about Luke. Secretly, the farm boy’s moody silences, and his unusual eyesight, had impressed Sabina in a way that gave her an odd feeling in her stomach. Now she was tempted to tear up the stupid poem and throw it away.
She nearly did. She crumpled the paper into a ball. She hurled it across the room, then ignored it by opening her diary. But Sabina couldn’t concentrate. Words written on paper, as the women in white had explained, possessed a spirit and a power of their own.
After a while, the girl gave up. She retrieved the paper and freed the words by lighting a candle and then smoothing the paper flat on her desk.
Translated, the poem read:
A boy who sees what cannot be seen
Who hears words unspoken
A boy even stranger than me
Who doesn’t know squat
And is dumb as a rock
Although my sister would not agree
* * *
On the boat ride home, Captain Hannah said to Luke, “You take the controls. I think Izaak is hungry.”
It was late afternoon. The bay was calm, a waxen green.
The woman sat with her back to him, holding the baby. Luke stood at the wheel and steered toward a distant point of land. A clearing in the mangroves showed a clutter of docks. Houses there were elevated above the water on what locals called “Indian mounds.” They were ancient hills built of shells thousands of years ago by Florida’s First People.
Hannah’s boat was sleeker and faster than the clunky rental boat Luke and the sisters had been using. It gave the boy a good feeling to know his aunt trusted him to drive. He liked the way the deck felt beneath his feet, the way the hull sliced through waves. It reminded him of driving a snowmobile—neighbors had owned one back in Ohio. But the Florida air was warm. It smelled of salt and iodine and did not sting when breathed in.
When they were close to the fishing village where Hannah and Luke’s grandpa lived, Hannah said, “Good job. I’d let you dock the boat, but it’s getting late.” Then she noticed the broom handle that was Dr. Ford’s shark-tagging pole among Luke’s things. “Why’d you bring that?”
“There’s a crack near the point. Figured I’d fix it, because I’m the one who broke it. The tagging stick we usually use is a lot smaller, so we can get along without this one for a while.”
His aunt wasn’t the talkative type when she was driving a boat. “Marion likes you. He’ll appreciate that” is all she said.
Luke’s Grandfather Futch was the talkative type, no matter where or what time of day. Some of the strange things the old man said puzzled the boy yet often made him smile. Like now. They were in the kitchen. It was a crowded space with a propane stove, a sink, and a refrigerator that was probably as old as the fishing captain.
“Raised pigs in 4-H, did you?” Grandpa Futch asked. He was frying potatoes in a skillet while Luke set the table for three. Hannah and baby Izaak would be joining t
hem for dinner.
“A couple of black Angus cattle, too,” Luke said. “Mind if I excuse myself after I get the baby’s chair set up? I need to look for something while it’s still light. I broke our shark-tagging pole today, and I need to fix it.”
“You raised cattle?” The old man sneered, more interested in black Angus than the tagging pole. “Cows aren’t good for nothing but milk and mooing. Give me a pig any day.”
“Pigs are cool,” Luke agreed, but wanted to stay on topic. “Did you hear what I said about breaking that pole? I need to find the right piece of wood. It belongs to Dr. Ford.”
“Son,” the old man said, “I’m trying to teach you something here about being a sea captain. If your boat starts to sink—you can be a thousand miles offshore, it don’t matter—and if you’re carrying a cargo of livestock, the first thing you do is find the pigs. Pigs are smart. You can drop a pig in the middle of an ocean at midnight, and he’ll swim straight for land. It’s a gift that pigs are born with. Only the good Lord knows why.”
Luke found this educational but was determined to get outside. “I’d like to use the toolshed, if it’s okay. Maribel—she’s one of the girls I mentioned—she told me that kids in Cuba make their own baseball bats. That gave me an idea. I’m gonna made a brand-new tagging pole.”
His grandfather seemed not to hear. “Take a cow or a horse—never depend on those animals for directions. Sheep and goats are almost as bad. Now, a dog—heck, a dog will chase seagulls, it don’t matter to him. A dog could swim forty miles of open water and just be touching the beach—but if a seagull flies over? Forget it. A dang dog will head right back out to sea.”
“You don’t like dogs?” Luke asked. That was disappointing news.
“Not in this house,” the old man said. “Never again. Last dog we had ’bout got me ate up with fleas.” With a fork, he flipped the potatoes in a cast-iron skillet. Grease sputtered. “But a cat”—his grandfather reached for a mug of coffee—“now, there’s an animal worth knowing. A cat’s got brains. Know how you can tell? That’s right—if your boat sinks, a cat will already be in the water, waiting to climb onto the first pig that swims past.”
Luke consulted the nearest window. The sun was down, but the sky was still golden with light. He also noticed the oak tree that had been splintered by lightning on the same afternoon he’d been zapped.
“How long before we eat?” he asked.
“A lot faster than it will take you to carve a baseball bat” was the response.
Apparently, his grandfather had been listening.
“Not a bat,” Luke said. “A new tagging pole. It’ll take me a couple of days to finish it the way I want.”
“Okay, but be back here in thirty minutes,” the old man said. He waited until the boy was at the screen door to add, “You’re good at fixing things, I’ll say that much for you. Folks put way too much stock in being smart. I’ll take a hard worker any day.”
The boy took that as a compliment. “Thanks. Can I use the lathe?” A lathe was a machine with spindles that rotated. It had a cutting blade in the middle.
“Most kids, I’d say no”—his grandfather took a sip from the coffee mug—“but you’re pretty good with tools, too. There’re plenty of wood scraps in the shed. Help yourself.”
Luke had a different piece of wood in mind.
SIX
IF A SHARK JUMPS INTO THE BOAT
On days the three children didn’t fish, there was a short classroom session, usually outdoors. Dr. Ford wasn’t always around. Some days, he would leave alone on his boat. Other days, he flew off in the pretty blue-and-white seaplane he kept on a floating dock tethered in the mangroves.
On those occasions, Captain Hannah was in charge. She led them in safety drills, using one of the rental boats. They learned to row the boat using heavy wooden oars. Another useful skill was knowing how to drain water from the boat in a hurry by pulling a plug beneath the engine and using the throttle to speed ahead.
Hannah also made up flash cards that had to do with fishing and boating safety. The cards were used, rapid-fire, in daily pop quizzes. The kids sometimes borrowed the cards or quizzed one another from memory.
How do you tell the difference between a blacktip shark and a spinner shark? was one of the questions. The two fish were almost identical in appearance.
The answer: A spinner shark has a small black fin beneath its tail—an anal fin, it’s called. Blacktip sharks have whitish anal fins, but the tip of their dorsal fin is jet black.
There were many flash cards, and many more questions.
What’s the difference between a bull shark and a sandbar shark? Very few fishermen know.
A bull shark has a blunt nose and no rough-looking ridge on its back. A sandbar shark has a visible ridge on its back. Its dorsal fin is taller and broader.
Why are saltwater catfish and stingrays more dangerous than sharks?
This had seemed an absurd question that couldn’t possibly be true. But it was true. Saltwater catfish and stingrays are both equipped with needlelike spines that can pierce a person’s hands or feet. The spines inject a protein venom that isn’t deadly but requires immediate first aid. Hot water—as hot as the victim can stand—and a good scrubbing with antiseptic are necessary, then a trip to a doctor just to be safe.
What should you do if a shark jumps into the boat?
This wasn’t a silly question, either. Blacktips and spinner sharks often jump high out of the water, especially on the end of a hook.
Answer: Don’t panic—that is the most important thing. Wait for the shark to calm down, then cover it with a towel. When safe, tag the shark and revive it in the water.
What are two of the most common causes of serious boating accidents?
This embarrassing question was posed several times by a very serious Captain Hannah.
The answer: The cause of most accidents, for men, is urinating over the side while the motor is running. For men and women, it is losing a hat in a speeding boat, then circling back to retrieve the hat. Both scenarios cause people to lose their balance and fall overboard where a spinning propeller might kill them—and often does.
This inspired Luke, who still didn’t say much, to address an awkward topic. “What if I have to … you know, go, while we’re out there on the water, just me and two girls? Or if they have to, you know, use the bathroom, what should we do?”
Answer: Stop the boat, shut off the engine, and use a bucket while all passengers face forward.
“Sometimes music helps,” Captain Hannah suggested in a fun way. “Turn it loud and relax until the person using the bucket turns the music off. That’s the signal they’re done.”
Maribel liked Hannah. On Friday, the woman spent an hour with the trio in a rental boat. They didn’t fish, just focused on safety issues. She had entrusted the care of her child, baby Izaak, to the biologist and his dog.
In Maribel’s mind, this and some other clues partly explained why Dr. Ford was spending so much time helping three local kids learn to tag sharks and work around his laboratory.
It was his excuse to see Hannah and the baby. But there was another reason, Maribel suspected. It was also a way to keep an eye on Luke at the request of his aunt, the fishing guide. This suggested that the boy was recovering from an illness or was somehow different from other kids.
Maybe he was.
Maribel had seen the biologist focus on the boy as if studying him through a microscope. Studying seemed the correct word.
It was hard to understand why, at times, Luke had trouble remembering even the simplest things. He would wander off in a daze, then return as if he’d just awakened from a dream. When that happened, he could sometimes glance at a flash card and recite every line exactly as it was written.
Dr. Ford seemed more mystified by Luke’s unusual eyesight. How had the boy seen the monster bull shark before anyone else did? How had he known the shark would surface beside the boat while it was still deep underwater?
Something else strange was the retriever’s behavior. Dr. Ford had been the only person in the world whom that dog obeyed—until Luke appeared. The boy didn’t even have to speak. He would just motion, or mouth a command—sit, stay, come, heel—and the dog responded immediately.
“He communicates with animals through the air,” her sister, the secret witch, claimed. Then sounded a tad jealous when she added, “I don’t know why you talk about Luke so much, Maribel. He can do what he does because he grew up on a farm with filthy pigs and other animals no smarter than him.”
A mystery Sabina could not explain was why Luke almost always wore gloves. On the rare occasions he took them off, Maribel paid close attention. The boy had thick, hard hands. They reminded her of the hands of sugarcane workers in Cuba, although his skin was many shades lighter than theirs. His hair was reddish blond, and his right hand was usually curled into a fist.
Was he hiding something?
“The answer is simple. Tell him I’m a palm reader,” Sabina suggested that afternoon when Hannah and Luke were gone. “I can tell his future if he’ll open his big, ugly hands.”
“Dr. Ford will think we’re weird,” Maribel responded.
Her little sister didn’t care. “Everyone thinks I’m weird. So what?”
Maribel cared. “The man’s a scientist, and scientists laugh at magic tricks.”
“If it was any other scientist,” Sabina said, “I’d place a hex on him and wipe the smile off his face. I can do it. The women in white taught me. You and mamá never found out where I went those times I pretended to get lost in Havana.”
Without thinking, the girl’s fingers found the blue and yellow beads around her neck.
Maribel knew about the spooky store her sister had visited whenever she could sneak away. But why cause trouble by admitting it?
“Dr. Ford will think we’re locas,” Maribel insisted.
Sabina was even more stubborn than Pete, the curly-haired dog, so Maribel had to compromise. “If you’re going to trick Luke by pretending to be palm reader, at least wait until they let the three of us tag sharks alone. Next week, perhaps.”
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