by John Morano
“How can you ask that?” she screamed. “How can you eat Ebb? He was our friend!”
“I hope I still am,” the damselfish said from a few fins away. “And if you take another bite of my algae without asking, Hootie, you’re gonna be the one who’s dead. Get my drift, blowfish?”
“Hey, I . . .”
Binti jetted over to Ebb, ready to lay a seven-armed embrace on her resurrected pal.
“Stop it!” the farmer commanded. “Mind your distance.” Ebb hated emotional displays.
“But you’re alive!” Binti bellowed. “You’re alive!” She turned to Hootie, who’d snatched another algae hors d’oeuvre. “He’s alive!”
“What’s she talking about?” Hootie asked Ebb. “Did she just get sprayed?”
“Nah, she thought she was gonna pounce on me. Made a pretty good try too. But you gotta be smoother than sunlight to catch me, which is, by the wave, what ruined your plan.”
“How?” Binti asked as she adjusted to the dual realization that Ebb was alive and she was apparently still inept.
“Well, it seemed a little humany that one patch of seaweed would come directly at me while all the others floated out to sea.”
“I figured that might be a problem.”
“You almost got away with it . . . Take another bite of that algae, blowfish, and I’ll be using your scales as fertilizer.” Ebb turned back to Binti. “When you were hovering over me and that ray of sunlight broke through the clouds, it not only lit me up, but I could see the silhouette of a strange seven-armed octopus just above the seaweed. I wonder who that could be? I says to myself.
“Oh, it took a lot of thought for a simple farmer like me, but I must’ve guessed right, ’cause suddenly, this big, stupid octopus crashes down and murders . . . my lunch, a ball of algae. Yep, looks like you really showed me who the ultimate reef creature is. Must be me. Thanks for confirming what I already knew.” And with that, Ebb swallowed a big bite of his lunch and went back to work.
Later in the day, Binti was still feeling blue about her failed attempt to pounce on Ebb. She was so deflated that Hootie suggested she visit the gobies. “Go get cleaned. You’ll feel better. There’s nothing like being pampered when you feel down.”
“I don’t feel like a cleaning,” Binti said, pouting.
“Sure, you don’t now, but wait until those little gobies get going on you. Wait `til they suck your suckers, massage your mantle, and tweak your beak. You’ll forget all about that little episode.”
“Ya think?”
“Trust me, you melancholy mollusk. A good cleaning will give you a whole new outlook on life.” As they swam to the cleaning station, Hootie asked, “Are you still upset about the last shell?”
The octopus didn’t answer.
“Let it go, Binti. Didn’t your last experiment teach you anything?” Hootie didn’t mind trying new things, but he also prided himself on knowing when to quit. He felt that there was nothing inherently wrong with being a quitter. It could be the perfect course of action, provided the quitter knew what to quit and when to do it. For Hootie, it boiled down to timing. And he believed it was time for his friend to give up looking for a shell.
“I just picked the wrong shell last time. I should know better. I’m not a trident. A worm could see that a trident shell would clash with my arms. I need a different shell, something a little more . . . me. Maybe a bailer.”
“I got news for you.” But before he could utter another word, the sand erupted in a silent explosion, the water swelled, and Hootie disappeared, swallowed by a deceptively banded wobbegong. The large shark was half-buried in the sand beneath some weed-covered stones.
Binti went into her freeze and blend mode, stunned by Hootie’s loss. She watched the wobbegong sway its strong tail as it swam off. Then the shark paused, choked, gagged, and spit the blowfish’s bile-covered remains onto the sand. The remains spoke.
“Wobbegong, a stupid name for a stupid fish. What’s wrong with you? You should know better than to test a blowfish. You can’t swallow me. I’d make you sick if you did, fool. And they say I’m toxic. Now back off and let me continue my conversation. A barnacle has more sense than you.”
“My bad,” the shark mumbled. Then it flashed its teeth and went on its way.
“You bet your bad! Think before you swallow!”
Hootie waited until the shark was gone before he spoke to Binti. Had the wobbegong swallowed the octopus instead of the blowfish, he would’ve enjoyed a much more palatable meal.
Binti asked, “Are you okay?”
A little unsteady on his fins, the blowfish declared, “I’m fine, I’m fine. I’ll just swim it off. No big deal. Better fish than that have tried to swallow me . . . Now, what was I saying?”
“Something about news.”
“Right, right. I got news for you. Any shell is the wrong shell. You’re an octopus. It’s time to face the current.”
“I’m also a mollusk.”
“Well, that argument’s getting old. A squid’s a mollusk. Where’s its shell?”
“Maybe one of them is looking for a shell too. Maybe I’ll start a trend. Someone has to be the first.”
“Yeah? Well, as long as we’re being honest, lemme tell you what I think will happen. You’ll waste a whole lot of time—yours and mine. You’ll never be comfortable in any shell. And you’ll wind up getting eaten by an eel or a wobbegong ’cause you’re paying attention to shells instead of survival.”
They’d arrived at Paykak’s. Binti’s goby friend slipped her in front of the line, claiming it was an emergency case. The octopus hovered over a violet sponge, spread her arms out wide, and turned a relaxing shade of green while several tiny gobies went to work. Paykak floated next to the octopus.
“If I stay here and talk to you, you’ll get a much better cleaning,” he said. “It’s a sad reefality of the practice, but when the boss is around, all the cleaners become more gilligent.”
“Ah, it’s only natural.”
“Is it? You’d think they wouldn’t need the extra inducement, that there wouldn’t be another level they could rise to, that they’d always clean the best they could, but that’s just not the way it is anymore. Today, there’s no pride in one’s craft.” Paykak turned from Binti and shouted, “Hey, open your eyes! I can see that leech from here. Come on, fish. Suck ’em up!”
“Maybe if they were happier,” Binti mumbled as two gobies trimmed plaque from her beak.
“Happier? Who could be happier? Is there a more noble occupation for a fish than this? What other job can you do and be on a perpetual meal break at the same time? All they have to do is eat.” Again, Paykak turned from Binti. “Pus! I see pus! Make it disappear!”
“Well, you’re kinda tough on them, Paykak.”
“Tough? Me, tough? I’ll tell you what tough is. When I swam to my first cleaning station way out on the edge of the reef, every day I had to swim into the current, both ways. Why, I . . .”
“How could that be? Into the current both ways?”
“It’s a rather technical tidal event, just trust me on this. Like I was saying . . . Oh, yeah. Tough. Let me tell you, I earned this lateral stripe by being tough, swimming over a rock all day with no help and no fish waiting in line, flashing this blue stripe until you’re so tired you turn belly up and start floating to the surface. Then the only one who stops in for a cleaning is an ill-tempered reef shark who just ate a sprayed angelfish. You know what happens to a shark who just ate a sprayed angelfish?”
“No. I don’t eat angelfish, sprayed or otherwise.”
“Me either, but I’ll tell you what happens. It makes the shark twitch. You want to go inside the mouth of a twitching reef shark? Ever seen those teeth up close and fishonal?”
“Ah, no. And I don’t really want to.”
“That’s my point. And once you get into that twitching teeth trap, you know what you find? Nothing. There’s next to nothing ’cause those pain in the tailfin—”
&n
bsp; “Paykak!”
“I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to use the t-word. Gee, you’d think I could keep it clean.” The goby laughed. “Heeh, heeh . . . get it? I’m a cleaner, but I used a dirty word. Heeh, heeh, that’s pretty funny.”
Binti laughed, more out of awkwardness than amusement. She was starting to wonder about her friend.
“Okay, let me finish. There’s nothing in the shark’s mouth because of those scab remoras. For years, they’ve been cutting into my business. They’re the biggest suck-ups in the sea. Sharks wind up with their own private cleaners attached to them night and day. How can you compete with that? It’s not right.” Then Paykak returned to his original point. “Would any of these do-littles go in there and clean that shark?”
“I bet if—”
“No wave! In my day, gobies were gobies. I don’t know what’s going on today. Look at ’em. They’re like barnacles. ‘Oh, let the current carry the food to me.’ Ah, they need to get off their fins and get their scales dirty.”
Paykak shifted his attention to a tiny goby working on Binti. He calmly asked, “Do you see that lesion?”
The cleaner froze, petrified by Paykak’s question.
“Oh, spirit-fish save me! Do I have to show you everything? Take some fishnitiative yourself.”
As Paykak swam out to the youngster, another little goby emerged from behind Binti’s mantle and whispered, “He’s a legend, you know.”
Binti smiled, “Him?”
“Really, he’s a finspiration. It’s an honor to say that you studied under Paykak.
“But he’s so tough on you.”
“Sure, but what’s a little yelling? He’s passionate about cleaning. One day, we’ll all be great cleaners like him. He’s my fishtor.”
Paykak drifted up behind the little one, shocking him with, “Hey, are those jaws doing something other than cleaning? There’s a line back there, in case you haven’t noticed.”
The tiny goby winked at the octopus and then hurried back to work.
Paykak resumed his conversation. “That’s the trouble with you, Binti.”
“The trouble with me?”
“Well, now that you bring it up, you go around thinking a shell is going to make you happy.”
“I didn’t bring that up,” the octopus pointed out.
“You, me, what’s the difference? It would’ve come up anyway. You invertebrates are all alike. You need a backbone.”
“It’s a little easier to get a shell, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, do what’s easy. Settle. You’re like all the rest. I shouldn’t even be telling you this.”
“Telling me what? All you’re doing is insulting me.”
“I know someone, a turtle named Sev. He might be able to help you.”
“You mean help me find a shell?”
“No, I mean help you grow gills. Hello! What have we just been talking about here?”
“So how do I find Bev?”
“It’s Sev, not Bev. Hootie will take you. He knows the turtle better than I do.”
“Hootie knows the turtle? And he didn’t tell me about him?”
“Sounds like a question for a blowfish, not a goby.”
Kemar was soaked when he woke. The sand surrounding the boat was hard and cold. It had crusted around his eyes and on his hair. The boy squinted at the daylight, although the sun hadn’t yet risen above the mangrove.
He rolled out from under the boat, sat on an upturned five-gallon bucket, and pulled an unsealed can of Spam from beneath his kremar. The boy brushed his breakfast off, dining on the Spam, a banana, and a crushed single-serving box of Cheerios that Bao had left in the boat. It was an absolute feast compared with how he had eaten before leaving Cambodia.
The boat people used to joke, “You can only eat so much fish.” But in Cambodia, they said, “You can only eat so much dust.” The meal that he now enjoyed helped him feel further away from the past, as if he’d turned a corner.
After breakfast, Kemar flipped the boat over, slipped three round pieces of wood—which he used as rollers—under the keel, and worked the boat back into the surf. When Bao arrived, they loaded up their gear and rowed to Meela’s shop. The fisherman expected his motor to be ready. It wasn’t.
“Said problem with motor not big. Said it be ready today. Why not ready?”
Meela sucked on her cigar. She grinned and released the smoke through the handy gap between her front teeth. The sight made Kemar think of a tiny smokestack releasing steam from a boiler that burned deep inside her.
“A funny thing happened,” she began. “You see, Mr. Bao, I stored your outboard way over there. And right next to it—I didn’t want to lose track of your valuable property—I placed that old box of grenades you asked me to hold for you.”
“Took grenade! Bao not ask you hold grenade.”
“Could be. At my age, sometimes, events get a little foggy. Either way, they were your grenades, right?”
“Are my grenade,” Bao corrected her.
“Were,” Meela countered.
“Were?” Bao inquired.
“Were,” Meela repeated. “You see, I kept them together. The motor, the grenades, it was all your stuff. But the strangest thing happened. What are the odds of this happening? The lightning popped that palm tree over there. I know my eyes aren’t what they once were, but I saw it myself. A coconut dropped off and landed right in the box of grenades. And wouldn’t you know it? One of ’em exploded.
“Then another exploded and another. The good news is—and I know it’ll be your first question—I’m fine. My hut’s okay, and none of the other motors were damaged. But the bad news is, you lost all your grenades. And that pile of twisted metal under that tree, well, that’s your motor. I’m not even sure I can fix what’s left of it.”
“No motor?” Bao asked blankly.
“That would seem to be the situation.” Meela winked at Kemar, who looked on, fascinated. Just for effect, Meela blew a little more smoke. “I guess if you weren’t fishing with those darn grenades, none of this would’ve happened. Oh well, live and learn.” Meela turned to the boy. “That’s my motto, son. Live and learn.”
“How Bao fish now?”
“Looks like you’re gonna have to rent one of my boats—very expensive. Or you could paddle a dugout like most people here.”
“Can paddle, but not catch enough fish.”
“That is a problem . . . Got a sail?”
“This not sailboat.”
“That’s right. How about fishing from shore? There’s all kinds of fish running in the surf.”
Bao just stared at Meela as he became aware of her sarcasm.
“I see, not good business fishing from shore . . . Got another outboard?”
“Not have engine.” Obviously agitated, Bao repeated, “Not have engine.”
“That is unfortunate, Mr. Bao. Hey, wait a minute. I got motors. Want one?”
Again, Bao just stared at the old woman while Kemar briefly flashed his white teeth.
When it was all said and done, Bao had his outboard . . . kind of. Meela promised him an old Yamarudeson, a mishmash of parts from an old Yamaha, Evenrude, and Johnson. The mechanic claimed that with a little work, the motor would run just fine, perhaps a little sluggish at twenty-five horsepower, but it would do the job.
Meela had cautioned Bao before about damage to coral from excessive wakes and speeds, unattended props, and anchors, so neutering his craft with the puny motor was how she responded to his indifference.
She also forced Bao to agree to buoys and tie-ups wherever he fished the reef, keeping his anchor off the bottom. And certainly, if Meela ever heard that Bao was fishing with grenades or anything else lethal to the reef, she would refuse to service any motor that he used or borrowed. On Makoona, this was no idle threat. No one could avoid depending on Meela at one time or another. She was something of a goby in that respect.
As long as Bao kept his agreement, he would remain in Meela’s good grace
s. He would, however, have to wait two days before the mechanic could make his custom creation seaworthy.
Kemar helped Bao secure his motorless boat on shore. Then the frustrated fisherman trudged off down the beach. His young associate ran up to him, asking, “What are we going to do for the next two days?”
Bao replied, “We do nothing.”
“But what will I do?”
“Ask you, not me.”
Kemar stared at the man, confused.
“No fish. No money. No food. Two day, we fish again.” And as he continued down the beach, Bao spoke loudly, “Be good for you. Will appreciate more what Bao do for you.”
Kemar knew exactly what Bao did for him. He didn’t need the next two days to point that out. He also knew that once again, he was going to be hungry and cold. Then the boy heard an outboard running. He looked over his bony shoulder, back to Meela’s workshop, where he saw the motor reserved for Bao running like new. The Cambodian approached the mechanic.
“This motor runs nicely,” he said.
“Of course it does, it’s a Meela motor. As a matter of fact, I have to put a governor on it and slow it down.”
“But why won’t you let us fish with it now?”
“I won’t let that bilge-for-brains Bao fish with it now. He needs to be grounded for a few days.”
“Yes, but I, too, am grounded.”
Meela hadn’t considered that. Assuming Kemar was a half-pint version of a pint-sized Bao, she also hadn’t considered that she would like the boy. The woman raised her arm and extended her index finger. She wanted quiet while she considered the situation and chewed on her cigar.
“What’s your name again?”
“Kemar.”
“Kemar, how about this? The storm left me with some heavy work. I don’t like heavy work. Can you move a motor without getting sand in it?”
The boy studied the motor mounted in an oil barrel next to him. It was a coin toss as to whether the boy or the motor was heavier, but Kemar’s desire to work was absolutely bigger than the barrel, as Meela saw when the boy answered, “I can move these.”