“Where you think you going yout’?” said the security guard at the Morgan’s Harbour Hotel. He sat in a little white building and lifted the red and white barrier up and down for cars. Lloyd had simply ducked under it, not seeing the guard until too late. He stopped.
“Mornin,” he said, hoping a respectful politeness would win the guard over. “Me meetin somebody. She say me should wait for her under that almond tree.” He pointed.
“What the name of the person?
“Jules-somethin. Just meet her, over at the fishing beach.”
“So where she is? She on a boat? How you meet her if she on a boat? You should know her last name, so it can write up inna the book.”
“Not a boat. Surfboard. She soon come, man. Me will just wait over there, under the tree. You can see me. Me not going move from there.”
“Can’t let you in yout’. Not without the person full name for the book. Step back.”
Lloyd looked at the guard. He was young, in his twenties. His uniform was not properly ironed and he wore cheap dark glasses, the kind sold by downtown vendors. His hands were rough with big knuckles. Perhaps he had been a construction worker and had found easier work as a security guard and was not going to lose his job over a strange boy.
Lloyd stepped back, ducked under the barrier, and stood on the side of the Palisadoes Road, looking around for a place to wait. He needed to see the entrance to the hotel as he was afraid that the woman would not come right out into the parking lot, but would simply stand on the front step and look for him under the almond tree. If he was not there, she would turn around and go back into the hotel and he might never find her again. There was a little shade beside the gate but it gave no clear view of the front door. Lloyd crossed the road and stood in the sun, waiting for the dolphin woman.
He did not wait long—she could make that surfboard move fast-fast. As he had thought, she walked out of the hotel, stood on the curb and looked toward the almond tree. She shrugged and turned to go back inside. “Hi! Miss!” he called, as he had done from the dock. “Over here!” A bus drove past just then with a line of cars behind it, and he could not cross the road. She might not hear him or see him. “Miss!” he shouted to her back, jumping up and down, trying to be seen over the cars.
“That her?” said the guard, coming out of his shelter.
“Yes! Please, sah, please? Let me in. Do. Please.” Lloyd was finally able to run across the road. He waved his arms, hoping the movement would catch the woman’s eye. He could barely see her now—the inside of the hotel was in deep shadow. “MISS!” he shouted one last time, and the woman came out of the hotel into the parking lot.
“What . . . ?” she said. She shook her head and said something under her breath. She walked over to the barrier. She was wearing rolled up jeans over her wet suit and a towel around her neck. “He’s with me,” she said to the guard and her voice was sharp.
The guard was not impressed. “What him name and your name?”
“You write up my name already. You don’t remember? Look in the book. Jules Collier. His name is Lloyd.”
“Need him last name.”
“Saunders,” Lloyd said. See! He wanted to say to the guard. He was sweating more than ever in his church clothes. He wiped his face on his sleeve. The guard wrote slowly in his big register.
“Come inside, Lloyd,” Jules said. “I need to change. We can get you a drink and you can tell me your story.”
They sat at a bar overlooking Kingston Harbour. Lloyd had never been inside the hotel although from the sea he had seen the bar and the masts of sailboats moored in the marina. The seawater pool was murky and seaweed grew on its sides. He could not imagine white people swimming in it. He saw no guests although many tables were set for lunch with bandanna tablecloths and white napkins and empty glasses.
“What you want to drink?” Jules said, as the bartender stood in front of them.
“Soda, Miss.”
“Which kind? Pepsi? Coke? Ting? Ginger beer?”
“Pepsi.”
“A Pepsi and a Ting,” Jules said. “They on ice? You hungry, Lloyd? You want anything to eat?”
“Kitchen not open ’til twelve,” said the bartender.
“You don’t have any bar snacks?”
“Cheese crunchies, plantain chips . . .”
“Two each,” she said. “Plenty ice with the drinks.”
When the drinks came, Jules got up and moved to one of the tables nearer to the dock. The wind was strong and Lloyd felt less noticeable. If he were to leave the table, if he were to walk over and sit on the dock, with his back to the hotel, if he narrowed his eyes and gazed out to sea, he could pretend he was on the dock of the Port Royal fishing beach and no one would come and tell him to move.
A man washed down the decks of the nearest large boat, flying an American flag. Lloyd wondered what it would be like to go to sea on a boat like that—he could see tables and upholstered seats through the hatchway. He wondered if they needed crew, if they fished, or if they just moved around from place to place, marina to marina. What would it be like to own such a vessel, to truly live on the sea?
“. . . your story?” Lloyd realized Jules was talking to him. He took a sip of his drink and it was so cold it hurt his teeth and he could not really taste it. She pushed two of the bags of snacks over to him and opened one for herself.
“So tell me,” she said. “What happen to your granddaddy?”
“He go to Pedro. Sunday night. Leave from Rocky Point. Him don’t fish at Pedro. Never. Him was supposed to reach back Thursday, but him don’t come back.”
“When last you heard from him?”
“Wednesday.”
“Him went alone?”
“Dunno, Miss. Nobody at Gray Pond beach seen him. The fishers say to ask the Coast Guard; they say they go out there every Monday night. Me come over here to see if they will look for him. One time, a boat from the Yacht Club don’t come back and the Coast Guard did go out, and even the JDF send up a helicopter, and them found the boat wrecked down by Hellshire, and them found the men too, in life jackets. Dead.” Lloyd stopped. He did not want the JDF to find his grandfather’s wrecked boat, or his body. “Gramps, mebbe his boat engine give out. Mebbe him on a beach somewhere, can’t get back. Me just want somebody to look for him.”
Jules ran her hands over her hair. “I don’t know if the JDF will look for him, Lloyd. But is true, a Coast Guard boat go out to Pedro once a week. They take men out and bring men back; maybe they will ask some questions. Give me a minute to shower and change and make us go over there and ask them.”
“Them will take me with them to Pedro? Me can find him, Miss. Me know him is out there somewhere. Sea can’t kill my granddaddy.”
Jules shook her head. “I don’t think they will take you. But let’s ask. Soon come. You just sit here, eat up. Sorry is not better food, maybe we can get some fish in Port Royal after.” She got up, left her drink on the table and most of the cheese crunchies uneaten, and walked around the dining room behind them. Lloyd felt the bartender’s gaze. He was sure the bartender thought the likes of him should not be allowed to sit at a table at the Morgan’s Harbour Hotel.
He waited. He was anxious, sitting there alone, and he hoped Jules would come back quickly. He did not know how to talk to her. He wanted to ask her about her work with dolphins. Was she a scientist? He had seen scientists working in the Port Royal mangroves, with their wide-brimmed hats, their clipboards and rolls of tape. He did not know what they did there, but he saw them writing and taking pictures.
He knew the mangroves as a place where it was safe to moor a boat when a hurricane threatened, that somehow the sea remained much calmer inside their lagoons and channels. Many kinds of bird lived there—old joes, terns, gulls, herons—and some types of fish hid among the roots. He liked the strange shoots that grew downward from the plants. The strong smell of the swamp did not bother him.
If Maas Conrad was late coming back from sea, he always went into a channel through the mangroves to a place called Rosey’s Hole, where the leaves almost touched overhead and it was shady and quiet. Gramps would sling a line around one of the trees and pull the boat in close and there he would eat a bulla and an overripe pear and drink a hot Red Stripe beer. Sometimes he would lie back in the boat and sleep, while Lloyd slapped at mosquitoes and watched fallen leaves drift past.
They would motor out, as slowly as possible, so as not to send big waves surging through the mangroves, disrupting the order of things, and Gramps would get upset when he saw garbage tangled up in the roots and he would tell Lloyd it would affect the fishing, but he didn’t say how. He always said “fish-nin” instead of “fish-ing.” Lloyd thought Jules probably knew about mangroves and why they might affect fish-nin.
“You ready?” she said, from behind him. He got up. She was carrying her surfboard and paddle under one arm and held a backpack in the other. “Let’s go. Don’t want you to get your hopes up, though—I don’t know if Commander Peterson is even going to be there. But make us go and see what we can see.”
Her car was an old Jeep with a canvas top. She loaded the surfboard in the back and tied a red cloth to it to show where it stuck out. “Get in,” she said and there was a touch of impatience in her voice. Perhaps she was already sorry she had talked to him, perhaps she wished she could just take him back to the dock in Port Royal.
It took them less than a minute to get to the Coast Guard station. The gate was the cut off top of an old ship called the HMJS Cagway and there was a sign saying the base had been founded in 1963. The uniformed guard obviously knew Jules and smiled as she drove up to the guard post. “Commander here?” she asked.
“Him on Surrey,” said the guard. “But you can wait for him.” He didn’t seem to notice Lloyd.
“Awright, Phillips, thanks. Park in the usual place?” Jules didn’t wait for an answer.
They drove along a narrow road beside the Harbour. The Coast Guard base was a mix of new buildings and old—crumbling red brick and square concrete buildings. He saw a line of long wooden houses painted blue off to the left. They all had signs with the names of sea creatures—Shark, Barracuda, Dolphin.
She parked under a large willow tree. She turned to Lloyd and looked at him. “Let me do the talking, okay? What you granddaddy name again?”
“Conrad. Maas Conrad Saunders.”
They walked along a pathway toward the dock. Everything was very neat and painted, even the trunks of the coconut trees. The grass was brown and mowed. There was not a trace of litter. Lloyd could faintly hear the noise of some kind of machinery, perhaps a drill or a generator. They passed men in uniform, light blue shirts and dark blue trousers, who nodded to Jules and said, “Miss.” They passed a line of old willow trees, all leaning in one direction, making a soft sound in the sea breeze. They walked past an old concrete jetty, almost at sea level, covered with seagulls, also facing in one direction.
They walked onto the dock. The three big Coast Guard boats were moored together—the Surrey on one side of the dock, the Cornwall on the other, and the Middlesex tied up to the Cornwall. Two scuba divers were in the water at the stern of the Surrey, apparently cleaning the hull and propellers. Lloyd saw there was a stern ladder into the sea.
“We wait for him here,” Jules said and she walked to the end of the dock and sat, her legs dangling over the side, leaning back on her arms. She was wearing a clean pair of jeans, a white T-shirt, and the kind of buckled sandals that you could wear in the sea and were good on boats. Her skin was dark against the white T-shirt. She stared at the Harbour and swung her legs. She seemed fine in the hot sun and Lloyd wished he was wearing shorts and an undershirt. His shoes pinched. Behind them, sailors were lined up in rows doing drills of some kind. He smelled melting asphalt. No one challenged them. Jules seemed entirely at home on the Coast Guard base.
He sat beside her, but not too close. How to talk to her? How old was she? Twenty, he thought, maybe twenty-one, but then he remembered how easily she spoke with the guard at the Coast Guard gate, and the expert way she had handled the dolphin on Lime Cay. If she was a scientist, she would have been to university. Maybe she was twenty-five. Was she from Kingston? Did she still live in the city? What was she doing with the Coast Guard and why did they know her well enough to allow her onto the base? Did she ever fish? Had she been to the Pedro Cays? Could he trust her? He had no idea how to frame his questions. He feared they might seem disrespectful and she would be offended, but he thought it would be okay to ask about the Cays. “You been to Pedro, Miss?” he said.
“Many times,” she said. “At least once a month.”
“Why? You fishing out there?” As Lloyd said it, he knew how ridiculous the idea was. A woman fishing! Women were the cleaners and sellers of fish; men were the ones who brought them out of the sea.
Jules smiled. “Sometimes, if I want to eat a fish, I catch one. But no, I’m not out there fishing. I’m taking a census of dolphins on the Bank—counting—trying to find out how many there are, what species—what kinds—of dolphins.”
“How you do that?”
“Go out in a boat. We have a big map, where we draw out squares in the sea, then we go up and down in a pattern. If we see a dolphin we take a picture of his dorsal fin, put it in a computer, so we make sure we don’t count the same one twice. Just look for them and count.”
Lloyd could not imagine the drawing of squares in the sea. “You see a lot of them?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Depends on what you mean by a lot. Not compared to the amount that was probably there in old-time days. But more than I expected to find, yes. Mostly bottlenose. Some white-sided. Seen killer whales too—you know them?”
Lloyd shook his head; he had never heard of a killer whale. They sounded dangerous, not at all like dolphins.
“You seen Free Willy?”
“No, Miss. What is Free Willy?
“A movie about a killer whale. I bet you seen a picture of one—they’re black and white, like a panda.”
Lloyd did not want to ask what a panda was but he wanted Jules to keep talking. “Why you countin up the dolphins?”
“Want to know if the population is healthy. How many animals. If they are breeding; things like that.”
“Why you don’t do it close to shore? Pedro Cays far.”
Jules nodded. “Far, yes. But not so many dolphins inshore these days, too little food for them to eat. Not enough fish. Your granddaddy probably know about that. There’s a place out at Pedro, a bare rock, deep water around, nice reefs. We see a lot of dolphins there.”
“You went to school to study about dolphins?”
“Four years,” she said. “In California.”
“Why?”
“Why did I want to study dolphins?” She shrugged again. “Grew up beside the sea in Portie. Always loved it. Saw an angry fisher spear a dolphin once, the dolphin was fooling around with his trap. I thought it was a smart animal, to try and get the fish out. So I went to college in the US to learn about them.”
Lloyd’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. He did not want to talk about dolphins. He wanted to talk about Gramps, about his fears for the old man, his fears for himself. Who would speak kindly to him if his grandfather was never seen again? Who would teach him about manhood, about life? He wished for his grandfather’s low, rough voice, telling him dolphin stories, or about how the fish-nin was good, so good, in the old days. He had thought some of his stories boring, now he wanted to hear them all, again and again.
He knew his voice would shake if he spoke and he did not want the woman to hear that. He had to be strong. He said nothing. The sun was directly overhead and he wanted to find shade but he thought of Gramps lost at sea with the sun like a hammer on his head. So he closed his eyes and saw the sun bright inside his eyelids, as Gramps would, wherever he was. And he stayed where he was, on the dock at Cagway base, keeping company with his lost grandfather.