Blue Skin of the Sea (27 page)

He said he spent the night and all of the next day in the water before he spotted the Frenchman. “I was lucky I had the net … I waved it at the sailboat,” Dad said. “At least the water was warm. That damn ocean doesn’t care who you are or what you’re doing. You’re always on your own out there. Lucky for me that Frenchman came by … and lucky he wasn’t afraid to sail at night … it was almost dark when he found me.”

I sat in the Jeep until the sun got hot, until I could feel it burning my shoulders through my T-shirt.
You’re always on your own out there.
Keo and Uncle Raz were out there now, fishing, as if nothing had ever happened, where they’d probably spend every day of their lives. And so would Dad, when his leg got better.

But what about me?

I wasn’t one of them. I didn’t
want
to be different. But I was, that’s all. I didn’t have the guts to be one of them.

I drove up the old road toward the hospital, a little nervous. What would I say? I thought of Dad chugging out to the grounds on a smooth, light-blue sea. There was beauty in that. I’d always felt that way. But I loved more the richness of solid ground—the meandering old bumpy roads and squeaky Jeep seats, the hot steel floorboard under my bare feet, the sweet smell of rotting mangoes, the hovering trees, the flickering early-morning sun spots.

And Shelley.

She’d be wondering where I was, and why I hadn’t called. I should have. I’d been pretty hard on her. Was I getting to be like Dad? Was I closing down like Dad?

Dad was waiting for me outside, sitting on a bench with a pair of crutches, bandages on his arms. His doctor argued with him to stay at least one more day, but it made Dad nervous just being there. It was where my mother had died.

We didn’t say much to each other on the way home, just talked about who caught what in the past few days. And I told him about our search, and how Mr. Pierce had been the one to find his boat heading out toward the other side of the world.

Dad listened, but didn’t say anything about what
be
had been going through out there. It drove me
crazy.

I knew Dad’s silences drove Aunty Pearl crazy, too. I was feeling a little depressed one day and went up to talk to her. I felt empty, I told her. Dad and I hardly ever talked. She asked me if Dad had told me about my mother yet. “Only a little,” I said. “You see?” she said. “That’s what I mean. He hasn’t even told you about the most important thing in your life, and his life. Nobody knows
anything
about that man, not even you. So
many men around like that—living inside themselves. They’re afraid to talk about how they feel, or even
think
about how they feel. But your daddy can’t fool me. He’s proud of you, Sonny. And he loves you very much—very much. But he has no idea in the world how to show you that.”

The air got warmer as we drove down closer to sea level. Dad studied the ocean until the trees got in the way.

“Were you scared?” I finally asked.

Dad thought for a moment. “I could see the island the whole time.”

“But what about sharks? Weren’t you worried about them?”

“No.”

I laughed to myself. What other answer was he going to give me, anyway?

The next morning I drove down to the pier before sunrise to take Dad’s boat out while he was recuperating. I could catch up with school later. My grades were pretty good. But when I got to the harbor the
Ipo
was already tied alongside the pier, and Keo was moving around its deck in the light from the bulkhead.

I pulled the Jeep up next to the boat. “What are you doing?”

“Hey, cock-a-roach,” he said, smiling as if it were his first day out on his own boat. “Getting ready to go fishing, what does it look like?”

“But … ”

“Uncle Raz gave me some time off,” Keo said. “You still got school to go to.”

“I can catch up.”

“Naah. Go. I can take care of this tub.” As he spoke, he moved Dad’s gear around to spots on the deck more to his liking. “But if you really want to help, you can throw me the line. Time to get going before all the boats get out there.”

I got out of the Jeep and untied the
Ipo.
“Keo … ”

“No problem, pantie. You’re not much of a fisherman, anyway.”

“I can fish as good as you any day.”

“Sheese,” he said, then shook his head. He coiled the line neatly on the deck, then went forward to the controls. He waved as he throttled up out into the harbor.

I sat on the hood of the Jeep and watched Dad’s old sampan shrink to a black dot on the ocean. A burning rose in my throat and a trembling in my ears. I was grateful no one was there to ask me anything, because answering would have been too painful.

“You the cock-a-roach,” I mumbled.

Dad, Uncle Raz, now Keo. Men of the sea.

Men of my family.

Damn bull-headed muscle-brains.

A week later Shelley and I built a fire in a sandy spot between the rocks, out near the ocean in front of my house, like Keo and I had done so many hundred times before. Uncle Raz had given me a fresh
aku
and I’d soaked it in lemon-butter sauce. We invited Dad out to join us. I wanted to somehow pull our lives together again after what had happened.

Dad watched us cook, his crutches lying next to him and his beer propped up in a rocky nook. Shelley and I stuck ice-cold Cokes in the sand, and the three of us ate fish and rice around the snapping fire. We talked quietly under a black sky. The surf hissed gently in, filling the spots when no one said anything.

Ever since we’d found Dad I’d been rehearsing what I’d say to him—I had to do something, our lives could not just go silently on. I thought of asking Shelley, but it was my problem. I must have been pretty quiet that week, because Shelley finally said, “You’re getting to be just like your father, keeping everything to yourself.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve just got a lot on my mind.”

“Like what?”

“Dad …
Me
and Dad.”

Shelley waited.

“I guess I learned something while he was out there hanging onto that glass ball,” I went on. “Fm not on my own as much as I thought.”

And what else had I learned?

That I wasn’t one of them? That I wasn’t like Dad, Keo, or Uncle Raz? Was that
really
it?

Who was I fooling?

I was as much a part of them as the sand was of the sea. The only thing keeping me apart was myself, how I thought about myself. Sure I wasn’t as brave as Keo, or Dad, or Uncle Raz. But did that make me so different? Did that mean I didn’t have any guts? Maybe only in my own mind. And even though I wasn’t very much like
them,
I wasn’t so different from Uncle Harley or Grampa Joe, or even Mick Pierce.
Your uncle is soft,
Aunty Pearl had once said of Uncle Harley. Remembering that made me feel good inside. No, it made me feel
great.

After we finished eating, Dad, Shelley, and I sat around the fire watching our paper plates curl up in the flames. Dad’s dogs lounged around us.

When Dad got up to go inside, Shelley poked me with her elbow.

“Dad … wait a minute,” I said, standing. “I have something I want to tell you.”

Shelley grabbed my hand and pulled herself up next to me. “I think Fd better get going,” she said. “I’ve got a lot of homework.” She walked closer to Dad. “Fm glad you’re home, Mr. Mendoza. You scared us pretty bad.”

Dad half-smiled, then looked over at me. “Go up and get the glass ball.”

I got the glass ball from the garage where he’d been cleaning
it all week. It was beautiful once all the barnacles were scraped off, an old Japanese fishing float, probably forty or fifty years old, and very rare.

I brought it back to Dad.

He ran his hand over it. “Give this to your father,” he said, handing it to Shelley.

Shelley took it from him and held it close to her, looking down. She seemed to be thinking about something. Tears filled her eyes. She put the ball on the sand and stepped closer to Dad, then hugged him.

I’d never seen anyone hug Dad in my entire life.

Dad was as surprised by Shelley as I was, his arms out to the side, his eyes glancing over to me, then quickly darting away.

Slowly, his arms came in toward Shelley, then enclosed her. The two of them stayed that way for a few long seconds, then they parted.

Shelley disappeared into the darkness with the glass ball. Dad and I watched her until she was gone.

When no one spoke, Dad started limping back toward the house on his crutches, the dogs whisking around his knees.

“You remember when I was very young and fell under the skiff? When I got hit by the propeller?”

Dad stopped and looked back at me.

“I was terrified. I couldn’t breathe. You shook me and told me it was nothing. I was screaming and you told me to calm down. You said I wasn’t a baby anymore.”

Dad waited, studying me.

“I was so scared I blocked it from my mind. I’ve been afraid of the ocean all my life.”

The dogs lay down. Dad hopped all the way around to face me. “What’s on your mind, Sonny?”

“ … I … It’s just that I’ve been trying to hide that. I didn’t want you to know, or Keo.”

“I remember that day,” Dad said. He was silent a long time,
leaning on his crutches, staring at the sand. “I was more scared than you. I was going too fast. When you fell off and I felt the prop hit you I thought it killed you. It scared me bad. I shook you because I was scared, because I thought I’d lost you, too.”

The memory was clear, now. The nightmare, the gagging, the shredding life vest.

A silence grew.

“It was only a year after your mother died,” he added.

Without thinking, I said, almost in a whisper, “What was she like, Dad?”

Dad dug absently at the ground with a crutch. “Wait here,” he said, then hobbled back to the house. He returned with a book tucked under his arm. He handed it to me.

Anatomical Structures of the Dog.
“What’s this?”

“Read the name inside.”

I opened the cover.
Crissy St. George.
I looked up at Dad.

“She liked animals, like you. She wanted to be a veterinarian, and would have been. I have two boxes of things like that hidden away. I was going to give them to you someday.”

He smiled at me, a lonely smile. “I have always known that there is more of her in you than there is of me.” Dad scoffed and added, “Lucky for you.”

I held his gaze, and he looked back down at the sand.

“Don’t fool yourself about me, son. I have hidden things, too.”

Then Dad hopped around to leave. Even on crutches he was steady and sure.

“Dad, wait,” I said. “There’s still some fire left.”

He turned, then slowly lowered himself to the sand. He motioned for me to sit next to him. The dogs settled down around us, watching the fire.

“Tell me about her, Dad.”

∗    ∗    ∗

At six o’clock in the morning three weeks later, I took Dad’s skiff and headed out to sea. Two miles, straight toward the horizon. The ocean was calm, and as smooth as a fish eye. And blue—the early morning kind of blue you get in deep, deep water.

When the village had shrunk to a cluster of red and white dots on the edge of the island, I shut the engine down and let the skiff drift. Small slapping sounds squished out from under the hull when I took my T-shirt off. I couldn’t turn back, even though no one would ever know—except me. I peered over the side into the thick, sucking, bottomless depths.

The fear started as a trembling in my jaw. My hands shook as I dropped over the side and swam away from the skiff until I was sure I’d gone farther than Keo ever had. Two hundred feet, but it seemed like a mile.

I stopped and listened to the crackling and snapping sounds of the sea, and breathed the salt-thickened air. I turned quickly and looked all the way around, pulling my feet up under me. Sharks roamed through my thoughts.

Slow deep-sea swells moved beneath me toward the island. I floated on my back and breathed with them, long and steady. I drifted for ten or fifteen minutes, looking up at the boundless sky, the ocean alive with its buzzing, yet strangely still.

A small school of silvery, inch-long fish appeared from nowhere and started nibbling at my skin. I laughed and rolled over. They shot away when I started back to the skiff.

The island was a dark silhouette as the sun climbed up behind the mountain. Below, near the harbor, specks of fishing boats fanned slowly out toward their secret spots on the sea.

A great peace rose from the depths.