Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

“Bien hecho, hermanita.”

Or on days I didn’t sell so much, he’d shake his head disapprovingly.

“You can do better, Reina. Make your big brother proud.”

He always gave me a bonus of a few dollars to make sure I kept my mouth shut about the whole operation and didn’t start feeling guilty, confessing to Mami what we were doing. Carlito taught me there was a price to be paid for my silence and complicity, and I was honored to be his secret keeper.

For all the new people who turn up each day in the Keys, looking for a new life, there are even more people leaving. But that doesn’t make it any easier to find work. I try every salon on Crescent and all the neighboring Keys, but I’m told there is no room for new hires. I apply for a few waitressing jobs, but they say I have no restaurant experience. I try stores up and down the islands, even ask Julie if she needs a hand selling painted coconuts and Lolo if he needs help in his shop. But people say with low season coming, they’re better off short-staffed than taking on a new employee. Nesto counts himself among the lucky ones. After he fixed the turtle habitat, Mo, the manager of the dolphinarium, kept calling him for more repair jobs until he finally offered Nesto a permanent position, since something there needs to be fixed every day.

I spent plenty of time going along to work with Nesto before they took him on full-time, passing him his tools, just being an extra set of hands to feel useful in my unemployment. Nesto complains about working under the sun but I like the warmth, the breeze, so different from the stale recycled air and nail polish and acetone fumes I’m used to.

I decide to apply for a job at the dolphinarium too.

“How are you at math?” Mo asks during my interview.

We are alone within the wood-paneled walls of the back office. Between us, a wide desk covered in a mound of loose papers and manila folders that makes him look even smaller as he sits in his swivel chair.

“I’ve never had a problem calculating tabs, counting tips, or paying bills.”

He looks down at my résumé in his hands. I printed it out fresh though it’s already denting in the blow of the air conditioning.

“I see you don’t have a proper high school diploma. You’d need at least that for me to put you on the register in the gift shop.”

“It’s never been an issue before.”

He looks over the list of my past employment again and I notice the cut in his cheek that makes a shadow across half his face.

“How about I put you with the cleaning and feeding crew, and just rotate you around wherever you’re needed? You’ll help prepare the animals’ food barrels, clean the pens. What do you think?”

“I can do that, if that’s all you’ve got.”

He watches me, a bit of pity in his eyes, and I remember something big mouth Lolo told me; even though it’s supposed to be anonymous, everyone in the islands knows Mo is practically president of the AA chapter at the local Protestant church. He’s not married and nobody knows if he’s got a woman; people just know that he lives with a cockatiel named Dorothy. I stare at him. I used to be pretty good at appraising men. By the way he looks back at me, I estimate it’s been more than a few years since he’s slept with someone who didn’t charge him for it.

“I’ll tell you what, Reina. You’ve worked in salons so many years you must be good with people. I can offer you a slot in our Guest Relations department. You’ll do rounds of the park property, making sure visitors are having a good experience; you’ll make sure nobody is breaking any rules like throwing trash in the habitats, touching animals, smoking, or drinking on the premises. You’ll have to always be chipper. Ready to answer any questions guests might have for you. Anything you can’t handle, you send them over to me or a senior staff member. What do you think?”

“Sounds good to me.”

I’m proud of myself for getting hired, even if it’s entry level. Even if the last girl who had the position, who quit to go work at the big aquarium up in Largo, the dolphinarium’s main competition, was ten years younger than me.

On my first official day on the job, I’m wearing my new uniform of blue shorts and a blue polo shirt. Mo stops me out on the patio and tells me that as part of my job, I’m also supposed to let management know if any activists show up.

“Activists?”

“Animal rights people, specifically. They come around from time to time.”

“Why? This place is way nicer than the other dolphin parks around.”

I mean it. There are places where you can find a dolphin in an aboveground backyard swimming pool or in a fountain behind a motel, kids tossing in pennies to make a wish.

“They won’t accept that we take great care of them here. Sometimes they just want to make some noise, give the trainers a hard time, but we’ve had cases of more serious things happening. Even vandalism. We’ve found holes cut into fences and the way we usually find out isn’t because the animals get out, it’s because others get in . Last month we had a lemon shark swimming in one of the pens scaring Wilma and Betty half to death. All because of the damn activists who don’t know nothing about nothing.”

It’s kind of a funny thing for him to say given that Lolo told Nesto and me that before he came down to the Keys to run the dolphinarium, Mo managed a sneaker outlet up in Ocala.

“We are an accredited institution here, not some homegrown fish pen,” Mo continues. “We’ve got all our permits. These aren’t market dolphins. Most are rescues, or retired from other aquariums or circuses, and we take them in. We love these animals like family. If it weren’t for us, they wouldn’t have anywhere else to go.”

“What about back to the ocean?”

I can see from Mo’s expression this is the wrong thing to say.

I try again. “I mean, if they’re retired, why don’t you just release them?”

“They don’t know how to fend for themselves. You put any of these creatures out there in that wild ocean and you’ll see they won’t last a day. They don’t have their instincts anymore. And they sure as hell won’t feel like hunting again when they get their meals here free. If these animals could talk, they’d tell you how happy they are here.”

I don’t say anything.

“I want you to talk to the trainers and techs, Reina. They can explain the research we do here. We’re trying to learn from the animals. See what they have to teach us. We do a lot of good work, especially with our interaction programs. I see miracles happen every day when people with disabilities get in the water with the animals. That’s what the activist folk don’t understand. The dolphins here aren’t just for show.”

He says this just as a show in the front lagoon is getting started, rockabilly music coming on loud over the speakers. Through the window behind Mo, I see a trainer cuing a dolphin into a tail walk to the small crowd’s collective wow .

Mo looks over his shoulder to the show and back to me. “They love to perform. They love to make their trainers happy. And we love to look after them. It’s in the good book, Reina. Genesis 1:26. ‘God gave man dominion over animals.’ We know what’s best for them and the animals are so smart, they know it too.”

“All right. I’ll keep an eye out for trouble.”

When Mo leaves me to start my rounds, I walk along the dock from the lagoon holding the “family pod” at the front of the pen grid to the rows of pens behind it, containing pairs and trios of dolphins usually divided by gender, down to the nursery pen holding the mothers and the babies near the end. I notice one of the larger dolphins tucked into one of the front pens, its eyes following me as I pass through, floating half on its side in a way that makes it look like it’s dying or something, and when I ask Luke, one of the trainers, if the dolphin is okay, he just laughs and says that’s Sunshine’s way of spying on me.