Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

“I’ll swim with her. You saw how she was with me in the water. I know she’ll follow me. When she’s out far enough, she’ll know to go the rest of the way alone.”

Nesto shakes his head at me. “I don’t think so.”

“Listen, just like you walked across that border in Mexico, that dolphin is going to swim through that gap in the fence.”

As I say the words, I realize how silly I sound.

“Estás loca, Reina.”

“If we don’t get her out of there, either she’ll starve herself or she’ll be tortured into accepting she has to live in that pen forever. That’s no kind of life either.”

“The other dolphins seem to be doing okay there.”

“They’ve already been made into zombies.”

“They don’t try to escape.”

“Some people are better at being prisoners than others.”

“They’re not people, Reina.”

I turn from him. The biggest of the iguanas, with a high ridge extending from its head to its tail, swallows grapes a few feet away.

“Reina. Did you hear what I said? They’re not people.”

“Imagine they build a fence around this property we’re sitting on and tell us we can never leave it. Never, for as long as we live, only eating the shitty little food they let us eat after we perform whatever stupid chores they want us to perform. This tiny patch of land has to be the only world we’ll know forever. How would you feel?”

“I already know a place like that.”

“Then you know why we need to do this.”

“Look, we can talk about this later. We’re going to be late for work.”

When we’re in the truck, before he turns the key in the ignition, I say, “If you don’t help me, I’m going to cut a hole in that fence myself. It will be much harder to do alone. But I’ll do it.”

He covers his face with his hands, fingers long and cracked with calluses. His body looks especially tired to me that morning.

I start to feel bad for what I am asking but don’t stop myself.

“I’ve thought about this for a long time. I’m not going to change my mind.”

“Reina, por Dios santo. Can you just let this go?”

“I can’t. She’s not like the rest of them. She knows where she belongs.”

Later, at work, I see Nesto by the new pen. I’m talking to some visitors by Belle and Bonnet’s enclosure when he passes me, and ducks behind the curtain dividing the new dolphin from the dock. When I finish with the visitors, I go to the other side of the curtain and see him, his eyes fixed on the dolphin, her head still pressed to the fence, while Rachel and some techs sit on the dock nearby with clipboards, discussing new strategies to get her to integrate.

At night, back at the cottage, Nesto throws himself onto the bed without any dinner. He pulls off his beaded collares and places them on his handkerchief on the bedside table. I climb onto the bed and kneel at his side. He runs his hands on the fabric of my jeans, over my thighs down to my knees, and reaches for my hand.

“If we get caught, I’ll take the blame for everything,” I tell him. “I’ll say you were just driving the boat and had no idea what I was planning. But we won’t get caught. They don’t have any security cameras out there. They can’t afford it. And we can make it look like an accident, like the fence just came apart.”

“I did not come to this country to free a dolphin, Reina.”

“Neither did I.”

“What about the dolphins in the other pens? And what about all those other parks in these islands? There are dolphins just as miserable as that one everywhere . Letting one go isn’t going to make a difference.”

“It doesn’t matter. I can’t leave her there. I have to try.”

“It’s like trying to block the sun with a finger.”

“Two fingers,” I say. “There are two of us.”

He closes his eyes and shakes his head. When he opens them, he touches my hair, lightly, as if it’s made of light rather than my messy strands.

“I’ll help you. But only because you have a debt to pay to Yemayá for your family. You’re going to settle it by returning that dolphin to her waters.”

“I don’t know about debts, but I know it’s still the right thing to do.”

“We should wait until it rains. Just before or after a storm. Or even better, during one. So the guard on duty won’t hear the boat coming.”

“So we’ll do it?” I just want to be sure of what he’s saying.

“We’ll try , Reina. That’s all I can promise you. We’ll try.”

I put my arms around him and whisper my thanks into his ear, though it doesn’t seem like enough, not because of what he’s agreed to do, but for what it will mean to me if we are able to pull it off.

“You’re not scared?” he asks me.

I shake my head and smile though I feel heaviness in my chest, knowing the real reason I have any courage at all is that I have so little to lose.

The spring sun flames out later and later, but even on cloudy days when underwater visibility is poor, we go in for a swim. Once out in the blue, Nesto says, there is no way you can refuse it.

It’s there, while Nesto makes his own offerings to the ocean — watermelon, fruta bomba, or just a banana peel he casts off into the current with a question for Yemayá and Olokun, waiting to see if it floats or sinks — that I make my own petitions to the water, asking for help to guide me through the darkness, find my way through the night tide past the metal fence, so I can clear the way for the dolphin, lead her through the path to her freedom. Most of all, I ask the ocean to keep us all, Nesto, the dolphin, and me, unafraid.

A week or so later, two guys from Switzerland turn up at the dolphinarium and when I stop to ask if they’re enjoying the place like I’m directed to do, they start asking, not about the animals or the facility, but about my life, how I got lucky enough to end up working here, and where I’m from since I don’t look like any of the other girls around Crescent Key.

They ask what there is to do at night around here and if I’d like to go out with them.

“You look like you know how to have a good time,” one guy says. When I decline, they become even flirtier, playing the clown for me.

Mo stops me on the walkway as soon as I part from them.

“What was that all about? Looked like they were trying to pick you up.”

“They were just asking about the place.”

“Asking what?”

I realize I have an opportunity.

“About the new dolphin mostly. I guess word’s out she’s not doing so good here.”

Mo’s empty hairline shoots up and he looks back at the Swiss guys who’ve moved onto Dottie and Diana’s pen. Mo studies them, and I know I’ve planted a seed of suspicion that will serve me later.

It’s maintenance day. I walk over to the new dolphin’s pen and see that Nesto is already underwater, checking the bearings on the fence like he does on all the pens, and he’s doing what we agreed he’d do — instead of tightening the bolts holding the clamps to the corners and support posts, he’s actually loosening them. He works around the dolphin, still at her place along the fence. Rachel is out in the front lagoon working one of the shows. I notice Mo has followed me.

“What do you supposed she finds so fascinating about that fence?” Mo says, though I’m not sure if he’s posing the question to me or to himself.

“What’s on the other side. The sea.”

He pulls his hand out of his pocket and cups my shoulder, his palm warm through the cotton of my shirt.

“Let me explain something to you, Reina.” He points across the fence. “That out there is the gulf . Behind us is the ocean . And way down there, south of the Florida Straits, is the sea . We use the correct terminology around here. You got that, doll?”