The Orphan Master's Son (9 page)

The Captain pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and looked at it. “What's the point?”

“What's the point?” the Pilot asked.

“Yeah, what's the point? It's shit for us either way.”

Finally, the Captain stood, straightened his jacket. His time in Russia
had cured him of alcohol, yet he walked to the pilothouse as if for the harsh inevitability of a drink, rather than a radio call from the maritime minister in Chongjin. “That guy's only got so much,” the Pilot said, and when the red light went off, they knew the Captain had answered the call. Not that he had a choice. The
Junma
was never out of range. The Russians who'd owned the
Junma
had outfitted it with a radio taken from a submarine—its long antenna was meant to transmit from below the surface, and it had a 20-volt wet-cell battery to power it.

Jun Do watched the Captain silhouetted in the pilothouse and tried to imagine what he might be saying into the radio by the way he pushed his hat back and rubbed his eyes. Jun Do, in his hold, only received. He'd never transmitted in his life. He was secretly building a transmitter on shore, and the closer he got to completion, the more nervous he became over what he'd say into it.

When the Captain returned, he sat at the break in the rail where the winch swung over, his legs hanging free over the side. He took off his hat, a filthy thing he only sometimes wore, and set it aside. Jun Do studied the brass crest with the sickle and hammer embossed over a compass face and a harpoon. They didn't even make hats like that anymore.

“So,” the Pilot said. “What do they want?”

“Shrimp,” the Captain said. “Live shrimp.”

“In these waters?” the Pilot asked. “This time of year?” He shook his head. “No way, can't be done.”

Jun Do asked, “Why don't they just buy some shrimp?”

“I asked them that,” the Captain said. “The shrimp must be North Korean, they said.”

A request like that could only come from the top, perhaps the very top. They'd heard cold-water shrimp were in big demand in Pyongyang. It was a new fashion there to eat them while they were still alive.

“What should we do?” the Pilot asked.

“What to do,” the Captain said. “What to do.”

“Well, there's nothing to do,” Jun Do said. “We were ordered to get shrimp, so we must get shrimp, right?”

The Captain didn't say anything, he leaned back on the deck with his feet over the side and closed his eyes. “She was a believer, you know,” the Captain said. “My wife. She thought socialism was the only thing that would make us strong again. There would be a difficult period, she always
said, some sacrifices. And then things would be better. I didn't think I would miss that, you know. I didn't realize how much I needed someone to keep telling me
why.
”

“Why?” the Pilot asked. “Because other people depend on you. Everybody here needs you. Imagine if the Second Mate didn't have you to ask stupid questions to all day.”

The Captain waved him off. “The Russians gave me four years,” he said. “Four years on a fish-gutting ship, forever at sea, never once did we go to port. I got the Russians to let my crew go. They were young, village boys mostly. But next time? I doubt it.”

“We'll just go out for shrimp,” the Pilot said, “and if we don't get any, we don't get any.”

The Captain didn't say anything to that plan. “The trawlers were always coming,” he said. “They'd be out for weeks and then show up to transfer their catch to our prison ship. You never knew what it would be. You'd be down on the gutting floor, and you'd hear the engines of a trawler coming astern and then the hydraulic gates opening up and sometimes we'd even stand on our saw tables because down the chute, like a wave, would come thousands of fish—yellowtail, cod, snapper, even little sardines—and suddenly you were hip deep in them, and you'd fire up your pneumatic saws because nobody was getting out until you'd gutted your way out. Sometimes the fish were hoarfrosted from six weeks in a hold and sometimes they'd been caught that morning and still had the slime of life on them.

“Toward afternoon, they'd sluice the drains, and thousands of liters of guts would purge into the sea. We'd always go up top to watch that. Out of nowhere, clouds of seabirds would appear and then the topfish and sharks—believe me, a real frenzy. And then from below would rise the squid, huge ones from the Arctic, their albino color like milk in the water. When they got agitated, their flesh turned red and white, red and white, and when they struck, to stun their victims, they lanterned up, flashing bright as you could imagine. It was like watching underwater lightning to see them attack.

“One day, two trawlers decided to catch those squid. One set a drop net that hung deep in the water. The bottom of this net was tethered to the other trawler, which acted like a tug. The squid slowly surfaced, a hundred
kilos some of them, and when they started to flash, the net was towed beneath them and buttoned up.

“We all watched from the deck. We cheered, if you can believe that. Then we went back to work as if hundreds of squid, electric with anger, weren't about to come down that chute and swamp the lot of us. Send down a thousand sharks, please—they don't have ten arms and black beaks. Sharks don't get angry or have giant eyes or suckers with hooks on them. God, the sound of the squid tumbling down the chute, the jets of ink, their beaks against the stainless steel, the colors of them, flashing. There was this little guy on board, Vietnamese, I'll never forget him. A nice guy for sure, kind of green, much like our young Second Mate, and I sort of took him under my wing. He was a kid, didn't know anything about anything yet. And his wrists, if you'd seen them. They were no bigger than this.”

Jun Do heard the story as if it were being broadcast from some far-off, unknown place. Real stories like this, human ones, could get you sent to prison, and it didn't matter what they were about. It didn't matter if the story was about an old woman or a squid attack—if it diverted emotion from the Dear Leader, it was dangerous. Jun Do needed his typewriter, he needed to get this down, this was the whole reason he listened in the dark.

“What was his name?” he asked the Captain.

“The thing is,” the Captain said, “the Russians aren't the ones who took her from me. All the Russians wanted was four years. After four years they let me go. But here, it never ends. Here, there is no limit to anything.”

“What's that mean?” the Pilot asked.

“It means wheel her around,” the Captain told him. “We're heading north again.”

The Pilot said, “You're not going to do anything stupid, are you?”

“What I'm going to do is get us some shrimp.”

Jun Do asked him, “Were you shrimping when the Russians got you?”

But the Captain had closed his eyes.

“Vu,” he said. “The boy's name was Vu.”

The next night, the moon was strong, and they were far north, on the shoals of Juljuksan, a disputed island chain of volcanic reefs. All day, the
Captain had told Jun Do to listen for anything—“anything or anybody, anywhere near us”—but as they approached the southernmost atoll, the Captain ordered everything turned off so that all the batteries could power the spotlights.

Soon, they could hear patches of open break, and seeing the white water froth against the invisibility of black pumice was unnerving. Even the moon didn't help when you couldn't see the rocks. The Captain was with the Pilot at the wheel, while the First Mate was in the bow with the big spotlight. Using handhelds, the Second Mate was to starboard and Jun Do was to port, everyone lighting up the water in an effort to gauge the depth. Holds full, the
Junma
was low in the water and slow to respond, so the Machinist was with the engine in case power was needed fast.

There was a single channel that wound through fields of frozen lava that even the tide was at pains to crawl over, and soon the tide began drawing them fast and almost sideways through the trough, the dark glitter of bottom whirring by in Jun Do's light.

The Captain seemed revived, with a wild, nothing-to-lose smile on his face. “The Russians call this chute the foxtrot,” he said.

Out there in the tide, Jun Do saw a vessel. He called to the First Mate, and together, they lit it up. It was a patrol boat, broken up, on its side upon an oyster bar. There were no markings left, and it had been upon the rocks for some time. The antenna was small and spiraled, so he figured there was no radio worth salvaging.

“Bet they cracked up someplace else and the tide brung her here,” the Captain said.

Jun Do wasn't so sure about that. The Pilot said nothing.

“Look for her lifeboat,” the Captain told them.

The Second Mate was upset to be on the wrong side of the ship. “To see if there were survivors?” he asked.

“You just man that light,” the Pilot told him.

“Anything?” the Captain asked.

The First Mate shook his head no.

Jun Do saw the red of a fire extinguisher strapped to the boat's stern, and much as he wished the
Junma
had an extinguisher, he kept his mouth shut and with a whoosh, they flashed past the wreck and it was gone.

“I suppose no lifeboat's worth sinking for,” the Captain lamented.

They'd used buckets to put out the fire on the
Junma
, so the moment
of abandoning ship, the moment in which it would have been revealed to the Second Mate that they had no lifeboat, never came.

The Second Mate asked, “What's the deal with their lifeboat?”

“You just man that light,” the Pilot told him.

They cleared the offshore break, and as if cut from a tether, the
Junma
settled into calmer water. The craggy ass of the island was above them, and in its lee, finally, was a large lagoon that the outer currents kept in motion. Here was where the shrimp might congregate. They killed the lights, and then the engine, and entered the lagoon on inertia. Soon, they were slowly backpedaling with the circular tide. The current was constant and calm and rising, and even when the hull touched sand, no one seemed to worry.

Below raked obsidian bluffs was a steep, glassy black beach whose glint looked sharp enough to bleed your feet. In the sand, dwarfed, gnarled trees had anchored themselves, and in the blue light, you could see that the wind had curled even their needles. Upon the water, the moon revealed clumps of detritus swept in from the straits.

The Machinist extended the outriggers, then dipped the nets, soaking them so they'd submerge during skim runs. The mates secured the lines and the blocks, then raised the nets to see if any shrimp had turned up. Out in the green nylon webbing, a few shrimp bounced toward the trap, but there was something else out there, too.

They spilled the nets, and on the deck, amid the flipping and phosphorescing of a few dozen shrimp, were a couple of athletic shoes. They didn't match.

“These are American shoes,” the Machinist said.

Jun Do read the word written on the shoe. “Nike,” he said.

The Second Mate grabbed one.

Jun Do could read the look in his eye. “Don't worry,” Jun Do said. “The rowers are far from here.”

“Read the label,” the Second Mate said. “Is it a woman's shoe?”

The Captain came over and examined a shoe. He smelled it, and then bent the sole to see how much water squished out. “Don't bother,” the Captain said. “The thing's never even been worn.” He told the Pilot to turn on the floodlights, which revealed hundreds of shoes bobbing out in the jade-gray water. Thousands, maybe.

The Pilot scanned the waters. “I hope there's no shipping container swirling 'round this bathtub with us,” he said, “waiting to take our bottom out.”

The Captain turned to Jun Do. “You pick up any distress calls?”

Jun Do said, “You know the policy on that.”

The Second Mate asked, “What's the policy on distress calls?”

“I know the policy,” the Captain said. “I'm just trying to find out if there are a bunch of vessels headed our way in response to a call.”

“I didn't hear anything,” Jun Do said. “But people don't cry on the radio anymore. They have emergency beacons now, things that automatically transmit GPS coordinates up to satellites. I can't pick up any of that. The Pilot's right—a shipping container probably fell off a deck and washed up here.”

“Don't we answer distress calls?” the Second Mate asked.

“Not with him on board,” the Captain said and handed Jun Do a shoe. “Okay, gentlemen, let's get those nets back in the water. It's going to be a long night.”

Jun Do found a general broadcast station, loud and clear out of Vladivostok, and played it through a speaker on deck. It was Strauss. They started skimming the black water, and there was little time to marvel at the American shoes that began to pile atop the hatches.