PoraBora

Chapter Three

"Sharks," Pe exclaimed, and she scrambled over the rail, reaching down the fin to hold onto the oil slab. Don't spill it, reminded her callous side, which she heeded, because even her humane piece saw a gift from Keasau and knew not to waste it.

How she could pull the boy off without spilling it turned out to be a challenge, because the bone slab wasn't particularly deep (and it felt more like a crab shell than whalebone, which she found enormously confusing, as she couldn't think, nor wanted to, of any crab that big). The challenge only slowed the rescue, though, as she hurried across the ship to the other remora, pulled out her empty oil cans, and, holding them with the hook of her peg, dragged them through the oil.

She filled five of them and only stopped when she was scraping the shell and the boy's body had surfaced. Then she grabbed the bird, tossed it over her shoulder and onto the deck, grabbed some rope, and hoisted the boy over the manta's hull and under the railing. From there, she dragged him by the arms to the center with heavy breath.

The shell had flipped and righted itself and now a trail of oil followed on the surface. Pe kicked it out and around her boat. It passed very slowly.

Pe stood over the boy. She decided he was probably going to die. It would be the third death on her boat, which made her a bit sick, and it made her think of her mother laying beside her on the deck, hand in hers, telling her not to worry, telling her she would be okay, even as she bled into the koa wood.

The boy now dripped oil. Not blood. Pe shook herself, hooked her foot on the hoist rope, and dragged it back onto the boat's center.

She'd never seen a boy wearing a belt made of grass before.

It was hardly important. He was going to die, Pe told herself. But she pushed on his chest all the same. It was a hard chest, leaned by a life of work. Not all the boys she had known growing up had chests like his. Nor were theirs as slippery. If she was off-center, her compressions would end up on the boat.

"Come on," she said. "I don't want you to die on my boat." An unreasonable thought said reasonably, Push him off the boat, then.

Oil and water came up from the boy's throat as spittle. She hoped he'd cough on it, which she hoped would startle him back to consciousness. It didn't. She grabbed the bucket she had filled for the fish, which was still just sitting in the sun, and she flung its contents across the boy. It pushed the oil. Some of it went into the ocean. Some of it sat on the deck. None of it mixed with the water, and she made sure none of it made it to the fish.

Saving him was probably going to be more work than she wanted it to be.

Push him off the boat, then.

Pe got a scrub brush made of bristling grass. She had another made of the thick end of gull feathers but figured that might just pull off the boy's skin. She got more water from the sea and got to work.

The fish watched with its dead eyes and gaping mouth as she scrubbed. The eyes didn't follow when she went for more water (it was dead). It watched her switch back to compressions and check the boy's mouth and nose for breathing, and watched her grimace and blow air in. And push oil out.

Pe took time to fill her motor well so that the boat could keep moving, as the water around her had grown stagnant with oil. She removed the garment from his waist, averting her eyes as much as she could from the things she didn't want to see, and gave the grass belt a wash too. It showed signs of green.

The motor chugged her boat onwards again, and she lowered the ray's stinger, coiled the line, and started at cleaning up the deck in between compressions and gifts of air.