The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [27]
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.
While the crew seined for shoes above, Jun Do donned his headphones. There were lots of squawks and barks out there, and that would make someone, somewhere, happy. He’d missed the Chinese confessions just after sundown, which was for the best, as the voices always sounded hopelessly sad, and therefore guilty, to him. He did catch the Okinawan families making appeals to fathers listening on their ships, but it was hard to feel too bad for kids who had mothers and siblings. Plus the “adopt us” good cheer was enough to make a person sick. When the Russian families broadcast nothing but good cheer for their inmate fathers, it was to give the men strength. But trying to plead a parent into returning? Who would fall for that? Who would want to be around such a desperate, pathetic kid?
Jun Do fell asleep at his station, a rarity. He woke to the voice of the girl who rowed in the dark. She’d been rowing in the nude, she said, and under a sky that was “black and frilled, like a carnation stemmed in ink.” She’d had a vision that humans would one day return to the oceans, growing flippers and blowholes, that humanity would become one again in the oceans, and there’d be no intolerance or war. Poor girl, take a day off, he thought, and decided not to give the Second Mate that update.
In the morning, the Junma was headed south again, the seine net full and swinging wildly with its lightweight purse of shoes. There were hundreds of shoes across the deck, the First and Second Mates stringing them together by general design. These garlands hung from all the cleats to dry in the sun. It was clear they’d found only a few matches. Still, even without sleep, they seemed to be in high spirits.
The First Mate found a pair, blue and white, and stowed them under his bunk. The Pilot was marveling over a size fifteen, over what manner of human would take that size, and the Machinist had created a tall pile of shoes he intended for his wife to try. The silvers and reds, the flashy accents and reflective strips, the whitest of whites, they were pure gold, these shoes: they equaled food, gifts, bribes, and favors. The feeling of them on, as though you weren’t wearing anything on your feet. The shoes made the crew’s socks look positively lousy, and their legs looked mottled and sun-worn amid such undiluted color. The Second Mate sifted through every shoe until he found a pair of what he called his “America shoes.” They were both women’s shoes. One was red and white, the other blue. He threw his own shoes overboard, then he traversed the deck with a different Nike on each foot.
Ahead, a large cloud bank had formed to the east, with a vortex of seabirds working the leading edge of it. It was an upwelling, with cold water from deep in the trench rising to the surface and condensing the air. This was the deep water that sperm whales hunted and six-gill sharks called home. Surfacing in that upwell would be black jellyfish, squid, and deepwater shrimp, white and blind. Those