We were forty minutes into the flood tide when Buhi put the tape on, and I heard the splice before I heard the animal. Nobody else on the boat heard a thing. That's the job, being the one who hears the seam, and it has never once made me popular.
Selat Bakau at two in the morning is warm black water in a mangrove channel about as wide as a road. Low water leaves the roots out to breathe all day, and the flood hands it all back at once, mud gas and the sweet rot of something the crabs got to first. My sinuses filed a complaint. Sekar's boat is a converted lighter hull with the engine wrapped in blanket so it thumps instead of barks, and amidships there's a drum under a tarp, double-walled, temperature-held. It rode out empty. It wasn't going to ride back that way.
Rida Sekar has worked this stretch for eleven years, six of them for fish and five for what she calls contract. She does everything exactly one time. She took me on because a man I owe money to asked her politely. Her opening brief was complete: "Port rail. Hands inside. Make a noise while the deck is running and I'll put you in the mangroves and tell them you slipped." Then she poured me tea out of a flask, which is how I learned she wasn't joking about either half.
Buhi is nineteen and runs the playback deck, a scuffed field amp bolted to a locker with nine channel slots and a hand-lettered tape in each one. He works it the way a good drummer works a kit, all wrist. "Slot nine's the one," he said. "Nine works when nothing works. Eleven months I been running nine and it has not missed." He also asked me twice whether I could see in the dark. I can. It's the only party trick I've got left and I hate that it's always the first question.
The animals are singers. That's the word on the water and nobody uses the federal one, which runs four syllables and a form. Coastal, small for what they are, tagged on the dorsal ridge with a Bureau chip the size of a thumbnail, and they call across the channels in a two-note thing that goes up and then breaks in the middle. On a lynx build it sits right at the top edge of comfortable. It gets into your back teeth.
Amboy has been putting net in water since before the Bureau had a budget. Dead man's watch on his wrist, and he doesn't listen to the tapes. Ever. When nine is running he walks to the bow and stands with his back to the amp. "You want to stand there hearing a mother call for her own, that is your business," he said. "I have a daughter." Then he laughed, because there's no other way to finish that sentence on a boat.
She came up the channel at hour two, and there were two of them, and Sekar took the small one.
Here's how it goes. Soft net, weighted low, laid across the narrow at the bend. Engine off. Buhi kills the amp the second the answer comes back, so the last thing left in the water is the thing that isn't there. Then everybody waits with hands on the rail and nobody talks, and I could hear four heartbeats on that deck including mine, all running fast.
Somebody said hands. Mine were in the sling before any part of me got a vote. I took the head end. She was warm through the wet blanket in a way I wasn't ready for, heavier at the shoulder than her length lets on, and she didn't fight once she was out of the water, which was worse. I want it in the file that I did that, and that I was good at it. Eleven seconds, net to sling. Sekar said nothing, which from her is a commendation.
Then the drum, and the drum is where this stops being a story about a boat. The receiver came off a transfer skiff with a wrist counter and started it at the seal, not at the take. He wrote a time on the tarp in grease pencil and was gone inside a minute. Nobody on Sekar's crew signs anything. Nobody on Sekar's crew gets told anything.
"You make the sixty, you get top rate," Amboy said. He was watching the skiff wake flatten out. "Past the sixty the buyer's number moves and ours moves with it. Twenty years and no one has ever said why."
I know why. Our own desk printed why yesterday, off a rate schedule dictated in a cold room under a clearinghouse, and I sat on a rail in the dark with the answer in my mouth and didn't hand it to a sixty-year-old man who already wasn't sleeping. I still can't tell whether that was mercy or cowardice, and I notice I'm the only one grading it.
The rot isn't this crew. I keep wanting it to be, because they're right in front of me and they have faces. The fishery here went dry in 2058. Then a broker with clean nails started paying real money for live weight in a temperature-held drum, and Sekar had one skill and one boat. She can tell you where they calve. That's exactly why she's worth hiring, and it's the ugliest sentence in this piece.
On the run out I asked Buhi to play me nine on the headset. All of it. He was delighted, because nobody ever asks him about his work. It's a clean field recording, one female, that two-note call, eleven months in the slot and worn soft at the top end. Then the loop comes around, and past where anyone sane would've stopped listening there are four seconds of tail before the splice. Water breaking. A hull. A man's voice saying a number out loud.
They recorded her, and they recorded taking her, and both went on the tape.
I asked Buhi what the last part was. He listened to it twice with his whole face, then shrugged. "Ah. That's just the boat."
The singers come to it anyway. They come up the channel toward a voice that left the water eleven months ago and the sound of the net closing on her, and in eleven months Sekar has never had to change tapes, because it has never stopped working. If I were filling in the bottom of somebody's form, that's the figure I'd want on it. Not the hours. That one.