The Taste of Salt by Martha Southgate Page A

Mom, did you see that!” I finally said after a few minutes.
    â€œYeah, baby, that was something else,” my father said. His hand was still on my shoulder.
    â€œHow do you think he did that?” I said.
    â€œWell, now Josie, I don’t know,” Daddy said. “Let’s seeif we can figure that out.” As if he had heard us, the man who had done the demonstration came out of an industrial-looking side door. My father took my hand, leaving Tick and Mom standing in front of the tank, and we walked up to him. My father said, “Excuse me, young man?”
    â€œYes, sir?” He turned around, ready to help.
    â€œMy daughter here is very interested in marine life and I wonder if you could tell her a little bit about how that electric eel functions. She’s very smart and she wants to know.”
    I looked up at Daddy, my heart aching with embarrassment and love. The eel guy grinned and got down on one knee so he could talk directly to me. He launched into a long explanation of how it was mostly made up of organs that generated electricity and how those organs functioned. I absorbed some of it. But what I got most was the sense that my curiosity mattered—that guy on his knee in front of me and Daddy with his hand on my back, both trying to answer my questions. We probably talked for all of three minutes, but it was blissful. I walked back to Tick and Mom in a daze.
    Tick was still staring raptly at the tank. After a few minutes, he spoke. “I want him to do it again,” he said.
    Daddy and Mom laughed. “Tick, you are something, boy. Soon as you do something you like once, damn if you don’t want to do it again just a minute later,” Daddy said.
    â€œThat’s for sure,” Mom agreed then smiled at me. “Did you get your question answered, miss?”
    â€œYeah, yeah I did. Thanks, Mom.” She rested her hand on my head briefly and then we headed into the rest of the aquarium together, a family. The air was cool and smelled of salt water and closely packed humans.
    We stayed at the aquarium for probably another two hours. We saw a lot of cool stuff but nothing as amazing as that eel. I did love the tropical fish—they didn’t scare and thrill me like the eel had but I loved the way their colors asserted themselves. I used some of my allowance money to buy a poster in the gift shop of some Caribbean fish before we left. Tick bought a rubber eel and a little plastic goldfish that squirted water.
    It was a warm early summer day, the air resting mildly on our skin, the way it sometimes seems to do before it gets too hot. When we got home, Mom told us to go play and went inside. Tick got a bucket, filled it with a hose, dragged it to the backyard, and threw his eel in. He spent some time lining up his army men around the edge of the bucket. He put two in as scuba divers. “Come on, Josie, play with me,” he said. His eel dived and sloshed through the water as he made sizzling, fizzing sounds. Together we made up an elaborate story about an eel named Reggie who swam the seven seas and performed marvelous feats. No matter howassiduously Reggie was hunted, he always came battling back to defeat his many enemies. We played for a long time, getting soaking wet in the process. Finally, we took a break and sat side by side on the damp grass.
    â€œThat was something, huh, that eel?” I said. “I wish I could swim around with it.”
    â€œYou’d get fried up!” Tick laughed.
    â€œMaybe I could wear a special suit or something. You know, like on that old Jacques Cousteau show we saw. People go down there.”
    Tick pulled up a tuft of grass. “Yeah. I guess,” he said.
    â€œI wanna go down there.”
    â€œYeah? I don’t think they have eels like that in Lake Erie.”
    â€œNo, dummy. I’d have to go where they live. But I wanna go down into the ocean. When I’m grown.”
    Tick didn’t say