Peter Wicked

by Broos Campbell

  I looked away. “Is it dead?”

  “He is not.”

  He took off his hat and pressed his kerchief against his face: first his brow, then his upper lip, then beneath either eye. The Africa-shaped port wine stain on his brow stood out dark against the skin, as if it’d drawn all the blood of his face into it. That was usually a bad sign, but he seemed calm enough elsewise.

  I looked in the basket again. “Near about the quietest cat I ever see.”

  “The consequence of a dish of rum and cream.” The hat went back on his head, and the kerchief went back up his sleeve. “And Greybar is a he, not an it. He’s a living beast. He needs someone to look after him.”

  Greybar yawned, showing a mouthful of fangs.

  “Yes. Well,” I said. “I guess you better keep looking, then.”

  “He’s fond of you.”

  “He was fond of the fish I used to give him.”

  “You have an obdurate heart, Mr. Graves.”

  “It’s a lie. Ain’t nothing wrong with my heart,” I said. Not that I knew what obdurate meant; I just didn’t like the sound of it.

  “Then take your cat.”

  “I ain’t got a cat.”

  “No, but your cousin did. And now he is dead, and the Rattle-Snake is sank, and there is no one to look after the beast.” He said it like he was explaining items on a bill.

  “You shot Billy,” I said. “You take his cat.”

  Its tail twitched.

  “You like cats,” I said. “You take it.”

  Peter looked at the Frenchman again. He was leaning against the paw-paw tree with his hands in his pockets.

  “Greybar is not my responsibility.” Peter closed the lid again and slipped the wickerwork latch in place.

  I’d clasped my hands behind my back the way he’d taught me. The skeeter bites on my wrists itched like Old Harry.

  “I don’t guess you come all this way just to give me a cat.”

  “Nor did I. I came to say good-bye.” He shook out his sleeves. “The commodore has ordered the Breeze home to Norfolk, there to be condemned and sold.”

  I squeezed my wrist, waiting for the burning to fade away, waiting for the ache to ebb from my heart.

  “You’re coming down in the world, Peter. The Breeze ain’t nothing but an 8-gun sloop, and four-pounders at that.”

  He’d had her for a few weeks once before, with me as mate, and Billy had mocked us for it; it was one of many steps he’d taken on the way to his duel with Peter. I could see her out on the bay, now that I knew to look for her. She was hove up near to the Columbia, looking like a jolly boat beside the big 44-gun frigate. Peter deserved better than that.

  I looked at Peter hiding his shame, joy, whatever it was he felt.

  “Peter, she’s barely big enough for a master’s mate’s command.”

  “Nonetheless,” he said, “I require a command, and she serves my purpose.”

  He required a command. Yes, and I required a commodore’s star and a thousand dollars a year, but I didn’t see them lying around anywhere.

  “Where will you go after you get to Norfolk?”

  “You assume that I shall leave the service.” He looked past my shoulder again, eyeing the Frenchman. A hint of a smile crept across his face and was gone again like it’d never been. “There’s always the Africa trade.”

  “If I thought you’d stoop so low, I’d kill you myself.”

  “Gold? Ivory? Trading in these is low?”

  “You know what I mean, Peter Wickett. I remember you sailed in the Bight of Benin, and was in Whydah. You said it way back when we first took the Breeze.”

  “Did I? Well, then I shall go where the birds dwell,” he said, by which I supposed he would take a ramble in the country till he found where he was going. He tucked his sword up under his arm again, where it would be out of his way while he walked. “You might wish to be more careful in your passions, Mr. Graves. People might make a connection between them and your complexion.” He leaned forward. “And another word of advice, if you will allow me: When you fill your cup, as I have no doubt you will, drink deeply of it. Then tell me if it is as sweet as you thought it would be.”

  I sat on a palm stump and watched him trudge back down to Le Cap. He seemed to sink into the earth a little with each step, until he was no taller than an ordinary man.

  The basket shifted at my feet. I lifted the lid and looked in. Greybar’s head bobbled as he looked up at me, and I hauled him out by the scruff and set him by the side of the road. He backed and filled his way over to the paw-paw tree and puked against it.

  The French lieutenant came up behind me and looked up at the paw-paws. “Ah,” he said, “alors c’est ça une papaye.” Not the high-toned “Voici donc a quoi ressemble une papaye”—“Here it is, then, what a pawpaw looks like”—that I would’ve expected from the way he carried himself, but the common “Ah, so that’s a paw-paw.” It struck a jarring note, like he was pretending to be something less than he was.

  Greybar stood with his head down. I scratched him behind the ears, and he took a swipe at me. I snatched my hand away from his claws and looked over my shoulder at the Frenchman.

  “Why’n’t you quit talking French? And don’t stand behind me. You’re supposed to be a prisoner.”

  “Pardon, s’il vous plaît, m’sieur!”

  I looked at him close. I could’ve sworn he’d called me môsseur, a sneering way of saying monsieur, but he switched to English on me.

  “But they are getting ripe, yes?” he said. “Soon they will be too ripe.”

  “What do you care? They ain’t yours.”

  He shrugged as only a Frenchman can, with his whole body and a shake of the head, and his lips all twisted to one side.

  I turned my head so he couldn’t see my face.

  “Listen, pal, go away. You make my head hurt.”

  “I think he is not I who makes your head hurt,” he said, but low enough that he and I could both pretend I hadn’t heard, and he wandered off to the other side of the camp.

  I knelt down in front of the cat and held out my finger. He grabbed it. The pads of his paws were warm and rough against my skin as he pulled my finger closer and rubbed his cheek against it. He purred so low I could only feel the vibrations in my finger. I figured purring was a good sign. But he was also thrashing his tail, and that I knew was a bad sign.

  Then suddenly he bit me and I smacked him on the forehead. He gave me a puzzled look as he fell over, like I’d done something unfathomably strange, and I remembered he was drunk. Careful of his claws, I put him in a shady spot next to Quilty’s tent, with the basket nearby on its side where he could crawl back into it if he wanted.

  “No, I do not wish for a cat,” said Quilty. He’d come out from his tent to join me in the dubious shade of the paw-paw tree. He used my chin as a lever to move my head up and down and from side to side. He held up some fingers.

  I’d gotten my cocoanut cracked a time or three in the past several months. It’s what had landed me in that fever pit. First in the Bight of Léogâne off the western coast of the island, when we got swooped on by several hundred French picaroons and a gun blew up in my ear, and then when I fell off my horse during the assault on Jacmel, and then when I ran into a desk while Juge and I were fighting our way out of prison. There might’ve been some other times but I couldn’t recall them offhand. I’d been subject to fits and spells, but I hardly ever fell down anymore.

  “Three,” I said, looking at the fingers. “And I didn’t ask if you’d take him.”

  “I wish it to be clear from the outset,” he said. “Two.”

  “You’re sticking your thumb out.” I made the European gesture for three—two fingers and a thumb. “That makes three.”

  He smiled patiently. He was about the patientest cuss I knew.

  “It is the custom in such cases,” he said, “for the surgeon to manipulate the patient’s head, and for the patient to count the number of fingers that
the surgeon holds up. It has been our routine these several weeks. There is comfort in routine, Mr. Graves.”

  His big square fingers were black around the nails and stank of blood. I pulled my face away.

  “I myself cannot mend your head,” he said, “any more than I can turn you back into the amiable young man you once were, but I can make you be still until you mend yourself.” He held up a finger to shush me. “I am not proposing a return to strapping you into your hammock. Don’t worry. I shall release you this very day to the commodore.”

  “Well, I am just joy itself,” I said. “Now I can get back to shooting at people and sticking my sword in ’em. Where do I sign?”

  I’d meant it to be funny, but he didn’t laugh. He did give me a funny look, though, and said, “You needn’t sign anything. I have to sign a certificate.”

  I followed him into his tent, where about the yellowest man I ever seen lay in a daze on a cloth-draped table. A pewter bleeding-bowl lay nearby with an iron-smelling, fly-crawling pint in it.

  Quilty waved the flies away with an absent air as he fetched a printed form and filled in the spaces where my name and the date and what illness I’d had were supposed to go.

  I craned my head around to see what he wrote. “How come you surgeons never write so’s anybody else can read it?”

  “We live in fear—” He blew on the paper to dry the ink. He looked at the paper again and handed it to me. “We live in fear that ordinary mortals will discover how little we know. Off you go to the Columbia, now.”

  “Good,” I said, as we stepped once more into the tropical sunlight and the flower-smelling air. The Frenchman was still mooning around with his hands in his pockets. “Now I can be shed of Johnny Crappo over there.”

  “Who, Mr. Corbeau?” he said, summoning the French lieutenant with a wag of his finger. “I’m afraid you labor under a misapprehension, Mr. Graves. A prisoner is a military matter, not a medical one. The commodore has bade me send him along with you.” He chuckled as he went back into his tent.

  “Monsieur Corbeau,” I said, patting the paw-paw tree. “Faites-moi la courte échelle, s’il vous plaît. Make me the short ladder, if you please.”

  He held out his hands, palms up and the fingers interlaced; I stepped onto the rung, as it were, and used the ol’ death’s-head sword to cut down a load of ripe paw-paws. It don’t do to go empty-handed when calling on a commodore.

  Commodore Cyrus Gaswell was transferring himself from his barge to the Columbia when Corbeau and I pulled up in a shore boat. I hardly recognized the old coot in his gold lace and epaulets, he sparkled so. There was even the golden eagle and sky-blue ribbon of the Cincinnati in his lapel. He’d fought in the Revolution from the beginning, which made him a Methuselah—fifty if he was a day—but although the seat of his white britches was stretched tauter than it might’ve been once upon a day, the muscles bunched and rolled in his thighs and calves as he hauled himself up the frigate’s side, and power and woe lurked in the glances he cast here and there around his potato-like nose. He lingered on the spar deck while the extra attendants slipped away at the sight of my lieutenant’s uniform, until there were only two side boys and a bosun’s mate left to see me aboard. I did off my hat to the quarterdeck and the Stars and Stripes, and was about to do the same to Gaswell when he stuck out a paw for me to shake. He cast an eye on Corbeau coming up behind me and noted the basket of paw-paws that the sailors were handing up abaft of all, with Greybar perched in it with his ears laid flat aback.

  Gaswell’s splendiferous uniform weren’t in my honor; nor in Corbeau’s, neither.

  “Mr. Corbeau,” I said over my shoulder, “I’ll need your parole.”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” he said, gazing across at the Breeze. “I shall go nowhere.”

  “I’m leaving Greybar and the paw-paws with you.”

  “Yes, yes, they are safe with me.”

  I turned back to the commodore. “The paw-paws are for your table, sir, if you’ll allow me.”

  “I’ll have ’em for breakfast.” He waved off the flock of lieutenants and clerks that had descended on him with their messages and papers, clapped me on the arm, and said, “Let’s us have a dram.”

  “Things’ve gotten quiet as worms around here,” said Gaswell. He led me past the Marine sentry into his day-cabin and shut the door behind us. “Drop an anchor.”

  He shucked his gorgeous coat and tossed it across his settee. The great cabin of the Columbia was near about big enough to stick Peter’s whole Breeze sloop in it and not stretch the truth entirely out of recognition. The commodore’s cocked hat followed the coat.

  “Go on, sit,” he said, and with a thrust of one thick forefinger he let me know I was to sit in the straight-backed chair on the forward side of the big Cuban mahogany table he used for a desk.

  “Now that Toussaint’s drove Rigaud into exile in France,” he said, “he got time to spare to start thinking of me as a dog to sic on the Dons, as if I had no more manners than a Kentucky puke.” He rolled up his shirtsleeves. “I just seen him over to town. I do believe he intends to invade Santo Domingo and free the Spanish slaves. Been sending battalions over all week.”

  He poured himself a glass of whiskey and put it down where he stood. Then he poured a couple more and set them on the table. He dropped himself into his chair and held out a plug of tobacco and an ivory-handled clasp knife.

  “Chaw?”

  “No thank’ee, sir.”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t chaw.”

  “I like a cigar now and again, sir.”

  “Smoking!” He reached out with his foot and drew a well-watered spitkid closer to his chair. “That’s a damn disgusting habit.” He carved off a hunk of leaf and stuck it in his cheek. “How ye been enjoying your stay in the island?”

  “Depends, sir.” I reached for my glass. “You want the right answer or the honest answer?”

  He unbuttoned the knees of his britches and pulled his shoes and stockings off, saying, “I reckon ye know me well enough by now to guess the answer to that one.” His feet didn’t have an entirely unpleasant reek, but there was a power of it.

  “Well, sir,” I said, “then I will tell you I’m about as sick of this place as I can be and still stand to live.” I watched him take a sip of whiskey. “Hell ain’t in it—I never seen such a place for murder and mayhem as San Domingo. I figure anyplace else in the world ’ud be nuts in May compared to it.” I stuck my nose in my glass. The whiskey smelled like buttered fire.

  He looked at me over the rim of his glass with eyes like big blue eggs. “Scuttlebutt is you and Peter Wickett ain’t gettin’ along so well.”

  I lowered my glass, feeling the whiskey burning my lips and tongue. “Scuttlebutt ain’t always accurate, sir.”

  “Well, is it this time?”

  “I got nothing again’ him.”

  He launched an amber stream in the direction of the spitkid and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Ain’t what I asked.”

  “I can’t answer for him, sir. I can tell you this, though: he weren’t too happy I sank the Rattle-Snake.”

  He chawed and spat, and spat and chawed, and took another mouthful of whiskey. It takes skill to chaw and drink at the same time, but spitting on top of it was just showing off.

  “He ain’t happy he was below decks when ye boarded the Faucon,” he said.

  “Weren’t his fault, sir. The topmast cap fell on him.”

  “I know the topmast cap fell on him. But no one’ll remember it that way. They’ll just remember that you went across and he went below.”

  I threw back my whiskey and felt it boil in my guts. “I don’t expect he much likes the sight of me, sir.”

  “Don’t take yourself so serious—no one else does. I expect he’s too tied up in his own misery to think about you one way or t’other. If he mislikes anybody, it’s me, and I ain’t required to care what he likes. I ain’t allowed to care what he likes. Besides which, I told him I�
��d give him the best command I could as soon as I could.”

  “When was that, sir?”

  “About a month ago. Been gettin’ a mite sniffy. Thinks I don’t notice.” He shot me a wink, like he didn’t mean it serious, and said, “What about you, are ye fit?” He waved off Quilty’s certificate when I tried to poke it at him. “He wouldn’t send ye aboard of me without he thought ye were fit. I’m asking you. Are ye fit?”

  “Tolerable, sir. Just tolerable.” It like to killed me to admit it, but it don’t do to lie to commodores. They got ways of finding things out about you, things you might not even have knowed yourself.

  He hooked a pair of spectacles to his ears and settled the lenses on his nose. “You need to find your strength, son,” he said. He took a piece of paper off one of the neat piles on his desk and dipped his quill into the inkwell. “I’m sending you home. Somebody in the Navy Office wants to talk with you about the duel, anyway. I been putting ’em off for a while now.” He looked at me over his glasses. “I don’t guess it’s anything to worry about. They ain’t asked for Peter Wickett.”

  The way he said it, I felt like I’d stepped out on the front step of a winter’s morning and found the door locked behind me.

  TWO

  Gaswell sent Corbeau and me over to the Breeze in his own barge. He probably only done it because it was convenient for the Columbias—the boat being already in the water—but it was handsome of him all the same. We rode in style in the stern sheets, with Greybar yowling in the basket between us, while I educated Corbeau on the advantages of the Columbia as we receded from her, and the fine points of the Breeze as we approached. They were a study in contrasts, them two.

  The Columbia was a sister to the United States and the Constitution, rated as a 44 but built like a two-decker. “You can tell ’em apart mostly by the roundhouse,” I said, pointing at the low structure that gave the frigate a sort of poop deck. “I mean, you could if the Constitution was here. Constitution ain’t got a roundhouse, but the United States and the Columbia do. Don’t ask me why,” I said as he opened his mouth, “because I don’t know.” Our route took us around the bows and I pointed up at the figurehead, a fat lady with a gilt sword. “You’ll note the Amazon with our coat of arms on her shield.”