The Pirate's Daughter

by Robert Girardi

  “Where is everyone?” Wilson said.

  Tulj laughed. “They went to the dancing at the Nkifta Discotheque, but us, we do not go to the dancing.”

  “Where do you go?” Wilson said.

  “We go to the fights,” Tulj said. “Very big fights tonight.”

  “You’re kidding,” Wilson said, excited. “I was supposed to go to the fights, but”—he looked down at his watch—“isn’t it a little late?”

  “Oh, no, they have not yet started,” Tulj said.

  “Would you mind if I come along?” Wilson said.

  The African leaned back and smiled. “How much money do you have?”

  12

  Tulj drove an old Fiat three-wheel cycle truck with a four-and-a-half-foot open bed and a single wavering headlight. The brothers sat pressed knee to knee in the small cab up front; Wilson took the back and held on as best he could. Through rust holes in the bed, he could see the pavement passing beneath, and when they slowed down, he caught the gassy stink of exhaust. The air and the stars did him good. He leaned back, sobering, against the curve of the cab as they pulled over the Lacey Memorial Bridge onto the interstate.

  Tonight, Wilson’s dread manifested itself as a dull pulse of pain in his gut like a toothache. He had lived so much of his life by schedules and routine; he took the same bus at the same time, went to the same office, and did mostly the same things. Until recently there had been few surprises. It was through this sad and careful voodoo that he had sought to keep the dread at bay. But since the discovery of the tarot cards his routines had failed him. He knew something terrible was on its way, closing in; a clinching in his gut told him so: Even the blandest of foods, the egg salad sandwich he ate for lunch every day, gave him indigestion. He was deciding all at once, tonight, with the stars up and the wind in his hair, that perhaps it was time to lead a different sort of life.

  Tulj and N’fumi were arguing loudly in the cab and passing a bottle of tejiyaa back and forth. The Fiat swerved dangerously when they pulled off the highway at Lazarus onto Route 27 and into the confusion of cross-state traffic. Wilson sat up and watched the lights of the city recede behind the nearest tree line; soon there was little more than a dull glow in the sky. Ten minutes later they veered off 27 onto a fire road and then slowed and turned up a dirt track that bumped away into the pine and frog darkness of the Falling Rock Nature Preserve. Soon the stars were lost in the branches, and Wilson heard the hoot and scratch of animals in the brush and the slow, long-needled rustling of the firs. About fifteen minutes passed on Wilson’s illuminated digital watch before the truck emerged from the trees into a mud clearing full of cars. At the center, a large cinder-block bunkhouse showed a row of small yellow-lit windows just beneath the eaves.

  Wilson hopped out of the bed and stood on the loamy ground, hands in his pockets, waiting for the Africans to disengage themselves from the cramped interior. The Fiat was so small, like one of those clown cars at the circus. A dull thrumming, which was the sound of men’s voices, came from inside the bunkhouse. Thin, silvery clouds of smoke steamed out of the yellow windows into the clear night air.

  “Please, can you lend a hand here?” It was Tulj from the compartment of the Fiat.

  Wilson stepped over to the passenger-side window and saw that N’fumi had passed out, mouth open against the dashboard.

  “Too much tejiyaa,” Tulj said. “He is young yet; he does not know how to handle his liquor.”

  “What the hell,” Wilson said. “Twenty-one. Everyone’s allowed to float the boat at twenty-one.”

  “Yes, but I do not want him floating the boat, as you say, in the front seat of my truck,” Tulj said.

  They managed to carry N’fumi around to the back. Tulj let down the gate, and they hoisted him up into the bed and covered him to the chin with an old tarp. N’fumi’s legs stuck out a good two feet over the end, one of his sandals dangling off his foot. The effect was comic or sinister, Wilson couldn’t decide which.

  “My foolish brother is best off sleeping here,” Tulj said. “Meanwhile, we will proceed to the fights. Have you ever attended such an event in the past?”

  Wilson was going to lie, then thought better of it and shook his head.

  “It is much fun,” the African said, then he laughed. “I wasted my youth in such places, at home in the days before the Time of Killing.”

  13

  The bunkhouse was packed to the walls with men of many nationalities. Wilson looked around for Cricket but did not see a single woman in the crowd.

  There were Bupandans, Nigerians, Haitians, Salvadorans, Mexicans, Brazilians, Vietnamese, even a few white shack-trash rednecks wearing plaid workshirts and vinyl mesh baseball caps plastered with rebel flags, all gathered around a dirt pit about forty feet across, covered with blood and straw and feathers. The feathers were everywhere, floating on clouds of cigarette smoke in the yellow light. The smell was overpowering. At first, Wilson could hardly breathe. Then, suddenly, he grew used to the stifling, flatulent air.

  Tulj managed to push his way up to the railing over the pit, and Wilson took a position beside him. Sugarcane liquor in cloudy vinegar bottles was passed forward from the back of the crowd. Wilson drank and wiped his mouth on his hand as he’d seen someone do in a movie, and he passed it to Tulj, who drank and passed it to someone else. A dangerous, testosterone-charged atmosphere hung about the place, but it was not alien or unfamiliar. Here, Wilson got the sense, men were doing what they did best: drinking, fighting, gambling on violent sport.

  After a while two squat Salvadorans climbed into the pit. A roar went up from the crowd. The Salvadorans wore blood-spattered white T-shirts, and each carried a wire cage that contained a big, sleek, blue-feathered rooster. The birds were removed from their cages and held tightly beak to beak against the straw. Vicious-looking steel spurs glinted dully from their legs. They squawked and scratched and tried to get at each other as the betting went down around the pit. A half dozen dark youths of uncertain ethnicity ran through the crowd collecting bets, which they marked with playing cards torn in half. The dirty concrete floor was stuck with the torn cards and pink handbills in five languages. Broken glass crunched under Wilson’s shoes.

  Wilson was surprised. He had expected men, not birds. He decided that these were probably not the fights that Cricket had been talking about; then he changed his mind. Until the dogs two weeks ago, he hadn’t been to a track in all the years since his father’s death. This was the second gambling event he had attended in a month. In a way, Cricket was like a voice calling him back to his past.

  “In the mission school the Reverend Father told us a story about the fighting cocks,” Tulj said now in Wilson’s ear.

  “Yeah?” Wilson said.

  “There was once a great soldier in the country of Ancient Greece called Themistocles. He was in charge of fighting another country neighboring. I forget which—”

  “Persia,” Wilson said.

  “Ah, you know this story?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You see, the Ancient Greek Themistocles, he was moving his army to the front when he came upon two wild cocks in a field fighting each other to the death. He stopped and showed the brave animals to his troops. ‘Watch how they fight to the death,’ he said. ‘Take heed, my men!’ The next day the army, though badly outnumbered, won the battle, a great battle. This is how we may draw inspiration from animals.…” Tulj went on to explain what to look for when betting on cocks: clear eyes, good stance, size, and, most important, whether the bird evacuated its bowels just before the match.

  “If he does his business, it is very good luck indeed,” Tulj said. “Makes him lighter, faster, ready to fight.…”

  Tulj signaled a boy, who rushed over to take their bets. The boy was dark-skinned, big-eyed, Guatemalan or Mexican. He looked like Dondi, the Italian orphan, from Sunday comics of Wilson’s youth.

  “Señor,” he said to Wilson.

  Wilson turned to Tulj, who shrugged and pul
led out his pockets.

  “All spent on tejiyaa and kif and panu,” Tulj said, putting his mutilated hand on Wilson’s shoulder. “The honor of my brother’s name day is with you, my new friend.”

  Wilson took out his wallet. He had a hundred dollars and some change, his walking money till the fifteenth.

  “¿Cuánto, señor?” the boy said, impatient. “Ándale”

  Wilson looked into the pit, and in that moment the smaller of the two birds dropped two perfectly round chicken turds.

  “That one,” Wilson said, and on an impulse handed the boy everything he had. The boy made a quick notation on the back of a playing card, tore it in half, gave half to Wilson, then ran off into the crowd. Wilson looked at the torn card in his hand. The king of diamonds. “Here goes nothing,” he said to Tulj.

  The African smiled.

  A moment later, the handlers released their birds, jumped back, and the fight was on. Wilson saw little more than the quick flash of steel, flying feathers, and the spurting blood. The whole thing was over in less than a minute. The victorious bird, one wing hanging limp, reared back, flapped his good wing, and made an appalling crowing sound. Then he began to peck at the corpse of his opponent. Wilson won six hundred dollars, the odds on this bird, the long shot at six-to-one. In the next match he bet everything again and won again at seven-to-one. Then he won at three-to-one and five-to-one. There was money stuffed in the pockets of his jacket, in his khakis. He was dazed, his face was hot, he couldn’t seem to breathe right, he hardly knew what he was doing, but he wanted to win—this was the feeling that had come over him at the dog track. He felt the same metallic taste in his mouth, the same sweaty palms. It couldn’t be real, but the money kept on coming.

  An hour later, in a lull between fights, his head cleared a little, and he stepped back from the pit to see that a space had cleared around him. He stood alone in a circle of rough, dangerous-looking men. From across the room other men watched him, knives gleaming from their belts. Tulj was nowhere in sight. Wilson figured quickly that he had something like eight thousand dollars in his pocket. Directly on the other side of the pit a man in a white linen suit tapped long fingernails against the railing. Wilson looked up. The man’s sand-colored skin gleamed like oiled wood. His hair was jet black; his eyes a weird shade of dark blue. His suit held the shimmer of summer nights in a place that no one could afford.

  “So, you like to bet against my birds?” the man said in a voice that was little more than a whisper.

  “Huh?” Wilson said.

  “Who sent you?” the man said.

  “You’re kidding,” Wilson said.

  The man nodded as if he knew something that Wilson didn’t know. Then he waved a hand through the air and whispered, “Good luck,” in a way that made Wilson shudder.

  When the boy came up to take the bets for the next fight, Wilson palmed off a fifty-dollar bill.

  “The guy across the way in the white suit,” Wilson said. “Know anything?”

  The boy glanced quickly over his shoulder, and his mouth drooped. “El Señor Hidalgo,” he said, and shook his head. “Muy peligroso. You better lose this time, I think.”

  Wilson felt a tightening in his upper bowels and resolved to follow the boy’s advice. The match was between a scrawny bird with half a comb and a large, glossy specimen that looked like the bellicose rooster pictured on French stamps as the symbol of the French Republic. For some reason the odds were only two-to-one in favor of the larger bird. Wilson bet everything to lose on the scrawny bird and won sixteen thousand dollars. An angry hiss went up from the crowd. The man in the white suit across the way dug his long nails into the soft wood of the railing. One of them broke off, a small snapping sound, before he turned away. Wilson’s heart sank as the boy came over, dragging a mound of cash in a torn cardboard box. With or without the sixteen grand, he knew he wouldn’t get out of this place alive. The world hates nothing so much as a lucky man. He looked around, and suddenly Tulj was at his elbow.

  “If you were planning to win so bloody much money, you should have brought an army,” the African said angrily, “like the Ancient Greek Themistocles.”

  “Christ, let’s get out of here,” Wilson said, but the African backed away, making an X with his forearms.

  “I did not live through the Time of Killing in Bupanda to die for a box full of paper in a country I do not love,” he said. “I am sorry.” Then he turned and hurried away through the crowd.

  Wilson lingered desperately at the rail. He counted the crumpled money in the box, made neat stacks, and folded all of it into the pockets of his jacket. He was vaguely aware of the man in the white suit talking intensely to a group of thugs at the door. Two of them wore cowboy hats and shirts with the sleeves torn off. Another one, his face covered with strange hairy growths, sported the kind of gangsterish borsalino once known as a Little Caesar. Wilson’s dread had taken palpable form at last. A crowd of strangers, a man in an expensive white suit, a half dozen cheap hoodlums, sixteen thousand dollars in cash. He almost laughed out loud. It was like the fable about the appointment in Samarra: A rich man, told that Death is near, goes to the next town, Samarra, to escape his fate. There, of course, Death is waiting for him in the marketplace.

  Wilson held on awhile longer, till the place cleared out. Then he turned heavily toward the door. But before he rounded the pit, the Guatemalan boy who had taken the bets was at his side.

  “Señor, por favor,” the boy said.

  “What’s that?” Wilson said.

  “The beck door,” the boy said. “Trees, dark, vámosnos.” And he made a whistling noise through his teeth.

  Wilson followed him without thinking. They went behind a curtain into a small utility room where two Guatemalan men sat at a picnic table counting the house take. Taped to the wall behind them, an airbrushed beaver shot from Hustler and a Catholic prayer card showing the Virgin of Guadalupe balanced delicately on her sliver of moon. The men grunted when Wilson went past; they didn’t say anything. The rusty back door swung out onto the parking lot. The night burned beautiful with stars. The trees loomed, a dark refuge, twenty-five yards away across the dull backs of the cars. Wilson hesitated on the threshold.

  “Vámosnos, trees, dark,” the boy said, and tried to push Wilson into the night.

  “Take it easy,” Wilson said. He didn’t want to be rushed into this, his last sky full of stars, his last breath. When he stepped down into the parking lot, the door slammed behind him, and he knew it was a trap. Still, he took it slow and easy between the cars. Though he did not smoke much, he wished he had a cigarette; it is better to meet such moments with a cigarette in hand. Two groups of men, about a dozen in all, stepped out from either side of the bunkhouse. They fanned out, flanking him, intending to catch him in the last stretch before the trees. Their boots made squelchy noises on the soft ground. Wilson heard the sound of their breath and from somewhere, like hope departing, the distant howl of a freight train. They were close now, wolves loping alongside. Wilson reached a small open space between the cars. There, two men blocked the way, arms crossed, huge, just ahead. It came down to this last second, this silence, the woods waiting.

  Then, the sound of shattering glass, gunshots, and an uproar from the front side of the bunkhouse. A high, unnatural screaming was followed by more screams, coming closer. Wilson swung toward this sound; the men following Wilson swung toward this sound. In the next second, a black man wearing one sandal came running wildly around the corner, pursued by fifteen others. Wilson saw the yellow soccer balls on the man’s shirt and the purple shorts and knew it to be N’fumi. Ten more dragged Tulj along at a distance. The side of his face was bloody, his clothing torn.

  The men tackled N’fumi in the mud just beyond the last row of cars. Three of them grabbed him by the legs; two others took his arms. Wilson could see that they were Africans, heard them speak what sounded like Bupandan. One of the men drew out a long knife with a serrated edge and held it against N’fumi’s
throat. The poor boy’s eyes rolled with fear in the starlight. In an instant there was a crowd. A hundred men watched from between the cars, their faces bright with the prospect of more blood. Tulj was dragged up, made to kneel beside his brother. Wilson didn’t need to be told what was going on. There was a large Anda community in nearby Parkerville. Like the Bupus, they had fled the hatred and tragedy of their unfortunate nation, only to bring all of it along in their bellies, in their dark hearts.

  Someone switched on the headlights of a car, and the scene was illuminated in a harsh white light. The Anda holding the knife to N’fumi’s throat shouted a last obscenity and made ready to draw its serrated edge across the boy’s jugular. A man across the way—it didn’t matter who—licked his lips in anticipation. In that instant, an unnamed righteousness welled up inside Wilson’s breast. Without thinking, he put his foot on the bumper of the nearest car, a battered sixties-era Mercury, jumped onto the hood of a Chevy Impala of similar vintage, and in another short hop stood directly overlooking the action.

  “Stop!” Wilson cried, and something in his voice made the Anda hesitate. “You heard me! Put down that knife!” This sounded foolish to Wilson’s ears, but he didn’t know what else to say.

  The Anda kept the knife at N’fumi’s throat and looked up lazily. “What you want here, mistah?” he said. “You got your cash won, now go home. Sure, if you can get home.” Then he snickered, an evil rattling sound at the back of his throat.

  “Let me ask you something,” Wilson said, the same tone of authority in his voice. “How much is a man’s life worth to you?”

  The Anda blinked, his eyes bloodshot from drink and cigarettes, his lids wrinkly as old Morocco leather.

  “I asked you a question,” Wilson persisted. “How much?”

  The Anda shrugged. “This is a pig,” he said, slapping N’fumi’s neck with the flat side of the knife. “A pig and the son of a pig. A stinking Bupu. In my country we hunt them down and cut their throats like pigs.”