The Pirate's Daughter

by Robert Girardi

  “O.K.,” she said. “That’s all you get for a while.”

  “What do you mean?” Wilson said.

  “Two reasons,” Cricket said. “First, you’re not ready yet. You’re going to be thinking about your girlfriend for a while, I can tell. Second—and this is important—we have to pretend we’re brother and sister. That’s what your papers say, and that’s what I told the captain of the Compound Interest. He’s a tough old bastard named Amundsen, and if he finds out any different, he’ll put us ashore the first chance he gets.”

  “You’re crazy,” Wilson said.

  “No. It’s because the last couple they had aboard jumped ship to get married. I told you, remember? He doesn’t want that happening again. We’ve got to keep up appearances at least until we make the Azores. O.K.? That’s only a few weeks away.”

  “Why the Azores?” Wilson said, but Cricket wouldn’t answer. She kissed him one more time and leaned back and took up the bottle of wine. She pulled Wilson’s glass across the tablecloth, filled it, pushed it back again. “Drink up,” she said. “We’ve got to be aboard the Compound Interest for the midnight tide.”

  They finished the wine quickly, then stood and shouldered their bags and walked up the pier, in and out of the lamplight, quiet as two conspirators, the sea murmuring its furtive promises to the night at their backs.

  6

  Pale lights along the dark river. The jungle infested with silence. Small men in the underbrush hold flashlights beneath their chins like children at a Halloween party. Then, a screaming wells up out of nowhere, and the full moon above beats red against a black sky, and the river begins to froth and boil, something ancient rising to the surface, something terrible—

  Wilson snapped awake in an unfamiliar gloom, unable to breathe, his T-shirt drenched with sweat. He couldn’t see a thing. From all around came a deep, monotonous hush, familiar and alien at once, and the unmistakable surge of forward motion. The place where he lay was stuffy and windowless, and there was the sound of someone else breathing in the blackness nearby. If he didn’t get a lung full of fresh air soon, Wilson knew he would suffocate.

  In a panic he threw himself to the floor and stumbled off blindly. Instinct led him down a narrow corridor and up a ladder and at last out into the salt wind and the hazy dark of a warm night at sea. Here his lungs opened, and he fell back gasping against the bulkhead, and the events of the last twenty-four hours came flooding back. He was aboard the Compound Interest, making south-southeast across the Atlantic for the Azores. He had shipped out at midnight, chasing a beautiful woman and because life onshore had become intolerable to him—and for other reasons that were still not clear in his mind. He was sure the Tightness of his decision would assert itself once this momentary panic subsided. After all, wasn’t the possibility of drowning in a storm at sea better than drowning slowly in the day-to-dayness of life?

  When Wilson could breathe again, he looked up and found himself facing the stern of the vessel, its white, frothy wake vanishing in the ocean black like a road disappearing in a snowstorm. But the night and the ocean and the ship’s running lights could not obscure the vast bulk of the continent they were leaving behind. Just there, beyond the rim of darkness, a darker shape where the sky still held the light of cities. Wilson thought of baseball diamonds lit for night games, cocktail hour in a crowded bar, highways bumper to bumper with taillights at rush hour, and he thought of Andrea sleeping alone tonight, and he felt the terrible weight of the things he was leaving behind.

  “Hey there! Why aren’t you below with the rest?”

  Wilson swung around to face a short barrel of a man standing just the other side of the hatchway. The man’s wind-weathered face was covered with a bush of gray hair that seemed to grow in every direction. He wore a captain’s hat, a garish yellow plastic rain slicker, and blue shorts. Thick, hairy legs ended abruptly in a pair of worn leather boat shoes. Wilson didn’t need to be told that this was Captain Amundsen.

  “I asked you a question, mister!” The captain took an aggressive step forward. “You’re on my watch. Ship’s rules, no extraneous crew members taking their leisure topside during the night.”

  Wilson stuttered out a response. He had needed some fresh air, he said. He was sorry. Hard to breathe below.

  The captain stepped down to get a closer look. Wilson was suddenly aware of his own state of undress: a pair of green boxers printed with pink rabbits that had been a present from Andrea one Easter, a ratty old Ashland College T-shirt, faded and full of holes. His bare feet felt cold against the scrubbed wood of the deck.

  “Come aboard tonight with Cricket Page?”

  “Yes, sir,” Wilson said.

  “You’re the brother.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The captain scratched his beard. “That girl’s one of the best damn natural sailors I’ve ever seen,” he said. “And I’ve seen a few. I hope it runs in the family.”

  “I hope so too, sir,” Wilson said.

  “Of course, her navigational skills could use a little improving.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The captain scratched his beard again. “Well, what can it hurt?” he said. “I was just about to light a cigar.”

  They went up the deck to the navigational octagon, a sunken area at the center of the ship between the two masts, protected on seven sides by a thick Plexiglas cowling. The Mylar beach umbrella sails folded and unfolded above, and the vessel stayed an even course in the prevailing light winds. A foul-weather top lay open to the sky bleary with indistinct stars. The ship’s wheel, no larger than steering wheels found in ordinary sedans, was surrounded by a bewildering array of glowing radar screens and monitors showing crisp and colorful digital readouts. Gone the rope and wood, gone the brass instrumentation of former days. A computer terminal glowed quietly to one side, its clear plastic keys lit from within.

  They settled on waterproof flotation pillows on a polished aluminum bench that made up one angle of the octagon. The captain crossed his short legs with some difficulty, reached into the pocket of his windbreaker, and withdrew a small wooden box. Inside lay a half dozen fragrant finger-size cigars, wrapped in gold foil.

  “Cubans,” he said. “Got ’em in Havana.” He took a cigar out of the box, unwrapped it carefully, bit off the end, and lit up with the cigarette lighter from the console. Then he handed one to Wilson. For a while, the two of them sat back and drew on the cigars and watched clouds of pungent smoke blow off into the night.

  “There’s nothing like a good cigar,” the captain said at last. “Everything else will fail you or grow wearisome, including women. But a good cigar, hell, that’s a thing a man will never tire of.”

  Wilson smiled. A cool breeze from the west touched his face with gentle curiosity. Cigars reminded Wilson of his father. Years after his father’s death in the wreck of the four forty-five, Wilson inherited an old cardboard suitcase of the man’s possessions from his great-aunt’s estate. The suitcase had contained rubber-banded piles of yellowed racing forms, six small notebooks heavy with mathematical formulas for placing bets at certain tracks, stock certificates issued by companies long since bankrupt—but there had also been a handful of silver foreign coins and a fancy box of imported cigars. These had been the extent of his patrimony, fifty hand-rolled Coronado Supremos, each sealed with wax in airtight glass tubes. He had smoked them slowly over the years, always lighting up at four forty-five exactly in honor of his father, at one of the outdoor cafés in Buptown or the Bend. Now just one cigar remained, nestled in its tube with his spare socks at the bottom of the closet in his apartment back home.

  Wilson told the captain about the inherited Coronados with the theatrical gesticulations that cigars often seem to inspire in the amateur smoker. “When I get home again, and who knows how long that will be,” Wilson said, waving his cigar in a rueful arc, “I’ll buy a glass of the sixty-five-dollar Armagnac on the patio at the Cat and Cradle, and I’ll smoke that last cigar very, very slowly.”<
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  The captain’s cigar showed a steady glowing coal in the darkness. “At least you got something from your father,” he said. “I never got anything from mine but a kick in the ass. My old man was a bishop of the Reformed Lutheran Danish Church. You weren’t arguing with him, you know; you were arguing with God. When I was twelve, I ran off to Copenhagen and took ship for Africa. The sea receives all kinds of orphans, mister.”

  The captain was from a small fishing village on the bleak Frisian coast of Denmark, where it rains most of the year. When the sun comes out, the people weep, get drunk, make love to their neighbors’ wives, dance naked in the streets. The beauty of sunny days is too much for them; they go slightly mad until the rain comes back again. The captain had served on American vessels for thirty years; his English was perfect, bore no trace of the gray, rockbound coasts of his youth.

  “Amundsen,” Wilson said. “Any relation to the man who beat Scott to the pole?”

  “None,” the captain said. “A bunch of pasty-faced churchmen in my family for generations. I’m the first in a hundred fifty years to get some wind in my hair.”

  The sky above the sails brightened. A dull purple grew on the horizon, and the running lights began to dim. A button on the navigational console blinked on and off three times. Captain Amundsen threw up his hands.

  “These damn computers,” he said. “They tell me dawn is coming as if I couldn’t see it for myself.” He stood, made some quick adjustments, and turned to Wilson. “You’d better get below. Get some sleep. It’ll start soon enough.”

  Just as Wilson reached the hatchway, the wind picked up and the sails spread themselves above like wings, and in that breathy silence peculiar to wind and sail, the vessel heeled in a straight run toward morning.

  7

  The Compound Interest was temporary home to four human beings and a rumor, Dwight Ackerman. Wilson spent hours every morning toiling beneath the iron thumb of a diminutive Vietnamese cook named Nguyen, but the man they cooked for didn’t seem to exist outside the prodigious appetite that made Wilson’s presence on the ship necessary.

  They fed their invisible master like a wild animal in the zoo. Once a day, a little after noon, Nguyen delivered a massive tray of food into the mouth of Ackerman’s cave—the forward suite of stateroom and office from which the billionaire never emerged. The plates came back an hour later, licked clean. Wilson pictured a freak the size of a house stuffed into the bow of the ship, a behemoth wearing a polo shirt big as a tent, arms like joints of ham. Or nothing, a devouring void.

  The routine was always the same. Wilson rose bleary-eyed at 5:00 A.M. and stumbled through the gloom to the galley. Still half asleep, he attempted to decipher instructions written in yellow chalk in the cook’s barely legible scrawl on a chalkboard fixed to the bulkhead. The next two hours were filled with any number of menial tasks in preparation for the onslaught to come. Wilson lit pilot lights, sharpened knives, chopped onions and a dozen other vegetables, beat eggs, gutted fish, shelled shrimp, deboned chicken, tenderized cuts of pork and beef with a leather mallet, and threw all the scraps out to sea for the sharks following in the vessel’s wake.

  At 7:00 A.M. exactly, Nguyen appeared, wearing a spotless white double-breasted chef’s jacket and improbably tall chef’s hat, and the real work began on the menu du jour, usually Vietnamese in character: On a typical morning, they made spring rolls, lemon chicken, shrimp curry, barbecued spareribs, cinnamon beef, Saigon fish soup, scallion pancakes, boiled dumplings, twice-cooked pork—these just a sampling of the complicated dishes that could easily exhaust the entire repertoire of a good-sized Vietnamese restaurant back home. Ackerman had become addicted to the subtle cuisine of Indo-China while serving in the Quartermaster Corps during the War.

  Wilson’s job was more like battle than cooking. The little cook barked orders and darted around as if he were under artillery fire at Khe Sanh. The galley was a tight, airless corridor squeezed between the ready room and the forward hold. Stainless steel gas burners, a convection oven, and a refrigerator filled half the narrow space; small as he was, Nguyen managed to fill the other half with the force of his personality. He looked about thirty-eight but was probably closer to sixty, his skin brown and thick as an animal hide, after the manner of men who have spent too much time out of doors. A long, ragged scar bisected his left eyebrow; the back of his right hand showed a faded tattoo of the Legion’s five-pointed bomb insignia, surmounted by the regimental motto Marche ou Crève.

  To the natural peevishness of the chef, Nguyen added the career soldier’s love of discipline. He had learned his trade from the French in the days before Dien-Bien-Phu, had cooked for a Foreign Legion regimental mess, then for the American Army before Ackerman found him in a restaurant in Saigon. His chef’s whites didn’t seem to suit him. Wilson saw the man squatting in the jungle in camouflage and khaki, Sten gun slung over one shoulder.

  Of course Wilson could do nothing right. He diced and deboned too slow, couldn’t sauté an onion, didn’t even know how to scrub pots properly.

  “I think you raised by a family of stupids, joe!” Nguyen screamed at Wilson on his first day as cook’s assistant. “How you get cook license? You listen too much Buffalo Springfield, I think! And Mr. Jimi Hendrix! I think you smoke Mary Jane before work and you hear rock and roll banging around your head when you supposed to concentrate on food! Purple Haze in your brain right now, yes?”

  The cook had received the impression during the Vietnam War that Americans spent most of their time doing drugs and listening to loud music. Not only had these vices lost the U.S. a sure victory, Nguyen insisted, but they continued to foul up the lives of Americans everywhere.

  “In States you all a bunch of drugged-out stupids wearing headphones,” the cook said. “It’s amazing you can still take a piss without messing your pants!” Wilson tried to argue with him, but soon learned to keep his mouth shut. These theories, based on firsthand experience, circa 1967, were now set in stone. No amount of rational argument could break them down. Besides, there was just enough truth in what the cook said to dull Wilson’s enthusiasm. He remembered all too well the bright eccentric kids in high school who blew their minds out on bong-hits and Thai stick, and ended up dumb and impotent or dead or worse—sorting packages on the line for the postal service for the rest of their lives.

  After cleanup, at about two every afternoon, Wilson went topside and assumed the role of ordinary seaman. His hours on deck beneath the spreading Mylar and the bright sky more than made up for the heated torment of the galley. The ocean was a great field of poppies whose colors changed with the changing light: ultramarine at three, iris blue at five, lavender at sunset, then black with the darkness that dropped down above the masts like velvet cloth over a parrot cage. There seemed no end to the water and sky, the horizon a pale demarcation at the farthest distance.

  Wilson was speechless in the face of this severe beauty, dazzled by wind and sun and stars, by the immense, lovely emptiness of the waves. When on watch in the bow cage, his rapt attention to the simplicity of his new environment achieved something like the intensity of meditation, and it seemed that the old fearful, dread-haunted Wilson was emptying out at last, filling up with someone new. An untested person forming like a golem out of ocean air and the common mulch of experience and dreams.

  Ten days passed like this. The Compound Interest cut like an arrow through the brightness, sails folding and unfolding in the wind, meal following meal in the cramped galley below. Wilson and Cricket rarely exchanged a single word. He had her promise that things would change after the Azores and didn’t worry. She bunked in separate quarters, kept up a sisterly demeanor. But there wasn’t much time to think about the situation—always something to do on board ship.

  The good sailing held, the following winds and fast seas. Wilson slept the deep sleep of sailors that comes from weary limbs and sea air. The ocean lulled and unwound itself on all sides. Beneath the keel, the sand and shells of the continental shel
f gave way to the dark, pure water, unimaginably deep.

  8

  On the eleventh day out, in the morning, the Compound Interest crossed the twenty-seventh parallel at forty degrees west and passed from high winds and bright skies into the morass of seaweed and current-borne garbage known as the Sargasso Sea. The vessel sat becalmed, in the long hours after ten o’clock, awaiting the slightest wind. The beach umbrella sails flexed, found nothing, and settled back again with a mechanical sigh.

  “I’ve never known the dirty stuff to come this far north,” Captain Amundsen said. His charts showed good winds at this latitude, clear sailing. Wilson looked up from the brightwork, laid chamois and saddle soap aside for a few minutes, and came into the navigational octagon for a cigar. The captain did not like to smoke alone. The sea makes some men quiet, others garrulous; the captain was one of the latter.

  “In my lifetime, I’ve seen the ocean’s currents changing, the Sargasso getting nastier.” He poked his Cuban in Wilson’s direction. “Used to be just weeds. Now it’s full of junk. Petrochemical waste floating along in rusty fifty-gallon drums—you name it. Look at this shit. It’s the ocean’s toilet.”

  Wilson shielded his eyes against the flat yellow sky. Gulls hung motionless above the masts. A powerful stench of dead fish filled his nostrils; clumps of tangled seaweed floated along like giant turds. The black water was foul with crumpled cans and plastic jugs, six-pack holders, and other bits of trash. A broken dining room chair floated by upright, its legs tangled in a clump of seaweed big as a traffic island.

  “How does all this stuff get here?” Wilson said. “We’re in the middle of the ocean.”

  “I’ve seen a busted piano, even the burnt-out hulk of a Volkswagen floating on the weeds,” the captain said, studying the distance for a gust of wind. “Once saw three sealed wooden coffins bobbing along like corks. The currents bring it in. Your garbage scows come out of the major cities and dump illegally, just beyond the twelve-mile limit. The stuff has to end up somewhere. Here it is.”