The Pirate's Daughter

by Robert Girardi

  “When I was fifteen, he found me a berth as ordinary seaman on the Jesus of Lubeck, a rusty hulk of a cargo ship registered out of Rigala in Bupanda. Dad was good friends with the owner, a man we all called the Portugee, a pretty slick gambler who used to play a lot of high-stakes poker at Mazep’s. The Portugee was on a losing streak that year, so he came on as captain to get himself away from the cards. That first berth was tough. Real back-breaking work. It was the one that ruined my hands. The Portugee worked me really hard, topside in all sorts of weather. And he was an unpredictable bastard because he smoked a lot of opium—black, sticky stuff he got in jars from Thailand. I was indentured to him for the next four years, supposedly under his protection. What a strange character! Too smart for life at sea, spoke sixteen languages. When he wasn’t high, he was bored, and one day he decided to improve my education, as he put it. See, I had pretty much skipped school after the eighth grade.

  “His cabin was full of books. He had everything, all the classics, in English, French, Portuguese, Spanish—you name it. We studied four and a half hours a day, starting just before dawn, every day for three years. Maybe that’s why I hate all that crap to this day. Greek at four A.M. after barely two hours’ sleep, followed by a day of full watches, then more of the same. Still, when I shipped out on that tub, I could hardly read the newspaper. Four years later I was reading Aristotle and Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Byron. He was a big fan of Byron. I hate Byron.

  “Then, one day, the Portugee decided he couldn’t teach me anything more on his own and said it was time I go to a real school. He wanted me to go to college. I couldn’t believe it. I was a sailor; that’s all I ever wanted to be, I told him. But later, on the return crossing from Africa, he put in a course north-northeast, and we sailed into the harbor at New York City, and we tied up at old Pier 26, that used to belong to the old Flying Cloud Line, and we got into a cab and drove up the West Side Highway to St. Mary of the Flowers College, and he put me out on the sidewalk with my bag.”

  Cricket slugged back the wine left in her glass and stared out at the moss and the wet in the garden. The moss was the richest green imaginable and looked softer than any bed.

  “Go ahead …” Wilson finally had to prompt her.

  “So I was stuck at St. Mary’s for two years, with the Portugee paying all the bills. It was horrible, worse than anything I had experienced at sea. I was ostracized, humiliated. The place wasn’t much of a college. It was really a finishing school for rich, stupid New York chicks, who knew how to make a girl from the outside feel lower than shit. I wasn’t like them at all. I had just come from the deck of a gypsy cargo ship, for Christ’s sake! And before that, from the most obscure and backward islands in the Gulf of Mexico.

  “The rich, I think, are the crudest people alive; that’s how they get their money. It didn’t take the girls long to start in on me. My hands gave me away, like a servant trying to pass as an aristocrat in an eighteenth-century novel. I tried to get them massaged, manicured, but it was no use. I’m a big, tough girl, and I’m pretty touchy. If I heard one thing I didn’t like, one peep out of one of those bowheads, I’d stick my fist in her face. ‘You see this fist?’ I’d say; then I’d let her have it. It got to the point where no one would speak to me, not a word—the silent treatment.

  “Finally, I couldn’t stand any more, and I robbed the poor box in the chapel right before Christmas, when it was stuffed full of donations from their fat-cat parents, and I ran off. I put my name up on the board at the New York Yacht Club and holed up in a cheap motel in Newark until I found a berth on a yacht bound for Valparaiso. And it was only six months later, back at sea in the middle of a storm, that I started to feel safe again. The wind was howling, and the ship was falling into the waves, and there I was, laughing my head off. The crew thought I was nuts. But I’m telling you, anything, even drowning, was better than the girls at St. Mary of the Flowers.”

  15

  When the wine was gone, Wilson and Cricket went out to walk the streets of the town. Angra seemed like a dream in the misty light, its pastel buildings dulled by the fog and the rain. They walked down the wet steps into the lower town and along the commercial thoroughfares.

  Here the street lamps were lit though it was barely four in the afternoon. Smoked sausages and duck carcasses hung in the windows of restaurants. Fishermen stood at the tin counters of cafés, wearing thick, oily turtleneck sweaters. They stared through the plate glass at the heavy sky, their eyes dark as a winter sea. Cricket pulled close to Wilson; the weather had turned cold with the rain. He pressed her hard palm into his soft one. The world was a cruel place; everyone knew that.

  They stopped at a bar marked with the sign of the mermaid, filled with fishermen and drunken farmers from the interior. The floors of the place were old and warped, the white walls gray with years of cigarette smoke. They found a dark corner where the bar jutted out at an angle. Wilson bought two digestifs—Doulm, a liquor made from the figs that grow wild on the island. It was bitter and strong as grain alcohol.

  “Wow,” Wilson said, pounding his chest.

  Cricket downed hers quickly without comment and put her glass on the scratched tin counter of the bar.

  “Turn around,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t want you looking at me when I say what I’m going to say.”

  Puzzled, Wilson turned to face the wall. Cricket stepped close behind, her mouth an inch from his ear. She spoke quickly, and there was a seriousness in her voice that struck a grim, hollow note inside him.

  “Whatever happens on the rest of this voyage, you’ve got to stick by me,” she said. “You’ve got to stick by me and do exactly what I tell you to do.”

  Wilson tried to turn and face her, but she put her rough hands on his shoulders and kept him facing the wall.

  “What are you talking about? What’s going to happen?” Wilson said, a note of panic in his voice.

  “Sh! No questions! By saying anything to you now, I am violating a confidence that could mean my life. If you’re not up to a little trouble, if your heart is weak, if you can walk away and not look back, now’s your chance to do it.”

  Wilson stood rigid, unmoving. His hands felt clammy, his mouth dry. His dread told him to run. But what if the dread was playing a trick on him and he was running right back into its arms?

  “Cricket—”

  Her grip tightened on his shoulder. “No questions,” she said, then she continued in a softer voice. “If you want to leave now, it’s O.K. We had a great couple of days; a lot of people never even get that. You can go back to the pension and pack your things and fly out of here back to the States in the morning. If you don’t have enough money, I’ll give you some. But if you want to come with me, just turn around and kiss me and don’t say a word about this conversation now or ever. Take a minute to breathe quietly, and when you’re finished breathing quietly, decide. I know it’s not fair, but it’s the best I can do.”

  Wilson’s shoulders sagged. Despite himself, his breath came in short gasps. Suddenly he heard the raucous din of the bar, the men talking and laughing, the accordionist in the corner playing “Lady of Spain”; then just as suddenly, all of it was reduced to a faint buzzing in his ears. He closed his eyes and tried to look into the darkness of what would come ahead, but his intellect could not penetrate the cloud of unknowing. From somewhere near at hand came the shattering of a glass. Without thinking, he turned and took Cricket in his arms and kissed her on the lips.

  PART THREE

  THE

  PIRATE’S

  DAUGHTER

  1

  Twelve hours out of Angra do Heroismo’s white harbor, just past the barren rock of Formigas, at sunset, the sky turned the color of dried blood, and the sea went brown and mottled as the shell of a turtle.

  Wilson had never seen sea and sky such colors—a whole palette of warning.

  “Thirty years of sailing, you realize the sky is hardly ever blue,” the capt
ain said, a grim tone in his voice. “When it gets like this, you know there’s trouble on the way. Going to be one for the record books. A real killer.”

  The Compound Interest pitched and rolled in the swells. Its beach umbrella sails stuttered nervously in the wind. All of a sudden, the shortwave was full of faraway distress signals, anguished voices calling out in the naked, unintelligible language of men in fear for their lives. A wild front of rain, hail, and hurricane-force wind was blowing off the Serengeti and across the Atlantic to form a solid gray barrier of terrible weather one thousand miles wide and two thousand miles long. The captain bent an ear to the receiver as a crazy riff of Morse code came across the wire, then he shook his head and switched off the set.

  “There’s nothing to do now but plow right through it,” he said. “It’s heading right for us, coming fast. If we turn back, it will catch us from behind. Let’s put up the bubble and see what this tub can do.”

  They took down the canvas foul-weather cowling, retracted the beach umbrella sails, and switched over to the turbo-diesels. Then the captain and Wilson and Cricket went into the hold and brought up the eight Plexiglas sections and bolted them into place over the octagon. The Compound Interest was now watertight as a submarine. The air-purifying system cranked on with a comforting whirring sound. Sealed hatches divided the vessel into three airtight sections, each section equipped with its own supply of drinking water, freeze-dried food, and emergency locator beacon. If the vessel broke apart in heavy seas, the three compartments would float free, beacons pulsing distress through the airwaves to a five-hundred-mile radius.

  The navigational octagon, sealed by a hatch from below, could turn into a sort of self-contained microvessel. It came equipped with a compressed gas—hydrofoil propulsion system—no larger than a suitcase, but with a range of three hundred miles—manufactured by Newland Marine of Santa Barbara. In the event of structural collapse the octagon could separate from the foundering wreck and scoot off to Africa under its own power, a tiny plastic bubble of high-tech engineering on the trackless sea.

  2

  Fluorescent tubes glared down with a green and poisonous light. The unpaneled bulkhead lay bare of decor, except for an Italian pinup calendar that nobody had bothered to change since July. The ready room was a stuffy, narrow closet furnished with a chipped Formica-topped table and a padded bench covered in green baize fabric.

  Wilson was confined to this green purgatory as the storm lashed the ship, with nothing to do but ride it out. He took a book from his duffel bag, strapped himself into the bench, and began to read: It was Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the tattered single-volume edition from the used-book stall in the Bend. His eyes grew weary of the small text after a while, but that didn’t matter; the weeks of relentless motion had left him thirsty for the nonphysical, for the study and contemplation of his former, half-dreaming life.

  Beyond the thick polymer ribbing of the hull, the waves came down like mountains. At times the ship was inundated, completely underwater, its bow descending into the colorless valleys of the troughs. Meanwhile, Wilson’s head was full of emperors, assassinations, aqueducts, barbarians, roads that led to Rome, cruel twists of fate, the deeds of centurions, courtesans, and slaves, an endless procession of the great and the mediocre, the depraved and the forgotten. For twenty-two hundred pages and mile after mile of heavy seas, the famous city held out against the chaos of history till there was nothing palpable left of Rome at all, nothing except a few broken ruins and its essential component, the idea of order.

  Wilson looked up from his reading fourteen hours later. He had barely moved from his place in the ready room. Sometime during that interval Nguyen had taken a seat at the other end of the table. The Vietnamese cook seemed to possess an equilibrium all his own. Without benefit of safety harness, he sat upright on the bench, playing solitaire and smoking unfiltered Gauloises bleus from a crumpled pack, ash dropping a good inch off the end of his cigarette. As the vessel rolled, Nguyen swayed in that direction, like a gyroscope on a string. He laid the cards in meticulous rows; through some miracle of static electricity they stayed exactly where he put them.

  “So, how’re you doing?” Wilson said when he was able to focus on something other than print. He saw squiggles at the corner of his eyes from lack of sleep. “Got all the pots and pans battened down?” It was a stupid question, but he didn’t know what else to say. They had never exchanged a single word of conversation outside the galley.

  The cook barely raised an eyebrow.

  “You beating the odds there?” Wilson gave it his best smile.

  “No talk,” Nguyen said. He wouldn’t look up from the game.

  “Why not?”

  The cook sighed and folded the cards into the bottom of the deck and began to deal himself again. “All you joes,” he said. “The big, stupid joe who is captain, the joe who eats like a pig, and you, the joe who reads too much. After the français leave Cochin China, I see many American joes come to my country, joes like flies on shit. The joes come and bring helicopters and drop poison powder on the trees, and everybody dies. When joe comes to your house saying, ‘I want to be your friend,’ good advice run very fast in opposite direction.”

  “What does that mean?” Wilson said.

  “That mean I do not want to talk,” Nguyen said.

  “Why not have a conversation?” Wilson persisted. He was restless and a little dazed after so many hours of breathing the dust of history. “Here we are, stuck on a boat in the middle of a storm in the middle of the ocean with nothing to do except talk, and you won’t say a word.”

  The Vietnamese cook turned his face into the fluorescent glare. Thoughts registered behind his eyes like dark birds coming home to roost. “Listen up, joe,” he said. “I do not wish to make any friends with you. Because on this boat, who knows what happens and because later on I do not wish to be sorry for you.”

  Wilson tried to get Nguyen to explain himself, but the man would not say another word.

  3

  The storm lessened a bit the next afternoon. Wilson unbolted the deck hatch and went up into the navigational octagon. From this vantage the onslaught of weather was thrilling and terrifying. It seemed to him another world boiled out there in ferment, a landscape unseen since the beginning of time, when—so the story goes—God raised the seas in their fury upon the lifeless rock of the earth.

  Captain Amundsen and Cricket were perched over charts and instruments beneath the bubble, like turret gunners in a Flying Fortress. Waves pounded across the Plexiglas, reducing the illumination in the octagon to a dull, watery twilight.

  “State your business, mister,” the captain said as Wilson rebolted the hatch.

  “Permission to remain topside, sir,” Wilson said. “Going a little stir-crazy down there.”

  The captain nodded. “Take a look at this.”

  Wilson stepped over to the opalescent radar screen. The storm appeared as a writhing, ugly green stain the size of a continent, superimposed on the Atlantic’s familiar contours.

  “According to our satellite fix, we’ve been knocked off course by about four hundred nautical miles,” the captain said, squinting down at the screen. “We’re at two and a half degrees east of the twenty-second parallel, thirty-two degrees south of Greenwich. Making south-southeast for the Mauritanian coast of Africa at an approximate speed of seventeen knots.”

  “How much time to get back to where we’re supposed to be?”

  The captain squinted out at the murky turmoil beyond the bubble. “Never can tell. A few days, a week, two. The sea’s a mighty queer place. Anything can happen. I’ve seen tidal waves swallow whole cities and black skies at noon and volcanoes rising out of the dark water all bubbling and spitting up chunks of hot earth like blood, and I’ve seen worse yet.” The captain paused as a quick riff of static came over the shortwave. Wilson could almost make out the rise and fall of human speech before it faded out altogether.

  “Once did two
years as skipper of an English oceanographic vessel; this is twenty-odd years ago,” the captain continued, and a distant haunted look came to his eye. “She was the HMS Ozymandias, an old Royal Navy cutter refurbished for scientific work that some joker had renamed the Sandra Dee, after that blond girl who was in all those American beach movies.”

  “Sandra Dee played Gidget,” Wilson interrupted, “the original Gidget before the TV show,” but at a sharp glance from Cricket, he felt foolish and shut up.

  “The Brits outfitted the ship with all the latest technology.” The captain flicked a hard fingernail against the sonar screen. “Computers, sonar, radar, and a robot sub built by British Leyland and equipped with video cameras and attached by a two-mile-long umbilical cord. We were doing research on squids. Damned elusive creatures, the giant ones, I mean. But there’s been stories about them for centuries—how they can rise from the ocean floor and seize ships in their huge tentacles, how they’ve been known to do battle with whales. All apocryphal, of course, and ridiculed by marine biologists until some fisherman off the Douglas Reef in the South Pacific pulled up a sizable hunk of squid cartilage in the nets that fixed the whole creature at four hundred and sixty feet long. So everyone got excited, and we sailed out of Bristol in January to take a look down south.

  “It was pretty rough going for a while, bad weather and engine trouble, and we ended up spending a month or so in the anchorage at Rorotan till the weather cleared. Then we were out after them. For a while we found nothing remarkable, no squids bigger than the kind they fry up with garlic in Italian restaurants. But one night, I was on watch around midnight and the sonar went crazy, a whole pattern of blips about two fathoms off our port bow. I woke up one of the marine biologists, a Frenchwoman named Adrienne something, and we unleashed the robot, and it went down with its spotlights and video cameras into the blackness. After a few minutes it started sending back pictures. We couldn’t believe what we saw: a squid the size of a tractor trailer, its one monster eye about as big around as the aboveground swimming pools you see in humbler suburban neighborhoods in the States.