The Pirate's Daughter

by Robert Girardi

  “You bring that miserable son of a bitch into my home?” It came out as a sort of howl.

  “Wilson is my husband now,” Cricket said with a slight tremor in her voice. “Your son-in-law.”

  The pirate brought his fist down on the table in a violent blow that sent pencils flying. Cricket flinched. At that moment she was more like a disobedient teenager expecting a beating than a grown woman. Schlüber gathered a few papers and backed quietly into the living area. The pirate took a menacing step in Wilson’s direction.

  Wilson gently let go of Cricket’s hand and stepped up to meet him. “Sorry you missed the wedding, Dad,” he said. “It was a very nice—” Before he had time to finish, the pirate sprung forward quick as a baboon, fists clenched. Wilson wasn’t surprised; he had half expected something like this. He ducked out of the way just before the pirate swung up with a solid left hook. The pirate’s fist connected with the pressboard over the desk. The impact knocked the short-bladed sword from its hook, and the little man scooped up the weapon and lunged. He slashed at the air, his mouth working unintelligible obscenities.

  Wilson jumped around the desk to get out of the way, but in that second, an ancient instinct cut loose inside him, like cargo broken free of restraints in heavy seas. He reached over and pulled down one of the cutlasses and swung out wildly. The cutlass was heavier than he thought; it carried him along with a momentum of its own. His body followed through the swing, and the tip caught the pocket of the pirate’s Hawaiian shirt and there was a dull tearing sound. The pirate fell back with a gasp and went sprawling. Wilson stepped around quickly and brought the point to the pirate’s throat.

  Cricket let out a small cry and raised a trembling hand. “Wilson—” she began, then stopped. Her face had a white, pinched look. The trailer was still. Wilson heard his own heavy breathing and the calls of the men gutting the Compound Interest outside in the heat. He looked down the length of the heavy blade and saw an expression of pure hatred in the pirate’s eyes.

  “Listen to me, Cricket,” Wilson said when he caught his breath. “You tell this evil worm that I’m sick of being bullied and threatened. You tell him if he touches me again, even so much as spits in my direction, I will kill him.” Then he threw the cutlass to the floor and went out of the trailer and got into the driver seat of the Thing. He rested his elbows on the wheel and sat there for a long time in the sun, calming himself and listening to voices raised in anger from inside the trailer. He watched the workmen turning the Compound Interest from a luxury yacht to a vessel of war, and suddenly he longed to get to sea, to leave this precarious life on land behind, to reduce existence to its fundamentals—wind, sea, sky, and stars.

  A half hour later Cricket came out and climbed into the passenger seat. “I’m sorry,” she said. She put a hand like ice from the air-conditioning on his knee. “I didn’t think Dad’s reaction …” Her voice trailed off.

  “Does the man try to kill all your boyfriends?” Wilson said. “Or just me and Webster, whoever he was, that poor bastard.”

  “You’re not my boyfriend. You’re my husband, remember?” Cricket said.

  “Oh, yeah,” Wilson said.

  “I just spent the last hour trying to explain the fact of our wedding to Dad. I told him that I loved you, that if he hurt you, he would be hurting me. And I also reminded him that as my husband you are now protected under the Articles of Brotherhood … and well, I got him to agree to a truce. O.K.?”

  Wilson shrugged toward the horizon.

  “O.K.?”

  “Fine,” Wilson said, and Cricket went in and got her father. She lingered in the shade on the steps of the trailer as the pirate approached. His shirt hung in tatters. The thick gold chains gleamed from the grizzled hair of his chest.

  “You ruined my shirt,” the pirate said.

  Wilson looked down at the man’s balding scalp and didn’t say anything.

  The pirate blinked and looked away. “I’m told I have to get used to this thing,” he said. “We’ve had citizens in the family before, like Cricket’s mother, that law-abiding bitch. It doesn’t usually work out too well.”

  “Citizens?” Wilson said.

  “Anyone who’s not a pirate, we call them citizens,” the pirate said. “And you don’t strike me as much of a pirate. Too much conscience. It’s written all over you. But I guess we’ll see about that. There’s not much room for conscience where we’re going.”

  “Where’s that?” Wilson said.

  The pirate gave a wolfish grin. “The Dark Continent,” he said and waved in the direction of Africa.

  Just then, another workman climbed the scaffold to the stern with a pot of black paint. The walnut nameplate was gone now, and the spot had been sanded and primered. “What you want I should call her, Captain?” he called down.

  The pirate turned to Wilson. “Go ahead, citizen. You’re part of the family now. You give her a name.”

  The workman waited, brush poised.

  “The Dread,” Wilson said without hesitation. “Call her the Dread.”

  4

  The skyline of Rigala rose like a mouthful of broken teeth off the starboard bow. The Dread pitched in the swells a half mile out. Even from this distance Wilson could make out the pulverized facades of modern office towers, their shattered windows catching the afternoon sun, and he could see the white puffs of exploding shells coming from the slopes of Mount Mtungu, direct hits somewhere in the center city.

  “They used to call it the Paris of Central West Africa,” Cricket said. She came up behind Wilson at the taffrail and draped a tanned arm over his shoulder. “I remember shopping there as a kid. They had a Bon Marche, an Au Printemps; those are big French department stores. I bought a hat with flowers on it and a skimpy French bathing suit. There was already trouble then, but I remember a lot of music in the streets, and the people seemed happy.”

  “Shows you didn’t know crap, daughter.” Captain Page grunted from his place behind the wheel in the navigational octagon. “The Bupandans have always been a bloodthirsty lot. That was right around the time of the Oluzu District massacre. A whole ghetto neighborhood full of Andas hacked to pieces by government troops—men, women, children. I remember the screaming. Went on all night. You were asleep in the hotel room.”

  “That hotel was beautiful,” Cricket said, ignoring him. “It had a beautiful name, the Star of Africa. There was an old panoramic photograph from the colonial era in the lobby, the staff in white jackets posing on the front steps.”

  The pirate snorted from the octagon. “Those days are long gone,” he said, and he came around and shoved a pair of electronic binoculars into Wilson’s hand. “Have at it with these, citizen.”

  Wilson scanned the ruined skyline. The waterfront looked in sad shape. The docks were a mass of rubble. The stacks and towers of sunken vessels protruded from the black water of the harbor. Dark smoke from oil fires smudged the horizon like a greasy fingerprint.

  “The main body of Anda rebels holds the countryside to the west,” the pirate said with a sweep of his hand. “That includes Mount Mtungu, but not Mount Nbuni, which is in Bupu control. You’re looking at a very fucked situation that gets more fucked each day. It’s turned into a clan thing now, so you’ve got Andas fighting against Bupus siding with Andas and vice versa. As of last count there were six major factions fighting for control of the capital: the Bupu Patriotic Front Militia, which contains elements of the old Bupandan National Guard; the Anda National Militia, which controls all the highland areas; the Bupu People’s party—they’re the hardline Marxists; they control the old university town of Seme and surrounding countryside—the Anda People’s party, who were supported by the Cubans before the end of the Cold War; and the conservative Bupu National Congressional Militia, who control the northeast industrial corridor from Cangulu to Nevrongo. And a couple of other clan groups of either tribe who have no real political agenda and exist just to kill each other. And of course in the jungle you’ve got the Iwo peop
le. Let’s not forget about them.”

  “Who are they?” Wilson said.

  “They are not so much a people as a delicacy, like fancy mushrooms or caviar. They exist to be eaten up by everyone else.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  The pirate shrugged. “They’re bushmen. Pygmies, about so high. The women are prized as sex objects by both the Andas and Bupus. They say it’s like fucking a ten-year-old girl with fully developed breasts. Something of a turn-on, I hear. The men are either killed or taken to Cangulu to work in the copper mines, and the infants are raised as house slaves. But the real market is with the Arabs. They will pay fifty thousand dollars for a single Iwo maiden. There are brothels in Qatar stocked entirely with Iwo women. In any case, until now we’ve had to deal with Bupu or Anda traders if we wanted to get our hands on them. That’s a nut we’re going to crack.”

  Wilson was silent for a moment, scanning the ruins of the skyline for something, a flag, a Red Cross tent, any sign of hope or order. He lowered the binoculars and turned toward the pirate, grinning like death at his elbow.

  “So what’s the point?” Wilson said. “Why do they keep killing each other year after year?”

  The pirate let out a short laugh like a bark. “Why?” he said. “Don’t be ridiculous. People kill each other because they enjoy it, because that’s what they do best. Been that way since the first ape-man hit the second ape-man over the head with a bone. Gives them something to wake up to every morning.”

  5

  With sunset the sea calmed. The Dread idled beneath a pink sky on the gently heaving main. The ship’s company assembled in the octagon in the dying light for their last meal before Africa. There was the pirate, Cricket and Wilson, Schlüber, Mustapha, and Nguyen. Wilson hadn’t seen the Vietnamese cook since the seizure of the Compound Interest, nearly six months before. Now, that traumatic afternoon seemed like a sepia-toned illustration from another life.

  They ate cold lentil soup and bread and cheese and passed three bottles of thick red wine back and forth. Mysterious clouds drifted over the new moon, transparent against the pale pinkish sky. From the shortwave came a muted, plaintive music full of clarinets and saxophones, broadcast from an unimaginable ballroom, perhaps as far away as Cape Town. Wilson felt the deck of the ship beneath him, and the soft swell of the waves, and smelled the fresh air, and was glad to be at sea again, on his way between somewhere and somewhere, the place that is travel, where conclusions are suspended for the duration of the journey.

  Nguyen’s teeth looked blue from the wine. Wilson watched his blue teeth absently, and was almost surprised when the little man spoke.

  “You are one lucky bastard, joe,” he said. “Marry the captain’s daughter. Some people say smart bastard who save his ass. But what if captain’s daughter decide not to marry you? I say lucky bastard.”

  Wilson managed a weak smile. “I get the feeling that my luck could change in a second,” he said.

  “Not your luck,” the Vietnamese cook said. “Your luck is like the wind. Sometimes blow, sometimes not blow, but it never goes away. Your luck stronger than ours, I think. Captain crazy to take you aboard.”

  “Keep your mouth shut, Noog,” the pirate grunted.

  “Call it luck if you want.” Schlüber spoke from his cushion on the bench. “I say life is all statistics, probabilities and improbabilities. Wilson marrying Cricket wasn’t luck. It was just an improbability. There are mathematical equations to figure out the likelihood. And look at me. I answered an advertisement in the Frankfurter Allgemeine—high wages, exciting work, travel, M.B.A. required, it said—and I ended up a pirate. There’s an improbability for you.”

  “You’re not a pirate,” the pirate said. “You’re a goddamned accountant.”

  At this Mustapha put his head back and laughed, the day’s last shadows caught beneath the scarred ridges on his face.

  They lapsed into silence for the next hour. Cricket leaned into Wilson’s arm, put her head on his shoulder. He could still not get used to the idea that she was his wife. When the light disappeared in the west, the sky was a black smear. The lights of Rigala showed in the distance as two or three wavering points. It would be hours before they could motor any closer to the harbor. In the absence of laws and customs regulations, going ashore required the right man on the right dock, the right amount of money changing hands. Their man wasn’t due till midnight. Wilson could not see Cricket’s hand upon his own in the sea darkness.

  “I never liked these waters,” the pirate said. It was a disembodied statement out of the gloom.

  “Seems pretty calm,” Wilson said in something like his own reasonable voice. “What’s wrong with them?” He felt freer to speak now that he could not see the man.

  “You were talking about luck,” the pirate said. “It’s bad luck for pirates along these coasts. There’s many a pirate’s whitened bones at the bottom of this miserable patch of sea.”

  Despite himself, a chill went up Wilson’s spine.

  “Not far from here, about thirty degrees north, they got the greatest pirate of them all, Bartholomew Roberts,” the pirate said. “The man was a piratical genius. In just three years he captured over four hundred prizes. Not even my ancestor the great Elzevir Montague could beat that. But it was success that got Roberts in the end. The king sent a squadron of the British Navy, commanded by Captain Ogle in the HMS Swallow. Roberts had just captured a Spanish merchant vessel full of Madeira, and they were celebrating when the Swallow caught up with the Royal Venture—that was Roberts’s ship. Roberts himself didn’t drink, but the crew was dead drunk to a man. He couldn’t get them to their stations in time, and they were outmaneuvered. The poor bastard got it in the first volley of grape-shot. The crew was stunned. There lay the great Captain Roberts, just another corpse in his high hat and feathers, his famous red coat, his hip boots. The fight barely lasted another hour after that. With Roberts dead, the crew lost its gumption. Ogle hanged all of them and would have hanged Roberts’s dead body if it hadn’t been dumped over the side as he requested. The world has never seen a better pirate or a braver man.”

  When the moon brightened, Wilson and Cricket took a sleeping bag forward and lay on the deck beneath the steel wings of the marine cannon. They lay close, and Wilson could feel her breath on his cheek.

  “Why is your father like that?” Wilson said.

  “Like what?” Cricket said.

  “Absolutely immoral. I would say amoral, but he’s an intelligent man. He knows the difference between right and wrong. How does he justify his life of murder and slavery to himself? For that matter, how do you?”

  “Don’t go all serious on me,” Cricket said.

  “Tell me,” Wilson said. “This is your conscience talking to you, remember?”

  “It’s in our blood,” she said, “just like gambling is in yours. We’re pirates. Been pirates since the 1600s. You can’t fight blood.”

  “You’re going to have to give me more than that.”

  Cricket thought for a minute. “It’s the social contract,” she said. “We Pages have never believed in it. The idea that you go about treating your neighbor like you want to be treated is a crock of shit to us. We don’t believe it because we look around and see that the world is the kind of place where your neighbor would stab you in the back for a spare fig. Sure, for a couple of years here and there—during the Pax Romana, say, or the 1950s—the world seemed like a safe place ruled by law and reason. That was an illusion. Maybe the trains ran on time, and there was a proliferation of lawyers, but all of it was just a smokescreen over the chaos.”

  “You sound like Don Luis,” Wilson said, and felt Cricket stiffen.

  “O.K., try walking down the street alone at night in certain neighborhoods in your city,” she said. “What happens to your social contract then? Out the window.”

  “Let’s admit for a minute that the world is an evil place,” Wilson said, “which I deny. It still doesn’t give you the rig
ht to be part of the evil. We’ve got to keep fighting for the good, Cricket. Or at the very least not do any harm. That’s your first lesson in moral philosophy.”

  Cricket was silent, taking this in. “My life has been too hard to believe in goodness for its own sake,” she said. “All I’ve seen is big fish eating little fish. Scratch the surface, and you’ll find that people have the worst motives for what they do. But stick around. I’m still hoping some of your faith in mankind will rub off before too long. What do you think?”

  “It’s not me sticking around,” Wilson said. “It’s me getting you away from them.”

  “Patience,” Cricket whispered. “We’re going to need money, and we’ve got to pick the right moment.”

  “When will that be?”

  “Shut up,” Cricket said, and put her arms around Wilson, and as they kissed, the clouds drifted over the moon again, and the sky went black.

  6

  Under the same black sky at midnight the Dread crossed at low throttle into Rigala Harbor. Blasted derricks stood above the docks, twisted and skeletal in the flash of a distant bombardment. Half-sunken hulks leaked trails of iridescent oil across the dirty water. A searchlight trailed over low-lying clouds like a blindman’s finger reading braille, then winked out.

  The pirate took the wheel and guided the Dread to the far end of the commercial basin. A thin line of lightbulbs dangling from a bare power cable marked the length of the southernmost slip, padded with used tires. Cricket jumped onto the slip and tied the bowline to a rusty iron plug in the concrete, and the rest of the crew followed. A few minutes later the pirate solemnly distributed weapons from a heavy canvas bag that looked like it had once contained a set of golf clubs. Schlüber and Nguyen shouldered Chinese-made Kalashnikovs. Mustapha took an over-and-under and a machete in a wooden scabbard. Cricket took a MAC-10 machine pistol, a hunting knife, and a vinyl bag of extra clips. The captain took a 12-gauge semiautomatic shotgun and a 9 mm Beretta.