The Pirate's Daughter

by Robert Girardi

  “I know the feeling,” Wilson said, and was about to say more when he was interrupted by a trill of clicks and croaks from the Iwo. The small man duck-waddled forward on his haunches and reached into his pouch and withdrew a handful of leaves. Five leeches, black and shiny, wiggled at the damp center.

  “Oh, no!” Wilson said.

  “The Iwo says it’s time for your medicine again,” Colonel Saba said. “Got to put the mswimbe back on your face.”

  “You can understand his clicking?” Wilson said.

  Colonel Saba shrugged. “More or less. I was officer in charge of the Hruke Forest District for three years. There I came into contact with many Iwos. Their language is not that difficult, really. Very primitive. You learn to use your tongue and the back of your throat in ways you never thought possible.”

  “Tell him I’ve had enough of the leeches,” Wilson said. “Tell him to forget it.”

  The colonel made a few hesitant croaks, and the Iwo trilled back.

  “He says he is your physician. And your physician tells you to take the mswimbe right now,” the colonel said. “Otherwise your face may fall off. Infection sets in very quickly in this climate.”

  Wilson lay back and submitted to the treatment. He shuddered as the slimy creatures slithered around his face and fought down images from his worst nightmares.

  The colonel crawled over to take a look. “You should see the little blighters work,” he said. “Very amazing.”

  “No, thanks,” Wilson said.

  “Your face was a purple mess of bruises when they brought you in here. Now it’s almost normal.”

  “Great,” Wilson said. “I’ll look nice when they boil me alive.”

  “I’m afraid that is a fate reserved for officers,” the colonel said. “It is not so bad from what I hear. You pass out from the heat before it really starts to burn.”

  “What are they going to do to me?” Wilson said, and the dread took hold of his guts.

  “Best not to think about that,” the colonel said. He settled back into the corner and extracted another cigarette from the crumpled pack concealed in his rags. “This Iwo, he is a brave man,” he said as he lit up. “He’s too old for the slave traders; he knows the Bupus will kill him. But about an hour or so after they brought you here, he walked out of the jungle, and he sat down in front of the cage and sang a song in his language until they came and threw him inside.”

  “Why the hell did he do that?” Wilson said.

  “I will tell you the name of the song he was singing, and you will understand,” the colonel said. “It’s called ‘The Ghost Man from Far Away Who Set Free the Forest People on the Night of the Red Stars’; that’s a loose translation, of course. This song will be sung by their children and their great-grandchildren. The song is about you, my friend. You are an epic hero now, a great man, like Sequhue or Odysseus. This Iwo was chosen to come and take care of you here before the end. Perhaps if you are lucky, he has a drug in his pouch that will dull the pain of the torture.”

  Wilson couldn’t think what to say, then the leech slithered over his lips, and he held his breath. When it moved away again, he said, “Tell him thanks a lot for his help. But tell him I’m not the great man here. He is.”

  Colonel Saba delivered this message in halting clicks.

  The Iwo smiled suddenly, and it was as beautiful and strange as a smile on the face of a leopard in the heart of the jungle.

  3

  Wilson heard a sad music on the wind at dusk. He thought he made out the strains of “Amazing Grace” played to the calliope lilt of a Tinka band. Then, the sky went bloody beyond the cages and his fellow prisoners grew indistinct and there was the distant boom of cannon out on the lake.

  “What do you think that is?” he said half to himself.

  Colonel Saba blew the smoke of his last cigarette into ephemeral freedom through the roughhewn timber of the cage. “Nothing that will do us any good,” he said. “Prepare yourself for the inevitable, as I am prepared.”

  Wilson remembered the air thick with blood in the bone palisade and felt despair creep into his heart.

  “You’re right, we’ve all got to die,” he said, but his voice sounded thin and pitiful. “I guess sooner or later doesn’t matter. Like the poet says—Accursed! What have I to do with days?”

  “Not their way!” Colonel Saba said bitterly. “These Bupus are goddamned savages!” Then he caught himself and sighed. “Though I suppose we Andas are no better. You see, I was present at the soccer stadium in Bandali when we killed sixty thousand of them in one day. This was several years ago, at the beginning of the war. We advertised a free game between Bitumac and the Seme All-Stars—two very popular teams in those days—and we moved through the Bupu neighborhoods handing out free tickets. We had two dozen fifty-caliber machine guns hidden under canvas tarps around the top row of the stadium, and when it was packed with Bupus, we opened fire. There were a lot of families, kids—you know how kids like soccer. When we ran out of bullets, we moved in with sticks and machetes, and when it was done, we burned the bodies in a great stinking bonfire.” His voice sank to a guilty whisper. “After something like that, I suppose one shouldn’t mind so much being boiled alive.”

  “Were you behind one of the machine guns?” Wilson said, and he was glad he could not see the man’s face in the darkness.

  “Worse,” Colonel Saba said. “I gave the order to fire.”

  4

  The second night was calm and quiet. The waters of the lake hushed against the smooth stones of the beach; the jungle was full of the far-off cry of birds and the deep chatter of insects. The Iwo made a few small clicking sounds that Colonel Saba did not care to translate. Wilson tried to keep his mind off the coming ordeal, but this was impossible. How would they do it? He thought he would never sleep again; then he closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, it was almost noon and Cricket stood in the hot sun just beyond the bars of the cage.

  “Wake up, Wilson,” she said in a hard voice.

  Wilson stirred. When he saw it was Cricket, he tried to stand and clunked his head against the low roof. He hobbled over to the bars, rubbing his scalp, and squinted out into the brightness. He could not see her eyes, which were hidden behind Jackie O—type sunglasses with big black lenses, but her mouth was set and her gun hand rested on the butt of her dead father’s 9 mm Beretta, stuck in her belt.

  “I’m leaving in an hour,” she said. “Taking the Dread back to Quatre Sables.”

  “What about me?” Wilson said, half serious.

  She ignored him. “The operation here’s been a bust. It’ll take a whole year to round up those Iwos you set free, you fuck.”

  “Good,” Wilson said, then he didn’t know what to say. There followed an awkward beat in which he saw a black-winged shrike flap into the green fringe of jungle. Was it the same one that had followed them up the Mwtutsi in augury of troubles to come?

  “Anything else?” he said at last.

  “Yeah,” Cricket said, and her lip trembled. “We buried Dad last night.”

  “I’m sorry,” Wilson said. “He was your father. But he was also a murderous asshole, and he was going to shoot me.”

  “You needed shooting after what you did,” Cricket said. “I’m sorry I won’t be around to see them finish you off.”

  “So that’s it,” Wilson said, struggling to keep the panic out of his voice. “You’re not going to help me get out of here.”

  “I couldn’t do anything for you if I tried,” Cricket said. “You violated a sacred taboo in this part of the world. You cut into their profit margin. And you tried to kill Major Mpongu. That man’s a big shit around here. I don’t have to say I hope you suffer. You will. If they do it right, you can live up to three days without skin. I’ve seen it happen, these people are artists. You’re not really human anymore, just a quivering pink mass hanging on a pole.”

  “I guess you don’t love me after all,” Wilson said.

  “You’
re a bastard,” Cricket said between her teeth.

  “I won you from the Portugee, Cricket. Remember? You needed a good gambler, and you risked my neck because of it. So I’m holding a bad hand right now. Aces and eights, you know? Dead Man’s Hand. So you’re my wife, we belong to each other now. I need some help here.”

  “I don’t belong to anyone but myself,” she said, her voice dull, without expression. “It’s been like that from the beginning. There’s just myself. The rest of the world is full of stupid assholes.”

  “This the sort of thing that happened to old Webster?”

  “Fuck you,” Cricket said. Then she bit her lip and looked away, and Wilson caught a glimpse of her eyes behind the dark glasses and saw the tears on her cheeks.

  “I thought we were going to make it work,” Cricket said, her bottom lip trembling. “I really did. I know you don’t believe me, but I really haven’t felt as strongly for anyone in my life as I have for you. I guess I’ve got to stop holding on. I’ve got to get through my head that it’s not going to work out for us. We’re just too different—”

  “This is ridiculous,” Wilson said, and he gripped the wooden bars so hard he felt a splinter go into his hand. “We’re not breaking up over a cup of espresso at Bazzano’s. These bastards are going to skin me alive. You’ve got to get me out of here.”

  Cricket hesitated and looked down. “Impossible,” she said. “I tried.”

  “You did?” Wilson said. Despite himself, his heart made a flip-flop.

  “Oh, Wilson …” Cricket came close and pushed her sunglasses up into her hair and put her hands over his on the bars. Her eyes were a wet, fathomless blue-green this morning, like the color of Lake Tsuwanga in the long hours of dusk. A single blue-green tear fell across his scraped knuckles. “Why couldn’t you wait? In two years, in three years, we could have had enough money to live in Paris in high style for the rest of our lives.”

  “I couldn’t wait,” Wilson said. “I couldn’t swallow the death you wanted to feed me. I couldn’t build my happiness on the proceeds of piracy, on the labor of slaves, on a mound of dead bodies!”

  Cricket sighed and stepped back. She brought her sunglasses down over her eyes, and her mouth hardened. Wilson saw his battered face reflected in the black lenses.

  “You’re an idiot,” she said. “An asshole like all the other assholes. I shouldn’t have come.”

  “Why did you come?” Wilson said. Squinting out at her, he had the sensation that she was already far away, that he was looking at her through the wrong end of a telescope.

  “I shouldn’t have come,” Cricket repeated, and began to back away.

  “Will I be seeing you again?” Wilson said, desperate.

  “No,” Cricket said.

  “Will you miss me?” Wilson said, but Cricket did not answer. She spun around on her heels and headed off into the stark and unforgiving brightness of noon.

  5

  Wilson pressed himself flat against the bars, staring out until long after Cricket had passed out of his line of vision.

  When he realized she was not coming back, he collapsed onto the foul dirt floor of the cage as if he had been shot. On his back there in the ashen gloom, as a deeper gloom stole over his heart, his thoughts turned to death. So this is how it would end. What a strange fate! Alone, at the hands of torturers in an obscure corner of Africa, so far from the life he had known. For the first time in months, he thought of Andrea, no doubt asleep at that moment in her big, clean bed in her fine apartment on the thirty-third floor in the Pond Park Tower. What a fool he had been! He remembered the sound of her tears over the phone the night he left, and he remembered that she had loved him, and self-pity welled up like water in a clogged drain, and tears began to leak out of the corner of his eyes and down the sides of his face to make small dark spots in the dirt.

  But the sharp bleat of Colonel Saba’s snoring, like somebody snoring in a cartoon, sounded an absurd counterpoint to Wilson’s tears. After a few minutes he sat up and dried his eyes on the back of his hand. A hot wind sieved through the bars of the cage. Out there a parched and silent afternoon burned into the African dust. The Bupu guard lay asleep on a reed mat across the way, a bit of canvas propped over his head with a stick. The yellow dog slept in the narrow strip of shade at his side. Wilson imagined the Dread gliding away, across the brilliant water of the lake and almost burst into tears again. Then he turned at nothing and saw a pair of bright animal eyes fixed upon him. It was the Iwo, poised like a praying mantis at the back of the cage.

  “Hey, you!” Wilson said, annoyed suddenly. “How long have you been watching me?”

  The Iwo cocked his head to one side and let out an odd series of low clicks.

  “Saba,” Wilson called loudly, and the soldier stirred. “What does this midget want?”

  Colonel Saba yawned and raised himself on a bony elbow. He yawned again and swallowed dryly and made one or two halfhearted clicks.

  The Iwo cocked his head, indicated Wilson with a birdlike gesture, and began an involved clicking and croaking that went on for some time. Wilson watched the bones in the little man’s throat orchestrate this symphony and was reminded of the aluminum rods in the throat of the mechanical Abraham Lincoln robot he had seen in Disneyland one summer as a child. The thing had terrified him. A human throat didn’t move like that, didn’t make those sounds. He had been afraid that Abraham Lincoln was going to eat him alive.

  When the Iwo finished, he cocked his head at Wilson and waited for Colonel Saba to speak. The colonel scratched his chin, thought for a moment.

  “He says you’re very sick,” Colonel Saba said. “You’ve suffered a bad beating, of course, but that’s not what he means. He means you are sick inside. Not your body, but your spirit. He says you have a spirit beast inside you that has been gnawing at your guts and making your life miserable for many years.”

  “Hell,” Wilson said.

  “The Iwo wants to know if you have a heavy feeling here,” the colonel put a large flat hand against his solar plexus. “The feeling that something bad is always about to happen.”

  Wilson was silent. How did the little man know about his dread? “I’ve got this anxiety problem,” he said at last, feeling ridiculous for explaining. “I’ve been to psychiatrists back home. A dash of unfocused paranoia mixed in with some unfounded dread. I’ve gone through some therapy, as far as that goes. Don’t worry, I’m on top of the situation.”

  Colonel Saba translated for the little man.

  The Iwo shook his head and duck-walked over to Wilson. He smoothed a space in the dirt with his hand and extracted a stick from his pouch and began to scratch a picture there. He worked on the picture for fifteen minutes, and Wilson saw a frightful animal taking shape: part monkey, part raccoon, part rat—with sharp claws and rows of razor teeth like a shark. When the drawing was done, the Iwo began to croak and chirp. Wilson looked down at it and felt a familiar squeezing in his chest.

  “This is a picture of the spirit beast that is now wrestling with your life,” Colonel Saba said. “The Iwo says it has wrestled with the lives of people in your family in the spirit world for generations. He says you have been wrestling all alone since you were a child. It is a creature that went to live inside one of your ancestors many years ago in the country beyond the Hruke Forest, which is his way of saying Africa. Have your ancestors been in Africa?”

  “I don’t know,” Wilson said.

  “Do you recognize this thing?” Colonel Saba said, poking a bony finger at the picture in the dirt.

  “Yes,” Wilson said, and he hardly heard his own voice.

  “The spirit beast,” Colonel Saba said, “enters through a tear in your spirit like a wound, often caused by a tragedy in childhood. Did you undergo such a tragedy?”

  “Yes,” Wilson said, and his voice was less than a whisper.

  The Iwo put his hand on Wilson’s arm. His palm felt like the bark of a tree. Wilson turned and looked into his eyes. They were an
cient and black, but lit by flashes of color in the depths as if by lightning far off. The little man sighed and pointed to Wilson’s nose. He reached into his pouch and pulled out a small tube of lustrous black wood and two small green turdlike pellets.

  “Yonowpe,” Colonel Saba said, sounding impressed. “A real honor. He wants to give it to you. Yonowpe is a very powerful spirit medicine and very rare. It will help you wrestle against the spirit beast.

  Wilson squinted out at the glare of African sunlight. The guard stirred in his sleep. The yellow dog got up and trotted off. Wilson felt a curious malaise running across his body like the flu that was the unease of condemned men everywhere.

  He turned back to the Iwo. “What’s the goddamned use?” he said. “Today or tomorrow or the next day or the next, I’ll be dead. Skinned alive, I’m told. Let’s look on the bright side—when I’m dead, the spirit beast will be dead with me.”

  The Iwo cleared his throat and spit a mouthful of dry greenish phlegm between the bars.

  “The Iwo says the opera isn’t over until the fat lady sings,” Colonel Saba said. “The Iwo says in the fight between yourself and life, back life.”

  Wilson let the Iwo push him back into the dirt. The little man fixed one of the green pellets to one end of the tube and tamped down. He put the tube to his lips and put the other end in Wilson’s nostril. Wilson began to have immediate misgivings.

  “Hold on a minute,” Wilson said, but it was too late. The Iwo filled his lungs and blew. The green turd hit Wilson’s nostril with the force of a small explosion. He lurched back, a bitter taste in his mouth. The bony ledge behind his ears seemed to expand. Then he sneezed twice.