Silver's Gods

by Rich X Curtis

  “Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “I’m ready.”

  We reached the car without incident, and I unlocked it. Manual locks, no electronics in this era Crown Vic, which is why I preferred it. We got in and I pulled out, heading south. Nobody seemed to be following us.

  “You had this car prepared?” She asked. “Like, just in case?”

  I nodded. “And another, closer to the house.” I looked at her. “Just in case.”

  “You expected this?” she said.

  I waggled my head. “Expected? No, but I felt that if we were to park ourselves for two days, it would be a good idea to have an escape hatch ready. These guys came light, trying to catch us by surprise.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “If they wanted us, and knew about, well, me…” I pulled onto the highway, 95 South. “Then they would have come in force, with lots of backup. Local cops at roadblocks, helicopters.”

  “So what does that mean?” she said. “That it was just that one guy?”

  “Could mean a lot of things. Could mean they are not government, although I think they are.” I pulled into the fast lane. Time to make miles.

  “Then why? Why only send one guy?” she said.

  I shrugged. “We don’t know who they are, what part of the government. We don’t even know if they’re government at all. Could be FBI, could be CIA, could be somebody else with a mandate that says bring her and her friend in,” I said. “They might not even be government, or they could be hired hands from somebody else. Could even be corporate actors, although that would be rare. Corporations are a lot more skittish about work like this. Or, maybe there is part of the government acting on its own. The right hand and the left, you dig? It’s a problem with distributed systems, information flow is bottlenecked, stovepiped, edited. Classified.” I looked at her.

  She flopped back. Frustration. “You just said, ‘you dig.’ Seriously?” Then came up tall in her seat. “And hey, what about my stuff?”

  “Gone. Put it behind you.” I said. I have lifetimes of practicing patience with regular people, who sometimes take time to process obvious facts about a situation. “People don’t say dig anymore, do they?”

  “No, people don’t say ‘dig’”, she snapped. Anger. She smacked her forehead with her palm. “But my purse, my phone, my keys, my ID. Everything was back there. They’re gonna know who I am!” There was a rising note of panic in her voice.

  “Your stuff is gone. Sorry.” I said it bluntly, then softened. “Calm down. I can drop you off at some point, and you can explain to the feds or whoever these guys are what you were doing and why. Say I kidnapped you. You might avoid prison. Want me to do that? I can drop you off somewhere in about an hour. Call the cops, they can bring in the feds, somebody who knows something about what went down there and will want to talk with you. It will take a few days, though, if I had to guess. But your stuff is being pawed through right now by whoever sent our friend there. Count on it.”

  She stared at me, breathing hard through her nose. Anger. Resentment.

  “Or,” I continued, “you can stick with me and maybe get a great story out of it.” I flashed her a smile. Warm and sympathetic. “I’m not kidding about the story. The biggest, maybe. Biggest ever.”

  She sat back in her seat, covering her eyes with one hand. I saw tears.

  “I’d say, don’t be afraid,” I said, “but there is kind of a lot to be afraid of.” Generally true most of the time, but we ignore it on a day-to-day basis. “Look, I need help here, getting this story out, and you are my best bet right now. I need a witness who can be there with me.”

  “Be where?” she asked.

  “At wherever this road ends,” I said. “The end of the line.”

  She didn’t speak. I put down my foot on the gas, and drove.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The end of the line, we spoke of. But getting there is the question. How? Travel, I have known, naturally. Johnny Cash had a song, “I’ve Been Everywhere,” which I love. I have been everywhere. Well, almost everywhere. I feel like there isn’t a city in Europe I haven’t spent at least a lifetime in. I spent several hundred years with the great Mongol tribes during their height and lived for as long in what is now China. But it was long ago.

  So when I found my mission, my calling, my north star so to speak, to find others like me, that I felt must exist for there to be sense in the world, I needed to travel. It was difficult in New Spain, for a woman to get around. I have told you of my whoring days, so you appreciate it. I could become a fine lady, but such a lady needs a husband or a convincing story. Either is possible with money, but it’s difficult, and did not provide me with the freedom I needed. So, I became a pirate.

  The Caribbean was bustling with shipping. And with shipping comes parasites. Gangsters. I became one, a minor flea on the backside of the Spanish Empire. There were famous women pirates. Anne Bonny and so forth. I was not notorious and wasn’t a pirate that long. A mere handful of years, and it was a cover story for me, an assumed identity.

  Also, it’s one of those periods in my memory which is turbulent, stressed, and fragmentary. I don’t remember much of this period beyond a few key scenes which I pieced together. It’s like amnesia of a sort; before or after a traumatic event, sometimes the amnesiac cannot recall full memories. They can describe scenes, people, actions, but like beads of dew on a string.

  We raided. But it’s dangerous, being a pirate, let me tell you. Avoid criminals is my advice. They are not pleasant to be around for long periods. Desperate times bring desperate measures, for sure, and for criminals, every day but the day after a score is a desperate day. They are untrustworthy. It’s much more trouble than it is worth. Every time I have wound up a pirate, a highway-woman, or a gang leader of some sort, it’s been nothing but a massive pain in the ass. It’s like being a manager at the worst company ever, but around the clock with never a day off, and armed, dangerous employees who all mistrust each other and you.

  But it was useful, in the sense it got me out of New Spain. I came into Hispaniola as a whore, walked out in men’s clothes with a cutlass at my hip. I found a tavern near the docks and looked for the right kinds of people. I remember this, looking for the tough guys. Once you get a feel for the main culture, the subcultures become easy to identify. Criminal men typically feminize themselves. Oh, I don’t mean they’re gay, although many are, but more that they adopt showy accessories, gaudy jewelry, flamboyant clothes. It shows their challenge to authority, they think, but it’s also a kind of a uniform. You see it today, in many tough-guy subcultures. The pirates were like that.

  I found who I was looking for, the Captain of the Hawk, carousing with his crew. We talked, I recall, where I explained I wanted to sign on. I called myself Cordova, and told a tale of being a fearsome ex-whore with an axe to grind against the Spanish. He laughed at me and said they could use a whore on board, and belittled me, so I slashed open his belly with his own dagger and pulled his guts out onto the table. I just leaned over close to him so he could look down my shirt, reached down like I would touch his cock, looked him the eye, took his knife, and killed him. I turned to his crew and challenged them for authority. I said I was Captain of the Hawk now, and I would gut any man who tried to stop me. His crew wavered for a moment between slaying me or giving in. None dared, and that was that.

  We sailed the next day. I renamed the Hawk to Serpent. I wanted to call it Plumed Serpent, but the Spanish were religious and I feared none would stay long aboard a ship named after an Aztec god. But Quetzalcoatl fascinated me, as a god that gives gifts of civilization to mankind had a familiar ring to it. Could it not be that, if there were others like me, other servants of the dream masters in the New World, could it not be that they had left traces of themselves in the traditions and legends of the people there? I must have done, in the long ago past, and the echoes of these traditions are likely still with us, were we but able to discern them.

  I now had
a ship, a crew, and a mission. We took some prizes, but never any grand treasure ships, their holds stuffed with gold from the New World. Ours were local trade, pigs, lumber, oil, and wine. We took a slave ship once, on the shores of an island which I think was St. Lucia, and I freed them after taking my pick of the crew.

  Treasure ships existed, oh yes, but they were typically in fleets, and well-defended. Columbus had come looking for trade, but he settled for slaves. The Conquistadors had found the gold of the Aztecs, and after that it was pure gold-lust that drove them. But we found only a little gold in the few ships we took in my career on the Spanish Main. I was looking for information. I had heard of colonies to the north, among the wild continent yet unexplored by the Europeans. I wanted to learn more, as I had an inkling that these places were to be important.

  My career as a pirate was not long, as I have said. I included it here to be more or less complete, I guess. It happened, and I remember it. It’s all each of us can say, really. I remember Jokum, a freed slave from the ship I mentioned. He was fearsome, and loyal, with a big smile in his dark face. I can put a name to a few others: Hector, a Juan, a Jose. We had a cat on board whose name I can’t recall but whose furry face I can. I lived for several years with this crew. Perhaps we were, as other pirates are, mere bloodthirsty murderers and desperate thieves. I do not recall, although I suppose we must have been. I was their captain, and the Serpent was a pirate ship, full of pirates even if I was just pretending to be one. But I remember being happy there, with that crew, that ship, that life.

  They captured me, the English navy. I don’t recall how, or where, or what occurred. I just recall being dragged onto the deck of the Serpent. The flotsam and garbage of a recent fight littered the deck, and stank of smoke, smoldering sailcloth, burning wood, gunpowder, fear, and death. The crew was dead, those of them I could see, and I could not look for them at all. I was dazed. I surmise, to the best of my recollection, that we were in a fight with a British ship, and they beat the fuck out of us. I don’t remember. I’m glad I can’t remember this.

  It had been many, many years since I had heard English, and I had gained many words and a strange accent. I could understand them a little and hid what little I knew of their language. They hauled me, dazed and stupid, before an officer—perhaps the Captain but I think not, for he was young—inspected me. As if I were an animal or a haunch of beef. They thought me a whore, and I feared they would stuff me below decks for their use, but the British navy had, even then, rules about such things. Women were to be treated with respect, no matter their class. At least, this ship kept this rule. I was grateful later. The Serpent must have sunk, or maybe they saved it. I don’t know.

  I returned to England, being traded from ship to ship. I was in a fugue, I recall. I remember lying in a white hammock in a tiny stateroom, with a tiny window through which crept a tiny breeze. The wind in the sails, the scrabble of the sailors’ horny feet on the deck above me. The call of the watch and the long, lazy swell of the sea. I was tired and maybe depressed. It’s hard to say; exhaustion and hardcore depression are so similar. To me, at least.

  It comes on me, depression, like a funk. No interest in food, in talk, in work, in family. Nothing. Empty. Tired. Leave me alone. I need you to all just leave me the fuck alone. This is what it is like for me when I have it. I think I must have had it a lot, in my time, but the memories of this fade too.

  This is what I have learned about my mind, with so much time to study and think on it. Our memory banks, as you might say, only have so much capacity. I picture it like a book, or a set of clay tablets. The scribe of our memory writes upon the pages, or tablets, whatever, and they pile up. This is our memory, what we can remember. But all libraries have limits, correct? The building that holds the library is only so big. It can only hold so many books, or scrolls, or tablets. This building is our brain. So the scribe, being clever, throws out the oldest ones, and maybe ones we are not using. If he is a stupid or poorly instructed scribe, he may discard recent memories.

  This, I feel, is how our minds work. We have a sliding window of memory, perhaps, of reliable memories. Perhaps just the part of our minds which remember where to find things. This is why the aged cannot remember well. In one lifetime, when we watch our parents or grandparents struggle to remain themselves. For our memories are ourselves, aren’t they? In a real sense, that they are. The rest, perhaps, is reflex. Automation. Patterns laid down over time we rely on. Over one long life, this is the natural course of events; people age and grow forgetful and befuddled.

  My life, however, has been, as we have discussed, different. I do not suffer disease or failing of the body. I do not age. The physical, the biological aspects of aging do not trouble me. So I do not, as some very elderly do, forget to breathe, or how to swallow. Dreadful. But over time I purge much of my active memory, so that what I remember comes through in waves, fragments, isolated scenes stripped of much of their context. It is, as I think we’ve talked about, maddening.

  But enough of this. I mention it again only to illustrate my point. I am, perhaps, unreliable as a witness but some things I remember well. I pretended to speak only native tongues they did not know of. The English thought me an interesting specimen, only one of a few Mesoamerican natives they had encountered, so they were shipping me back, up the chain so to speak, because nobody wanted to take responsibility for letting me go. It wasn’t bad. I didn’t need to whore among them. They were decent enough that way; at least the officers were. The sailors, well, they are a rough trade, even now, so I am glad they kept me separate from them.

  The officers treated me kindly and taught me English as they spoke it and gave me books to read. Soon I had regained my proficiency with speech… I had last lived in England during the reign of King John, and then only a short while. I think I had been there…something to do with France, but I know not what. Always England and France, fighting and plotting. Upon reaching England, from Portsmouth they took me in a carriage to London, to a fine house. There I lived a time. A man would speak with me, a thin, sour man who seemed much interested in the Spanish and what they did in the New World, who was who, and so forth. I pretended only to be a simple whore, and, unable to answer his more contemporaneous questions. He asked me about the natives, how they lived, their beliefs and such. He took notes on this, and I believe he was a scholar, a historian of some sort. I soon had him convinced that I didn’t know much. I told him I grew up in a brothel in Cuba. His eyes glinted at this, but he made no advances, though I did, I confess, make it clear such advances were possible. It’s something I usually do with men, flirt with them, as it gave me all kinds of leverage over them. Men, generally, are fools this way.

  Soon, however, he tired of me and passed me onto a lady friend of his, who took me into her house as a lady’s maid. A nasty old woman. She told me I was not to fuck anyone in her household, and that they would whip me and kicked into the street should I forget it. I suspect my reputation had preceded me. I remember stealing money from her late one night, and slipping through a window onto a roof, ridden by a dream of a dark-haired woman surrounded by candles and finery. I needed to find her, speak to her, speak to her about the New World. Find out what she knew. She was important. Who was she? Dark hair, olive skin, dark eyes. She could be anyone.

  But, as always, my dreams guided me. I wandered London in a daze, as if drunk, but always near the river and Buckingham House. I became convinced she either lived there or was a guest. Sometimes she was with a man, red-haired, long nose. Intimate with him, I knew it at once, with dream-cemented certainty. The King. This woman was the King’s lover.

  I hit upon a plan, and this, I remember well. I spent the money on a nice dress (for my mistress was my tale) which I saw displayed in a shop frequented by the elite wives. It was from France, low cut, and blue silk. It cost most of what I had stolen from the Duchess, the woman whose house I had fled. Stuffing it into a sack, I took it to another tailor, in a cheaper part of town, and had it alter
ed. I gave it pockets under the skirt, had it sized to fit me like a glove, and bought some gloves of the purest white calfskin. My legs I kept bare, as the daring women of the time did.

  This tailor I murdered after he did his work. Yes, I know, it was wrong. But you must understand, he was giving me dirty looks and, surprised at the quality of the dress I took from my sack, liked not at all my request for two long, narrow pockets in the petticoats and a slit disguised at my hip to allow my hand to slip inside.

  You must also understand this…England was a police state. An absolute monarchy with much treachery and intrigue going on among the powerful. Plots and rumors of plots. Religious tensions were high with a Protestant on the throne, Catholicism outlawed and driven underground. He would betray me. I could see it in his eyes, despite what I had paid him. I broke his neck and hid his body in a closet. I took my money, since he no longer needed it. Then I stuffed the dress and gloves into a sack, and some white calfskin slippers, and went to find a brothel.

  Not just any brothel, but one I knew must exist somewhere near Court. There is always such. Courtiers are lusty, for power stimulates like nothing else. It draws women just as men, although the women play for much lower stakes. I knew such a place was there, even knowing nothing about it. And I knew the power dynamics of those it served and who served in it. Like a mechanic approaching a car engine. They are all the same, the basic principles and moving parts.

  Most of what we do as humans is like this, the same patterns reflected and refracted, over and over. Slight differences here and there, like novel spices in a meal, but the ingredients remain the same.

  I found it, after several days of watching and talking to girls who worked in such places. Finding it, I found the Madame who ran things for the owners. Margaret, she was, and would strike any girl who called her Maggie. I approached her on introduction from a girl I paid to do so. She met me in the alley behind the establishment.