Scurvy Goonda (13 page)

Ted looked down at the burbling liquid.

“So, what do you do with it?” he said.

“We use it to coat our weapons,” said Joelle-Michelle. “As you’ll find out. You see, there’s a Greenies antidote, and we know where it’s being made. Which reminds me, I have a badminton racket for you.”

“What?”

“You’ll understand soon.”

If Persephone’s chest had still contained a heart, it would have been pumping furiously. But alas, since that wasn’t an option, her foot was nervously banging out a steady rhythm—
BaBUMP-BaBUMP-BaBUMP!

“Pretty bird,” chanted Persephone to herself. “Pretty bird. Pretty bird. He will find you pretty. Hello, Scurvy. Hello,
Scurvy
. Hel-LO, Scur-VY.”

Persephone was sitting at one end of a long table filled with all kinds of food—everything she remembered that Scurvy liked. Tapioca. Crab legs. Shepherd’s pie. Beef tartare. And piles and piles of bacon covering specially ordered golden plates, cooked to every degree of crispiness and floppy-fattiness. Persephone even had bacon made from bulls and frogs and horses and social workers—all in the hopes of making her adorable Scurvy happy. She had heard that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, and if Scurvy didn’t love her, well then, she would feed him his own heart.

Persephone listened to the sound of her own bones clattering. She was second-guessing her blue dress. Was it too forward? She really should have gone with something more demure—after all, she didn’t want Scurvy
knowing
that she had been thinking about him for the past three hundred years. Might seem a touch desperate.

“Oh,” she said, panicking. “I need to change, I need to change.”

But then the doorknob turned.

Persephone almost fainted.

The doorknob turned some more and then returned to its original position.

Persephone felt like she was a teenager.

The doorknob attempted to turn again and then shook back and forth a bit.

“Er, P-p-president Skeleton,” said Bugslush. “I think I might have accidentally l-locked myself out. And I don’t have a k-k-key.”

Persephone sighed. Even though her knees were weak from all this anxiety, she pulled herself to her feet and walked across the floor to the locked door, her high heels clopping all the way. She took a deep breath into her nonexistent lungs and turned the knob.

Bugslush strode confidently inside, masking his mistake, and bowed toward the invited guest.

“President Skelet-ton,” said Bugslush. “May I introduce Mr. Sc-sc-scurvy Gordon?”

“I prefer Goonda these days,” said a voice from the other side of the doorway. And with that, Scurvy walked into the room. His shabby clothes had been pressed, his boots had been shined to a blinding polish, his beard had been trimmed, his eyebrows had been tamed, his fingernails had been clipped, his skin had been exfoliated, and his tricorne hat had been cleaned and hammered back into its original shape.

Inside, Persephone swooned.

Scurvy had been groomed against his will by Persephone’s
personal staff of well-compensated beauticians, but despite the aggressive makeover, he had to admit that on the whole, he enjoyed the spiffing up. He felt particularly handsome tonight.

“Scurvy!” said Persephone, her eye sockets transfixed on her eternal love.

“Good gravy,” said Scurvy, looking at Persephone. “Yer so
tall.”

Persephone twisted her jawbone into a sort of smile.

“Power makes everybody seem taller,” said Persephone.

“Strange tah hear ya talkin’,” said Scurvy.

“I’ve worked on my diction since … the boat,” said Persephone.

“Oh,” said Scurvy.

“You still have your hat,” said Persephone, all excited and girlish.

“Three hundred years and counting. Har!” said Scurvy, trying to make his voice sound normal. He couldn’t believe that this was the bird who used to creep him out by staring at him sixteen hours a day, sitting on his shoulder three inches away.

“And your
dreadful
Greenies have been cured, I see,” said Persephone.

“Yer doctors gave me an antidote,” said Scurvy. A white-coated physician had given him a shot, and within a few minutes, all the bumps had disappeared, and his strength was returning. “Brand-new me.”

“You’re just the same as I remember you,” said Persephone, leaning in closer.

Scurvy realized that he had been paid a compliment, and that Persephone was expecting him to offer one in return.

“And you,” said Scurvy, “are more …
colorful
than ever. Ya got all dressed up.”

Persephone curtsied modestly.

“It’s a special occasion,” she said. “Come and join me at the table.”

And that’s when Scurvy looked at what they were having for dinner.

Stretching out on the table in front of Scurvy was a fantasy that played out nightly behind his eyelids, when he was in bed and just letting his mind wander. He had never seen so much bacon—it was as though the bounty of the supermarket meat rack had tripled in size and been dumped onto enormous gold platters. The plates of bacon were topped with bacon bits and sugarcoated bacon candies, and there were glasses of pureed bacon to wash down the rest of the bacon. It was a meal sent from heaven.

“B-bacon, Mr. Goonda?” said Bugslush.

“Holy crow,” said Scurvy as Bugslush placed a two-foot-long slab on his plate.

The honey possum picked up a silver gravy boat.

“Some bacon s-sauce for your b-bacon?” said Bugslush.

“Please,” said Scurvy, and Bugslush poured a long stream of greasy sauce over Scurvy’s slab of bacon.

“May I bring anything for y-you, President Skeleton?” said Bugslush.

“That will be all, Bugslush,” said Persephone. “Mr. Goonda and I have much to talk about.”

With a bow, Bugslush left the room, thrilled to be dismissed.

As soon as the door shut behind Bugslush, Persephone picked up a large glass of scarlet wine and swirled the liquid with small rotations of her bony wrist. She looked at Scurvy, studying him. It had been so long. She took a drink, but to Scurvy it
didn’t look like she was really tasting the
vino
—it simply went down the hatch, and a strange plunking sound came from her torso, as though the liquid was thunking into … a plastic bag?

“Here you are,” said Persephone, coyly. “Here. You. Are. Indeed.”

But Scurvy already knew he was definitely
here
, and even though there was more bacon around than he had ever seen in any one place, he didn’t like the way that this heavily accessorized skeleton was looking at him. There was something going on behind those empty eyes. He put his head down and took a huge bite of his bacon slab, hoping that when he looked up again, she would be gone.

“You know,” said Persephone. “I forgave you for not saving me all those years ago. After all, the boat was on fire, and you probably weren’t able to come down into the galley, even to save a devoted friend.”

“Right, the sinkin’,” said Scurvy. “I remember that night. I
attempted
tah get downstairs and grab yer cage, because a captain
never
lets any of his crew perish. But ya should have seen tha fight on deck—two of tha king’s ships and mercenaries galore.”

“Hmm … sounds rough,” said Persephone. “Not as bad as being trapped alone in a burning cage, but still… quite bad.”

“I tried, Persephone. I tried tah get through tha fire, but I was tossed overboard in tha fight. I was meant tah go down with that ship.”

“Then
prove
that you tried, Scurvy!” said Persephone. She knew it was an unfair request, but she had been waiting to talk about this for three hundred years. The possibility that Scurvy
hadn’t
abandoned her was overwhelming. If she was going to completely reverse her thinking after three hundred years, she was going to need evidence.

Scurvy rolled up the legs of his pants, exposing calf muscles covered everywhere in coarse black hair. That is, everywhere except in two odd spots—blotches of exposed scar tissue.

“See these?” said Scurvy, pointing at the hairless patches of skin.

“I do,” said Persephone.

“I have them because I was attacked by an ab-com from the other boat when I was trying to run downstairs tah get ya. I couldn’t get there, Persephone. I’ve carried these scars fer three centuries.”

Persephone considered this.

“I see,” she said. She wasn’t sure if Scurvy was telling the truth—he could have received those scars anywhere.

“You swear that you got attacked that very day.”

“I swear tah ya. Tha reason I got tha scars is that I was trying so hard tah get tah ya before ya were hurt that I wasn’t payin’ as much attention tah my fightin’ as I shoulda been.”

Persephone noticed that Scurvy had stopped eating the bacon. That was the clincher—he never stopped eating except to make an important point.

And now she loved him more than ever.

“Oh, my darling,” she said, and drank the rest of her glass of wine, which splashed audibly into her trash bag.

“Scurvy,” she continued. “The reason I invited you here tonight is… it’s because I want to be with you.”

As soon as those words came out of Persephone’s beak,
Scurvy realized he had made a mistake. In lying about how he had tried to rescue Persephone—when in reality he had been far too busy fighting to worry about some creepy skeleton bird—he had inadvertently given her the impression that he was valiantly looking out for her. The truth was, he’d gotten the burns on his legs when he’d been cooking bacon naked and dropped the pan.

“Er,” said Scurvy. “What does that mean, exactly? That ya want to be
with
me.”

“It means that I want you in my life,” said Persephone.

“Well, that’s great! I mean, we’re doing that right now, aren’t we? Technically, I’m
in
yer life—if I’m sitting across tha table from ya, I’m occupying
space
in yer life, ya might say, so we’re right where we need tah be.”

“That’s not exactly what I mean, Scurvy,” said Persephone. “I want
you
. Always. Here and everywhere else we might go.”

“But, Persephone, you were my
bird!”

“I
used
to be your bird, but now I want to be your wife,” said Persephone, twirling a wing bone in the curls of her blond wig. “Say yes, my darling. Or else, my darling.”

Swamster was not built for the outdoors. All around him, filling up the transport trucks, were members of President Skeleton’s elite guard: a Bazlook that looked like a sloth with a tiny head on an enormous body, a Bradook that had the appearance of a blond furball with tiny eyes poking out, a snaggletoothed Krumsplat that had the appearance of a rabid porcupine and moved along by hurling itself high into the air, splatting to the ground, and then repeating the process.

“Ye look uncomfortable with that crossbow,” the Bazlook told Swamster.

“I’m more accustomed to finger-sandwich platters,” Swamster explained.

“Well,” said the Bradook, “you better get used to it, because it’s going to be a busy hunting day.”

Swamster had never hunted for anything in his life, aside from
just
the right swimsuit to disguise the bit of extra around his waist.

The caravan approached a road that cut through a field of spotlights pointed at the sky, and the Krumsplat handed around sunglasses—looking at the beams could damage the eyes. The spotlights had been designed by the first inhabitants of Middlemost, who figured if they could make their world look like a
star, all potential invaders would leave them alone for fear of being burned up. The spotlights had worked wonders ever since.

“How much longer until we reach the place where the boy was seen?” said Swamster.

“Soon,” said the Krumsplat.

“Let’s say that we do find the boy,” said Swamster. “We kill him, let him know who’s boss, kill him, that kind of thing. Are we supposed to just leave his body lying out, or can we at least send it back to Earth so that his family can bury him properly?”

“President Skeleton said I should eat it,” said the Bazlook. “And she told me to make sure you have a bite, to toughen you up.”

“Eat the boy. Excellent. Can’t wait.”

Scurvy scowled.

The truth was, he was simply not a one-woman kind of pirate—something that wasn’t all that unusual among men of his seafaring occupation. And he truly wasn’t a one-woman pirate if the woman in question happened to be a skeleton cockatoo. His world travels had revealed to him that there were many, many ab-com women. Before he had even met Persephone, he had been married three times.

Scurvy had taken his first wife, Sofia, while he was haunting the islands of the Mediterranean, bouncing from the Islas Baleares to Corsica to Crete, and living a sailor’s life. Sofia stayed with him for as long as she could stand the claustro-phobic ship holds and the savage confrontations that were a part of Scurvy’s everyday pirate existence, until the day finally came when she left him for a watchmaker from Constantinople, whom she had married secretly, claiming that her marriage to Scurvy had never been legal, due to the fact that a barnacle and not a priest had performed the ceremony.

For his second marriage, he had picked a tall, mysterious woman from Casablanca named Amal—a woman so mysterious that she never removed the veil that covered most of her face. But he was mesmerized by her striking eyes—she had to be an unimaginable beauty under those alluring veils, he was sure of it.
Amal was more patient with Scurvy’s lifestyle than Sofia had been, and she would wait for him in Morocco while he was away at sea for months and years. Whenever he made his way back to northern Africa, she was always standing at the end of the dock, veils blowing in the Atlantic winds, meeting his ship as it pulled into port.

Eventually, Scurvy discovered that Amal wore a veil because she was a bearded woman in the circus, but he got over this minor detail quickly—he wasn’t a picky man. He and Amal spent their nights talking about beard maintenance, and because of her tips Scurvy’s mane had been silky smooth for three centuries.

His third wife had been Cindy, whom he had left on Antarctica because she so thoroughly aggravated him. She was probably annoying the penguins there today. He didn’t like thinking about Cindy, because it wasn’t usually his style to leave women at the bottom of the world, and he still felt guilty about the whole situation.