The Pirate's Daughter (10 page)

“Bazzano's.”

“What are you doing all the way out there?”

Wilson didn't know how to begin, then he blurted out, “Andrea, I'm going away.”
Silence.

“Andrea, did you hear what I said?”

“I heard you,” Andrea said. “It just took a minute to sink in.” Her voice was calm and flat.

“Things haven't been good with us, not for a long time. We both know that,” Wilson said. “There's nothing in my life right now that makes me happy. We fight, we make up, we fight, we make up. It's always the same. I get on the same bus; the same files are sitting on my computer at work. I feel like I can't breathe. I need a change.”

“So where are you going?”

“Does it matter?”

“No, I guess not. How long?”

Wilson hesitated. “A year, two. Maybe longer.”

There was a sudden crash, then the staticky sound of fumbling for the receiver. “You call me to tell me you're leaving for two years?” Andrea's voice came back angry a moment later. “After all the crap we've been through together, you tell me you're leaving me
over the phone?
”

“I'm sorry it worked out this way,” Wilson said. “But I just don't have time to hash things out in person. I'm leaving in a couple of hours.”

All at once, Andrea began to sob in great, broken gasps. Wilson listened, his stomach twisting in knots.

“Andrea, please,” he said at last. “I'm really sorry. I feel like hell about this.”

“You feel like hell? It's always about you, isn't it? You bastard, you—” But she couldn't finish. The sobbing went on for another few minutes, then subsided. “Wilson, I love you,” she said, her voice calmer. “I know we don't talk about things. We need to talk more. I always thought we'd get married. I was sure of it. I've just been waiting for you to find out what you want to do with your life. That's all. I thought you'd decide to go back to school, something like that. That's what's making you miserable! Not me, not us! You
don't know what to do with yourself. Running away isn't going to help.”

“It's all I've got right now, Andrea,” Wilson said.

“Let's talk about this in person, O.K.? Maybe we could go to couples counseling. Things will get better, I know they will.”

“It's too late,” Wilson said.

“Is there someone else? Are you there with someone else?”

“No,” Wilson lied.

“You're lying,” she said, and started to sob again. The sound was like a knife turning in his gut. When the conversation ended a half hour later, he found his face was wet with tears. He could still hear Andrea's last, frightened whisper.

“You're not coming back to me; you're never coming back to me. I thought after all these years—I thought you—”

But Wilson did not catch the rest because the line went dead. Whether she hung up on him or there was a problem with the connection, he never knew. He leaned into the fetid booth and squeezed his eyes shut and tried to hold in his tears with the palm of his hand. He had not expected this pain, these tears, but he couldn't say whether leaving Andrea or change itself had caused the reaction. He realized now that he hated change more than anything else in the world; change meant death and sadness. He hated change as much as he was drawn to it. Suddenly he remembered a vacation trip to Maine he and Andrea had taken three years before, when things had been good between them: On the way up they had pulled over somewhere in rural New England and spent the night in the car. They woke at dawn and walked out into a dew-wet field of waist-high wildflowers and made love there, surrounded by red and purple blooms, the sky bright as hope above. He could still remember the feel of her body beneath his, her breath close in his ear. No. It was best not to think of those things. He dried his face on his sleeve and went back out onto the loggia.

One arm hooked over the back of her chair, Cricket smoked a harsh foreign cigarette that she had bummed from someone at the
bar. Another bottle of red wine sat half empty on the table. She looked up as Wilson approached, a long, appraising look, with something dangerous hidden in the depths.

“So, it's done?” she said when he sat down.

Wilson nodded miserably. He felt so rotten he could hardly speak.

“Hey, Wilson,” Cricket said. She took his wrist tightly in her hand callused as any farmer's, pulled him over, and kissed him hard on the lips. Wilson's first impulse was to pull away; then he felt her breasts through the striped top, and he didn't pull away. She drew her lips off his after a minute or so, panting a little, but stayed close enough for Wilson to smell the cigarette and the wine on her breath.

“O.K.,” she said. “That's all you get for a while.”

“What do you mean?” Wilson said.

“Two reasons,” Cricket said. “First, you're not ready yet. You're going to be thinking about your girlfriend for a while, I can tell. Second—and this is important—we have to pretend we're brother and sister. That's what your papers say, and that's what I told the captain of the
Compound Interest
. He's a tough old bastard named Amundsen, and if he finds out any different, he'll put us ashore the first chance he gets.”

“You're crazy,” Wilson said.

“No. It's because the last couple they had aboard jumped ship to get married. I told you, remember? He doesn't want that happening again. We've got to keep up appearances at least until we make the Azores. O.K.? That's only a few weeks away.”

“Why the Azores?” Wilson said, but Cricket wouldn't answer. She kissed him one more time and leaned back and took up the bottle of wine. She pulled Wilson's glass across the tablecloth, filled it, pushed it back again. “Drink up,” she said. “We've got to be aboard the
Compound Interest
for the midnight tide.”

They finished the wine quickly, then stood and shouldered their
bags and walked up the pier, in and out of the lamplight, quiet as two conspirators, the sea murmuring its furtive promises to the night at their backs.

Pale lights along the dark river. The jungle infested with silence. Small men in the underbrush hold flashlights beneath their chins like children at a Halloween party. Then, a screaming wells up out of nowhere, and the full moon above beats red against a black sky, and the river begins to froth and boil, something ancient rising to the surface, something terrible—

Wilson snapped awake in an unfamiliar gloom, unable to breathe, his T-shirt drenched with sweat. He couldn't see a thing. From all around came a deep, monotonous hush, familiar and alien at once, and the unmistakable surge of forward motion. The place where he lay was stuffy and windowless, and there was the sound of someone else breathing in the blackness nearby. If he didn't get a lung full of fresh air soon, Wilson knew he would suffocate.

In a panic he threw himself to the floor and stumbled off blindly. Instinct led him down a narrow corridor and up a ladder and at last out into the salt wind and the hazy dark of a warm night at sea. Here his lungs opened, and he fell back gasping against the bulkhead, and the events of the last twenty-four hours came flooding back. He was aboard the
Compound Interest
, making south-southeast across the Atlantic for the Azores. He had shipped out at midnight, chasing a beautiful woman and because life onshore had become intolerable to him—and for other reasons that were still not clear in his mind. He was sure the Tightness of his decision would assert itself once this momentary panic subsided. After all, wasn't the possibility of
drowning in a storm at sea better than drowning slowly in the day-to-dayness of life?

When Wilson could breathe again, he looked up and found himself facing the stern of the vessel, its white, frothy wake vanishing in the ocean black like a road disappearing in a snowstorm. But the night and the ocean and the ship's running lights could not obscure the vast bulk of the continent they were leaving behind. Just there, beyond the rim of darkness, a darker shape where the sky still held the light of cities. Wilson thought of baseball diamonds lit for night games, cocktail hour in a crowded bar, highways bumper to bumper with taillights at rush hour, and he thought of Andrea sleeping alone tonight, and he felt the terrible weight of the things he was leaving behind.

“Hey there! Why aren't you below with the rest?”

Wilson swung around to face a short barrel of a man standing just the other side of the hatchway. The man's wind-weathered face was covered with a bush of gray hair that seemed to grow in every direction. He wore a captain's hat, a garish yellow plastic rain slicker, and blue shorts. Thick, hairy legs ended abruptly in a pair of worn leather boat shoes. Wilson didn't need to be told that this was Captain Amundsen.

“I asked you a question, mister!” The captain took an aggressive step forward. “You're on my watch. Ship's rules, no extraneous crew members taking their leisure topside during the night.”

Wilson stuttered out a response. He had needed some fresh air, he said. He was sorry. Hard to breathe below.

The captain stepped down to get a closer look. Wilson was suddenly aware of his own state of undress: a pair of green boxers printed with pink rabbits that had been a present from Andrea one Easter, a ratty old Ashland College T-shirt, faded and full of holes. His bare feet felt cold against the scrubbed wood of the deck.

“Come aboard tonight with Cricket Page?”

“Yes, sir,” Wilson said.

“You're the brother.”

“Yes, sir.”

The captain scratched his beard. “That girl's one of the best damn natural sailors I've ever seen,” he said. “And I've seen a few. I hope it runs in the family.”

“I hope so too, sir,” Wilson said.

“Of course, her navigational skills could use a little improving.”

“Yes, sir.”

The captain scratched his beard again. “Well, what can it hurt?” he said. “I was just about to light a cigar.”

They went up the deck to the navigational octagon, a sunken area at the center of the ship between the two masts, protected on seven sides by a thick Plexiglas cowling. The Mylar beach umbrella sails folded and unfolded above, and the vessel stayed an even course in the prevailing light winds. A foul-weather top lay open to the sky bleary with indistinct stars. The ship's wheel, no larger than steering wheels found in ordinary sedans, was surrounded by a bewildering array of glowing radar screens and monitors showing crisp and colorful digital readouts. Gone the rope and wood, gone the brass instrumentation of former days. A computer terminal glowed quietly to one side, its clear plastic keys lit from within.

They settled on waterproof flotation pillows on a polished aluminum bench that made up one angle of the octagon. The captain crossed his short legs with some difficulty, reached into the pocket of his windbreaker, and withdrew a small wooden box. Inside lay a half dozen fragrant finger-size cigars, wrapped in gold foil.

“Cubans,” he said. “Got 'em in Havana.” He took a cigar out of the box, unwrapped it carefully, bit off the end, and lit up with the cigarette lighter from the console. Then he handed one to Wilson. For a while, the two of them sat back and drew on the cigars and watched clouds of pungent smoke blow off into the night.

“There's nothing like a good cigar,” the captain said at last. “Everything else will fail you or grow wearisome, including women. But a good cigar, hell, that's a thing a man will never tire of.”

Wilson smiled. A cool breeze from the west touched his face with
gentle curiosity. Cigars reminded Wilson of his father. Years after his father's death in the wreck of the four forty-five, Wilson inherited an old cardboard suitcase of the man's possessions from his great-aunt's estate. The suitcase had contained rubber-banded piles of yellowed racing forms, six small notebooks heavy with mathematical formulas for placing bets at certain tracks, stock certificates issued by companies long since bankrupt—but there had also been a handful of silver foreign coins and a fancy box of imported cigars. These had been the extent of his patrimony, fifty hand-rolled Coronado Supremos, each sealed with wax in airtight glass tubes. He had smoked them slowly over the years, always lighting up at four forty-five exactly in honor of his father, at one of the outdoor cafés in Buptown or the Bend. Now just one cigar remained, nestled in its tube with his spare socks at the bottom of the closet in his apartment back home.

Wilson told the captain about the inherited Coronados with the theatrical gesticulations that cigars often seem to inspire in the amateur smoker. “When I get home again, and who knows how long that will be,” Wilson said, waving his cigar in a rueful arc, “I'll buy a glass of the sixty-five-dollar Armagnac on the patio at the Cat and Cradle, and I'll smoke that last cigar very, very slowly.”

The captain's cigar showed a steady glowing coal in the darkness. “At least you got something from your father,” he said. “I never got anything from mine but a kick in the ass. My old man was a bishop of the Reformed Lutheran Danish Church. You weren't arguing with him, you know; you were arguing with God. When I was twelve, I ran off to Copenhagen and took ship for Africa. The sea receives all kinds of orphans, mister.”

The captain was from a small fishing village on the bleak Frisian coast of Denmark, where it rains most of the year. When the sun comes out, the people weep, get drunk, make love to their neighbors' wives, dance naked in the streets. The beauty of sunny days is too much for them; they go slightly mad until the rain comes back again. The captain had served on American vessels for thirty years;
his English was perfect, bore no trace of the gray, rockbound coasts of his youth.

“Amundsen,” Wilson said. “Any relation to the man who beat Scott to the pole?”

“None,” the captain said. “A bunch of pasty-faced churchmen in my family for generations. I'm the first in a hundred fifty years to get some wind in my hair.”