The Pirate's Daughter (19 page)

The thought of moving an inch from the club chair set his head spinning. He closed his eyes and listened to the slow rumble of the ship, felt it in his bones. When he opened them again, Cricket was kneeling before him, her hand on his knee. She had changed her midshipman's outfit for a T-shirt and jeans. Concern showed like flecks of gold in her green eyes. “Do you feel like eating?”

Wilson nodded yes and sat forward with an effort. She placed a blue plastic tray on his lap. There was a grilled cheese sandwich, a large deli pickle, a pile of barbecued potato chips, and a tall glass of lemonade sweating in the heat.

“That's made from real African lemons,” Cricket said. “Good stuff. Drink it slowly.”

Wilson took small sips of the lemonade and ate half the sandwich. The cheese had an odd sharp taste, not altogether bad.

“Goat cheese,” Cricket said. “All we've got on the island is goats. A few sheep. No cows. Goats will eat garbage, and there's plenty of that.”

“The island?” Wilson said.

“I'll tell you all about it when we get there.” She handed him a little pillbox full of aspirin.

He swallowed three of them and a few minutes later felt better.

“How do you feel now?”

“Not bad, considering I've just had a near-death experience.”

“I know you're exhausted,” Cricket said, “and probably still in shock, but I don't want …” Her voice trailed off. She went over to the porthole, then came back and sat cross-legged on the bunk. “Like I said, I'm not a monster.”

“So you're not a monster,” Wilson said. “But you're not a hell of a lot better. You're a pirate.”

“Barely.” Cricket blinked at him. “I'm just a woman who's had to make some unfortunate decisions. I'm trapped in this life. It's all I've ever known.”

“What about Captain Amundsen?” Wilson said. “Was that one of your unfortunate decisions?”

Cricket bit her lip and looked away. “I went to him last night,” she said in a small voice. “They had him down in the hold, tied to a steam pipe so he couldn't sit or lie down. I untied him, I gave him something to eat. ‘Just go along with us for a little while,' I said. ‘When Dad asks you to work for the Brotherhood, say you will. You play along now, and later, after a couple of years, when they stop watching you so closely, you'll have a chance to escape.' Do you know what he did?”

“I have an idea,” Wilson said.

“He spit the food back in my face. Black bean soup. Got in my
hair, all over. The captain practically threw himself off that plank, Wilson! Maybe he wanted to prove something; maybe he was tired of life and wanted to go out a martyr. But he did have a choice!”

“He's dead now,” Wilson said.

“Yes.” Cricket's voice trembled. “And I regret that more than I can say. I really liked the old guy. What makes it worse is this whole operation was about kidnapping Ackerman, not about the captain at all.”

Wilson was silent. Cricket stared at the oval patch of sunlight as it moved up the bulkhead to three in the afternoon. Finally, she looked over at him, her green eyes dark and fathomless. Then her lip began to tremble again, and she leaned forward, and tears made dark splotches on her jeans.

“Wilson, don't hate me,” she said. “I'm so lonely. You can help me out of this nightmare.”

Wilson shook his head. “How?” he said at last.

Cricket shrugged miserably. “You're good. I need your goodness. Sometimes I can't say what's right or wrong. My father tells me to do something, and I do it because that's the way it's been since I was a kid. It's always been the family and the Brotherhood against the rest of the world. What's right for the family has often been wrong for someone else. You're different. You know what's right and wrong for everyone.”

“You're asking me to be your conscience?” Wilson raised an eyebrow.

“Something like that,” Cricket said.

“You don't need a degree in moral philosophy to figure out making an innocent person walk the plank is not a good thing,” Wilson said. “If you don't know that, I can't help you.”

“But you can help me in another way that's very important.” Cricket looked up at him, suddenly dry-eyed. “You can gamble.”

“Why the hell does gambling matter so much to you?”

“Let's not talk anymore. You need some rest right now.”

Cricket stood and helped Wilson over to the bunk. They lay together side by side but not touching as dusk fell, a scarlet dome over green islands and Africa in the distance, and the night came on, full of piteous stars.

Small islands lay close off either bow, half hidden in malarial haze. The reedy channels were full of crocodiles and kingfishers. Knobby-rooted trees, home to birds of every description, grew down to the black water. By 10:00
A.M
. the sky burned white with heat, so bright it became impossible to look out the porthole.

Wilson had never experienced such oppressive weather. Trying to breathe here was like trying to breathe underwater. The
Storm
Car's ancient diesels droned loud and soft in maddening, irregular pulses. For hours the two of them lay naked and sweating in the bunk, caught in a sort of erotic torpor. They reached for each other, sweated together for a while, then lay apart and sweated into the moist sheets.

Cricket rose at dusk, wet a rag in the rusty water of the sink, and sponged Wilson's flesh. This cooled him for the barest second, till the water evaporated, rising like steam in the moist air.

“These goddamned islands,” Cricket said, her eyes purple-lidded from the heat. “The climate's terrible where we're going, but nothing's as terrible as this.”

“Where are we?”

“The Mojango Archipelago.”

“It's not Africa?”

“Close enough,” Cricket said. “We're about sixty miles off the Bupandan coast. Dad comes through the Mojangos whenever he's towing a prize. It's very private. The islands were declared a wildlife sanctuary by the United Nations about twenty years ago. There's a no-fly zone overhead because of all the birds, and there's only one channel through this muck, which is off limits to international shipping. Come here.”

Wilson got up with some effort and went over to the porthole. Hummocks overgrown with salt grass slid by in the channel below. Tall birds with red and yellow feathers stood on one leg in the muddy shallows, watching the vessel pass with lusterless, uncurious
eyes. Blue-tailed African thrushes sat preening themselves on the rusty railing of the companionway, dropping splotches of guano to the deck. Clouds of scarlet wrens swirled through the thick air overhead.

Wilson watched for a while and the world seemed alive with feathery movement. “There are a hell of a lot of birds out there,” he said.

“As of last count three hundred and seventy-five separate species, and half of them exist nowhere else in the world,” Cricket said.

“Why here, particularly?” Wilson said.

“Actually it's because of the bugs,” Cricket said. “The birds eat the bugs. The bugs are here because the reeds and the tide pools make an ideal habitat. The reeds and the tide pools are here because—” She shrugged. “You get the idea.”

“What kind of bugs?” Wilson said.

“Locusts, flying cockroaches, termites, Java beetles, bottle flies, mosquitoes, giant gnats, winged African earwigs, you name it. Go ahead, listen,” Cricket said. “You've got to concentrate to hear them.”

Wilson steadied himself against the bulkhead and listened. After a few seconds another sound became clear beneath the monotonous rumble of the diesel, a small pervasive chattering that was everywhere and nowhere. Then his eyes adjusted, and he saw them against the hazy, descending sun. Millions of black specks, the air thick and grainy with them.

“My God!” he said.

“Yeah,” Cricket said. “You can't open your mouth topside without something flying in. The crew wears these mesh beekeeper's hats when they go topside. Except for Dad. He just bats them away like they're nothing. But I can't stand the goddamn things, they give me the creeps. That's why we're down here for the duration of the voyage.”

“That the only reason?” Wilson said.

Cricket smiled, her breasts faintly translucent in the diminishing light.

Later that night, it was too hot to sleep. They lay in the hot darkness not touching because of the heat. Wilson listened to the chug of the engines and the dull drone of the insects and wondered what the future would hold. How would he find his way home again? Where would he wake up tomorrow or a week from tomorrow? What did his dread have in store for him next?

“My father will kill you if he can find a way,” Cricket said suddenly.

Wilson was startled; it seemed she could read his mind.

“So why doesn't he just come down now and get it over with?” Wilson said.

“He wouldn't dare with me around,” Cricket said. “He knows I'd report him to the Thirty Captains. Even we pirates live by rules, you know. You're mine by authority of the Articles, and the Articles are law with us. There's nothing more sacred to a pirate than property rights. But Dad is an unscrupulous bastard. There will be plenty of quiet opportunities ashore. We're going to have to be very careful until he gets used to the idea of you being around.”

Cricket turned on her side. Then she turned back and put a hand on his thigh. “I love you,” she said in a voice that Wilson had to strain to hear. “You don't have to say anything, not a word, if you don't want to.”

Wilson didn't say anything.

“You don't believe me.”

“O.K., you love me,” Wilson said with some bitterness. “Is that why you dragged me into this mess against my will? I'm not a pirate, I'm not a murderer,” she pulled away at this “and I'm telling you now, the first chance I get, I'm clearing out.”

“Impossible,” Cricket said quietly. “Where would you go?”

“Home,” Wilson said.

“Your home's here with me now. Remember that mark on your shoulder?”

Before he could reply, Wilson felt her slide down the damp mattress and he felt her breasts against his leg, and he stiffened and her mouth was on him there.

Grassy hummocks covered with sleeping birds fell away into tropical gloom beyond the porthole. The shallow black water swarmed with insects. Slowly evolving creatures, unnamed and sinewy, half fish, half something else, swam up toward the fading light.

Along the crowded cement wharves, cranes hoisted pallets full of dark cargo into dilapidated freighters that showed no flag or registry. The dockyard was a mess of crates and livestock and rusty scrap metal. Native dockworkers labored bare to the waist, their purple-black skin shining in the sun. Beyond a fifteen-foot barbed-wire fence, a shanty city lay strewn up the slope. Paths of red mud straggled and intersected in a crazy web through a maze of plywood shacks, lean-tos made from brush, and cardboard box huts tied together with vine.
No, city was the wrong word for this ugly sprawl
, Wilson thought.
More like a garbage dump, teeming with humanity
.

“Where are we?” He stood naked with a pair of binoculars at the porthole. It was only an hour or two after dawn but already hot enough to fry an egg on deck.

Cricket yawned and stuck her nose in the air. “From the putrid stench, I'd say it's Quatre Sables,” she said. “No plumbing, no sewers, no nothing.”

“So this is Africa,” Wilson said, and there was an unexpected thrill at the thought. “Which country?”

“Sorry, it's not quite Africa,” Cricket said. She sat up, scratching
her head. “We're still twenty-five miles or so off the Bupandan coast. You're looking at the island of Quatre Sables, just south of the Mojangos. And it's no country at all. Used to belong to Portugal, I guess; now it belongs to us. It's a pirate republic.”

“What does that mean exactly?”

Cricket shrugged. “We claim no flag except the skull and crossbones. We govern ourselves by the Confederation of Thirty Captains under the Articles of Brotherhood. Everyone's got their place in the chain of command.”

She came up and pressed into him from behind and put her arms around him and put her hands over his shoulders. “Look up there. Do you see the big places on the ridge?”

Wilson pointed the binoculars: high up the slope, a semicircle of fine white houses separated by a wall from the cardboard slums below. He caught a glimpse of green lawns and palm trees, thought he saw the sun glint off the windshield of a car.

“We live up there,” Cricket said.

“Who's we?” Wilson said.

“The Thirty Captains. My father's one of them. I called Quatre Sables a republic. That's the wrong word. Oligarchy is better, I suppose. We own the ships; we plan the missions; we make the money; we make the rules.”

“What about all of them?” Wilson lowered the binoculars and gestured toward the trash city on the slope.

“Refugees, mostly. From the civil war in Bupanda. They're not part of the Brotherhood.”

“What are they, then?”

Cricket shrugged, a cruel glint in her eye. “Cannon fodder.”

Wilson stood bewildered on the quay, his skin alive with prickly heat as the light faded lavender over the back of the island to the west. He felt light-headed after two days in Cricket's cabin aboard the
Storm Car
. His jaw popped every time he swallowed; his knees ached. The gangs of dockworkers and the disembarking pirate crews passed in a blur of sweat and muscle. “You look a little green,” Cricket said.

“I'm fine,” Wilson said, but there was a faint buzzing in his inner ear.

“I've got to take care of a couple of things, shouldn't be longer than fifteen,” Cricket said. “Here …” She reached into her duffel bag and pulled out her nickel-plated .38 and pushed it into the waistband of Wilson's jeans. “If anyone bothers you, shoot them.” Then she was gone.