The Pirate's Daughter (3 page)

“One night, just before Christmas when I was about seven years old, my father showed up drunk in the middle of the night at my window. He cut the screen out with a pocketknife, and wrapped me in a sweater and put me in his outboard. We took the Palmetto Passage between Outer and Inner Key, and I remember the smell of diesel and my father's cigarette and the sky black as ink, no stars, nothing.

“We tied up at Mazep's dock and went into the place, a garish pink bungalow the size of a parking garage. In the living room there were about twenty-five guys in suits, all with guns drawn. The scene was very tense. In an inflatable kiddie pool on the floor was all this money—about two million dollars in cash, my father told me later—all of it riding on a single cut of the cards between Mazep and some big shot from Chicago. They wanted somebody totally disinterested
to cut the cards, and they couldn't find anybody there, so my father went and got me.

“I was scared shitless, shaking like a leaf, but I didn't cry. They opened up a new pack. I can still hear the sound of the cellophane, and I can still smell the beer and body odor and whiskey and their big gangster cigars. I cut the cards. It was the king of hearts. They had bet high-low, Mazep low, the big shot high. Johnny Mazep lost everything. His wife, who was Brazilian and always a little crazy anyway, committed suicide. Two months later, he sold his house and left the Palmettos for good, and his family had been there for two hundred years, first as wreckers and privateers, then smugglers and gamblers. Always something like that.

“The big shot from Chicago gave me four five-hundred-dollar bills for cutting the cards for him. I kept them folded up tight in my hand all the way home in the outboard, the moon up and shining on the dark water. In the morning my mother found the screen cut and the two thousand dollars under my pillow. I told her the tooth fairy came during the night and left the money. ‘Mighty expensive tooth,' she said, and she fixed the screen and put the money in a savings account for me and didn't say anything else. As soon as I could, about ten years later, I took that money out of the bank, and I went to sea and I haven't been back to the Palmettos since.”

The second bottle of wine was almost empty now. Little bits of cork floated in the inch or so of pale yellow liquid at the bottom. Wilson felt fine. He poured the last few drops into Cricket's glass. When she brought the glass to her lips, he noticed with a start that her hands were rough and broken nailed, work scarred, hard looking. They didn't seem to go with the coppery hair and the green eyes the color of tropic shallows full of fish and coral. Cricket caught Wilson looking at her hands, flushed a little, and hid them quickly under the tablecloth.

“Why have you stayed away from your home for so long?” Wilson said to cover the awkwardness.

Cricket shrugged, her hair glinting in the sunlight. “I prefer the
sea,” she said. “It's so changeable, one minute stormy, the next flat as a plate. It's supposed to be that way, so you're ready for whatever happens. On land we have this illusion of stability. But that's a big lie; everything can ride on the single turn of a card. At least at sea you know where you stand. I'll tell you what a sailor is, a sailor—”

But she was interrupted by the maître d' in the suit, who stepped up and proffered the bill on a glossy black tray.

“L'addition,”
he said with the gravity of a cardinal pronouncing a blessing.

“How much is it?” Cricket said.

Wilson waved her away. “On me,” he said.

It came to $178.29, not including tax and tip—more than his food budget for the entire month. “Shit, just for soup and salad … I guess it's the wine.…” He checked the wine list and saw that the first bottle Cricket had ordered was listed at $65, the second at $78.

As he was fumbling with his credit card, she got up quickly. “Thanks for lunch,” she said. “Better get back to the store.”

Figuring out the tip, Wilson barely heard, and when he looked up, she was gone.

Two days later Wilson met Andrea for happy hour at Marina's in the Marina, a large, noisy restaurant-bar popular with the Financial Mile after-work crowd.

Marina's was the kind of place Wilson hated—slick, overpackaged, too many rules: You couldn't drink on the patio without ordering food; you couldn't get a booth between five and eight o'clock in the evening without at least four persons in your party; there was a ten-dollar minimum at the bar, where no checks were
accepted in the absence of a driver's license and two credit cards. Muscular crew-cut men in blue shorts and red Marina's in the Marina T-shirts and carrying walkie-talkies, patrolled the roped-off perimeter of the outdoor terrace, looking for patrons who had managed somehow to get drunk off the overpriced watery drinks and those foolish few who had dared seat themselves without applying to the hostess first. Whenever Wilson went to Marina's, he felt like a prisoner in a fascist state for the upwardly mobile.

At the upstairs bar, Andrea looked harried and tired. Her briefcase, fat with memos and spreadsheets and the morning's Exchange Commission reports, stood on the counter beside her. For three days she'd been using a temp to fill Wilson's job, and the temp didn't know where important files were located, was unfamiliar with office routine, had trouble accessing the database from the PC in Wilson's cubicle.

“Thanks to you, things have been just fucking crazy the last couple of days,” was the first thing Andrea said as Wilson stepped up to the bar. He was a half hour late. A watery Caipirinha waited on the counter, ice melting in the glass.

“Is this mine?” he said.

“You were supposed to be here at six. I ordered it for you because happy hour prices ended fifteen minutes ago.” She glared over at him from her modest glass of house white, her eyes angry. “I gave the temp the ax today.”

“Why did you do that?” Wilson said, surprised.

“Because he was a fuckup. He couldn't find the Marti Sugar File, and there it was, sitting on the S drive—”

“Christ,” Wilson said, “you didn't give the kid a chance. Probably some college kid.”

She ignored him. “—and because you're coming back tomorrow. Enough of this playing-sick shit. You seem fine to me.”

Wilson shook his head and looked out the green-tinted window at the white boats passing in and out of the marina and didn't say anything. For the last two days, he'd been at the public library in
City Center reading books on the interpretation of the tarot deck. Depending on whom you read, the Emperor and the Page of Wands when arranged in juxtaposition could mean any number of things, both good and bad. But the meaning was never static; it changed according to their position relative to the other cards in the classic fifteen-card H pattern used for divination. The books didn't say anything about what it could mean to find two cards like that on the sidewalk, at the end of a dusty afternoon, on the way home from work, in the middle of your life.

“You coming back, or do I have to find someone else?” Andrea glowered up at him.

“They make their Caipirinhas with salt here,” Wilson said shaking the melting ice cubes in his drink. “Someone should tell the bartender that they're not margaritas; they're Caipirinhas. No salt. No tequila. Just Pitú, limes, and sugar.”

“I knew it was a bad idea from the start,” Andrea said. “Unprofessional. A woman with my responsibilities just doesn't hire her boyfriend as executive assistant. But you were broke; you needed a job. As usual.”

It was an old, familiar argument, and they carried it between them like a sick friend—into the cab on the way to Andrea's apartment in the Pond Park Tower, into the lobby of that bland monolith, and up thirty stories in the high-speed elevator, the attendant grimacing his boredom to the chrome template of buttons to hear them going at it again. Once behind the steel door of number 3017, they let the argument drop briefly, as Andrea checked the eight messages from the office put on her answering machine in the hour and a half since she left work.

Wilson and Andrea had met six years before at Straight and Straight, the bond trading firm that occupies ten floors of the Maas Tower downtown. Wilson had only just recently accepted a leave of absence from the graduate archaeology program at Ashland College for financial reasons and had accepted a job with Straight and Straight as an administrative assistant in the commodities department
—a temporary measure, until he earned enough to go back to school. In those days, Andrea had been a bright young M.B.A. account executive just twenty-four years old, on the way up, with two three-hundred-dollar suits and five pairs of imitation Italian pumps in her closet, an intuitive grasp of the municipal bond market, a cute ass, and a nice sense of humor. The dust of the city would not settle on her as it settled on so many. Now, she was an executive vice-president at the Tea Exchange, owned seven six-hundred-dollar suits, twenty-two pairs of genuine Italian pumps, and eight weeks of a vacation condominium on the Mexican Atlantic coast at Sangre de Oro she never had time to use.

For the last two years their arguments had been about Wilson's agenda. Andrea wanted to know why he didn't do anything with his life, why he didn't—for example—go back to Ashland and finish up, or get a career-track job with the state historical society, anything. Wilson couldn't say, really. His reasons were inarticulate, having to do with the dread that afflicted even his best days. He was not an idle man, just a man who was waiting—though he couldn't say for what. And to wait properly, you must be in readiness, free from extraneous attachments. Also, he had decided, there was something horrible about archaeologists. They dug up things that the earth had meant to conceal, put to rest: the bones of the ancient dead buried in sandy graves with the pitiful objects—pots and spoons and combs—that had served them in life; shattered bits of monuments to forgotten, murderous kings; vanished cities of execrable memory marked only by a few postholes filled with rubble and a dark stain in the clay. To Wilson, there was more than a little bit of grave robbing about the discipline.

But it was the teeth that had finally done it for him. In the year before Wilson quit school, he had gone on a dig at Asidonhoppo in Brokopondo State, Suriname. They opened a sacred cave dedicated to Ampuka, the Warrou Indian god of the mouth. Before the dig was over two months later, they had removed nearly 300,000 sacrificial teeth from the dank hole—human molars, incisors, canines—all
very interesting indications of the diet and physical condition of the original owners, and so forth, but, from Wilson's point of view, the most dreadful thing he had ever seen. His dreams for years afterward were haunted by the million teeth of some monster mouth, chomping down and masticating whole families, villages, the landscape itself.

The eight messages noted or returned, Andrea shook out of her work clothes on the white rug in the living room in a sort of spasm of suit, silk blouse, pumps, and pearls and, with a wave toward Wilson that meant “wait,” padded down the hall to the bathroom for her home-from-the-office shower.

He watched the door close, heard the sound of the water, then skulked around the apartment, hands in his pockets. He couldn't bring himself to sit down on her stylish, uncomfortable furniture, couldn't say just now why he had come over tonight. He squatted for no reason, put his hand palm flat against Andrea's expensive clothes in a smooth heap on the rug. They still held the warmth of her body. Then, he went out onto the granite balcony and stood staring down at the panorama below.

You can see a long way from the thirtieth floor of Pond Park Tower—from the Harvey Channel in the east to the hazy suburban hills of Warinocco County north of the interstate. It was the last long moment before evening. The sky above the city looked swollen with color. The earth curved away to the sea, toward far islands, each concealing its own secret life, its own story: a house on an unknown stretch of beach, over-hung with royal palms and tamarinds, a room with rattan shades drawn against the bright sunset, a white bed draped with mosquito netting, a wooden bowl full of pomegranates on the table. In the garden, the wide leaves of a banana tree nattering in the wind as a beautiful woman emerges from the surf … One is filled with such ridiculous longings in that diminishing hour. Wilson, no better than the rest of us, stood helpless as a child before the tragic vastness of the world at dusk.
The city teeming to the bridges, the vague outline of mountains behind, the ocean's monotonous swell, all the faces he would never know.

When the shower went off in the bathroom, Wilson stepped back inside and pulled the heavy sliding glass door shut. Andrea padded into the living room naked, rubbing her dark hair with a blue towel. She paused when she came onto the rug and let the towel drop to her side. Her body looked perfect. Wilson could never see her naked, especially at this time of day, and not want to make love. If the effect was calculated—hundreds of hours at the health club with a personal trainer, on the Stair Master, on the little track around which two hundred laps make up a mile—the end results were still primal and redeeming.

“You look great, honey,” Wilson said. “You …” He couldn't finish.

“It's about time you noticed that,” Andrea said. “I've been losing weight lately. Four and a half pounds since July.”

Wilson couldn't see her eyes in the dim light.

“I wanted you to come over the other night,” she said in a small-girlish voice. “I almost called you, I almost picked up the phone. Twice.”

“Why didn't you?”

“I don't know.”

“How long has it been?”

“Eight, no, ten days.”

“I'm sorry,” Wilson said, moving toward her, “that's too long.” Soft yellow lights came up over the leather couch on the automatic timer, and Andrea lay back on the damp towel on the jungle thick pile of the rug, her legs open, her clean shampoo-smelling hair curling damp in Wilson's hands.