The Pirate's Daughter (34 page)

“Were you behind one of the machine guns?” Wilson said, and he was glad he could not see the man's face in the darkness.

“Worse,” Colonel Saba said. “I gave the order to fire.”

The second night was calm and quiet. The waters of the lake hushed against the smooth stones of the beach; the jungle was full of the far-off cry of birds and the deep chatter of insects. The Iwo made a few small clicking sounds that Colonel Saba did not care to translate. Wilson tried to keep his mind off the coming ordeal, but this was impossible. How would they do it? He thought he would never sleep again; then he closed his eyes, and when he
opened them again, it was almost noon and Cricket stood in the hot sun just beyond the bars of the cage.

“Wake up, Wilson,” she said in a hard voice.

Wilson stirred. When he saw it was Cricket, he tried to stand and clunked his head against the low roof. He hobbled over to the bars, rubbing his scalp, and squinted out into the brightness. He could not see her eyes, which were hidden behind Jackie O—type sunglasses with big black lenses, but her mouth was set and her gun hand rested on the butt of her dead father's 9 mm Beretta, stuck in her belt.

“I'm leaving in an hour,” she said. “Taking the
Dread
back to Quatre Sables.”

“What about me?” Wilson said, half serious.

She ignored him. “The operation here's been a bust. It'll take a whole year to round up those Iwos you set free, you fuck.”

“Good,” Wilson said, then he didn't know what to say. There followed an awkward beat in which he saw a black-winged shrike flap into the green fringe of jungle. Was it the same one that had followed them up the Mwtutsi in augury of troubles to come?

“Anything else?” he said at last.

“Yeah,” Cricket said, and her lip trembled. “We buried Dad last night.”

“I'm sorry,” Wilson said. “He was your father. But he was also a murderous asshole, and he was going to shoot me.”

“You needed shooting after what you did,” Cricket said. “I'm sorry I won't be around to see them finish you off.”

“So that's it,” Wilson said, struggling to keep the panic out of his voice. “You're not going to help me get out of here.”

“I couldn't do anything for you if I tried,” Cricket said. “You violated a sacred taboo in this part of the world. You cut into their profit margin. And you tried to kill Major Mpongu. That man's a big shit around here. I don't have to say I hope you suffer. You will. If they do it right, you can live up to three days without skin. I've
seen it happen, these people are artists. You're not really human anymore, just a quivering pink mass hanging on a pole.”

“I guess you don't love me after all,” Wilson said.

“You're a bastard,” Cricket said between her teeth.

“I won you from the Portugee, Cricket. Remember? You needed a good gambler, and you risked my neck because of it. So I'm holding a bad hand right now. Aces and eights, you know? Dead Man's Hand. So you're my wife, we belong to each other now. I need some help here.”

“I don't belong to anyone but myself,” she said, her voice dull, without expression. “It's been like that from the beginning. There's just myself. The rest of the world is full of stupid assholes.”

“This the sort of thing that happened to old Webster?”

“Fuck you,” Cricket said. Then she bit her lip and looked away, and Wilson caught a glimpse of her eyes behind the dark glasses and saw the tears on her cheeks.

“I thought we were going to make it work,” Cricket said, her bottom lip trembling. “I really did. I know you don't believe me, but I really haven't felt as strongly for anyone in my life as I have for you. I guess I've got to stop holding on. I've got to get through my head that it's not going to work out for us. We're just too different—”

“This is ridiculous,” Wilson said, and he gripped the wooden bars so hard he felt a splinter go into his hand. “We're not breaking up over a cup of espresso at Bazzano's. These bastards are going to skin me alive. You've got to get me out of here.”

Cricket hesitated and looked down. “Impossible,” she said. “I tried.”

“You did?” Wilson said. Despite himself, his heart made a flip-flop.

“Oh, Wilson …” Cricket came close and pushed her sunglasses up into her hair and put her hands over his on the bars. Her eyes were a wet, fathomless blue-green this morning, like the color of Lake Tsuwanga in the long hours of dusk. A single blue-green
tear fell across his scraped knuckles. “Why couldn't you wait? In two years, in three years, we could have had enough money to live in Paris in high style for the rest of our lives.”

“I couldn't wait,” Wilson said. “I couldn't swallow the death you wanted to feed me. I couldn't build my happiness on the proceeds of piracy, on the labor of slaves, on a mound of dead bodies!”

Cricket sighed and stepped back. She brought her sunglasses down over her eyes, and her mouth hardened. Wilson saw his battered face reflected in the black lenses.

“You're an idiot,” she said. “An asshole like all the other assholes. I shouldn't have come.”

“Why did you come?” Wilson said. Squinting out at her, he had the sensation that she was already far away, that he was looking at her through the wrong end of a telescope.

“I shouldn't have come,” Cricket repeated, and began to back away.

“Will I be seeing you again?” Wilson said, desperate.

“No,” Cricket said.

“Will you miss me?” Wilson said, but Cricket did not answer. She spun around on her heels and headed off into the stark and unforgiving brightness of noon.

Wilson pressed himself flat against the bars, staring out until long after Cricket had passed out of his line of vision.

When he realized she was not coming back, he collapsed onto the foul dirt floor of the cage as if he had been shot. On his back there in the ashen gloom, as a deeper gloom stole over his heart, his thoughts turned to death. So this is how it would end. What a strange fate! Alone, at the hands of torturers in an obscure corner of
Africa, so far from the life he had known. For the first time in months, he thought of Andrea, no doubt asleep at that moment in her big, clean bed in her fine apartment on the thirty-third floor in the Pond Park Tower. What a fool he had been! He remembered the sound of her tears over the phone the night he left, and he remembered that she had loved him, and self-pity welled up like water in a clogged drain, and tears began to leak out of the corner of his eyes and down the sides of his face to make small dark spots in the dirt.

But the sharp bleat of Colonel Saba's snoring, like somebody snoring in a cartoon, sounded an absurd counterpoint to Wilson's tears. After a few minutes he sat up and dried his eyes on the back of his hand. A hot wind sieved through the bars of the cage. Out there a parched and silent afternoon burned into the African dust. The Bupu guard lay asleep on a reed mat across the way, a bit of canvas propped over his head with a stick. The yellow dog slept in the narrow strip of shade at his side. Wilson imagined the
Dread
gliding away, across the brilliant water of the lake and almost burst into tears again. Then he turned at nothing and saw a pair of bright animal eyes fixed upon him. It was the Iwo, poised like a praying mantis at the back of the cage.

“Hey, you!” Wilson said, annoyed suddenly. “How long have you been watching me?”

The Iwo cocked his head to one side and let out an odd series of low clicks.

“Saba,” Wilson called loudly, and the soldier stirred. “What does this midget want?”

Colonel Saba yawned and raised himself on a bony elbow. He yawned again and swallowed dryly and made one or two halfhearted clicks.

The Iwo cocked his head, indicated Wilson with a birdlike gesture, and began an involved clicking and croaking that went on for some time. Wilson watched the bones in the little man's throat orchestrate this symphony and was reminded of the aluminum rods
in the throat of the mechanical Abraham Lincoln robot he had seen in Disneyland one summer as a child. The thing had terrified him. A human throat didn't move like that, didn't make those sounds. He had been afraid that Abraham Lincoln was going to eat him alive.

When the Iwo finished, he cocked his head at Wilson and waited for Colonel Saba to speak. The colonel scratched his chin, thought for a moment.

“He says you're very sick,” Colonel Saba said. “You've suffered a bad beating, of course, but that's not what he means. He means you are sick inside. Not your body, but your spirit. He says you have a spirit beast inside you that has been gnawing at your guts and making your life miserable for many years.”

“Hell,” Wilson said.

“The Iwo wants to know if you have a heavy feeling here,” the colonel put a large flat hand against his solar plexus. “The feeling that something bad is always about to happen.”

Wilson was silent. How did the little man know about his dread? “I've got this anxiety problem,” he said at last, feeling ridiculous for explaining. “I've been to psychiatrists back home. A dash of unfocused paranoia mixed in with some unfounded dread. I've gone through some therapy, as far as that goes. Don't worry, I'm on top of the situation.”

Colonel Saba translated for the little man.

The Iwo shook his head and duck-walked over to Wilson. He smoothed a space in the dirt with his hand and extracted a stick from his pouch and began to scratch a picture there. He worked on the picture for fifteen minutes, and Wilson saw a frightful animal taking shape: part monkey, part raccoon, part rat—with sharp claws and rows of razor teeth like a shark. When the drawing was done, the Iwo began to croak and chirp. Wilson looked down at it and felt a familiar squeezing in his chest.

“This is a picture of the spirit beast that is now wrestling with your life,” Colonel Saba said. “The Iwo says it has wrestled with the lives of people in your family in the spirit world for generations. He
says you have been wrestling all alone since you were a child. It is a creature that went to live inside one of your ancestors many years ago in the country beyond the Hruke Forest, which is his way of saying Africa. Have your ancestors been in Africa?”

“I don't know,” Wilson said.

“Do you recognize this thing?” Colonel Saba said, poking a bony finger at the picture in the dirt.

“Yes,” Wilson said, and he hardly heard his own voice.

“The spirit beast,” Colonel Saba said, “enters through a tear in your spirit like a wound, often caused by a tragedy in childhood. Did you undergo such a tragedy?”

“Yes,” Wilson said, and his voice was less than a whisper.

The Iwo put his hand on Wilson's arm. His palm felt like the bark of a tree. Wilson turned and looked into his eyes. They were ancient and black, but lit by flashes of color in the depths as if by lightning far off. The little man sighed and pointed to Wilson's nose. He reached into his pouch and pulled out a small tube of lustrous black wood and two small green turdlike pellets.

“Yonowpe,” Colonel Saba said, sounding impressed. “A real honor. He wants to give it to you. Yonowpe is a very powerful spirit medicine and very rare. It will help you wrestle against the spirit beast.

Wilson squinted out at the glare of African sunlight. The guard stirred in his sleep. The yellow dog got up and trotted off. Wilson felt a curious malaise running across his body like the flu that was the unease of condemned men everywhere.

He turned back to the Iwo. “What's the goddamned use?” he said. “Today or tomorrow or the next day or the next, I'll be dead. Skinned alive, I'm told. Let's look on the bright side—when I'm dead, the spirit beast will be dead with me.”

The Iwo cleared his throat and spit a mouthful of dry greenish phlegm between the bars.

“The Iwo says the opera isn't over until the fat lady sings,”
Colonel Saba said. “The Iwo says in the fight between yourself and life, back life.”

Wilson let the Iwo push him back into the dirt. The little man fixed one of the green pellets to one end of the tube and tamped down. He put the tube to his lips and put the other end in Wilson's nostril. Wilson began to have immediate misgivings.

“Hold on a minute,” Wilson said, but it was too late. The Iwo filled his lungs and blew. The green turd hit Wilson's nostril with the force of a small explosion. He lurched back, a bitter taste in his mouth. The bony ledge behind his ears seemed to expand. Then he sneezed twice.

He opened his eyes after the second sneeze and found himself at the bottom of Lake Tsuwanga, where the water wasn't water at all, but a gelatin-thick ooze of ice and something else. He waited for a moment there in the ooze and cold, the bones of the Great Carew lying close at hand, until he saw them coming: Strange phosphorous fish compressed to ultimate hardness by the pressure of the water, bringing their own light with them through the darkness like a secret.

Wilson moved slowly through the crowds along the sidewalk up Commerce Avenue. The steady thump of construction came from nearby. He felt the thud of the jackhammers along the cement pavement. The sky above the silver needle of the Rubicon Building showed a peerless blue, free of clouds. A good day in early spring
.

Minutes passed before he noticed the massive old cars waiting at the light of Commerce and Rubicon, then he realized that the street was full of these anachronistic vehicles. They were the finned glossy monsters of another era, huge Cadillacs and De Sotos, Ramblers and Nash wagons and Studebakers
,
made of chrome and steel and painted in light pastels and upholstered in plaid vinyl, chugging along the clean blacktop at the curb. A moment later, he noticed the pedestrians: businessmen sporting snap-brim hats and skinny ties and shiny three-button suits; secretaries with bright red lipstick and beehive hairdos, or bouffants or flips, wearing stiletto heels and poufy dresses and wrist-length white gloves and carrying big shiny purses of patent leather
.