The Pirate's Daughter (4 page)

Later, in the darkness of the bedroom on the big bed, they kissed and said “I love you” to the hollow echo of the apartment and fell asleep at last, digital clock glowing amber and watchful on the nightstand beside them.

On Friday, Wilson went back to work at the Tea Exchange and was immediately up to his ears in the minutiae that runs one year into the next: mailing lists, franking privileges, Xerox machines, lost documents, software and hardware, all the crap—he told himself bitterly—invented by the prosaic to keep the rest of us from asking the reasons for things. You look up, it's years later, the mind is dull, and none of the Great Questions have been attempted.

He finished the day exhausted by the effort of catching up, by nothing, by the routine, by sitting in chairs that he had sat in before, and he boarded the Rubicon bus and loosened his tie and fell asleep against the smudge of grease on the scarred plastic bus window.

Asleep, Wilson's temperature rose; he sweated into the collar of his Brooks Brothers shirt and began to dream.

A bright afternoon in early spring, he is ten years old. His mother, young and pretty, wearing her shiny black hair in a flip and a leopard print pillbox hat and a thin leopard-print coat, holds his hand tightly as they cross the street from Lazar and Martin's department store, where she has bought him a tin ray gun that makes whirring noises when he pulls the trigger. The Maas Tower is under construction, a skeleton of black girders rising up to the sun. As they pass beneath the scaffolding, he is the first to see the long shadow on the sidewalk. He stares up, not understanding for a few seconds; then there is no time to cry out before the deadly rush and the pavement bending like a springboard. He is heaved up and thrown through the air—the secret joy of flying in his heart—over the ranks of slow-moving cars, over the gawkers, over the policeman on the horse. But he does not land with a thump on a bag of concrete mix, as he did in life. Instead he spreads his arms and soars up and over the tops of the buildings, past the snapped crane cable, past the horror-stricken construction workers in their yellow hard hats gaping down at

the woman smashed like a bug beneath the girder, past the deco silver needle of the Rubicon Building, and out over the Harvey Channel and Blackpool Island and the gray-blue sea churning with whitecaps and ships heading for the harbor. And at last, all sight of land left behind, he is robbed by the wind of his child's clothes, and in the next second he is a grown man hurtling naked a mile above the earth to meet an approaching darkness that is not a storm or the night coming on, that is the empty space on the horizon from which the future breaks like a thunderhead over the weary hearts of men and women
.

Wilson got off the bus half dazed and stumbled down Overlook Avenue. The industrial streets of the Rubicon District were filled with a melancholy silence that was like the sound of water running over rocks in the wilderness. The dream had left his shirt stuck to his back with sweat; his head would not clear. He unlocked the street door to his apartment, went up the rutted stairs, and undid the double locks on the steel door. Just inside there was another door of leaded glass panes, enclosing a small foyer, barely large enough for an umbrella stand and a broken end table. The tarot cards lay on the end table with a set of spare keys and a half dozen pennies. Wilson stared down at the cards and once again felt the dread gnaw at his insides.

The air in the living room was heavy and stale and smelled like dirty socks, even though the windows always stood open to the Harvey Channel below; only the bedroom was air-conditioned. A fine coating of dust covered Wilson's life as it covered his books stacked to the ceiling against every wall and in the bricked-up fireplace. For the first time, he wished he had a cat to greet him when
he came home, but he knew it would be cruel to leave a cat alone in the apartment all day. Suddenly, the next breath, the next second seemed unbearable. He picked up a book, Bernal Diaz's
Conquest of New Spain
, wiped the dust off the cover with his finger, put it down again. The moment passed. He went into the bedroom and changed his clothes, got a beer from the refrigerator, and turned on the TV, as he did every evening during the week.

Halfway through the news, just as Wilson began to doze off, the phone rang. He sat up straight, startled. Andrea was en route to Denver for a weekend management retreat—he couldn't think who it might be; somehow, in the course of life's ordinary disconnections, he had lost touch with all his friends. He waited till the fifth ring to pick up the receiver, his palms asweat with dread.

“Yes?”

“Wilson?” A woman's voice. Silence.

“Is this Wilson Lander?”

“Yes, who's this?”

“Wilson, it's Susan Page.”

“Page?” Wilson said.

“You know, Cricket—don't you remember me? You came into Nancy's shop on Tuesday, and we went to lunch at L'Aille. I ordered all that expensive wine.”

“Yes, I remember,” Wilson said, and he tried to sound annoyed but found himself picturing her coppery hair in the sunlight.

“Look, I'd like to return the favor.”

Wilson hesitated. He felt the tug of his dread somewhere inside. And for a brief second he thought of Andrea on the flight west, spreadsheet across her lap, that business-worried expression on her face as she figured the numbers again on her calculator. Then he put the image completely out of his mind.

The usual Saturday night spectacle in the Bend. Boom boxes boomed from the backs of tricked-out jeeps jammed to a standstill up Cooper Avenue. Along the dirty pavement, immigrants from parts of the world where men wear turbans and women go about with their faces veiled sold cheap sunglasses, bead jewelry, and T-shirts from plywood stalls. At the corner of Morton and Fifth, a man with one withered arm plucked a three-string guitar with his teeth; across the street a woman in a wheelchair sang songs from
Brigadoon
at the top of her lungs, accompanied by a midget on an ocarina carved from a potato. Gypsies told fortunes off fold-up card tables in tiny storefronts. The yellow tang of car exhaust hung in the air.

Wilson pushed his way through this mess, through the crowds up McDermot to the Orion Hotel and went in the back way and found Cricket at the bar beneath the big neon clock.

“Hello,” he said. “Where's my wine?”

She turned around and smiled. “Martinis,” she said, indicating her drink. “What else would you order at the Orion?” And she leaned over and kissed him on the side of the mouth.

Wilson was a little startled by this gesture, but Cricket didn't seem to notice. “Oops, got some lipstick on your face,” she said, and licked her thumb and rubbed his bottom lip.

Wilson ordered a martini with extra olives, and when the drink came, he took a long sip and studied her over the rim of the glass: She had abandoned the unflattering sweatshirt and canvas pants of their first meeting for a tight-fitting striped top and fashionable bellbottoms of some gauzy material that allowed the curious to glimpse the smooth lines of her hips and legs through the fabric. Her narrow waist was cinched by a wide leather square-buckled belt, and she wore a half dozen silver bracelets and glossy red lipstick, and her
coppery mess of hair was tamed and pulled back in a sophisticated bun. Except for her work-scarred hands and the muscles in her arms, Wilson thought, she could have stepped right off the cover of
Vogue
, and he felt a hollow thrill in the pit of his stomach when he considered that she had probably dressed up like this for his sake.

They drank their martinis and watched the place fill up. The Orion Hotel, built in 1915—Calvin Coolidge had once stayed in the Presidential Suite—had been fashionable for about thirty years, but its fortunes declined with the neighborhood, and by the late sixties it had become a skid row flophouse frequented by prostitutes and junkies. Then, in the early eighties, bohemians and homosexuals began to move into the big loft apartments overlooking the Harvey Channel and up Fleet Street. Vegetarian restaurants, health food stores, coffee shops, and used-book stores followed this migration, sprouting up like weeds on every corner. In 1989 a famous French interior designer bought the decrepit hotel, tore out the faded gilt lobby, and redecorated the rooms with steel sinks, trendy wall sconces, and sharkskin furniture. For two million dollars he restored the old bar to original specifications, including the 1928 mural of George and Martha Washington relaxing over mint juleps at Mount Vernon, done in the style of Maxfield Parrish.

Wilson stared up at Martha with her bonnet and prim, capable expression, and he couldn't suppress a flash of Andrea and a stab of guilt. He was having a hard time keeping his eyes off Cricket's breasts beneath the tight striped top. He had never cheated on his girlfriend before. Is that what was happening now?

Conversation lagged. Cricket finished her martini. She ate the three olives from the plastic sword and put her drink on the bar with a decisive click.

“Aren't you going to ask me how I got your phone number?” she said.

“Yeah,” Wilson said. “I was wondering about that. I didn't think you had my last name.”

Cricket smiled. “I'm very resourceful, which means I'm dangerous,”
she said. “I might as well warn you right now. After work Tuesday I went next door to L'Aille and told the manager that you were my lover and we had gotten in a fight and I was through with you and as a matter of principle I wanted to pay for the lunch. He pulled the credit card receipt and
voilà
. Your name and phone number.”

“Did you pay the bill?” Wilson said.

“No,” Cricket said. “That was just an excuse. I let the manager talk me out of it.”

They ordered another round of martinis, and Wilson began to loosen up. Bar light glinted off Cricket's silver jewelry. The place was crowded now with attractive, expensively dressed young-society types. Wilson wore an old plaid sports jacket, a comfortably broken-in pair of khakis, a pair of down-at-heel loafers, and a rumpled white shirt with a raveling collar.

“I'm a little underdressed,” he said, looking around at the slick Italian-tailored suits and evening dresses.

Cricket waved her hand. “Hell,” she said, “you look just like you're supposed to look.”

“How's that?” Wilson said.

“Oh”—she thought for a second—“like the young Gregory Peck in
Valley of Decision
. Have you ever seen that?”

“No,” Wilson said.

She started to explain the plot; then she shook her head. “Trust me,” she said. “It's a ridiculous old movie, but he plays a very earnest young man, and he's very convincing. I'll be the first to confess I always had a big crush on Gregory Peck.”

Wilson changed the subject.

For a while they talked about traveling and about the sea. Cricket hadn't always crewed the yachts of the wealthy. In her late teens she had worked a tramp steamer owned by a friend of her father's. Wilson hadn't been many places, and he listened, fascinated, to stories of Rangoon and Maracaibo, of Santiago de Chile and Bangladesh. She had seen knife fights in the barrios of Valparaiso,
tribesmen in Borneo who still took the heads of their enemies and lived as humans lived forty thousand years ago, mutiny and yellow fever and beautiful sunsets and strange unnamed fish and devastating storms off the African coast.

“My God! Sounds like you really lead an exciting life,” Wilson said.

“I do,” Cricket said. “And if I stay in any one place too long, I start getting fat and lazy and bored. I'm looking for a berth right now. Next ship, I'm out of here.”

“Oh, well,” Wilson said. “You'll have to send me a postcard from Timbuktu.”

“Just might,” Cricket said.

“I like the
idea
of travel,” Wilson said, “but not travel itself. Truth is, I'm a terrible traveler. I can't sleep; I can't shit. I have to come home to go to the bathroom, so trips any longer than three days can be extremely painful.”

Cricket laughed.

“Also, there's something else. A while back I spent a few months in Suriname on a dig sponsored by Ashland College and the Deutsche Bank—my one time out of the continental U.S. We had an air-conditioned trailer with all the amenities and even cable TV from a satellite dish, but that didn't take the edge off the foreignness. Each place has its own soul, I think. It's in the water like bacteria. And it takes a lot of time to get used to that soul; you've got to know how the air smells after it rains, watch how the sun hits the trees in the morning every day for years to get a real handle on it. Maybe you've got to bury your people in the ground before you can understand a place. Hell, it could take generations.”

“You're a romantic,” Cricket said.

“Just sensitive to my environment,” Wilson said. He was careful not to mention the dread. “One of the reasons why I gave up archaeology. Traipsing all over the world to dig up other people's bones. I suppose I'd rather read about it in
National Geographic
.”

When he looked at his illuminated digital watch a few minutes
later, it was ten twenty-two and the bar was very crowded. They were wedged into a corner by a loud party in tuxedos and black dresses, the men rich and obnoxious, the women tanned and drunk. One of the latter began laughing like a hyena, shrieking in Wilson's ear. She laughed so hard some of her drink came out her nose.

“You want to go someplace else?” Wilson said. He put his hand on Cricket's back and leaned close. He felt a kind of electric charge go through his fingertips.

“Yes,” Cricket said. “If we hurry, we might just have time to catch the last couple of races.”

“Races?” Wilson said.

The dog track at Mimosa Park was a broken-down reminder of its days of deco glory. Lime green paint peeled off the streamlined towers; tube lights fritzed off and on around the silhouette of the neon greyhound above the main gate. The big clock had stopped at a quarter after two on some forgotten windblown afternoon thirty years gone. From across the parking lot the track looked like an ocean liner left to rot in dry dock.