The Pirate's Daughter (7 page)

Wilson took out his wallet. He had a hundred dollars and some change, his walking money till the fifteenth.

“¿Cuánto, señor?”
the boy said, impatient.
“Ándale”

Wilson looked into the pit, and in that moment the smaller of the two birds dropped two perfectly round chicken turds.

“That one,” Wilson said, and on an impulse handed the boy everything he had. The boy made a quick notation on the back of a playing card, tore it in half, gave half to Wilson, then ran off into the crowd. Wilson looked at the torn card in his hand. The king of diamonds. “Here goes nothing,” he said to Tulj.

The African smiled.

A moment later, the handlers released their birds, jumped back, and the fight was on. Wilson saw little more than the quick flash of steel, flying feathers, and the spurting blood. The whole thing was over in less than a minute. The victorious bird, one wing hanging limp, reared back, flapped his good wing, and made an appalling crowing sound. Then he began to peck at the corpse of his opponent. Wilson won six hundred dollars, the odds on this bird, the long shot at six-to-one. In the next match he bet everything again and won again at seven-to-one. Then he won at three-to-one and five-to-one. There was money stuffed in the pockets of his jacket, in his khakis. He was dazed, his face was hot, he couldn't seem to breathe right, he hardly knew what he was doing, but he wanted to win—this was the feeling that had come over him at the dog track.
He felt the same metallic taste in his mouth, the same sweaty palms. It couldn't be real, but the money kept on coming.

An hour later, in a lull between fights, his head cleared a little, and he stepped back from the pit to see that a space had cleared around him. He stood alone in a circle of rough, dangerous-looking men. From across the room other men watched him, knives gleaming from their belts. Tulj was nowhere in sight. Wilson figured quickly that he had something like eight thousand dollars in his pocket. Directly on the other side of the pit a man in a white linen suit tapped long fingernails against the railing. Wilson looked up. The man's sand-colored skin gleamed like oiled wood. His hair was jet black; his eyes a weird shade of dark blue. His suit held the shimmer of summer nights in a place that no one could afford.

“So, you like to bet against my birds?” the man said in a voice that was little more than a whisper.

“Huh?” Wilson said.

“Who sent you?” the man said.

“You're kidding,” Wilson said.

The man nodded as if he knew something that Wilson didn't know. Then he waved a hand through the air and whispered, “Good luck,” in a way that made Wilson shudder.

When the boy came up to take the bets for the next fight, Wilson palmed off a fifty-dollar bill.

“The guy across the way in the white suit,” Wilson said. “Know anything?”

The boy glanced quickly over his shoulder, and his mouth drooped. “El Señor Hidalgo,” he said, and shook his head. “
Muy peligroso
. You better lose this time, I think.”

Wilson felt a tightening in his upper bowels and resolved to follow the boy's advice. The match was between a scrawny bird with half a comb and a large, glossy specimen that looked like the bellicose rooster pictured on French stamps as the symbol of the French Republic. For some reason the odds were only two-to-one in favor of the larger bird. Wilson bet everything to lose on the scrawny bird
and won sixteen thousand dollars. An angry hiss went up from the crowd. The man in the white suit across the way dug his long nails into the soft wood of the railing. One of them broke off, a small snapping sound, before he turned away. Wilson's heart sank as the boy came over, dragging a mound of cash in a torn cardboard box. With or without the sixteen grand, he knew he wouldn't get out of this place alive. The world hates nothing so much as a lucky man. He looked around, and suddenly Tulj was at his elbow.

“If you were planning to win so bloody much money, you should have brought an army,” the African said angrily, “like the Ancient Greek Themistocles.”

“Christ, let's get out of here,” Wilson said, but the African backed away, making an X with his forearms.

“I did not live through the Time of Killing in Bupanda to die for a box full of paper in a country I do not love,” he said. “I am sorry.” Then he turned and hurried away through the crowd.

Wilson lingered desperately at the rail. He counted the crumpled money in the box, made neat stacks, and folded all of it into the pockets of his jacket. He was vaguely aware of the man in the white suit talking intensely to a group of thugs at the door. Two of them wore cowboy hats and shirts with the sleeves torn off. Another one, his face covered with strange hairy growths, sported the kind of gangsterish borsalino once known as a Little Caesar. Wilson's dread had taken palpable form at last. A crowd of strangers, a man in an expensive white suit, a half dozen cheap hoodlums, sixteen thousand dollars in cash. He almost laughed out loud. It was like the fable about the appointment in Samarra: A rich man, told that Death is near, goes to the next town, Samarra, to escape his fate. There, of course, Death is waiting for him in the marketplace.

Wilson held on awhile longer, till the place cleared out. Then he turned heavily toward the door. But before he rounded the pit, the Guatemalan boy who had taken the bets was at his side.

“Señor, por favor,”
the boy said.

“What's that?” Wilson said.

“The beck door,” the boy said. “Trees, dark,
vámosnos
.” And he made a whistling noise through his teeth.

Wilson followed him without thinking. They went behind a curtain into a small utility room where two Guatemalan men sat at a picnic table counting the house take. Taped to the wall behind them, an airbrushed beaver shot from
Hustler
and a Catholic prayer card showing the Virgin of Guadalupe balanced delicately on her sliver of moon. The men grunted when Wilson went past; they didn't say anything. The rusty back door swung out onto the parking lot. The night burned beautiful with stars. The trees loomed, a dark refuge, twenty-five yards away across the dull backs of the cars. Wilson hesitated on the threshold.

“
Vámosnos
, trees, dark,” the boy said, and tried to push Wilson into the night.

“Take it easy,” Wilson said. He didn't want to be rushed into this, his last sky full of stars, his last breath. When he stepped down into the parking lot, the door slammed behind him, and he knew it was a trap. Still, he took it slow and easy between the cars. Though he did not smoke much, he wished he had a cigarette; it is better to meet such moments with a cigarette in hand. Two groups of men, about a dozen in all, stepped out from either side of the bunkhouse. They fanned out, flanking him, intending to catch him in the last stretch before the trees. Their boots made squelchy noises on the soft ground. Wilson heard the sound of their breath and from somewhere, like hope departing, the distant howl of a freight train. They were close now, wolves loping alongside. Wilson reached a small open space between the cars. There, two men blocked the way, arms crossed, huge, just ahead. It came down to this last second, this silence, the woods waiting.

Then, the sound of shattering glass, gunshots, and an uproar from the front side of the bunkhouse. A high, unnatural screaming was followed by more screams, coming closer. Wilson swung toward this sound; the men following Wilson swung toward this sound. In the next second, a black man wearing one sandal came running
wildly around the corner, pursued by fifteen others. Wilson saw the yellow soccer balls on the man's shirt and the purple shorts and knew it to be N'fumi. Ten more dragged Tulj along at a distance. The side of his face was bloody, his clothing torn.

The men tackled N'fumi in the mud just beyond the last row of cars. Three of them grabbed him by the legs; two others took his arms. Wilson could see that they were Africans, heard them speak what sounded like Bupandan. One of the men drew out a long knife with a serrated edge and held it against N'fumi's throat. The poor boy's eyes rolled with fear in the starlight. In an instant there was a crowd. A hundred men watched from between the cars, their faces bright with the prospect of more blood. Tulj was dragged up, made to kneel beside his brother. Wilson didn't need to be told what was going on. There was a large Anda community in nearby Parkerville. Like the Bupus, they had fled the hatred and tragedy of their unfortunate nation, only to bring all of it along in their bellies, in their dark hearts.

Someone switched on the headlights of a car, and the scene was illuminated in a harsh white light. The Anda holding the knife to N'fumi's throat shouted a last obscenity and made ready to draw its serrated edge across the boy's jugular. A man across the way—it didn't matter who—licked his lips in anticipation. In that instant, an unnamed righteousness welled up inside Wilson's breast. Without thinking, he put his foot on the bumper of the nearest car, a battered sixties-era Mercury, jumped onto the hood of a Chevy Impala of similar vintage, and in another short hop stood directly overlooking the action.

“Stop!” Wilson cried, and something in his voice made the Anda hesitate. “You heard me! Put down that knife!” This sounded foolish to Wilson's ears, but he didn't know what else to say.

The Anda kept the knife at N'fumi's throat and looked up lazily. “What you want here, mistah?” he said. “You got your cash won, now go home. Sure, if you can get home.” Then he snickered, an evil rattling sound at the back of his throat.

“Let me ask you something,” Wilson said, the same tone of authority in his voice. “How much is a man's life worth to you?”

The Anda blinked, his eyes bloodshot from drink and cigarettes, his lids wrinkly as old Morocco leather.

“I asked you a question,” Wilson persisted. “How much?”

The Anda shrugged. “This is a pig,” he said, slapping N'fumi's neck with the flat side of the knife. “A pig and the son of a pig. A stinking Bupu. In my country we hunt them down and cut their throats like pigs.”

“This is my country,” Wilson said. “And in my country a man's life is still worth something. How much for this one?”

The Anda blinked again, slow as an owl.

“A thousand dollars, two thousand dollars, six thousand dollars?” Wilson said, and began to take the bills out of his pocket and throw them at the Anda's feet. When there was quite a pile of money down there, Wilson paused dramatically and said, “Is that enough?”

The Anda prodded the bills with his toe and smiled genially. “No,” he said.

“All right,” Wilson said, “I'll tell you what …” He reached into his pockets and drew out two fistfuls of cash. “I've got about sixteen thousand dollars here,” he said. “I'll give you all of it for both of them.” He nodded toward N'fumi and Tulj. The latter stared up at him, a blank expression in his eyes.

The Anda thought for a moment, then he nodded slowly. “You have a deal, mistah,” he said.

“You'll let them go?” Wilson said.

The Anda drew up straight. “When an Anda gives his word,” he said.

Wilson opened his fists and let the money drop. It fluttered in the headlights. The Anda threw N'fumi facefirst into the mud and gave him a hard kick in the ass. A shout of laughter went up from the crowd. The tension broke. Tulj was released and stood helpless, rubbing his wrist with his good hand.

“Go!” the Anda yelled at them in English. “Go!”

In a moment the brothers were gone, scrambling on hands and knees for the woods.

Wilson watched from the hood of the Impala till they were lost in the darkness, then he stepped down. The crowd parted respectfully. Hands in his pockets, he walked across the soft ground to the front parking lot, wondering how he would get back home. The thugs in the cowboy hats faded off into the night to the sound of car engines and the smell of carbon monoxide. He didn't matter to them now that the money was gone. A match flared from nearby. Wilson looked up. The man in the white linen suit leaned gracefully against the body of a late-model silver Mercedes limousine. He lit a thin cigarillo and shook the match out slowly as Wilson passed.

“A gesture,” he said. “So—”

Wilson stopped and turned to face him.

“—so pretty.” Then he smiled a weary, knowing smile and nodded. “Very pretty. Passing out men's lives like a king, eh? No! Like an emperor!” He poked the cigarillo at Wilson's chest for emphasis.

“An emperor,” Wilson said, turning the word over in his mind.

The man nodded. “That's the thing about gamblers,” he said. “Sometimes they get to play emperor for a night. But the next morning, what are they?” He turned his hands empty, palm up.

“I'm no gambler,” Wilson said. “I'm just an average guy.”

The man drew on his cigarillo and blew smoke toward the bright stars. “I lost seventy-five thousand dollars betting against you tonight,” he said. “You are a gambler, my friend.”

Wilson was about to turn away, but instead he stepped forward and put out his hand. “My name is Wilson Lander,” he said.

Surprised, the man in the white suit hesitated, but at last he shook Wilson's hand.

“Don Luis Gabriel Hidalgo de la Vaca,” he said.

“Luis, I wonder if you could do me a favor,” Wilson said.

Wilson rode up front with the chauffeur all the way back to the city. The chauffeur, an enormous Filipino man with an acne-pitted face, had once been a professional wrestler called the Killa from Manila, though he actually hailed from a small rice-growing community in the foothills of Mindanao and many years before had gone to the seminary to study for the priesthood. Wilson remembered the man's face from Sunday morning wrestling extravaganzas on TV when he was a kid, and his story from wrestling magazines of the era. He tried to start up a conversation, but the Killa wouldn't talk.