It was exactly how Gwen felt, almost the very same thing. She wasn’t going home and she couldn’t stay here. That night she slept deep and long, her heart pounding the whole time but her head empty as the night sky. It would be how
Pirates!
would sleep, the entire crew.
Normally the crew of the
Corsair
rose early, to make sure the costumes and props were in order for the first show of the day. Gwen and Amber had seen them working with false, forced cheer on the otherwise empty pier, and they saw the hook on board, where they left the keys careless and easy because who would take them. But Friday night the crew would be made to sleep late. After the Pisco turned them out, a crate of liquor would turn up, left for them at their inexpensive, shoddy lodgings. The Barbary Coast. They would not ask questions, but pass the night in drunken revels, noticing not that one bottle was spiked with the sleeping dosage of a stepmonster. Saturday morning the actors would awaken, their heads splitting, but it would be too late. The real pirates would sneak in the night and larder the
Corsair
with new equipment, a new crew, and a truer calling. They would come in the night and take what was rightfully theirs.
Gwen hadn’t made this up. This was history. It was happening. She wasn’t thinking about it, imagining the boxes and duffels on the deck. She was really leaving. She and her captain, her fellow belligerents, strode through the patches of tourists leaving restaurants, smoking in silent pairs, or glowering silent in families. Her crew was carrying clothing, water, some food, gasoline, miscellany, Jean-Robert in his cage, rustling and covered in a towel, and weapons. It felt real. The pier felt solid. The railing felt metal. The boat looked like an actual, genuine pirate vessel. The sky was the limit. Their lives were now disengaged from all control and drifting out of bounds.
On board were benches with hinged tops for emergency storage, and they threw the life vests overboard. They had decided to jettison these, as no such things could be found in the books they had read. Gwen grabbed two, reading what was written on the inside of the bench:
LIFE PRESERVER INSTRUCTIONS:
1. Put on as a vest.
2. Tie strips tightly to hold jacket against body.
3. Clip the hook into the ring.
4. Pull strap tight to hold jacket close.
5. Ready to go.
Ready to go.
“Manny.” Errol’s voice was loud on the deck.
“I’m just getting my act together,” Manny said. Gwen watched him gaze at the screen of his cell phone one last time, scrolling through something before turning it off and tossing it onto the pier, where it scuttled next to the one dropped by Cody, who was already down below looking through the costumes, not having brought a change of clothes when he was shanghaied. Manny heaved the cage aboard and then pulled something out of the pocket of his seaman’s coat. This, too, he gazed at, and scrolled through. This, too, he tossed away. It was his Bible, black and worn as the heavens. He did not have to abandon it, but Gwen had showed him a captioned drawing. Captain Nebekenezer, known to his men as Neb, burying his Bible. Its divine precepts being so at variance with the wicked course of his life that he did not choose to keep a book that condemned him in his lawless career.
“Come along,” called Errol. As they had suspected, the captain’s wheel was not how the boat was actually steered, but the captain stood by the wheel nonetheless. “Too late to die young, Manny.”
Manny’s eyes were on the Bible, invisible on the pier. “I don’t know. I was raised it was wrong to live without rules or punishments.”
“They already told us the rules,” Cody said, coming up the wooden stairs.
“There’s punishments too,” Errol said, and Gwen watched him rack his brain for the list of punishments he liked so much in
Captain Blood.
“Any pirate who conceals, conceals, conceals captured treasure shall be set ashore on . . . I forget the word.”
“Island,” Gwen said.
“Island,” Errol agreed, “and there left with a single bottle of water, a single loaf of bread and a single bullet in a single pistol.”
“Assuming we find one,” Amber said. She was unwinding a thick rope, tied in a showy knot to a cleat on the pier with
Pirates!
painted on it in gold script, and Manny leaned in to help her. Gwen could see the crumply bulge in his shirt pocket, the packet of tea he had brought along, catmint likely being irreplaceable on the high seas.
“Your parents are worried already, you know,” Manny said. “They probably haven’t started dinner. It’s bad luck to start dinner, my mama always told me, before your children are home. Please God let this not be the meal I cooked, they will say, when I found out she’s gone.”
(But it was. Chicken.)
“We will be the scourge of the San Francisco Bay Area,” Amber said, “dedicated to the egalitarian and comely—no, shit.”
Gwen and Amber had texted this back and forth to each other, polishing and sloganeering when the world thought they were safe in bed asleep. “
Comradely
,” Gwen said. “Dedicated to the egalitarian and
comradely
distribution of life chances.”
Amber grinned and got back on track. “And all the happiness in the world shall tumble into—”
“
All
the happiness?’ Manny asked from the pier. “That’s a lot. How about just an unfair amount of happiness?”
“Treat reluctance like seasickness,” Errol said, picking something off his sleeve. “If you feel it, focus on the horizon.”
“On the boat, I thought,” Gwen said. “For seasickness.”
Errol’s eyes got uncertain. “Well,” he said, “focus on
something.
”
Manny laughed and in one fat swoop leapt aboard. It was not wise, now that the history is known, to do so. Given the madness ahead, it was madness to join. But all occupations and philosophies are to some extent foolhardy. His bulk upon landing briefly unsettled the ship, but then it righted. Time to get the show on the road. Gwen would stand at the front of this stolen ship, facing out and proud like a figurehead. She would feel her own cells dividing, growing and dreaming of growing at the same time. It was going to be easy. Tallyho and hallelujah! Exodus and excelsior! Avast! Here goes!
Errol looked out from the wheel at the dark, untamable water, his face as open and bright as the moon. “Off we go,” the captain said.
“Off we go,” the parrot squawked. It’s so easy to steal things.
O the morning, this morning, early and sunny through the window, halcyon until the wind blew it all to sea. The drapes hadn’t worked at their job, which was keeping the room dark for their occupant, Phil Needle. His body was long and sore, stretched out like a limousine across the bad bed, naked and blinking, parts of him damp in hot sheets. The room was loud with an old song. Belly Jefferson, deep and scratchy, pouring water through his phone, ringing by his bed, next to a glass of water, scarcely full, and his wallet and a magazine about Los Angeles the hotel had left for him. The headline said, LOS ANGELES
.
He picked up.
“Yes?”
“Is this Phil Needle?”
“Yes.”
“Phil Needle of Phil Needle Productions?”
“Yes.” The room, and its carpet, discredited him.
“I have Leonard Steed on the line.”
“Hold on.” Phil Needle used one of his stiff elbows to prop himself up. The phone rubbed against his ear, and with his other hand he quickly reached out, grabbed the glass of water, and splashed some of it in his face. There was a lot more water than he thought, and it slapped itself onto his sticky chin and ran down his neck and chest. “I’m ready,” he said into the phone, dripping. But Leonard Steed was already there.
“Glad to hear it, Needle,” he said.
“Who was that? Where are you?”
“Downstairs with coffee. I had my assistant patch you in.” At this time in our history, satellites in outer space were often used this way, to connect people who were almost within touching distance on earth. Phil Needle put the glass back, knocking his wallet open. Something was gone.
“How are you, Steed?”
“The normal nonsense,” Leonard Steed said. “It’s the morrow, though. I’m having coffee and I wanted to check. Good to go in half an hour?”
“Yes,” Phil Needle said. “What time is it?”
“Tell me I didn’t wake you up.”
“No, no,” Phil Needle said, and swung his legs out to the fluffy floor. His shadow looked gaunt and crappy on the wall, and the sheets were wet in patches.
“Good, good. I want to conference before the powwow.”
“Yes, a half hour,” Phil Needle said. “Thirty minutes.”
“Make it twenty,” Leonard Steed said.
“Okay,” Phil Needle said.
“
Okay,
you mean
yes
?
”
“
Yes
,” Phil Needle said.
“What, you’re not dressed?”
“What? Yes.”
“You want to fuck her again?”
“What?”
“To the victors, yes? How was it? Tell me something about it.”
Phil Needle sat up and looked out the window. His legs were too close together for his penis to get comfortable. “I’ll see you downstairs.”
“Come
on.
” His voice got closer to the earpiece. “Is she a moaner? All quiet? She seems like a moaner. Come on, tell me something that’ll give me a buzz with my coffee.”
“Leonard—”
“Did she suck it first?”
“I’m not—”
“Tell me. It will bring us closer together.”
“No.”
“Is she right there? She wants to do it again.”
“No.”
“Okay, then tell me something else. What’s the name of this show we’re going to pitch together?”
“I told you before, I don’t have a title.”
“Surprise, surprise. Okay, well, say nothing to the king’s men. Make them guess, maybe.
What do you think it’s called?
Will that work, Needle?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’ll need strong arms and strong backs. Now it’s eighteen minutes, so I’ll let you go. You’re not going to tell me, I know. You fucked her on my say-so and you’re being a gentleman?”
“Leonard,” Phil Needle said. “How much did you drink last night?”
“Felt great on the treadmill this morning,” Leonard Steed said. “Seventeen minutes.”
He hung up.
Strong arms and strong backs.
But Phil Needle stood up brittle, everything creaking with nothing to offer. On a chair, upholstered too fancy for the room, was last night’s discarded clothing. He looked closer. What was it that was missing? There was a slot for something in his open wallet, a tiny plastic rectangle behind which a photograph of his wife and daughter smiled. They were two different photographs, as it seemed impossible to get both of them to smile in the same room. But the photograph of his daughter was gone. It was just his wife, and a blank leather rectangle. He tapped the space, and spread his legs further. What time was it?
Belly Jefferson sang again.
Phil Needle picked it up. “What?” he said, but there was just empty humming and nothing on the screen. The satellite had spun away from Leonard Steed’s assistant, probably, and Phil Needle waited, nude, for it to return to orbit. Then he heard, dimly over the hum, a man saying, “We’ve got the father.”
Phil Needle stood there, like a picture of a snowman. Dripping water. A man came on the phone and asked him if he was himself and he said he was. There was another muttering over the hum. He remembered, from something someplace sometime, that when someone calls for an emergency, the first thing they say, if the person is alive, is “She’s alive.”
“
What
?
” Phil Needle shouted. “
What
?
”
“I’m sorry,” said the man. “There’s an emergency. It was difficult to find you.”
So it
was
an emergency. “What’s the emergency?”
“I don’t know. We’re trying to get your wife on the phone.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you know,” Phil Needle said, “and you’re not telling me, then you are—”
“Your daughter’s missing.”
Phil Needle would never remember how his eye fell on the blank rectangle in his wallet, only that his first thought, nonsensical and guilty, was
How’d they know?
“Missing,” he said finally, or right away. He was cold now, and grabbed the blanket from the bed, tugging it, tugging it, tugging it harder from the corners of the mattress and wrapping it around all of him. He saw his underpants on the chair. When he’d taken those off, he’d been happy.
“We’re trying to get your wife,” the man said, “to the phone.”
His wife, his nearest and dearest. And his daughter, someplace else.