A Commodore of Errors (38 page)

The young pirate looked to the leader, who just pointed at the chair the chief had been sitting on.

“Oh, come on,” the chief whined. “How am I supposed to see all the gauges from this chair?”

The leader stepped closer to the chief, now tied up in the swivel-less chair with the rough polypro cutting into his wrists. “Where is everybody?” the leader said. “This must be a trick.”

“Yeah, right.” The chief laughed. “I wish it was a trick. No, my men are all up on the bridge, getting their nails done instead of slinging wrenches. Go on up there, you'll see.”

The chief could tell that the pirates did not believe him, that they really thought the crew was playing some kind of trick on them. He watched the pirates file out of the control room, looking over their shoulders.

“Don't expect to cut the line!” the chief called after them. “You'll have to wait your turn like everyone else.”

The leader put a halt to the procession out of the control room when he stopped to turn back to the chief. “What line? What are you talking about?”

The chief just laughed. “You'll find out. Go on. Just go on up to the bridge.

Mrs. Tannenbaume was the first one on the bridge to see the pirates. They were standing outside on the wing looking a little unsure of themselves.

She signaled to Mitzi, who was working on Swifty in the chair, to have a look outside. Mitzi, who, Mrs. Tannenbaume knew, was a bit squeamish about pirates, went white when she laid eyes on them. Mrs. Tannenbaume walked calmly over to her and said, “Just follow my lead. Don't look nervous.”

When Mitzi's face took on an even more alarmed look, she said, “Trust me. If you get nervous, who knows what Captain Courageous here will do.” Mrs. Tannenbaume was talking about Swifty, who was beginning to stir now that Mitzi had stopped pulling on his toes. “Look,” Mrs. Tannenbaume whispered, keeping one eye on the pirates still hovering uncertainly on the other side of the bridge wing door. “We're surrounded by nothing but followers up here. So trust me, if we stay calm, the crew'll follow our lead.”

Swifty's hand went up to the hot cloth on his face but Mrs. Tannenbaume grabbed it and placed it back on his lap. “We've got some visitors,” she said quietly, bending down to Swifty's ear. “Stay under that cloth and everything'll be alright.”

Swifty must've known who the visitors might be because Mrs. Tannenbaume saw the blanket covering his body go taut. She knew there was no way he'd move a muscle now.

“Well look here,” Mrs. Tannenbaume announced in a voice loud enough for everyone on the bridge to hear. “Looks like we've got visitors.”

The pirates made their move at the sound of her voice but then stopped suddenly—piling into one another—when Mrs. Tannenbaume swung open the sliding door to the wheelhouse.

“
Shalom
!”

She knew she had them at “hello.”

The pirates were a ragtag bunch, that's for sure. Most of them were shoeless and their black feet were callused and knobby from so many protruding, ugly corns. And skinny! The way their bony legs stuck out from their baggy and tattered shorts, Mrs. Tannenbaume wondered what they spent all their ill-gotten booty on. They sure weren't spending it on food. One of them had a gray scrubby beard, but most of them looked like they could be teenagers, their faces were so smooth and clean. All of them wore clothes that were soiled and stained and ill-fitting for the most part, and most had big sunglasses covering their faces and bandanas covering their heads. The rest were bareheaded and squinting in the sun. There was nothing particularly menacing about them—they merely looked “third world,” as far as Mrs. Tannenbaume was concerned. The only thing giving them away as “bad guys” was their weapons. They all carried rifles, one or two
slung over their backs and one that each carried in his arms. The rifles looked cheap and ill-made, even the ones that weren't rusted and held together with duct tape. Aside from the beat-up weaponry they carried, they didn't look all that evil. But, they were pirates, after all, and they were armed to the teeth. The crew didn't stand a chance fighting them off. What were they going to use for weapons, their heat guns?

Mrs. Tannenbaume knew they wouldn't need heat guns if the crew followed her lead. And so far they were.

“Come in, come in!”

A couple of the engineers were sitting on the chart table waiting for their turn with Mitzi when they saw the pirates. They jumped down to defend their ship but Mrs. Tannenbaume held them back.

“Don't even think about it. These are our guests. They deserve a manicure as much as you do.”

Mitzi told Swifty to make way for the pirates and he complied without complaint. With one hand still clutching the hot cloth to his face, he shimmied out of the captain's chair into Ski's waiting arms, which were there to guide his blind shipmate to the stool next to the wheel. When Swifty was seated, he put both hands on the cloth and held it firmly against his face. This display of cowardice disgusted the engineers and they again looked like they were about to make their move against the pirates but this time it was Mitzi who discouraged such a tactic.

“You,” she said, pointing to the second engineer. “Make yourself useful and get another towel from the coffeepot.” She then walked over to the electrician, who was getting his nails done by Sylvia. “Get up. We need to make room for our friends.”

Mrs. Tannenbaume knew that the electrician, who by now had proven to be Mitzi's best customer, would comply with whatever was asked of him in order to keep his favored status in Mitzi's appointment book. He stood right up, brushed the seat clean, and held his arm out to welcome the pirates. “Who's next?” A genuine smile lit up his face. “You guys are gonna love Sylvia's work. She's really come a long way.”

The electrician walked toward the pirates with his hands out, palms down, to show off his half-moons. “See?”

The leader spread out his arms to keep his youthful compatriots from getting too close to the half-moons.

Mrs. Tannenbaume could tell from the chief pirate's reaction that he knew he was in uncharted waters with this ship. His eyes darted around the wheel-house—when he dared to take them off the electrician's hands, that is—and Mrs. Tannenbaume watched him take in all that he surveyed. He appeared to be particularly curious about the heat gun/paint tray getup. His eyes kept coming back to it while he took in the rest of the bridge—the bookshelves lined with bottles of nail polish, the cheesecloth-draped chart table, the hand-painted wood signs advertising Mitzi's daily specials. Surely the man had never seen a bridge like this one. And aside from all the nonstandard bridge equipment he saw, he surely had never seen a crew like this one. The normal attire on the bridge of a ship—at least any ship he would have likely pirated—was khakis, not boilersuits. But here he found engineers in boilersuits and stewards and cooks in white smocks, lounging around with wet hair, waiting on a blow-dry and manicure from a stunning redhead and a cute young Thai girl.

When the second engineer—resplendent in his pressed boilersuit, exquisitely coiffed hair, and gleaming nails—walked over with the Pyrex coffee pot in one hand and a pair of channel locks with a steaming hot towel in the other, the chief pirate had evidently seen enough. He spread out both arms to keep the young ones safely behind him and backed his entire team off the bridge wing. When they got to the ladder at the aft end, they backed down it, never taking their eyes off the bizarre crew.

Mrs. Tannenbaume walked out to the edge of the wing and watched the pirates descend all the way to the main deck. When the last of them climbed down into the waiting pirate boat, she called to the bridge, telling Swifty to put in the log that the pirates were away.

The crew let out a whooping holler.

Captain Tannenbaume, down below in his cabin dreaming of milk cows, never even knew pirates had attacked his ship.

NIGHT ORDERS

M
rs. Tannenbaume had been looking forward to this day, a day to herself, a day where she would do absolutely nothing. She'd spent the last week on the bridge navigating 24-7 as the ship made its way through the heavily trafficked waters of the Gulf of Suez, and then the canal, and then the Mediterranean.

With her son preoccupied doing who knew what, with Swifty busy with his manicures and pedicures and the other mates with theirs, Mrs. Tannenbaume had become the de facto master of the
God is Able
. She was certainly the one who made the final call on meeting arrangements with other ships—whether to alter course or hold course and speed, that all-important calculus that keeps ships from colliding with one another. She told the mates that she did not like this business of always being the give-way vessel. She had been giving way her entire life, and she was tired of it. “Let the other guy move,” she told the mates. “Don't let him—or the Rules of the Road—bully you into changing course.” Mrs. Tannenbaume saw the leviathan ships that plied the world's oceans as
nothing more than bullies scaring the smaller boats into keeping out of their way so that they could pass unimpeded. Well, Mrs. Tannenbaume would not let the bastards intimidate her.

In the odd moments when Mrs. Tannenbaume was not navigating or lending a hand in Mitzi's salon, not to mention quelling a pirate attack (such as it was), she had her nose in one of the various logbooks she discovered on the bridge—a nod, perhaps, to her thirty-five years in education as a data entry clerk. She read the various logbooks with a critical eye and found herself second-guessing some of the orders her son had given over the years. And since she was the supernumerary, she felt it was her right to make her own log entries. Also, after only a quick perusal of the Captain's standing orders book, she decided to make a few changes. Captain Tannenbaume's Standing Orders called for the deck officers to, among other things, keep a one nautical mile Closest Point of Approach with all ship traffic, to call the master if the CPA dropped to less than a mile, and to blow five short and rapid blasts of the whistle if in doubt as to the intentions of the other vessel—in that order. Mrs. Tannenbaume wanted the mates to blow the danger signal first, notify her second, and to forget about keeping the one nautical mile CPA altogether. The mates, however, knew better, which is how it fell upon Mrs. Tannenbaume to do all of the navigating. She made it sound like navigating 24-7 was a burden, but in truth, she preferred to do it all herself—at least that way she knew it would be done to her liking.

By far, Mrs. Tannenbaume's favorite logbook was the Captain's Night Orders book, orders issued by the captain on a nightly basis that supplemented his standing orders. They were sometimes explicit orders, such as an order to call the master when the ship came near a known shoal area, or perhaps just a simple reminder to keep an extra special lookout for small fishing vessels if the ship was expected to be in the vicinity of a fishing fleet overnight. Mrs. Tannenbaume saw the Night Orders book differently. She saw it as a way to harp on her pet subject night after night, and since the mates were required to place their initials next to the night orders when they came on watch each night, Mrs. Tannenbaume knew she had a captive audience. “Hold your course and speed” became her nightly entry in the Captain's Night Orders book. The mates dutifully initialed the new orders, as did the engineers and cooks. In fact, everyone
who stepped foot on the bridge placed their initials next to her night orders, something that greatly pleased Mrs. Tannenbaume. She felt like she was putting her stamp on things and everyone treated her like the head honcho.

Everyone except the Suez Canal pilot.

The pilot had presented a distinct problem for Mrs. Tannenbaume. When he first came aboard, she figured him to be some sort of flunky, someone to be coddled but not taken seriously. As far as Mrs. Tannenbaume could tell, the man only seemed to be interested in extracting from the crew a stash of cigarettes. Marlboro reds, evidently, were his brand, because Mrs. Tannenbaume noticed how indignant he became when Swifty offered him a carton of Lucky Strikes. She was mortified when Swifty gave in and coughed up a carton of Reds. She, for one, would not kowtow to the man.