We Are Pirates: A Novel (15 page)

“
She
has a boy she wants to steal,” Amber said. “A captive, like.”

“Some well-rigged young man?” Errol said, and gave a shouty little laugh.

“He wouldn’t get this,” Gwen said.

“He doesn’t have to,” Amber said. “He’ll be there anyway.” She held out her hand—
TALLY
—and knocked it against Gwen’s
HO
. “Tell you later.”

Gwen put her hand on Errol’s, which had a fistful of Italian landscape. “Captain, is this enough crew?”

“How many is it?” Errol asked.

“One,” Gwen said, pointing at herself, “two, three.”

“Four with Cody,” Amber said.

“
Nathan
,” Gwen said.

“Not enough,” Errol said, shaking his head. “Impossible, impossible!”

“It’s not a big boat,” Gwen said, although they hadn’t really checked out the boat.

“Quiet, wench,” Amber said.

“Ha!” Errol said, and Manny returned with the steaming pot. On the tray were four small cups, rounded like urns, and he placed them all over the hand-wrecked puzzle and poured odd, weak tea.

“What is this?” Errol asked.

“The same tea I make always,” Manny said.

“Catmint,” Gwen remembered.

“Catmint,” Errol repeated. “Maybe I do like him.”

Everyone sipped. To Gwen it tasted almost like nothing, and then, softly, she felt something woozy on her tongue, and grinned at Amber, who was blinking down into her cup. Manny was able-bodied, Gwen thought. Strong. She caught Amber’s eye.

“Is this Haitian?” she asked Manny.

Manny nodded and sipped his own tea. “There is no place to make it here, not the right way. So what are you planning?”

“Who says we’re planning anything?” Amber said quickly.

“A little bird told me,” he said, and gestured around the room with a thick, thick arm. “What are you up to, little girls in this room?”

“We’re not little,” Gwen said, but she was grinning. “Pirates.”

Manny laughed. “Pirates!” he said. “You say it so strong for such a thing.
Pirates
, with a capital
P
?”

“With a capital everything,” Gwen said.

“What do you mean,
pirates
? There’s no pirates now.”

“There’s an equivalent,” Amber said. “We have it in our heads.”

“We want to get out of here,” Gwen said, “and take back what’s taken.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Manny said. “This is an old-age home. You are girls.”

Gwen felt very fierce, and held Manny in her fierce gaze. Her brain sloshed with catmint, and she thought of something she had read, hidden under the bed. “We want to forge a social order,” she said, “beyond the realm of traditional authority.”

“Traditional authority,” Manny repeated, and scratched his big, flat ear. “That actually sounds pretty cool.”

“We will set the world afear’d,” Errol said.

Manny chuckled. “Every fear hides a wish,” he recited, maybe, “and vice versa. Why don’t you tell me what you are the hell talking about?”

They told him. Gwen thought she was better at it this time. Errol was looking deep into space, lost in thought, or just lost, but Amber was smiling almost proudly at Gwen as she talked of pirates of old and then, slowly, with help from Amber, moved the plan into what was then, for a few days at least, called the present, and when Gwen was done, Manny had put his cup down and looked around the table like everyone was capable.

“Pirates,” he said finally.

“Yes!” Amber said. “Gwen and I’ve already stolen, so we have a taste of the life.”

“What did you steal?” Manny asked, and then put up his chalky hand. “Don’t tell me. Enough troubles. But there is a difference, yes, between pirates and thieves?”

“Pirates have a reason,” Amber said. “For, I don’t know, glory. Glory and justice.”

“And what is your reason? Why are you girls doing this thing?”

“We can’t just,” Gwen said, gesturing around the cagey room, “
sit here.
We have to get away.”

“From what?”

“From the whole thing,” Amber said, and to Gwen’s surprise, Manny nodded.

“I know what that is,” he said. “It is why I am here, cleaning up after grandfathers and grandmothers miles from my home.”

“What’s Haiti like?” Gwen said.

“Terrible,” Manny said with a shake of his head. “I miss it so.”

“The whole world’s terrible,” Errol said moodily. He was holding his tea but wasn’t sipping it. Gwen thought maybe he’d forgotten it was to drink, and sipped hers obviously, to help him.

“The whole world?” Manny said. “That’s all we have, man. Besides the whole world, there’s not much.”

“Exactly,” Gwen said, and knocked her hand against Amber’s again, spilling a little tea onto the fancy rug. “We are leaving it. We are doing it. It’s the right thing to do.”

“If it’s the right thing, you should do it,” Manny said. “That’s what they say in my church. Even if they say it’s wrong, and you know it’s right.”

“Beyond the realm of traditional authority,” Amber said.

“Tallyho,” Errol said.

Manny nodded. “And good luck on it.”

“You don’t want to join us?” Amber asked, and Manny chuckled again.

“No, no. No, no, no.”

“But you just said you
hated
it,” Amber said, amazed and loud. “You said it was
terrible
!”

“I’m still,” Manny said, “not going to hop on a boat with you little ducks. That far I have not fallen.”

“I see I’m interrupting a tea party,” cooed Peggy from the French doors, and then folded her arms in front of her chest, too high, like she needed a shelf for her chin. “Mrs. Hinterman was complaining.”

“Just a little incident,” Manny said. “A ripple on the water.”

“It didn’t sound little,” Peggy said.

“I gave the map to Grounds,” Manny said. “It needs a stronger bolt.”

“I’m not talking about Grounds’ job,” Peggy said. “I’m talking about yours.”

One narrative, about the hated people in our lands, is that eventually they get what is coming to them. This is what prisoners have told themselves, the afflicted and the fallen, since the first asshole walked amongst us, kicking infants and click-click-clicking a ballpoint pen. But Peggy did not fall into a vat of anything ravenous or burning, not then and not ever.

“I made tea for everybody,” Manny said. “We seem to be calming down.”

“I see a fallen orchid,” Peggy said, pointing, and Gwen remembered that she had called him
invaluable.
He certainly looked invalued. “Cleaning it up would go a long way, Manny. A
long
way.”

“Yes,” Manny said.

“Perhaps dirt floors are de rigueur in Jamaica,” Peggy said, “but working here, let alone if you want to start your own business, you have to clean it up.
Now.
”

Terrible Peggy stopped talking. Manny nodded and gave his frown to his tea. Just about everybody else, by the way, in this book is white. He stood up to the fall of more puzzle pieces, and looked down at Gwen blinking slowly. “Yes,” he said. “I will go.”

“
Verily
?
” Amber said, and plunked down her empty teacup. Errol shouted a laugh, and Peggy, stupid, kept frowning.

“He’s not from Jamaica,” Gwen said of her newest crewman. “He’s from Haiti.”

Manny whistled something and opened the broom closet. “Where am I from?” he asked. “Where am I from, Jean-Robert? Where am I from?”

The closet was in the corner, and Gwen craned to see. It was the little bird he had mentioned, although it was big and bright, scuffling in the cage in the corner where the sun razored in. It was a parrot, its jerky eyes moving from the seed in its claw to all the staring eyes in the room. Gwen thought a parrot was too perfect almost, but why not? Why not a perfect plan, with a perfect crew? Why not pirates?

“Tortuga!” the parrot cawked.
Perfect.

Chapter 6

They could not hear each other over the music, but it was no fun talking on the phone if you weren’t playing music, and it was ridiculous to text if you were reading something out loud. Gwen liked to lie on her stomach, looking out at the bridge and the sparkling sea, with one leg stretched out—the one with the burn—with her toe on the volume knob. Synchronized swimming had finally paid off. It was her right leg—or
starboard
, she was trying to learn to remember to think.

“Listen to this,” Amber said on the other end. “There is never a boredom. There is always plenty to occupy the mind of a watchkeeper on the bridge at sea. But there is a restlessness. A man realizes many things on deck, and can find his eye clouded with a yen for home and other matters of seeming urgency. But what of the future? What’s yen?”

“I’m not sure,” Gwen said. “Chinese money, I think, or Japanese.”

“Oh, yeah, Japanese money. I learned about it in Global. That doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe they fenced something in a Japanese port,” Gwen said, “and then they wanted to bring it home. A yen for home?” Gwen was still proud of knowing
fenced.

“Okay,” Amber said uncertainly. “But what of the future? Even the most vibrant of adventures requires the safest of passages. The vision of the watchkeeper should be the triumphant arrival and not one other thing on God’s earth.”

Sometimes it was hard. Gwen and Amber had been doing this for days. Or
nights
, really, because their days were spent prowling the docks, looting the drugstore—Amber did this alone, while Gwen served as watchkeeper outside, so as not to be recognized from her first caper and thus have all their plans undone—and generally battening down the hatches. They stared at satellite photographs of the Glasserman home, which at this point in history were glittering prizes ripe for the plucking on any computer screen. “Click
ZOOM
,” Amber would say, and they would get closer to the roof of the house. They would imagine the well-rigged young man following the false map that would make him irretrievable to the civilized world. But at night they kept reading the logs and the lores, frowning at slippery vocabulary, the thorny, gendered nouns of untranslated Romance languages, the frustrating lack of imagination of town names in the New World, New York, New Orleans, New everything. Would they need a victualler? Should the
Corsair
prove to be a frigatoon, would Errol’s naval training be sufficient? How heavy is a cat-o’-nine-tails, and how easily can it repel the strong arm of the law?

“
And
,” Amber said, “it says a man realizes many things on deck, but they must mean women too, right?”

“I hope so,” Gwen said. The monsoons of men in the books, and the tiny drizzles of women, were a problem they didn’t want to admit. There is a slender, secret history of female pirates, but it was nowhere in the private library of their captain. Promising names would be dashed by a pronoun in the next sentence. Jan Janssen was a man. Jean Laffite was a man. Andrea de Lomellini was a man. Jean Rose was a man. Adrian Jansz Pater was a man. Countless Turkish pirates, all men, were named Kara. Sandra, queen of the pirates, dressed as a man. Anne Bonny not only disguised herself as a man but a gay man, a man who liked men, which is why her mother had a heart attack. (That part was good.) Alwilda just became a pirate to escape marrying a man. Arabella Bishop was a woman, but she wasn’t a real pirate, more of an enabler. Elizabeth Killigrew was more of a pirate patron. Rachel Wall was more of a pirate wife. Ruby of Kishmoor was more of a pirate’s daughter. Lydia Bailey was simply captured by pirates—the Nathan Glasserman of the Old World. There was Grace O’Malley, although she was trained by her father, and there was Maria Lindsey, who committed suicide by taking poison
and
by jumping off a cliff, and there was the troubling entry in Errol’s
Compleat Pirate Dictionary
: “Rape: SEE WOMEN
, TREATMENT OF
.” She lay flat on the bed.

“You
hope
so?”

“Quiet, wench. Of course there are risks. We’ll be on the high sea. It’s not, I don’t know. It’s something.”

“
It’s something.
Verily. It’s like, in science class? There’s, you know, control and experiment. This is an experiment. But there’s no, if you know what I mean, control.”

From where Gwen lay the rest of the bed was flat and continuous with the horizon of the water. But it was all control, was what she felt. She was a hockey puck—people hit her with sticks and sent her places, but who cares, even when she scored a goal? The goal wasn’t hers. It belonged to the people who hit her.

“We just have to,” Gwen said. She said it like it was the beginning of the sentence, but then she said nothing at the end. Amber said nothing too, probably nodding, and the beat of the same song kept nodding too.