We Are Pirates: A Novel (32 page)

Amber was fiddling with something in her hands. “Well,” Gwen said, “these are dark days.”

“Yes,” Cody said, and the helicopter took a loud lap while he said something else. Gwen looked at him.

“You can’t,” she said, and Amber frowned at both of them. “There isn’t one.”

“I’m sorry,” Cody said. “I didn’t know it would be—”

“Be what?”

“I didn’t know we’d kill people.”

“There’s not a pirate account that omits bloodshed. None I’ve seen.”

“Yeah, you told me, but Gwen, I didn’t read those books.”

“You were
invited
to join us,” Amber said, finally getting the gist. Errol grunted and bent to examine a thick log with greens sprawled around it like dead string.

“You invited my brother,” Cody reminded her, and Amber went back to her fumbling. It was the radio. Gwen put her hand on it.

“No,” she said gently.

“Too far above us to hear,” Amber said, cocking her head up to the helicopter. “Tortuga would be cheering company.”

“We should save the batteries,” Gwen said. “They might be failing.”
Also
, she thought.

“Worry about your deserter,” Amber said.

“I’m not
deserting
,” Cody said, and put his hands over his eyes.

“They won’t take you,” Gwen said, and saw Errol startle back at something. “You’ve left all bounds, Cody. When they find the wreckage, your family will never utter your name again.”

Cody was shaking his head roughly. His eyes threw out another line of tears. “I know I came with you,” he said, “and I know I wanted to attack the boat. I know that man was bad. I know we had knives.”

“And then?” Gwen asked. “And
then
?
And then
?
”

Cody looked desperately at her. “I just want to go home,” he said again, and the helicopter roared over them again. It was there for the big story. It was not interested in teenagers hiding in the bushes, probably ducking out of church, or an old man lifting up a log in one shaky hand, scowling, to lurch further into the wild. The aerial shot of the mast of the
Corsair
, leaning out of the grimy water with a few soaked planks for company, would be a successful part of the evening broadcast. But Gwen didn’t think of the boat. It was gone. She thought of herself and her charges, beyond the law and looking to stay that way, and waited through the last lap until the sky was empty and the coast was clear, before walking out of the sticks and scratches, onto the flat gray landscape and the fading noise.

“It is an
insult
!” The captain’s cry could finally be heard. “It is
all
an
insult
!”

The log thunked to the concrete, splatting mud on Gwen’s muddy boots, and Errol followed, crashing through the brush into the morning sun. He looked terrible. It looked, in his snarling mouth, like one of his own teeth had been knocked loose, and his hair was wild with twigs and brambles crowning it, and there were specks of blood freckled down his arms and all over his clothing. Just one sleeve was rolled up, with Errol’s thick-banded watch shining like a signal, and the other hand was filthy—the one holding the rusty saw. His eyes were everywhere, darting angrily and accusingly from the trauma of whatever unrecorded battle he had fought in the night. “Scallywag!” he shouted hoarsely. “Rogue! Scum! Culprit! Asshole!”

He had already pushed Cody to the ground. Cody scrambled to stand but once standing he did not run, his expression fearful but stubborn too. He was never one to run away from a bully. He stayed there and got the crap beaten out of him.

“Errol,” Gwen said quietly.

“Out of this!” he cried. “I have right of reprisal!”

Cody looked at her. He didn’t know what that meant, either.

“Errol,” she said, “it’s Gwen.”

“I know,” Errol said darkly. “I’ve been looking all over.”

“We’re on Treasure Island,” she said. “Remember?”

“I have no home, not anymore. It is all an insult!”

He was pointing at the log, the green stretching out of the sodden wood to offer weird flowers, like ancient skulls.

“Orchids,” Amber said. Some stealthy grower, or perhaps some miraculous accident, on a log in a nothing place.

“He took what’s mine,” Errol spat, “and left me these!”

Gwen looked at the flowers, delicate and hideous, like the whole scheme. “Errol.”

“Sold it from under me,” Errol said, “and cast me into the diaspora.”

“
Captain.
”

Errol looked at her for the first time. “Hello,” he said blankly.

“It’s Gwen.”

“He took what’s mine,” he muttered. “Sold my house to buy his own and left me stranded with insults of flowers.”

“These were just here,” Amber tried. “This is not what we’re after.”

Errol pointed the saw at Cody. “My fucking son,” he said.

“I’m not your son,” Cody said.

“We agreed until such time that the treasure could be divided. He took spoils. And
now
he talks of desertion, sends a priceful gift as distraction? You will feel the sting of this lash, by Neptune I swear it.”

Most of this Gwen recognized from
Treasure Seekers
, but Cody hadn’t read anything. “What?” he said. “What did I take?”

“
Everything.
”

Cody found the lever to be fierce, an angry look at the old man, as such generations have given each other since the sea was wet. “Name,” he said. “One. Thing.”

“I am having trouble with my memory,” Errol answered, and then swiveled, violently, to stare at Gwen.

“Please,” Gwen said. “Wait. Tarry.”

“I will fight any man, with any weapon.”

“It won’t help to hurt him,” she said.

“
Can’t hoit
,” Errol said, with a wild cackle. Blood came from his mouth, the hole from the tooth maybe, or some other wound she could not see.

“Captain,” she said. “Sailors are a particularly volatile element.”

“Agreed. I want him punished for his crimes.”

“I think his crimes,” Gwen said carefully, “are different from the ones you are thinking of.”

“You could say that of any man.”

“Yes, but—”

“And no man will believe the whipping my son will receive.”

“Okay, but let’s try and be reasonable for a second.”

Errol let out a ghastly cry, his hands spread wide at the heavens. It was long, loud, lost, frantic, and ended suddenly, as if he had remembered something at that very moment. “
D’ye hear
?
” he asked Gwen, although she was the one who had said it. “
D’ye hear?
Reasonable!”

“Just for a second,” Gwen said desperately.

He screamed again, and Gwen had to move her hands up to cover her ears. No man should scream like that. It was an untamed noise, separate from whatever containment civilization required. She had felt that scream so many times but never found the voice to let it out. Now she knew why. Because people hated it was why. It drove them mad and angry. “
Reasonable
!
” he said, when it was over. “I’ll have you know, grommet, we don’t sit here to hear reason. We go according to—” and another scream again, short this time, and Errol looked down.

Cody’s cleaver was stuck in his leg.

“
Bastard
!
” Errol screamed. Cody was panting. Another amateur move, Gwen thought, a rash act from a crewman unready for the voyage. He had come at Errol from the side, the blade now stuck in right below the knee, the handle quaking where the boy had let go. It was a strange, strange place for a wound. It was impossible, even when Gwen could see it plain as day. There was a sharp, bad gasp from Errol’s throat, and then for a second it was so quiet Gwen could hear a few birds, and the traffic overhead from the bridge. Cody leaned down and wiggled the cleaver out of Errol’s leg. The blood bled. Errol looked at it and then looked at Cody and the swordfight properly began.

In countless histories, the clashing of swords is a battle of wits, barbs tossed down from swinging chandeliers, brash laughter as the heavy curtains are cut to ribbons. They didn’t know, Gwen thought. They couldn’t have seen one. Errol and Cody set upon each other bestially, the cleaver and saw jerking and arcing not like rapiers or cutlasses but like antlers and claws and teeth. Birds circled and fled as they made their way down the last of the path to the lot. Even the underbrush seemed to shrink from their flailing arms, as if they were unpopular kids moving through a party. They did not have the breath for insults—there was not a shout of “Take back all slander!” from Cody, or “Give back what you stole, knave!” from Errol—though as Gwen tailed them, she could hear their grunts and squeaks. They were dodgy all the way, neither pirate beaten, ducking away from each mad blow as they circled the provisions still sheltered by the overturned boat. Cody was a scrambler, his feet loosening rocks and garbage, even toppling two cardboard boxes stacked up in the corner of the lot, empty and soaked and never having held anything. Errol was surer but slower, having lost all hesitation about the world, his steps uneven from the first blow. The flat of the saw slapped Cody’s face. Errol kicked at the cleaver as it tried another wound, spilling blood from the first one onto the wet ground. Errol found an overturned chair in a mess of grass—as if someone, years ago, had stormed away from the dinner table—and brandished it with his other hand like a lion tamer, its ruined seat cushion flopping to the ground. Gwen tailed them warily. Errol had rumpled Cody’s hair on the deck of the
Corsair
at least once. Now they were enemies, unreasonable barbarians. When the chair hit Cody’s shoulder, she must have gasped.

Cody turned to glance at her, set his mouth in a tense grin, and then darted from Errol’s saw with more grace than was necessary, showing off for his ladylove, ducking under the chair and kicking Errol in the back of the knees. Errol screamed, high and wild like a panicked woman, and moved his saw jaggedly forward—Cody had to pull back his belly to avoid it—before snarling something. It sounded like “Six years.” Cody, with a flourish, backed away six or eight steps and quickly tore off the topcoat worn by Captain Scrod, first one sleeve and then the other, then twirled it around the hand that wasn’t holding the cleaver, around and around like spaghetti on a fork. Gwen had seen this in movies, a fighter spinning a heavy, mummified hand of cloth, for a shield, she was pretty sure. Cody didn’t need to do it. Cody wasn’t doing it right. He looked at his hand to see. Errol stepped forward calmly and dragged the saw across Cody’s bare arm. You could hear the flesh tear over the traffic, and Cody’s scream and the clatter of the cleaver on the ground as the wound widened, his skin opening like an umbrella. Cody went down and Errol stood over him, his bad foot on Cody’s chest pinning him down and bleeding away, with his saw up in the air in both hands, angled straight down like an arrow.
You are here.

“Dead to me!” Errol cried, “and
dead
!”

“
Stop
!
” Amber screamed. Gwen couldn’t believe it, but Errol did. He stopped and looked over, mid-plunge, at Gwen’s best friend. She was crying, Gwen saw, tears long and slow down her face.

And she was holding the gun.

“
I’ll shoot both of you.
” Amber stepped closer. Gwen remembered the thing that clicked on the gun when Roger had it. Had it clicked now? What was going to happen? “
Both of you, either of you, I don’t care.
”

“Who are you?” Errol said hoarsely. Cody looked grateful and embarrassed both. “Who are you, interfering?”

“One of your crew,” Amber said. “We must stick together or die. We run the gauntlet of the whole world, not at each other.”

Amber hadn’t said it right—a good forger but not a good reader, they would say about her in times to come—but Errol nodded like it meant something. To him it likely did. He put the saw down and kicked Cody’s bleeding arm with his other foot, then stepped off him.

“Begone,” he said wearily. “You and all who support you. It’s mutiny.”

“Errol,” Gwen said.

“Sell my house and kill my woman. Send your filthy flowers to wash your hands.”

“I don’t even know,” Cody said, breathing hard, “what you’re talking about.” He tried to stand up but had to slide, bleeding, across the ground to Gwen. Amber followed him with the gun but gave up. Cody put his hand on Gwen’s leg and then blinked up at her.

“You, too, Vera?” Errol asked.

“
Gwen
,” Gwen said. “No.” But she reached down, and couldn’t help it, lifted him up. Blood slid onto her pants, sticky and staining, and in that second she realized she’d die in them, these pants she’d chosen because they were the toughest. Errol tossed the saw to the ground and limped to the water, where the mast of the
Corsair
still stood ready, even as the boat had fallen apart. He pointed at the mast and then said something to himself, his shoulders raising and lowering in argument as he paced on the bank. It was terrible, where they were. Gwen had expected things to go wrong—they went wrong in all of Errol’s books—but not this way. She had wanted them to go wrong better.