The Pirate's Daughter (14 page)

Wilson nodded. “It's the dread,” he said. He had noticed this in
women. The very neurosis that made his life so difficult attracted members of the opposite sex. Some women went for the dread the way bees went for honey.

“The what?” Cricket said.

“The feeling I have that something bad is going to happen next, that disaster is always waiting just around the corner.”

“I know that feeling,” she said, and it sounded like she understood. “At any moment you're prepared to lose everything. That's why you're such a good gambler.”

Wilson thought for a minute. “That's one way of looking at it,” he said.

That afternoon, they dressed and for the first time in two days went downstairs starving, to look for something to eat.

The concierge, drowsing over the same copy of the
Courier Ilheiú
, looked up scowling and pointed to a hand-lettered sign over her easy chair.

“We missed breakfast,” Cricket said. “We missed lunch too. Dinner isn't for another four hours. No eating between meals, those are the house rules.”

“Oh, my God,” Wilson said with alarm. “Four hours. I don't think I can wait that long.”

Cricket nodded and narrowed her eyes and turned to the old woman. There was another exchange in Portuguese, this one rising to an argument, but Cricket was persistent. At last the woman threw up her hands, heaved out of the easy chair, which bore the permanent indentation of her bony rear end, and slammed off into the kitchen through a heavy door to the right. Cricket and Wilson followed.

“What did you say to her?” Wilson whispered into Cricket's ear.

“I told her if she didn't feed us, I'd break her face,” Cricket said.

The kitchen was a large, pleasant, well-lit room with a fireplace, a white ceramic gas stove, and a large old-fashioned wooden sideboard along one wall. Pots bubbled on the stove and filled the room with the rich, delicious smell of food. A glass door opened onto a beautiful little moss garden at the center of which stood a crumbling plaster nymph, glistening in the rain.

“She looks cold out there,” Wilson said.

Cricket didn't say anything.

They sat at a tile-topped table. The concierge ladled some of the food from the pots into pottery bowls, slammed them down on the table, and left. Cricket brought over plates and cutlery, a bottle of wine, and bread from the sideboard. They had sopa de Peixes, a delicious soup of fish and squid and shellfish; chicarrones, which are hot Portuguese sausages; and saffron rice. The wine was a red Verdelhoa, which, according to the label on the bottle, once graced the table of the tsars.

“This is great,” Wilson said with his mouth full.

Cricket was too busy eating to respond.

When the rice and soup and sausages were gone, they sat sated, finishing the wine. Wilson already knew Cricket well enough to know that good food and wine put her in a confessional mood.

“Tell me more,” he said, and filled her glass.

“About what?” she said.

“About you.”

She took a quick gulp of the wine and lowered her eyes. “You really want to know?” Her voice sounded small and uncertain.

“Yes.”

“I was a lot of trouble in the old days,” she said after a pause. “I fell in with a pretty bad crowd my first year at Palmetto High. You know the type, beer-swilling shit-kicking dudes with bad-ass cars; only because it was an island, the thing there was cigarette boats with huge engines. I ran away a couple of times—once to New
Orleans, once to Miami—was in and out of juvie for the usual vandalism and drunkenness. Guess you could say I grew up pretty fast. In any case, my parents couldn't control me, so my dad thought I'd be better off at sea.

“When I was fifteen, he found me a berth as ordinary seaman on the
Jesus of Lubeck
, a rusty hulk of a cargo ship registered out of Rigala in Bupanda. Dad was good friends with the owner, a man we all called the Portugee, a pretty slick gambler who used to play a lot of high-stakes poker at Mazep's. The Portugee was on a losing streak that year, so he came on as captain to get himself away from the cards. That first berth was tough. Real back-breaking work. It was the one that ruined my hands. The Portugee worked me really hard, topside in all sorts of weather. And he was an unpredictable bastard because he smoked a lot of opium—black, sticky stuff he got in jars from Thailand. I was indentured to him for the next four years, supposedly under his protection. What a strange character! Too smart for life at sea, spoke sixteen languages. When he wasn't high, he was bored, and one day he decided to improve my education, as he put it. See, I had pretty much skipped school after the eighth grade.

“His cabin was full of books. He had everything, all the classics, in English, French, Portuguese, Spanish—you name it. We studied four and a half hours a day, starting just before dawn, every day for three years. Maybe that's why I hate all that crap to this day. Greek at four
A.M
. after barely two hours' sleep, followed by a day of full watches, then more of the same. Still, when I shipped out on that tub, I could hardly read the newspaper. Four years later I was reading Aristotle and Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Byron. He was a big fan of Byron. I hate Byron.

“Then, one day, the Portugee decided he couldn't teach me anything more on his own and said it was time I go to a real school. He wanted me to go to college. I couldn't believe it. I was a sailor; that's all I ever wanted to be, I told him. But later, on the return crossing from Africa, he put in a course north-northeast, and we
sailed into the harbor at New York City, and we tied up at old Pier 26, that used to belong to the old Flying Cloud Line, and we got into a cab and drove up the West Side Highway to St. Mary of the Flowers College, and he put me out on the sidewalk with my bag.”

Cricket slugged back the wine left in her glass and stared out at the moss and the wet in the garden. The moss was the richest green imaginable and looked softer than any bed.

“Go ahead …” Wilson finally had to prompt her.

“So I was stuck at St. Mary's for two years, with the Portugee paying all the bills. It was horrible, worse than anything I had experienced at sea. I was ostracized, humiliated. The place wasn't much of a college. It was really a finishing school for rich, stupid New York chicks, who knew how to make a girl from the outside feel lower than shit. I wasn't like them at all. I had just come from the deck of a gypsy cargo ship, for Christ's sake! And before that, from the most obscure and backward islands in the Gulf of Mexico.

“The rich, I think, are the crudest people alive; that's how they get their money. It didn't take the girls long to start in on me. My hands gave me away, like a servant trying to pass as an aristocrat in an eighteenth-century novel. I tried to get them massaged, manicured, but it was no use. I'm a big, tough girl, and I'm pretty touchy. If I heard one thing I didn't like, one peep out of one of those bowheads, I'd stick my fist in her face. ‘You see this fist?' I'd say; then I'd let her have it. It got to the point where no one would speak to me, not a word—the silent treatment.

“Finally, I couldn't stand any more, and I robbed the poor box in the chapel right before Christmas, when it was stuffed full of donations from their fat-cat parents, and I ran off. I put my name up on the board at the New York Yacht Club and holed up in a cheap motel in Newark until I found a berth on a yacht bound for Valparaiso. And it was only six months later, back at sea in the middle of a storm, that I started to feel safe again. The wind was howling, and the ship was falling into the waves, and there I was,
laughing my head off. The crew thought I was nuts. But I'm telling you, anything, even drowning, was better than the girls at St. Mary of the Flowers.”

When the wine was gone, Wilson and Cricket went out to walk the streets of the town. Angra seemed like a dream in the misty light, its pastel buildings dulled by the fog and the rain. They walked down the wet steps into the lower town and along the commercial thoroughfares.

Here the street lamps were lit though it was barely four in the afternoon. Smoked sausages and duck carcasses hung in the windows of restaurants. Fishermen stood at the tin counters of cafés, wearing thick, oily turtleneck sweaters. They stared through the plate glass at the heavy sky, their eyes dark as a winter sea. Cricket pulled close to Wilson; the weather had turned cold with the rain. He pressed her hard palm into his soft one. The world was a cruel place; everyone knew that.

They stopped at a bar marked with the sign of the mermaid, filled with fishermen and drunken farmers from the interior. The floors of the place were old and warped, the white walls gray with years of cigarette smoke. They found a dark corner where the bar jutted out at an angle. Wilson bought two
digestifs
—Doulm, a liquor made from the figs that grow wild on the island. It was bitter and strong as grain alcohol.

“Wow,” Wilson said, pounding his chest.

Cricket downed hers quickly without comment and put her glass on the scratched tin counter of the bar.

“Turn around,” she said.

“What?”

“I don't want you looking at me when I say what I'm going to say.”

Puzzled, Wilson turned to face the wall. Cricket stepped close behind, her mouth an inch from his ear. She spoke quickly, and there was a seriousness in her voice that struck a grim, hollow note inside him.

“Whatever happens on the rest of this voyage, you've got to stick by me,” she said. “You've got to stick by me and do exactly what I tell you to do.”

Wilson tried to turn and face her, but she put her rough hands on his shoulders and kept him facing the wall.

“What are you talking about? What's going to happen?” Wilson said, a note of panic in his voice.

“Sh! No questions! By saying anything to you now, I am violating a confidence that could mean my life. If you're not up to a little trouble, if your heart is weak, if you can walk away and not look back, now's your chance to do it.”

Wilson stood rigid, unmoving. His hands felt clammy, his mouth dry. His dread told him to run. But what if the dread was playing a trick on him and he was running right back into its arms?

“Cricket—”

Her grip tightened on his shoulder. “No questions,” she said, then she continued in a softer voice. “If you want to leave now, it's O.K. We had a great couple of days; a lot of people never even get that. You can go back to the pension and pack your things and fly out of here back to the States in the morning. If you don't have enough money, I'll give you some. But if you want to come with me, just turn around and kiss me and don't say a word about this conversation now or ever. Take a minute to breathe quietly, and when you're finished breathing quietly, decide. I know it's not fair, but it's the best I can do.”

Wilson's shoulders sagged. Despite himself, his breath came in short gasps. Suddenly he heard the raucous din of the bar, the men talking and laughing, the accordionist in the corner playing “Lady of
Spain”; then just as suddenly, all of it was reduced to a faint buzzing in his ears. He closed his eyes and tried to look into the darkness of what would come ahead, but his intellect could not penetrate the cloud of unknowing. From somewhere near at hand came the shattering of a glass. Without thinking, he turned and took Cricket in his arms and kissed her on the lips.

Twelve hours out of Angra do Heroismo's white harbor, just past the barren rock of Formigas, at sunset, the sky turned the color of dried blood, and the sea went brown and mottled as the shell of a turtle.

Wilson had never seen sea and sky such colors—a whole palette of warning.

“Thirty years of sailing, you realize the sky is hardly ever blue,” the captain said, a grim tone in his voice. “When it gets like this, you know there's trouble on the way. Going to be one for the record books. A real killer.”

The
Compound Interest
pitched and rolled in the swells. Its beach umbrella sails stuttered nervously in the wind. All of a sudden, the shortwave was full of faraway distress signals, anguished voices calling out in the naked, unintelligible language of men in fear for their lives. A wild front of rain, hail, and hurricane-force wind was blowing off the Serengeti and across the Atlantic to form a solid gray barrier of terrible weather one thousand miles wide and two thousand miles long. The captain bent an ear to the receiver as a crazy riff of Morse code came across the wire, then he shook his head and switched off the set.

“There's nothing to do now but plow right through it,” he said. “It's heading right for us, coming fast. If we turn back, it will catch us from behind. Let's put up the bubble and see what this tub can do.”

They took down the canvas foul-weather cowling, retracted the beach umbrella sails, and switched over to the turbo-diesels. Then the captain and Wilson and Cricket went into the hold and brought up the eight Plexiglas sections and bolted them into place over the octagon. The
Compound Interest
was now watertight as a submarine. The air-purifying system cranked on with a comforting whirring sound. Sealed hatches divided the vessel into three airtight sections, each section equipped with its own supply of drinking water, freeze-dried
food, and emergency locator beacon. If the vessel broke apart in heavy seas, the three compartments would float free, beacons pulsing distress through the airwaves to a five-hundred-mile radius.

The navigational octagon, sealed by a hatch from below, could turn into a sort of self-contained microvessel. It came equipped with a compressed gas—hydrofoil propulsion system—no larger than a suitcase, but with a range of three hundred miles—manufactured by Newland Marine of Santa Barbara. In the event of structural collapse the octagon could separate from the foundering wreck and scoot off to Africa under its own power, a tiny plastic bubble of high-tech engineering on the trackless sea.