Pirate Talk or Mermalade (10 page)

Row to the next cove, there’s bound to be a ship there, in such a pirate’s drink.

But whose?

Row, just row.

It’s a danger—

Wish we were served with Smith’s flying fish today. I could eat two raw, still flapping.

Nothing will come along, ship or whale. We’ll have to row to Timbuktu.

Hanged.

Egad!

It means we are on the right road.

Like the devil’s hawk it is, waiting for me in the
damned true hunger of my youth, fluttering above.

Hanged.

Food, food at last—that’s what I hear. Flying swankey.

Row. And row.

Sometimes I think you’re happy to have that leg of wood, to trail it beside my rowing and tease the bird.

Oh, many’s the time I wanted such a leg, oh, yes. To go with mine eye and hook. Get to your rowing hard. Harder!

Hanged.

Hush, hush—a ship.

It’s got Baltrick’s prow on it.

You thick-witted, skull-less, one-legged, one-eyed idiot-brother—not so loud!

They must be out carousing.

The boat, hold the boat—Don’t hit it again. Where’s the line?

Hanged.

Not if the watch is drunk and sleeping.

Let’s see what we can take before they take us.

A pleasure to plunder our dear father, be he yours or mine.

Beef, beef—and that one that holds the corn—the lightest one’s leather. See, the chalk marks?

A little more of the candle and I could see—move the candle thus. Your arm ruins the light—

I hope the watch can’t untie your knots.

His head is knots.

Here’s a cask about the right size of the ones I heard Baltrick was taking on, though it’s not dry. Hear it?

Open it anyway. Gold plates in wine—I’ve heard that tried. Baltrick’s shipwright has a beard that points to mischief in that way. But easy with the cutlass. You don’t want vinegar and gold splashing the deck.

What a mess.

Cornmeal—and gold sacrileges, gods of one or the other. You’d know Baltrick would have those.

Maybe a dozen.

Hanged.

The bird will give us away again. I’ll catch it in this corner—it can’t fly off down here. Just—by the neck.

No!

Like a dream! Not even a squawk. Mind the blood. I’ll
skewer the bird to my peg to quiet my walking, that’s what I’ll do. But first a feather.

You fool you, you fop.

Aye—and you’re the pirate.

Not as stupid as you. There’s got to be more booty at hand than just gold gods for our sacks, and a handful of feathers. What of this barrel?

If the mallet were here—

Jerk it hard—

It’s open, it’s open. Move the light close.

For delivery at the dock and right to their Missus’ carts, I’m sure. Not spoilt a bit.

Baltrick did like the making of a pickle.

I wonder how O’Henry’s head feels about being so close to Flannery’s parts. Help me get the staves back.

Do they stay pickled once they put them in the ground for burial? Is it sort of an immortality they give them, unwitting?

Unwitted.

A lot of salt it took.

Salt they have.

Hush. It’s someone alive above and looking about.

It’s them come back, Grifton or some lug. Baltrick walks like a lord, it’s not him.

Grifton’s the sort who might kill us if we haven’t got gold, as much as if we do. Let’s take the gods.

I’ll stay below as always.

We must show ourselves, fight or beguile them.

That’s my arm you’re pulling, my arm where it was lashed and the hook that pulls so.

You come up or you’ll end up in a barrel yourself. Mind the blood.

Baltrick!

They must have polejammed him. Guts and more guts.

Hush.

If it’s mutiny, whose side should we cast for?

The navigator’s. At least then we won’t be lost.

Serves him right for wanting his name on a map and not treasure. I’ve heard of navigators like him but I never wanted to lay eyes on one, let alone drop his anchor.

We shouldn’t have left the ship to hunt. The seals were a trick of light, luring us.

Seals was his excuse. He wanted an explore. If only he hadn’t dallied, waiting for the clouds to part like some sign.

They didn’t part, they parted us from the blasted boat.

The next melt of ice and the boat will hove to. I swear it, he says. But everyone knows the snow falls year round here.

He was headed right off the edge of the earth.

I could feel that through my socket. Some big cataract at its very edge.

First a loud roar, he says, and all the creatures of hell will fly up and push the boat down, all those winged dragons he talked of.

That’s the truth of it.

A pleasure to eat him.

It was the parrot that loved us.

A love light on me shoulder. The way treasure is never heavy, the same.

You’re an old guff, saying that about a parrot so long gone, and so hated.

It’s the change of heat and the company that makes it so. I never thought we’d be anywhere the drifts would come up to my boot.

Nearly all the way to your tinkler, it is.

I wished I had those boots of yours. I take back what I said, that you looked like a dilly on the streets of Yarmouth, I meant to say those boots just cried out for trouble.

What? I can’t hear you with the sacrileges clanking.

Trouble, I said. I loved that parrot.

White—white all over.

Worse than a dead ocean on a flat day. Hardly a sea to see in such a snow.

Treasure’s not heavy in the heath, not heavy on horseback, not heavy in the hold—but heavy as hell’s a’blazes in a snowstorm and heavier still when the snow’s all over and boot high.

We must leave it.

But treasure be the point of pirating.

All this time and we had a wont of treasure, yes, yes,
but leave it now we must. The treasure, or your life. That’s always the way of treasure.

I wouldn’t leave it for an explore and I won’t leave it now.

A map, then, for where we finally heave it off.

Think high thoughts, where the snow starts in the heavens—the sacrileges are not so heavy.

The last paper we had was charts.

The navigator burned them soon enough. To get warm, he said but I know he did it so we couldn’t get back and say he got himself and us lost.

We didn’t eat him at first, did we? We tramped.

He kept coming up.

Froze where he fell. Froze with the ashes of his charts sooting his pantleg.

I’d burn them myself all over again, just a cat’s ass warm it would make me, mind you, the way it did.

But don’t you remember—you still stand in the clothes of that first wreck as well as the dead of this one—you have paper. If you could be so kind as to review the pockets of Giorno? I went through mine own when you needed a sweet to suck on, as you might remember, and I can tell you right off I haven’t a scrap. Giorno had jewels wrapped in paper, I saw him steal them from the diva.

I can’t quite reach—

I can bend my hook. Alsop’s pockets, full of damp salt herring, Redbeard’s with twine—always one for twine for garroting, and here’s a shark’s tooth from Davy Brown’s or else his own tooth, what do you think? And here’s that whale’s eye.

Don’t you ever throw anything out?

I’ll be keeping that.

There’s a pocket in the rear in these rags of Louis’ and they’re as empty as they should be for one so prone, Lindamood the Younger’s kept rocks, rocks I tell you, that’s all he ever wanted. Giorno’s jacket was the rubbed blue? You’re right, I remember Giorno had paper for toileting, like he was royal.
Candide
he called the pages.

Check that brace of pockets he kept by his belt. My hands are too stiff.

Candide
was short, I remember him saying. But there’s nothing.

So much for the literary boot.

What about carving a map into your leg, notches that tell the place of the booty-leaving by way of the carving?

Last time it was only three days before we forgot what the marks meant and then the wood splintered and I needed a new leg. You could carve notches into my good leg now, it’s as cold and as stiff as wood.

My tongue’s bit in pieces.

That’s the parrot feather you bit, where it was hanging low to your hat and froze.

It could have been a quill.

No ink but blood.

Oh, for another bird.

Pirates nearly always put treasure somewhere hard to find, it’s just hard to find the pirate who can ever find a treasure again.

You’ve had too much sun in the face.

Look who’s talking about sun, with your eye crusted shut and the patch missing.

They’re shut so I don’t go blind looking at that earring of yours against the ice.

That isn’t my earring, that earring froze and tore off at the start. That’s the sun itself through the fog that’s coming up fast through the ridge we’ve got to make for.

The fog’s running toward us.

Swill, that’s what we need. A nice bowl of swill.

A nice warm gallows.

A lit fire under our feet. A map that shows where to go, not so much of where we’ve been. The next cove or the next.

Oh, for the navigator.

He could read a map and draw one too.

It’s not my fault he stepped into the first hole he found in his explore. A man has to watch his feet in the snow.

And not burn the map. At least we didn’t go in for that idea of his of roping us together. Where would that have put us?

I do heartily repent.

I repent I did so little mischief.