The Pirate's Daughter (6 page)

“You want to eat?” he said, closing his eyes with the question.

“Yes,” Wilson said. “That stuff smells pretty good.”

“No, no,” the old man said, “kitchen is closed. We have only tejiyaa now.”

“A glass of tejiyaa's fine, but you couldn't bring me a little something to go along with it? An appetizer?”

“Impossible,” the old man said.

“Nothing?”

The old man gestured to the table where the Bupandans sat devouring mounds of food. “We serve them everything,” he said. “Special celebration tonight.”

“All right,” Wilson said, but he must have looked disappointed because the old man raised a hand.

“Wait, O.K.?” and he turned and went over to the other table. A few quick words were exchanged in Bupandan; then he stepped back again.

“They say you may join them if you wish,” he said. “But you must buy your own bottle of tejiyaa.”

“Thanks,” Wilson said, “but I couldn't impose—”

The old man's yellow eyes came to life for a moment. “You may join them,” he insisted. “Bupandan hospitality.”

Wilson didn't have much of a choice. A place was made at the crowded table, and he found himself squatting in the midst of a Bupandan birthday party. The sleek youth to his right had just turned twenty-one. He wore a birthday outfit of purple shorts, a black silk shirt printed with yellow soccer balls, and black-and-gold woven sandals. His name, if Wilson could make it out right was Kuji N'fumi. His brother, about ten years older, sat on Wilson's left. He was Tulj Ra'au. The other dozen or so young men introduced themselves one by one, but Wilson didn't catch more than a mouthful of syllables. They seemed a jovial group, laughing and telling jokes in Bupandan, with an occasional lapse into a colorful sort of English for Wilson's benefit, and the blue bottles of tejiyaa came and went, and the kif was eaten and replaced by na'kif and kif'tu—all variations of the same spicy goulash, with chickpeas, beets, and chicken respectively. It was not until halfway through the meal that Wilson noticed the scars.

Each man had them, sinister pinkish lacerations showing distinctly against the dark black skin. They were not tribal markings, but healed-over wounds, as if someone had once attacked this group with a rather long knife. A few lacked the usual number of fingers or toes. On his left hand Tulj Ra'au had only the thumb and little finger, the stub of the third digit decorated grotesquely with a gaudy ring of intricate gold openwork.

“You like my ring?” Tulj saw Wilson looking at it.

“Y-yes,” Wilson stuttered unconvincingly.

Tulj took the ring off his stub and handed it over to Wilson, who held it up to the light, nodded politely and handed it back.

“It's very … elaborate,” Wilson said.

Tulj threw his head back and laughed, showing healthy white
teeth and gold fillings. “No, it is Anda crap,” he said. “You are just being polite. The Andas are like savages, children. They are fond of gaudy trinkets, like this ring. I wear it only to remind me of the Anda pig I killed. I cut his throat and took the ring; then I cut off his ears; then I cut off his head, like that!” He brought his mutilated hand down on the table in a karate chop with sudden fury, and the atmosphere of the party changed in that instant. Tulj let loose in Bupandan, shaking the ring at his companions. A few of the young men covered their faces with their hands and began rocking back and forth. N'fumi's eyes filled with tears. Others rose quickly, stalked halfway down the block, and stalked back. It was as if the severed head that Tulj had mentioned had just been flung into the center of the table. After a few minutes of general lamentation, Tulj said something and everyone settled down again.

“Please, you must forgive us poor Bupus,” he said to Wilson. “But we are all of us from the village of Lifdawa, and it was upon that place one Saturday, when everyone was at the markets, that the Andas first came down from the mountains with the guns and the machetes and the killing. They killed everyone, men, women, children. They killed all day long till the dry ground was muddy with Bupu blood. All here were wounded and left for dead in the piles of butchered bodies, but at night we crawled away to the jungle. Many months later, we got on the boats to come to America. Your country is good to us, but it is also not too good. In Bupanda I went to the mission school, and before the Time of Killing I was a student at the university in Rigala. I studied engineering. Now”—he gestured with his mutilated hand—“I drive a truck.”

Wilson nodded respectfully. The whole world remembered the horrible Bupandan massacres of five years before. The Bupus and the Andas, two tribes that had shared that part of West Africa for a thousand years suddenly rose up and began slaughtering each other, with all the force of a natural disaster. The causes were inscrutable, beyond rational understanding—what is the motivation of a tidal wave or an erupting volcano?—but the effects were immediate. A
million dead on both sides, a million refugees already, and more coming.

The last of the food was consumed a little after midnight, and the women came and cleared the table. A last bottle of tejiyaa was poured and drunk. This potent stuff tasted like kerosene. Wilson had a hard time choking it down, but choke it down he did, in the final round of toasts to N'fumi, the birthday boy. The stars glittered brilliantly overhead, the crowds passed along the streets, and there was a warm, comfortable feeling in his chest. These Bupus were all fine fellows. He felt he was among friends. The tragedies they had witnessed did not prevent them from enjoying life. Let that be a lesson to his dread! He looked from the stars into his oiled leather cup, and when he looked up again, he was alone at the table with Tulj and N'fumi.

“Where is everyone?” Wilson said.

Tulj laughed. “They went to the dancing at the Nkifta Discotheque, but us, we do not go to the dancing.”

“Where do you go?” Wilson said.

“We go to the fights,” Tulj said. “Very big fights tonight.”

“You're kidding,” Wilson said, excited. “I was supposed to go to the fights, but”—he looked down at his watch—“isn't it a little late?”

“Oh, no, they have not yet started,” Tulj said.

“Would you mind if I come along?” Wilson said.

The African leaned back and smiled. “How much money do you have?”

Tulj drove an old Fiat three-wheel cycle truck with a four-and-a-half-foot open bed and a single wavering headlight. The brothers sat pressed knee to knee in the small cab up front; Wilson took the back and held on as best he could. Through rust holes in the bed, he could see the pavement passing beneath, and when they slowed down, he caught the gassy stink of exhaust. The air and the stars did him good. He leaned back, sobering, against the curve of the cab as they pulled over the Lacey Memorial Bridge onto the interstate.

Tonight, Wilson's dread manifested itself as a dull pulse of pain in his gut like a toothache. He had lived so much of his life by schedules and routine; he took the same bus at the same time, went to the same office, and did mostly the same things. Until recently there had been few surprises. It was through this sad and careful voodoo that he had sought to keep the dread at bay. But since the discovery of the tarot cards his routines had failed him. He knew something terrible was on its way, closing in; a clinching in his gut told him so: Even the blandest of foods, the egg salad sandwich he ate for lunch every day, gave him indigestion. He was deciding all at once, tonight, with the stars up and the wind in his hair, that perhaps it was time to lead a different sort of life.

Tulj and N'fumi were arguing loudly in the cab and passing a bottle of tejiyaa back and forth. The Fiat swerved dangerously when they pulled off the highway at Lazarus onto Route 27 and into the confusion of cross-state traffic. Wilson sat up and watched the lights of the city recede behind the nearest tree line; soon there was little more than a dull glow in the sky. Ten minutes later they veered off 27 onto a fire road and then slowed and turned up a dirt track that bumped away into the pine and frog darkness of the Falling Rock Nature Preserve. Soon the stars were lost in the branches, and
Wilson heard the hoot and scratch of animals in the brush and the slow, long-needled rustling of the firs. About fifteen minutes passed on Wilson's illuminated digital watch before the truck emerged from the trees into a mud clearing full of cars. At the center, a large cinder-block bunkhouse showed a row of small yellow-lit windows just beneath the eaves.

Wilson hopped out of the bed and stood on the loamy ground, hands in his pockets, waiting for the Africans to disengage themselves from the cramped interior. The Fiat was so small, like one of those clown cars at the circus. A dull thrumming, which was the sound of men's voices, came from inside the bunkhouse. Thin, silvery clouds of smoke steamed out of the yellow windows into the clear night air.

“Please, can you lend a hand here?” It was Tulj from the compartment of the Fiat.

Wilson stepped over to the passenger-side window and saw that N'fumi had passed out, mouth open against the dashboard.

“Too much tejiyaa,” Tulj said. “He is young yet; he does not know how to handle his liquor.”

“What the hell,” Wilson said. “Twenty-one. Everyone's allowed to float the boat at twenty-one.”

“Yes, but I do not want him floating the boat, as you say, in the front seat of my truck,” Tulj said.

They managed to carry N'fumi around to the back. Tulj let down the gate, and they hoisted him up into the bed and covered him to the chin with an old tarp. N'fumi's legs stuck out a good two feet over the end, one of his sandals dangling off his foot. The effect was comic or sinister, Wilson couldn't decide which.

“My foolish brother is best off sleeping here,” Tulj said. “Meanwhile, we will proceed to the fights. Have you ever attended such an event in the past?”

Wilson was going to lie, then thought better of it and shook his head.

“It is much fun,” the African said, then he laughed. “I wasted my youth in such places, at home in the days before the Time of Killing.”

The bunkhouse was packed to the walls with men of many nationalities. Wilson looked around for Cricket but did not see a single woman in the crowd.

There were Bupandans, Nigerians, Haitians, Salvadorans, Mexicans, Brazilians, Vietnamese, even a few white shack-trash rednecks wearing plaid workshirts and vinyl mesh baseball caps plastered with rebel flags, all gathered around a dirt pit about forty feet across, covered with blood and straw and feathers. The feathers were everywhere, floating on clouds of cigarette smoke in the yellow light. The smell was overpowering. At first, Wilson could hardly breathe. Then, suddenly, he grew used to the stifling, flatulent air.

Tulj managed to push his way up to the railing over the pit, and Wilson took a position beside him. Sugarcane liquor in cloudy vinegar bottles was passed forward from the back of the crowd. Wilson drank and wiped his mouth on his hand as he'd seen someone do in a movie, and he passed it to Tulj, who drank and passed it to someone else. A dangerous, testosterone-charged atmosphere hung about the place, but it was not alien or unfamiliar. Here, Wilson got the sense, men were doing what they did best: drinking, fighting, gambling on violent sport.

After a while two squat Salvadorans climbed into the pit. A roar went up from the crowd. The Salvadorans wore blood-spattered white T-shirts, and each carried a wire cage that contained a big, sleek, blue-feathered rooster. The birds were removed from their cages and held tightly beak to beak against the straw. Vicious-looking
steel spurs glinted dully from their legs. They squawked and scratched and tried to get at each other as the betting went down around the pit. A half dozen dark youths of uncertain ethnicity ran through the crowd collecting bets, which they marked with playing cards torn in half. The dirty concrete floor was stuck with the torn cards and pink handbills in five languages. Broken glass crunched under Wilson's shoes.

Wilson was surprised. He had expected men, not birds. He decided that these were probably not the fights that Cricket had been talking about; then he changed his mind. Until the dogs two weeks ago, he hadn't been to a track in all the years since his father's death. This was the second gambling event he had attended in a month. In a way, Cricket was like a voice calling him back to his past.

“In the mission school the Reverend Father told us a story about the fighting cocks,” Tulj said now in Wilson's ear.

“Yeah?” Wilson said.

“There was once a great soldier in the country of Ancient Greece called Themistocles. He was in charge of fighting another country neighboring. I forget which—”

“Persia,” Wilson said.

“Ah, you know this story?”

“Go ahead.”

“You see, the Ancient Greek Themistocles, he was moving his army to the front when he came upon two wild cocks in a field fighting each other to the death. He stopped and showed the brave animals to his troops. ‘Watch how they fight to the death,' he said. ‘Take heed, my men!' The next day the army, though badly outnumbered, won the battle, a great battle. This is how we may draw inspiration from animals.…” Tulj went on to explain what to look for when betting on cocks: clear eyes, good stance, size, and, most important, whether the bird evacuated its bowels just before the match.

“If he does his business, it is very good luck indeed,” Tulj said. “Makes him lighter, faster, ready to fight.…”

Tulj signaled a boy, who rushed over to take their bets. The boy was dark-skinned, big-eyed, Guatemalan or Mexican. He looked like Dondi, the Italian orphan, from Sunday comics of Wilson's youth.

“Señor,” he said to Wilson.

Wilson turned to Tulj, who shrugged and pulled out his pockets.

“All spent on tejiyaa and kif and panu,” Tulj said, putting his mutilated hand on Wilson's shoulder. “The honor of my brother's name day is with you, my new friend.”