We Are Pirates: A Novel (30 page)

“Yeah, cool, turn it on.”

Even out here they could find his signal. They bobbed their heads and listened to him, and the mutterings of lost souls in the microphone booths, until the weather broke and the moon was a skull in the sky. With the radio off, there were noises around, noises of nature but not, to Gwen, sounding natural. Better to look at the lights of the bridge, the flashes of cars braking and moving, dots and dashes of a message trying for home.

“I’m a stranger here,” Errol said in the darkness. “Where am I?”

“Treasure Island, Captain,” Gwen said. She could scarcely see him, just a standing shadow taking off its hat, next to the silent bulk of Manny.

“Did you come here maybe in the Navy?” Amber asked.

“I don’t know,” Errol said. “I have a problem with it.”

Manny handed Gwen something plastic, light and smooth in her palm like a cheap utensil. It was a flashlight, she could feel, and when she moved the switch, it glared Cody out of his sleep.

“What?” Cody stood and shook his skinny legs. “Oh, yeah,” he said in recognition.

“Treasure Island,” Errol repeated. “Only in America.”

“Only Americans think it’s only in America,” Manny replied, his bulk huge in the blackness. “Places like this are everywhere.”

“What about me?” Errol said. “Where am I?”

“We ran aground,” Amber said. “The storm gave us problems.”

“I have a problem with my memory,” Errol said.

“Gwen’s got a plan for what’s next,” Amber said.

Errol’s shadow put its hat back on. “Who?”

“If it’s acceptable to you, Captain,” Gwen said, “I thought we should send a team to scout ahead in the hopes of finding a part of the world where we might settle ourselves.”

“Any old port in a storm,” Errol recited.

“Where?” Cody asked.

“Up there.” Gwen pointed with the flashlight.

“It’s too dark,” Cody said.

“Maybe, the hotel on the map,” Amber said, “or at least somewhere warm and dry.”

“That would be nice,” Cody said.

“
Can’t hoit
,” Errol murmured.

Manny sighed, his silhouetted shoulders a great wave. “I’m out of here.”

Gwen’s light rose up the bulk of the figure until it hit Manny’s squinting eyes. “What?” she said.

“I guess I’m not cut out for this occupation of piracy,” he said, his voice lilting in the dark. “I’ve been thinking about it this whole time.”

“But you’re
from Tortuga
,” Gwen said, and the light shook in his face.

“Put that down,” he said, and Gwen lowered it. The first thing in the beam was Gwen’s knife, still at her side.

“But you left home,” Amber said. “You’re like us, you left.”

“I had no choice,” Manny said. “I was to end up a disappeared man. There was no life for me there, do you understand?”

“
Yes
,” Gwen said.

“
No.
I lived under a dictator.”

“Same thing,” Gwen said, her mother glaring at her in the dark.

“
No
,” Manny said again. “I had so many lives before I cleaned up for Peggy. Many things. In Florida I sold eggs, just as I sold eggs to get there. Hid in a rented truck driving north in record heat to become an apple picker. Did windshields and detailing all day. People hire us because we’re cheap and that’s all. Money under the table, and never what was promised.”

“What does this have to do with—”

“Exactly! Thank you! What
does
my story have to do with it? It’s not a place for me here. I might now find one.”

“
Manny
,” Gwen said. She was surprised to find her hand ready with the knife.

“My real name is Myoparo,” he said. “Nobody tries to pronounce it in the States.”

“I won’t let you.”

“What will you do?” Manny laughed a little. “Maroon me?”

“I
will
maroon you,” Gwen said.

“Gwen—” Cody said.

“Maroon you on a sandspit. You take one more step away and I’ll split your gullet.”

“Little girl—”

“
No
!
” Gwen cried. “I won’t have it! You cannot leave! We need you with us!”

“God be with you,” Manny replied and rustled away into the bushes.

Gwen felt her anger, clenched and fierce and not enough. “You won’t get a stone’s throw from here!” she cried, and reached down to find a stone to make her point. But it took a while to find a stone in the dark, and then when she threw it, it just disappeared. He was out of this history, although not out of history at large, as no one is. There was a place for him on the American island. He would meet a girl in an hour, huddled up against a sign. NO TRESPASSING, it said, BY ORDER OF THE UNITED STATES NAVY, but the sign was on the ground, leaned up against a garbage can half-full of water, where some months ago men had thrown away beer cans and forgotten about them. Who watches over places like this? Nobody. Invisible, they broke the law, trespassed back to the bridge together, and in six months Myoparo Bernardin would be made a citizen of the United States. It is quite a story he tells, and most of it is true. Were it cleaned up and broadcast, for a show on American something, it would be an episode to remember. But instead Manny would vanish into the melting pot of what was still called, at this point in history, the American dream: a wife and a child and a legitimate business. And money, of course. He had the twenty-five thousand dollars in his pocket with the catmint tea. Manny was no fool. Even with the radio off, Gwen could not hear him make his way, but she knew how it went. It was the way it always went, in the world and now out of it. Something was stolen from her. Her fingers closed on the knife handle. She would get it back in her clutches.

Chapter 12

The big story on the night in question was the theft of a boat, scarcely seaworthy and not yet discovered in pieces on Treasure Island, but Phil Needle let himself into his condo largely ignorant of the big story. His wife too. He wouldn’t have cared if he knew. The condo was dead. It was no longer a home. He put the photograph of himself down on the kitchen counter and watched Marina clack over to the fridge.

“Do you want to eat something?”

A gun
, Phil Needle thought, but it wasn’t true. He caught a glimpse, out the show-offy window in the living room, at the bridge that had trapped him, glittering into the dark mass of Treasure Island. Man-made. Maybe the map was true.

“
Phil
?
”

Phil Needle came back. “What?”

“
Eat something.
Do you want to.”

“I’m not—I guess I should,” he said to her. “Long day. Just chips at the gas station, was lunch. I woke up this morning in Los Angeles.”
Naked
, he remembered.

“And you didn’t
fly
,” Marina spat, and slammed down yogurt with a happy cow on the label. A steak would taste good. But Marina was done cooking, just moving her hand on the counter like it was pretending to be a spider.

“This is where I last saw her,” she said quietly. Toby II emerged from someplace and whined at the glass. Phil slid the door, and he went out to shit. It felt more dramatic than it was:
where I last saw her.
It was a kitchen. “What do you think happened?”

“Nothing,” she said, and shook her head. “When I picture it I picture nothing.”

Nothing. He stood for a second and pictured it too, and then drifted out of the kitchen and up the stairs to the bedroom, bonking his suitcase behind him. He wanted to shower, but then when he was undressed he kept going and changed into one of many T-shirts he had promoting things. They were mailed to his office all the time, in the hope—apparently prescient—that he would wear them. His favorite sweatshirt, the most comfortable one, was missing from his closet. Could
one thing
be just where he wanted it? He washed his face and felt Gwen’s absence in the bathroom opposite his, on the other side of the mirror.

He shouldn’t have gone into her room, but he did.

The bed was unmade, with the sheets toppled down one side and a few decorative pillows leaned carelessly against one wall. MY PRINCESS SLEEPS HERE, said one, a long-ago gift, as if Gwen were a princess who belonged to a pillow. Her closet was open—Marina had checked for what she might have been wearing—and her desk was ransacked so thoroughly that it looked for a minute like it was upside down. Two drawers had been pulled from their slots and lay overturned in an X on the frayed blotter. A pile of strange books, both startling and familiar, were scattered on the floor, their covers full of ships and swords. Phil Needle saw a small, folded triangle of paper on the floor, almost hidden behind one of the desk’s oversplindly legs.

PERSONAL
it said on one side of the triangle.

Dear Nathan,

I can’t stop thinking about you all the time and the way you stole my heart. Your arms, your face, your eyes, your expression you must have when you play the bass so good. I know that you’re with Naomi so I probably don’t have a chance. But I want to talk to you alone. I want to make you see that I love you more and better and everything. I want to kiss you and other things too. I am a mistake, verily
(
only you and me and my parents know this
)
,

and here Phil Needle sat on the bed

and when I think that you won’t love me I wish I’d never been born.

Gwen Needle almost hadn’t been born. She was the result of tsunamis of fertility treatments, years of special diets and false positives, Marina’s feet in stirrups and Phil Needle masturbating into plastic cups, always with the prim offer, from the brittle nurse, of “visual aids,” which was a stack of pornography kept behind the gleaming white doors of a cupboard in a room shuddering with the ghosts of other fruitless fathers with their pants off. The problem was not his fault, not his fault, not his fault, but Phil Needle had endured the unspoken question throughout all the consultations:
What is wrong with your fucking?
He had almost convinced himself that children were gratuitous, and that they could sell the house in the Sunset, its second bedroom gaping empty, and live somewhere new and shiny and close to the water, the end of the family line, when finally, in the words of the smirky third doctor they had tried,
it took.
The whole time—it must have been nine months, right?—neither of them drank, Marina so that Gwen would not perish in the reluctant womb, and Phil Needle in sympathetic support, except for the drinks he had by himself while his plump, round wife slept down the hall. In January, the month of Christmas trees in garbage trucks, he could feel movement below his wife’s skin. It was the first thing Gwen did: kick, her limbs soon stretching out from Marina’s belly like a periscope. Little Baby Submarine, they called it.
Her.
On the drive home from the hospital, with Marina in back and Gwen sound asleep, already pouting, it looked like, in the car seat, Phil Needle thought,
Why use the seat belt? Why strap myself in? If there is an accident the baby will die, and if the baby dies I am finished.

Three nights later he planted a tree.

She didn’t die, though. When she was two, she found Marina’s birth control pills and ate nine of them before they found her. They’d induced vomiting by giving her, on someone’s advice, a raw shrimp, but she didn’t die. She was slow to walk—“Walk to me!” Phil Needle must have said to her a thousand times. She begged to fly kites on windless days. For three days when she was eleven she was a strict vegetarian. She loved to throw bread into the pond in the park, not the part of the pond where everybody threw bread, but where the old men sat frowning at their motorized miniature boats, the bread attracting ducks and gulls, who would splatter around the armadas and spoil the scale of the thing. “Walk to me!” he would say. But she kept moving past him. Phil Needle was so hurt—he knew it was silly—that it was a few seconds before he reacted to the fact that she’d fallen down the stairs. Only two stitches, with a kind of thread that disappeared by itself, although he swore her unmarked face was never the same. It was Marina’s idea, it
was
, not to tell Gwen how troublesome it had been to cook her up. She’d take it hard, Marina had said. She’d get delicate. Nathan, Phil Needle remembered, was that insolent older brother, his surfer hair and big nose that would look so terrible on a grandchild. Look where they go, these submarines. They are safe nowhere. No one can save them. Look what happens! Look what happens! Nobody, nobody, nobody should have children.

“Phil!”

“Yes,” he said, but quietly. One of the books had a sock on it, Gwen’s small sad sock, and Phil Needle thought of Levine’s articles, her bag in his suitcase. Underwear, et cetera. It was better to hide them now, those zipped-up secrets, before Marina unpacked and found them. “
Yes
!
”

“Where are you?”

He doubled back to his room to grab the crumpled bag, and then back down the stairs. His photograph was back on the piano, smiling and unrebuked. All of them were grinning in front of various backgrounds. What did it mean? One day they were happy, many days, even. Marina had opened the yogurt but then given up again.