We Are Pirates: A Novel (33 page)

“He cut my arm,” Cody wheezed.

“To be fair,” she said, “you did it first.”

“I was Singapored.”

“
Shanghaied.
”

“I knew it was a city,” Cody said, and stood on his own, although he shivered a little, shifting his weight from one little leg to the other. Gwen remembered what he’d told them: that he’d had to wear tights for a school play. A sad performance it must have been. She looked at the blood on her pants and thought, for the first in a long time, of the burn on her leg, while Cody fished into his pockets and pulled out a small square that he smoothed in his hands.

“This is so good of you,” he said quietly, and held it up for her to see. Gwen Needle grinned back, in a photograph. She was at her dad’s office, where he had been trying a new camera. Allan had made her laugh about something, she remembered. It was thousands of years ago.

“Where did you find this?”

“I stole it,” Cody said, promptly and proudly. “From your dad’s wallet in the locker room. While he was showering.”

Cody naked, amongst other naked men. Gwen could not help scanning them in her head, looking for Nathan.

“I always keep it with me.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying—I’m giving it back,” Cody said, and tucked it into her hand.

“You’re giving me a picture of me?”

“It’s like a badge, right? When a policeman quits?”

“Pirates don’t wear
badges
,” Amber said.

“That’s what I’m saying,” Cody said. His hands gestured to the bridge, the rescue boat, the distant, muttering captain. “I thought we could get away from stuff.”

“We were supposed to get away from
everything
,” Gwen said. “This is the same as everything. It’s like school is what it is, you giving me back my picture.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry? What pittance is that?”

“You know I don’t get it when you talk to me like that.”

“Leave, then,” she said to the boy. “Go home, if that’s what you fought for.”

He looked wildly around. “I—I don’t—”

“Leave or I will drive you from this place.”

“There’s no car.”

“It means
force
,” she said, and gave him a shove on his shoulder, just one. He stepped back, amazed, and then looked up at the bridge, back to the buildings, out to sea. His arm dribbled down blood.

“We should have gone to Tortuga,” he said weakly.

“You don’t know anything,” Amber said. “That’s too far.”

“The show, I mean. At the Fillmore.”

“I didn’t want a
date
,” Gwen said. No one would understand this. It is the presumed mission of all women, a quest for a man, and no amount of bloodshed can dissuade the myth.
For a boy
, people would say to her soon, in disbelief or even in admiration, and they would all be wrong. She had written notes to Nathan, yes, but she had not been so dim and reckless as to send them. They were safe and sheltered in a drawer. Gwen dropped her hands. She had been, she was stunned to notice, tearing out her hair, and now her hands hung down at her sides, the knife on one side and nothing on the other. “What good are you,” she said, “offering these nonsenses in a time of genuine strife?”

Cody didn’t say anything to her, not ever again.

“
What good are you
?
”

Cody headed for the big buildings. Gwen and Amber watched him go. It was difficult to tell who was marooning whom. In a few months it would be as if she had simply shared an elevator with this story. Amber she would remember, and their mad captain still muttering by the shore, but Cody would fade away and then everything would fade away and Gwen would remember mostly her own disappointment, and the silent, pleading faces of the dead. God, God, she was tired.

“I hope he comes back,” Amber said.

“Really?”

“With breakfast,” Amber said, with a small grin. “Even the pirates on that lonesome raft, at the end of that thing, had grog, remember?”

Grog sounded good. She was thirsty and wanted to feel the blur, the rush, that drunkenness promised. She should have saved some bottles, when they were attacking
The Wild Lady.
She should not have let all that go up, she thought, as Cody slipped around a building and out of sight, in smoke.

“I think there’s orange juice,” Gwen said, and they trooped over to the overturned rescue boat. They flipped it over and looked at what they had.

“Soda, I thought maybe,” Amber said. “The juice is gone. It was in a carton. There’s tonic.”

“Ginger ale.”

“Oh, I want that.”

They shared a bottle. It fizzed at them snobbily, as if to say,
We’re doing fine, all we bubbles.

“We weren’t supposed to use anything,” Amber said, with a guilty glance at Errol, down by the water.

“Yeah,” Gwen said. “Until such time that the treasure can be divided.”

“We’re divided enough,” Amber said. “Half our crew is exiled away.”

“Quiet, wench.”

“You’re the wench,” Amber said, and then, after a minute, “I wonder what happened to them.”

“Them?” Gwen looked back at where Cody had disappeared.

“The ones on the boat,” Amber said quietly.

Gwen did not want to think about them. The way the man had looked at Amber. The screaming girl they could have silenced, maybe, instead of torn apart.

“It’s okay. I don’t want to talk about it either.”

“Then why did you—”

“I don’t know, okay? I had to say something.”

Gwen finished the bottle and threw it to crash on the ground as she put her arm around Amber. “Thank you for what you did, with the gun.”

“I wasn’t thinking.”

“It worked.”

“I’m not even sure it would have gone off.”

“It’s okay.”

“You think? Maybe I should have let one of them kill the other one.”

“No.”

“It would have fixed things between us, maybe.”

“What?”

“Not
us.
All
of us. Because it’s splitting. Dispersing, like you read to me. I mean, these are the only people I love in the whole—” She flailed uselessly at the water.

“I know. Me too.”

“I was miserable before I met you,” she said. “I know I pretended like I had something, but that day at the dentist I would have gone home and, I don’t know how, got dead.”

Gwen looked at the little scars on Amber’s ankle.

“I mean, even my ex, when he was my
boyfriend.
Even he called me Monkeyface.”

“What?”

“Don’t say you don’t notice.”

“Amber, you don’t look like a monkey.”

“The Stepmonster said”—Amber was crying again—“she’d never seen anyone uglier.”

“She’s a—” Gwen said, “bitch and liar.”

“I have nothing if we go home.”

“We’re not going home.”

“I mean it.”

“So do I.”

“We can’t steal a boat. That idea’s over. There’s no hotel and no treasure.”

“We have a boat,” Gwen said, and pointed to the boat.

“That?”

“That.”

“In the sea.”

“Yes, straight out, through the Golden Gate.”

“We wouldn’t last. Not long.”

“I didn’t say
long.
I said
out.
”

“West.”

“Yes. Wait. Yes, west.”

“Straight off into the sunset.”

Gwen thought of the Sunset, her old neighborhood. A better place, a better life. She nodded fiercely. She did not know what would happen, but she knew how it would go.

“Okay,” Amber said slowly. “
And
,
we’re taking the captain, right?”

“Of course. What did you think?”

“I don’t know. He’s getting up there.”

“I know.”

“If
we
won’t last long.”

“Yeah. But we’re not marooning him.”

“No, no, I know. I just wanted you—”

“To be ready.”

“To be
sure.
”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Amber said. “You tell him.”

“We should do something about his leg.”

“Bandages? There’s a clean T-shirt, at least. I’ll load up a few things.”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

They did not move.

“Okay,” Amber said again. “
Now.
”

Gwen moved, with one glance at Cody. He was long gone. (By the time the remains of the rescue boat washed ashore, Cody was watching his parents’ arrival, via four-wheel drive, at this desolate place. A dog walker, with a cell phone and the milk of human kindness in his veins, was about to see his stumbling figure now.) She tramped through a puddle of worry and made herself think of her old house again in the Sunset, an incongruous but convincing fantasy of where this last stage of the trip would take them. Things added up in her mind, but nowhere else. She had a clean T-shirt in her hand, and that was all. She wished she could just take a wand and make everything good like that, because otherwise it was the same question she’d asked Cody.

What good was she?

Errol was standing silently next to two heavy planks, bright and new as if from a lumberyard, but quite wet. He was decompensating, is what it was called at this point in history. His leg was bleeding. His face was flushed. He was hotheaded, hot-everythinged. Gwen knelt next to him and looked at his bleeding knee. The wound scowled back. Gwen wiped at it with one end of the T-shirt, and Errol groaned and looked down.

“What’s that?” he said.

“Hold still,” she said. “I need to bandage you up.” She cupped one hand into a puddle, but the water looked dirtier than the knee. She tied the shirt around his leg anyway, as tightly as she could, which was not very tightly, and the blood moved through it almost right away.
Waterlogged,
she thought, and then looked down at the planks. Would waterlogged matter if they’re going to be oars?

“It hurts,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, and lifted one plank. It was wet, but not weak.

“Somebody did this to me.”

“Yes,” she said again. “We have to get out of here, Captain.” Gwen listened, not for the first time, for sirens heading down the road from the bridge. Nothing, though.

“I know you.”

“Yes,” Gwen said very sadly. “Gwen.”

“My dearest.”

So she wouldn’t cry, she heaved one of the planks onto her shoulder to carry it, and Errol looked at her approvingly. “Tell me something,” he said. “How did we meet?”

“Right now we need to leave,” Gwen said.

“No.”

“Come with me.”

“Tell me how we met.”

“You’re my
captain
,” Gwen said fervently, “and Captain, it’s time to go.”

Errol just shook his head. “It’s two thirty is what it is,” he said, looking at his watch. Gwen knew it was morning and not two thirty. The watch had stopped, at another time.

“Please come with me,” Gwen said, but she could not carry both planks and tug on his sleeve, too.

He shook his head and shook his head and shook his head, faster and faster and faster, and then stopped and peered at her. “Where?” he said finally, as if through fog. At last it was something someone else might say in conversation.

“The sunset,” she said. “On the thing we took. The rescue boat.”

“That’s not right,” he said.

“It’s the only place to go,” Gwen said. “They’ll find us soon otherwise.”

“Triemiola?” he said.

That was a warship, often used to combat piracy. Gwen nodded quickly.

“All right,” he said.

She walked behind him with the planks, herding him toward the boat.
Rescue
boat wasn’t right, she realized. It was
life.

Amber smiled at them when they arrived. They dragged the boat down some rocks to another part of the shore, so they wouldn’t get caught up with the
Corsair
and its detritus. The lifeboat, their livelihood, was carrying just one box of some food and one bottle of water and the two makeshift oars Gwen had found. And Gwen had her knife. And Amber had the gun. And the radio. The lifeboat squealed over a rock and then they helped Errol inside. He looked so done and lonely, sitting in an open boat on a sea that had no friendly shore. But then they joined him, crowding into the boat and using the planks to push themselves off Treasure Island and points west, as best they could. The three last pirates cast off and stayed with their history and their final odyssey. It was why they had come, Gwen thought, so they could leave again, this time farther out and farther away into the enormous part of the water, wide and empty like a painting of a landscape. The big picture, Gwen thought, the big story of our lives. It was, finally, the answer: what good we are.