THE PIRATES

The pirates came aboard in a bloody dusk in a tussle of meaty hands and rouge and bonepierced lips and grim little bursts of powder and the first thing was they stood our captain and officers up against the rail and executed them one by one with pistol shots to the face, very gory, without saying a word. We knew it would happen this way because we had turned and run from them for a long time and put up a hard fight. More gunshots were heard belowdecks, following the slap of bare feet, then the situation was taken care of down there, apparently.

We stood with our hands in the air on the main deck where it tipped for all the good it would ever do us and night was falling like lost love in Manila.

Like all of Manila, and the night sky.

We had even recovered our breath a little, but the pirates just waited quiet and crouched where they had us corralled by the pilot house, and looked at us out of dead faces.

Silently, cautiously, their boy cracked open a barrel of grog and dipped from it and drank, but it didn’t seem to help. His expression never changed, as he dipped again and again and again, passing cupfuls, drinking some, looking at us. The captain took a cup and drank it and did not smile or exhibit any expression at all in his mouth, or fat red nose, or calm black eyes. Foul water slapped the side of the schooner and the soft creaking of the ropes filled our blasted eardrums as the truth came to us, that these were not like other pirates we had seen dancing from yardarms, shouting in dockyard taverns, caterwauling in wheeling streets, not like storybook pirates, not gay.

Not big talkers.

The pirates stood and watched their own slender captain, his tricornered hat and red vest and his extremely large, quiet guns, trained at nothing in particular. Silently they gulped and blinked.

Their captain watched them back, deliberately cocking and uncocking the hammers of his guns, and us and no words were exchanged or movement at all was attempted, as we sat and floated across a world of water.

Off across the red waves their pirate brethren hung like patient monkeys from their own ratlines where the black ship hove fifty yards off our starboard bow, and everything was completely silent because the pirates had thrown the dying and wounded into the Indian Ocean fifteen minutes since, so now it was just the living left.

We realized in the calm and pause that they had never spoken or laughed since the moment they had grappled our mizzen, and our impulse was to speak and plead, but the pirates did not seem to be encouraging us to do those things there in the middle of the world’s wettest desert, as the softest gust of breeze gently flicked the red feathers in the pirate captain’s red head of hair. There was no expression behind his pirate eyes, no laughter, feeling, or hope as finally, excruciatingly, the world’s shyest pirate, he turned to his lieutenants and breathed a word of command.