A Pirates Life for Me
By Grayson Queen
Copyright 2013 Grayson Queen. Editing and cover provided by Queen Creative.
“Isn’t there some sort of maritime law against this?”
The idle chatter stops and the captain looks up at me. I’m sitting at his table, directly across from him. If I don’t think about it, the entire situation makes sense. If I take the time to question something, everything clouds over with a fog of confusion.
“Isn’t there a law against not working?” The captain asks.
“No,” I say. That argument is quickly snuffed.
“If you don’t work, you don’t eat,” the captain says. “If you don’t eat, you die.” The captain puts a hand in the air and says, “Action,” he puts the other hand out, “consequence. That sounds mighty similar.”
“Like an unwritten law,” the steersman says.
Steersman?
Captain?
I’m beginning to feel too far removed from reality.
Standing, I say this aloud, “This is stupid. People don’t do this, Tony.”
“Sure they do,” the captain says.
“Normal people don’t do this,” I rephrase. “Eventually someone is going to come after us. What then?”
The table was already silent, but it seemed to have sunken even further into those murky depths. The captain casually takes a sip of wine. The action is done with purpose and goddamn him; it’s worked. Some how he’s regained the image of dignity and charisma.
“You’re free to leave the ship any time you want, Robert.”
I don’t know if he’s waiting for me to turn and leave, but there’s a pause.
He continues, “After you go, what then? Do you go back to waiting in an unemployment line or do you take a job woefully substandard to your abilities? Are you gonna beg your ex-wife to take you back or are you going to sleep on the streets again? I’ve seen something in you Robert, but that something wasn’t designed for the world out there. You belong here and the sooner you accept that, the sooner we can get down to business.
“There’s a road of adventures ahead of us. All of us,” the captain stands raising his glass. “Where once we were the outcasts, now we are a crew. Where once we were the social anomalies, now we are a family. Each and every one of you has contributed something indispensable to get us here. This is our home, we built it, we run it and we are its masters.”
At that, the room erupts in a cheer. Glasses are clinked and wine is drunk.
I let myself fall back into the chair. The captain was right. There wasn’t anything left out there for me. But it doesn’t mean I have to like it. I sit quietly and sulk in my chair, the first mate's chair.
More wine is drunk.
Then the rum is brought out.
There’s no telling what time it is, but most of the crew begins staggering to bed after a couple rounds of, “What do you do with a drunken sailor.” The first lieutenant is still mumbling a slurred version of this when the captain begins speaking again. Some might call it rhetoric. Others might call it a speech. I tended to see it as a spoken manifesto.
“The world hasn’t allowed us much.” He was drunk, but it wasn’t showing. “What can a person do when they don’t fit into social norm? I for one am not willing to give up and play follow the leader. Sure, this idea, this situation is insane, but that’s why we’re here. In respect to how the world is run in capitalism and consumerism, we are insane. We’re insane because we can’t hold a regular job and buy things on credit. I’m not going to say this is the correct solution, but it’s the best solution we have. If we can’t be normal, we’ll be the least normal as possible.”
For what seems like a moment I close my eyes. When I open them again the room is empty save for me and the captain.
He is talking to himself, “I feel like I’ve brought you all here on my crazy Noah’s ark. This whole thing is some strange attempt at saving the last free thinkers of this world before the flood sweeps you all away.”
I pass out again.
I wake to find myself alone in an uncomfortable chair. There’s a pain biting into my spine and, as I stand, my muscles scream. Some traces of alcohol are still running around my system. That combined with the swaying of the ship makes the journey up top more difficult than it should be.
The muscles behind my eyes strain as I look up into the morning sky. The first shift is already hard at work pulling ropes and moving sails.
Someone says, “Morning, Sir.”
I hardly acknowledge him. My legs are already carrying me to the port side railing. Looking down at the waves crashing by becomes mesmerizing.
I don’t know how long I’ve been standing here when someone yells, “Ship ahoy. Port side, two o’clock.”
I let my eyes glance to that point in the distance, but I can’t see anything. There’s a man on the quarter deck with a telescope. It takes me a moment to climb up. He hands me the hunk of brass without me having to ask for it. Again I look portside and this time I see it. A white beast glistening in the sunlight. Waiting a moment I try to gain some perspective on its size. I spot a woman on the bow of the ship pointing in our direction and saying something to a man who comes topside.
“Strike the colors,” I yell.
Without hesitation, a deck hand pulls down the skull and crossbones.
On the other ship it looks like the man has a pair of binoculars. I think he’s waving at me.
“Wake the crew,” I order.
Going aft to the captain’s state room I give a courtesy knock before entering. The captain is lounging on a chair playing with Mr. Jeevus, his pet monkey.
“Sir, we’ve spotted a yacht, maybe a hundred footer, on our port side. I’d say it’ll cross our bow within the next hour.”
“Well, we’ll just have to be in its way when it gets here,” the captain says.
The next forty five minutes are hell. With standing orders that no more than ten men can be on the deck at any one time, I can hear the crew getting restless.
“He waved at you?” The second lieutenant asks.
This is the man that was a pirate before he was a pirate. Somewhere out there is a folder full of warrants for his arrest on the thousands of information piracy laws he’s broken. He was the man at the back of the theater with the handheld camera, the man with the serial numbers for software and the man with the passwords to most everything. As anyone might imagine of a man like this, he was thin. When I first met him he was an unhealthy layer of flesh on his bones. I can see now, muscle fibers over his thin frame.
“Yeah,” I say. “I almost laughed.”
“Do you think they’re armed?” The second lieutenant asks. He’s rubbing his hand nervously over the hilt of his cutlass.
“More than likely,” I say. “But the biggest weakness about a weapon is that you only have it out when you’re expecting to be attacked.”
The yacht is close enough now that I can see people on the deck pointing and gawking at our huge wooden fish, this galleon. I can imagine what I’d be thinking if I came upon an eighteenth century ship while sailing in the middle of nowhere. In fact, we counted on this. People can’t get enough of the novelty and most of the time they ask if they can come aboard just before we attack. It’s hard not to take pride in this beautiful vessel even if it is called The Zombie Mistress.
I order a course correction, so we don’t intersect the yacht's path but come alongside it instead. The navigator makes some quick calculation.
“Sir,” he says. I go over to him as he points at a map. “On this new course, we’ll be dipping out of international waters for a moment.”
“How far in?” I ask.<
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“Not much, sir. But if, on the off chance a navy ship came by, we wouldn’t have enough time to make it back out.”
“Do you honestly think an imaginary line will stop them from pursuing us?”
“Then should we break off, sir?”
“No, Mister Reynolds, I’ve already made arrangements in the event we come across the authorities.”
“Yes, sir.” The navigator gives the steersman direction and the second lieutenant pulls me aside.
“Arrangements?” The second lieutenant asks.
I smile.
Slowly I’ve been pulling the crew on deck and ordering them to keep out of sight. The captain is at my side watching over things but keeping silent for the most part. Moments ago, I gave the order to drop our main sail and now we’ve come to a stand still. A couple men are lined up on the port side with ropes at the ready. An older gentleman with graying hair and a glass of champagne is standing directly across from the captain and me.
“Avast me matey,” the man says mockingly.
I’m about to say something when the captain replies.
“It’s nice to see some new faces. If you can imagine,
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