Lackbeard

by Cody B. Stewart

  If only.

  The room contained little, but what did he need that he could not take from the world out there? After all, you couldn’t shove adventure into one tiny room.

  Dreams aside, a tiny room is all it was. His cot was an uncomfortable length of cloth pulled over rusty springs that squealed with the tiniest movement. And the nothing he had in there was the same nothing that he had out there. The same nothing that he’d always had. The same nothing he would always have.

  At least, if he allowed it to be that way.

  Carter opened the book again, reading Mr. Croce’s inscription for the hundredth time.

  The flash of foggy memory played in his head again. “Yer brother’s got a pirate’s soul,” she said. His mother. So long ago he wondered if it had happened at all.

  Then he remembered what else he’d taken from the museum. What the police hadn’t found.

  Darla walked into the room without knocking. Her face was red like she’d been crying. Or maybe yelling. Probably yelling. “I can’t believe my mom. She’s such a raging…” She growled instead of finishing the sentence.

  Brad lay on his cot, tossing his football in the air. “It’s not her fault. She gave us plenty of chances. Really, you only need one chance to not break into a museum full of priceless artifacts. And we blew it.” He caught his ball and turned to Carter. “I hope your stupid book was worth it. Now they’re shipping me off to war.”

  Carter traced his finger along the inscription one more time before closing the book. “Actually, it was. You might want to look away,” he then said to Darla.

  Before she could react, he shoved his hand down his pants.

  “Inappropriate,” she shouted as she shielded her eyes. “It may be time for you to have that talk with your brother,” she said to Brad.

  “Eureka,” Carter said as he removed his hand from his pants, holding a small wooden box, covered in symbols that looked like part of a forgotten language.

  “What is that?” Darla said.

  “A treasure chest,” Carter answered with a smile.

  “Looks like a pencil case,” Brad said. “So I’m being shipped off to war not just for a book, but so you can keep your pencils safe.”

  “Who even uses pencils?” Carter put his ear to the box. He ran his fingers along the length of it, hoping to hear it answer his unasked questions. His right index finger caught on something—the tiny pedestal foot on the bottom. It turned slightly with the pressure of his finger. He pressed it, and it moved more. He turned it in a full circle.

  “Make that a broken pencil case,” Brad added. “I’ll need a better story to tell my brothers-in-arms when we’re in the foxhole. Maybe I’ll them I joined the army because I needed money to fix my brother’s brain.”

  Ignoring his brother’s whining, Carter scanned the books on his shelf, the only possessions he had in this world. Granted, they were all ratty and dog-eared. Some even had pages missing. But they were his. And all were pirate-related, of course. Biographies on legendary pirates. History books. Fictional adventure stories. Everything a boy needed to build a fantasy world of plunder and the wide-open seas. His finger landed on the one he needed—an index of pirate treasures and antiquities, objects used by the sea-faring legends themselves.

  He opened to a page he’d previously marked, its corner folded over so many times it nearly fell off. He dropped the book on the desk for Brad and Darla to see. “Still think it’s a pencil case?”

  Darla sucked in a breath as she looked at a picture of the exact object Carter held in his hand. “No way.”

  Brad hopped off his bed. “Okay, so you actually took something of value. I don’t know why you thought this would make me feel better.”

  “This is a four-lock box,” Carter said as he read the passage in the book. “Made to hold something of great value.” Suddenly, the rotating piece clicked.

  The room went quiet.

  Even Brad’s eyes were glued to the thing now.

  Carter moved his fingers up the box to another rotating piece. He turned it and click. Two more pieces. Two more clicks.

  None of them were even breathing at that point.

  The bottom panel of the box popped open. Carter’s mind went blank. He felt like he should be thinking something. Imagining all the wonders that lay inside this artifact. All the amazing things he would do with it. But there was nothing.

  Not until his fingers reached inside the box and brushed against that ancient scrap of vellum. He slid it out, and Darla’s jaw dropped open.

  “Don’t even tell me,” she said.

  Brad stood upright for the first time since the cops stuffed him in the back of the cruiser. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

  The crinkling sound, like autumn leaves crunching underfoot as Carter unrolled the vellum was like a symphony in his ears. He imagined. He’d never heard a symphony. His heart stopped, froze, turned to a solid chunk of gold in his chest.

  There, on the old paper, was a map, hand-drawn in dark crimson ink. A compass rose sat in the bottom left corner. Cracks ran through the paper. There were small blobs of ink in the lines where the hand drawing it had paused for a moment. Words were misspelled. Nothing was to scale.

  It was perfect.

  Darla extended her hand.

  “Careful,” Carter said, handing it over. “It’s old.”

  “How old?” Brad asked.

  Carter couldn’t help but smile. He could barely speak without breaking out into laughter. His eyes filled with tears. “Golden Age of Piracy old. Over three hundred years.”

  Darla pointed to a spot on the map. “There’s seriously an ‘X’ on here. Marking an actual spot.”

  “Not just any old X, but a German cross X,” Carter corrected.

  “What’s the difference?”

  Carter’s smile grew even wider, if that were possible. “As everyone knows, an X shows where treasure is buried. But a German cross X…” Carter sighed. “Those were reserved for great treasure.”

  “How great?”

  “Huge freakin’ piles of pirate plunder.”

  Darla’s awed expression exploded into one of pure glee. She jumped up and down, laughed, squealed, and then ran out of the room.

  Carter and Brad stared after her, frozen like awkward, gawking statues.

  “Did she just steal my map?” Carter asked in disbelief.

  “Yup,” Brad answered. “Welcome to the world of piracy.”

  They breathed a collective sigh of relief when Darla burst back into the room a moment later.

  She held up her old, scuffed, and scratched iPad for them to see. “What do you see?” The boys looked for a moment, and then she held the map up next to it.

  “Shiver me timbers,” Carter said. “They be twins.”

  The shapes on both matched. The landmarks, the positioning of the water. No question about it, they were the same.

  “Where?” Brad said.

  Darla tapped the screen, zooming out to reveal a tropical island chain. “The Bahamas. Specifically…” She tapped the screen again and zoomed in on one of the islands. “Eleuthera.” Darla squealed again. “I knew it.”

  “What?” Carter said, taking back the map.

  “That we didn’t go through all that just to steal a book.”

  Carter flashed a sly smile that shone through with mischief. “We’re pirates now, Darla. It’s always about the treasure.”

  A sudden dour cloud drifted over Carter and Darla and swallowed up the excitement, leaving them standing in puddles up to their ankles.

  Brad. If ever there was a human rain cloud.

  Make that a storm cloud. With lightning!

  “Hate to ruin your grand adventure before it starts, but aren’t you two forgetting something? That part where you’re being shipped off to live with a family on the other side of the country, and I’m getting press-ganged to a military academy?”

  For just a split second, Carter heard the crack in Brad’s voice and saw it
in his face. And in that crack he saw and heard everything he was trying not to feel.

  Carter placed the map gently on his cot and grabbed his brother by the shoulders. He looked up into his eyes and lowered his voice. “None but the wrath of the kraken could tear this crew asunder.” When Brad’s expression went unchanged, Carter changed his voice. “We won’t be separated, bro. You just gotta trust me. You do trust me, right?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, I may have earned that. But you will.” Carter’s smile reached critical mischief. “Because I have a plan.”

  Brad gulped. For the first time since he learned he was being shipped off to a military academy, he now had something else to fear. Something much worse—one of his little brother’s plans.

  4

  Darla emerged from her mother’s bedroom just a minute after entering, her face pulled down in a frown. In the brief second before she spoke, Carter imagined his plan slamming into a rocky outcrop before even leaving the harbor.

  Then she held up a set of keys and her face flipped into a smile. “Got ’em. She’s out cold. Halfway through a new box of wine.”

  “Phase one complete,” Carter said.

  The three of them ran down the hall, down the stairs, and out the back door to the driveway. Darla tossed Brad the keys.

  “Shotgun,” Carter called.

  “Yeah, right,” Darla said as she shoved him out of the way and got in the front seat.

  Brad slid into the driver’s seat and looked at Carter in the mirror. “You realize the very first thing you asked me to do after telling me to trust you is steal a car?”

  “I do,” Carter answered. “But technically speaking, it’s a van. Now, get this box moving.”

  Brad shook his head, started the van and shifted into gear. Brad had only gotten his license a few weeks earlier, and it showed. He drove like an old lady. A paranoid old lady. The van moved at a snail’s crawl but eventually reached its destination—a dark alley in a sketchy part of town.

  “Seriously?” Brad’s forehead fell against the steering wheel.

  “Your yellow streak is starting to show through your shirt,” Darla said.

  Brad’s frown sunk even lower.

  “Relax, it’ll be fine.”

  “Sure, it will. Because everything has been so fine thus far.”

  Carter poked his head into the front seat. “This is an essential part of the plan. How lucky are we that Darla has underworld connections?”

  Brad shook his head and sighed as Darla stepped out of the van.

  She stared into the dark, cocking her ear as though to listen. When she heard a rattle and a hissing sound, she smiled. “Iggy, Spritz, you there? It’s me, Whitebread.”

  “Whitebread?” Carter and Brad asked in unison.

  “It’s my tagger name,” she answered.

  “Naturally,” Brad said.

  She flashed a mischievous smile over her shoulder. “Haven’t done it in a while. There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

  Carter punched Brad in the arm. “She’s got history. You know what they say about a girl with history?”

  Darla turned around and gave Carter a death-ray stare. “Tell me, Carter. What do they say about a girl with history?”

  Carter’s lip quivered. “Um… You know… History’s cool.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Suddenly, two figures emerged from the dark of the alley. They were teens, about the same age as Darla, fifteen or sixteen. Both wore dark hoodies and torn jeans. Both were covered with splotches of bright paint, making them look like two-legged, upright-walking psychedelic Dalmatians. They bumped knuckles with Darla, and then Spritz, a Latina with long black hair streaked with blue highlights, said, “Nice mom van. Bringing the kids to soccer practice?”

  Iggy, an Asian boy with gauged ears, pointed at Brad behind the wheel. “That guy selling you insurance?”

  Carter laughed hard in Brad’s ear, which turned bright red.

  “My boyfriend,” Darla said.

  Both taggers chuckled. Spritz made a comment Carter couldn’t hear, but Darla immediately punched her in the shoulder.

  “There’s the Whitebread I know,” Spritz said. “What you need, girl?”

  “Your talents,” Darla said.

  “The canvas?” Iggy asked.

  Darla pointed at the van.

  “The ride or the boyfriend?” Spritz asked. “I’m good, not a miracle worker.”

  Darla punched her again. A moment later, she opened the passenger door and said, “They’ll do it.”

  “Phase two complete,” Carter said. “Now starts the hard stuff.”

  Brad sighed.

  Ms. Roberts burst into the room just as the sun began to peek into the boys’ bedroom. The door slammed open like a prison cell opening for the last time. “Wakey-wakey. Rise and shine.” She had a sing-song quality to her voice, a Christmas morning glee. “Today’s the day. The first day of the rest of my life.”

  “Don’t you mean the rest of our lives?” Carter asked

  “Get washed up,” she sang as she danced out of the room. “No one likes a smelly orphan.” And she was gone.

  Carter and Brad kicked off their blankets. They were both fully dressed underneath, and hadn’t slept a wink. They leapt out of bed. Brad pulled a large duffel bag out from under his bed while Carter rounded up everything they would need.

  As Carter shoved some clothes into the bag, the door swung open and three of the residents of St. John’s County Orphanage entered the room.

  They were an eclectic bunch. But Carter wouldn’t have grown up with any other kids had he been given the chance. They made life tolerable. Sometimes even fun.

  Yvette, a fifteen-year-old Cuban, was not someone to be messed with. She’d given Brad more than his fair share of black eyes in the past five years, a few of which he deserved. Simply put, the girl took no crap. “I can’t believe that evil hag is splitting you up.” She slammed her fist into the palm of her hand. “Ella es una bruja!”

  “It is what it is,” Brad said as he resumed packing.

  Marcus was the youngest of the three at fourteen, but he was the tallest. He was a black kid from Pittsburgh. He’d come down to Florida with his grandparents when he was five, but they’d both died a year later. He bounced around to a few homes, but never stayed long. His old-school fro poked out from under his Pittsburgh Pirates hat. “It sucks, but it is what it is.”

  Louis hadn’t been in the house very long. He was only fourteen, but his parents kicked him out of the house when he came out to them last year. Carter often imagined dropping them in shark-infested waters.

  His hair was shaved on one side and the rest hung past his ear on the other side. He clung to a pink Hello Kitty suitcase. He dabbed at the tears streaming down his cheeks with a pink Hello Kitty handkerchief. “I hate goodbyes. They’re so…so…”

  “Sucky.”

  “Thank you, Marcus. Wonderfully stated.”

  Carter stood defiantly in front of them and pulled his skull and crossbones hood over his head.

  They rolled their eyes.

  “Don’t be countin’ us out just yet,” Carter said in his pirate voice. “Ain’t a tide in all the seven seas strong enough to pull us apart.”

  He nearly choked on the last word, his pirate swagger faltering, when Linn appeared like a technicolor ghost in the doorway. She drifted into the room on a swell of watercolor—if that artist had dropped his glass of water on the easel and all the colors swirled together. She wore a bright orange Kentucky Derby hat, a green and purple summer dress with ruffles, and mismatched red and blue knee socks.

  She stopped only inches from Carter. He suddenly became way too aware of his own body. His face felt warm. Hot! He didn’t know what to do with his hands. Or his feet. Or his tongue. He’d forgotten how to speak. He wanted to pull his hood over his eyes.

  “I heard you were leaving,” Linn said.

  “Uh-huh,” was all Carter could forc
e his mutinous tongue to say.

  “I’m gonna miss you.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I hope we see each other again.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  And then the moment he’d dreamed of. She leaned in. That lean in. The one in movies where the soft music starts to play and everything moves in slow motion. Only Carter didn’t hear any music. He heard the sound of his heart pounding in his ears. And things didn’t slow down. They sped up and went sideways and tripped over themselves.

  Her lips were just centimeters from touching his. Finally, he regained control of his body. He shot his hand forward and gripped hers in a firm handshake. “Take care of yourself.”

  Linn’s frown would have made even the happiest clown sad. Her hand slipped out of Carter’s sweaty palm. She wiped it on the ruffles of her dress as she walked out.

  “Smooth,” Brad said.

  “Like a cheese grater,” Marcus added. “Painful. Watching that hurt me.”

  “Whatever,” Carter said. “The only girl for me is the sea,” he added in his pirate voice, though it sounded half-hearted. He turned from the others to hide his reddening cheeks and noticed Darla walking across the yard, toward the next-door neighbor’s house carrying a plate of cookies. The sight made him feel a little better.

  “Phase three in progress,” he said.

  Brad rushed to the window to see. His cheeks reddened at the sight of her.

  “You really think this will work?” Brad said, his voice full of longing.

  “Absolutely,” Carter answered. “Walter’s geared up for big game. His equipment will hold.”

  Walter’s yard looked like a junkyard of old fishing equipment. The fence was made of vintage fishing rods. The mailbox was a taxidermied tarpon. A dilapidated old fishing boat took up most of the driveway, though it never came out from under its tarp. Sitting in the middle of the yard was a huge chunk of raw meat—a rump roast from the looks of it—stuck through with a giant shark hook, which was tied to a length of braided fishing line that led through Walter’s open window. Today’s bait. It was ham yesterday—a whole freakin’ ham!—but he didn’t catch anything, so he must have changed it up. He didn’t catch anything the day before either. Or the day before that. But there was always bait on that hook.