ON STRANGER TIDES 4 page

Chandagnac was acutely aware that he was standing on a beach on the wrong side of the world, in front of a crowd of drunken murderers. To be performing a puppet show under these circumstances seemed as weirdly inappropriate as May Day garlands on a gibbet … or, it occurred to him, as dancing and playing musical instruments when getting into position to board a merchant ship and kill more than half of her crew.

From the direction of the other fires now came shambling into the firelight the oldest-looking man Chandagnac had seen since leaving England. His beard and long, ropy hair were the color of old bones, and his face was dark old leather stretched taut over a skull. Chandagnac couldn't guess the man's race, but when several of the pirates greeted the old man as "governor" and made room for him to sit down he guessed that this must be the "daft old wreck" Skank had mentioned, the one who'd been the island's only inhabitant when the pirates found the place.

The male puppet had walked up to the barrel and seemed about to go on past, but the female leaned out of the doorway-like opening and cocked her head. "Evening, sir," said Chandagnac shrilly, feeling like a fool. "Would you care to buy a lady a drink?"

"I beg your pardon?" Chandagnac had the other puppet say in a broad parody of an upper-class English accent. "I'm very hard of—"

"Please speak up, sir," the female puppet interrupted. "I don't hear very well."

"—of hearing."

"You say what, sir? Something you're fearing? I think I know what you're referring to, sir, and you needn't fear it with me. I can guarantee—"

"No, no, hearing, hearing."

"Herring? Hungry, are you? What about herring?"

"I say I'm very hard of it."

"Oh! Oh, well, splendid, sir, splendid, very hard of it, are you, well, let's get down to business and stop discussing fish, then, shall we—"

"It's a trap!" yelled one of the pirates from the audience. "She'll be leading him straight into the hands of a press gang! That's how the Navy got me!"

"With a woman?" called another pirate incredulously, " I just got a drink—and I didn't even down half of it before they clocked me in the head and I woke up in the ship's boat."

Davies laughed as he uncorked a fresh bottle. "They got me with candy. I was fifteen, and walking home from the woodcarving shop where I was 'prenticed." He tipped the bottle up and took a long sip.

"They can't!" another man spoke up. "It's illegal! Apprentices younger than eighteen is exempt. You should have told the captain, Phil, he'd have put you back ashore with an apology."

"Queen Anne made that law in 1703, but I was pressed four years before that." Davies grinned and tilted the bottle up again, then wiped his moustache and said, "And they didn't make it retroactive."

He looked up at Chandagnac. "Yeah, have her lead him to a press gang."

"Uh … all right." Chandagnac had seen press gangs in action in several countries, though his age, or citizenship, or possibly an occasional discreet bribe from his father, had kept him from ever becoming their prey.

"Step right this way, sir," the female puppet said alluringly, slinking back inside the barrel. "We can have a drink before proceeding to other matters."

The other puppet's head bobbed idiotically. "I beg your pardon?"

"I say I know this place. We can get a drink."

"Stink? I'll say. My word, no wonder, look at these rough lads, I'm not certain I—" The male puppet followed her inside, and then Chandagnac shook the puppets and rattled the toe of his boot against the back of the barrel. "Ow!" he had a rough voice yell, "Look out! Get him! That's it! Hold him down! And there you go, sir! May I be the first to congratulate you on having took up a life on the high seas."

Chandagnac had some hope of getting his story back into its accustomed channel, but his audience now demanded that he follow his unfortunate protagonist onto a Navy ship, and so he had to tip the barrel over onto its side to serve as the ship, and quickly snip-and-tack the woman's skirt into a pair of trousers so that various male roles could be taken by that puppet.

Prompted by his reminiscent audience, Chandagnac had the poor protagonist puppet—whose upper-class accent had by now disappeared—suffer all sorts of punishments at the hands of the feared and despised officers. He had an ear cut off for replying to an order in tones an officer chose to consider sarcastic, his teeth were knocked in with a belaying pin for some other offense, and then he was

"flogged around the fleet," which apparently meant that he was ceremoniously boated to each of a number of ships in order to be flogged aboard each one. Finally the audience permitted him to jump ship at a tropical port and wade ashore. Several members of the audience seemed to lose interest at this point, and began singing, and a couple were fencing with sticks out beyond the circle.

Chandagnac continued despite the distractions, and had the runaway hiding in the jungle to await the arrival of some pirate boat that could use another sailor, but then the very old man leaped to his feet.

"The spring!" the old man yelled. "The water that is foul even as it wells from the earth!"

"'At's right, governor," Skank said, "but you're interrupting the show."

"The faces in the spray! Almas de los perditos!"

"Pipe down, Sawney!" yelled someone else.

"Ah!" The old man looked around wide-eyed, then winked. "Vinegar," he said then, as portentously as if he was telling them the password to the Heavenly Kingdom, "will drive lice away from your body."

"I am not a dog!" yelled the black man who had helped intimidate Chandagnac into giving this performance. It looked to Chandagnac as though the whole thing was degenerating into chaos.

"That's news Charlie Vane's crew needs more than we do, governor," said Davies. The pirate chief handed the old man the bottle he'd been working on, which was still more than half-full. "Why don't you go tell him?"

Governor Sawney took a long sip and then ambled away, back into the darkness, pausing twice to call out admonitory-sounding bits of Old Testament scripture.

At this point, to Chandagnac's relief, someone yelled that the food was ready. He left the puppets in the barrel and joined the rush to the cooking pot, where he was handed a board with a hot, wet, bloated-looking chicken on it. It smelled fairly good, though, for the bucket he'd seen emptied into the pot earlier had contained a curry that some other crew had found too spicy to be eaten, so he shucked his chicken out of its loosened skin and then impaled the bird on a stick and held it over the flames. Several of the pirates who also were less than enthusiastic about half-boiled chicken did the same, and after they'd all eaten, and chased the still-dubious food with more brandy, someone called out a proposal that the puppeteer should be made the official cook.

The idea drew assenting shouts, and Davies, who'd been among the number who had followed Chandagnac's cooking example, got drunkenly to his feet. "Get up, pup," he said to Chandagnac.

Choosing to regard the term of address as a diminutive of the word puppeteer, Chandagnac stood up

—though not smiling.

"What's your name, pup?"

"John Chandagnac."

"Shandy-what?"

"Chandagnac." A board in the fire popped loudly, throwing sparks into the sky.

"Hell, boy, life's too short for names like that. Shandy's your name. And plenty of name it is, too, for a cook." He turned to the rest of the pirates, sprawled like battle casualties across the sand. "This here's Jack Shandy," he said, loudly enough to be heard over the perpetual babble. "He's the cook."

Everyone who comprehended it seemed pleased, and Skank perched one of the unclaimed boiled chickens on a three-cornered hat and made Chandagnac wear it while draining a mug of rum.

After that the evening became, for the new cook, a long foggy blur punctuated by occasional clear impressions: he was splashing in the surf at one point, taking part in some complicated dance, and the music was a drumming that took in as counterpoint the surf roll and the warm wind rattling in the palms and even Chandagnac's own heartbeat; later he had broken free of it and had run ashore and then wandered for a long time between the water and the jungle, skirting the fires and whispering

"John Chandagnac" over and over to himself, for with a new name assigned to him he could imagine forgetting the old one, out here in this world of murder and rum and small, vivid islands; and some time after that he saw a gang of naked children who had found his puppets and were making them dance, but weren't touching the wooden figures in any way, only cupping their hands near them, and each tack-head in the jigging puppets was glowing dull red; and then finally he found himself sitting in soft sand that would be even more comfortable to lie down in. He lay back, realized he still had the hat on, fumbled it off, accidentally thrust his hand into the cold chicken's abdomen, jackknifed up to vomit a couple of yards down the slope, then sank back again and slept.

Chapter Three

The summer of 1718 was not a typical one for the outlaw republic on New Providence Island.

Traditionally the Caribbean pirates careened their larger vessels in the spring, and when the hulls were cleaned of weed and barnacles, and all rotten planks and cordage were replaced, they stocked the holds with food, water and the best of the winter's loot and then sailed off to the northwest, skating around the Berry Islands and the Biminis and then letting the eternal Gulf Stream assist them as they worked their way up the North American coastline. The governors of the English colonies generally welcomed the pirates, grateful for the prosperity their cut-rate goods brought, and the Caribbean in summer was a steamy breeding ground for malaria and yellow fever and every sort of flux, to say nothing of the hurricanes that chose that season, more often than not, to come slanting up westward from the open Atlantic beyond Barbados, ripping around Cuba and up into the Gulf of Mexico like spinning drill bits across a pane of glass, creating and splitting and even totally obliterating islands in their paths.

But it was July now, and the New Providence harbor was still crowded with sloops and schooners and brigantines, and even a couple of three-masted ships, and cooking fires still smudged the air above the huts and shacks and sailcloth tents along the beach, and the whores and black market wholesale buyers still sauntered among the crews and watched eagerly for incoming craft; for word had it that Woodes Rogers had been appointed governor of the island by King George, and was due to arrive with a Royal Navy escort any day now, bringing the King's Pardon for any pirates that wanted to renounce piracy, and the punishments prescribed by law for any that didn't.

The philosophy commonest among the New Providence residents in the early weeks of July was most frequently summed up in the phrase "Wait and see." A few, such as Philip Davies, were determined to be gone by the time Rogers arrived, and a few others, chiefly Charlie Vane and his crew, had resolved to stay and forcibly resist this incursion from the authorities across the Atlantic; but most of the pirates were inclined to accept the offer of amnesty, and eliminate from their futures the specter of the ceremonial silver oar carried by the executioner when he escorted a condemned pirate to the gibbet and the clergyman and the crowd and the last knot the pirate would ever have dealings with.

And after all, if they didn't find life under the new regime an improvement, they could always steal a boat and follow the wind to some other island. Two hundred years ago the Spanish had made a point of stocking all their islands with pigs and cattle, and a man could do a lot worse than to live on some unmonitored shore, subsisting on fruit and fish and meat dried over the buccan fires; the buccaneer way of life had effectively ended a century ago when the Spaniards drove all such harmless beach-gypsies off their islands and onto the sea—and the Spaniards had soon regretted it, for the evicted buccaneers quickly became seagoing predators—but the islands were still there.

Oranges stippled the jungle now like bright gold coins on green satin and crushed velvet, and even the people who'd been raised in England followed the examples of the other races and graced their plain fare with tamarinds, papayas and mangoes; avocados by the hundreds hung fat and darkly green in the trees, often falling and thudding heavily to the sand and startling pirates who weren't accustomed to seeing the things in the season when they were ripe.

Cookery, in fact, had become a bigger part of daily life in the New Providence settlement, both because the imminent arrival of Woodes Rogers meant at least the postponement of piratical ventures, leaving people the time to pay more attention to what they ate, and because the ship's cook of the Vociferous Carmichael had not only proven to be competent, but had undertaken to prepare batches big enough to feed several crews in exchange for help in procuring the cooking supplies. In the three weeks since the Carmichael had arrived, for example, there had been seven "bouillabaisse endeavors," in which just about everyone, pirates and whores and black marketeers and children, waded out into the harbor at low tide, armed with nets and buckets, and dragged out of the sea enough animals of one sort and another for the cook to make a vast fish stew, and when the stuff was bubbling in the several huge pots over the fire on the beach, pungently aromatic with garlic and onion and saffron, they said incoming ships would smell the stew long before they'd see the island.

And as the month wore on and the days grew to their longest, at dinnertime more and more people had been drifting over to where Davies' crews clustered around the moored sloop Jenny, for the Jenny and the Carmichael were supposed to leave New Providence Island, taking the cook along, on Saturday the twenty-third.

On Friday afternoon the cook was rowing a boat up the harbor from the deep inlet where the Carmichael sat; the ship was restored to her normal upright position now, and had been pulled almost all the way back down into the water, and as Jack Shandy watched her recede, his muscled brown arms hauling on the oars and propelling the boat forward, he saw section after section of scaffolding, axed and pried loose from the hull, spin down and splash into the sea.

Before the end of the month, he told himself, I should be able to get to Kingston and get my credit situation established, and then get a boat to Port-au-Prince and pay a visit to the … family estate.

Now that he'd seen the colors of these western skies and seas and islands, he didn't feel nearly as disoriented by the drawing he'd seen in the letter his lawyer had found; the wide porches and windows of the Chandagnac house in Port-au-Prince, with the waving palms and giant tree ferns in the background and the parrots sketched flying overhead, now seemed much more attainable, much less like a drawing of imagined dwellings on the moon.

After the death of old Francois Chandagnac, his father, John's lawyer had located a hitherto unknown Chandagnac cousin in Bayonne, and this cousin had let them have a file of letters from an aunt in Haiti, where John had always vaguely understood he had a grandfather and an uncle. These letters, and then a lot of expensive research in obscure labyrinths of deeds, quitclaims, probate and birth and death records, had finally turned up the information which caused John Chandagnac to terminate his engagement to the daughter of a successful coal merchant, resign from his position with the textile firm and book passage aboard the Vociferous Carmichael to the far side of the globe: John learned that his grandfather in Haiti had, in his will, left his house, sugarcane plantation and considerable fortune to his eldest son Francois, John's father, and had then died in 1703; and that Francois' younger half-brother Sebastian, also a resident of Haiti, had produced forged documents to indicate that Francois was dead.

On the basis of this fraud, Sebastian had inherited the estate … and John Chandagnac's father, not even aware of the inheritance, had gone on giving his marionette performances, in ever-increasing poverty and ill health, until that last lonely night in Brussels in the winter of 1714. His uncle had, in effect, killed his father as well as robbed him.

Jack Shandy squinted now, and pulled harder on the oars as if that might get him into his uncle's presence sooner, as he remembered talking to the landlady of the shabby rooming house in which his father had died. John Chandagnac had gone there as soon as he'd heard of his father's death, and he plied the woman with quantities of syrupy Dutch gin to get her to focus her dim attention on the old puppeteer whose body had been carried down her stairs four days earlier. Finally she had remembered the incident. "Ah, oui," she'd said, smiling and nodding, "oui. C'etait impossible de savoir ci c'etait lefroid ou la faim." His father had either frozen to death or starved, and there'd been no one there to notice which death had got him first.

Jack Shandy had no real plan, no particular idea of what he'd do when he got to Port-au-Prince—

though he had brought his father's death certificate to show to the French authorities in Haiti—but his lawyer had told him that the charges would be virtually impossible to press from another country in another hemisphere, so he was bringing it to where his uncle Sebastian lived. He could only guess at what problems he would run into, difficulties of pressing criminal charges as an alien, hiring a resident attorney, ascertaining precisely which—if any!— local laws had been broken … he simply knew he had to confront his uncle, let the man know that his crime had been uncovered, and had led to the death of the cheated brother …

Shandy hauled on the oars, and watched the long muscles flex in his arms and braced legs, and he allowed himself a grim smile. In addition to extra cannon, powder and shot, sorcerous apparatus—the tools of vodun, or voodoo—had been loaded aboard the Carmichael, and one magical procedure required the use of a large mirror; another pirate crew had acquired several, and had sold one to Woefully Fat, Davies' chief bocor, and Shandy had been given the job of getting the thing aboard.

During the operation he had happened to face the mirror squarely—and for a moment he actually hadn't recognized himself, and thought he was looking at one of the pirates beyond the glass.

The weeks of laboring at reconditioning the Carmichael had broadened his shoulders, leaned his waist and given him a couple of new scars on his hands, and he realized that he'd have to stop thinking of himself as unshaven and admit he had a beard—sun-bleached in irregular blond streaks, as was his hair, which for convenience he now wore pulled back into a tarred pigtail—but it was the deep cigar-hued tan, acquired during weeks of shirtless work under the tropical sun, that really made him look indistinguishable from the wild men around him.

Yeah, he thought, I'll sneak onto Uncle Sebastian's pirated estate and then when he's walking around, routing poachers from the shrubbery or whatever it is the gentry does around here, I'll rise up all fearsome-looking and menace him with a cutlass.

Then his savage grin turned sheepish, for he remembered the last time he'd talked to Beth Hurwood.

She had once again managed to elude Leo Friend, and Shandy and she had gone walking south along the beach in the relaxed hour after dinner when the breeze was cooling and the parrots were fluttering in raucous flocks overhead. Shandy had told her about seeing himself in the mirror, and how he'd thought for a moment that he was seeing one of the members of Davies' crew; "One of the other members, I guess I should say," he had added, with perhaps just a touch of adolescent pride in his voice.

Beth had laughed indulgently and taken his hand. "You're not a member, John," she said. "Could you have killed those sailors, or shot old Captain Chaworth?"

Sobered, and hoping his tan would conceal the sudden reddening of his face, he had muttered, "No."

They had walked without speaking for a while then, and Beth didn't take her hand from his until they reached the careened Carmichael and had to turn around.

Pulling a little harder on the left oar to slant the boat toward shore, he looked over his right shoulder and saw Skank and the others waiting for him beside the stack of Carrara marble slabs, which was at least visibly lower now than it had been that morning. Behind them the white beach, dazzling in the afternoon glare, sloped up to the tawdry litter of tents and shacks, and beyond that to the jungle. A woman in a tattered purple dress was trudging along the top of the sand slope.

Venner waded out when Shandy had got the boat into the shallows, and Shandy climbed over the gunwale and helped him drag it up onto the sand.

"I could row the next few lots over if yer gettin' tired, Jack," said Venner, his smile as constant as the sunburn across his broad shoulders. Behind him stood Mr. Bird, the black man who frequently thought someone had called him a dog.

"Naw, 'at's all right, Venner," Shandy said, crouching to get a grip on the topmost marble slab. He hoisted it up, stumped stiff-legged and grimacing to the boat, and then slid the stone over the gunwale and onto the rear thwart, and from there to the floor. "At the Carmichael they're lowering me a stout net, and I just loop it around each block and then wave 'em to lift." He walked back to the stack as Skank edged past him, carrying another one of the blocks.

"Good," said Venner, taking the other side of the next block Shandy crouched over. "Take it easy and don't lose no sweat nor blood is my way."

Shandy squinted thoughtfully at Venner as the two of them shambled toward the boat. Venner never seemed to do quite his share of any hard work, but the man had prevented Shandy from being killed on that day when Davies took the Carmichael, and his avoid-all-strain philosophy tempted Shandy to confide his escape plan to him. Venner must regard the upcoming enterprise as at least a regrettable strain, and if Shandy was going to hide ashore until the Jenny and the Carmichael had left, and then re-emerge and wait for the arrival of the new governor from England, a partner who knew the island and its customs would be valuable indeed.

Mr. Bird had picked up one of the blocks and was shambling along behind them, peering around suspiciously. Shandy was about to ask Venner to meet him after this job was finished, to discuss some pragmatic applications of his philosophy, but he heard a scuffing from up the slope and turned to see who was approaching.

It was the woman in the purple dress, and when he and Venner had disposed of their block, Shandy shaded his eyes to look at her.

"Howdy, Jack," she said, and Shandy realized it was Jim Bonny's wife.

"Hello, Ann," he said. It annoyed him to realize that, even though she was a big, chunky teenager with crooked teeth, his chest felt suddenly chilly inside, and his heart was thudding like a hammer into soft dirt. Though in Beth Hurwood's company he was a little ashamed of his beard and tarred hair and deep-bitten tan, when Bonny's wife was around he was furtively proud of them.

"Still ballasting that thing?" she said, nodding past him at the Carmichael. She had learned the term while watching him work one afternoon a few days ago.

"Yeah," he said, walking up out of the water and trying not to stare at her breasts, clearly visible under her carelessly buttoned blouse. He forced himself to keep his mind on his job. "At least this is the last of it, the moveable ballast. The Carmichael was awfully crank—heeled something terrible coming over sharply in a strong wind. Almost spilled us all right over the side when she came around to face the Jenny that day." He recalled the breakfast table tumbling across the poop deck, and the napkins spinning away into the sea directly below where he and Beth had clung to the rail and each other—and then he realized that his gaze had drifted back to Ann's bosom. He turned to the stack and took hold of another slab.

"Sounds like an awful lot of work," Ann said. "Do you have to do quite so much of it?"

He shrugged. "The seas and the weathers are what is; your vessels adapt to them or sink." He lifted the slab, turned his back on her and shuffled toward the boat, where Mr. Bird and Skank were lowering one in. Venner was sitting on the beach, making a show of worriedly scrutinizing the bottom of his foot.

Shandy's pulse and breathing were loud in his head, so he idn't hear Ann splashing along right behind him; Skank and Mr. Bird strode back ashore, and when Shandy straightened up from laying down his block, and turned around, he found himself being kissed.

Ann's arms were around him and her mouth was open, and against his bare chest he could feel her nipples right through the fabric of her blouse; like most people on the island she smelled of sweat and liquor, but in her case it was with such a female tang that Shandy forgot his resolutions about her and forgot Beth and his father and his uncle, and just brought his arms up and pulled her closer. The girl, together with the hot sun on his back and the warm water around his ankles, seemed for a moment to moor him to the island like some tree, animated only by biological promptings and reflexes and not even minimally self-aware.

Then he recollected himself and lowered his arms; she stepped back, grinning at him.

"What," Shandy began to croak, "what," he went on more strongly, "was that for?"

She laughed. "For? For luck, man."

"Heads up, Jack," said Skank quietly.

Jim Bonny was floundering down the slope, his round face red under a dark cloth, and his boots kicking up plumes of white sand. "Shandy you son of a bitch!" he was squalling. "You goddamn sneaking son of a bitch!"

Though apprehensive, Shandy faced him. "What do you want, Jim?" he called evenly.

Bonny halted in front of his wife with his boots just short of the water, and for a moment he seemed about to hit her. Then he hesitated, and his gaze fell away from hers, and he scowled across at Shandy. He fumbled a clasp knife out of his pocket—Shandy stepped back, snatching at his own—

but when Bonny had unfolded his blade he pressed the point into the tip of his own left forefinger and flicked the blade outward, throwing a couple of drops of blood toward Shandy, and at the same time he began chanting a nonsensical multi-language rhyme.

Shandy noticed that the sun was suddenly hotter—shockingly hotter—and then Skank had leaped onto Jim Bonny's back from behind and knocked him forward onto his knees in the water, and then hopped off and planted a bare foot between the shoulders of Bonny's coat and shoved him onto his face in the shallows.

Bonny was floundering and splashing and cursing, but the sudden sweat was cooling on Shandy's face and shoulders, and Skank waded in and kicked Bonny in the arm. "You ain't forgettin' any of the rules now, are you, Jim?" Skank asked. "No vodun offenses among us unless it's a declared duel, isn't that the way?" Bonny had been struggling to push himself up out of the water, but Skank kicked him again, harder, and he collapsed with a sputtering cry of protest.

Shandy glanced at Ann, and was a little surprised to see that she seemed concerned. Mr. Bird was watching with evident disapproval.

"You're no bocor" Skank went on, "and there's pickney infants on the island that could set your head blazing like a torch and laugh at any lame drogue you could make to stop 'em with, but Shandy's new and don't know nothin' about all that. You think Davies'll be pleased if I tell him about this?"

Bonny had scuttled away, and now floundered to his feet. "But—but he was kissin' my—"

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 575