A Pirate’s Log

"You'll ‘ave to put a h-hole through me before you put one through my ship!" They stood toe to toe, glowing orange from the light of the campfire. Poindexter sneered up at her, and used a high pitched voice that would have been comical in any other situation. We stood on the bank where the Stanislaus Creek emptied into the wide San Joaquin, and as the matriarch's minions beached their aluminum skiffs onto the asphalt shore, our Gator waited unattended a few yards away, its glare as sinister as mine.

     Who was she, who gave me that same venomous look a few hours before that was now used on Poindexter; who wants to think she's in charge of us, to insist on sinking our ship? The Stanislaus was clogged with fallen trees, blocking ships and skiffs, but she refused to keep our ship afloat. We would be abandoning our ships to the scavengers, she said in other words, and our mean, fast ship with a heavy machine gun would pose a threat to her. She repeated her illogic for too long before I interrupted.

     "Aren't we all going to find a pile of weapons?" I walked towards their fire-lit argument. "Why the hell would you be scared of anything when we'll come back armed to the teeth?"

     She turned towards me, her cold face rigid, and calmly said, "Scared? Scared nothing, no, you go. You, afterwards nothing us. Take guns ‘nough carry, go, someway else. Leave boat rot."

     I gave out a little laugh, and walked slowly up to her, her body as still as a cadaver, her eyes following mine. "If we were gonna try anything with you fine hosts," I calmly replied, "your throats would've been slit before we landed."

     The muscles in her face relaxed, yet her vicious eyes stayed focused. "Talk big." She brushed past me up the slope towards another campfire cooking meat around ruined mobile homes. As she strutted, she sighed, and said, "Fine, beach boat, talk all morrow."

     She and her crew left us to walk our boat farther towards a dirt section of the curving bank, the two guided it up front it and I pushed through the half-sunken cars to pull it up on the ground. Realizing we were alone, I asked Poindexter where the paper was.

     "Bill and me know what's on it, don't worry."

     "I asked you where it was dammit, this ain't the time for games."

     "Why on Earth should I tell you? What do –" 

     Bill grunted disapprovingly and pushed Poindexter into the water. 

     Poindexter snarled, but didn't say a word. He got up and went to the stern to help push the ship onto land. When we finished, Bill came around to us, looking and listening for eavesdroppers. "The address," he paused, looked around, "is Camp Morris in Modesto. Someone named Cur wrote these numbers on it: ‘five, two, three, one, five.' Whatever that means, it might be important."

     "I don't know what the hell those numbers are - stop jerkin me around!"

     "Relax, I'll show you. Hold the boat up so I can get in the cabin."

     Poindexter and I stood on the shore and held the sides of it as Bill boarded, went inside and broke a bottle, and came out, handing me a paper from the glass shards. He pointed to five characters, which I studied intently in the moonlight, picturing them in my head as Bill handed me whisky bottles and what little food we had. Bill jumped off, and gently we laid the Gator to rest, leaning it up on its side. We walked past the beach fire, and Bill took the paper and threw it in.

     They sat around listening only to the sounds of the crackling fire. No chatter, no music. There were three more foot soldiers than there were when we landed, adding to her conquering legion of 15 (not including us). I grabbed a piece of deer meat and walked away from the group, finding a mobile home in good enough shape to accommodate me. The living room's roof was mostly intact, so I sat on the grimy mattress on the floor to finish off the deer and a pint of whisky before I passed out from exhaustion. A dog walked up to the trailer entrance where a door once was, and pouted and whined until I threw a piece of meat out into the brush.

     He chased it, and knew better than to come back, leaving me in peace to reflect on the day, mostly about her. She was a scorpion, this young fiery woman, seemingly as malicious and devil-hearted as I. And I'll be damned if still she wasn't the most dangerously beautiful woman my eyes had ever come across. Her piercing chin and full lips were bewitching, and that look, that psychotic look, that made her blue eyes explode before strangling me with a noose, sent all my senses spinning!

     I dozed off with her image in my head, and suddenly there she was, by my side, her baggy clothes flung into the water. We floated on the river, her body pressed against mine, atop an alligator's back, scaly and rough. Our tongues danced and our hands went wandering, and my subconscious only granted this image for a few great moments before the alligator flipped over. Her pale naked body flew into the trees as I went under, the alligator embracing my skull with its jaw and drowning me in its grip, waking me into a frenzy.

      I looked around the trailer, and again there she was; I had woken to a dream inside a dream.

     "You okay?" she asked in an unfamiliar tone as she sat on the edge of the mattress, pulling her pants up her long legs.

     I paused for a few moments, still thinking it was a dream, and when nothing happened except her waiting stare, I asked, "What's this?"