Yiddish for Pirates(84)

He paused for history to appreciate his bon mots.

“Ach, gey kaken afn yam,” I wished to say. “May you release your bowels upon the open ocean and may sharks take interest in your sphincter. May their teeth seek hacksaw passage to the twisted phylactery of your intestines.”

But I’d wait. There’d be time for bile. First I had to rescue Moishe. The captain stood over the three sacked men.

“We have played this pretty masked ball of singing sirens for two reasons. We wished to catch you alive, Master Christophorus, who is now desired at court. We shall transport you in chains, for your gubernatorial misdeeds have displeased our sovereigns. We have herded together your entire crew, who—in the unlikely event that they should have wished it—cannot now do anything to save you, but will be of help in our plantations.”

He regarded the burlap sacks with disdain.

“We also wish to secure some particular charts from the circumcised circumnavigator, Moishe,” he said, focussing on the bound feet that he assumed—incorrectly—to be Moishe’s.

“There is a particular book—once buried like storybook treasure—which for a time was in the possession of the now-departed Grand Inquisitor,” the Spanish captain said. “And there is a map. I now command you, in the name of Ferdinand and Isabella, and in the name of the Holy Father to give them to me.”

From within the sack, there was only prepling muttering from the bo’sun.

“Provide me one or the other or you shall burn like kindling. Except with screaming.”

Then there was more than mumbling. “It is I. Higgs.”

“I do not know this name.”

“The bo’sun. I led them here to you. I doused their food with the philtre that you gave me. I am your shipboard man, your spy.”

“A spy who cannot be silent should be made so,” the captain said. In one ampersanding motion, he drew his sword and plunged it into the loquacious sack.

Then he moved one sack to the west.

“My odds in this thimblerig shell game have just increased,” he said to Moishe’s sack. “The map or the books?”

“You’ve caught me like a cat-o’-nines in a bag,” Moishe said. “So maybe we can talk?”

The captain sliced the burlap open, the newborn boychik Moishe revealed to the world in a rough C-section. The front of his smock was cut and a line of blood seeped from chin to nuts, Moishe halfway to bloodlet kosher.

Moishe stood and ducked behind the three sorcerous maidels, capeless yet still preternatural in the flickering shadows of the fire. He pushed the first one and it was distaff dominos as one fell into the other and finally knocked over the captain who fell onto Columbus.

“Oof,” Columbus said.

The scene, a tropical starter kit for Chaplin and Keaton.

Then Moishe ran.

Perhaps it wasn’t a noble escape but it was efficient. He sprinted down the beach, turned into the dark forest, and leapt through the brush. I sped down from the palm where I had hidden and dived at the parrot by the fire, my talons out. The mamzer didn’t see what hit him. And afterwards, blinded by my claws, he saw nothing at all.

Then I, too, disappeared between the leaves.





Chapter Four



Silence or speed. Moishe chose speed, bounding through the forest, his knees pumping nearly to his chin. A stampede of one disappearing into the shadows and the shadows of shadows, panting and shvitzing like the rainforest itself. I dodged branches and shadows, hovering over Moishe.

Behind us, the stomping bootfalls and shouting of the Spanish. The clatter of metal blades. A quick glance back and we could see the dim lights of their lanterns’ crooked progress. They could read Moishe’s bushwhacked path. A red carpet through the green. He had made it easier for them to catch him.

And then?

We’d seen how they forged compliance, how they punished resistance.

They cut off hands, pressed steaming pokers into eyes. Flayed, racked, and sliced. And that was better than what they did to Los Indios.

Moishe turned and slogged through the fetid gizzard of a swamp. Oozy shmutz creamed his thighs and thousands of insects stung his skin. I was spared the shmutz, but I, too, was the nosh of bugs. Constellations of irritation and pain formed over me as if I’d dived into a Tabasco vat and my body vibrated with sting. Moishe dunked down into the swamp, taking cover in the clotted water behind a fallen tree.

I found the dark crook of a nearby tree.

So. Those were pearls that were his eyes.

A broch.

I’d blinded the parrot without thought. Fight or flight. I could do both. If there was a playbook, I hadn’t just stepped outside the text, I was thousands of miles beyond the margin. So far that I’d come around the other side to the very beginning of the game itself.

An eye for an eye.

Or two eyes for treachery.

The Spanish marched forward. Moishe’s trails had disappeared, but desire imagines paths though the thicket, even when none exists. They tromped forward toward where we weren’t.

We did our best to continue to not be there.

We waited for a few hours, then Moishe crawled from the swamp, a slime-covered Golem born from the ooze. The dawn sun, too, shlumped out of the star-bit night and we crept through the gloom. The shriek of monkeys and the thrilling of morning birds. The rainforest waking, beginning its workday with this racket.