PIRATE X

Barry Becker’s decision to become a pirate was mostly his father’s doing, with a further inopportune nudge from a career guidance counselor when the lad was just shy of sixteen. 

It all began as an innocent game devised by Barry’s father which had involved nothing more than drawing an X on a town map in mystic-red crayon. Map in hand, the boy would then be sent out with instructions to locate the marked spot and bring back whatever he might find there. This was repeated daily—a new spot on the town grid—until the whole thing was smeared red and impossible to read. 

But the game didn’t end there. Oh no. Barry’s father simply chose another crayon, burgundy perhaps, and scrawled another X on top of all the smear. 

Now, one might have wondered whether little Barry Becker ever managed to find anything at the spot marked X. And the answer was yes nearly every time. Libraries and drain holes, traffic lights and public drinking fountains. Tangibles made of concrete, impossible to bring home. One time he even found an XXX nightclub.

“Finally a real X,” he dribbled into his shirt.

“Quit yer salivating and scram,” the Manageress’ terse response.

“But this is where the X is,” he protested, stamping his schoolboy shoe crossly on the floor.

The woman grabbed him by the ear. “Come back when yer eighteen, my boy. Be plenty of X for you then.”

Barry trudged home, feeling even more defeated than usual. 

“Nothing today?” his father said, stuffing his bong behind the couch; he tried not to smoke around his son in case it withered him somehow. “Never mind, buddy. Let’s try again tomorrow.”

And Barry immediately began to cheer up, counting down the hours until the next search could commence.

Now, little Barry’s hunt for X could easily have led him down an algebraic path, especially since there was a school math club dedicated entirely to the cause, but this hadn’t occurred to his career guidance counselor when they met in his high school years.

“So you like looking for things?”

“Yes. Things marked X.”

“Ah, like Cowboy X on Sesame Street? Although he really prefers marking things with an X, from what I recall.”

Barry rolled his eyes in the way that teenagers do. He was well past Sesame Street, except when he was sick, and his mother brought him apples cut up like little boats.

“No. I like using maps to find things marked with an X.”

“Ah, like a pirate then, perhaps?” The counselor had meant this more by way of clarification, but Barry latched onto the idea as soon as he heard it.

“So then if I’m gonna be a pirate, I won’t be needing school.”

“I suppose not.”

Another more gifted counselor might have been able to turn things around. 

Multiplication will be important because you will need to count your loot.

Geography will be essential so you can recognise land from your ship.

History will be vital, too, so you don’t face the fate of that rascal Pirate Drake.

But not this Counselor, a frayed old soul who yearned for retirement and the company of daytime television.

Barry, however, was ecstatic. Finally he had a vocation, although it came with certain obstacles, the first one, rather awkwardly being a complete abhorrence of water. You see, Barry neither liked to drink it nor swim in it. Every bath time was a struggle, dehydration a constant peril. In fact, so entrenched was his aquaphobia that he thought about becoming a land pirate instead, except they weren’t a known breed from what he had read. Pirates were generally referred to as crooks, thieves, and scallywags, none of which appealed to him, and he began to realize that he wasn’t even sure that he wanted to be a pirate per se. He didn’t want to loot and pillage, he just wanted to find X when marked on a treasure map. He even contemplated calling himself an X-hunter or X-forager instead. But it seemed to confuse people when he told them because they automatically began thinking he was yet another sort of reality TV star, until they begged him for an explanation, which he dutifully gave, and the lights in their heads came on and they said, “Oh, I see. You want to be a pirate.”

Fortunately, one of the brighter kids at school finally resolved the problem by pointing out that pirates don’t actually have to go in the water if they don’t want to. They are generally just on top of it. If anything, they are better known for pushing other people in.

Relieved, Barry ticked “water” off his impediments list. But he still had another problem.

Fish.

Barry Becker did not like fish.

He loathed them, truth be told. However, he also knew he would have to eat them if he was going to voyage alone for months at a time. Sure, he could live on canned food, but he wasn’t a wealthy pirate (not yet anyway) and it seemed foolish to buy food when you could have it for free. 

Fortunately, the town chef was so inspired by his plans that he offered to teach Barry how to fillet and spice all manner of sea creatures and how to douse them in so many oils and flavors you wouldn’t even know it was a fish but for its black, staring eyes and the crunch of its scaly fins. 

Barry quite enjoyed these cooking lessons and might well have become a caterer instead if the chef had thought to include some Xs in his recipes.

Water and fish now sorted, all that was left was the boat and some sea-faring skills, so Barry enrolled in a community college where he achieved a distinction in rope storage and a scraping pass in navigation. “Pirates,” he explained cheerfully to the doubting face of his college tutor, “probably learn on the job anyway.” 

He then bought a boat. It didn’t cost him much either on account of the boat being quite small and the fact that it had been in the epicenter of a very bitter divorce battle with said boat having been instrumental in a case of In Flagrante Delicto on more than one occasion. Barry was delighted, although his mother less so, and she made him hose it down with an industrial-strength detergent, thus making Barry’s resolve to sail even more firmly set. What sort of pirate did what their mother said anyway?

Now all he needed was a map with an X which his father was able to oblige after a long rummage through the attic. 

“Belonged to your Opa,” he had said, thrusting it into the boy’s hands.

Barry stared at the map which appeared to have become caramelized with the passage of time. Then again, it had belonged to Opa whose penchant for stroopwafels had made him quite the adhesive sort back when he was alive. Either way, it was such a stained mess that Barry’s father had to draw a big circle of where they were now (or so he thought) and then an even bigger X  on a blob of land that looked like an ink spot. 

“Opa’s homeland, I think.” 

“But where is it?”

“Go find it and see.”

***

Barry had been sailing for three full moon phases. He had become accustomed to the lengthy days, which yawned out before him in a canopy of ceaseless blue, but the nights were almost foreign now, even darker than black, if that were even possible, but perhaps this was just a side effect of having been alone for so long. The stars appeared to have rearranged themselves too, as if they had been flung off the end of God’s paintbrush during an art class disagreement. Where was the celestial carpet he had known since he was a child? Long gone, he supposed, along with all the canned food he had eaten in the early days.

But there were happier times, too, like when he unfurled the pirate flag he had bought in a junk shop and let it swing in the breeze, reminding him he was a pirate; he was doing what he had dreamed. Sometimes he put up a rainbow flag instead to lighten his mood, but the pirate flag made him feel invincible, a conquistador of the seas.

However, he brought it down post-haste when he reached the Strait of Malacca and a cove-dwelling village warned him of its perils. 

“Very bad,” they said to him, chewing on coconuts rinds. “Pirates!” 

“But so am…” he had interrupted, until he noticed them all gesturing slit throats and thought better of it. 

“Eat,” they said generously, heaping a palm frond with local delicacies which Barry ate most obligingly while pulling faces at the pirate word.

After a few days, belly distended from nasi lemak and fermented coconut sap, Barry continued down the Strait much to the bafflement of his hosts who couldn’t quite fathom why he would want to continue on. But they were not driven by X the same way Barry was. He still felt a little anxious after all the villagers had said, so he spent a lot of his time crouching his head down low under the assumption that if he were so crouched, so too was his boat. 

He supposed he did see boats harboring pirates during this time, irate-looking men wearing machine guns like pageant sashes whom he watched from afar but who paid little attention to him. His boat was too small and not the kind of loot that they were looking for. 

Later though, near Africa, he would see pirates who meant business. Bigger men with bigger guns and yellow, unpicked teeth. He would remain grateful for the enormous Atlantic troughs that kept them far apart. 

Then, once he had passed Africa, he knew he must be getting close since he seemed to have covered most of Opa’s map but had not yet found X. He decided to ask for directions at a verdant island where most of the girls appeared to have forgotten their tops and some of the boys had forgotten their bottoms.  It seemed like a jolly sort of place, so he hoisted up his rainbow flag which made them all cheer and offer him fruity cocktails. 

He liked their language, too, a rolling sort of sound where the vowels whirled in people’s mouths in a rhythmic, joyful way. Indeed, he might well have been tempted to stay there indefinitely were it not for his quest and the fact that more and more boys had started getting cuddly with him. His family hadn’t been tactile at the best of times, perhaps his mother when she wasn’t worn down and his father after too much weed. But he hadn’t had any brothers or sisters, so all the hugging and hair stroking made him feel a little nervous, and he found it difficult to reciprocate without feeling awkward. 

No. He would need to leave this haven of enveloping limbs and keep hunting for X and not lose sight of his quest.

***

His boat landed at nightfall just as a soupy fog had begun shrouding the deck, and the hull of his boat had begun scraping wearily on some stones. A man appeared, towering, in a blue, purl-stitched sweater, and helped him pull the boat to shore. He offered Barry a blanket and a bowl of soused herring. 

“I’ll take the blanket,” said Barry, scrunching his nose at the pickled dish. 

There were no lights to be seen anywhere, except for the dingy glow of the man’s kerosene lantern, but Barry was still curious. He pulled out Opa’s map–the little of it that remained–and showed it to the man.

“X?” he asked.

 “Ja,” responded the man, and Barry’s heart sank in the same way it had when he was a small boy and he had come home from one of his many X-hunts empty-handed. 

The man could sense Barry’s disappointment and patted the lad’s arm.

“You need work, son?” he asked in a rhotic sort of roll which made him sound like an American but more exotic somehow.

Barry nodded. He had never really been that keen on work before, but he was tired of swallowing sea gusts and in need of a pair of jeans that didn’t smell of fish bowels.

“Come then.” 

The two walked along a mudded, narrow path. Barry couldn’t see beyond his own boots, but he sensed he was being watched, not by people or even animals, but by tall long-stemmed flowers, whispering among themselves. 

They arrived at a wooden farmhouse where the man gave him some apple cake (slightly redolent of herring) and showed him to a cramped room up in the attic. 

“You can start tomorrow,” he said, and then he was gone. 

The following morning Barry was led out to a colourful field, blood red and twilight blue, deep mauve and sunset orange. He had been right about the watching fields then; there were tulips everywhere, row after row, undulating in the wind, surging and billowing like waves on a rainbow sea.

Patiently the man demonstrated how to pull the tulips upwards from the soil, bulbs intact, which Barry found a little sad. They all looked so spirited undulating together; it seemed a great pity to have to separate them now. 

But he also wanted money and to smell less like a rotting eel, so he put on some gardening gloves and began rupturing their pretty lives.

A few hours passed and Barry felt a shadow cast over his skin. A hand reached down to him with a hunk of brown bread and some red waxy cheese. He bit straight into the cheese.

“No, no,” said the hand hastily, pulling away the cheese, unraveling the red wax before handing it back again. “You must be hungry!”

Barry looked up. In front soared a fair young woman, laughing at him.

“A little,” he said. 

“You’re a good worker,” she continued, taking Barry by surprise; he had been accused of many things but never of that. 

“Come eat with me,” she said, gesturing towards a small canal at the end of the field. 

The two made their way down to a row of cherry blossoms growing beside a canal where painted boats were quietly prowling along the water’s edge. It was peaceful as they ate–only the occasional quack from a drifting duck–but after a while Barry became aware of a whirring, clattering sound. It reminded him of those calmer nights out on the high seas when the wind had whispered between his boat sails in a steady, rhythmic manner. Whirr and then clatter. Whirr and then clatter. 

“What is that noise?” 

“It’s a windmill,” said the woman. “Haven’t you ever seen one before?”

Barry shook his head. 

She took his hand and led him between the cherry blossoms. On the other side stood the most glorious structure Barry had ever seen.

“Do you like it?” the woman asked, touched by Barry’s obvious enthusiasm.

Barry nodded, utterly spellbound. For there right in front of him spun these four magnificent sails, crisscrossed in the form of a giant, latticed X.

“Oh yes,” he answered joyfully. “I like it very much.

***

Joanna Galbraith lives and writes in Tuscany with her cat, Pirate, who is also fond of the letter X.