Pirate Jenny wore an eye-patch. She told inquisitive strangers, tourists, idiots and fools that she lost her eye in a Key West bar-brawl. Truth is she was struck by flying debris in the prop-wash of her daddy's seaplane when she was fourteen. Piddling around the dock. Fishing a little. Reading his Hemingway books and smoking his Lucky Strikes. Ensconced among steel drums and glass carboys. Loved to be near her Skipper.
*
Barometers were falling and the wind off Indigo Bay made her khaki trousers flap like gale warning flags. She wore the Skipper's peaked military cap with its 50-Mission crush (dented by earphones) anchored firmly on her head. She tugged its visor down. Her refitted Coast Guard Albatross was gassed up and ready to go. If McEwan and his wife hurried, they could take off before the storm hit.Waiting on the dock and screwing her eye to the tropical tree line, giant mahogany way back in, she tried to force by sheer will-power of thought McEwan's arrival.
She cut a rakish figure.
Looking like an aviatrix from the days of Pancho Barnes. Sandy flaxen hair and a hide tanned to a deep hickory. Cerulean eyes and crow's feet.
People assumed her name was lifted from George Wunder's Sunday comic strip "Terry and The Pirates," with its soldier-of-fortune character with an eye-patch. But they were wrong.
She was Pirate Jenny from The Three-penny Opera!
*
A skeletal road of bone-white sand crooked out of the lush primeval forest of coconut palms, tall and bent according to dictates of sun and wind. The road continued around a corner, beneath drooping lantana and shady ficus town trees. Then it morphed into a hardpan of crushed seashell, and wound past chicken-scratch shanties with faded picket fences and humble yards rearing mango, avocado and banana.
Daddy Doc's taxi lumbered into view. It left the road and rattled onto the dock.
"Yo, Daddy!" She saluted the seventy-year-old man known best for his Yoruba magic and herbal medicine. His uncanny affinity with both Oreshas and Saints gained him unwanted notoriety.
He gave her a nod. Mirrorshades shielded his eyes. He often said that eyes are windows to the soul.
To McEwan she snapped, "C'mon! Let's go!"
"OK OK," he muttered, assisting a grotesquely thin and wan Bernice. "Two suitcases, rear seat."
"Gottem! Get aboard. I'm right behind you."
She did not mention to anyone that taking off could be dicey. Her passengers looked commited to the flight. She herself was always up to a challenge. Made life worth living.
"Kind of choppy," McEwan interjected, seating himself beside her. "Might be a rough ride."
She glanced sideways. Noticed his brown leather World War 2 facsimile bomber jacket and his feathered early-frost hairjob. One hundred percent yuppie, right down to his irritating know-it-all attitude.
"You're not co-pilot, Mac," she said dryly. "Please sit aft with your wife."
The Albatross was a heavy bird. During a past life it had performed rescues on the high seas. Pirate Jenny grinned, lips pealed back, baring her teeth.
All right, girrrl. It's showtime!
*
The Albatross climbed slowly, resolutely, with dauntless finesse, skimming over Cabo Verde low enough for McEwan to count the trees. Almost. He glimpsed the fire-gutted lighthouse, stone wounds open to the sun. As they gained altitude the verdant panorama of Saint James passed beneath as if in a
dreamy silent movie. He felt a zooming in his stomach. Once again he felt like a kid on his first airplane ride.
His pride had been stung.
Stung in that tender secret place where he remained an adolescent. Damn her!
During the five years he had known her Pirate Jenny treated him with brusque contempt. He was clever not to mistake it as garden-variety feminist male-bashing. He knew the problem went deeper. The source of her dislike, he felt, was rooted in his duplicity. He was a gay playwright and his friends in the theatre were of the same feather. Bernice was his beard.
Aware of the complexity of his guilt, he enjoyed status quo. Preferring not to be outed.
He loved Bernice in his undefined way. Thus the abuse.
Pirate Jenny would have none of him.
Well, fuck her! Fuck her in the ass!
*
McEwan was born in Victoria, British Columbia. His first lover killed himself after they had quarreled over a poem. McEwan and Sam McLeod had written a poem together. Two voices shared within a romantic villanelle. Sam submitted the piece to a literary magazine and it was published with no credit going to McEwan. The spat resulted in a slap to Sam's blushing face. McEwan stormed from the chintzy flat, never to see his beloved again. He wrote a play.
*
Ten years later he found a narrow niche of success in New York. Critics found his dramas embarrassingly derivative, lurid as Tennessee Williams and gonzo as Sam Shepard. He had yet to find himself. One day he wrote this way, next day he wrote that way. He worked with a catty old queen in New York, a rapacious wit who fancied herself as a mistress of ridicule. She coveted the talents of young men, earning their loyalty by being an adept dramaturge. A wax museum Tallulah Bankhead, she edited and produced their raw works in exchange for raw adulation. Unbeknownst to them she was an energy vampire. McEwan slept with her once and the result was an amicable mindmeld. They cavorted painting the town, ending up at Elaine's.
When away, writing in the Caribbean, he burned votive candles to the good queen.
*
McEwan first met Pirate Jenny at his Carnival party. She arrived with Maurice and Jaime, and was introduced as the seaplane pilot who had shuttled in most of his guests, from Key Biscayne, Key Largo and Key West. Drunkards all. He assumed she was a bull dyke costumed as someone from some pulp magazine with cover art by H.S. Ward.
They shook hands. Her grip was crushing. His was mincing, almost Middle Eastern. Styled after Alec Guiness in "Lawrence of Arabia."
He recalled how she would be smitten with Bernice. The brassy bitch evidently viewed his wife as a vicitm of mysogyny. Sisterhood, bah humbug!
*
Pirate Jenny broke into this mental tempest. She hollered above the roar of the engines, "Hey, back there! Mac, how's your wife doing?"
Bernice had slumped over, fastened by her safety belt.
He groaned, "Oh, God."
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