Saleesi won’t tell me nothing more about Valley of the Sun coz she says it’ll ruin the surprise, so I ignore her and go back to cutting up the fish and putting chunks in two jars of lime, coconut juice and chilli. She steals chunks jus’ raw and chucks them in her mouth and picks off the skeleton with her teeth like raw fish is the tastiest meal ever.
‘Don’t you cook fish where you’re from?’ I ask.
‘You ain’t cooking, you is jus’ soaking.’
‘It’s a kind of cooking. It makes the meat softer and more flavourful.’
‘Ooh, more flavourful! You’re some kind of fancy-pants, ain’tcha?’ Saleesi says.
I get hot then. ‘I ain’t fancy. I’m a hardworking fisher, and I know what makes fish taste best.’
‘And I know what fills my belly.’ Saleesi mashes big chunks of raw fish in her face with her good hand and grins so fish meat squeezes out between her teeth.
I laugh coz she looks silly, even if she is the most annoying person ever. I slap her fish-chunk-thieving hand. ‘Jus’ wait till it’s done!’ and I scoop the rest of the fish chunks into two jars. ‘It takes a while for the lime to work into the meat.’ I’m glad I caught big fish now I got another mouth to feed.
I fetch the first-aid kit, and make sure Saleesi’s finger is clean and wrapped up properly. Her chin is set hard and a tear rolls down her face, but she don’t complain once. She’s pretty staunch. She’s also really skinny after jus’ feeding herself on Pirate Bradshaw’s boat, so no wonder she was shoving that raw fish in like she never had no breakfast.
Now she’s not bleeding and the fish is done, I haul up a bucket of sea water to wash down the deck. If Ma saw the deck of Licorice in this state, she’d be mad. I take off my hat, wash down my face, head and hands to cool me off.
‘What’s wrong with your head?’ Saleesi asks.
Her head is sitting there, almost bald. I don’t think she should be making fun of people with injuries.
‘I forgot my hat one day and the sun burnt my hair right off,’ I say.
Saleesi frowns and runs her hand over her own head.
‘You wanna get a hat,’ I say. ‘There’ll be a spare down in the hull.’
Jus’ as I pick up the chopping board to scrape the fish carcasses into the sea, Saleesi yells, ‘Shark’s back!’
Saleesi’s got a white-knuckle grip on the deck wall, coz that shark’s fin is cutting through the sea, water bulging ahead of it, running at us at a great speed, head on!
The shark being as big as one hull of Licorice, I don’t want her to hit us full on. It might sink us.
I drop everything and hammer on the bell we keep for when we’re sailing in fog, coz maybe old mama shark ain’t seen us, but she don’t turn away and I dunno what to do. If I turn away, she’ll strike one of the hulls and make a hole for sure, so I jus’ keep on hammering on the bell and watching her coming head on.
‘Get down and hang on!’ I yell to Saleesi. Her face is pale as anything as she drops to the floor and hooks her good arm through the steering wheel. I dive down and do the same thing.
There’s a whomp! Licorice dives, and we, still clinging to the wheel near the stern, pop up high in the air as the nose of the boat dips into the sea. We slide forward. Saleesi screams. And the sight I see is one I can’t hardly understand. There’s a giant shark tail thrashing up in the air, but coming up over the deck wall is a snapping croc head, and our legs are slipping out from under us, sliding down to meet both these things we never wanna meet in our whole lives ever. Fish carcasses and blood and us, all sliding towards two things that wanna eat us and Licorice diving down nose first to meet them.
Then Licorice bucks and with a terrible heave the shark flicks her mighty tail and flings herself back into the sea. Licorice pops back up, bounces and rocks, boom swinging side to side, so we stay low and hang on until she rights herself.
There’s this moment of calm. The breeze catches the sail and it swings back to where it should be with a waloompf, wind fills the sail and Licorice creaks as she pulls herself around to carry on the way she was going. The steady slop, slop, slop of sea waves beats on her hulls and I kick off a fish carcass and pull myself up.
I help Saleesi up, coz she’s looking sick. The hull thumps and rocks, and a fin glides away from the boat again.
‘That shark’s pretty angry that this boat stole two good meals from her,’ she says, and points into the net. ‘Yer gator’s back.’
‘He’s not mine,’ I say. ‘I got no control over what he does. He’d eat me soon as look at me.’ It’s gotta be the same croc, coz there’s no reason for a sea croc to be this far from shore unless he chased a pirate off a boat, and besides, he’s got her big knife buried tip-deep in his skull. ‘Well, that’s not very nice,’ I say. I look around for sails, scared that if Uncle Croc can find us, Pirate Bradshaw can too.
‘She’ll be mad about losing that cutlass. That’s her favourite,’ Saleesi says.
‘The croc is jus’ doing what crocs do, ain’t no call to leave him swimming around maimed.’
The croc opens his mouth to warn me not to try anything, like I even could.
The frame that holds the net is dipping at the front where the shark landed on it, and my heart sinks. Ma is gonna be so mad at me about that. Metal’s not as strong once it’s been bent and unbent. The rust will get in.
The shark nudges the boat again, pushing it sideways.
‘Go away or I’ll whomp you!’ Saleesi screams.
One of the jars of fish has broken and fish chunks is all over the deck along with the glass fragments threatening to stick our feet. My bucket, the water what was in it, the fish carcasses and their blood and guts, lime skins and coconut juice, and Saleesi’s finger blood, all sloshing around in a terrible mess. So all I can do is rescue the jar that’s whole, and we sit on a seat and eat fish chunks until the shark decides neither the croc nor Saleesi is gonna come back to her.
Then I sweep everything into a pile, pull the lime skin bung to let all the liquids run out, and fish out the carcasses and fish chunks. I feed them to Uncle Croc while Saleesi hooks a rope over that big ol’ knife.
The croc is so exhausted from out-swimming giant sharks he jus’ lies there with his mouth wide letting me chuck everything in, barely snapping shut now and then to swallow. But when Saleesi hooks the rope now tied to the knife over the boom and pulls tight, yanking it from in his skull, he goes into a struggling frenzy, snapping his head this way and that, making the knife pop out and go flying up. Saleesi snaffles it right out of the air with a quick grab and jams it in her belt like a pirate, blood dripping and everything.
‘How come you get to keep it?’ I ask.
‘I earned it!’ she says. ‘All the years I worked for that old pirate! Every day in trying to pay off my debt, she’d charge me more and every day my debt got bigger not smaller. I tried not eating a thing, and working till I dropped but I still couldn’t get ahead. She’d jus’ charge me fare from one place to another, or say I broke something and charge me for fixing it. Right now she’s figuring what it cost her to repair the rudder that she chopped off to get rid of me, and sharpen the axe what blunted chopping off my finger. What she calls working for her was jus’ me slaving with money involved.’
‘We don’t use money where I’m from,’ I say. ‘And we don’t have no slaves.’
‘Good!’ Saleesi says. ‘That’s where I’m going then. Money is stupid. Too hard to earn. Too easy to steal. Better off without it. And ain’t one person better than another. Everyone’s got a right to live free.’ She puts her hands on her hips and stands legs apart in front of the wheel like she’s a pirate queen.
‘This is why we gotta rescue my friend Jaguar,’ I tell her. I’m sure she’ll understand now. ‘He’s paying off a debt for me, and it ain’t fair. He done nothing wrong. He’d never do nothing wrong, and that’s why they took him, coz it was easier than taking me.’
‘Well, that ain’t fair,’ Saleesi says. ‘We’ll free him and we’ll all go back to where you’re from where there’s no money and people is jus’ fisherpeople, and we’ll all live happily ever after.’
I smile. I think I like Saleesi.
‘Where’s your people from?’ I ask.
‘I don’t hardly know,’ she says. ‘I was only eight when my father’s boat was attacked by thieves and he hid me below. Pirate Bradshaw arrived after, and she said she was owed for answering his SOS message, so I gotta work it off. I din’t have no one to stick up for me, coz my father disappeared that day, so I jus’ ended up doing her pirating. Now I seen how she operates, I reckon it’s her what owes me! You was lucky you set your croc on her.’
‘That stupid croc!’ I say. ‘The only thing he ever learned was how to jump into boats! He was so stupid he got his legs caught in my net and dragged out to sea with me when I went chasing after my friend. I jus’ fed him so as not to be cruel to a trapped animal. Now he thinks my net is his own personal sea-going beach. When we get to Valley of the Sun, maybe he’ll get off there and look for some new territory for himself.’
Saleesi laughs. ‘Ain’t no place for crocs on Valley of the Sun. Best we leave him sitting right there, if he’ll stay. Ain’t no one gonna steal this little black boat if there’s a big ol’ croc sitting on it.’
