The fifteen-meter Julius Caesar was loosely moored to the swanky, forty-two meter schooner and doing one helluva job on its expensive hull. Each swell caused rough kisses, nicks and dents that would be an absolute bear for the owners to have buffed out.
“What was that?” Jope screeched at the noise of the bumping boats. He lunged into Ratu, who was scrambling to find a light switch.
“Must be goblins.” Ratu was all too familiar with his friend’s crippling fear of the dark. He’d also had to contend with Jope’s fear of heights, cats, loud noises and open spaces. It was a lot of fear to overcome for any pirate worth his salt.
Coincidentally, it was Julius Caesar himself, Emperor of Rome, who was credited with coining the phrase “worth his salt,” since his soldiers were paid, in part, with rations of salt. If a soldier was not up to snuff, he was said to be not worth his salt.
Ratu and Jope knew a little about this, having once snuck into a matinee of Marlon Brando’s version of Julius Caesar, each packing two fat joints, their own two-liter bottles of beer, but no popcorn.
“How come everything is black and white?” Jope had asked twenty minutes into the movie, the first joint and half the beer gone.
“They didn’t have color back then.”
Jope had pondered this for a minute. “How’d they know when the light turned green?”
It was Jope’s shaking hand that found the light switch first, after a second and third loud bump in the night shook the walls and floor of the big schooner. A moan escaped the skinny black pirate, and if his starter pistol had been a real gun, he most definitely would have shot off a few of his own toes.
“Okay, good,” Ratu said of Jope’s light switch discovery. “Hey, what you make of them packages?”
The oversized forward stateroom was nearly three-quarters filled with neatly stacked brown, brick-shaped bundles. As small-time crooks and occasional drug salesmen—mostly to island-hopping backpackers—Ratu and Jope had a pretty good idea of what was wrapped up in the bricks. And they’d seen enough cop videos of drug smuggling busts, always a little bummed because it meant the prices would be going up and their profit margins going down.
“Can’t be.” Jope’s eyes were wide.
“No way, man.” Ratu’s eyes were even wider.
They stood side-by-side, starter pistols hanging limp in right hands, trying to decide whether this was the greatest thing ever, or if they maybe should slowly back out the door and scurry back onto the Julius Caesar and forget what they’d just found. Both knew this was some big time shit.
“That’s gotta be a billion dollars worth of coke, Ratu.”
“Not a billion. A billion would sink dis big boat. Maybe half a billion.”
Ratu stepped forward, away from the door, and plucked a package from the top of the thick wall it formed. He felt its heft and then used the sight knob on the barrel of his starter pistol to rip through the brown paper and plastic inner wrapping. A thick white powder spewed from the wound; both men greedily jabbed index fingers and rubbed their gums.
“That’s blow, yeah?” Jope asked, and Ratu shook his head in agreement.
Jope bent over the bag, closed one nostril with his cocaine-coated index finger and snorted what would be a year’s worth of wages had he’d ever held a legitimate job back home. Ratu used his own index finger to do the same thing.
“I can’t feel my tongue,” Ratu tried to say. His entire mouth had gone completely numb from the nearly pure cocaine. The black chests of both pirates looked like chocolate doughnuts sprinkled with powdered sugar. Their noses were as white as their eyes.
Then Jope’s own oral paralysis took hold with pins and needles as the pair stood looking at each other, unable to communicate.
“They’ll kill us,” Jope tried saying. “Please, let’s leave this shit and get out of here fast.”
“Yeah, let’s grab as much as we can,” Ratu attempted to say, but he sounded an awful lot like the old drunk guy from Ono who’d fallen off the Suva peer and hadn’t been pulled up from the bottom of the harbor for a good ten minutes. The poor old guy sat on the curb of the main drag these days, occasionally making motor boat sounds.
Before Jope could reach the door, Ratu had scooped an armload full of bricks and was making motor boat sounds for Jope to come help. The high quality cocaine allowed the fearful pirate to overcome his clamoring inner voice.
“They gonna chop you up and use you for chum,” Jope’s inner voice warned.
“I can’t hear you,” Jope answered, sticking one finger in his ear and humming, while Ratu pulled down bricks to cart another load out to their boat.
“I didn’t say nothing,” Ratu said.
“They gonna chop him up, too,” said the inner voice. “Chop, chop, chop!”
Forty minutes later, the planet’s newest millionaire drug king-pins were pushing off in the Julius Caesar, heading out into the deepest waters. Paranoid and sweating freely from doses of cocaine of such high quality that it would have killed men with weaker hearts, the pirate duo stood on the pilot deck and began singing the only pirate song they knew. It was from another old black and white movie.
Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.
Because of their numb mouths, the song came out sounding like a couple of motor boats badly in need of tune-ups.