“You’re goin’ too fucking fast!” Jope’s pencil nub bounced around the scrap of paper on the console of the Julius Caesar, its sharp graphite point sure to break from his wild jabbing. The pirates each sat in a helm seat, high up in the pilot house, pouring sweat despite the relatively cool air rushing at them from over the low windscreen. Running full-out, the fishing boat turned scurvy galleon bounded from white-cap to white-cap at thirty knots.
As anyone who’d snuck into a theater for a pirate movie would know, a ship’s speed was more important than its weaponry. That was fortunate, for this ship was equipped with nothing but starter pistols.
As often happens with someone who has recently snorted a death-defying amount of high-grade cocaine, each pirate had become obsessed with his own individual mission. Jope needed to know how much all the cocaine they’d stolen was worth. Although the task was complicated by the fact that he’d never learned multiplication, extensive street corner drug dealing did provide a solid starting point.
“How much does a kilo go for?” Jope asked.
“A lot. A kilo is a lot.” Ratu concentrated on the choppy sea below the bucking prow, his right hand cramped from gripping the helm too tightly. Ratu’s cocaine obsession manifested itself in a need for more speed. As much godforsaken speed as he could squeeze out of their stolen charter fishing boat. Both throttle levers of the control box for the twin diesel engines were jammed forward, and Ratu continued to push with all his might, trying to get one more knot out of the straining engines.
“No, I mean how much money.” Jope was trying to sharpen the broken pencil point by rubbing it back and forth on its side. “If you was gonna buy a kilo of coke, how much money would it cost?”
“We don’t need to buy coke, stupid.” Ratu’s left hand was cramping from squeezing the hard shifter knobs. “We got like a hundred kilos, you dumb fuck.”
“Don’t call me a dumb fuck, Ratu.” Jope, whose feelings were hurt whenever his friend called him names, was especially sensitive to words like dumb and stupid. “How much money would we get for selling a kilo?”
“I don’t know, maybe five or ten thousand? Shit, Jope, it feels like we’re slowing down.” Ratu searched the various knobs and buttons for some sort of overdrive, some faster gear. “Don’t it feel like we’re slowing down?” Ratu considered the plausibility of getting a foot up on the gear box to force the throttle forward even harder. Sweat was dripping into his eyes, burning his vision. “Fuck, it’s hot. We’re going too slow!”
“Ten thousand? You mean ten thousand Fiji dollars?”
“Jesus, what’s ten thousand Fiji dollars? What the hell are you asking me?” Ratu was annoyed by this interruption in his quest for acceleration.
“How many zeros do I make?”
“Go down and see what you can throw overboard!” Ratu squeezed the helm with both hands, his left foot up on the console in order to force both throttle sticks as far forward as they’d go. He appeared to be frozen in mid karate kick.
“A hundred is two zeros.” Jope squinted down at the slip of paper, trying to navigate the pencil in a circular motion, but the bounding boat turned both zeros into lopsided figure eights.
“Jope!” Ratu yelled at his pirate partner. “We need to get rid of extra weight. Go down on the main deck and look for anything heavy we don’t need and throw it overboard. We swimmin’ like a big fat woman, too damn heavy. We gotta go faster!”
“Stop yelling at me.” Jope abandoned his pencil, which immediately bounced to the floor and rolled away. He sat in the helm seat staring down longingly, making one brief attempt to do the math in his head, but the zeros looked liked lopsided figure eights in there as well. “Fuck it,” he finally said, feeling a dip in his energy-filled high. His body countered by sending out a flourish of tiny electrical impulses demanding he replenish all these wonderful new chemicals.
“C’mon, hurry up, Jope!” Ratu’s voice was straining from the muscle cramps, which had moved from his hands into his crotch. It seemed this position had stabilized the loss of speed, but he now had to contend with his wildly vibrating testicles. The coke had first made his balls crawl up and feel like they’d disappeared, but now they were back, looking to cool off, trying to escape his overheated body. “My balls really hurt.”
“I’m going.” Jope got up and turned toward the jostling ladder. It would be useless asking Ratu to slow down so he didn’t break his neck climbing down to the main deck.
“Hurry!”
Jope’s sweat-slick hands grabbed hold of the aluminum railing as he backed down to the main deck. He was motivated more by the need for another big snort than by Ratu’s badgering and name-calling. Ratu acted like the boss only because he was taller by maybe one finger. And that was only from having bushier hair. People sometimes mixed up their names because they looked alike, especially if they hadn’t showered and their hair had become greasy and flat. What had Ratu yelled at him about? Going faster? How was he supposed to make the boat go faster? Jope had forgotten what Ratu had sent him off to do. Ratu sometimes acted too crazy, like when he’d slapped a beer bottle out of the biker’s hand at the Riki Tik for no reason. With a queer smile on his face, Ratu had just walked up to the huge monster looking dude, looked him in the eye and slapped the bottle into the air. It fizzed all over the tables and floor and white foam dripped from the guy’s leather jacket and shaggy beard. The big biker had grabbed Ratu with two hands, one at his throat and the other at his crotch, lifted him over his head and thrown him through the big glass window of the bar. Ratu had landed in a groaning heap on the sidewalk, the same loony smile still on his face.
“Oh, yeah!” Jope remembered that he was supposed to find things to throw overboard.