Clarence Chance, Contributor

Chance

It was on that fateful Saturday night that he met Trapper John, and it was Trapper John who had turned him into a pirate.

The boat rushed across the Caribbean Sea; the little boy struggled to keep his balance. Above the noise of the Yamaha engine Trapper John shouted, "Yuh see that, boy?"

Trapper John revved up the engine a few more notches. Against its noise, he shouted, "This thing kicks like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan put together!"

The boat's front rose up into the air like a plane readying itself for take off; then it fell, just touching the sea for a second then rising again, an endless repetition of rising and falling. The little runaway 12-year-old was enthralled by it.

"How yuh feel, boyo?" Trappper John shouted in his ear. And the boy, his expression a curious mix of fear and fascination said, "Mi flying."

Trapper John shouted in his ear again: "What yuh say, boy?"

The boy raised his voice and shouted back: "Mi feel like mi flying!"

He was falling again. His hands flapped vigorously as he tried desperately not to fall into the hole somebody had dug for him. He woke to find his hands beating down on the old bed. He gathered himself, stepped out of the board house and went and leaned against the bow of the solitary boat anchored on the cay. The sun was blazing overhead, throwing fire onto his bare back even as the water played with his feet. He stared vacantly out to sea. It was not blue and beautiful as it had been when Trapper John had first brought him out in a boat that Sunday morning. The sea represented prison walls for David Barnaby - not six-by-eight walls but miles upon miles of impregnable prison walls. For even when hurricanes Emily, Dennis and Ivan threatened, they left him out there on the cay, since, as they put it, he knew too much of everything. And if he were to take a boat and run, where would he run to? Which direction was Kingston, anyway? He had tried it once and had drifted for four days in the open sea.

The cay sat 100 kilometres southwest of Kingston. It was a bank of coral and sand, its east side covered by sea grass. Around it swam schools of parrot fish, snapper and butterfishes, and from holes in the coral little crabs appeared, then disappeared, again and again. The small waves broke gently against the boat.

There was a time when these waters were the domain of marauding, murderous pirates. It was a time when the great European power first outlawed, and then enlisted pirates in wars against her enemies. A cannon ball to the mid-section of a ship, a sword thrust through the body, were the means of death for many pirates in the Caribbean. If you have the ear for it, you can still hear some pirate's forlorn, ghost-like cry on the breath of a rushing wave or on the almost silent purr of the Caribbean's currents.

Again his mind was replaying the incident. He had been looking for his football boots and had suddenly stepped into his father's room and seen him and the little girl together. Maybe it was the moral sense that his mother had instilled in him; maybe it was what the police had said, or the lawyer's arguments, but David had testified against his father in a carnal abuse case. David's testimony sent his father away for three years.

Now he was thinking that nobody had told him his testimony would have destroyed him; nobody told him his own family would turn against him, or that the community, too, would turn against him. That's why he had run away.

It was on that fateful Saturday night that he met Trapper John, and it was Trapper John who had turned him into a pirate. At night, David, Trapper John and the rest of the crew would travel in their speedboats and steal fish from the fishermen's fish pots. Things were getting worse, for over the last six months they had embarked upon armed robbery on the high seas - not just fish but boat fuel, money, jewelry - and David was getting scared.

To begin with, David had blamed his father. How could he do such a thing to a child? But then he started blaming himself, "If I had just not walked in at the time I did," he thought. And now he had settled on blaming the girl. "She should have known not to enter a man's room. See how she has wrecked my life!"

For five years David Barnaby had been imprisoned on a cay southwest of Kingston, Jamaica. At night he was a pirate and by day he was to make himself invisible. "He knows too much, he might give us away," Trapper John told the others.

David Barnaby, leaning against the boat, thought he saw another boat on the horizon. Then he saw another, and then another. He rushed into the board house and came back out with the binoculars. The other four crew members rushed out after him, puzzled. Through the binoculars David saw the first boat was Trapper John's boat; two other boats were chasing it.

The men came down to the water's edge. In a husky voice one asked, "Is what?"

When David did not answer, the man grabbed the binoculars, peered through them, and shouted, "Police to rahtid!"

The four men quickly untied the boat, started the engine and hopped in. "Carry mi, please!" David pleaded, and he jumped in too. One man grabbed his feet, another his upper body, and they threw him overboard. David swam back to shore, feeling by the end as if his lungs would explode; his nose burned like fire. He lay on the beach exhausted; sand covered his belly and chest and the left side of his face. David Barnaby cried.

He heard when the boats approached but he remained on his belly. He thought he heard a familiar voice, but then thought that it couldn't be. But he slowly turned over as the voice came again. "David, is that you?"

Isaiah Barnaby rushed back to one of the boats and shouted, "Madgeline, Madgeline, it's him! We found our boy!"

They arrived back in Kingston late that day. At the family home in Patrick City his sister called to him: "Come, look on your little brother."

David was surprised. "Mommy," he said, "you didn't say you had another child." Then he saw the look on her face and knew it was not her child.

"Whose child is this, Daddy?" he asked his father.

"David, you know a mistake was made five years ago. Well, it's sad to say it, but another mistake was made two years ago, son."

David's anger rose. "Daddy, yuh mean to say prison taught you nothing? And you, Mommy, how much more of this yuh going to take?" He got up from off the sofa. "W,ell I am not going to take this. Goodbye!"

"Are you running away again?" his mother asked.

"No mommy. This time I'm walking away."

The scent in the go-go club was one that a man could get used to. The lights were low, the music high. Young girls contorted their bodies around poles. David Barnaby sat on a stool feeling as lost as he'd felt a day ago. A shapely, scantily-clad young woman came over to him. "Lap dance?"

"No, no," David said. "I not feeling so hot tonight."

"Relationship? The girl shouted in David's ear."

"More like family," David shouted back into her ear.

"Why don't you pay for a private room and let's enjoy each other's company?" the girl suggested.

"Wish I could," David said.

To his surprise, the girl took his hand and shouted in his ear, "Tonight is your lucky night!"

The private room was really not a room but a cubicle. There was a passage in the middle of a large room, with cubicles on both sides of it. They sat on a long upholstered seat. "So what were you saying about your family now?" The girl said.

"You see, my father is a very immoral man. And my mother, she is so, well - fool-fool."

"Can I tell you a story?" the girl said.

David nodded.

"There was a girl who had no mother, no family to teach her about the things of the world, so she became attached to big-people things very early. When she was thirteen she was caught with a much older man, who went to prison for three years because of it. When the man came out they again made the same mistake and a little boy was born. The man's wife took the child from the misguided girl and treated it as if it was her own ..."

David rose. "You? You!"

"David, go home to your family," the girl said tenderly. "Your mother and father searched the whole island for you when others would have given up." She sat looking at him for a moment, seeming genuinely to care for him. "Your family needs you. And, believe it or not, you need them, too."

"Who are you to be lecturing me?" David shouted. "Do you know what I've gone through?"

Now the dancer rose angrily in turn. "Do you know what I have gone through? Do you know what your mother and father went through?"

And she turned and walked out of the cubicle and left David there.

David knocked timidly on the door of the family home. When his mother opened it, he hugged her as if his life depended on it.