Prometheus's Child

occupation finds the man. Like me. I grew up in a farming family — had no interest in the sea until a friend’s father took me sailing.”

Pope nodded quietly. Approaching the stern, he said, “I always enjoyed athletics, competition, and shooting. The SEALs seemed the biggest challenge. But sometimes…”

“Yes?”

“Well, sometimes I wish I could just do the job, you know? Without the responsibility. Sometimes I wish I could just be like… them.” He gestured toward Bosco and Breezy, sitting on a tarp spread on the fantail.

The two friends were still practicing their pirate routine while cleaning the M-60s. According to one’s perspective, either they had perfected the act beyond all reasoning, or it still needed a great deal of work.

Bosco set aside a spare barrel, cocked a squinty eye at his partner, and pitched his voice into a low, gravelly octave somewhere between Wally Beery and Yosemite Sam. “Aye, matey, when we took the Tarabulus, the decks ran red!”

In a poor Johnny Depp imitation, Breezy replied, “Avast! You’re the second best pirate I ever saw.”

“Second best? Why’s that?”

Breezy explained, “You need a peg leg and a parrot named Carl Bob.”

“Well, matey, next time we’re ashore for grog, we can go shopping at a pet store. But by Davy Jones’s locker, I’m keeping both me legs.”

At that clue, the friends broke into something resembling a song:

“Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest.
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest!
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!
The mate was fixed by the bosun’s pike,
The bosun brained with a marlinspike
And cooky’s throat was marked belike,
It had been gripped by fingers ten;
And there they lay, all good dead men
Like break o’day in a boozing ken.
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!”

Unseen by the latter-day buccaneers, Victor Pope regarded the happy youngsters and envied their buoyant emotions. He knew that the mood would not last long.