The Pirates Of Crocodile Lake
Installment 8

Chapter IV
continued

    When we rowed the LIBERTAD from the restaurant’s shore to Crocodile Lake, it took us all night and all the next day. Part of the reason it took so long was the sneaky course we followed around islands so we could stay out of sight. In the skiff we powered down the channel straight for the Petruzzo’s beach and we made it in just under an hour, just like Alfredo said we would. I steered the boat toward the sand and slowed down. We were almost there when the propeller hit bottom and the engine conked out. Jack hopped out of the boat and pulled us the rest of the way. “Next time tilt it up when you come in.” He said pointing to the other beached boats. They all had their outboard engines tilted forward and their props up out of the water. I tilted our engine. It was easy. I just pulled it toward me and the prop swung out of the water. It looked okay. The bump on the bottom sounded worse than it was. Jack and I muscled the boat up onto the beach and wedged its bow into the dry sand.
    “That’ll hold it!” Jack said. “Hey, listen!”
    We stopped messing with the boat and stood still. There was music playing in the restaurant. The glass doors to the deck were closed but the lights were on inside. And cars were beginning to pull up in the parking lot. “They must be servin’ breakfast.” I said to Jack, and Jack said, “No, I mean listen to the music. We know that song.” Then I heard the part Jack recognized. “Come Monday, it’ll be alright. Come Monday, I’ll be holdin’ you tight.”
    “Yeah!” I said, and we listened until the song was over. It was a song mom sang to us when she was feeling good and dad hadn’t been drinking for a few days. She’d sing it softly, almost whispering, like she was afraid she might spook things and scare all the good away.
    I stood the empty jugs upright and Jack unscrewed their caps. Jack stretched the dock hose down and we filled both jugs right in the boat. Then we left the boat and the beach and went across the highway to Kmart for the things on Alfredo’s list.
    The whole time we were shopping, I kept a lookout for dad. In the hardware department, some guy wearing a faded red shirt went by and I freaked, pulling our cart backwards into a rack of brooms and mops all hanging together. Dad was wearing his old red shirt when we ran away from him. But this wasn’t dad. It was somebody else in a red shirt. Jack didn’t seem worried about running into dad at all. He was thinking about something else. He was too quiet, and every so often he chuckled like a raccoon getting into mischief.
    “Hey, Jack. What’s goin’ on?” I asked, and he just said “Huh?”
    Later, in the checkout aisle, I asked him the same question again, and he said “Huh?” again. I couldn’t tell if he didn’t want me to know what he was thinking and chuckling about or if he didn’t know he was thinking and chuckling. So I just dropped it and didn’t talk to him all the way back to the boat.
    We loaded our supplies in the skiff and were ready to shove off when that girl Mia came out of the restaurant and saw us. “Sandy! Jack! Wait!” I was surprised that she remembered our names. We waited for her to come down the steps of the deck and onto the beach. When she got close to us, she asked point blank, “What did you boys do with my father’s boat?”
    She really caught me off guard. I expected her to be nice to us the way she was the other day when we were buying lunch. Jack kept his cool and said, “We didn’t take your father’s boat. This ain’t your father’s boat!”
    “I know it isn’t!” Mia said. “This is the Sharker’s boat! He beaches it here whenever he comes to town for supplies.”
    “Who’s the Sharker?” I asked, acting dumb.
    “You know who he is! You have been at his place in my father’s boat. I know it. The local fishermen know it. And your father knows it too. He’s been hunting for you both all week!”
    That was a bomb we didn’t expect to drop. Jack stepped up to Mia as if he was gonna punch her and I pulled him back. But he shook me off, and marched up to Mia again until they stood face to face.
    “How do you know about our old man? You gotta tell us!” Jack demanded.
    “Yeah, Mia,” I said. “Its important. You gotta tell us what you know.”
    Mia sat on the bow of the skiff and told us about what had just happened in the restaurant while we were across the highway at Kmart. She said the whole island had been talking about the stolen boat. Some people said they saw it with a couple of kids in it out on the bay. And just that morning one of the local fisherman named Bill told her dad that he thought he saw it tied up to the Sharker’s boat. Mia said there was a stranger sitting at the end of the breakfast counter. When he heard the fisherman mention the stolen boat, he got all excited and asked if there were two young boys in it. When Bill said no, the stranger asked whereabouts the sharker lived. Once he knew, he left in a hurry. She said he walked with a limp.
    “How’d you know he was our old man?” Jack asked.
    “I guessed.” Mia told Jack. “You and Sandy seemed unusually interested in daddy’s boat the other day. And the stranger was awfully interested in it too. Only he was looking for two boys. He had the same sandy colored hair as your brother.” Mia turned to me, “And he combed it straight forward the way you do, or did, before your new punk look.” Now she was laughing. I had forgotten all about my spiked hair! I really felt like a weirdo. I pulled my T-shirt off to cover my head. Then she saw all the black magic marker dots on my belly and chest.
    “You say he thinks we’re stayin’ at Alfredo’s?” Jack asked Mia.
    “Whose Alfredo?” Mia asked.
    “The Sharker.” I told her. “That’s his real name.”
    “Oh. Alfredo. Hmm.” Mia said. “Yes, I’m sure he thinks you’re staying there. You are. Aren’t you?”
    “No.” Jack bragged. “We’re livin’ in Crocodile Lake.”
    “Crocodile Lake!!” Mia said. “It’s too dangerous for you in there! Nobody’s allowed to go in there! That’s strictly off-limits to the public!”
    “We know.” Jack said. “That’s why we went. The old man’ll never look for us in there. He’ll never guess we’d be livin’ with all those crocs.”
    “I guess!” Mia said. “But why would you dare to live with crocodiles instead of being with your father? Where’s your mother? What’s going on with your family?”
    It was time we told Mia our story and we did, just the way we told Alfredo. Only this time, when I mentioned the part about what we were afraid dad did to mom, Jack blurted out, “And he’ll kill us too if he finds us!”
    “Yeah, Mia,” I said. “We can’t go with our father. Mom’s gone. And if we go to the cops, they’ll put us away.”
“They’ll bust us apart!” Jack said.
    Mia’s dark eyes were crying. She looked away and let the tears drip and fall. “Don’t you see?” I asked her. “We gotta hideout where nobody can find us. Crocodile Lake is the only place for us.”
     Mia looked back at me. Then she looked at Jack. “I knew there was a good reason you stole daddy’s boat. You didn’t look like bad boys to me.” She thought for a second, then she said, “I’ll keep your secret. But you’ve got to promise me you’ll be very careful in that place. And you have to stay away from the Sharker’s boat. Your father will be looking for you there.”
    “We promise.” I said.
    “We’ll be careful.” Jack promised. “But we gotta go to Alfredo’s. We got his supplies.”
    “That’s right.” I told Mia. “We’ll just have to be on the lookout when we go back.”
    “Come back here if you need food or anything else.” Mia said. “I can get it from the restaurant.” Mia’s mom called her from the deck. They were going someplace. “I’m late for school.” Mia told us. “Mom’s gonna drive me.” Mia ran up the beach to the deck steps and turned around to wave. “Bye”, she said looking right at me, and Jack said, “Bye, Mia.”
    “Bye,” I said watching her go.

    The tide was going out. We had to drag the skiff over ten feet or more of wet sand to get it to where we could shove off. And once we had shoved off, the skiff, loaded with the two heavy water jugs, sat deeper in the water. Jack used an oar to pole us out a ways to where it was deep enough to lower the prop and start the motor. I steered us slowly back out into the bay, watching the water color like Alfredo said. “Green or blue, go through”.
Whenever we came to a patch of water that looked brown, we went around it. And if it was too big to go around, I tilted the outboard up just enough so we could go over the spot without hitting bottom. Jack helped by climbing forward and sitting up on the bow. He was just heavy enough to raise the back of the boat an inch or two.
Once we were all the way across the bay, and cruising in the deep channel, Jack climbed back over the supplies and water jugs and sat next to me. For awhile we just motored along, listening to the hum of the outboard and watching the water go by. Jack got to chuckling like a raccoon again. He made me jealous, cause I couldn’t think of anything to laugh about. All I could think about was dad waiting for us down at Alfredo’s.
    “Do you think he’ll find us?” I asked my raccoon brother.
    “Who?”
    “Who?! Dad! That’s who! Weren’t you listenin’ at all to what Mia said?”
    “Oh – NO. No way he’ll find us!” Jack said. “He’ll be lookin’ around the bridge for us to go by. He don’t have a boat. And if he does get a boat, he won’t go in Crocodile Lake. Like Mia said, its off-limits. There are signs all around it. All we gotta do is be extra sneaky whenever we go to Alfredo’s. Stop worryin’, Sandy.”
    Then just like that Jack put the whole thing out of his mind and went back to smiling and making his little raccoon sounds. I wanted to choke him! He just left me there alone with my worry. Suddenly Jack stopped chuckling, reached into his back pocket, and pulled out the cherry bomb. “Forget the old man.” He said, holding the little red ball right in front of my nose. “I’m gonna get rid of that hammerhead!”
    “You figurin’ on chasin’ it away with that little thing?” I asked.
    “No. I’m gonna kill it with this little thing. We’re gonna kill it!”
    “We’re gonna kill it? How?”
    Jack sat up taller in his seat and looked me in the eyes. “We’re gonna knock it out with this, and then hang it up, just like Alfredo said. Remember? Hangin’ a shark upside-down suffocates it. That means it KILLS it! That’s how we’re gonna do it.”
    I slowed the skiff down to a crawl. “Look, Jack,” I said. “that hammerhead is just bein’ a shark, that’s all. He’s just swimmin’ around, huntin’ for things to eat.” I took the cherry bomb and held it. It was heavier than I thought it would be. “Besides Jack,” I said looking real close at the bomb, “aren’t you the one who’s always repeatin’ the stuff you hear on T.V.?….How sharks aren’t really out to get people….How they’re bein’ hunted down and they might become endangered?”
    Jack grabbed the cherry bomb back. “I know. And I don’t care! This shark’s already endangered. “Cause I’m gonna kill it!”
    “Why?” I asked but I knew why and Jack said it. “Cause with it around we won’t be able to catch any big fish. We’ll never be able to get out of the boat and go snorkelin’ when the tide is in. And we’ll always be afraid. That’s why!” Jack gritted his teeth and growled at me. “We’re gonna kill it! Shark. Gone!”
    That made me laugh. “Shark. Gone!” I said, imitating Jack’s growl, and that made him laugh.
    “Okay, Jack, you win. We’ll do it. We’ll hang that overgrown sucker and kill him dead!”
The breeze that was coming down the channel got stronger. Small waves slapped the bow of the skiff and made our ride more fun. I goosed the throttle and we were slapping waves and getting wet with spray all the way down the channel.
    It was almost lunch time when we reached the bridge. At least that’s what my stomach told me. “I’m so hungry I could eat that whole chunk of baloney Alfredo has.” I said to Jack.
    “Yeah, all fried up and greasy.” Jack said, licking his chops.
    There was no one on the bridge when we went under it. And the one car that crossed over was a tan dodge, not dad’s gray chevy. I figured it was too soon for the old man to have gotten himself a boat, so I motored right to Alfredo’s without paying much attention to all the little mangrove coves around us where a small boat could be hidden. Besides it was windy and the water was pretty choppy. It’d be hard to keep a boat still and quiet.

    Tying up to Alfredo’s wasn’t easy. The waves bobbed the skiff up and down. Jack had to hold the rail of Alfredo’s boat with both hands to keep the skiff from banging against the ladder. I stumbled and fell trying to make knots. When I finally got the front and back of the skiff tied to the big boat, Jack climbed up the ladder, dragging Alfredo’s water jug. I climbed right behind him, pushing the jug from below to help him haul it over the rail and onto the deck. Then I went back down to the skiff for the groceries. The sun was high. There were no snakes out on the deck. Jack pushed open the cabin door and we went inside. Alfredo was asleep on the long bench. He was holding an empty bottle of aspirin. I took the bottle from his hand and put it on the table next to the new bottle we had bought him. Alfredo opened his eyes and slowly sat up. He looked at the table and all the supplies we had gotten.
    “Gracias, Amigos.” He said. “And did you fill the water jugs?”
    “Yep!” Jack answered.
    “The skiff….she ran good?”
    “She sure did!” I told him.
    “Bueno! Bueno!” Alfredo said. He sounded happy, but looked bad. He leaned forward to stand up. Then he sat right back down.
    “You okay?” Jack asked.
    “Oh, yes.” Alfredo said. “ Its just my arthritis. Sometimes I’m good. Sometimes I can barely get on my feet. The aspirin helps. I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me. I’m just old. Too old, I think.”
    We did just what Alfredo told us. We didn’t worry about him. He let us fry up some of his baloney for ourselves, and we heated a can of chicken soup for him. He looked alot better after he had eaten his soup.
    “How old are you?” Jack asked Alfredo.
    “I’m 70.” Alfredo said.
    “70? Years? 70! That’s almost a hundred!” Jack shouted.
    “Not quite.” Alfredo said. “But sometimes I feel like it. And when I think back over the years – all the things I’ve seen and done – it seems like more than a hundred.”
    Alfredo carried his soup bowl to the sink and washed it. Jack and I washed our dishes next to him. Then Alfredo said, “Having you boys to talk to makes me feel young again. Maybe you should stay here with me. We could clean up the deck and make this old boat look like she used to.”
    “We can’t stay here.” I told Alfredo.
    “Yeah!” Jack said, “Our old man knows about us bein’ here. He’ll be lookin’ for us. You better watch out. He might come here and hurt you!”
    Alfredo went to the cabin door and stepped out. When he came back in he said, “There’s no one around here now. You boys take my skiff to tow your boat into the refuge. Make your camp again with your boat and use my boat to get around. There’s more gas on the deck. Take it along.”
    “But, what about what Jack said?” I asked. “What if dad comes here and…?”
    “No need to worry about me.” Alfredo said, picking up his sharp kitchen knife. “I may be an old man, but I’m still strong and I can take care of myself!” He stabbed the knife into the wooden table. Jack’s eyes opened wider than I’d ever seen them. They were almost all whites. I stopped worrying about Alfredo and started worrying about dad and if he was gonna get himself killed. I took Jack’s arm and pulled him away. It was time for us to go.
     Alfredo saw us off. He didn’t look scary any more. We putted away in the skiff, and towed the LIBERTAD back into the refuge. When we passed our first croc sunning itself on a mud bank, Jungle Jack didn’t even notice it. His eyes were wide open, but he wasn’t seeing anything. It was like he was in a trance ever since we left Alfredo. Finally, he talked. “Do you really think Alfredo would kill our old man?”
    “Naah!” I told Jack. “I don’t think dad will even talk to Alfredo. He’ll just watch Alfredo’s boat. That’s all. Don’t even think about Alfredo killin’ dad, Jack. It ain’t gonna happen.”
    “I hope it does.” Jack said. “I hope Alfredo does kill him.”
    “Hey Jack! Don’t talk like that! You don’t know what you’re sayin’!”
    “Yes I do, Sandy. I wish dad was dead!”
    I steered around a small mangrove island and entered our little cove. We spent the rest of the afternoon making the LIBERTAD into a camp, catching some snappers, and cooking them. When the tide started rising and inching up onto the beach, we climbed back into the boat.

    At sunset the wind finally calmed down. The sky turned orange. The water glowed orange and pink, and the crocs began to swim. Annabelle swam close by Alfredo’s skiff, bumping it with her side as she passed. Jack and I were crouched down in the bow of the LIBERTAD, and we stayed down until she was farther away. When Annabelle reached the middle of the cove, she sunk like a rock and stayed under. Jack grabbed the binoculars and looked all around to see where she would surface.
    “What’s she doin’ down under?” He asked himself. Then he spotted something. “A turtle!” He said, keeping the thing in his sight. “There’s a great big snapping turtle floatin’ out there, Sandy. Have a look!”
    I aimed the binoculars at the spot Jack was pointing to and, as soon as I got the turtle in focus, Annabelle attacked it from beneath. “Holy Underpants!” Jack yelled. I kept the binocs on the spot and saw Annabelle crunch that turtle into pieces with one tremendous bite! Then, raisin’ her huge chin up out of the water, she swallowed the whole bloody mess. It was gruesome. It was horrible.
    “Cool!” Jack said, eyes glued to Annabelle as she swam away.
    I looked at my little brother to see if he was growing horns on his head, or hair on his ears, or something else wild and wooley. He was starting to scare me. He was bloodthirsty! He turned to me all excited and said, “Tomorrow, Sandy! When the tide comes in, we kill the shark!”
    That night in the candle’s light, Jack tamed down. We played UNO with the deck of cards Jack picked up near the checkout counter at Kmart. Then I just kicked back and stared up at the starry sky while Jack calmly plotted the murder of the hammerhead.
    “We’ll need all the rope in the skiff, and then some.” Jack said.
    “None of the rope that we used to make camp.” I told him. “We need to keep things tied together here.”
    “Right!” said Jack. “We can use the rope from the mast. And I’ll cut a piece from the anchor. If we tie all the pieces together, we’ll have plenty to hang the shark.”
    “Where can we hang a ten foot long, three hundred pound shark?” I asked, and Jack dried up.
He had no answer. I was sorry I asked the question. “We’ll figure it out tomorrow, Jack.” I said, “We’ll find a branch or something.”
    “Yeah!” Jack said. “No problem!”

end of Chapter IV

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