from a distant star in their buttocks. Now I was smoke called
Kelly pale in my mind together with a Yes. Sandy hairs,
member erect marching around was cleared. Dancing boys to the
music played their bags wriggling pale groin toes
twisted. We now have a double crew down the Red Sea area. Story
started with an argument sentences to hang. The sentence
preyed on merchant vessels carrying the cargo beautiful
hanged back to life women dancing lewdly and ensuring
protection against their bodies once one had been rescued. He
claimed to have learned the gallows smile. Gasping his lips back
surged erect he ejaculated noose and knot feet
across the floor. Spirits around his neck. Spurting six.
Today we reached Port Roger on the coast of Panama. This was formerly Fort Pheasant and had been used as a base by English pirates sixty years ago. The coast here is highly dangerous for the navigation of large vessels, owing to shallows and reefs. Port Roger is one of the few deepwater harbors. It is, however, so difficult to reach that only a navigator with exact knowledge of the passage can hope to do so.
The coastline is a distant green smudge on our starboard side. Strobe and Thomas scan the skyline with telescopes.
"Guarda costa..." the boys mutter uneasily.
Capture by the Spanish means torture or, at best, slavery. If overtaken by a Spanish ship we will abandon ship in the lifeboats, leaving The Great White to the Spanish. The boarding party will receive a surprise, for I have arranged a device which will explode the entire cargo of powder as soon as the doors to the hold are opened.
Now the ship rounds and heads towards land. Strobe, stripped to the waist, has taken the wheel, his thin body infused with alertness. Two boys are taking soundings on both sides, and the escort ship is a hundred yards beyond us. We are sailing through a narrow channel in a reef, Mr. Thomas and Kelley calling out orders as the ship slips like a snake through a strip of blue water. The coastline is ever clearer, trees slowly appearing and low hills in a shimmer of heat. An inaudible twang like a loosed bowstring as the ship glides into a deep blue harbor a few hundred yards from the shore, where waves break on a crescent of sand.
We drop anchor a bare hundred yards from the beach, The Siren a like distance behind us. From the harbor the town is difficult to discern, being sheltered by a thick growth of bamboo and set among trees and vines. I had the curious impression of looking at a painting in a gold frame: the two ships riding at anchor in the still blue harbor, a cool morning breeze, and written on the bottom of the frame: "Port Roger—April 1, 1702."
The Oarsmen
Thin copper-red bodies leaning against the oars as boats glide forward in a silver spray of surf and flying fish against a background of beach and palm trees.
Unloading the Cargo
Bright red gums, sharp white teeth, buttocks exposed as the cargo is passed over the side with much singing and laughter. The boys make up songs about the cargo as it is passed along to the rafts and relayed to the beach. These songs, translated by Kelley, who has sidled up to me in his pushy ghost way, seem flatly idiotic.
The boys are unloading powder kegs. We offer to help but the Indians sing. "White man's hands slippery like rotten bananas." Now they pass up the powder kegs.... "This go boom boom up question's ass."
I ask Kelley what is this "question"?
"Short for Inquisition."
Boy holds up keg of opium.... "Spanish no get this, shit come in pants, very dirty muy sucio."
"And Kiki is getting a hard-on because he knows I look at his asshole when he bends over for opio."
"I was thinking of Maria."
"Take off the cloth and show us Maria."
Kiki blushes, but he must obey the rules of this game. He takes off his loincloth, smiling shyly to reveal lush purple-pink genitals, nuts tight, cock straining up, the flower smell of it fills the hold.
"Maria his asshole. I fuck him her spurt six feet...." He looks around, challenging the boys who sit on the opium kegs.
Some of the boys extract gold nuggets from little pouches at their belts cunningly contrived from Spanish testicles.
"He love this so much I keep it in his nuts. Soon get rich like him."
"That should be easy for a bastard like you."
"Put your yellow shit where your mouth is, sister fucker. I see you do it with my own eyes."
An area is cleared and carefully measured off and the bets placed. Kiki bends over, hands on knees. The other boy, who looks like Kiki's twin brother, uncorks a little-phallus-shaped vessel of pink coral, and a powerful odor fills the hold, already heavy with the smells of opium, hashish, and salt water drying on young bodies. The reek from the pink coral container is a heavy sweet rotten musky smell like a perfumed corpse, or like the smell you catch after lightning strikes.
The unguent glistens in the dim light of the hold, where red limbs stir lazily like fish in black water. Now the boy rubs the glowing unguent up Kiki's ass and Kiki writhes and bares his teeth as the other boy slides it in and they both light up and glow—for a moment the hold is bright as day with every face and body clearly outlined.
Radiant Boys
"Bucking for Radiant Bars," Kelley mutters sourly.
"Radiant Bars?" I ask.
"Yeah. It's the old army game from here to eternity. Now you may know Radiant Boys is a special type ghost, when you see one you die soon after. Of course you can get used to anything and bright boys is all in the day's work to me. Now a good strong Radiant Boy can light up a room with a twenty-foot ceiling. One of the best lived in an Irish castle and was the ghost of a ten-year-old boy strangled by his insane mother. That one killed three cabinet ministers and the vicar.
"So the dirty-trick boys get wind of this good thing and set up Project RB to take care of key enemy personnel. They don't even know what buttons to push. Project RB is dumped into the lap of us tech sergeants. We get half-hanged, half-drowned, half-strangled, the medics pawing us over.... 'How did it feel? Did you get radiant?'
"Put your shit where the bys were. Radiant Boys is a special strike of death The ghost lacks water. And a powerful odor filled the RB project. Half-hanged half-bodies, the smell is pawing us over. Sweet rotten musky smell like. Then some smart-pants-come-lately pulls the radiant ass out from under you and makes shavetail out of it. Facts of like in the army. Uncorks the old army game screwing tech sergeant like me."
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories—as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
Captain Nordenholz Disembarks at Port Roger
There he is standing on a ruined pier left over from the English in some uniform of his own devising. He is flanked by Opium Jones, the de Fuentes twins and Captain Strobe, all looking like a troupe of traveling players a bit down on their luck but united in determination to play out their assigned roles. Boys trail behind them, carrying an assortment of bags, cases, and chests. They walk across the beach and disappear one after another into a wall of leaves.
I don't know what gave me such an impression of shabbiness about this procession, since they all must have chests of gold and precious stones, but for a moment they appeared to my eyes as seedy players with grand roles but no money to pay the rent. The jewels and the gold are false, the curtains patched and shredded and torn, the theater long closed. I was smitten by a feeling of sadness and desolation, as the words of the Immortal Bard came to my mind: