“You’ve caught me like a cat-o’-nines in a bag,” Moishe said. “So maybe we can talk?”
The captain sliced the burlap open, the newborn boychik Moishe revealed to the world in a rough C-section. The front of his smock was cut and a line of blood seeped from chin to nuts, Moishe halfway to bloodlet kosher.
Moishe stood and ducked behind the three sorcerous maidels, capeless yet still preternatural in the flickering shadows of the fire. He pushed the first one and it was distaff dominos as one fell into the other and finally knocked over the captain who fell onto Columbus.
“Oof,” Columbus said.
The scene, a tropical starter kit for Chaplin and Keaton.
Then Moishe ran.
Perhaps it wasn’t a noble escape but it was efficient. He sprinted down the beach, turned into the dark forest, and leapt through the brush. I sped down from the palm where I had hidden and dived at the parrot by the fire, my talons out. The mamzer didn’t see what hit him. And afterwards, blinded by my claws, he saw nothing at all.
Then I, too, disappeared between the leaves.
Chapter Four
Silence or speed. Moishe chose speed, bounding through the forest, his knees pumping nearly to his chin. A stampede of one disappearing into the shadows and the shadows of shadows, panting and shvitzing like the rainforest itself. I dodged branches and shadows, hovering over Moishe.
Behind us, the stomping bootfalls and shouting of the Spanish. The clatter of metal blades. A quick glance back and we could see the dim lights of their lanterns’ crooked progress. They could read Moishe’s bushwhacked path. A red carpet through the green. He had made it easier for them to catch him.
And then?
We’d seen how they forged compliance, how they punished resistance.
They cut off hands, pressed steaming pokers into eyes. Flayed, racked, and sliced. And that was better than what they did to Los Indios.
Moishe turned and slogged through the fetid gizzard of a swamp. Oozy shmutz creamed his thighs and thousands of insects stung his skin. I was spared the shmutz, but I, too, was the nosh of bugs. Constellations of irritation and pain formed over me as if I’d dived into a Tabasco vat and my body vibrated with sting. Moishe dunked down into the swamp, taking cover in the clotted water behind a fallen tree.
I found the dark crook of a nearby tree.
So. Those were pearls that were his eyes.
A broch.
I’d blinded the parrot without thought. Fight or flight. I could do both. If there was a playbook, I hadn’t just stepped outside the text, I was thousands of miles beyond the margin. So far that I’d come around the other side to the very beginning of the game itself.
An eye for an eye.
Or two eyes for treachery.
The Spanish marched forward. Moishe’s trails had disappeared, but desire imagines paths though the thicket, even when none exists. They tromped forward toward where we weren’t.
We did our best to continue to not be there.
We waited for a few hours, then Moishe crawled from the swamp, a slime-covered Golem born from the ooze. The dawn sun, too, shlumped out of the star-bit night and we crept through the gloom. The shriek of monkeys and the thrilling of morning birds. The rainforest waking, beginning its workday with this racket.
Nifter-shmifter, what does it matter, as long as you make a living?
In the distance, a warm breeze and a brightness. We were near shore. We continued forward, listening for the Spanish.
I flew ahead on reconnaissance.
Gornisht. Nothing. We were safe.
Moishe crept from the trees and onto the sand. He was coated in a crust of algae, a woodwose, a greeneh, a vilder Yid of the woods.
And one who was so tired he could plotz.
He collapsed on the shadowy sand beneath a fruit tree. We noshed on the flesh of fallen fruit, soft, overripe and dribbling, and thought only of a warm bath.
Then we slept.
For an afternoon or a day, who knew, but we woke in an instant.
“Hei!” the voice said. “Hei, hei!”
I dove into the air, took refuge on a branch out of cutlass range. Moishe vaulted to his feet, crouched in fighting position, and drew the sword he didn’t have.
His only weapon: chutzpah.
Before us stood the three beguiling young crones who had attempted to entrap us. The now blind parrot rested on the shoulder of the most bountiful. They, too, did not appear to be armed with anything beyond surprise and the sorcerous terror with which they had just turned our spines into gliver human jelly.
“Put the sword down,” the first one said, as if Moishe were brandishing anything but air.
Moishe’s hand dropped to his side. He face rested but his eyes scanned the beach for means of escape. Not for nothing was he the Yam Gazlen, the elusive Yiddish scourge of the Indies.
“Zorg zich nit. Don’t worry,” the second said.
“You have your health,” said the third.
“And we have killed the governor, Panfilo de Narváez,” said the first.
“Eyn toyt iz far im veynik—iz far im veynik,” said the parrot.