Free Orphan Pirates of the Spanish Main by Dennis Danvers

 
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    When asked about his own childhood by his children, Dad would say something like “I was a galley slave on a pirate ship, and we sailed the Spanish Main!” I doubt my dad knew anything about any kind of ship or even where the Spanish Main was exactly. He just liked the way it sounded stringing the words together. I don’t think they even had galley slaves on pirate ships, certainly not in the early twentieth century when Dad was a kid, but none of that mattered in the least when Dad made a story of something.
    He was once attacked by a herd of wildebeests while mowing the grass, when they mistook the new riding lawn mower for a Land Rover on safari and made a perfectly understandable preemptive strike. He emerged unscathed, but Mom’s newly planted shrubbery, part of a brief but passionate fling with horticulture, was mowed down in the melee, and the mower’s blade was busted, so Dad never had to ride the damn thing again. He preferred his reel. It took him a dreamy afternoon to mow the grass, the blades sighing and clattering.
    The puppy he brought home from his travels had been rescued from a space capsule in New Mexico and might be a Russian cosmonaut, an alien, or—my favorite—Top Secret, which explained why she was more intelligent and loving than all other dogs. We named her Natasha—we were all big Rocky and Bullwinkle fans. At the end of her miraculous life, Dad buried her in the backyard, knelt and cried over her late into the night. I fell asleep at my windowsill watching him, crying too. I grew up thinking crying was okay if you felt like it.
    He was raised in a boarding school for gifted salesmen—the campus looked like a string of motels—where he was taught how to drive all over hell and half of Georgia, pad his expense account, and tell every joke ever told that couldn’t be told in front of me and my brother. Well, he’d say . Maybe just one. Just sort of dirty. Mom, giggling, told him not to, which alerted us we were about to hear something good. When you’re hearing about some woman stuck in a toilet on her wedding night, a plumber on the way to rescue her, you don’t press for details about the storyteller’s childhood.
    Which version of his childhood? There were several to choose from. These are just salesmen’s samples, not for resale. He never told us the truth. Or if he did, it was buried under so much bullshit, you couldn’t find it with a whole army of pirates and farmers’ daughters. He didn’t want to tell us, plain and simple.
    He wasn’t always like that. If I really needed to talk to him about something serious—which comes up more often when you’re single digits than you might think—he dropped the bullshit and listened like no one else.
    I finally asked Mom. I had too many ideas running around in my head of these different kids Dad had been to keep them straight, like his life was three or four crazy movies all mashed up together. I imagined my favorites. Abbott & Costello meet Fred Astaire and Frankenstein East of Eden. I knew some of them weren’t true, couldn’t be true, that he was just pretending, but I didn’t always know, and I didn’t know which ones might be true, which little boy I could imagine myself being, because more than anything in the world, I wanted to be like him.
    Turns out none of them were him. Young Master Smoke and Mister Mirrors. Who might you imagine he was? Who would you like him to be? Pick one of those. Who he really was, like Natasha’s mysterious origins, was classified. I’ve come to believe he was an alien who had taken on human form—Mom too—and that made me and my brother essentially aliens too, but that’s not what she told me.
    â€œYour father was an orphan,” Mom said. “He grew up in a Catholic orphanage. He doesn’t like to talk about it.”
    I often wish she hadn’t said that last part because