Free Orphan Pirates of the Spanish Main by Dennis Danvers Page A

I’m one of those kids, even now, at sixty-seven, who takes things to heart, and I never asked the follow-up questions while he was around to ask. I was too busy being charmed like everybody else. Lots of aliens were planted in orphanages, old enough to know their mission, but too old to stand a chance of adoption.
    I sort of knew he was an orphan before I asked. Not having paternal grandparents was a clue, but I wasn’t the only kid without. Some kids didn’t have fathers. What’s a couple of grandparents? What I hadn’t known was that Dad never had a real home when he was little. He lived in one. He never had anybody. I wish I could’ve talked to him about it. Who knows? Maybe he did too. There’s a whole lot of things I don’t like to talk about with anyone, I would talk about with my dad if he were still alive.
    Like my brother, for instance. It’s like we had a different identical father. Like I said—Mister Mirrors. All my wives have said there’s no mistaking Ollie and I are brothers—the voice, the timing, gestures, sense of humor. It’s only in the trivial matters like deeply cherished beliefs where we differ. Also, I’m tall and skinny, and he’s neither, even though we have the same big blue eyes.
    We both have a passion for cooking. Dad taught us. Alien men love to cook.
    Dad told me he first learned to cook when he was playing Mr. Potato Head, in a hot steamy kitchen, and Potato said, “‘Hey, don’t you think I’d be more comfortable and appealing without this dirty brown coat on?’ One thing led to another, and before you know it, he taught me how to make perfect mashed potatoes.”
    I was making perfect mashed potatoes when he told me this. Dad had taught me how. I was standing on a stepstool, mashing. His hand was wrapped around mine to make sure I kept a good grip on the pot handle. The potholder, which had a cat on it because I loved them, was battle-scarred, with singed edges and greasy stains, but it was mine. We bought it at the grocery store because I liked it. Dad couldn’t say no. I suspect that’s because he never had anybody to ask for anything.
    â€œWhat about gravy?” I asked. “Did Potato teach you that?” That was the lesson for the day. He was going to show me gravy. We were in a kitchen redolent with the smell of roasting beef garnished with garlic and rosemary. I had watched him truss it, snipped the twine with the massive kitchen shears when instructed, helped him insert whole cloves of garlic into the flesh.
    â€œGravy came later,” Dad said, “on a wagon train out west—somewhere between Death Valley and Tombstone. The settlers were looking for a new cook after they’d just staked the last one out on an anthill for the awful gooey lumpy gravy he made them, and buzzards were eating his eyeballs, which the settlers joked seemed to be as gummy as his gravy. Don’t believe what you see on TV. Settlers weren’t always nice. Some were so ornery, folks back home were probably begging them to leave town. Don’t believe that pioneering spirit stuff either. Most of them were just leaving some kind of mess they’d made of their lives, so that middle of nowhere was the only option left. There wasn’t a lot of singing around the campfire. Everybody was scared to take the cook’s job, so they gave it to me because I was just a kid, and they thought they could push me around.”
    â€œWhat did you do?” I asked, mashing furiously as Dad poured in a little more hot milk. Of course I asked. I was a skilled straight man by the time I was in first grade. Turns out—my favorite part—he went out in the moonlight in the desert, away from all the cranky settlers, where a lizard not unlike the chameleon I got at the State Fair of Texas only weeks before turned into an Indian shaman who taught him how to make the best gravy in the world on a campfire