Sanky Panky Pirate BOOK PREVIEW

Pickup Line 1: Avaste me beauty! Prepare to be boarded!

Santiago charged me, expecting to run me through. But I lithely dodged his attacks. Jab. Evade. Slash. Evade. Stab. Evade. Santiago lunged his sword forward and watched it go over my shoulder-

I spun sideways and delivered a sidekick to Santiago’s stomach.

“Oof!” My brother staggered backwards and gave me a shocked look. Santiago charged me again, holding his cutlass in both hands and brought it down at me in a high downwards slash.

I didn’t move and I’m sure my brother was regretting his hasty actions and thinking to himself that he’d really end up slicing his own brother in two. However-

[TIME OUT. HIT THAT PAUSE BUTTON.]

I’m really getting ahead of myself. Aren’t I? I should really start this story at the beginning. And I guess the real beginning would be the day I was born…

I was born on a windward island in the Caribbean called Dominican Republic in the town called Cabarete Village. The day I was born was unlucky. A hurricane was passing through Dominican Republic and leaving your home was not only dangerous but impossible. I mean, the wind was blowing so hard cows were flying through the air. My mother Esperanza – an exotic island woman with tanned skin, long, wavy, black hair and eyes that resembled onyx stones – sent for the local doctor, a man named Dr. Julian to come once she had gone into labor, but he was unable to leave Cabarete Hospital because of the hurricane.

The only other person who was there to assist my mother during childbirth, however, was my barbaric, gringo, pirate father apparently. He didn’t know the first thing about childbirth but somehow my mother managed to safely deliver me into this world…

My umbilical chord still needed to be cut and there were no scalpels available, and so not knowing what else to do my father whipped out his machete and cut my umbilical chord with it before my mother could stop him. My mother, of course, had a fit:

“Franco! What do you think you’re doing waving that dangerous weapon around in front of your own son like that?! He could be hurt!” Esperanza exclaimed.

But Franco just chuckled. “Me son won’t be hurt so easily. Blimey! Look how he’s grabbed onto me machete and won’t let go!”

Esperanza looked down at her baby boy and her eyes widened when she saw that it was true and that I was gripping the blade of the machete with my bare hand and giggling. My mother promptly passed out from the sight.

“This lad of mine has balls of steel!” My pirate father chuckled uproariously at the fact that even though he was waving a machete at me I didn’t cry. “I’m going to call him Machete!”

And that’s apparently how I ended up with a cliché name like Machete.

Sometime not long after that my father departed the Dominican Republic…never to return again. My pirate father had abandoned my mother and had chosen his first love: the sea. Because of this I decided I hated pirates. My mother told me that father had probably been killed either in a sea battle against a merchant ship he was trying to plunder or perhaps the Sea Forces had finally caught up with him. Once, my mother slipped up and told me that Father had a bounty of one thousand pieces-of-eight on his head. An unheard of bounty. It made me wonder sometimes, just who was my father, really? 

[FASTFORWARD]

Okay, so I grew up. People grow up whether they want to or not. Before I knew it I had somehow managed to survive to the age of twelve. Even with the hard time my Mother had raising me by herself when I was twelve I was dirt poor. I was also a limpiabotas – a shoeshine boy. I would go into town and shine the shoes of rich gringo merchants for about one real. Merchants would come to the DR on galleons in order to resupply before practically fleeing to the next island.