Credit goes to the giant corporation with many hungry lawyers.

Centuries after finding the Fountain of Youth, Jack Sparrow sets his eyes on an extremely useful "ship."

As Time Goes By

It's still the same old story.

Kyle couldn't believe they were actually going to do it.

It was night, a quarter-moon for thief-light, all quiet on the grassy airfield and his father's ancient fighter planes; at the river, the geese on the docks huddled with their necks tucked in; trucks on the freeway rushed past steady and calm. He paced the driveway, one hand gripping a remote control. Behind the quiet house, reared the sail-like tail of a much larger bird, the retired pirate hawk Tonga Mars. Kyle's target.

Two weeks before, Jack Sparrow had first dropped off the highway to see Bonny and Ned's Air Museum and Antique Emporium, striding right past the fence that guarded the Sopwith Camel, the Jenny, the Corsair, and the Hellcat, to a sun-bleached Tiki bar where a drowsy figure in a splotchy button-down slumped with his back to the road, reading about medical maggots in a back issue of Surgical Innovation. At the crunch of boots on gravel, the shirt stood up, pushed lank brown hair off a bony white forehead, and blinked hooded blue eyes at the visitor.

"Tap a fifty, lad," Jack had demanded, delicately extending a counterfeit bill to be changed and leaning close enough to the tall young man's collarbone to cow him with his breath. Kyle, backpedaling, had hurriedly obliged, and Jack had signed the guest book under the bar with a scrawl and a curlicue and swaggered toward the riverbank, leaving his would-be docent at the admission stand.

The sleeper at the docks dwarfed the house twice over: a gorilla-browed cliff of a nose, broken at the pinnacle by a crazed bubble of canopy; smooth flanks rising sheer to a perfunctory curve over the back; wing-floats like war canoes; a tail like a second plane; all squat and blocky and awkward and up-stretched—except for those wings: long, even, albatross wings, shaped to lift that cargo freighter of a fuselage. Every spring, two busloads of high-schoolers stood shoulder-to-shoulder on those wings for the most dramatic class photo on the West Coast.

"Hullo again," Jack muttered. "Black doesn't suit you at all."

The flying boat still wore the black paint he'd left her in—night camouflage, applied for practical reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with nostalgic sentiment of any kind—with the showmanly addition of a Jolly Roger dangling under her shoreward wing. A plain polyester Jolly Roger, not his personal flag.

"Would you like to hear the history of the legendary pirate plane Tonga Mars?" asked Kyle from his shoulder. "Perhaps a brochure?"

Jack waved off the pamphlet. "Tell me, laddie—is this ship in working order?"

"The engines are still there," said Kyle, surprised. "Dad drained all the fluids and stripped out the hoses—better to preserve it, you know."

Jack frowned.

"Dad's always wanted to fly it," Kyle said. "But we…so far, we, uh, lack the funds." Funds, indeed—to fill her tanks would cost more than Kyle's car was worth.

"Legend'ry, eh?" asked Jack, brightening. "Whatever for?"

Kyle huffed in relief—he didn't like awkward questions from people in giant leather hats who looked like they slept in bus stations and drank vodka for breakfast—and followed the tourist down the dock into the cavernous fuselage: two decks of fiercely echoing steel rooms, tall ceilings knotted with pipes and struts, bulkheads crusted in rust and raunchy graffiti drawings. Fluorescents flickered above the light from the sparse portholes, and display cabinets stood at each wall. With little hope to fly again, Tonga was a museum ship.

"Tonga Mars is the one—the only—military aircraft ever captured and flown by sea robbers," he recited in his slick, tour-guide's patter. "The JRM Mars series was commissioned by the United States Navy in 1943 as a long range transport aircraft that could land at any seaport, carry massive cargo loads, and cross the Pacific on a single fueling. She stands forty-eight feet from keel to tail, one hundred twenty feet long, with a two hundred foot wingspan. Only seven planes were built—"

"Skip to the next part," said Jack, trying to examine the walls through the protective shields of Plexiglass that Bonny and Ned had installed. The interior had been hung with memorabilia: some cheesy costume bits, like a plastic chest of what appeared to be chocolate gold coins, some original equipment and personal items that had come with the plane, and some vintage Tommy guns that Jack wished had come with the plane, had they only had the ammunition. He was annoyed to see that the disco ball had survived.

"The next part?" asked Kyle.

Jack turned away from the wall. "The part where it happens," he explained, exasperated.

"Um," said Kyle, having lost his place. "While lying at anchor in Tokyo Bay, the Tonga was hijacked—"

"Cut out," Jack corrected him.

"No. Hijacked."

"You ever sail a ship, lad? Trust me for the fine points."

"I've never sailed a ship," said Kyle through gritted teeth, "but I fly two planes."

Jack, though shorter, continued to stare down his nose at him.

"This is a plane," said Kyle, seeing his point had been lost.

"And a ship," Jack cut in, sweeping his hands in. "Ships, our podgy friend being—generously—one," he began, with a gingerly wave around the walls, "and planes, are hijacked when there is, corporeally, a sorry jack at the helm or in the cockpit—cockpit for Podgy, like a plane—sorry—" to the ship, "to whose protesting corpus the jacking may be done to. Cut out is a little fleet of boats running up with guns and knives and pistols and wrenching the sleeping vessel from her homely berth—which was what was done."

Kyle sucked in a breath through his nose. "You're absolutely right," he allowed, as Jack led him up the steep stairway to the upper deck and the glassed-off, but intact, bridge.

"What'dyou expect? I'm Captain—er—John Smith. Continue."

"TheTonga was 'cut out' of Tokyo Bay in 1953, and over the next eighteen years, was implicated in nearly one hundred pirate attacks in every major sea."

Kyle went on to describe the Tonga's more notable exploits—the oil tanker, Cairo, the Chinese destroyer, the South African secretary of state—"Skip the destroyer," Jack ordered—and closed with the bizarre circumstances of her capture: crewed solely by Marshal Islanders in banana-leaf kilts, she had landed in Guam, and she and her operators were taken into Naval custody when they attempted to purchase gasoline with rupees. The captain—

"I was wondering when you'd get to 'im."

The captain, a mysterious character who styled himself 'Jack Sparrow' after the famed eighteenth century pirate—

"Do tell."

Kyle was not an expert in eighteenth century piracy—just planes, medicine, and mammalian taxidermy.

The captain was never found, and the plane—

"Ship."

The ship lingered in a boneyard for a while, then found its way to Ned and Bonny through their begging and pleading, and with the help of several high-ranking naval friends Ned had made before he retired.

"And here it is," Kyle concluded.

"And you are sure," Jack demanded, pushing himself away from the transparent wall he'd been leaning on, "that nothing sensitive is missing?"

"Not unless we had a break-in."

Jack made a last inspection, from stem to stern—nose to tail—darting sidelong, evaluative glances at Kyle. At last he pranced casually back to shore, Kyle following until they returned to the ticket stand.

"Would you like to see our other vintage aircraft? Or stop in the gift shop?" Kyle asked.

Jack halted and spun so fast Kyle nearly ran him over. "D'you have any idea," he asked, "the pounds of gold the Tonga took in? Per share?"

"No one does," said Kyle defensively. "There's no exact tally of what it took. And then they had to sell it black market—you know how that goes—"

"Yes, but do you?" Jack asked, narrowing his eyes. He looked Kyle up and down one last time, before leaning in. "Two."

He turned and headed back toward the highway, trench-coat flapping. He was halfway down the driveway before Kyle charged up after him, eyes alight, sputtering, "Two? Two pounds? Two what?"

Jack spun round again, grinning like a cat. "How'd you like to see Malacca?'

The Mars flying boats are completely real, completely humongous, and almost extinct. There's two left, out of an original six (not seven). Those last planes have been converted to waterbombers and have a snappy red-and-white color scheme. A Mars could carry seven Jeeps at once.

How'd I do?