A/N: Things are a mess at home right now, and this chapter may not have come off as good as it could have, but I am still hacking away. This is the last chapter of this part of the two inept pirates' first stage after their escape. I have some nasty little things in store for them coming up. And Mullroy and Murtag will be returning soon.

My thanks go out to my wonderful readers. You keep me going. Thanks to PeiPei, Catgirlutah, and Blacklabel for reading consistently. And thanks, Bill for actually leaving reviews.

Chapter 20: Looney Tooney

Although Marita had given Ragetti free reign to go out and get completely and utterly sloshed with his friend and his canine buddy, the one eyed pirate ended up inside, in the kitchen with the female residents. It was not to say that he would not have preferred to have joined Pintel and Lucy and their entertaining activities, that would most certainly render him unconscious before the sun sunk below the horizon. Quite the contrary were his feelings, but somehow, when the five year old came running into the kitchen with her arms full of books and that happy gleeful smile on her lips and those big wide cheerful and hopeful dark eyes, he was coerced into staying for the reading lesson to enlighten that dingy place known as his mind instead of boozing up and blowing out the candles upstairs.

Soon books were opened, various objects were put on the table, and paper, ink, and quills were placed before the tall lanky man. Estella's laughter filled the room as she tried to teach him his letters by doing show and tell. She did quite a convincing performance of a cat by meowing and rolling about on the floor. The man thought it was quite a good rendition and applauded her efforts. Marita was less enthused, especially with the amount of dirt she managed to get on her clothes from the floor.

After a couple of hours (and a tea break in there) of examples and play acting by the child, Marita decided to put some of their teachings into practice. She inked a quill and turned to her confused but eager student, who was watching her with some misgivings. Her face was passive and professional, much like the day he and Pintel had first met her, but he did not miss the favor written in her dark sparkling eyes. He watched and silently enjoyed the glint of sunlight on her smooth silken mahogany silken hair. The smell of her perfume made him smile and daydream about things that would have gotten him smacked if only she knew. Her words spoken from those cherry lips traveled into his ears, passed through without even a snack break and touched nothing tangible in between.

"What handed are you?" she asked as she held the quill out to him. "If you are left handed, this will have to wait until you are a little more healed."

His expression went blanker than the page before him, but what else was new. His brow furrowed with concentration, and his good eye moved inward to look at his nose in an ineffective effort of crossing, but it found such actions impossible without the right partner. "Uh . . .?" he answered intelligently, "I don't know. I ain't ne'er tried to write an'thing 'fore now."

A frown crossed the bakery mistress' face, but her eyes were still bright and giving. She sighed exasperated. "Which is your dominate hand?" Confusion continued to parade happily across his face. Chagrin presented itself to the woman. He was making this harder than it should have been. His brow furrowed with thought. There had to be something that he could relate to that she could say in front of her daughter. "Which hand do you shoot your pistol with?"

"I di'n't shoot last night," he replied defensively.

She blew out a breath with more disgust. She wanted to smack him now. Never again would she try to teach the brain dead, she promised herself. "If you were to shoot, which hand would you use?" she inquired with forced patience.

"Uh . . ." he answered, as he scratched his head in thought. The roots of his golden hair were smoldering with the effort. "The right one!" he exclaimed joyfully as the answer came to him in a flash. He wiggled his long fingers of the empty right hand. His appendage did not remain empty for long. Marita put the quill into the dancing fingers. Confused puzzlement crossed Ragetti's paling face, as he wrapped his fingers around the quill like one would a stick or a door handle.

"I want you to write your name," she ordered him, "Estella and I have spent the best part of four hours showing you letters, teaching you their sounds, and showing you the words on the page. Your turn. Show me what you have learned."

"I don't remember all those letters! There were an awfully lot of them!" he answered defensively, as his cheeks turned a brilliant shade of red against his dead white pale face.

"Try," she insisted gently. He bit his lower lip and trembled. He should have paid more attention to her words and her teaching than her cleavage. "I won't make fun of you, I promise. I am asking you to do something kind of hard for the first time, but I think it would be something special to you and you would remember it better. Besides, it is something practical. Just your first name is alright for now. 'Ragetti' will take more practice."

Ragetti swallowed down the growing lump in his throat. He really should have joined Pintel, Lucy, and that bottle of rum outside. He knew what he was doing on those grounds. He grasped the quill around with his fingers, and he felt a complaint from his bladder. He thought about excusing himself and not returning until he was properly sloshed.

Marita pushed back a stray lock of hair. She placed her left hand lightly on his left shoulder, and with her delicate right hand, she positioned his fingers around the writing instrument the proper way. The butterflies came out of their hiding and fluttered about his stomach and began to move up his esophagus.

After several frustrating minutes, she finally got him to write something in an unsteady hand. He spelled out "T-O-O-N-E-Y". She smacked her forehead with the palm of her opened hand. She shook her head and decided to give up for the day. Besides, it was drawing on time for dinner. Estella gathered up the books and ran off to put them away.

"I guess me da were right. I'm too daft to learn an'thing fancy," the pirate spoke quietly, as his shoulders drooped.

Marita paused in her gathering of the food for the evening meal and looked at him. She sighed and put the stuff down on the table before him and shook her head. She had been too harsh on him. She knew it.

"You are doing alright. I'm just an impatient teacher. The lesson seems very easy to me, but I have been able to read and write for more than 20 years, and Estella already knows so much, but I have been teaching her for quite some time now, and it is almost like walking and talking for her. You are a bit older and set in your ways. I shouldn't be so discouraged with you nor should I discourage you. You were kind of close." She paused and took up the quill, that Estella had left behind and dipped in the inkwell. She wrote out his name under his attempt as "T-O-N-Y", He looked at it and smiled brightly. "So," she added, "No self pity and no talking yourself down. Enough of all of this and help me get dinner together, Tooney," she smirked.

His cheeks puffed up and turned some amazing shades of red, as he looked down. She placed a hand under his chin and forced his face upwards to look at her. A pleasant smile played across her lips. "I know," she confessed, "I promised not to make fun of you, but it is a funny sounding word. You were close."

His frown disappeared, although his face remained terribly flushed. She let him go, and he took the vegetables that she had brought him. He cleaned and chopped them up with minimal use of his left hand. It was harder than it looked to keep his left shoulder still all the time. He never realized how useful that arm and hand were until he had limited use of it. Once he had finished, and Marita had smacked him in the head four times for flipping peas at Estella, he was told firmly to go and find that lowlife Pintel and Lucy and get them out of whatever trouble the older man had gotten them into.

Ragetti had no trouble in finding his partner of many and various crimes, and the picture was not a pretty one to paint. Since Pintel went out the back door, he and the dog had disappeared into the greenery, that the two pirates had found upon their escape from the Royal Navy. Ragetti found Lucy unconscious, tangled, and suspended from the ground by a couple of feet in growing vines. The one eyed man cocked his head and stared at the scene before him, and he tried to figure out how the dog got himself into such an interesting position and such a tie of limbs, but it was beyond him, and he had used his brain too much that day. In a messy sort of way, scattered through the growth of greenery and trees, were pieces of Pintel's clothing. The younger pirate followed his friend's clothing to find the man in the flesh. The squat older man was sprawled out in a compromising position and butt naked on a bed of moss. Needless to say, when Pintel woke up tomorrow, he was going to have a nasty sunburn in a delicate place, and he was likely to have weed poisoning where the sun don't shine. A good part of Ragetti was quite glad that he was safe in the kitchen when all this happened, and then again, another part of him was rather jealous that he had missed out on being stupidly drunk and doing equally stupid things.

The younger pirate sighed, fetched two buckets of water, one at a time, and unceremoniously gave each of his friends a cold bath and a rude awakening. Lucy struggled awake and went flying and not exactly gracefully from the vine entanglement. Ragetti was aware enough and fast enough to avoid being squashed by the giant dog.

Pintel did not take his bath too well either. The older pirate sputtered and spewed some interesting comments, and he called Ragetti some equally interesting things, that weren't exactly true, given that Ragetti hadn't seen his mother since he was 14, and he would never think about doing such things to her. The other name was more accurate of Lucy. Grumbling and collecting his clothes, Pintel followed his friend back into the bakery.

Dinner went on without a hitch, and since the moon was still a bit on the full side, the pirates weren't too keen on going carousing about. So, they got to bed at a somewhat reasonable hour, and they looked like they may have been on this side of the living for a change on Monday morning, despite being a bit hung over. One could not ask for a miracle. Marita had cut Ragetti's chores down significantly, because she didn't want him messing his arm up further. This brought many and various complaints from Pintel. The bakery mistress turned on him and casually kneed him to shut him up. While the older man crawled into a ball of pain, Marita helped the tall man setup his afternoon chores of watching the baking and minor cleaning up of things in the kitchen.

Estella got a special job, too. Marita still had her shopping to do, and since she could not get the child to stay away from the two scallywags while she was gone, she found the perfect job for her. Pintel, for all his flaws, was still the best to take care of the front and the customers. So, the little girl's special assignment was to sit up front and help the older pirate do his job properly by keeping his mouth in order and his hands out of other people's pockets.

"I don't need no baby sitter!" he complained loudly, "And especially not a baby one!"

Marita turned on him with that cool smirk on her lips. "If you act the puerile, you will be treated like a baby."

"Madam, there is nuttin' pure 'bouts me!" he insisted.

"I believe that one for a change," she commented as she left the bakery.

The bakery was exceptionally busy, because news and rumors flew around at the speed of the wind in a hurricane through the town. Many people had that morbid need to see the place where the raiding pirates were shot down. They wanted to see the brave heroes of the fight and the remaining blood stains. Of course, like any story or tidbit of news, things were blown out of proportion, and somehow Pintel became a brave warrior hero, who bare handedly took on six armed pirates, who held the mistress and the child captive. This wasn't to say that Pintel didn't help embellish these stories further.

Ragetti's part was muddled about, too. Sometimes the man was said to have hid behind the counter while the others fought, while other stories told of his grand cunning in rescuing the woman and the child from the kidnappers. Either story made him draw that blank look and blush terribly, and he shrunk back to the kitchen to return to his chores and his reading lessons.

Although fond of basking in his own glory, Pintel was glad to be done with the day. This wasn't to say that he didn't help the customers out of the store rather forcefully. Lucky for all involved, Marita returned early enough to close down shop for the evening and give the older man a couple of hours of relief. Estella just continued to bustle around as usual, and the customers were entertained by the cute little urchin.

Neither man needed much coaxing to go to bed early, although Pintel had procured four separate dates for the evening. He just couldn't break any of those precious ladies' hearts by saying "no". Nevermind he stood them all up. Oh well, he always knew he was a heartbreaker. Although Marita did not approve of her help socializing on the job in this manner, she had to admit the man's pockets were clean and she was pleased with the day's progress. Pintel and Ragetti both received an extra bottle of rum for a job well done.

Although business slowed down after the first week, things went well for the following couple of weeks. The men went back to getting sloshed on Friday night, but they managed to get back home Saturday night. Although Ragetti had a hangover that would have killed the average man. he was up and about on Sunday afternoon for his reading lessons. At some point in time, he got the gist of it all, and he made some real progress, but his glory was short lived. In four weeks time, something happened that changed the daily routine the two men had fallen into.