SHE-BAD the SAILOR - Part One of Two  
By HENSPURS 
Sinbad Jr.'s brawny daughter prepares to battle a terrible family curse due to strike. 


Prologue:

"Morning, Cap'n Hardtack!"

"Mornin', She-bad. The rum's comin' up. Have a seat."

The NO ONE UNDER 21 sign just inside the open door of Hardtacks' tavern didn't
mean much.

She-Bad, even at the age of nine, came in regularly to hear sea-stories,
arm-wrestle and pick up her pa's rum. Hardtack didn't make a fuss about
selling rum like that; he knew her old man was just sending She-bad on an
errand he couldn't run himself.

In the broad, age-stained mirror behind the bar, She-bad saw herself. Tall,
good shoulders, long limbs. And topping it off, that head of dark red hair.
Coarse, but neat.

For all Hardtack's 300 lbs, she could now beat him at arm-wrestling.

Beachcomber Barnes, with his fleshly leg on the floor and his peg-leg
incongruously propped on a table, sat snoring until the wind slammed the
shutters. "Say, look who's come in! Ye get bigger ev'ry time I see ye. Ye
still got my old book, Hardtack? Show this woman-child her pa."

"I know what my pa looks like, Beachcomber."

"Oh, ye do, do ye? Heh!" Beachcomber got up, and soon all three people were
clustered at the bar. Beachcomber licked his lips and threw open the huge old
photo album.

A green feather served as a bookmark.

"That...that's my pa? Him?" She-bad looked on in disbelief.

She had never seen any photographs or drawings of her father in his youth.
Yes, there was some resemblance. It was an eerie feeling to see a man whom she
had always known as frail to be on his feet and looking so robust.

"There's gotta be one of his wife in here, somewheres..."

"Tchh! Sinbad Jr. never married...." Beachcomber put on his best "Oops" face.

Hardtack shot him a look to drive home the point about not blabbing.

"Very beautiful woman, your ma was," Beachcomber said at last. "Very devoted
to your pa. Never left him. 'til you was borned."

That bit of news was bittersweet to She-bad.

Image after image. The eerie feeling turned to one of awe and pride. But then
the creepy sensation returned. Angry scribble marks were on many of the
photographs and some of the snapshots were cut in half or torn. She-bad
recognized these defacements as attempts to cover up something.

Or someone. Whoever had been cut out or obliterated was small. She-bad had a
feeling it was a small child.

"That can't be me!" She-bad said, betrayed.

"No, She-bad, not you. It's..." Hardtack didn't finish. He closed the album
and withdrew it from She-bad's reach, nesting the book behind the counter.

"Ye mean to say this woman-child don't know...?" Beachcomber sputtered. Then
he went dead silent.

He looked straight into She-Bad's eyes. "If your pa ain't told you about his
youth, I got no business at all...nor you, neither, Beachcomber...spinnin'
yarns and seein' things that very likely he don't want no one 'ceptin' himself
to reveal."

PART ONE:

Lightning sparked the dark sky, but She-bad had just turned thirteen and she
had never feared the sight of those sudden, angry flashes or the war-like
booms of thunder that followed. Somehow, in a way she didn't understand, those
outbursts were in her makeup. Being out in the storm agreed with her
profoundly.

With her father feeling so low and bleak lately, She-bad made a mental note
not to stay out too long.

They had redundant and reliable generators---she and her father lived in a
lighthouse after all---but everything in the world had a limit at which it was
bound to fail.

A strange, echoing squawk like a parrot laughing ran across the wet sky.
Strange to think of anything other than seabirds and waterfowl out in such
weather.

Given that the lightning was so frequent, her father might be having a hard
time of it; his heart wasn't what it used to be. Loud noises, even ones he
knew about, frightened him. And then there was his insistence that he was
being haunted. He swore he heard voices in the dead of night, always turning
resentful when she didn't hear the same thing. How many times had She-Bad had
to tell him:

"I'm not deaf, Pa! I just don't hear the voices you're talking about. I would
never tease you like that!"

People said she was allergic to technology. She-bad never had a phone of her
own and hated, absolutely hated using the landline at the lighthouse or even
the radio. She also didn't have a car or want one. If she had a message or
something she wanted to deliver, she ran. Life outside the little community
she lived in held no interest for her.

But it was on a day like this she first met Hump. She had saved his delivery
job, his van and his life when the seaside road dropped out right in front of
him. She-bad hefted a boulder and rolled it under the truck, keeping the
wheels off the ground while inside, Hump desperately shoved all the cargo that
had slid forward against the seats back until the van balanced. She-bad pulled
the van back from the tilting section of pavement before it dropped into the
water.

Boyishly, she wore suspenders, the straps aligned on either side of her
jutting bust. Her pa said she looked much better with suspenders than a belt.

Hump, upon stepping on shaky legs from the rescued van, looked at her waist,
expecting a belt. Their relationship began awkwardly, but it stood the test of
time and She-bad rarely looked at another guy. The near-death experience
hadn't put Hump off of driving. He became a local. Not accidentally, the two
saw a lot of each other over the years.

Today, his little delivery truck scooting along the sea front highway was
doing a brisk fifty miles per hour on the straightaway.

It made the same run every Friday. Tomorrow was her birthday. Seventeen. And
she still wasn't interested in taking a driving lesson.

She-Bad, out for her morning jog, easily kept up with the truck as she ran
parallel to the highway, sometimes losing sight of the road, but never
breaking her stride. The yellow delivery truck was unmistakable; she knew she
wasn't looking at a different truck when it and the roadway came back into
view.

With an average build up to the age of seven, She-Bad, with her hair the
darkest shade of red and her eyes the color of the deep ocean, put on real
heft. She began bulking up in the arms and torso while retaining her exotic
looks. It would have been easy for her to turn awkward and lunky, but the ugly
stick missed her on every swipe except for her heroic, blocky chin which gave
her the false look of having an under bite.

She had no such deformity; her jaw was simply heavy.

Smallish feet had been her father's most embarrassing feature, and she
inherited them, along with long, sleek legs which were not the equal of her
upper body. Only her outthrust buttocks, thick thighs and generous hips leant
her the feminine shape she aspired to. She followed her father's fashion of
wearing blue pants with cuffs that reached only to her mid-calves. She
continued to wear suspenders; the straps disappeared around the sides of her
breasts, coming back sharply to go over her massive trapezius muscles and down
her wide back.

She never wore socks.

Unaccountably out of white short-sleeved shirts when she wanted to stock up at
the store, She-Bad now insisted on pale yellow T's with a dark red long-sleeve
men's dress shirt cover-up---the tails tied snugly under her bust.

For the moment, her high breasts were firm D-cups. They heaved when she ran
wrong; She-Bad developed a smooth gait to reduce the bounce---and the jogging
bra did the rest.

Not a slave to the bathroom scale, She-Bad figured she was pushing three
hundred pounds---but at six and a half feet tall at age sixteen, she could
make all that poundage look alluring. And she had more than one admirer.

She would see one of them today. See him and hint that she wanted a date. If
only father was feeling well enough that she could leave him. Or if someone
felt brave enough to come to her house. Very few felt that brave lately.

The distant parroty squawks came again, drowned out by thunder.

Now the hill. Grunting into a new gear to take on the grade, the delivery
truck growled up the slope.

Heavier than usual, She-Bad mused. He's carrying a lot this time. He's slower.
Should I wait for him, or...?

She-Bad got close enough to the truck to see the driver switch on the
windshield wipers. It was Hump "Hornblower" Clements at the wheel. Twenty-six
now and strong, he'd been to sea, but he got his nickname from his excessive
horn use when driving. Hump and her father used to talk, back when normal
conversation didn't leave the latter gasping and wheezing.

The lighthouse made Hump uncomfortable; the solid gold coins he got as bonus
money for making deliveries seemed to smooth things over. But there were
tensions.

Taking eleven yard broad jumps and high jumps to clear rocks in the terrain,
she beat Hump's truck to the summit, as usual, pocking the ground with
footprints.

The lighthouse, formidable and red-striped, loomed into view. She sprinted for
the driveway and did a few laps around the fifty acre plot on which the
lighthouse was built.

Hardly winded, She-Bad waited for the truck to pull up.

As usual, the truck made a delivery here. Oxygen bottles for her father. He
was going through more and more of them and having to wear that ugly pale
green mask longer and longer to keep from passing out.

"Got here a little behind schedule, Hump!"

"Blew a tire on the way up," he said, indicating the sagging left rear of the
truck.

"Men..." She-bad lifted the delivery truck's rear quarter, holding the vehicle
perfectly in place until Hump could scurry and change it out for a spare.
"Now, let's get that pallet down."

When the bottle-crammed pallet was unloaded, she carried the whole thing
inside the wide front door and then toted out the empties.

Hump wore a long face as he jotted and scribbled on his clipboard full of
forms. "I haven't seen your pa in months, She-Bad. How is he?"

"He's...getting by," she lied.

"Never thought I'd hate doing business with Sinbad Jr.," Hump said with a
sigh. "But all this oxygen. His order has tripled in a year. That can't be
good. The old timers remember when nothing could stop him."

"Oh, those are just stories." She-bad felt dishonest about saying that, given
all the time she had spent at Hardtack's over the years, listening to total
strangers talk about Sinbad Jr. battling pirate crews, sea-dragons, giant
savages and unstoppable war machines.

"He doesn't want anyone telling you tales about his glory days," Hump said,
"I'm sworn to secrecy. But from what I gather, some others were not.
Beachcomber Barnes must have rattled off a lot before he died."

Taking a look at the empty medical oxygen tanks, he added a wrinkle or two to
his frown. "But he'd better get around to telling you those tales pretty
soon."

Hump stowed his clipboard and papers and opened the door of his truck.

"Pa says he's being haunted." She-bad found herself drifting closer to Hump.

"That could be," the delivery man said in a low voice.

Thunder boomed.

"Can't someone, someone with the guts tell me what's going on? Even you, Hump.
And I thought I was falling in love with you!" She-bad stomped, putting her
narrow foot through the grass and well into the wet ground, leaving a slot.

"Promise me you won't stomp like that indoors, She-bad."

More thunder. The wind picked up.

"I thought so, too," Hump said, his voice tight with fear. "But right now,
this place is under a mighty bad spell. Haunting is the price to pay for being
smitten with the Curse of the Seven Seas. Myself, I've taken Sinbad Jr.'s
treasure as payment. I can never go to sea again. I don't even like driving
alongside it. I'm scared to fly over it. There's no charm or blessing that can
counteract the Seven Seas Curse."

"I know about the S.S. Singer, his old ship," She-bad boasted. "I know about
him crushing Egoots and Rotcoddam.

I even know about the magic belt!"

Hump came to a standstill. He couldn't help it.

"She-bad, you've shaped up into more woman than I could ever have imagined.
Hell, I am in love with you. But between us is a twist of fate that's got to
be mended."

Without saying more, and taking advantage of her nearness, Hump leaned into
her huge body and kissed her. Tongues darted and slid. She-bad slid her hand
down his leg, nearing his crotch. Hump didn't retreat. She held him up in the
air and then twirled him romantically around, wishing his hair was long enough
to swirl as they turned. She drew him close again, kissing and squeezing with
undisguised lust. "What a wedding night we're gonna have, Hump!"

She would have this man, she knew that. But when. It couldn't come soon
enough. Maybe she wouldn't wait for the wedding. Beachcomber had slipped when
he said her own parents had never been wed.

"Your pa's tight-lipped, She-bad. But you're sure as hell not. If only he
himself could give you away."

But as hot the kiss had been, and despite the sight of her great, stiff
nipples making high-rise bumps at the tips of her breasts, Hump stepped back
and braced his hands on her bulging forearms. Veins slid under his grip.

"Oh, Hump. What is it?" Her ardor cooled.

"She-bad, your pa has to tell what happened to his first mate, and how you
came to be. That awful secret has been rotting in him like a sunken ship...and
he's got to tell you before he can't. Unless he does, you and I can never be
happy. The curse will see to that, She-bad. You can believe that."

"Hump Clements, if you think I'm nothing but a child, you have another thing
coming." She squeezed his bottom hard.

"Maybe I'm afraid of what you'll do me if you catch me with another
woman...but that wedding night sounds good to me if only I can find a bed that
will hold up. If your pa is feeling well, I'll stop my tomorrow...and not for
supplies.

I have something I'd very much like to ask."

She-Bad's desire reignited. "Take tomorrow off. If he says yes, you can spend
the night right here. The bed I've got is sturdy enough to hold two."

A long, hungry kiss from him and his hands roaming all over her body would
have been great just then, but after she unclenched her hand from his rear,
Hump only gave a thumbs-up and limped to his truck. In another minute, he was
on his way back to town.

Hours later, She-bad still couldn't relax.

The storm shortened the day. Lightning played havoc in the house; lights
flickered, the radio went in and out and odd sounds that maybe weren't the
wind ran through the walls.

She assumed her father was resting after supper.

A freak gust of wind charged through the house, blowing open a section of
wood-paneling that She-bad had never noticed or suspected as being a secret
door.

The door was just under six feet high. She had to duck as she entered. In the
flickering light of a single lamp, she beheld a splendid hidden shrine.

Maritime knick-knacks, some familiar, some not, lined the walls, but the
centerpiece was a museum-worthy wooden case with a glass top like a fairy-tale
coffin. Laid neatly within was a tiny white pullover shirt, (with tell-tale
scorches) an equally small white watchcap (ratty), a tiny corncob pipe
brown-stained with old tobacco, and three green tail feathers. The feathers
looked like the one that had been the bookmark in Beachcomber's album. She
bent low over the glass, wondering if the clothes had belonged to a child or a
midget. One thing she knew: the little garments and other items belonged to
someone who was now dead. She wondered if she'd had a brother. And another
thing, someone was behind her.

"Well, girl," A tired, high-pitched voice came from the frame of the secret
door. A string of deep, weary coughs. "I see you discovered Salty."

"Pa!" She-bad straightened and turned.

"Or, all that I felt I should preserve of him. Salty's little grave is
thousands of miles away where he died. I couldn't bring his little body with
me. Salty wouldn't have it. He just wouldn't have it that way. He's been
haunting me, you see."

"He was...so small, Pa. Was he...your son?"

Sinbad Jr. the sailor, his thick red hair now low and thin and shot with iron
gray streaks spoke from his seat in the wheelchair.

"No. Not even human. Salty was a parrot. A little bird with green feathers. We
went on every adventure together."

"Pa, I know I shouldn't be in here."

"No. You're the right age now. A year ago, I wouldn't have let you know about
this place. I wouldn't have let you go near it. But you've got to know. About
the past. The glory

days. You must have heard the townsfolk talk."

"How old are you, Pa?"

"Twenty-seven." Sinbad Jr. slumped. Gray locks of hair fell over his wrinkled
forehead. "I sinned, you see. Salty was right about that. He put the curse on
me! Because I misused he magic belt...."

The old sailor withdrew a ragged strip of fabric from under his lap blanket
and held it up.

"Pa, what was this thing? Is this...THE belt?"

Cold, wet wind swirled in the room.

"Salty? Salty, if you're here with us, please give me time. You've got to give
me more...time." Winded from raising his voice, Sinbad Jr. leaned his head
back and gasped.

He fumbled for his small oxygen mask and covered his face.

She gingerly reached out her hand. It was THE belt. But something had
destroyed the leather from within, not from the outside. The buckle was a
twisted, blackened nugget of metal, impossible to determine.

Parrot laughter filled the room, echoing in the dark as the lights went out.
The lightning cracked outside, close enough so that they could both hear the
sizzle. Then the thunder rattled the house to its foundations.

She-bad wasn't afraid. "Pa. You have to tell me what happened. No more
waiting. No more delaying. I'm not going to hear about my beginnings from a
hundred different people in the town...I want to hear it from you. I want to
hear everything."

She stamped her foot, making the house shake again. The lights leaped up,
driving back the darkness. In the orange and black of the secret room, the
ghostly parrot laughter came again.

Taking a deep drag of his oxygen, Sinbad looked around the room, eyes wide.

"What does this all mean, Pa?"

"No time to...tell you the whole thing, but the magic belt was something else!
And there were rules. I broke 'em.

I was young. My passion...was too fierce for me...to control. I was used to
getting my own way. There are two things that...I knew damned well I should
never try when I was wearing the belt..."

Sinbad Jr. held up two crooked fingers. "TAKE a life. And the other...was MAKE
a life."

"Make a life...you mean ME? Pa, do you mean me? Pa? Pa, answer me! The curse!
How do I counteract the curse?"

The oxygen bottle with its breath mask fell to the floor, hissing. "Help her,
Salty. Help..."

She retrieved the fallen bottle, held it to his face and hoped for the best
while expecting the worst. "How, Pa?

Don't go before you tell me! Don't you go, Pa!"

Sinbad Jr. lowered his hand, never to raise it again.

PART ONE OF TWO