Jolly Roger
Admiral Biscuit
There was a rhythm to life in Ocean City. If she thought about it in a literary sense, it was the same metaphor repeated: the ocean’s tides came in and they left. So to did the tourists, and everything that was associated with them. Or maybe it was best to think more of an agricultural metaphor: in the wintertime, the city lay fallow. In the spring, they prepared the beaches for the tourist crop . . .
Corduroy wasn’t exactly a literary pony. She stood by the front door of her apartment complex in the false dawn and waited patiently until a familiar pickup truck pulled into the parking lot.
It stopped by the entrance and the door unlatched; Corduroy reached up and pulled the door open and then hopped inside.
They’d long since passed the point of needing greetings or filler conversations; they were co-workers headed to a usual day at work. Sometimes they’d talk about sports or movies or what book they’d been reading—Juan enjoyed detective novels and she liked Sci-Fi.
Juan said that reading had helped him with English, and she agreed. It didn’t help with figuring out how to speak the words, but it was good for spelling and grammar.
He motioned to the radio—another unwritten rule was that if he was late, she had the undisputed right to change the station. Sometimes she took it, but there was just so much human music she hadn’t heard yet and she never knew what would pique her interest. A couple weeks ago he had a CD of Mariachi music, and that had been amazing. Nopony had ever thought of making music like that.
They stopped for breakfast at Burger King. Corduroy bought an impossible croissant and cinnamon sticks, while Juan chose an eggnormous burrito.
She didn’t like imposing on the restaurant workers, especially if there was a line, but she couldn’t help but wonder if they could make the eggnormous burrito impossible. It was big enough to be breakfast and lunch.
•••
Their breakfasts were a memory and empty wrappers by the time the truck nosed onto the Isle of Wight Bay Bridge. The commercial on the radio finished and a familiar musical hook began—Corduroy began tapping her hoof to the beat and Juan nodded.
Humans didn’t often spontaneously sing, which was a shame—there was so much music on the radio, and Juan had a great voice. Today was a good day for it; the sun was rising over the ocean, painting the world in reds and oranges, glittering off the bay. Early risers were already out on their boats, some of the hoping that the early fish would catch the worm. As the truck started the downslope to the Isle of Wight, both Juan and Corduroy were singing along with Somewhere Out There at full volume.
Today was going to be a good day.
•••
One week until tourist season. And it was pre-tourist season: Ocean City was kicking it off with a huge car show, a weekend-long parade of classic cars and hot rods. Some of the nuance of it all was lost on Corduroy, who still struggled to understand non-classic cars. There was a huge variety and some people got offended if she got their name wrong. Some of the cars passing might have been classic or they might not have.
A big cream-colored car got her attention. It was probably classic; most cars were small and roundish; this one was longer than Juan’s pickup.
It looked yacht-like.
•••
She lost sight of it when they turned into the municipal parking lot.
“No backhoe for you today,” Juan said as he parked. The weather had been favorable and they’d gotten the beach groomed early. “You and Chris are going to be putting lifeguard stands in place.”
She nodded—she’d helped with that last year. There were lots of human machines she had to get used to; pulling things into place was second-nature to her. Last year they’d struggled with the first one until she convinced Chris to tie a harness around her and then pulling it up was a simple task.
“Grab some extra rope and toss it in the truck.”
“Who gets to drive?”
Juan pulled a set of keys off the peg and tossed them to her; she caught them in her mouth. “Don’t crash the truck.”
•••
Further north, in Delaware, there were stone watchtowers that stood over the beach, castle turrets that had been built to watch for ships and submarines. The lifeguard stands were less substantial, and kept off the beach in the off-season, lest the ocean claim them as its own.
She and Chris tilted the first onto the pickup’s tailgate, tied it down, and then hopped into the cab.
They had a map of where the towers were supposed to go, and worked their way north. They could drag along behind the truck; the legs acted like the runners on a stone-boat and the truck had plenty of power to pull them.
Focus was important—the truck was faster than the backhoe, and people paid less attention to it. She already knew that people walked across the road wherever it was convenient, whether or not there was traffic, here on the beach the rules were different. People weren’t expecting a fast-moving truck and she’d be in trouble if she accidentally squished a tourist.
She only noticed the cars on the boardwalk when they were setting up the first lifeguard stand. A steady parade of them—cars were normally forbidden but apparently it was okay if they were classic cars.
Chris kept getting distracted by them—maybe that was why Juan wanted her to drive the truck.
It was kind of weird to have an entire weekend devoted to old cars. Nopony paraded their old farm wagons through town.
Maybe if they had a boardwalk, ponies would.
She’d learned how to tie the knots she needed to assemble a makeshift harness. Chris tied the rope around the armrest on the lifeguard stand and then tied it to her rope harness. She dug her hooves into the sand and started pulling; at first the lifeguard stand resisted and then it started lifting off the truck, helped along by Chris standing in the bed and pushing. Once it started moving, her work eased off, and as it got mostly upright the rope slacked as it fell into place.
It took some extra work to get it leveled—lifeguards didn’t like crooked stands—and then it was in place.
Juan could set them by using the truck to push them upright. She didn’t trust her driving skills to attempt that.
•••
By quitting time, the beach sported a nice collection of lifeguard stands, with more to install tomorrow.
Juan wanted to spend some time exploring the panoply of classic cars parading and parked, and she was in an explore-y mood. Standing on a sidewalk wasn’t her thing, but amusement parks were. A fun diversion, a perpetual party atmosphere, and all fair food was fried. That was an unwritten law, and the Jolly Roger Amusement Park was only a few blocks away.
It was a good plan, and it was foiled by the cyclic nature of Ocean City. All the fun parts of the park weren’t open just yet.
Mini-golf was, but kicking a ball into a cup—or struggling with a mini golf stick—wasn’t her thing. That was the kind of sport that would be entertaining with friends, but wasn’t a good solo sport.
Even if the rides weren’t running, she could explore parts of the park and get the lay of the land. Over by the main entrance, a crew was putting in new gravel and smoothing it out with a big ride-on roller, and she watched them work for a few minutes. Driving a car, however classic, down a street to show off didn’t have any real purpose, but the roller did, sitting in position as a crew shoveled gravel piles into place and then stood back and watched it roll over them.
The path underhoof was similar gravel, and might have been kissed by the machine’s rollers. The tourists didn’t really understand the work that went into getting everything just right for them. Next weekend when the mobs really started flocking, they wouldn’t spare a moment of consideration for the crew shoveling out all the access paths, moving a winter’s worth of sand back onto the beach proper; they wouldn’t appreciate the work she’d done tugging all the lifeguard towers upright.
But it was work that had to be done. The amusement park also needed to get ready for the spring tourists. The mini-golf course greens were fake grass, playable all year long. The walking paths were real gravel.
Corduroy still had her high-viz vest on—there weren’t any lockers at work where she could keep it, and she hadn’t thought to toss it in Juan’s truck before heading to the park. As such, she probably passed for a worker—nopony was yelling at her for not having bought a ticket, or visiting parts of the park which were currently closed.
The gravel roller could only hold her attention for so long. She gave a friendly nod to the crew and then walked off to see what else a slumbering park might have to offer.
•••
Human trains were monstrous things that shook the ground as they passed, and they stretched on nearly forever. Pony trains were smaller, but still plenty big enough to ride and haul cargo. Amusement park tourist trains were even smaller; the steam locomotive’s cab wasn’t big enough for an adult human to fit in, and she had her doubts about a human foal old enough to operate it fitting in.
Then again, it was fake.
Fake-ish. Not only did the ground need maintenance, so did the locomotive. The mechanics had quit work for the day, leaving it open for anypony to see its fakery. What should have been a fuel bunker on a steam locomotive was instead a gasoline engine, turned around backwards so its driveshaft ran forward to the locomotive drivers. She peered under it, getting sense of its workings. It was basically a truck running in reverse all the time—she wasn’t as good at inspecting her truck as her backhoe, since the truck kept much of its engine hidden under plastic covers, but what she could see on the locomotive looked conceptually similar.
Just the same, it ran on rails and it pulled cars behind it, and that qualified it as a locomotive.
Corduroy walked around it and wondered if the park might be hiring part-time locomotive engineers. It couldn't be more complicated to operate than her backhoe; it had a set of tracks to guide it, after all. It might be fun to drive a train.
Or it might be boring, since all it would do was go in circles and stop at the stations. City maintenance was an ever-changing job, from scooping snow to scooping sand to dragging lifeguard stands down the beach. Someday soon Juan was going to let her loose with the wheel loader. He’d already let her ride in the wheelhouse while he worked, and explained the controls to her. They were similar to the backhoe.
It sat higher up than her backhoe and tricked her perspective of things, but she was sure she could learn to operate it.
•••
When it came to dinner, Jolly Roger was a wash. None of the overpriced food stands were operating yet. Mothers Cantina was just across the street, though, and they had a queso black bean burrito that had an unholy amount of cheese on it and more beans than anypony should ever eat in one sitting. It cost an hour’s pay and it was worth every penny; she left with half the burrito in a sack.
•••
Big 107.7 was easy listening music for the ride home. Alice Cooper was deejaying; he came on in the evenings. She liked him, he had a good voice and lots of interesting stories to tell and he really liked ponies. Some people didn’t.
It wasn’t quite dark when Juan dropped her off at her apartment complex. The days were stretching out, they were cyclic, too.
Corduroy gave him a goodby nuzzle and grabbed her paper sack. She waited by the front door until he’d pulled out of the parking lot and then she walked up the stairs to her apartment.
After putting her leftover burrito in the fridge, she took one last look at the evening sky. The moon was over the horizon, a mere sliver, and stars were coming out. She took off her high-viz vest and hung it up, then went to bed.