My Civic doesn't really have to follow the laws of physics, so the places I drive can get rather ridiculous. But the heart wants what the heart wants, so I oblige.

******

Amadi Mengestu didn't fear the ocean like most people. He wasn't ignorant to the dangers; more than once, his skiffs broke down, caught leaks, or were shot to ribbons by marks who were better armed than he had anticipated. He had been lucky, and he had begun to believe that the ocean favored him, that it loved him as much as he loved it.

"The loot was never what motivated me most," Amadi said as he gazed lovingly at the water we were driving across. I shot him a disbelieving glare, and he got the hint.

"OK, most of the time, it wasn't what motivated me. It wasn't the violence…" Amadi trailed off, contemplating lying again, but deciding against it, "It was intoxicating."

His joyful gaze turned sour as he raised his eyes to the horizon.

"It felt…right. Here are these behemoths, loaded to the gunnels with enough grain to feed my town for a year. And most of it will…will turn to hamburger buns that will spoil on the shelves of an American grocery store!"

His hands clenched into fists as the rage erupted in his head, still as white hot as the first day he had set out in a tiny boat to take on a gluttonous giant. Such opulence, sailing only a hundred knots from the shoreline, was some kind of sick joke, he had thought. He had looked forward to showing them the joke wasn't funny.

And when the time came, he didn't fail to perform. The others had been nauseous, both from the bucking of the small craft beneath them, and from their frayed nerves. Everyone had them, but they presented their anxiety differently. For Amadi, the sheer terror of what they were about to do seemed to convert itself one-to-one into white-knuckle thrill. He would finally get to take from the swine.

******

"The others called me 'yaxaaska' after that first raid," Amadi recalled. His mind was a turbulent swirl of emotions, like churned oil that refused to mix with the sea.

He had never found adequate words to describe that day, nor the slaughter he personally committed. The exploding hammer blow of his RPK machine gun firing full-auto was still palpable in his ears and his hands. The memory of the bridge crew’s stunned visages, as they set their eyes on bits of their own viscera, felt like ice on the back of Amadi’s neck: chilling, invigorating, as thrilling as it was revulsive. 

He still held no remorse for turning the bridge into something from a nightmare, but that wasn’t to say that he regarded the memory with fondness.

“I didn’t like the nickname. Crocodiles are feral, senseless,” He said, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath of the salty air, “There were reasons for what I did.”

I grimaced as a misty spray floated in through the open windows. Me, I never was much for beaches and the humid wind. The Civic would be fine; it could handle land, water, sky and even the depths of space without so much as scratching the paint.

For Amadi, however, the ocean was like a gambling table. He had seen plenty leave that table, either turning away from the job of high-seas piracy to become beggars, or finding their final rest beneath the surface. But for those who were smart enough, who could stomach the unpredictable chaos and violence, and who were just lucky enough, there was no better way to win and win big.

“I kept them alive, you know,” Amadi said defensively, “My whole town. They survived because of what we did.”

I gave him a sidelong glance as he launched into more spirited justification.

“And not just by stealing! We protected the fishing boats, while others stole from them. We never did it for money!” 

He screamed at me like I had personally accused him of immorality. Like nearly every other criminal who rode with me, the expertise at mental gymnastics came naturally for Amadi. Those who broke the law seemed to know the power of the spoken word better than anyone else. A thank you, a cry of joy, the adoration from a young child who would not go hungry: he didn’t just need these things, he craved them. It was hard to feel guilty about anything he did when he was being celebrated for it.

“I always said I would answer for it when my time came. I suppose…” Amadi trailed off, suddenly dipping into a different emotion altogether.

******

The feeling of his mother’s hand on his cheek was not a caress, but a slap.

“God will condemn you for this,” She had told him. Her eyes, full of rage, terror and sorrow, was the foremost of the flashbulb memories that never ceased playing in his dreams.

The arguments were always the same, whether or not the outings had resulted in bloodshed. Inevitably, the conversation would turn to Amadi’s father. Amadi would scream that she was a hypocrite, as she did not condemn his father for acts of “terrorism;” and his mother would remind him that the man’s service in the ONLF was not voluntary.

The different ways people process the same event can be perplexing. For Amadi’s mother, the loss of her husband had been a moment of hellish grief, but also an opportunity. She’d never stop missing the man, but his refusal to run and insistence that they stand and fight for what little they had, died with him. Now, she and Amadi could flee, like they had needed to do all along.

But for Amadi, Mengestu Zerezghi was a name to be spoken with admiration, a patronym the son was proud to bear. His father had stood his ground in a battle he couldn’t possibly win. With his own life, he had bought time for his family to escape, like any man and soldier should do. Amadi’s mother had tolerated the boy’s hero worship during their life in Somalia, but came to regret not intervening sooner.

She would grieve again, I knew. Amadi knew it too, but couldn’t make sense of the maelstrom it created in his soul.

A smack from beneath the Civic jolted us into the air, breaking us away from the memory. Amadi didn’t seem to notice, but it got to me. Bumps in an old street were one thing, but when the ground…water itself was coming up at you, it was a different feeling. I rubbed my jaw to counter some of the weird discomfort of my teeth smashing together.

“You learn to steel your face after a time,” Amadi said, having noticed my expression.

“You might. I’m not a water person,” I retorted. Amadi shrugged.

It seemed like he was about to relax into a sailor’s trance, let the sea rock him a bit. People who spent lots of time on boats were weird like that; Death often said “the bilges of their souls filled up with seawater.” I really can’t overemphasize how dramatic and strange Death can be.

“I don’t believe God will forgive me, you know,” He said. It was a thought that had just appeared in his head.

“Yeah?”

“All of those who become weapons against the enemies of God? Blew themselves up in a crowded mosque? They fool themselves.”

“You think so?”

My question changed his face from an expression of visible pride and confidence, to one of dumbfounded confusion.

“You don’t?” He asked. Even without the ability to read his mind, I could have predicted the sermon he was preparing to convince me that he was right.

“I’m asking about you,” I replied. He deflated a bit.

“Well…yes. I actually read the Quran. We are not supposed to kill God’s children, we are supposed to save them.” It was a version of what he had intended to say before, but with less emphasis than he had planned.

“And the ones you killed on the sea?” I asked.

“What of them?”

“Some of them were Muslims, too.”

“Those were murderers. They forfeited God’s mercy.”

“And the crews of the cargo ships?”

His shoulders sagged as he leaned back into the cloth seat, which protested the extra motion with a metallic creak. Amadi’s face couldn’t decide if it wanted to sag from melancholy or scowl with derision.

“I only killed when I had to,” He said softly.

“‘And if thy Lord had willed, He verily would have made mankind one nation, yet they cease not differing,” I replied. He stayed silent; he always gave the requisite respect to the word of the prophet.

“Like I said, I don’t expect forgiveness,” He said. The faces of the ones he had murdered never left his memory. He had never grown numb to the killing; on the contrary, he counted on the visceral feeling of shock, chaos, and guilt to spur him on. It forced him to remember why he did it, like a twisted kind of sunk cost fallacy. He couldn’t have stopped being a murderous pirate who always got what he was after; even if he hadn’t killed again after that first frenzied hijacking, the stain of what he had done would always remain. Better to retain the title of the evil man, so no one else had to bear it.

“There will be others who do what you did. They will do it, because you did it. You know that,” I said. Like always, this wasn’t a judgment. It was the thought that was on the tip of his tongue, his words. I was just playing them back to him.

“It never ends, does it? The hunger, the misery…they just go on,” Amadi said, “And I have sold my soul to hold it back.”

“Unfortunately, ‘souls’ have never paid for all that much,” I replied.

This wasn’t anything new to him. The successful raids were the ones he had liked to think about, but they happened less often than the failures. Part of what had made him a “good” pirate was that he had not grown despondent when they were chased away with fire hoses and hot lead, or when they boarded a ship - and perhaps murdered its crew - to find a ship full of cargo they couldn’t move. He had lasted so long, because the overwhelming desperation had never crowded his judgment enough to make him persist when it was time to run.

And he had never given into the weight of failure. The cries of hungry infants, the shivering of elderly grandparents, and the stink of a city for which the treatment for gangrene was an unattainable luxury, had not driven him to climb willingly into a coffin and shut the door.

But now, he was tired. The fight against the hunger was over. He had lost.

“Nothing will change,” He said, finally giving in to the despair that had gnawed at the door to his heart for so long.

“Things always change,” I replied. This gave him no comfort. Sometimes, the change was that the desperation grew deeper, or that it ceased, because there was no one left to feel it.

His thoughts. Not mine.

******

Amadi Mengestu, dead at age 25, sustained multiple gunshot wounds while attempting to board a cargo ship. His body was never recovered. 

He was survived by his mother, Kamali Genet, who sheltered the orphaned and runaway children of pirates after the passing of her son.

The Quran calls for thieves to lose their hands, and Amadi knew this. His mother knew this. Perhaps she wished that the traditional punishment had been applied. No one would have carried it out, of course. She knew the hunger of the city, of the whole coastline, as well as anyone else in Somalia, and she would have been no more immune to the degradation of social morality that comes of a constantly empty stomach.

He never asked about his victims while he “sailed” with me. I carried them too, of course. Their opinions of the man that killed them were…surprisingly varied. But like Amadi, they too were delivered into Death’s hands, just as tired, just as unready to leave. Most living humans would have called Amadi’s death karma or justice; “live by the sword, die by the sword,” they might have said.

For one, the people who called it “karma” only knew the word, and not the more complex beliefs that went with it.

And as for justice?

Well, that brand of justice just leads to more passengers for me.

Is that what you want, dear reader?