Arriving in Richmond in the early morning hours, Wheelin’ Bone and his mates parked along a trash-cluttered street in the federal housing project Gilpin Court, and proceeded to an apartment that was the lair of a local drug dealer other land pirates called Smack.
When Smack looked out the window and spied Wheelin’ Bone dressed in a long black coat, black Nikes, and a black warm-up suit that had skulls and bones all over it, Smack got a little uneasy.
“Shit, I don’t know, ” he said to several of his lieutenants. “Man, he look bad. Look like he might be packing an Uzi under that black coat a his, ’cause I can see the barrel poking out. ”
“You sure that ain’t a buttonhole?”
“I say we don’t take no chances. ”
“Shit no, we ain’t taking no chances, ” Smack agreed. “I say we shoot ’em through the door. ”
Pistol slides snapped throughout the lair, and then the inexplicable happened. Wheelin’ Bone and his crew were about to knock on the door when suddenly they vanished with a strange crackle of static and a flash of intense white light. This frightened Smack and his pirates, and they responded with a salvo of gunfire that ripped up the door and shattered lamps and beer bottles. They fired until magazines were empty. When the smoke cleared, they peered out in astonishment at the dark, empty street.
Wheelin’ Bone and his crew spun through the Third Dimension, passing through the Wrinkle in Time, and landed softly on a gunboat called Rover, which was loaded with eighteenth-century antiques, jewelry, and sacks of gold dust and silver coins.
“Where the fuck are we?” Wheelin’ Bone asked as he stared out at the peaceful waters of the Chesapeake Bay and the distant shadowy shape of Tangier Island. “Man, I ain’t never seen a boat this old. It don’t even have a motor or a flashlight. ”
“Shit, look at these guns!” one of his mates exclaimed, as he inspected a huge cannon. “I sure would like to shoot one of these at a police car!”
Wheelin’ Bone and his crew laughed at the image, and set about to figure out how to safely handle cannons, make homemade grenades, and sail. As days and weeks passed, they were indiscriminate in seizing other ships and celebrated with drunken nights of Madeira wine and rum, because they had quickly run out of pot and crack cocaine and could find no one who had ever heard of either. Wheelin’ Bone and his men became expert at attacking other pirate ships and setting them on fire after they had been pillaged and their crews shot, hacked to pieces, and dumped overboard to be eaten by crabs.
Years passed and the American Revolution ended, but Wheelin’ Bone became only more powerful and lustful. He terrorized the bay and the shores of Maryland and Virginia, and became even more feared than Blackbeard was in his day, although there is no record that Wheelin’ Bone ever had a beard or set it on fire. His modus operandi, which he no doubt learned from stories about Blackbeard that were passed down from pirate to pirate, was to blast his cannons at the broadside of an unsuspecting vessel, which was followed by the hurling of Blackbeard-style grenades that were case-bottles filled with powder, small shot, slugs, pieces of lead, and iron– rather much like modern pipe bombs, except the grenades were ignited by a small, quick match that the pirates lit before quickly tossing the massively destructive devices into enemy ships. Wheelin’ Bone and his mates would then board the disabled ship, step over the dead and finish off the wounded, and raid to their hearts’ content.
Wheland or Wheelin’ Bone (whatever you prefer to call him) faded from historical documentation toward the end of the eighteenth century, and by 1806, piracy had pretty much come to an end in the bay, although those otherwise peaceful waters and neighboring shores became vicious and volatile again six short years later during the War of 1812. Indeed, the Chesapeake and the nearby Patuxent River to this day remain a focal point of military activity, thus explaining the inconvenient restricted areas I mentioned in an earlier essay that make it so difficult to fly to Tangier Island.