Dagger Key and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  “Looks like he’s pointing right at us, huh?” said Stanky.

  When I was good and stoned, once the park had crystallized into a Victorian fantasy of dark green lawns amid crisp shadows and fountaining shrubs, the storefronts beyond hiding their secrets behind black glass, and McGuigan’s ornate sign with its ruby coat of arms appearing to occupy an unreal corner in the dimension next door, I said, “Mia went back to her mom’s tonight. She’s going to be there for a while.”

  “Bummer.” He had squirreled away a can of Coke in his coat pocket, which he now opened.

  “It’s normal for us. Chances are she’ll screw around on me a little and spend most of the time curled up on her mom’s sofa, eating Cocoa Puffs out of the box and watching soaps. She’ll be back eventually.”

  He had a swig of Coke and nodded.

  “What bothers me,” I said, “is the reason she left. Not the real reason, but the excuse she gave. She claims you’ve been touching her. Rubbing against her and making like it was an accident.”

  This elicited a flurry of protests and I-swear-to-Gods. I let him run down before I said, “It’s not a big deal.”

  “She’s lying, man! I…”

  “Whatever. Mia can handle herself. You cross the line with her, you’ll be picking your balls up off the floor.”

  I could almost hear the gears grinding as he wondered how close he had come to being deballed.

  “I want you to listen,” I went on. “No interruptions. Even if you think I’m wrong about something. Deal?”

  “Sure…yeah.”

  “Most of what I put out is garbage music. Meanderthal, Big Sissy, The Swimming Holes, Junk Brothers…”

  “I love the Junk Brothers, man! They’re why I sent you my demo.”

  I gazed at him sternly—he ducked his head and winced by way of apology.

  “So rock and roll is garbage,” I said. “It’s disposable music. But once in a great while, somebody does something perfect. Something that makes the music seem indispensable. I think you can make something perfect. You may not ever get rock star money. I doubt you can be mainstreamed. The best you can hope for, probably, is Tom Waits money. That’s plenty, believe me. I think you’ll be huge in Europe. You’ll be celebrated there. You’ve got a false bass that reminds me of Blind Willie Johnson. You write tremendous lyrics. That fractured guitar style of yours is unique. It’s out there, but it’s funky and people are going to love it. You have a natural appeal to punks and art rockers. To rock geeks like me. But there’s one thing can stop you—that’s your problem with women.”

  Not even this reference to his difficulties with Sabela and Mia could disrupt his rapt attentiveness.

  “You can screw this up very easily,” I told him. “You let that inappropriate touching thing of yours get out of hand, you will screw it up. You have to learn to let things come. To do that, you have to believe in yourself. I know you’ve had a shitty life so far, and your self-esteem is low. But you have to break the habit of thinking that you’re getting over on people. You don’t need to get over on them. You’ve got something they want. You’ve got talent. People will cut you a ton of slack because of that talent, but you keep messing up with women, their patience is going to run out. Now I don’t know where all that music comes from, but it doesn’t sound like it came from a basement. It’s a gift. You have to start treating it like one.”

  I asked him for a cigarette and lit up. Though I’d given variations of the speech dozens of times, I bought into it this time and I was excited.

  “Ten days from now you’ll be playing for a live audience,” I said. “If you put in the work, if you can believe in yourself, you’ll get all you want of everything. And that’s how you do it, man. By putting in the work and playing a kick-ass set. I’ll help any way I can. I’m going to do publicity, T-shirts…and I’m going to give them away if I have to. I’m going to get the word out that Joe Stanky is something special. And you know what? Industry people will listen, because I have a track record.” I blew a smoke ring and watched it disperse. “These are things I won’t usually do for a band until they’re farther along, but I believe in you. I believe in your music. But you have to believe in yourself and you have to put in the work.”

  I’m not sure how much of my speech, which lasted several minutes more, stuck to him. He acted inspired, but I couldn’t tell how much of the act was real; I knew on some level he was still running a con. We cut across the park, detouring so he could inspect the statue again. I glanced back at the library and saw two white lights shaped like fuzzy asterisks. At first I thought they were moving across the face of the building, that some people were playing with flashlights; but their brightness was too sharp and erratic, and they appeared to be coming from behind the library, shining through the stone, heading toward us. After ten or fifteen seconds, they faded from sight. Spooked, I noticed that Stanky was staring at the building and I asked if he had seen the lights.

  “That was weird, man!” he said. “What was it?”

  “Swamp gas. UFOs. Who knows?”

  I started walking toward McGuigan’s and Stanky fell in alongside me. His limp had returned.

  “After we have those beers, you know?” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Can we catch a cab home?” His limp became exaggerated. “I think I really hurt my leg.”

  Part of the speech must have taken, because I didn’t have to roust Stanky out of bed the next morning. He woke before me, ate his grits (I allowed him a single bowl each day), knocked back a couple of Diet Cokes (my idea), and sequestered himself in the studio, playing adagio trumpet runs and writing on the Casio. Later, I heard the band thumping away. After practice, I caught Geno, the drummer, on his way out the door, brought him into the office and asked how the music was sounding.

  “It doesn’t blow,” he said.

  I asked to him to clarify.

  “The guy writes some hard drum parts, but they’re tasty, you know. Tight.”

  Geno appeared to want to tell me more, but spaced and ran a beringed hand through his shoulder-length black hair. He was a handsome kid, if you could look past the ink, the brands, and the multiple piercings. An excellent drummer and reliable. I had learned to be patient with him.

  “Overall,” I said, “how do you think the band’s shaping up?”

  He looked puzzled. “You heard us.”

  “Yes. I know what I think. I’m interested in what you think.”

  “Oh…okay.” He scratched the side of his neck, the habitat of a red and black Chinese tiger. “It’s very cool. Strong. I never heard nothing like it. I mean, it’s got jazz elements, but not enough to where it doesn’t rock. The guy sings great. We might go somewhere if he can control his weirdness.”

  I didn’t want to ask how Stanky was being weird, but I did.

  “He and Jerry got a conflict,” Geno said. “Jerry can’t get this one part down, and Stanky’s on him about it. I keep telling Stanky to quit ragging him. Leave Jerry alone and he’ll stay on it until he can play it backwards. But Stanky, he’s relentless and Jerry’s getting pissed. He don’t love the guy, anyway. Like today, Stanky cracks about we should call the band Stanky and Our Gang.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yeah, right. But it was cute, you know. Kind of funny. Jerry took it personal, though. He like to got into it with Stanky.”

  “I’ll talk to them. Anything else?”

  “Naw. Stanky’s a geek, but you know me. The music’s right and I’m there.”

  The following day I had lunch scheduled with Andrea. It was also the day that my secretary, Kiwanda, a petite Afro-American woman in her late twenties, came back to work after a leave during which she had been taking care of her grandmother. I needed an afternoon off—I thought I’d visit friends, have a few drinks—so I gave over Stanky into her charge, warning her that he was prone to getting handsy with the ladies.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, sorting through some new orders. “You
go have fun.”

  Andrea had staked out one of the high-backed booths at the rear of McGuigan’s and was drinking a martini. She usually ran late, liked sitting at the front, and drank red wine. She had hung her jacket on the hook at the side of the booth and looked fetching in a cream-colored blouse. I nudged the martini glass and asked what was up with the booze.

  “Bad day in court. I had to ask for a continuance. So…” She hoisted the martini. “I’m boozing it up.”

  “Is this that pollution thing?”

  “No, it’s a pro bono case.”

  “Thought you weren’t going to do any pro bono work for a while.”

  She shrugged, drank. “What can I say?”

  “All that class guilt. It must be tough.” I signaled a waitress, pointed to Andrea’s martini and held up two fingers. “I suppose I should be grateful. If you weren’t carrying around that guilt, you would have married Snuffy Huffington the Third or somebody.”

  “Let’s not banter,” Andrea said. “We always banter. Let’s just talk. Tell me what’s going on with you.”

  I was good at reading Andrea, but it was strange how well I read her at that moment. Stress showed in her face. Nervousness. Both predictable components. But mainly I saw a profound loneliness and that startled me. I’d never thought of her as being lonely. I told her about Stanky, the good parts, his writing, his musicianship.

  “The guy plays everything,” I said. “Guitar, flute, sax, trumpet. Little piano, little drums. He’s like some kind of mutant they produced in a secret high school band lab. And his voice. It’s the Jim Nabors effect. You know, the guy who played Gomer Pyle? Nobody expected a guy looked that goofy could sing, so when he did, they thought he was great, even though he sounded like he had sinus trouble. It’s the same with Stanky, except his voice really is great.”

  “You’re always picking up these curious strays,” she said. “Remember the high school kid who played bass, the one who fainted every time he was under pressure? Brian Something. You’d come upstairs and say, ‘You should see what Brian did,’ and tell me he laid a bass on its side and played Mozart riffs on it. And I’d go…”

  “Bach,” I said.

  “And I’d go, ‘Yeah, but he faints!’” She laughed. “You always think you can fix them.”

  “You’re coming dangerously close to banter,” I said.

  “You owe me one.” She wiggled her forefinger and grinned. “I’m right, aren’t I? There’s a downside to this guy.”

  I told her about Stanky’s downside and, when I reached the part about Mia leaving, Andrea said, “The circus must be in town.”

  “Now you owe me one.”

  “You can’t expect me to be reasonable about Mia.” She half-sang the name, did a little shimmy, made a moue.

  “That’s two you owe me,” I said.

  “Sorry.” She straightened her smile. “You know she’ll come back. She always does.”

  I liked that she was acting flirty and, though I had no resolution in mind, I didn’t want her to stop.

  “You don’t have to worry about me,” she said. “Honest.”

  “Huh?”

  “So how talented is this Stanky? Give me an example.”

  “What do you mean, I don’t have to worry about you?”

  “Never mind. Now come on! Give me some Stanky.”

  “You want me to sing?”

  “You were a singer, weren’t you? A pretty good one, as I recall.”

  “Yeah, but I can’t do what he does.”

  She sat expectantly, hands folded on the tabletop.

  “All right,” I said.

  I did a verse of “Devil’s Blues,” beginning with the lines:

  “There’s a grapevine in heaven,

  There’s a peavine in hell,

  One don’t grow grapes,

  The other don’t grow peas as well…”

  I sailed on through to the chorus, getting into the vocal:

  “Devil’s Blues!

  God owes him…”

  A bald guy popped his head over the top of an adjacent booth and looked at me, then ducked back down. I heard laughter.

  “That’s enough,” I said to Andrea.

  “Interesting,” she said. “Not my cup of tea, but I wouldn’t mind hearing him.”

  “He’s playing the Crucible next weekend.”

  “Is that an invitation?”

  “Sure. If you’ll come.”

  “I have to see how things develop at the office. Is a tentative yes okay?”

  “Way better than a firm no,” I said.

  We ordered from the grille and, after we had eaten, Andrea called her office and told them she was taking the rest of the day. We switched from martinis to red wine, and we talked, we laughed, we got silly, we got drunk. The sounds of the bar folded around us and I started to remember how it felt to be in love with her. We wobbled out of McGuigan’s around four o’clock. The sun was lowering behind the Bittersmiths, but shed a rich golden light; it was still warm enough for people to be sitting in sweaters and shirts on park benches under the orange leaves.

  Andrea lived around the corner from the bar, so I walked her home. She was weaving a little and kept bumping into me. “You better take a cab home,” she said, and I said, “I’m not the one who’s walking funny,” which earned me a punch in the arm. When we came to her door, she turned to me, gripping her briefcase with both hands and said, “I’ll see you next weekend, maybe.”

  “That’d be great.”

  She hovered there a second longer and then she kissed me. Flung her arms about my neck, clocking me with the briefcase, and gave me a one-hundred percent all-Andrea kiss that, if I were a cartoon character, would have rolled my socks up and down and levitated my hat. She buried her face in my neck and said, “Sorry. I’m sorry.” I was going to say, For what?, but she pulled away in a hurry, appearing panicked, and fled up the stairs.

  I nearly hit a parked car on the drive home, not because I was drunk, but because thinking about the kiss and her reaction afterward impaired my concentration. What was she sorry about? The kiss? Flirting? The divorce? I couldn’t work it out, and I couldn’t work out, either, what I was feeling. Lust, certainly. Having her body pressed against mine had fully engaged my senses. But there was more. Considerably more. I decided it stood a chance of becoming a mental health issue and did my best to put it from mind.

  Kiwanda was busy in the office. She had the computers networking and was going through prehistoric paper files on the floor. I asked what was up and she told me she had devised a more efficient filing system. She had never been much of an innovator, so this unnerved me, but I let it pass and asked if she’d had any problems with my boy Stanky.

  “Not so you’d notice,” she said tersely.

  From this, I deduced that there had been a problem, but I let that pass as well and went upstairs to the apartment. Walls papered with flyers and band photographs; a grouping of newish, ultra-functional Swedish furniture—I realized I had liked the apartment better when Andrea did the decorating, this despite the fact that interior design had been one of our bones of contention. The walls, in particular, annoyed me. I was being stared at by young men with shaved heads and flowing locks in arrogant poses, stupid with tattoos, by five or six bands that had tried to stiff me, by a few hundred bad-to-indifferent memories and a dozen good ones. Maybe a dozen. I sat on a leather and chrome couch (it was a showy piece, but uncomfortable) and watched the early news. George Bush, Iraq, the price of gasoline…fuck! Restless, I went down to the basement.

  Stanky was watching the Comedy Channel. Mad TV. Another of his passions. He was slumped on the couch, remote in hand, and had a Coke and a cigarette working, an ice pack clamped to his cheek. I had the idea the ice pack was for my benefit, so I didn’t ask about it, but knew it must be connected to Kiwanda’s attitude. He barely acknowledged my presence, just sat there and pouted. I took a chair and watched with him. At last he said, “I need a rhythm guitar player.”
>
  “I’m not going to hire another musician this late in the game.”

  He set down the ice pack. His cheek was red, but that might have been from the ice pack itself…although I thought I detected a slight puffiness. “I seriously need him,” he said.

  “Don’t push me on this.”

  “It’s important, man! For this one song, anyway.”

  “What song?”

  “A new one.”

  I waited and then said, “That’s all you’re going to tell me?”

  “It needs a rhythm guitar.”

  This tubby little madman recumbent on my couch was making demands—it felt good to reject him, but he persisted.

  “It’s just one song, man,” he said in full-on wheedle. “Please! It’s a surprise.”

  “I don’t like surprises.”

  “Come on! You’ll like this one, I promise.”

  I told him I’d see what I could do, had a talk with him about Jerry, and the atmosphere lightened. He sat up straight, chortling at Mad TV, now and then saying, “Decent!,” his ultimate accolade. The skits were funny and I laughed, too.

  “I did my horoscope today,” he said as the show went to commercial.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You’re a Cancer.”

  He didn’t like that, but maintained an upbeat air. “I don’t mean astrology, man. I use The Guide.” He slid the TV Guide across the coffee table, pointing out an entry with a grimy finger, a black-rimmed nail. I snatched it up and read:

  “King Creole: *** Based on a Harold Robbins novel. A young man (Elvis Presley) with a gang background rises from the streets to become a rock and roll star. Vic Morrow. 1:30.”

  “Decent, huh!” said Stanky. “You try it. Close your eyes and stick your finger in on a random page and see what you get. I use the movie section in back, but some people use the whole programming section.”