Dagger Key and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  Pleasant laughter, so perfect it sounded canned. “David sends his regards,” said Wine. “He’s sorry he couldn’t contact you personally, but he’s going to be tied up all day.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “David listened to that new artist of yours. Joe Stanky? In all the years I’ve known him, I’ve never heard him react like he did this morning.”

  “He liked it?”

  “He didn’t like it…” Wine paused for dramatic effect. “He was knocked out.”

  I wondered how Geffen had gotten hold of the EP. Mine not to reason why, I figured.

  Wine told me that Geffen wanted to hear more. Did I have any other recorded material?

  “I’ve got nine songs on tape,” I said. “But some of them are raw.”

  “David likes raw. Can we get a dupe?”

  “You know…I usually prefer to push out an album or two before I look for a deal.”

  “Listen, Vernon. We’re not going to let you go to the poorhouse on this.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  “In fact, David wanted me to sound you out about our bringing you in under the Dreamworks umbrella.”

  Stunned, I said, “In what capacity?”

  “I’ll let David tell you about that. He’ll call you in a day or two. He’s had his eye on you for some time.”

  I envisioned Sauron spying from his dark tower. I had a dim view of corporate life and I wasn’t as overwhelmed by this news as Wine had likely presumed I would be. After the call ended, however, I felt as if I had modeled for Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel mural, the man about to be touched by God’s billionaire-ish finger. My impulse was to tell Stanky, but I didn’t want his ego to grow more swollen. I called Andrea and learned she would be in court until mid-afternoon. I started to call Rudy, then thought it would be too easy for him to refuse me over the phone. Better to yank him out of his cave and buy him lunch. I wanted to bust his chops about missing the EP release and I needed to talk with someone face-to-face, to analyze this thing that was happening around Stanky. Had the buzz I’d generated about him taken wings on a magical current? The idea that David Geffen was planning to call seemed preposterous. Was Stanky that good? Was I? What, if anything, did Geffen have in mind? Rudy, who enjoyed playing Yoda to my Luke, would help place these questions in coherent perspective.

  When I reached Rudy’s office, I found Gwen on the phone. Her make-up, usually perfect, was in need of repair; it appeared that she had been crying. “I don’t know,” she said with strain in her voice. “You’ll have to…no. I really don’t know.”

  I pointed to the inner office and mouthed, Is he in?

  She signaled me to wait.

  “I’ve got someone here,” she said into the phone. “I’ll have to…yes. Yes, I will let you know. All right. Yes. Goodbye.” She hung up and, her chin quivering, tried several times to speak, finally blurting out, “I’m so sorry. He’s dead. Rudy’s dead.”

  I think I may have laughed—I made some sort of noise, some expression of denial, yet I knew it was true. My face flooded with heat and I went back a step, as if the words had thrown me off-balance.

  Gwen said that Rudy had committed suicide early that morning. He had—according to his wife—worked in the office until after midnight, then driven home and taken some pills. The phone rang again. I left Gwen to deal with it and stepped into the inner office to call Beth. I sat at Rudy’s desk, but that felt wrong, so I walked around with the phone for a while. Rudy had been a depressed guy, but hell everyone in Black William was depressed about something. I thought that I had been way more depressed than Rudy. He seemed to have it together. Nice wife, healthy income, kids. Sure, he was a for-shit architect in a for-shit town, and not doing the work he wanted, but that was no reason to kill yourself.

  Standing by the drafting table, I saw his waste basket was crammed with torn paper. A crawly sensation rippled the skin between my shoulder blades. I dumped the shreds onto the table. Rudy had done a compulsive job of tearing them up, but I could tell they were pieces of his comic strip. Painstakingly, I sorted through them and managed to reassemble most of a frame. In it, a pair of black hands (presumably belonging to a mineworker) were holding a gobbet of pork, as though in offering; above it floated a spiky white ball. The ball had extruded a longish spike to penetrate the pork and the image gave the impression that the ball was sucking meat through a straw. I stared at the frame, trying to interpret it, to tie the image in with everything that had happened, but I felt a vibration pass through my body, like the heavy, impersonal signal of Rudy’s death, and I imagined him on the bathroom floor, foam on his mouth, and I had to sit back down.

  Beth, when I called her, didn’t feel like talking. I asked if there was anything I could do, and she said if I could find out when the police were going to release the body, she would appreciate it. She said she would let me know about the funeral, sounding—as had Gwen—like someone who was barely holding it together. Hearing that in her voice caused me to leak a few tears and, when she heard me start to cry, she quickly got off the phone, as if she didn’t want my lesser grief to pollute her own, as if Rudy dying had broken whatever bond there was between us. I thought this might be true.

  I called the police and, after speaking to a functionary, reached a detective whom I knew, Ross Peloblanco, who asked my connection to the deceased.

  “Friend of the family,” I said. “I’m calling for his wife.”

  “Huh,” said Peloblanco, his attention distracted by something in his office.

  “So when are you going to release him?”

  “I think they already done the autopsy. There’s been a bunch of suicides lately and the ME put a rush on this one.”

  “How many’s a bunch?”

  “Oops! Did I say that? Don’t worry about it. The ME’s a whack job. He’s batshit about conspiracy theories.”

  “So…can I tell the funeral home to come now?”

  Peloblanco sneezed, said, “Shit!,” and then went on: “Bowen did some work for my mom. She said he was a real gentleman. You never know what’s going on with people, do ya?” He blew his nose. “I guess you can come pick him up whenever.”

  The waters of the Polozny never freeze. No matter how cold it gets or how long the cold lasts, they are kept warm by a cocktail of pollutants and, though the river may flow more sluggishly in winter, it continues on its course, black and gelid. There is something statutory about its poisonous constancy. It seems less river than regulation, a divine remark rendered daily into law, engraving itself upon the world year after year until its long meander has eaten a crack that runs the length and breadth of creation, and its acids and oxides drain into the void.

  Between the viewing and the funeral, in among the various consoling talks and offerings of condolence, I spent a great deal of time gazing at the Polozny, sitting on the stoop and smoking, enduring the cold wind, brooding over half-baked profundities. The muted roaring of the mill surrounded me, as did dull thuds and clunks and distant car horns that seemed to issue from the gray sky, the sounds of business as usual, the muffled engine of commerce. Black William must be, I thought, situated on the ass-end of Purgatory, the place where all those overlooked by God were kept. The dead river dividing a dying landscape, a dingy accumulation of snow melting into slush on its banks; the mill, a Hell of red brick with its chimney smoke of souls; the scatters of crows winging away from leafless trees; old Mrs. Gables two doors down, tottering out to the sidewalk, peering along the street for the mail, for a glimpse of her son’s maroon Honda Civic, for some hopeful thing, then, her hopes dashed, laboriously climbing her stairs and going inside to sit alone and count the ticks of her clock: these were evidences of God’s fabulous absence, His careless abandonment of a destiny-less town to its several griefs. I scoffed at those who professed to understand grief, who deemed it a simple matter, a painful yet comprehensible transition, and partitioned the process into stages (my trivial imagination made them into gaudy stagecoach
es painted different colors) in order to enable its victims to adapt more readily to the house rules. After the initial shock of Rudy’s suicide had waned, grief overran me like a virus, it swarmed, breeding pockets of weakness and fever, eventually receding at its own pace, on its own terms, and though it may have been subject to an easy compartmentalization—Anger, Denial, et al—that kind of analysis did not address its nuances and could not remedy the thousand small bitternesses that grief inflames and encysts. On the morning of the funeral, when I voiced one such bitterness, complaining about how Beth had treated me since Rudy died, mentioning the phone call, pointing out other incidences of her intolerance, her rudeness in pushing me away, Andrea—who had joined me on the stoop—set me straight.

  “She’s not angry at you,” Andrea said. “She’s jealous. You and Rudy…that was a part of him she never shared, and when she sees you, she doesn’t know how to handle it.”

  “You think?”

  “I used to feel that way.”

  “About me and Rudy?”

  She nodded. “And about the business. I don’t feel that way now. I guess I’m older. I understand you and Rudy had a guy thing and I didn’t need to know everything about it. But Beth’s dealing with a lot right now. She’s oversensitive and she feels…jilted. She feels that Rudy abandoned her for you. A little, anyway. So she’s jilting you. She’ll get over it, or she won’t. People are funny like that. Sometimes resentments are all that hold them together. You shouldn’t take it personally”

  I refitted my gaze to the Polozny, more-or-less satisfied by what she had said. “We live on the banks of the River Styx,” I said after a while. “At least it has a Styx-ian gravitas.”

  “Stygian,” she said.

  I turned to her, inquiring.

  “That’s the word you wanted. Stygian.”

  “Oh…right.”

  A silence marked by the passing of a mail truck, its tire chains grinding the asphalt and spitting slush; the driver waved.

  “I think I know why Rudy did it,” I said, and told her what I had found in the office waste basket. “More than anything he wanted to do creative work. When he finally did, it gave him nightmares. It messed with his head. He must have built it into this huge thing and…” I tapped out a cigarette, stuck it in my mouth. “It doesn’t sound like much of a reason, but I can relate. That’s why it bites my ass to see guys like Stanky who do something creative every time they take a piss. I want to write those songs. I want to have the acclaim. It gets me thinking, someday I might wind up like Rudy.”

  “That’s not you. You said it yourself—you get pissed off. You find someplace else to put your energy.” She rumpled my hair. “Buck up, Sparky. You’re going to live a long time and have lots worse problems.”

  It crossed my mind to suggest that the stars might have played some mysterious part in Rudy’s death, and to mention the rash of suicides (five, I had learned); but all that seemed unimportant, dwarfed by the death itself.

  At one juncture during that weekend, Stanky ventured forth from TV-land to offer his sympathies. He may have been sincere, but I didn’t trust his sincerity—it had an obsequious quality and I believed he was currying favor, paving the way so he might hit me up for another advance. Pale and shivering, hunched against the cold; the greasy collar of his jacket turned up; holding a Camel in two nicotine-stained fingers; his doughy features cinched in an expression of exaggerated dolor: I hated him at that moment and told him I was taking some days off, that he could work on the album or go play with his high school sycophants. “It’s up to you,” I said. “Just don’t bother me about it.” He made no reply, but the front door slamming informed me that he had not taken it well.

  On Wednesday, Patty Prole (nee Patricia Hand), the leader of the Swimming Holes, a mutual friend of mine and Rudy’s who had come down from Pittsburgh for the funeral, joined me and Andrea for dinner at McGuigan’s, and, as we strolled past the park, I recalled that more than a month—thirty-four days, to be exact—had elapsed since I had last seen the stars. The crowd had dwindled to about a hundred-and-fifty (Stanky and Liz among them). They stood in clumps around the statue, clinging to the hope that Black William would appear; though judging by their general listlessness, the edge of their anticipation had been blunted and they were gathered there because they had nothing better to do. The van belonging to the science people from Pitt remained parked at the southeast corner of the library, but I had heard they were going to pull up stakes if nothing happened in the next day or two.

  McGuigan’s was a bubble of heat and light and happy conversation. A Joe Henry song played in the background; Pitt basketball was on every TV. I had not thought the whole town dressed in mourning, but the jolly, bustling atmosphere came as something of a shock. They had saved the back booth for us and, after drinking for a half-hour or so, I found myself enjoying the evening. Patty was a slight, pretty, blue-eyed blond in her late twenties, dressed in a black leather jacket and jeans. To accommodate the sober purpose of this trip home, she had removed her visible piercings. With the majority of her tattoos covered by the jacket, she looked like an ordinary girl from western Pennsylvania and nothing like the exotic, pantherine creature she became on stage. When talk turned to Rudy, Andrea and I embraced the subject, offering humorous anecdotes and fond reminiscence, but Patty, though she laughed, was subdued. She toyed with her fork, idly stabbing holes in the label on her beer bottle, and at length revealed the reason for her moodiness.

  “Did Rudy ever tell you we had a thing?” she asked.

  “He alluded to it,” I said. “But well after the fact. Years.”

  “I bet you guys talked all about it when you’re up at Kempton’s Pond. He said you used to talk about the local talent when you’re up there sometimes.”

  Andrea elbowed me, not too sharply, in mock reproof.

  “As I remember, the conversation went like this,” I said. “We were talking about bands, the Swimming Holes came up, and he mentioned he’d had an affair with you. And I said, ‘Oh, yeah?’ And Rudy said, ‘Yeah.’ Then after a minute he said, ‘Patty’s a great girl.’”

  “That’s what he said? We had an affair? That’s the word he used?”

  “I believe so.”

  “He didn’t say he was banging me or like that?”

  “No.”

  “And that’s all he said?” Patty stared at me sidelong, as if trying to penetrate layers of deception.

  “That’s all I remember.”

  “I bet you tried to get more out of him. I know you. You were hungering for details.”

  “I can’t promise I wasn’t,” I said. “I just don’t remember. You know Rudy. He was a private guy. You could beat on him with a shovel and not get a thing out of him. I’m surprised he told me that much.”

  She held my gaze a moment longer. “Shit! I can’t tell if you’re lying.”

  “He’s not,” said Andrea.

  “You got him scoped, huh? He’s dead to rights.” Patty grinned and leaned against the wall, putting one fashionably booted foot up on the bench. “Rudy and me…it was a couple weeks right before the band left town. It was probably stupid. Sometimes I regret it, but sometimes I don’t.”

  Andrea asked how it happened, and Patty, who obviously wanted to talk about it, said, “You know. Like always. We started hanging out, talking. Finally I asked him straight out, ‘Where’s this going, Rudy?’ Because we only had a couple of weeks and I wanted to know if it was all in my head. He got this peculiar look on his face and kissed me. Like I said, it didn’t last long, but it was deep, you know. That’s why I’m glad Rudy didn’t tell everyone how it was in the sack. It’s a dumb thing to worry about, but…” Her voice had developed a tremor. “I guess that’s what I’m down to.”

  “You loved him,” said Andrea.

  “Yeah. I did.” Patty shook off the blues and sat up. “There wasn’t anywhere for it to go. He’d never leave his kids and I was going off to Pittsburgh. I hated his wife for a while. I didn’
t feel guilty about it. But now I look at her…She was never part of our scene. With Vernon and Rudy and the bands. She lived off to the side of it all. It wasn’t like that with you, Andrea. You had your law thing going, but when you were around, you were into it. You were one of the girls. But Beth was so totally not into it. She still can’t stand us. And now it feels like I stole something from her. That really sucks.”

  Platitudes occurred to me, but I kept quiet. Andrea stirred at my side.

  “Sometimes it pays to be stupid,” Patty said gloomily.

  I had a moment when the light and happy babble of the bar were thrust aside by the gonging thought that my friend was dead, and I didn’t entirely understand what she meant, but I knew she was right.

  Patty snagged a passing waitress. “Can I get a couple of eggs over?” she asked. “I know you’re not serving breakfast, but that’s all I eat is breakfast.” She winked broadly at the waitress. “Most important meal of the day, so I make every meal breakfast.”

  The waitress began to explain why eggs were impossible, but Patty cut in, saying, “You don’t want me to starve, do ya? You must have a couple of eggs back there. Some fries and bacon. Toast. We’re huge tippers, I swear.”

  Exasperated, the waitress said she’d see if the cook would do it.

  “I know you can work him, honey,” Patty said. “Tell him to make the eggs dippy, okay?”

  We left McGuigan’s shortly after eight, heading for Corky’s, a workingman’s bar where we could do some serious drinking, but as we came abreast of the statue, Patty said, “Hey, let’s go talk to Stanky.” Stanky and Liz were sitting on the base of the statue; Pin and the other boys were cross-legged at their feet, like students attending their master. The crowd had thinned and was down, I’d guess, to about a hundred and twenty; a third of that number were clustered around the science van and the head scientist, who was hunched over a piece of equipment set up on the edge of the library lawn. I lagged behind as we walked over and noticed Liz stiffen at the sight of Patty. The boys gazed adoringly at her. Stanky cast me a spiteful glance.