Dagger Key and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  “Yeah,” he said. “I mind.”

  I watched him out of the corner of my eye. His features relaxed from their belligerent expression and he appeared to be tracking the progress of something through the air. I asked what he was looking at, half-expecting him to claim that he had discovered a microscopic planet with an erratic orbit, but he said, “A gnat.” Then he laughed. “A gnat with a fucking aura.”

  “You see that shit all the time?”

  “Auras? Yeah. Weirder stuff than that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Shadows.” He fumbled in his pocket and fished out a wad of bills, napkins, gum wrappers—there must have been thirty or forty hundreds in with the debris; he selected a twenty, tossed the rest on the table and hailed the blond waitress. “Margarita rocks,” he told her. “Salt.”

  “Better slow down,” I said. “If you’re going to play poker, that is.”

  “You kidding me? I need a handicap to play with those old ladies.”

  I let my thoughts wander, vaguely mindful of the activity in the pool, speculating on the rate of skin cancers among the patrons of the Seminole Paradise, reflecting on the fact that I had not seen a single Seminole during our stay, if one omitted the grotesque statue of Osceola in the lobby, fashioned from a shiny yellowish brown material—petrified Cheese Whiz was my best guess. The waitress set Pellerin’s margarita down on the table; her eyes snagged on the cash strewn across it. She offered Pellerin his change and he told her to keep it. He tilted his head, squinted at her name tag, and said, “Is waitressing your regular job, Tammy, or just something you do on the side?”

  Tammy didn’t know how to take this. She flashed her teeth, struck a pose that accentuated her breasts and said, “I’m sorry?”

  “Reason I ask,” said Pellerin, “I wonder if you ever done any hostessing? I’m throwing a party up in my suite tonight. Around ten o’clock. And I was hoping to get a couple of girls to help me host it. You know the drill. Take care of the guests. See that everyone’s got a drink. You’d be doing me a huge favor.” He reached into his other pocket, peeled what looked to be about a grand off his roll and held it out to her. “That’s a down payment.”

  A light switched on in Tammy’s brain and she re-evaluated Pellerin. “So how many guests are we talking about?” she asked.

  “I’m the only one you’d have to worry about.” Pellerin gave a lizardly smile. “But I can be a real chore.”

  “Why, I think we can probably handle it.” Tammy accepted the bills, folded them, stashed them next to her heart. “Around ten, you say?”

  “I’m in the Everglades Suite,” said Pellerin. “Wear something negligible. And one more thing, darling. It’d be nice if your friend was a Latina. Maybe a Cuban girl. On the slender side. Maybe her name could be…Thomasina?”

  “Why, isn’t that a coincidence! That’s my best friend’s name!” Tammy turned and twitched her cute butt. “See ya tonight.”

  As she sashayed off, Pellerin slurped down half his margarita and sighed. “Ain’t freedom grand?”

  “What was that bullshit?” I said. “You’re in the Everglades Suite?”

  “Three nights from now, we could be lying in a landfill,” he said. “I booked myself a suite and I’m going to have me a party.”

  “This isn’t wise,” I said. “Suppose she gets a look at your eyes?”

  “Did you get a load of the brain on that girl? I could tell her I was down in the Amazon and got stung by electric bees, she’d be fine with it.”

  I wasn’t too sure about that, but then I was distracted from worry by thinking about Jo all alone in Room 1138.

  “Yeah, boy!” said Pellerin, and grinned—he’d been watching me. “What they say is true. Every cloud has a silver lining.”

  I made no response.

  “Hell, if Jocundra don’t do it for you,” he said, “I’m sure Tammy and Thomasina wouldn’t mind accommodating another guest.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “On second thought, I believe you’re the kind of guy who needs that old emotion lotion to really get off.”

  “Shut your hole, okay?”

  Pellerin finished his margarita, signaled Tammy for another. I was through cautioning him about his drinking. Maybe he’d drop dead. That would let us off the hook. More people had jumped into the pool—it looked like a sparkling blue bowl of human head soup. There came a loud screech that resolved into “The Pina Colada Song” piped in over speakers attached to the surrounding palms. I was half-angry, though I couldn’t have told you at what, and that damn song exacerbated my mood. Tammy brought the margarita and engaged in playful banter with Pellerin.

  “Does your friend want a friend?” she asked. “Because I bet I could fix him up.”

  “Naw, he’s got a friend,” said Pellerin. “The trouble is, she ain’t treating him all that friendly”

  “Aw! Well, if he needs a friendly-ier friend, you let me know, hear?”

  I shut my eyes and squeezed the arms of my chair, exerting myself in an attempt to suppress a shout. Eventually I relaxed and my mind snapped back into on-duty mode. “What kind of shadows?” I asked Pellerin.

  He gazed at me blankly. “Huh?”

  “You said you were seeing shadows. What kind?”

  “You’re starting to sound like Jocundra, man.”

  “What, is it a big secret?”

  He licked salt off the rim of his glass. “I don’t guess they’re shadows, really. They’re these black shapes, like a man, but they don’t have any faces. Sometimes they have lights inside them. Shifting lights. They kind of flow together.”

  I laughed. “Sounds like a lava lamp?”

  “Everybody’s got one,” he said. “But it’s not an aura. It’s more substantial. I see patterns, too. Like…” He poked around in the pile of money and trash on the table and plucked out a napkin bearing the McSorely’s logo. “Like this here. The whole thing creeps me out.”

  On the napkin were several sketches of what appeared to be ironwork designs: veves. I asked why it creeped him out.

  “When we were on the island,” Pellerin went on, “I found these books on voodoo. And while I was leafing through them, I saw that same design. It’s used in the practice of voodoo. Called a veve. That there’s the veve of Ogoun Badagris, the voodoo god of war. And this…” He pointed to a second sketch. “This one’s Ogoun in his aspect as the god of fire. I get that one a lot.” He paused and then said, “You know anything about it?”

  I had no doubt that he could read me if I lied and, although it was my instinct to lie, I didn’t see any reason to hide things from him anymore; yet I didn’t want to freak him out, either.

  “Jo told me she had another patient who saw this same sort of pattern,” I said.

  “What else she tell you?”

  “She said he did some great things before…”

  “Before he died, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  There ensued a silence, during which I noticed that the song playing over the speakers was now “Margaritaville”.

  “She told me he got to where he could cure the sick,” I said.

  He stared at me. “Fuck.”

  “Let’s get through the weekend, then you can worry about it,” I said.

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “It’s a lot to process, I give you that. But you can’t…”

  “I knew she was holding back, but…man!” He picked up his drink, put it back down. “You know, I don’t much fucking care if we get through the weekend.”

  “I care,” I said, but he appeared not to hear me, gazing out across the pool toward the hedge of palms and shrubbery that hid the concrete block wall that separated Seminole Paradise from a Circuit City store.

  “You ever have the feeling you’re on the verge of understanding everything?” he said. “That if you could see things a tad clearer, you’d have the big picture in view? I mean the Big Picture. How it all fits together. That’s where I’m at. But
I’m also getting this feeling I don’t fucking want to see the big picture, that it’s about ten shades darker than the picture I already got.” He chewed on that a second, then heaved up to his feet. “I’m going to the casino.”

  “Wait a second!” I said as he walked away.

  I busied myself plucking the hundreds out of the mess we’d made on the table, and I pressed the clutter of bills into his hands. He seemed startled by the money, as if it were an unexpected bonus, but then he stepped to the edge of the glittering pool and said in a loud voice, “Hey! Here you go, you lucky people!” and tossed the money into the air.

  There couldn’t have been more than four or five thousand dollars, but for the furore it caused, it might have been a million. As the bills fluttered down, people surged through the water after them; others sprawled on the tiles in their mad scramble to dive into the pool. Children were elbowed aside, the elderly were at risk. A buff young lad surfaced with a joyous expression, clutching a fistful of bills, and was immediately hauled under by a bikini girl and her boyfriend, their faces aglow with greed. The water was lashed into a froth as by sharks in a feeding frenzy. Terrified screams replaced the prettier shrieks that had attended roughhousing and dunkings. One man dragged a woman from the melee and sought to give her mouth-to-mouth, whereupon she kicked him in the groin. The lifeguard’s umbrella toppled into the water. He shouted incoherent orders over his mike. This served to increase the chaos. He began blowing his whistle over and over, an irate clown with his cheeks puffed and a nose covered in sun block.

  Pellerin was laughing as I pulled him away from the pool, and he was still laughing when I shoved him through the double glass doors of the hotel. I adopted a threatening pose, intending to lecture him, and he made an effort to stifle his laughter; but then I started laughing, too, and his mirth redoubled. We stood wheezing and giggling in the lobby, giddy as teenage girls, drawing hostile stares from the guests waiting in line at Reception, enduring the drudgery of check-in. At the time I assumed that we were laughing at two different things, or at different aspects of the same thing, but now I’m not so sure.

  That picture of Pellerin laughing by the side of the pool, bills fluttering out above the water…it emerges from the smoke of memory like a painted dream, like one of those images that come just before a commercial break in a television drama, when the action freezes and the colors are altered by a laboratory process. Though it seems unreal, the rest—by comparison—seems in retrospect less than unreal, a dusting of atoms, whispers, and suggestions of hue that we must arrange into a story in order to lend body to this central moment. Yet the stories we create are invariably inaccurate and the central moments we choose to remember change us as much or more as we change them, and so, in truth, my memories are no more “real” than Josey Pellerin’s, although they have, as Jo would put it, more foundation…But I was saying, that picture of Pellerin beside the pool stayed with me because, I believe, it was the first time I had acknowledged him as a man and not a freak. And when I went to see him late the next morning, it was motivated more by curiosity over how he’d made out with Tammy and Thomasina than by caretaker concerns.

  The door to the suite had been left ajar. I sneaked a look inside and, seeing no one around, eased into the foyer. The living room was empty, an air-conditioned vacancy of earth tones and overstuffed furniture, with potted palms and a photomural of the Everglades attempting a naturalistic touch. Everything was very neat. Magazines centered on the coffee table; no empty glasses or bottles. On the sideboard, a welcome basket of fruit, wine, and cheese was still clenched in shrinkwrap. I proceeded down the hall and came to an open door. Wearing a terrycloth bathrobe and sunglasses, Pellerin sat beside the rumpled bed, his feet propped on a table covered with a linen cloth and laden with dishes and metal dish covers, drinking champagne out of a bottle and eating a slice of pizza, looking out the window at the overcast. In the bed, partly covered by the sheets, a brown-skinned girl lay on her belly, black hair fanned across her face. Thomasina. There was nary a sign of Tammy, though the bed was king-sized and she might well have been buried beneath the covers. I knocked and he beckoned me to come on in. A big scorch mark on the wall behind his head, about the size of a serving tray, caught my notice. I asked what had happened and he told me that Tammy had shot an aerosol spray through a lit cigarette lighter, producing a flamethrower effect.

  “You know those sons-of-bitches wouldn’t let me order in a pizza last night,” he said. “Is that bullshit or what? I had to bribe the bellboy.” He pointed to a Domino’s box on the floor—it held two slices fettered with strings of congealed cheese—and told me to help myself.

  I declined, sat opposite him, and he asked what time it was.

  “Around eleven.” I picked up a plastic pill bottle from the table. The label read:

  R. Saloman

  Viagra 50 mg.

  1 tablet as needed.

  “Who’s R. Saloman?” I asked.

  “Beats me. Friend of the bellboy, maybe. The kid’s a walking pharmacy.” Pellerin scratched his chest. “Want some room service?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “How about some coffee? Sure, you want some coffee.”

  He reached for the phone, ordered coffee and sweet rolls. Thomasina stirred but did not wake.

  “Where’s Tammy?” I asked.

  “In the head? Or she might have gone home. We were doing shots last night and she got sick.”

  “You trying to kill yourself, man? Maybe you haven’t noticed, but you’re not in the best of shape.”

  Pellerin had a swig of champagne. “You my fairy godmother now?”

  “I’m just being solicitous of your health.”

  “Because that was Jocundra’s job, and I shit-canned her.”

  “Look, don’t get the idea you’re in charge here. You’re not in charge.”

  “Oh, I’m far from having that idea. We all know who’s in charge.”

  Jocundra’s voice called from the living room. “Josey!”

  “In here, darling!” He gave me a wink. “This ought to be good.”

  Seconds later, Jocundra materialized in the doorway, dressed in jeans and a man’s pinstriped dress shirt with the sleeves neatly rolled up. Her eyes stuck on Thomasina, then went to me and Pellerin. “I need to talk to you. I’ll come back.”

  “Don’t be that way,” said Pellerin. “We’re all pals. Sit with us. We got coffee coming.”

  She had another glance at Thomasina, then came to the table and took the chair between me and Pellerin.

  “I spoke to management,” she said. “They’re not going to kick us out, but you’re banned from the pool area.”

  “Damn!” said Pellerin. “And here I was dying for a swim.”

  Jocundra started to speak, likely to reprimand him, but thought better of it. An edgy quiet closed in around us.

  “You know they got a couple of live gators in that pond in the courtyard? That’s why there’s a fence around it.” Pellerin shook his head in mock amazement. “They don’t never show themselves. Can’t say as I blame them.”

  Another stretch of quiet.

  “I’m going over to Ruddle’s house later to see what I can see,” I said. “It’s right on the water. That might be good for us. It’s a potential avenue of escape if things go south.”

  There would probably have been another interval of silence, if not for Tammy who, wearing a towel turbaned around her hair and nothing else, entered the room, said, “Oops!”, and tippy-toed to the bed, slipping in under the covers next to Thomasina. She sat up, shook out her hair, and said to me, “Is this your friend? She’s so pretty!”

  “Hey, babe!” Pellerin said. “I thought you went home.”

  “I was making myself sweet for you,” said Tammy in a little-girl voice.

  “I’ll be in my room,” said Jocundra.

  “Why you acting this way?” Pellerin caught her wrist. “Like you been wronged or something. If anyone’s been wronged, it’s me. Sit do
wn and be polite. There’s no reason we can’t act like friends.”

  Tammy, baffled, gestured at me and said to Pellerin, “I thought she was his friend.”

  Jocundra twisted free and walked out. I caught up to her in the living room. “Hey, slow down,” I said, blocking the door to the suite.

  She folded her arms and lowered her head, shielding her eyes with one hand, as if close to tears. “Let me by!”

  “All right.” I moved aside, inviting her to leave. “You’re not helping him by behaving like this. You’re not helping me, you’re not helping yourself. But go ahead. Take a break. I’ll handle things. Just try and pull yourself together by Saturday night.”

  She stood a moment, then walked over to a sofa, stood another moment and sat down.

  “Why’re you getting so bent out of shape?” I dropped into a chair. “I thought you didn’t have a strong connection with this guy.”

  “I don’t!”

  “Then why…”

  “Because I couldn’t make a connection with him. It’s my fault he’s alone.”

  “He’s not exactly alone,” I reminded her.

  “You know it’s not the same. He needs someone with him who understands what he’s going through.”

  With two people breathing in it, the room seemed almost airless, like a room in a Motel 6 with bolted-shut plastic windows. I thought about yanking back the drapes and opening the glass door onto the balcony, but I couldn’t muster the energy.

  “He’s not exercising,” Jocundra said. “He’s not taking his meds.”

  “Maybe you should have slept with him.”

  “I tried once, but…I couldn’t. And that’s your fault.”

  I was about to ask her why it was my fault—I knew why, but I wanted to hear her say it—when Pellerin limped into the room.

  “I’ve been taking my meds. And I’m not a fool.” He lowered himself into a chair, smirking at us. “You crazy kids! Why don’t you run away and get hitched?”

  Jo’s startled expression waned; she folded her hands in her lap and bowed her head, like Anne Boleyn awaiting the inevitable.

  “It’s no big thing,” said Pellerin. “Really. So how about we ditch the soap opera and move on?”