Dagger Key and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  He orders the turtle and, after a second heated exchange, Selkie orders the conch salad.

  Things get busy and, when next Fredo notices, the German couple are in a better mood. Selkie is drinking a beer. Klose says something that makes her smile, then turns his attention to Fredo, who is clearing their plates.

  “Let me tell you a story, Mister Galvez,” he says. “And afterward you can tell me if it sounds familiar.”

  “I guess I got time for a tale,” says Fredo.

  “It won’t take long.” Again, Klose opens his backpack and removes a paperback with a garish cover. “Anne Cormac,” he says, leafing through the pages, “was a young Irishwoman, barely sixteen, who married a pirate named James Bonny. He carried her off to Nassau—in those days it was known as New Providence. There she engaged in an affair with the notorious pirate Calico Jack. Anne was of a violent disposition, adept as any man with a cutlass, and when Jack put to sea again, she went with him. Some say she disguised herself as a man, but according to members of the crew, she only dressed in men’s clothing before a battle.” Klose offers the paperback to Fredo, open to a central page. “Here. Have a look.”

  On the page is a sketch of Annie, a slender woman dressed in trousers and a loose-fitting ruffled shirt, a cutlass in one hand, a pistol in the other. Fredo has never had so precise an image of her and he studies it intently.

  “Of course,” Klose goes on, “I’m skipping over a great deal. Anne had many adventures prior to meeting Jack. Many affairs. Her husband James was deathly afraid of her. In fact, he had her arrested at one point by the Governor of New Providence, claiming that she would kill him if set free. But Anne had done the governor a favor, informing him of a plot against his life, and he refused to send her to the gallows. He said if Jack could not persuade James to accept a divorce-by-sale, Anne would be flogged and returned to her husband. She was incensed by the idea that she could be bought and sold like a cow. She and Jack made their escape not long after. They stole a sloop and returned to pirating.”

  “An early feminist, nicht wahr?” Selkie says, a sardonic edge to her voice, and asks for another beer.

  “In a way, I suppose,” says Klose.

  As Fredo sets a fresh bottle on the counter, she places her hand atop his and says, “You must forgive Alvin. He is drunk with these pirate stories.”

  “Besotted,” Klose says coldly. “I believe that is the word you want.”

  Selkie says something in German that Klose ignores. Thunder grumbles in the distance, the rain beats down harder. Outside, a vehicle pulls up, its engine dieseling.

  “In the end,” Klose continues, “Calico Jack and Anne were sentenced to hang in Jamaica, along with another female pirate, Mary Reade. She had joined Jack’s crew as well, recruited from a ship that they captured. Anne seduced her, thinking she was man, and the two of them had an affair. Quite a passionate one, it’s said. Eventually Jack was hanged and Mary was reported to have died of a fever in prison. But Anne did not hang. She disappeared. Now it is generally thought that her father, who was a wealthy lawyer, bought her freedom and conveyed her to a plantation that he owned in South Carolina, where she lived out her days under a false name. But this I do not believe. I believe she came to Cay Cuchillo.”

  Fredo affects nonchalance; he scratches his neck. “Nobody around here named Bonny.”

  Wilton re-enters, makes a show of shaking off rain. “Occurs to me you folks might want a ride back to the Cove. It’s coming down fierce.”

  “That would be wonderful!” Selkie hops off her stool.

  “She married,” Klose says. “She changed her surname to that of her husband.”

  “Alvin!”

  Klose casts her a bitter look, but begins to pack up his possessions. “The fact is,” he says to Fredo, “I believe she married an ancestor of yours.”

  “You got your facts wrong there,” Fredo says, moving off to help another customer. “Ain’t no Yankees in this mon’s family.”

  In the hillside shanty up from the bar, Fredo and Emily lie facing one another in a nylon hammock. Because wind is driving rain through the windows, they have put up the shutters and the air is close; the room is illuminated by the low yellow flame of a kerosene lamp that hangs on one of the posts to which the hammock is secured. Jenry and Palace are asleep in the next room. On a pallet to the side of the hammock, Leona makes a gurgling noise. The shanty shudders with a gust. Rain slashes against the boards.

  “This weather harsh,” Emily says.

  “It likely clear by morning.” Fredo presses against her and she laughs softly, pleased to feel his arousal.

  “You want something? You got to work for it, then, ’cause I weary.”

  “I weary, too. All except this one part.”

  “That’s the part usually gets it way, don’t it?”

  They kiss, his hand goes to her breast, and she makes a musical noise in the back of her throat. Her lined face looks older than her thirty-two years, yet despite three children, her body is still youthful, her breasts firm, and she likes having them fondled.

  “Maybe you won’t have to work so hard after all.” She rests her knee on his hip and fits herself to him. “Mmmm,” she says as he pushes inside. “Ohh…that’s nice.”

  They set the hammock to swaying, but their lovemaking grows less insistent and soon they are content with merely being joined, sustaining their arousal by means of slight shifts in position.

  “I had a visit from Annie today,” he says.

  “What she want?”

  He tells her and she asks what he plans to do.

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  They move lazily together, hammock strings squeaking, and Emily says, “Think Annie warning us against the German?”

  “The mon seem like a decent sort. It could be anybody.”

  After a brief let-up, the rain pounds harder, the shutters rattle and, taking his cue from the storm, Fredo thrusts heavily into Emily, but she clamps both her hands to his buttocks, holding him still.

  “Show him the pictures,” she says.

  “The German fella?”

  “You got to ’least show him. Find out how much money he willing to part with. And you know they got plenty. You see that stone his wife wearing?”

  “We be taking a risk.”

  Emily pushes him away, breaking their union. “Every time Annie come visit, there risk and there opportunity. We taking a risk not to show him. I worried about the boys.”

  “The boys solid,” he says. “They be fine.”

  “They not solid, they just young. But Jenry, he old enough he starting to understand that he don’t have no future better than what he sees in front of him. He come home the other day acting all crazy and smelling of gas. You know what that mean. He sniffing red gas with that bunch hangs around the wharf.”

  “I speak to him.”

  “Speaking to him won’t do no good. We got to give our children reason to hope.”

  She rolls up to her knees, a practiced maneuver that allows for the unsteadiness of the hammock, and comes astride him.

  “You want Jenry to wind up like them wharf boys? Begging for pennies and falling out back of Tully’s place?” She hisses in frustration. “That not my ambition. We got to do what we can for the children, no matter the risk.”

  Fredo tries to pull her hips down, seeking to enter her again, but she restrains him.

  “You don’t show him the pictures,” she says, “I will.”

  Her ferocity seems to heat the room further and, confronted by such passion, weakened by desire, Fredo says, “All right. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “If you can manage the cafe…Yeah, I do it in the morning.”

  She braces with her right hand, reaches beneath her with the left and guides him inside. In the yellowed dimness, like light from another age, ancient light, she looks younger now, her face softer and less careworn. As she moves, touching herself, her breath quickening, a ho
arse groan is dredged from Fredo’s chest.

  Lights break

  behind his eyelids,

  the serpent moon

  uncoils

  along his backbone,

  a bamboo flute

  shrieks in his ear

  as Emily reaches her moment, collapsing atop his chest. They lie quietly, their breath subsiding, the hammock strings quivering. After a time she slips off him onto her side. She rests her head on his shoulder. “I know this hard for you,” she says.

  “Hard ain’t the word for it.”

  “Well, hard or worse than hard, it’s all we can do.” She turns onto her back, gazes at the ceiling. “We gots to put things right for the family.”

  A muggy, windless morning, but Treasure Cove’s dining room is cool, air-conditioned, furnished with Spanish Colonial-style tables and chairs, its whitewashed ceiling crossed by thick varnished beams. On the wall above the bar is a painted map of the island—Dagger Key, the legend reads (the Spanish name is inscribed in smaller letters and enclosed in parentheses beneath). The other walls are hung with flintlocks and cutlasses, replica work manufactured and given a patina of antiquity on the mainland. Sunlight tilts in through a big bay window overlooking the sea, leaving most of the room in shadow. Beside it, bumping against the glass, a pair of flies mate in mid-air, their buzzing unnaturally loud. Close to the horizon, a shrimper lies becalmed in an inch of dazzle.

  Only three of the tables are occupied, one by a woman and her two small children, their piping voices shrill and demanding; another by an elderly couple peering at a guidebook, and the third by Wilton Barrios and a gray-haired man. He picks at a fruit plate and nods solemnly while Wilton talks. Fredo sits at the bar and Vinroy, the bartender, a handsome, young, energetic black man, serves him a cup of rich-smelling coffee.

  “Can you tell me anything about this Klose fella that staying here?” Fredo asks.

  “Klose,” Vinroy says. “Yeah, the pirate mon. One thing I know, his wife ain’t never going to be lonely. She catting around something crazy. Every time he go for a swim, she in here fooling with whoever on duty.”

  “You not tempted by that, now?”

  “I tempted, all right.” Vinroy rubs thumb and forefinger together. “Cash money, you know. She willing to pay, I willing to play.”

  “You going to lose your job, mon.”

  “Ain’t lost it yet.” Vinroy grins. “Tell the truth, I expect her husband be happy if someone take her off his hands.”

  Fredo sips his coffee. “How they fixed for money?”

  Vinroy takes a stack of round glass ashtrays and begins distributing them. “He throw the cash around pretty good. Their diving gear real sweet.” He aims an ashtray as might a shuffleboard player, slides it along the bar, gives it some body english, and snaps his fingers when it teeters at the end of the counter and stabilizes. “Divina, the girl who clean they suite, she say the wife got herself some fine clothes.” He picks up a rag, swipes it along the bar. “They got a nice little motor boat with a cabin below decks and a wheel house. Klose tell me it were builded from a kit, you know. So I don’t expect it worth that much. They come down along the coast from Cozumel. That’s where he buy it. They planning to run the coast down to the Bay Islands.”

  Fredo removes a cigarette from a crumpled pack. “They early risers?”

  “You ain’t got long to wait. Mon come in every morning about this time. The woman like to sleep in.” Vinroy checks his watch. “I got to go change. You all right on the coffee?”

  “I could use some fire.”

  Vinroy reaches beneath the bar, flips him a packet of matches with a skull-and-crossbones on the flap, and goes out through the kitchen. Fredo lights the cigarette. His smoke uncoils bluely and his thoughts stretch out, less thoughts than they are appreciations of the coolness, the taste of the coffee, the play of light and shadow beneath the window.

  Skin a delicate mosaic,

  inlay of viridian and jade,

  a gekko freezes on the wall

  waiting for an unwitting fly

  and Klose enters the bar, a folded newspaper under his arm. He stops on seeing Fredo and comes over. “Mister Galvez!” He puts a hand lightly on Fredo’s shoulder. “I didn’t expect to find you here.”

  “Thought I’d hear the finish of that tale,” says Fredo.

  Klose hesitates, smiles. “Will you join me for breakfast?”

  They relocate to a corner table and Vinroy, now dressed in white shorts and a navy polo shirt with Treasure Cove inscribed in white on the breast pocket, comes to take their order. Fredo asks for eight strips of bacon, well done, and a roll.

  “So much meat,” Klose says chidingly. “It’s not healthy to eat meat so early in the morning.”

  “I have me some fritters earlier. I figure I wrap the bacon up for lunch.”

  Klose’s smile falters as he digests, perhaps, the economic nuances that attach to Fredo’s response.

  “What you got to tell me about old Eduardo Galvez?” says Fredo. “The mon who marry Annie.”

  “You know about this?”

  “Sure I know. It family business.”

  Klose appears stunned. “You are claiming to be Anne Bonny’s descendant?”

  “Yesterday you trying to pin it on me, and now you say I claiming it?”

  “You denied the connection. I thought…”

  “I don’t like talking about Annie where other people can hear.”

  “But why? All this happened three hundred years ago.”

  “It still happening, mon. But I’ll get to that.” Fredo has a sip of coffee, finds it to have cooled. “You worked out some of the story; now I going to tell you the rest. Annie come to the island and she marry Eduardo Galvez some years after. But she did not come alone. That Mary Reade were with her. I know…” He holds up a hand to forestall an interruption. “They say she die in prison, but that were another woman did the dying. It were Mary that engineered the escape. She bribe someone high up with the promise of treasure. It ain’t clear who. Someone she knew that were close to the governor, though…”

  Fredo breaks off as Vinroy approaches with a tray, delivering bacon and rolls, granola, chopped banana, chunks of mango and papaya, a fresh jug of coffee.

  “The plan were for Mary and Annie to take their share of the treasure and go to New Orleans,” Fredo says once Vinroy is out of earshot. “But Mary…”

  “The treasure was here?” asks Klose. “On Cay Cuchillo?”

  He’s excited, unmindful of his food, and Fredo feels more secure about telling him the rest.

  “That’s right,” he says. “Calico Jack bury it here, and Mary use the knowledge to secure their freedom. They make sail from New Provincetown to Cay Cuchillo and once they divide the treasure up, like I saying, they plan to find a boat what will carry them to New Orleans. But Mary decide she want to stay here. They have a big row about it, but in the end they build a café on the island and call it The Two Swans.”

  Wilton Barrios stands abruptly, knocking over his chair, and spits curses in Spanish. The gray-haired man looks up at him placidly and has a bite of melon.

  “Maricon!” Wilton clenches his fists and appears ready to strike the man, but instead turns and stalks toward the door. On seeing Fredo and Klose, he takes a hitch in his stride and his furious expression abates as he goes out into the corridor, leaving the children gawking in his wake, the elderly couple whispering together, Vinroy shaking his head behind the bar.

  As far as Klose is concerned, however, none of this might have happened. “The Two Swans,” he said. “This is your cafe?”

  “It been rebuilt more times than I can tally,” says Fredo. “The boards rot, the winds blow it down…you know. Over the years, people drop the ‘Two,’ and then when the British write down the name for their records, they throw in an extra n and the change stick. But I guess you could say it more-or-less the same. It occupy the same ground, at least.”

  Fredo nibbles the end of a thick-cu
t strip of bacon. “Cay Cuchillo were a place where nobody care what two women do with one another, and that why Mary so strong for to stay here. For a while they happy, but Annie have a roving eye. She like men and other women, too. And come the day when she say she going to take her fair share of the treasure and leave. Mary beg her to stay, but once Annie have it in mind to do something, the weight of the world can be against her and she going to have her way. So Mary say, ‘Go ahead, then. But the treasure ain’t going nowhere.’ She snatch up a cutlass and menace Annie. She not angry, she stricken by the thought of losing her love. But Annie’s angry at being thwarted, and when she angry she a terror. She go at Mary with a dagger and stab her deep. Mary run out onto the beach, down toward the point from the café, and that’s where Annie catch her. Mary pleading for her life. She tell Annie that she didn’t mean nothing, she loves her. But Annie say, ‘To hell with love, and to hell with you!’ And she cut Mary down.

  “When Annie realize what she have done, the spirit go right out of her. All her fierceness, all her joy in life, were spent with that one knife-stroke. She pass the days drinking and weeping. She don’t care no more about New Orleans, about the café, about nothing—she might have drink herself to death if Eduardo Galvez didn’t happen along. He prop her up, he help her to face things. She never come to love him, but she grateful to him and that’s enough. She bear him three sons. The last of them, the one she died giving birth to, I of his line.”

  Vinroy saunters up, concerned that there’s something wrong with the food, they haven’t eaten a bite—Klose tells him, no, he was preoccupied, and shovels in a spoonful of granola as if to demonstrate his appetite.

  “What all that fuss with Wilton?” Fredo asks.

  “Some business. I don’t know,” says Vinroy, and nods toward the gray-haired man. “Wilton tell me he’s an investor. ’Pear he got the good sense not to invest with Wilton.”