There’s no sign of the Selkie. Perhaps, she thinks, she has miscalculated. She should have sighted them by now, and she wonders if they were foolish enough to try the windward passage. If so, they may have gone down, down into a graveyard already populated by hundreds of ships, some sent there by Annie’s hand. And yet she feels they’re close by. Engineless, they wouldn’t want to be caught out in the channel with weather coming and the cross on board; they would have allowed the boat to drift close to shore before trying to effect repairs. Leaden clouds are pushing in from the west, black brooms of rain sweeping the sea. She needs to find them before the squall hits.
Sputter and pop
of the dory’s outboard.
Annie cuts the motor and drifts.
Winded silence.
It was a day like this she first met Jack. Clear, with a squall in the offing. In the market at New Providence. She carrying a basket, tarrying by a fishwife’s stall, inspecting a fresh-caught bonita, and there he was, walking with his mates, like a lion among dogs, handsome in a tri-corner and an embroidered frock coat, a full head taller than the rest. In answer to her inquiry, the fishwife said, “Why that’s Calico Jack, miss. The pirate.” He was not much of a pirate, Annie learned. Too cautious by half. Cock like an Irish toothpick. Still, if he’d had a lion’s heart, she would never have strayed…though Mary would have tested her loyalties, no matter the circumstance, teaching her the woman’s way. The night Jack caught them at it, scissoring their quims in the sail locker, he made a show of outrage and wounded pride, but was intrigued by their display and let himself be drawn into a game of rub-and-tickle, seduced by shy looks and clever smiles. La, but that was a merry voyage! The crew rarely saw their captain abovedecks, and then only when they would anchor off the edge of the reef, lower a longboat and go fishing for shark, she and Jack and Mary, bait fish flopping in the bilge, their mineral reds and blues and yellows glistening like rare gemstones. The William might have sailed in circles and mutiny been muttered had not the first mate been a man of sober purpose and scant imagination.
God’s light! Where are they?
Having reached the end of one cay, Annie restarts the motor and points the dory toward the next, about two hundred meters away. Then a dazzle hard by the tip of the island, as of the sun off a metal surface. She cuts the outboard and peers toward it, shielding her eyes. There. By that cove. An off-white shape against whiter sand. She unships the oars and begins to row. After thirty meters, she’s certain it’s the Selkie. She quits rowing and assesses the situation. Unless she waits until nightfall, it’s unlikely she’ll be able to catch them unawares, and she doesn’t want to wait. She’s been too long in the body. The tastes of this world are too rich, their joys too poignant. She’s grown accustomed to being desireless and dreamless, the merest stripe of her old self. The memories circling her now, pecking and clawing at her brain…she yearns to have them fade, become as ephemeral as monsters in fog. Even the good ones have their attendant pains.
Her stomach growls. She wishes she hadn’t ruined those sausages. Water seeped through a rip in the foil while she was stowing the watchman’s body beneath the pier, making a soggy mess of the packet. She takes the dagger from her boot. Her best chance of approaching the Selkie without being noticed, she concludes, is to swim. She has a sailor’s fear of the water, and of sharks, but she’s dealt with that fear before. The sun strong on her back, she rows to within a hundred meters of the cabin cruiser, hoping the light chop is sufficiently busy to hide the dory, and drops the sea anchor. She shucks her boots and strips off her shirt, bites down on the dagger’s blade and slips over the side. The water feels like a new, cool skin.
As she swims, rain needles the sea and the leading edge of the squall darkens the sky. Annie’s less than twenty meters from the Selkie, when a figure in shorts appears in the stern. Klose. She stops swimming, keeping afloat by moving her arms. Klose appears to be staring directly at her, but gives no sign of alarm. He has a drink from a plastic bottle, then ducks down, going out of sight. He must be attempting repairs on the engine. She starts to swim again, dog-paddling, not wanting to make a splash, angling toward the bow. Music, faint and jangly, comes across the distance. On reaching the boat, she realizes the bow is too high—she’ll have to board in the stern. She works her way around to the other side of the craft and hangs onto a projection. The music is cut off. Selkie calls out, asking a question in German. Klose’s response, also in German, is curt. Annie waits for the music to resume, but it does not. There is only the slap of wavelets against the hull, the hiss of the rain, an occasional sound of metal on metal. She’ll have to be quick.
She gathers herself, seeking in the stream of time a propitious moment, a moment that summons her, and then she launches herself from the water, jaws clamped tightly upon the dagger, clutching the rail; her feet find purchase and she vaults over it, landing in a half-crouch. Kneeling by the open hatch, wrench in hand, Klose turns toward her, his aghast, grease-smeared face a parody of shock. Annie stabs downward, but the blade is deflected by Klose’s wrench. He calls to Selkie, tries to stand, but he’s twisted around, thrown off-balance by the blow. She slips behind him, bars an arm about his neck, strangling his outcry, and hauls him erect; she bends him backward and drives the dagger into his side, excavating under the ribs with the blade. He stiffens, thrashes about, makes an effort to see her, as if hoping to engage her mercy with his eyes. She stabs again, quieting his struggles, though he pries at her arm, which is slick from his spittle. A third blow quiets him utterly. His fingers unpeel from her arm, the wrench falls, he slumps to the deck. The rain, coming down harder now, sluices away his blood before it can pool.
At the bottom of the companionway, the door to the cabin stand ajar. Selkie must have heard the commotion, and Annie waits for her to emerge, to call to her husband, to peek out.
The cabin cruiser rocks on the heavying chop.
Gusts of wind slanting the rain,
whitecaps pitching,
land and sea gone gray as death.
At length, alert for surprises, she creeps down the ladder, pushes open the door with the point of the dagger, and passes through the galley into the sleeping quarters. Selkie is lying on her belly in a bunk, one foot in the air, wearing a pair of opaque pink panties. She’s leafing through a magazine, headphones over her ears. Annie’s captivated by the shape of her leg, the curve of her back. So like Mary in her carefree attitude, yet entirely unlike her in form. Plush and soft where Mary was lean and muscular. Annie steps inside the cabin and undergoes a dislocation. It’s as if she’s standing in a ruder cabin with dark, ill-fitted boards and a port whose glass is warped and bespotted with birdlime. The vision dissolves and once again the windows are narrow, the walls paneled, the bunk carpentered out of some polished reddish wood. Yet the shade of that other cabin persists and she thinks it may be a sign of more significant persistence. She recalls a Hindu sailmaker aboard the William who told stories of souls passing from one flesh to another, stories that charmed her with their easy, airy logic and caused her to rethink the moral oversimplifications of the Christian creed (not that she was ever a zealot)—it seemed just that the character of one’s life, as the sailmaker claimed, was a punishment for sins committed during a previous existence, that good be rewarded with perfect emptiness, that evil men be reborn as calves or suckling pigs, kings as chattels, and pirates as whores, all that was hard and strong in them made pliant and submissive.
Selkie turns onto her side and sees Annie. She registers the blood on his clothing. Her eyes drop to the dagger, sheathed in Klose’s blood. A look of fright occupies her face. She presses back into the corner of the bunk, breasts nodding, one hand clutching the sheet, the other braced against the wall.
“The money,” Annie says.
Tremulously, Selkie says, “In the galley. The cabinet under the sink. Please! Don’t hurt me.”
Annie half-turns, intending to investigate, but is struck by a more vivid dislocation—Mary,
brown and naked, holding out her arms, inviting her into an embrace.
“Mary?” Annie says. “Is it you?”
She cannot believe it, yet neither can she deny the temptation toward belief—she wonders now if the things of herself she recognized in Selkie were intimations of Mary reborn in this harlot’s flesh. They shared a soul, she and Mary, though Annie owned the stronger half of it.
“Mary?” she says again, and her heart beats faster, as if those two syllables keyed the racing of her blood.
Selkie’s fear has been diluted by bewilderment, and Annie, uncertain herself, comes a step nearer.
“Do you not know me, Mary?” she asks. “It’s Annie.”
Bewilderment, again. And then a canniness shows itself in Selkie’s expression. Hesitantly, she puts a hand to her temple, the gesture seeming to convey that she’s experiencing an inner turmoil, that what Annie said has waked something inside her and provoked a fleeting recognition; yet it’s such an artificial gesture, it fails to convince, and the look of dismay that accompanies it accents this failure.
“Annie?” she says. “I…”
She makes a second pass with her hand, the fingertips just touching her cheek. A feeble noise issues from her throat. It appears she’s caught between grief and the memory of love, between her husband’s blood and a fleeting glimpse of another time.
Annie realizes that Selkie must have heard the story of Dagger Key from Klose and, confronted by this dangerous man with her husband’s blood on his knife, someone she must assume is deranged, she’s attempting to play a tune he’ll dance to—but that she’s acting is no proof of anything. Mary was always quick-witted. It may be she’s both acting and stirred by a memory.
Lowering the dagger, Annie sits down on the edge of the bunk, places her hand on Selkie’s thigh. A tremor runs through the milky flesh, but Selkie does not freeze up, rather her expression grows dreamy and unfocused; her eyes drift to Annie’s fingers, lying so near her quim. And Annie, possessed by yet another memory, re-envisioning the time when Mary first revealed herself and, lying back, let her knees fall apart to show Annie her rosy…Annie twigs aside the flimsy pink fabric and slides a finger along Selkie’s lips. Already moist. She cannot be, Annie thinks, so good at playing a part that her body would not betray her.
Selkie’s belly quakes, her hips bridge up off the mattress as Annie thrust two fingers inside her. The cabin shrinks around them. There is no corpse abovedecks, no history of betrayal. All that exists is the sounds of rain and wind, the rolling of the boat, the bunk. Lost amid the recollection of other days with the rain sawing and wind gusting hard, the William knocked about on a choppy sea, Annie cuts away the panties and lowers between Mary’s legs, Selkie’s legs, making play with tongue, teeth and lips, until Selkie’s outcry lights the sexual darkness and her thighs clamp viselike to Annie’s head. They lie quietly for a time. Annie rests her head on Selkie’s belly, her mind thronged with contraries, the urge to have done with this fancy contending with the desire to linger, to make of the day an idyll, or more than a day. After three hundred years, she has earned a bit of freedom, has she not? She exults in the taste coating her tongue, the scent cloying her nostrils. Then Selkie, Mary…she shifts away and sits on her haunches. Tentatively, she fingers the top button of Annie’s shorts and, when Annie doesn’t object, she undoes the buttons and slides the shorts down past her hips. Annie’s momentarily put off by the sight of a man’s yard standing to attention between her thighs and, when Selkie takes it in her mouth, it seems unnatural to know a man’s portion of pleasure. But in that milk-pale face she finds the lineaments of Mary’s darker, angular face. She closes her eyes, holds tight to the dagger and recalls a fiercer delight.
In the afterglow of sex, Selkie cuddles, her arm flung across Annie’s chest. She whispers, “Oh, Annie. It is you!” She, Selkie, claims to have been awakened by Annie, a process that began when she met him at the café. Met her, rather. It’s all so confusing! When she touched her hand, she had this curious frisson, a sense of there having been something between them. Does he remember that moment? Did he feel it, too? Ever since, bits and pieces of memory have leaked into her head. And then the kiss…She’s sorry about that. Alvin forced her to paint her lips with the drug. Of course, she was a willing complicitor. She hadn’t recognized Annie yet. Not entirely. But when they kissed, that’s when the memories really started to come. She can’t recall much about their time together, mere fragments, but she will remember, she thinks, with Annie’s help. And now, well, they’ll sell the cross and then they’ll travel, just as they always wanted. England and the Continent. Asia. Annie is charmed by this portrait of an ideal life and makes an affirmative noise, and Selkie, appearing to gain in confidence, prattles on about getting a little cottage somewhere, a home base. For the most part, Annie believes none of what Selkie says, yet she can’t discount it utterly, because Selkie’s physical reactions remind her so much of Mary’s. When Annie toys with her nipples, she shivers and gives a little musical sound that’s identical to the one Mary used to make. She thinks it strange that Selkie’s pillowy breasts would respond the same way as Mary’s, which were the size of onions. Yet all her soft cries and responses bear an astounding similarity to Mary’s and, as a result, Annie allows herself to be seduced by Selkie’s dream of the future, however calculated it may be. It’s as if the cabin has been crammed with the invisible furniture of another life…
…with bolts of silk,
half-unrolled,
gold coins spilled from a chest
the size of a piglet,
the sound of Jack pissing
into a pewter jug,
a tall mirror with an ebon frame
reflecting the tumbled bed,
two tousled female heads,
and beyond,
past the window frame,
a dawn sky, a flotilla of lavender clouds…
Annie lives among those clouds
for a time.
She breathes in spices,
tastes a softer clime…
Then, shocked from that dream, perhaps by some ancient reflex, a sense of wrongness, a ghostly alarm given, or perhaps it’s simply a matter of the overcast brightening, the squall lessening, the change in the weather alerting her to the need for action, she makes one of those abrupt decisions upon which her life has always turned. She leans over Selkie, who’s half-asleep, and, using the point of the dagger, nicks the artery in the side of her neck. Selkie’s eyes snap open. She clamps a hand to the wound to stifle the blood spray. She mouths a word: Annie. She pleads silently for a life that’s spewing out between her fingers.
“Go,” Annie says to her, retreating from the bunk. “Hurry from this world.”
Selkie gurgles; her eyes widen further.
Annie’s heart is numb, her spirit is numb. She leaves Selkie struggling on the bed, goes into the galley, looks in the cabinet and collects the biscuit tin; on the same shelf as the tin lies a bulky object wrapped in linen rags. She hesitates, then lets it lie. They’ve paid a sufficient price to carry it with them into eternity and, without the burden of the cross, Annie reckons that she’s one step closer to extinction…and, mayhap, rebirth. Serve her right, it would, if she were to be Mary’s victim in another existence. She snatches a hatchet from the wall and tests the edge—it will serve to scuttle the boat. She steps back into the sleeping quarters. Selkie’s fingers are still pressed to the wound, her eyes are open, but judging by the blood pooling on the sheets, she is either dead or close to death. There’s still a trace of color in her face. Annie studies her for a moment, feeling both regret and vindication. The voluptuous body on the bunk and the memory of Mary offer a dissonance and an affinity that she cannot resolve. It seems that she has been confronted by something approximating this odd imbalance in every relationship she’s had.
“If you are Mary, God rest ye. We’ll meet again someday,” Annie says by way of farewell. “If you’re not, you should remember it’s ever a bad omen to sa
il on a vessel that bears your name.”
It’s closer to morning than midnight when Fredo returns to Swann’s Cafe, walking the beach from the pointed tip of the island. He’s wearing a clean T-shirt and trousers that he knows must belong to Klose, and he has no memory of what happened aboard the Selkie. The biscuit tin under his arm, however, tells him that no good came that day to the German couple. And, too, he has a cloudy memory of a struggle with Wilton Barrios that will not come clear. High, thin clouds rush across the moon, reducing but not obscuring its radiance, and the wind blows steadily at his back as if pushing him toward home. When he reaches the L-shaped palm, he feels about in the sand for a key, finds it, and opens the door to the café. He digs with his hands in the packed sand behind the counter. Once the hole is deep enough, he places the biscuit tin in it, covers it with sand and stamps it smooth. Only then does he light a kerosene lamp. He sits at the counter, stares at the brightly painted boards for the longest time—they have the look of a puzzle that’s been fitted together, but the puzzle in his mind is scattered and fathomless. Exhausted, he puts his head down on his elbows. He drifts toward sleep, but the thought of the murders he almost certainly has committed pricks him to alertness and he sits up straight. Immediately, he wants to rest his head again, but instead he takes the broom from behind the counter and begins to sweep. He has been sweeping for about fifteen minutes, losing himself in the task, when the door creaks, giving him a fright. Emily peeks in, her hair covered by a paisley scarf. He doesn’t know what to say to her, so he lowers his head and takes an ineffectual swipe with the broom.
Dagger Key and Other Stories Page 53
