Dagger Key and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  “Why you don’t come home, Fredo?” she asks, slipping into the café. “You know I’m worrying about you.”

  “I just get back,” he said. “I thought I do some cleaning.”

  She steps close, puts her hands on his waist. “You all right?”

  He drops the broom and enfolds her in an embrace. Tears start from his eyes. They hold one another in silence, and then Emily pushes him away. “You hungry? I make you a sandwich if you want.”

  He sits again at the counter while she busies herself in the kitchen. A brownish stain on his thumbnail attracts his attention. He scrapes at it with a fingernail until it is gone. Through the kitchen door, he can see Emily’s back—she’s bent over the cutting board. “How the boys?” he asks.

  “Palace, he act angry all the time you gone. That how he show he’s worried, I expect. Jenry…” She makes a fretful noise with her tongue. “I don’t know what to do about that boy.” She glances at him over his shoulder. “You get the money?”

  “Yeah. I bury it back of the counter.”

  “You have trouble getting it?”

  He lets the question hang for a moment. “I gone for…what is it? Must be more than a day, and you ask me that? Damn right, I have me some trouble! There’s blood on these hands. I don’t remember nothing about it, but I know!”

  Not moving a muscle, Emily stands with her head down, back bowed, hands on the cutting board.

  “I know,” says Fredo weakly.

  Emily returns to her labors, but says nothing. She finishes the sandwiches and carries them to Fredo. Cheese, lettuce, avocado. And bacon.

  “I got that bacon for you yesterday,” she says. “I had to cook it up, or else it spoil.”

  Fredo nods his thanks, has a bite. The taste fuels his hunger—suddenly he’s ravenous and wolfs down half a sandwich. Emily fetches him a warm Coke and he takes a swig.

  “We going to give some of that money to the church,” Emily says firmly.

  Fredo swallows. “You think if we slip Jesus a little something extra, that make it right?”

  “Don’t talk that way to me! Don’t make out it’s only you gots to bear this burden! I bearing it, too. Difference is, I glad to bear it for the boys.”

  Fredo has another bite, chews. “Sorry.”

  “I don’t need your sorry, I needs you to be a man.”

  “Ain’t I proved that to you? You can’t allow me to have a bad feeling about things?”

  Emily comes around to his side of the counter, puts her arms around him and kisses his cheek. “We both of us on edge. Things going to go better now.”

  “This thing with Wilton,” Fredo says. “I can’t get it out of my head.”

  “What about Wilton?”

  He relates his clouded memory of a struggle between he and Wilton up at the notch.

  “I’m not going to waste tears over Wilton,” says Emily. “If it happen, it were because he try and steal from us. The same with the Germans. Two days, Fredo. You gone two days. You know they must try and cheat you.”

  “True,” he says.

  “No matter her evil ways, Annie always protect this family. We in the clear—you can trust her to make certain of that. All that’s left is for us to live with what she done.” Emily cups his face in both her hands. “Together, we strong enough. It take some doing, but we’ll manage.”

  The flickering light softens the iron of her expression. He seems to see down to her irresolute self and understands that she’s as frightened as he of the mortal consequences of Annie’s crimes. Oddly enough, that comforts him more than her assurances. He kisses the knuckles of her hands and sighs.

  “If it up to me,” he says, “I throw that damn cup into the sea. The dagger, too.”

  She pulls away, sits on a stool beside him. “Maybe we should take the money and leave the island behind. Maybe that be best for everyone.”

  “It’s something to think about,” he says. “But I too weary to make decisions now. We got time to work it through.”

  “Why don’t you go on up and get some sleep? I finish with the cleaning.”

  “I ain’t ready to sleep. You need anything from town?”

  “Some fish would be nice. Maybe a barracuda head for a stew.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “The usual. Bread, bananas…you know.”

  They settle back into their familiar roles, discussing the functioning of the café, the household, taking refuge in gentle talk that seems to rise up like smoke to conceal the strangeness of the past days, Emily laughing as Fredo tells her about Garnett Steadman, his story of how he saw a vast congregation of mackerel off the reef, and Fredo chuckling over Emily’s gossip about Annabelle Lister and her several lovers.

  Outside, the sky is purpling. Some of the stars have disappeared. A solitary wave crunches on the reef. The wind has all but died, an occasional breeze lifting a palm frond, causing a hibiscus blossom to nod. Crabs glide and scuttle across the beach, pausing in their race, hearkening to an indefinite signal. Somewhere inland, an engine sputters to life. Beneath the dock at Treasure Cove, the night watchman floats in murky water, tiny fish swimming in and out of his eyeless sockets. In the notch, the vine matte writhes, clacking its braided cowrie shells, and grows still. Fifty feet below, in a thicket of thorny shrubs, the corpse of Wilton Barrios has been rendered unrecognizable by dogs. Vultures soar on an aerial above hills that are starting to show green. The morning widens, the eastern sky is pinked. All the mysteries of Dagger Key are being obscured beneath the semblance of an ordinary day, buried in light. What’s true remains unknown, what’s false is abundantly clear. Fredo steps from the café, fires up a cigarette, and stares toward Belize. His exhalation suggests an expansive measure of relief. A pariah dog ambling along the edge of the water pauses to sniff at the still-pulsing body of a jellyfish.

  The seagull’s wing

  divides the wave,

  the lights of Swann’s Café

  grow dim…

  STORY NOTES

  Stars Seen Through Stone

  I made my living for a decade as a rock musician, mostly in the Detroit area. Though many of my collaborators were excellent technicians, most of the musicians I played with were not terrific human beings. Speaking generally, they had enormous egos and the attention span of gerbils, and tended to sulk when their every whim wasn’t being catered to. A case in point, I recall a rhythm guitar player who had been in a mood, unresponsive and scowling and occasionally belligerent. After a couple of weeks, he made his difficulty known to me, drawing me aside and asking in a surly tone, “How come you write all the songs?”

  I was surprised, since he had never expressed any previous interest in writing, and I said, “I don’t know, man. Why don’t you write one?”

  He was nonplussed by this, having expected me to argue for my creative primacy, but soon recovered and said that he would get right on it. I never heard any more about songwriting from him, but his mood improved immeasurably.

  Minor problems of this sort were endemic, but from time to time they escalated. On one occasion, we were playing an outdoor concert in front of seven or eight thousand people, when the rhythm section fell apart behind me. I turned and discovered that the drummer and the keyboard player were having a fistfight on stage. All bands have these personality conflicts to one degree or another, but I would wager that most bands never had to deal with anyone like the man upon whom the character of Joe Stanky is modeled.

  Not only are all the episodes concerning Stanky are solidly grounded in fact; I have underplayed the pain-in-the-ass that he actually was and omitted the most egregious of his malefactions for fear he would be perceived as unrealistic. For example, when he broke up with his inamorata, “Liz,” Stanky, displaying a zeal and—I must say—a certain stick-to-it-iveness that he had never shown with the band, waited until she went home to visit her mother and proceeded to masturbate on all her possessions, paying especial attention to her books and records. He then fled the premis
es.

  He was like a great, ugly child who had to be watched over, nurtured, punished, and fed. I was forced to see to his dental care. A trumpet player without teeth is scarcely an asset, and his teeth were in a state of dire neglect. Despite the fact that he made my life difficult for a couple of years, he was an immensely talented musician, and I was, like Vernon in the story, a fool for talent. Perhaps this was the root of my downfall in the music business. But I wasn’t a complete fool—eventually I severed all ties with him. A few years later, I was chopping wood in front of my house, when I saw a penguin-like figure walking down the street toward me. A chill swept over me. As the figure drew near, I realized it was, indeed, Stanky. He came up, all smiles, exhibiting the body language of a dog who has been beaten, and began talking about “the good old days,” what a great band we’d had, etc. He asked if I had a band currently and suggested that we should get together and play some music.

  I had the ax in my hand, and perhaps I made some twitch that persuaded him I might be feeling murderous, for he quickly dropped that topic and, after fumbling around for a bit, he tried another tack, coming at the subject obliquely, and began telling me how he was a changed man due to his acceptance of Jesus Christ. I never saw him again after that day, but I kept expecting him, like a curse, to reappear.

  And now, in this story, he has.

  Emerald Street Expansions

  I’m not much of a reader. I read a lot when I was a kid, but after I got to college I stopped for about fifteen years, partly because the way literature was taught put me off the good stuff. I still don’t read as much now as I suppose I should. But once in a while I’ve gone on jags during which I read an author’s entire output…or as much as I can tolerate. I read Foucault and Celine in this fashion, also Balzac and de Maupassant, Cendrars and Mallarmé and Genet, Proust and Michaud…It seems I have something of a passion for French writing. When I was sixteen or so, I read all of what remains of the work of Francois Villon and was struck by the lines:

  “…when I lie down at night,

  I have a great fear of falling.”

  I’ve been unable since to find the poem that contains those lines, so this story may be based on a misapprehension (though it’s as likely that my attempt at finding it was desultory). Anyway, I was fascinated by Villon, who was a thief and a poet. I also fancied myself a poet and a criminal (though, in truth, I was far more criminal than poet, having been arrested for several minor offenses and having no published work), and I greatly admired Villon for his career flexibility. And so, later in life, I wrote this story for no other reason than to express that admiration and for the opportunity to do a pastiche of his style.

  I should mention, because she will vilify me if I don’t, that the aspect and character of Amorise is derived partly from Villon’s poem, “The Testament,” and partly from a friend of mine, Elle Mauruzak, who played in the Goth-punk band, The Hiss, and worked by day in what is fondly referred to by some Seattle-ites as the Ban Roll-on Building, due to its similarity in appearance to that product.

  Limbo

  I knew a guy in Detroit named Alkazoff who was a member of the Armenian Mafia, who were reputed to be behind most of the organized crime in the area. I first met him in this vast, dingy poolroom on Woodward Avenue, a major artery of Detroit, and, as we shared a common background in music and were equally matched as pool players, we wound up spending time together. We both were devotees of boxing and, since Alkazoff was connected, he could get great seats and would occasionally take me along. Sometimes we went to the fights in the company of his associates and on those occasions I felt like a chicken among foxes. I never really felt in danger among them, but Alkazoff had told me stories, carefully edited, about his life and I suspected that some of these men had figured in those stories and that there was blood on their hands. When I became a writer, I started a piece based on the stories that Alkazoff had told me, but I lost interest in the factual material and turned it into a story about a criminal hiding from other criminals, using Alkazoff as the protagonist.

  The setting of the story, the town of Champion, the lake and the cabin, reflects a place in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where my ex-wife and I spent a pleasant vacation one autumn. My most salient memory of the time (a memory I tried unsuccessfully to fit into “Limbo”) is that one morning I dropped acid, took my National Steel guitar (a lovely old thing with a painting of a girl waterskiing on the back), and went into the woods to write songs. I found a sunny spot between two fallen trees that lay about thirty feet apart, and sat with my back against one and plunked away. It was incredibly peaceful there, with birds chittering, lots of little sounds, the sun warming my bones, and that peace infected me. I felt in absolute harmony with my environment, and perhaps I was, for soon birds and squirrels began hopping about me, coming close enough to touch. It was like a damn Disney movie. I smiled beatifically at them and made incidental music for the film. I’d been in this state for perhaps an hour when suddenly an animal popped up from behind the fallen tree opposite me, bracing with its forepaws on the trunk. I stared at it inquisitively, wondering what delightful forest creature had now been sent my way. It was, I’d estimate, about 40 pounds in weight, with a bear-like body and a head like a cross between those of a raccoon and a dog. It stared back at me for five or six seconds, and emitted a fierce, high-pitched growl, rather like the outcry of a tiny jaguar; then it disappeared behind the trunk and, apparently, went to tend other business. When I returned to the cabin that afternoon, I told the wife, a native of Michigan, about my day and described the animal to her and asked if she knew what it was.

  “You’re lucky it didn’t tear you apart,” she said, busy doing something at the sink. “That was a wolverine.”

  “No shit?”

  She proceeded to tell me in brief about the ferocity of wolverines, relating an anecdote or two by way of illustration, and repeated, “You were lucky.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  Liar’s House

  “Liar’s House” is one of several stories I’ve written about the dragon Griaule, (the first being “The Man Who Painted The Dragon Griaule”) and there will be at least two more. The idea of Griaule occurred to me when I was stuck for something to write while attending the Clarion Workshop—I went out onto the campus of Michigan State University and sat under a tree and smoked a joint to jog my brain. I then wrote down in my notebook the words “big fucking dragon.” I felt exceptionally clever. Big stuff, I thought, is cool.

  The notion of an immense paralyzed dragon, more than a mile in length and seven hundred feet high, which dominates the world around him by means of its mental energies, seemed appropriate to the Reagan Administration; but even a paralyzed dragon must grow and change, and for this story I decided, during the course of writing it, that Griaule would want children—how then would he go about it? Well, who cares, really? I understand that Griaule is representative of Christ or Oprah or some other mythic figure, but we’re talking about a bloody dragon here. However, in case you do care, such was—stated in question form—my idiot thesis.

  I don’t know what it is that brings me back to Griaule. I hate elves, wizards, halflings, and dragons with equal intensity. Maybe it’s because I saw a list once of fictional dragons ordered by size and mine was the biggest. And the stories are fairly popular. It makes me think that I might make a career of this, writing stories about the biggest whatever. The biggest gopher, an aphid the size of a small planet, a gargantuan dust bunny. Anyway, the next story in the Griaule cycle or whatever it is will be “Beautiful Blood,” which will be published by Night Shade Books in ’08 and details certain unusual properties of the dragon’s blood. And the last story, a short novel of approximately 60,000 words, will be entitled The Grand Tour, and will be included with the other stories, collected in a single volume.

  Unlike the majority of my stuff, there’s little autobiographical material in “Liar’s House”, the exception being that the sketch of the hotel’s owner is based o
n one of my old landlords, a man who surely will have his own special boutique hell. God bless you, Mr. Weimer, wherever you are. When it comes time for you to pass, I’ll be there with itching powder and a ball gag to make certain your last moments are a joy.

  Dead Money

  For a long time now, I’ve intended to revisit the materials of my first novel, Green Eyes, and the female protagonist of that novel, Jocundra Verret.

  “Dead Money” is the result. I had wanted to put a poker game into the novel, but Terry Carr thought it would break the continuity of the narrative and I see now that, as was his habit, Terry was right.

  Occasionally I play poker at a local card room. I never win much, never lose much, but I like the game and the environment, and I could easily lose a whole lot more if I let myself go. There’s a guy who comes into the card room who sometimes uses a cane, sometimes not. I have no idea if he’s a good player or bad, but he’s the model for Josey Pellerin in the story. I’ve never exchanged a word with him, so I have no idea what he’s about, but he looks cool in his black cowboy hat and shades, and I’ve imagined various sinister reasons for his condition.

  Some relationships are like self-inflicted wounds. Jack’s relationship with Jocundra is like that—he knows it’s going to be bad for him, but he goes ahead in spite of that and, though he reads innumerable signs along the way directing him to desist, he continues pursuing it to the bitter end. Obviously, many people have this same propensity. For my part, show me a woman who’s a psychological wreck and, better, doesn’t know she’s a wreck and, better yet, has a prescription for anti-depressants, a trouble-plagued, ongoing relationship, and bursts into tears every few minutes…hey, I’m there! I assume that this signals some sort of mental problem, but why fix it if it ain’t broke? I’m considering having T-shirts printed that bear the legend, “You’re Beautiful—Just Shoot Me Now”, and business cards that say…Well, never mind.