Dagger Key and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  Enough of matters sub-textual.

  The Seminole Hard Rock Casino and Hotel in Hollywood, Florida is one of God’s most egregious errors. I recommend you spend a night there if you ever get down South Florida way and are, like myself, an aficionado of the grotesque and love the smell of terminal despair. Perhaps the International Conference on the Fantastic could be moved there—it might liven things up. Judging by the chests of the waitresses, hostesses, and pros who populate the place, there must be a silicon mine nearby. Look too closely, you could lose an eye. Gaping old men with ghastly complexions teeter on the bar stools; old women with leathery tanned skin, heavy gold bracelets adorning their liver-spotted wrists, lounge by the pool like alligators who have put on a human guise, their cold eyes tracking the cabana boys. It is home to mutants of every imaginable stamp. Aliens could land on the grounds and people would believe it was a publicity stunt. After a while they’d embrace those nine-foot-tall green beans with eyes and fangs as part of their natural surroundings. Seriously, folks.

  The Seminole Paradise. Check it out.

  Dinner at Baldassaro’s

  My stories often begin life with, not an idea, but a phrase or a sentence, often not part of the opening, though in this instance it was. This particular sentence (“Giacinta had a beautiful sneeze.”) originally was in a story set in present-day Havana, concerning a CIA agent recuperating from a broken hip in his Havana apartment, stoned on painkillers, who is alternately keeping tabs on the progress of an operation and remembering his days in the Canal Zone and a young brother-and-sister whom he caught gleaning the high-security dumpsite. That story has been stewing in my pot for many years, and I’m beginning to doubt it will ever be done; so I lifted the sentence and used it to open the present story.

  I spent a few days in Diamante not too long ago directly following the town’s chile pepper festival, a week during which the townspeople decorate everything, including themselves, with peppers, an event I was happy to avoid. I prefer to visit places in the off-season, when they let drop the disguise they have adopted for the tourist trade. While there, I had a dream in which the waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea were transformed overnight into a garden of heroic statuary. The story developed backward from that point and deals with one of my favorite recurring paranoid fantasies: I have always suspected (though I doubt it’s true) that the world would not have gotten this fucked-up unless someone was orchestrating things toward that end.

  There simply aren’t enough Cro Magnon stories for my tastes. Let’s leave it at that.

  Abimagique

  When I lived in Seattle, I sometimes took lunch in a little teriyaki place in the University District (Teriyaki Plus, near the corner of 45th and Roosevelt). It was notable for the fact that Bill Gates had eaten there, an event commemorated by a Polaroid of The World’s Richest Nerd on the wall above one of the tables. Often I would find a zaftig woman with orange and black hair eating alone at one of the tables, reading a paperback. Despite being slightly overweight, she was quite attractive and I wondered why no one ever hit on her—the restaurant was frequented by students at the University of Washington, many of them males who targeted her with stares.

  One afternoon I went home and wrote the paragraph that opens this story, except in the first person. It sat in my computer for several years, then, while I was recovering from a serious back injury, unable to write in other than short bursts, I opened the file and, on a whim, changed the paragraph to the second person. That inspired me to write a couple of pages. When I picked up the story a few months later, I quickly realized I was writing a novella in the second person, present tense, a difficult chore; but I thought, What the hell.

  I made the narrator callow in the extreme so I could have him drift along cluelessly while the plot happened around him and at the end he’d be no more knowledgeable than, say, you or I would after an intense experience with a Tantric witch and her crippled minions that ended in her death. Human beings are lousy at figuring things out, yet their fictive creations are often brilliant at it, and this strikes me as highly unrealistic; thus I was striving for a kind of bungling naturalism in the character. Bungling naturalism being one of my strengths as a writer, I’m confident I succeeded.

  The Lepidopterist

  The island of Roatan off the Caribbean coast of Honduras is a place rife with storytellers. John Anderson McCrae, now deceased, was not among the best of them. The best I knew was Devlin Walker, who’s mentioned in the story as having two left feet…which, in fact, he did. McCrae was always drunk and usually his stories became incoherent ramblings after he had a few. But he had a couple of interesting narrative twitches, not least among them the habit of exclaiming, “God Bless America!,” whenever he thought he was losing his audience or preparatory to asking to be bought another drink. So I decided to use him as the narrator for this little political fable.

  I originally approached McCrae because I wanted to ask him about Lee Christmas, an American railroad engineer who became, first, a general in the Honduran army and, second, a mercenary who played a major role in establishing the United Fruit Company, a man whom, according to my informants, McCrae had known as a boy. After ten or twelve beers, he took to acting out his story. When he talked about his childhood, telling how his father, a mean drunk, told him to get under the table, he got under the table to demonstrate how he’d obeyed, an exertion that caused him nearly to pass out. We (my brother-in-law and I) hauled him up and tried to get him talking again, but he was too far gone to do other than babble incoherently, punctuating his half-sentences with loud, “God Bless America!”s. This caused some unpleasantness with a group of Americans who were staying at a nearby resort and thought that he was putting them on. I imagine he was, in a way, putting all of us on. But McCrae’s attitude toward Americans was not informed by hostility, rather by a gentle humor.

  I realize I may have painted him as a colorful relic, a memory souvenir of the Caribbean, but that’s not how I viewed him. He was a man who’d seen a lot. His father actually had been a wrecker, and he was afflicted by the fact that he had participated in his father’s crimes, which included smuggling and gun-running. He knew a lot, too, and, had he been born to a better estate, who can say what he might have done.

  The last time I saw him, he was scuttling from bar to bar in Coxxen Hole, the island’s capital. I was impatient to be on my way, let him hustle me for a dollar, and hurried off. He yelled something after me, which I’m certain was a colorful island tribute, but I paid no attention—I was hurrying to meet someone; I can’t recall who—and thus it is forever lost. When I returned to Coxxen Hole five years later, McCrae was dead and it was too late (if I ever had the necessary funds) to realize my dream for him. I wanted to buy a TV station and give him an hour in the seven PM slot, usually handed over to reruns, and a set dressed to resemble an island bar. I’d prime him with a six-pack and let him shout “God Bless America!” to his heart’s content, using these exclamations as parentheses to enclose his wit and wisdom, gradually sinking into a stuporous condition and passing out just before the last commercial break. I think he’d be huge. No one would believe he wasn’t the latest thinking man’s comic. It’d be paradise for McCrae. He’d have guests to hustle, pretty girls at whom to leer, and he could afford a liver transplant. And I’m fairly sure that “God Bless America!” would become a catchphrase meaning, more-or-less, “You bet your ass!”

  Dagger Key

  I wanted to write an old-time pirate story, complete with ship-boardings and chases across the Spanish Main, but I hate doing research. I don’t even like being close to more than a few books. Libraries put me to sleep. There must be some chemical given off by all those old books that has a soporific effect on me. The Internet helps, but even there, after a short while, I find myself drifting over to my message board, or I buy something online or visit a sports site…In short, I guess I’m lazy. So the problem was to write such a story, yet set in a time with which I was familiar.

  When I w
as a boy, I’d read about Anne Bonny and her lover, Mary Reade, and I decided to write about Annie who, by all accounts, was more bloodthirsty than the men with whom she sailed. I hated to think that, as is commonly held, she wound up as Southern Belle in South Carolina, so I put her on a remote key off the coast of Belize (or in Fredo’s head, depending on your interpretation of the story).

  Fredo and Emily are based on a couple I met in Guyana fourteen years ago. They had, to my mind, the most equitable marriage I’ve ever been privy to. They were so reasonable with one another, I assumed that one or both had to be deeply twisted, if not insane, and I was intrigued by the idea that this marriage could be sustained by the lurid fantasy of a serialist or the violent nature of a family ghost.

  I’ve long been an admirer of Peter Mathiessen, the author and naturalist, especially of his classic novel, Far Tortuga. In this story, I wanted to do homage to him and to the experimental typography of that novel. I wanted to go him one better and incorporate bits of poetry into the prose, because life along the Caribbean littoral strikes me as being intensely poetic in character due to a constant interaction with the natural world, and to the speech of those indigenous to the region, which can be scanned as poetry.

  There are other, more significant reasons, of course, why I wrote the story, but this is the sort of thing I tell people who ask.

  Lucius Shepard’s latest novel is Softspoken and he is currently at work on a non-fiction book about Central America and a long, crypto-vampire novel. He lives in Vancouver, Washington.