“I will collect it from the bank this morning,” Klose says. “And the cross?”
“I fixing to get it this afternoon.”
“Then all is in order?”
“We got things to talk about, but I’ll order me some breakfast first.” Fredo gives Vinroy a wave. “You making out a damn sight better than me, so this on your tab.”
“There is no guarantee of that,” Selkie says with a degree of irritation. “We must smuggle the cross into Germany. We must find a trustworthy buyer. Boah! Too much can go wrong!”
“The poorer you are, the more you got those same problems. We both taking a gamble, but if you win, you crazy rich, mon. That cross, even and you sell it cut up for the stones and the gold, it worth millions. Like that English fella on TV used to say, you be having champagne dreams.” Fredo makes a disgusted noise. “Me, maybe I get my kids off the island. Nothing much else going to change. But if I try to sell the cross for true value…and it my property, mon! It come down to me all the way from Annie.” He slaps the table angrily. “If I asks for millions, you think I be getting it? Hell, no! You can’t count to ten before I’m lying in a ditch somewhere with my throat slit and some bastard already rich rolling into his bank and everybody smiling upon him, saying, ‘Have a chair, sir,’ and ‘Ain’t you looking splendid this morning, sir,’ all because he stole a poor man’s property.”
Having listened to this outburst, Klose seems abashed—he clears his throat and looks down at his coffee cup; but Selkie maintains her expression of sleek, sulky discontent. It’s evident to Fredo now, if it hasn’t been before, that she’s the ruler of the marriage. It’s also evident that her perversity colors the couple’s actions. Klose is merely a drone and she’s the one Annie will have to watch.
“What for you, Fredo?” Vinroy, looking crisp in his navy shirt and white shorts.
“Fry me up about ten of them little sausages and wrap ’em with some rolls. For now, let me have some hotcakes.”
“Coffee?” Vinroy asks.
“Yeah, mon.”
Vinroy inquires whether the German couple would like a refill of their coffee, and Selkie says, no, they have to be going. Vinroy stacks their dishes and, once he’s gone, Klose says, “You said you would have instructions for us.”
A wave of fatigue washes over Fredo. He sits up straight, blinks against the sunlight chuting through the glass. “I be at your place around nine o’clock. At eight-thirty, you sit down at the kitchen table and stay there. Don’t make a move until I say so. Leave the door unlocked and the window shade open so I can peer in. Wear what you got on now. That way I can see you ain’t carrying no weapon. Keep the money close by. I don’t want you have to go into another room to fetch it.”
“Would you like us to put our hands in the air?” Selkie lays the sarcasm on thick, but Fredo gives her question its due.
“Maybe, and I see something not right,” he says. “Do what I say, everything go smooth. But let me tell you this much. You ain’t dealing with no bobo tonight, so have a care.”
After Selkie and Klose leave, Vinroy brings Fredo’s food, the sausages and rolls wrapped in a tin foil packet. “I seen you scaling down the rocks earlier,” he says. “What you doing way up there?”
“Wasting time,” says Fredo. “I used to crawl up there when I a boy and spy on the water.”
Vinroy looks perplexed. “What you expect to see?”
“Seen manta rays out past the reef.”
“I ain’t see no mantas for years.”
“None left to see, I reckon.”
Fredo spreads butter and blackberry jam on his hotcakes and cuts them into little bites. His thoughts turn to Selkie as he eats, but he pushes them aside and recalls
a big shadow coasting
through aquamarine water
over white sand,
rising explosively,
hidden by spray,
and then revealed for an instant,
the great rubbery body aloft,
strange monstrous beast
flapping black wings of muscle,
peering into unaccustomed light
with eyes opposed like a hammerhead’s,
crashing down, making a splash
like a depth charge,
becoming once again
a big shadow coasting
through aquamarine water
over white sand.
A young American couple sits at an adjoining table; they talk about mix ratios and the woman’s new rebreather. Her hair is the color of a fresh honeycomb, bleached to straw in places by the sun. She has an easy laugh, health insurance, a future. For a change, Fredo is too preoccupied to envy her beautiful blond life. He ladles more preserves onto his plate, dips a bite of pancake in it, savoring the sweetness.
Long ago, after the murder of Mary Reade, before Annie conceived her first child, she was in the habit of walking into the hills, carrying with her a bottle of rum. There she would sit in a secluded spot and drink herself blind, grieving, weeping, lamenting the sins of her young life. That spot, shadowed by banana trees and sabal palms, is near the top of Dagger Key’s tallest hill, a weedy notch some twenty feet wide and twelve feet deep. Bromeliads, ferns and vines festoon walls of dark conglomerate rock; and, matting one section of wall, is a mass of vines that have been interwoven with dozens of cowrie shells, bits of ribbon and oddly shaped pieces of driftwood. Fredo doesn’t know who tends the notch. It must be tended, he thinks. The ribbons must fade, the shells must fall away as the vines wither; yet the vines are always green, the shells white, and the ribbons unfaded whenever he comes. It seems unlikely that an islander would be responsible—most recognize the notch to be a duppy place and keep their distance. Many of those who have trespassed will testify to having night terrors for months after the fact and rarely return.
Maybe, Fredo thinks, it’s Annie.
That was his father’s view. The first time he brought Fredo to the notch, he voiced the opinion that the vines were tended either by Annie or the Caribe wizard whose spirit has befriended her—or, perhaps, served her—through the centuries.
Fredo arrives at the notch shortly past noon and begins drinking from a fifth of unrefined rum purchased at John Wayne’s. Though not usually a drinking man, indulging in a beer now and then, he has been taught that he has to open himself to Annie, to attune himself to her drunken grief, her guilt and rage. He can’t abide the taste of rum, but he forces the raw stuff down and soon grows bleary and addled. The sun veers across the sky when he looks up, and the fringe of vegetation that hides the notch from all but the most discerning eye appears to undulate with unseen currents.
Mired in a complicated
shadow of banana fronds,
he feels that he’s being lowered
into a deep well,
a spiritual depth,
a hole bored into the bottom of the world
from the world below…
…and the more he drinks, the deeper he sinks, until it’s as if he’s at the end of a long tunnel, a place that the sun, although he sees it shining, cannot warm, and the wind, although it stirs the leaves around him, cannot reach. And it’s then that he starts to sense Annie’s presence and the presence of other spirits, too. The grass at his feet ripples with the passage of a snake duppy, the shade of a lizard, and the vine matte shakes itself as if some old ghost is shouldering on its cloak, the cowrie shells clacking together. The base of his neck prickles as Annie begins to settle over him, a cloud obscuring his soul. On the verge of passing out, he sees the vine matte shift forward, moving at the pace of a very old man taking hobbling steps. Something is dislodged from the matte, a bundle wrapped in a grimy sack, bulky, dropping with a clank onto the ground. Drool escapes the corner of Fredo’s lips, eels onto his chin. His head lolls, his eyelids flutter and a thick, glutinous noise issues from his throat. He stretches a hand out toward the sack, wanting to touch his treasure, to see its golden glory…but a crunching in the brush stays him. A voice, Wilton Barrios’ voice, says, “Fredo…” The remainder of his utterance is obliterated by Annie’s fury, a fuming hiss, like fire drowning in rain, that swirls around Fredo, seeming to occupy a space both inside his head and without. In his confusion, he’s inspired to struggle to his knees. Ignoring Wilton’s booming, unintelligible speech, he pushes up to his feet, staggers, braces with one hand on the ground, inadvertently gripping a fist-sized rock, and then he straightens, swaying, half-possessed, blinking in sunlight that has suddenly grown too warm and too bright. The world steadies around him. The vine matte snaps back to its customary position against the rock face; the vegetation seethes with the ordinary actions of the wind. Wilton swims into focus, wearing a sweated-through Cuban-style shirt that’s hiked up over the revolver stuck in his waistband, a confident look on his jaundiced, jowly face.