“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 premises.
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:
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.