Dagger Key and Other Stories

They seem to mingle, the edges of two clouds interpenetrating, yet he has no real sense of her, no clue as to what sort of woman she is. She never lets him near, except when she wears him like a dress and then he can remember no more than bits and pieces. He knows her story, but it’s only a story and has little personal context. The vague apprehension he has of her is fading and, though her image lingers, motionless on the beach, if he turns away for a second, if he even blinks, she’ll be gone. He lowers his head, worried by what she has told him.

A bell ringing.

Armed with a long switch, William Jerome, a skinny black man, is driving five cows along the beach toward their grazing ground in the hills inland. As he comes abreast of the cafe, he sings out, “How’s she going, Fredo?”

“You know, mon. It going and going.”

The bell cow veers toward the water and William drives her back with a flick of his switch. “Damn,” he says. “If I rule the day, it ain’t going to get no hotter than this.” He waves to Fredo and, as the herd picks up the pace, he breaks into a trot. Fredo sits a while, listening to the hiss of the surf, then he sighs, stands. He’s got work to do.

Fredo buys turtle meat, conch, and a stalk of bananas in the market at Dever’s Landing, the island’s sole town, a collection of shanties perched on thin posts against the storm tides, like drab long-legged birds carrying their nests on their backs, and, at the foot of a long concrete wharf, a dun-colored stucco building housing the police, the customs office, the bank. Tully Langdon, the man who runs the wharf, is late in rising, so Fredo has to wait for his gas. He sits on an empty oil drum, cooled by the salt breeze.

A vulture,

it might be carved

of shadow or obsidian,

black wings folded

atop a creosote-tarred piling,

turns its head

toward him and he crosses himself. Tully arrives and, once Fredo has accomplished his business, he catches a ride on the iceman’s truck back to the café. At mid-morning, his wife Emily, a lean black woman in faded print dress and tennis shoes, walks down from the hillside shanty and joins him, their four-year-old, Leona, in tow. Their boys, Jenry and Palace, are at school. Leona plays about Emily’s feet in the kitchen as she cuts the turtle meat into strips and pounds it soft. Shortly after noon, Wilton Barrios, thickset and yellow-skinned, acne scarring on his cheeks, comes in and plants himself at a table, the chair complaining beneath him. Heavy eyelids lend him a sleepy, sated look. He’s one of the island’s few prosperous citizens. Gold rings on his fingers, cell phone clipped to an alligator belt. He sold the land upon which the resort was built and, for the particular character of his prosperity, if for no other reason, he’s not well liked.

“Got some nice turtle,” Fredo tells him. “If you want, Emily fix you some conch salad, too.”

Wilton grunts his approval and says, “I’ll take fries with the turtle.” He adjusts his belt beneath the overhang of his belly. “There’s a white mon asking about you at Treasure Cove.”

“That so?” Fredo carries Wilton a beer.

“Yeah, a German fella. The mon’s crazy about pirates. ’Pears like he got an interest in talking to you. I tell him I’m going up your way for lunch, I got room for he and his woman in the Jeep. But he just grin and say, ‘No, we going to walk. Walking be good for us.’” Wilton chuckles. “The sun duppy panting in the street, and he think it be good for them.”

“When they coming?”

“I seen them toiling up the beach. They be along directly and they don’t die first.”

A battered truck pulls up outside and two laborers saunter in and sit as far away from Wilton as possible. They order beans and rice, beer. Wilton has almost finished eating and a squall is moving in from the northeast, leaden clouds sweeping over the island, when the German couple arrive. The man is fit and tanned, in his late thirties, dressed in shorts and a sweated through T-shirt, his blond hair pulled into a ponytail; the woman is similarly attired, but her hair is a silky platinum blond, and her skin is pale where her clothing has protected her, face and arms and legs sun-reddened, and she is soft, voluptuous to the point of caricature, with enormous breasts and a rear-end that nearly obscures the seat of the stool onto which she has collapsed. She has the look of an enormous doll, skin dappled with hectic patches, stuffed into garments that must have belonged to a smaller doll. A diamond plump as a cashew on her left hand signals wealth to the world. She orders a Pepsi, which Leona fetches, and, as the little girl gapes, astonished by her milky immensity, she presses the cold bottle to her neck and forehead, and gazes at the thatch, her eyes lidded and lips parted, as if spent by passionate demands.

Emily darts from the kitchen and snatches Leona back, and the man introduces himself as Alvin Klose (Klo-suh, he says) and asks if he is speaking to Fredo Galvez.

“That’s my name, all right,” Fredo says.