Dagger Key and Other Stories

She braces with her right hand, reaches beneath her with the left and guides him inside. In the yellowed dimness, like light from another age, ancient light, she looks younger now, her face softer and less careworn. As she moves, touching herself, her breath quickening, a hoarse groan is dredged from Fredo’s chest.

Lights break

behind his eyelids,

the serpent moon

uncoils

along his backbone,

a bamboo flute

shrieks in his ear

as Emily reaches her moment, collapsing atop his chest. They lie quietly, their breath subsiding, the hammock strings quivering. After a time she slips off him onto her side. She rests her head on his shoulder. “I know this hard for you,” she says.

“Hard ain’t the word for it.”

“Well, hard or worse than hard, it’s all we can do.” She turns onto her back, gazes at the ceiling. “We gots to put things right for the family.”

A muggy, windless morning, but Treasure Cove’s dining room is cool, air-conditioned, furnished with Spanish Colonial-style tables and chairs, its whitewashed ceiling crossed by thick varnished beams. On the wall above the bar is a painted map of the island—Dagger Key, the legend reads (the Spanish name is inscribed in smaller letters and enclosed in parentheses beneath). The other walls are hung with flintlocks and cutlasses, replica work manufactured and given a patina of antiquity on the mainland. Sunlight tilts in through a big bay window overlooking the sea, leaving most of the room in shadow. Beside it, bumping against the glass, a pair of flies mate in mid-air, their buzzing unnaturally loud. Close to the horizon, a shrimper lies becalmed in an inch of dazzle.

Only three of the tables are occupied, one by a woman and her two small children, their piping voices shrill and demanding; another by an elderly couple peering at a guidebook, and the third by Wilton Barrios and a gray-haired man. He picks at a fruit plate and nods solemnly while Wilton talks. Fredo sits at the bar and Vinroy, the bartender, a handsome, young, energetic black man, serves him a cup of rich-smelling coffee.

“Can you tell me anything about this Klose fella that staying here?” Fredo asks.

“Klose,” Vinroy says. “Yeah, the pirate mon. One thing I know, his wife ain’t never going to be lonely. She catting around something crazy. Every time he go for a swim, she in here fooling with whoever on duty.”

“You not tempted by that, now?”

“I tempted, all right.” Vinroy rubs thumb and forefinger together. “Cash money, you know. She willing to pay, I willing to play.”

“You going to lose your job, mon.”

“Ain’t lost it yet.” Vinroy grins. “Tell the truth, I expect her husband be happy if someone take her off his hands.”

Fredo sips his coffee. “How they fixed for money?”

Vinroy takes a stack of round glass ashtrays and begins distributing them. “He throw the cash around pretty good. Their diving gear real sweet.” He aims an ashtray as might a shuffleboard player, slides it along the bar, gives it some body english, and snaps his fingers when it teeters at the end of the counter and stabilizes. “Divina, the girl who clean they suite, she say the wife got herself some fine clothes.” He picks up a rag, swipes it along the bar. “They got a nice little motor boat with a cabin below decks and a wheel house. Klose tell me it were builded from a kit, you know. So I don’t expect it worth that much. They come down along the coast from Cozumel. That’s where he buy it. They planning to run the coast down to the Bay Islands.”

Fredo removes a cigarette from a crumpled pack. “They early risers?”

“You ain’t got long to wait. Mon come in every morning about this time. The woman like to sleep in.” Vinroy checks his watch. “I got to go change. You all right on the coffee?”

“I could use some fire.”

Vinroy reaches beneath the bar, flips him a packet of matches with a skull-and-crossbones on the flap, and goes out through the kitchen. Fredo lights the cigarette. His smoke uncoils bluely and his thoughts stretch out, less thoughts than they are appreciations of the coolness, the taste of the coffee, the play of light and shadow beneath the window.

Skin a delicate mosaic,

inlay of viridian and jade,

a gekko freezes on the wall

waiting for an unwitting fly

and Klose enters the bar, a folded newspaper under his arm. He stops on seeing Fredo and comes over. “Mister Galvez!” He puts a hand lightly on Fredo’s shoulder. “I didn’t expect to find you here.”

“Thought I’d hear the finish of that tale,” says Fredo.

Klose hesitates, smiles. “Will you join me for breakfast?”

They relocate to a corner table and Vinroy, now dressed in white shorts and a navy polo shirt with Treasure Cove inscribed in white on the breast pocket, comes to take their order. Fredo asks for eight strips of bacon, well done, and a roll.

“So much meat,” Klose says chidingly. “It’s not healthy to eat meat so early in the morning.”

“I have me some fritters earlier. I figure I wrap the bacon up for lunch.”

Klose’s smile falters as he digests, perhaps, the economic nuances that attach to Fredo’s response.