Dagger Key and Other Stories

Selkie starts to raise an objection, but Fredo says, “I ain’t going to bargain with you. Fifty’s what I need. Fifty in small bills. I can’t get it from you, I’ll get it somewheres else. For fifty, you stealing it. Any one of the stones worth a damn sight more than that, so I ain’t going to listen about you ain’t got it. If that the case, we got no use to talk further.”

After a pause, Selkie says, “Fifty thousand. Yes. This I think we can manage, but it’s good you do not ask for more. We will have to sell some things. And to transfer the money takes time. We cannot do this in less than two days.”

Fredo doesn’t like it, but after a brief internal debate, he agrees. “Two days, then. Not a minute longer.”

He gathers himself, preparing to stand, and Selkie asks if he would like a drink. To seal the bargain, she says. She leans back, half-reclining on the sofa, and puts one slippered foot up on the cushion, opening her legs. A smile plays about the corners of her lips, and Fredo realizes that more than a drink is being offered. His eyes go to the bedroom door. It’s cracked open and would afford anyone behind it an unobstructed view of the sofa.

“Please, Fredo. Stay for a drink…or two,” Selkie says. “Alvin will not mind.”

Angry that they think him a fool, or that he would willingly serve their perversity, he stands and says, “I’ll take back my paper now.”

“Your paper? I don’t understand.”

“The one with the sketch of the cross.”

She makes a smacking sound with her lips, rises and goes to the breakfast table; she opens a drawer and extracts the folded paper, holds it out to him.

“I don’t want no funny business when I bring the cross,” he says. “I catch a sniff of anything wrong, and that be the end of it. You hear me?”

“No problem,” Selkie says flatly.

He snatches the paper, avoiding the touch of her fingers.

“When will you bring it?” she asks.

“If I not here by ten that night, I not coming. But I see you in the morning, day after tomorrow, and give you instructions. Meet me in the bar for breakfast. Eight o’clock.”

“So early!”

“I got things to do of the day.”

She tips her head to the side, as if this new angle will allow her to see inside him. “Is the cross buried so deep, it will cost you a day to dig it up?”

“Not deep,” he says, opening the door to admit the humid air, perfumed by a night-blooming cereus. “But deep enough that no man alive can find it.”

The bank opens each morning at eight-thirty, and at eight-fifteen, Fredo is sitting across the street in a shanty bar known as John Wayne’s, named for its owner, John Wayne Casterman, an elderly man with nut-brown skin and a wizened neck like a turtle’s, his head nearly bald, a few tufts of cottony hair seeming to float above his scalp like clouds above a barren planet. The bar is accessed by a two-tiered stairway of rickety boards and rotting railings, and consists of a single room containing half-a-dozen tables and a makeshift counter of oil drums. Faded reggae posters advertising bands that no longer exist postage-stamp the weathered planking of the walls. John Wayne is perched on a stool behind the oil drums, humming to himself, reading a day-old newspaper, and Fredo sits by the door, nursing a warmish beer, watching the armed guards smoking in front of the bank, the passage of a Toyota pick-up, an old VW bus, a Hyundai truck carrying a load of concrete blocks. A young black woman, Jenny Bowen, in a tight skirt and a red tank top, balances a bowl covered in cheesecloth on her head, her walk an African elegance, serene and sensual. She pays no mind to the guards, who stare at her, whisper together, and laugh. Fredo remembers her as a little girl, when she skipped everywhere she went. Two pariah dogs engage in a snarling match, snapping at one another, until a bystander runs them off. The sun is a yellow glare in the east. Dust settles, rises from the dirt street, settles again.

Garnett Steadman, a man even older than John Wayne, hobbles into the bar, and, after a brief exchange with Fredo, How’s Emily doing?, I spied your boy Jenry yesterday, etc, he takes a stool and talks fishing with John Wayne…

…I bait the hook
with a chunk of barracuda,
and where I toss it in,
the sea go dark with mackerel.
The surface all lathered up around me
just like in the back time
when the fishing always good.
But not a one take a bite of that barra,
and I had that duppy feeling,
cold in the middle of the day,
like the sun ain’t truly hot,
like them fish ain’t truly there…