Dagger Key and Other Stories

When the food arrived, Magali picked up her venison steak and nibbled a bite, chewed, threw back her head and swallowed. She repeated this process over and over. Hota shoveled down his meal without tasting it, his attention unwavering. Like the icon of some faded gaiety, an old man with wisps of white hair fraying up from his mottled scalp, wearing a ratty purple cloak, entered the tavern and played a whistling music on bamboo pipes; he stopped at the other tables, begging for a coin, but veered away from Hota after receiving a hostile look.

Hota understood that something was wrong. The ordinary grind of his thoughts had been suppressed, damped down, but he had no will to contend against the agent of suppression, whatever it was, so seduced was he by Magali’s face and figure. He derived a proprietary pleasure from watching the convulsive working of her throat, the fastidious movements of her fingers and teeth. Like an old man watching a very young girl. Greedy for life, not sex. Lusting after some forbidden essence. Although he perceived this ugliness in himself and wanted to reject it, he could not do so and tracked her every gesture and change in expression. She gave no sign that she noticed the intensity or the character of his vigilance, but the fact that she never once engaged his eyes told him she knew he was looking and that all her actions were part of a show. The inside of his head felt warm, as if his brain, too, were pulsing with soft orange light.

More customers drifted into the tavern. The conversation and laughter outvoiced the kitchen noises, but it seemed quiet where Hota and Magali sat, their isolation unimpaired. Two bulky men in work-stained clothes came to join the blond man at his table. They drank swiftly, draining their mugs in a few gulps, and began casting glances at Magali, who was now devouring her second steak. They put their heads together and whispered and then laughed uproariously. Typically, Hota would have ignored their derision, but anger mounted in him like a liquid heated in a vial. He heaved up from the bench and went over to the men’s table and glared down at them. The newcomers appeared to know him, at least by reputation, for one, adopting an air of appeasement, muttered his name, and the other fitted his gaze to the table top. But either the blond man was only recently arrived in Teocinte or else he was immune to fear. He sneered at Hota and asked, “What do you want?”

One of the others made silent speech with his eyes to the blond man, as if encouraging him to be wary, but the man said, “Why are you frightened of this lump of shit? Let’s hear what’s on his mind.”

Through the lens of anger, Hota saw him not as a man, but as a creature you might find clinging to the pitch-coated piling of a dock, an unlovely thing with loathsome urges and appetites, and a pink, rubbery face that was a caricature of the human.

“Can’t you talk, then? Very well. I’ll talk.” Smirking, the blond man settled back against the wall, resting a foot on the bench. “Do you know who I am?”

Hota held his tongue.

“No? It doesn’t matter. The thing that most matters is who you are. You’re a man who needs no introduction. Useless. Dull. A clod. You might as well carry a sign with those words on it. You announce yourself everywhere you go, in everything you do.”

Hota felt as if his skin were a crust that was restraining some molten substance beneath.

“I suppose it would be easiest for you to think of me as your opposite,” the blond man continued. “I employ men such as you. I turn them to my purposes. I might be persuaded to employ you…if you’re as strong as you look. Are you?”

A smile came unbidden to Hota’s face.

The blond man chuckled. “Well, strength’s not everything, my friend. I’ve bested many men who were stronger than me. Do you know how?” He tapped the side of his head. “Because I’m strong up here. I could take things from you and you wouldn’t be able to stop me. Your woman, for instance. Beautiful! I gave some thought to taking her off your hands. But I’ve concluded that she’ll feel more at home with you.” He gave a bemused sniff. “For your sake, I hope she fucks less like a pig than she eats.”