“He doesn’t deserve you,” Shellane said.
“You don’t know me…and you don’t know him.”
“Twenty-five years ago I used to be him.”
“I doubt that. Avery’s one of a kind.”
“No he’s not. I had a girlfriend…a lot like you. Sweet, pretty. She loved me, but I couldn’t get it together. I was too damn lazy. I thought because I was smart, the world was going to fall at my feet. Eventually she left me. But before that happened, I did my best to make her feel as bad about herself as I felt about myself.”
She was silent a few beats. “Did you ever get it together?”
“I got by, but I never did what I wanted.”
“What was that?”
“It’s a bit of a coincidence, actually. I wanted to be a musician. I wrote songs…or tried to. Screwed around in a garage band. But I settled for the next best thing.”
She looked at him expectantly.
“Maybe I’ll tell you about it sometime,” he said.
They sat without speaking for a minute. Shellane told himself it was time to pull back. The pause was an opportunity to quit this foolishness. But instead he said, “Have dinner with me tonight. We can drive into Marquette.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not? He’ll be playing tonight.”
“He plays every night.”
“Then why not have dinner? You afraid someone will see us?”
She gave no reply, and he said, “Come over to the cabin, then. I’ll cook up some steaks.”
“I might have to eat at home.” She flattened her palms against her thighs. “I could come over after…maybe.”
“Okay,” he said.
“I don’t want you to think…that…”
“I promise not to think.”
That brought a wan smile. “We can just talk, if that’s all right.”
“Talk would be good.”
She appeared to be growing uncomfortable and, watching her hands wrestle with one another, her eyes darting toward the lake, he timed her and said to himself, the instant before she spoke the same words, I should go.
Late that afternoon it seemed deep November arrived at the lake in all its dank and gray displeasure, a cold wind pushing in a pewter overcast and spatterings of rain. As the dusk turned to dark, a fog rolled in, ghost-dressing the trees in whitish rags that clung to the boughs like relics of an ancient festival. Shellane, who had gone for a walk just as the fog began to accumulate, was forced to grope his way along, guided by the muffled slap of the waves. He had brought a flashlight, but all the beam illuminated was churning walls of fog. He must have been within a hundred yards of the cabin when he realized he could no longer hear the water. He kept going in what he assumed to be the direction of the shoreline, but after ten minutes, he was still on solid ground. He must have gotten turned around, he thought. He shined the flashlight ahead. A momentary thinning of the mist, and he made out a building. If anyone was at home, he could ask directions. The visibility was so poor, he couldn’t see much until he was right up next to the wall. The boards were knotty and badly carpentered, set at irregular slants and coated with pitch. He ran his right hand against one and picked up a splinter.
“Shit!” He examined his palm. Blood welled from a gouge, and a toothpick-sized sliver of wood was visible beneath the skin. He shook his hand to ease the hurt and happened to glance upward. Protruding from the wall some twenty feet overhead was a huge black fist, perfectly articulated and twice the circumference of an oil drum. From its clenched fingers hung a shred of rotting rope.
Shellane’s heart seemed itself to close into a fist. Swirling fog hid the thing from view, but he could have sworn it was not affixed to the wall, but rather emerged from it, the boards flowing out into the shape, as if the building were angry and had extruded this symptom of its mood.
He heard movement behind him and spun about, caught his heel and fell. Knocked loose on impact, the flashlight rolled away, becoming a mound of yellowish radiance off in the fog. Panicked, he scrambled up, breathing hard. He could no longer see much of the building, just the partial outline of a roof.
A guttural noise; pounding footsteps.
“Hey!” Shellane called.
More footsteps, and another voice, maybe the same one.
“Quit screwing around!” he shouted. The hairs on his neck prickled. Who the fuck would own such a place? Some pissant Goths. Rich kids who’d never gotten over The Cure. Movement on his right. Something heavy and ungainly.
Fuck directions, he told himself.
He started away from the building, walking fast, holding his arms out like Frankenstein’s monster to ward off obstructions. Less than ten seconds later, he hit a drop-off and staggered into cold ankle-deep water. He overbalanced and toppled onto his side, raising a splash. He pushed up from the silty bottom, found his way to shore, and stood shivering. Listening for voices. The only sound was that of the water dripping from his clothes onto the sand. He felt foolish at having been spooked by, probably, a bunch of twits who wore eyeliner and drank wine out of silver cups and thought they were unique.
That fist, though. What a freakshow!
If things were different, he thought, he’d give them a lesson in reality. Blow a couple of nine-millimeter holes in their point of view. But his annoyance faded quickly, and after squeezing and shaking the excess water from his clothes, he trudged off along the shore.
He doubted that Grace would show that evening, and truth be told, he wasn’t sure he wanted her to. His experience in the fog had rekindled his caution, and he thought it might be best for them both if she blew him off. He could be no help to her, and she would only endanger him. At nine o’clock he switched on the laptop and called up his crime file. Seeing Marty Gerbasi in Detroit had made him realize it was time to add a more personal reminiscence. He’d been having a beer in the Antrim back in Southie, the winter of ’83, when Marty had come in with Donnie Doyle, a pale twist of a kid with peroxided hair and a rabbity look who occasionally hooked on with a crew as a driver. Stupid as a stopped clock. They’d sat down next to Shellane and all three of them had tried to drink the bar out of Bushmills. Marty was buying, playing the grand fellow, laughing at Donnie’s stories, most of them lies about his gambling prowess, and winking broadly at Shellane as if to say he knew the kid was bullshit. Around 1 AM they staggered out of the bar—at least Donnie had staggered. Marty and Shellane had handled their liquor. No one ever saw Donnie Doyle after that night, and Shellane understood that having Marty buy you drinks was not a good thing. Like so many of Shellane’s associates, he lacked the necessary inch of conscience to qualify as human. Over the years, Shellane’s recognition that he was involved with a company of affable sociopaths had grown more poignant, eventually causing him to rethink his future, to realize that sooner or later Marty would offer to buy him drinks. He never found out what Donnie Doyle had done to deserve his night out with good ol’ Roy Shellane and the guinea angel of death, but he figured it was nothing more than some unfortunate behavior, maybe a tendency toward loquaciousness or…
A knock on the door. Ignoring his determination that he was better off without her, he jumped up to let Grace in. The plaid jacket and jeans again. Ponytail.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said as he stood aside to allow her to pass.
“I didn’t know if you’d make it at all, what with the fog.”
She sat at the table, shrugged out of the jacket; she had on a green turtleneck underneath. “It’s nice and warm in here,” she said, then pointed to his hand, which he had bandaged after removing the splinter. “What happened?”
Her eyes widened when he told her about the black house.
“You know who owns the place?” he asked.
A shake of her head. “It’s really old. Lots of people stay there.”
“Have you met any of them?”
“They don’t talk to me.”
Shellane went into the kitchen and poured two fingers of bour
bon. He glanced at her inquiringly, held up the bottle, expecting her to refuse.
“I’ll try it,” she said.
He poured, set the glass in front of her. She touched the rim with her forefinger, closed her hand around it, then had a sip. She sipped again and smiled. “It’s good!”
She was easier around him than before, and this both elated and distressed him. What he felt for her, when he tried to isolate it, was less defined than what he felt toward her husband. He was attracted, but the basis of the attraction confounded him. True, she was sexy, with her green eyes and expressive mouth and strong, slender body. Her vulnerability made him feel protective, and this enhanced the other feelings. But he could not help thinking that a large part of his attraction was due to the danger she posed. For several years he had limited his contact with women to those he met through outcall services; now, alone with her in this secluded place, he wondered if he was not toying with fate, pretending there was something for them other than the moment. She finished her drink and asked for a refill. He doubted she was much of a drinker and thought this might be her way of signaling that she was ready to take a step. He did not believe her capable of discretion. Her spirit was so damaged, if Broillard were to get a whiff of another man and pressured her, she might confess everything. Broillard might no longer care about her…though in Shellane’s experience, men who abused their women were extremely possessive of them.
She asked what he used the laptop for, and he told her the lie about his book. She pressed him on the subject, inquiring as to his feelings about his work, and he fended off her questions by saying he didn’t know enough about writing yet to be able to talk about it with any intelligence.
“But you were a songwriter,” she said.
“I was a wanna-be. That doesn’t qualify me to speak about it.”
“That’s not true. If you want to do something, you think about it. Even if it’s not conscious, you come to understand things about it. Techniques…strategies.”
“Sounds like you should be telling me about your work,” he said. When she demurred, he asked what she would write about if she regained her confidence.
“It’s not my confidence that’s the problem.”
“Sure it is,” he said. “Having enough confidence to fail is most of everything. So tell me. What would you write about.”
“The lake.” She tugged at a strand of hair that had come loose from the ponytail, stretched it down beside her ear so as to contrive a sideburn. “It’s all I know. My father and I lived here from the time I was four. My mother died when I was a baby.”
“It’s your father’s house you’re in now?”
She nodded. “After he died, Avery came along. He helped me with the business.”
“The Gas ’n Guzzle?”
“Avery renamed it,” she said. “It used to be Malloy’s. I wanted to keep the name, but…” She gave another of those glum gestures that Shellane was beginning to interpret as redolent of her attitude toward an entire spectrum of defeats.
“So Avery moved right in, did he?”
“I guess.” She held out her empty glass again and he poured a stiffer drink.
“Looks like I’m going to have to call you a cab,” he said.
She giggled, lifted the glass and touched the liquid with the tip of her tongue. It was the first sign of happiness she had shown him, and it was so pure a thing, evocative of a girlish sweetness, that Shellane, himself a little drunk, was moved to touch her cheek.
Alarmed, she pulled away. He started to apologize, but she said, “No, it’s okay. Really!” But she appeared flustered. At any minute, he thought, he would hear her say she had to go.
She stared into her glass for such a long time, Shellane grew uncomfortable. Then, her tone suddenly forceful, she said, “I could write a hundred stories about the lake. Every day it has a different mood. I never wanted to live anywhere else.” She looked up at him. “You like it here too, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but I couldn’t live here.”
“Why not?”
“It’s complicated,” he said after a pause.
She laid her palms flat on the table and appeared to study their shapes against the dark wood; then she pushed up to her feet. “May I use your restroom?”
She was so long in the bathroom, Shellane began to worry. The water had been running ever since she went in. What could she be doing? Effecting an ornate suicide? Praying? Changing into animal form? He considered asking if she was okay, but decided this was too much solicitude.
Wind jiggled the door latch, and a bough scraped the roof. He stretched out his legs, let his eyelids droop. He pictured Grace with the glass raised to her pale lips, the tawny whiskey and the coppery color of her hair blended by lamplight. He did not notice the sound of the bathroom door opening, but heard her soft step behind him. Her face was freshly scrubbed and shining. She was holding a bath towel in front of her, but let it drop to the side. Her breasts were high and small, strawberry-tipped; the pearly arcs of her hips centered by a tuft of coppery flame. Her eyes locked onto his.
“I’d like to stay,” she said.
There came a point during the night, with the wind sharking through the trees, rattling the cabin as if it were a sackful of bones, knifing through the boards to sting Shellane’s skin with cold…there came a point when he recognized that he understood nothing, either of the world or the ways of women, not even the workings of his own heart. Or maybe understanding was not the key he had thought it was. Maybe it only functioned up to a point, maybe it explained everything except the important things, and they were in themselves like the underside of a cloud, part of an overarching surface that was impossible to quantify from a human perspective. Maybe everything was that simple and that complex. Whatever the architecture and rule of life, whatever chemistry was in play, whatever rituals of pain and loneliness had nourished the moment, it was clear they were not just fucking, they were making love. Grace was a river running through his arms, supple and easy, moving with a sinewy eagerness, as if new to each bend and passage of their course. The wind drove away the clouds, the fog. Moonlight slipped between the curtains, and she burned pale against the sheets, announcing her pleasure with musical breaths. Coming astride him, she appeared to hover in the dimness, lifting high and then her hips twisting cleverly down to conjoin them, face hidden by the fall of her hair. At times she spoke in a whisper so faint and diffuse, it seemed a ghostly sibilance arising from her skin. She would say his name, the name she thought was his, and he would want to tell her his true name, to reveal his secrets; but instead he buried his mouth in her flesh, whispering endearments and promises that, though he meant them, he could never keep. At last, near dawn, she fell asleep, and he lay drifting, so exhausted he felt his soul was floating half out of his body, points of light flaring behind his lids, the afterimages of his intoxication.
He must have slept a while, for the next he recalled she was stirring in his arms. The sun sliced through the curtains, painting a golden slant across the shadow of her face. Her eyelids fluttered, and she made a small indefinite noise.
“Morning,” he said.
Anxiety surfaced in her sleepy face, but lived only a moment. “I wasn’t sure…” she murmured.
“Sure about what?”
“Nothing.” After a second or two she sat up, holding the sheet to her breasts, looking about the room in bewilderment, as if amazed to find herself there.
“You all right?” he asked.
She nodded, settled back onto the pillow. Her eyes, lit by the sun, were weirdly bright, like glowing coins. He turned her to face him, laying a hand on her hip. A tear formed at the corner of her left eye.
“What’s this?” he asked, wiping it away.
Her expression was almost clownishly dolorous. She took his hand and placed it between her legs so he could feel the moistness there, then pushed into his fingers, letting him open her.
“Holy Jesus,” he said. “You’ll be the death of me.
”
After she had gone, making another of her sudden exits, leaving before he could determine what she wanted or be assured as to what she felt, Shellane went down to the shore and rested against the old glacial boulder. His thoughts were images of Grace. Her face close to his. How she had looked above him, her hair flipped all to one side in violent toss, like the flag of her pleasure, head turned and back arched as she came. A presentiment of trouble, of Broillard and what he might do, called for his attention, but he was not ready to consider that question. He believed he could handle Broillard—he had handled far worse. The Mitsubishi warehouse in Brooklyn. The New Haven bank job. He recalled a mansion they’d broken into in upstate New York, going after an art collection. An old Nathaniel Hawthorne sort of house with secret rooms and hidden passages. A billionaire’s antique toy. The security system had not been a problem, but the house had been full of 18th-century perils they could never have anticipated, the most daunting of which was a subterranean maze. One man had been skewered by a booby trap, but Shellane had succeeded in unraveling the logic of the maze, and they managed to escape with the art. If he could deal with all of that, he could take care of Mister Endless Fucking Blue Stars.
He chuckled at the brutal character of his nostalgia.
Memories.
He had been hoping Grace would return, but several hours passed and she did not. Around noon, the blue Cadillac roared past the cabin on its way toward Champion, Broillard off to spend the afternoon at the Gas ’n Guzzle, and Shellane headed along the shore toward Grace’s house. He stood on the beach below the place for several minutes, uncertain about approaching. At length he climbed the slope and peeked through the picture window. She was sitting on the carpet with her back toward him, legs drawn up beneath her. Her shoulders were shaking, as with heavy sobs. He had not taken notice of the furniture before—ratty, second-hand stuff in worse shape than the pieces in his cabin. Clothing strewn on the floor. A plate of dried pasta balanced on the arm of the sofa. Piles of compact discs and magazines. Empty pizza boxes, McDonald’s cartons, condom wrappers. Your basic rock and roll decor. He went to the door and knocked. No answer. He pushed on in. She did not look up.
Dagger Key and Other Stories Page 16