Dagger Key and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  “It’s me,” he said.

  She sat staring straight ahead, strands of coppery hair stuck to her damp cheeks.

  “Come on,” he said, extending a hand. “Let’s get out of here.”

  She did not move; her expression did not change.

  He dropped to his knees. “What’s he say to you?” he asked. “That you’re ugly…stupid? That you don’t have a clue? You can’t believe that.”

  A damp heat of despondency radiated from her. It was as if she were steeped in the emotion, submerged beneath it, like a statue beneath a transparent lake.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said. “You know things with your heart most people don’t have names for. I can tell that of you…even after just one night.” Though he believed this of her, though belief in her had been born in him, what he said rang false to his ears, as if it were a line he had learned to recite and had chosen to believe.

  She began to cry again, silently, her shoulders heaving. Shellane felt incompetent in the face of her despair. He wanted to put an arm around her, but sensed she wouldn’t want to be touched.

  “Is it guilt you’re feeling?” he asked. “About last night?”

  He might not have been there, for all the attention she gave to him. He remained kneeling beside her for a short while and then asked if she wanted him to go.

  It seemed that she nodded.

  “All right.” He got to his feet. “I’ll be at the cabin.” He crossed to the door, hesitated. “We can get past this, Grace.”

  Once outside, he recognized the idiocy of that statement. She was not going to leave with him—he knew that in his bones. Even if she would, he had no desire to drag her along through the shooting gallery of his life. Anger at Broillard grew large in him. Back at the cabin, he paced back and forth, then flung himself into the Toyota and drove toward town at an excessive rate of speed. He parked in the Gas ’n Guzzle lot and sat with his hands clamped to the wheel, telling himself that if he let go he would charge into the place and play an endless blue tune on Broillard’s head. Yet as he continued to sit there, he recognized that his battle to maintain control was pure bullshit. He was conning himself. Playing at being human. If he let go of the wheel, he would do nothing. He might wish that he would act, that he would lose it and go roaring into the Gas ’n Guzzle and drop the hammer on Broillard in the name of love and honor. But he would never risk it. Twenty years in the cold ditches of the underworld had left him at a remove from the natural demands and fevers of the heart. He supposed he had become, like his old crime partners, an affable sociopath who stood with one foot outside the world, a man whose emotions were smaller than the norm. And this being the case, wasn’t what he felt for Grace equally bullshit?

  His anger dimmed and, without ever having left the car, he drove back to the cabin and sat on the steps, practicing calm, gazing out at the tranquil blue surface of the lake, the evergreens standing sentinel along the shadowy avenues leading off among them. Still as a postcard image. Soothing in its simple shapes and colors. He recalled how Grace had talked about it. He believed her view of the place to be romantic delusion, but wished he could share in it. The idea of sharing anything, after the years of solitude, filled him with yearning. But he knew he was incapable of it. Those shadows of Hiroshima burned onto stone, those parings of lives. That was him. A thin dark urgency was all that remained.

  Mid-afternoon, and Grace had not appeared. Shellane started toward her house, but thought better of it and took himself in the opposite direction, hoping to walk off his gloom. The sun had sunk to the level of the treeline and, though a rich golden light spread throughout the air, the glaze of mid-day warmth had dissipated. His breath smoked; a chill cut through his windbreaker and hurried his step. He kept his eyes down, kicking at stones, at whatever minor obstructions came to view, manufacturing small goals such as kicking a fish head without breaking stride. He had gone almost a mile when he saw a figure standing among the trees about a hundred feet away. A naked man. Not wearing a stitch. Skinny and tall and pale. Judging by the man’s stillness, Shellane thought he must be waiting for someone. His second impression, based on no clear evidence, was that the man was waiting for him. A pinprick of cold blossomed at the center of his chest and he peered at the man, trying to make out his particulars. He felt as if a channel had opened between them, a clear tunnel in the air, and that along it flowed a palpable menace.

  This, he thought, was a sign of how shaky the thing with Grace had made him. There were no grounds for fear. Yet he kept on his guard, uncertain whether to turn back or go forward, and, when the man started toward him, moving with a purposeful stride, he felt a sting of panic that sent him scrambling up the shadowed, needle-covered slopes, in among the trees. After perhaps twenty or thirty seconds, he was overtaken by embarrassment—he did not consider himself the sort to panic for any reason, let alone the appearance of a skinny naked stranger whom he could surely snap in two. He stopped and looked around, but saw no one. He adjusted the windbreaker about his hips and shoulders. Drew a steadying breath and rested a palm against the trunk of a spruce; his palm came away sticky, smeared with reddish resin. He studied the marks—like a little hexagram of tacky blood—and wiped it clean on his trousers.

  “Fucking Christ,” he said, and stepped out of hiding.

  The man was standing no more than twenty-five feet away, his bony ass was turned to Shellane, and he was staring down at the lake. He was bald, his skull was knobbly, almost bean-shaped, and his skin was bleached and grayish. Shellane eased behind the spruce trunk and turned sideways so as to be completely hidden. The wind built a faltering rush from the boughs, like the amplified issuance of a final breath. His heart felt hot and huge, less beating than pulsing rapidly. A scraping noise caused him to stiffen. The idea that he had nothing to fear wouldn’t stick in his mind—he was terribly afraid, and for no reason he could fathom. Then the man came stalking past Shellane’s hiding place, and a reason became apparent: his face had the glaring eyes and gashed mouth and mad fixity of a jack o’lantern. Outsized features carved into the gray skin. He paused, no more than a dozen feet away, his head tilted. Shellane noticed a ruff of flesh at the base of his neck…maybe it wasn’t flesh. Rubber. The son-of-a-bitch must be wearing one of those rubber Halloween masks. But if it was a mask, Shellane wasn’t eager to learn what lay beneath. He held still, not allowing himself to breathe until the man’s ground-eating stride carried him out of sight.

  On his way home he remembered the black house and thought that the man in the mask must be one of the freaks who lived there. The thing to do would be to check the house out…No. That wasn’t it. The wise thing to do, the rational thing, would be to put the lake in his rear view. This place was punching holes in him. Or maybe it wasn’t the place. Maybe the years had worn him down to zero, and he just happened to be here when it all started to fall apart, a sudden erosion like that of a man who’d been granted an extra century of life and on the day the term expired, he turned to dust? What if he was only walking around in his head, and in reality he was no more than two piles of gray dust in a pair of empty shoes?

  Bullshit, he said to himself, and picked up the pace. To be that way, to be the dust of a dead spell…he should be so lucky.

  By the time Shellane reached the cabin, his desire to leave the lake had been subsumed by concern for Grace and a generalized depression that blunted the sharpness of his fears and muddied his thoughts. Feeling at loose ends, his energy low, he sat at his laptop playing solitaire. The darkness that soon began to gather seemed to compress the space around him, and he saw himself isolated in a little cube of brightness adrift in boundless night. A man holding digital aces, cards made of light, haunted by freaks and old crimes and a weeping woman. It was all bullshit, he realized. This poetry of self-pity leaking from him. He remembered the ridged and bloody hole in Donnie Doyle’s forehead, and he remembered a few seconds before the hole had appeared, Marty Gerbasi handing him the gun and saying, “You do it, Roy.” An
d he had said, “What?”, as if he didn’t know what Marty meant. But he knew, he knew this was how he bought into the big game, this was the soul price of his profession. Gerbasi said. “I like you, Roy. But that don’t mean shit. You need to do this now, understand?” He understood everything. The moral choices, the consequences attending each choice. And so he took the gun and wrote a song on Donnie Doyle’s forehead, the only important song he had ever authored, a hole punched through the bone…

  The door latch rattled at Grace’s knock, so light it might have been a puff of wind. He felt the pressure of her gloom brushing against his own, like two rain clouds merging. He let her in and sank to his knees before her, his face to her belly, the clean smell of wool soaking up and stilling the tumble of his thoughts. When he stood, his hands following the curve of her hips, slipping beneath the sweater to cup her breasts, he felt his fingers were stained white by her flesh, that whiteness was spreading through him. Her lips grazed his ear and she said, “He hit me. In the stomach where it wouldn’t show. He told me I was ignorant. A fat Irish cow.” She went on and on, cataloguing Broillard’s attacks upon her, all in a husky tone doubtless influenced by Shellane’s gentler assault, and yet the list of her husband’s sins had an erotic value of its own, informing and encouraging his gentleness. Rage and desire partnered in his mind, and as he removed her clothing, it seemed he was removing as well the baffles that kept his anger contained, so that when they fell into the bed and made the mattress springs creak in a symphony of strain, it was as if anger were riding between his shoulder blades, spurring his exertions, inspiring him to pin her to the bed like a broken insect and fabricate a chorus of moans and cries. Though joined to her, part of his mind listened with almost critical acuteness as she whispered all manner of breathy endearments. Wind dance, meaningless love garbage. Garbled expressions of comic book word balloon passion, sounding one moment like she was strangling on oatmeal, the next emitting pretty snatches of hummed melody. She bucked and plunged, heels hooked behind his calves, the tendon strings of her thighs corded like wires. They were both fucking to win, he thought. To injure, to defile. Love…love…love…love. The chant of galley slaves stoking his mean-spirited rhythm. When he came, a cry spewing from his throat, he was aware of its rawness, its ugly finality, like that of man gutted by a single stroke, shocked and beginning to die.

  She left him with her usual suddenness in the morning, returning, he assumed, to the befouled emptiness of her home. Scatters of rain tap-danced on the roof, and he stood by the bed, staring down at the wet spot on the sheet, which had dried into a shape reminiscent of a gray bird on the wing. The violence of their passion, its patina of furious artificiality, all inspired by her relation of Broillard’s abuse—it unsettled him. He was still angry. Angry at her for trying to use him. That was what she had been doing, he believed. Trying to rouse his anger. And she had succeeded. He was angry at Broillard for having caused her to hate so powerfully, so obsessively, that she would use him, Shellane, as a means of wreaking vengeance. But he didn’t care if that was her intent. He was ready to be used.

  He drove into town and parked off to the side of the Gas ’n Guzzle, then walked toward the entrance, moved by an almost casual animus, as if of a mind merely to offer a stern warning. It was no act of self-deception—not this time; it was a mask he wore to hide from others a dangerous mood. Thanks to Grace, he had at least reclaimed something of his old self, the purity of his anger. He pushed the door inward, jingling the bell atop it. A girl in a hooded gray sweatshirt was at the counter, buying cigarettes from Broillard, who offered him a careless one-fingered wave. Shellane ambled along the aisles, picking up a can of soup, spaghetti, a bottle of virgin olive oil. When the girl left, he waited at the counter while Broillard rang up the sale.

  “Little pasta tonight, eh?” said Broillard, checking the price of the spaghetti. “How’s it going out there?”

  “Real great,” Shellane said. “I’m fucking your wife.”

  The words released a cold chemical, sent it flooding through him. His hands were like ice. Broillard gaped at him, an expression that—with his long hair and sideburns—lent him a hayseed look.

  “I know how you treat her,” Shellane went on. “But you lay a hand on her, you say an unkind word, I will take you into the deep woods and leave you for the beasts. My word on it.”

  “You nuts, man?” Broillard made a grab for something on the shelf beneath the counter, but Shellane caught his wrist and squeezed until the bones ground together. With his free hand, he fumbled about on the shelf. His fingers curled around a wooden shaft—a sawed-off baseball bat. He rapped Broillard with it on the side of his head, hard enough to provoke an outcry.

  “Supposing I smash your fingers with this little guy,” Shellane said. “There goes the ol’ career, eh?”

  He rapped Broillard again, harder this time, sending him to his knees, hands upheld to stave off another blow.

  “I don’t know who it is you’re doing,” Broillard said with whiny outrage, “but it ain’t my wife!”

  “Nice-looking redhead name of Grace. Beautiful green eyes, perky tits. Ass round as a teapot. Sound familiar?”

  Broillard pushed himself into a corner, as far from Shellane as possible, and his voice unsteady, shrilled, “Get the fuck outta here!”

  “Oh, I’ll be going. Soon as I’m certain you understand that I’m your daddy. From this point on, you don’t even whimper unless I give you a kick.”

  Broillard summoned breath and shouted, “Help!”

  Shellane leaned across the counter and clubbed him on the kneecap. While Broillard was busy absorbing the pain, he went to the door, locked it, and turned the Closed sign outward. He shut the blinds, throwing the interior of the store into a gray twilight.

  “Now we can be intimate,” he said, coming back over to the counter. “Now we can communicate.”

  “I swear to God,” Broillard said. “If you…”

  Shellane shouted, an inarticulate roar that caused Broillard to flatten himself against the wall.

  “Grace told me a great deal about you,” Shellane said. “But she didn’t let on what a big pussy you are.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck you want, man! This is crazy!”

  “Crazy is hitting her in the stomach so it won’t show. Telling her she’s a fat cow and she fucks like a sick fish. Like a cat with the heaves. That was very inventive, Avery…that last. It has the feel of hateful observance.”

  Looking stricken, Broillard came to one knee. “Who told you?”

  “Grace. She gave me chapter and verse on your sorry ass.”

  “She’s dead.” Broillard said it with bewilderment, then more vehemently: “She’s dead! Somebody’s feeding you a bunch of shit!”

  Shellane left a pause. “What do you mean she’s dead?”

  “She’s dead…she died! Two years ago!” Broillard’s expression gave no indication that he was lying. “She’s dead,” he repeated with an air of maudlin distraction. “I…You can’t…”

  “Don’t play with me.”

  “I’m not playing. It’s the truth!” Broillard put his hands to his head, as if fearful it might explode. “This is too weird, man. What’re you trying to do?”

  Shellane wondered if he had been tricked. “You have a picture of her?”

  Broillard blinked at him. “Yeah…I think. Yeah.”

  “Let me see it!”

  “I gotta…” Broillard pointed to the cash register.

  “Get it!” Shellane told him.

  Broillard reached with two fingers between the cash register and a display case, extracted a dusty photograph with curled edges, and handed it to Shellane. In the picture Broillard was standing in front of the blue Caddy, his arm around Grace, who was shielding her eyes against the sun. He was thinner. The shape of one sideburn barely sketched on his cheek. Grace looked the same as she had that morning. Both wore Endless Blue Stars T-shirts.

  “That’s not her,” Broillard said wi
th weak assurance. “She’s not the woman you’re banging, right?”

  Shellane had a moment’s dizziness, as if he’d stood up too quickly. He stared at the photograph, unable to gather his emotions, aware only of dread and hopelessness.

  “She’s dead!” Broillard said with desperate insistence. “Go out to the cemetery and look, you don’t believe me.”

  Shellane let the picture fall onto the counter. “We’ll both go,” he said.

  The local boneyard was quiet and neatly landscaped and, as they passed among the ranked stones, a few drops of rain still falling, Shellane was annoyed by the impacted piety of grandfather trees and green lawns and had the thought that death was quiet enough in its own right and he would prefer to wind up in a Third World cemetery, some place with a feeling of community, kids drooling taco juice on your plot, balloon salesmen, noisy families picnicking in front of a loved one’s crypt. Grace’s stone was a modest chunk of gray marble in a corner of graveyard, close by an elderly maple, its crown of yellow leaves half denuded. What looked to be her college yearbook photo, a waist-up shot of a smiling girl in a dark blue sweater, a gold locket on a chain, was recessed in the marble beneath a transparent plastic square. Her legend read:

  GRACE BROILLARD

  1971-2000

  BELOVED WIFE

  No flowers were in evidence. The smell of leaf mold and a damp, darker odor.

  Numb, uncomprehending, Shellane asked, “How did she die?”

  “Natural causes,” Broillard said.

  “The hell does that mean? What’s natural about the death of a twenty-nine-year-old woman?”

  “She passed out,” said Broillard with a quaver. “Some kinda trouble with her heart. We thought she drowned, ’cause she fell over at the edge of the lake. But the doctor told us her heart just stopped. She didn’t have any water in her lungs.”

  Looking off at the sky, Shellane felt that his emotions had been eclipsed by a gray sun. “Lie down,” he said. Broillard tried to dart away, but Shellane caught his arm. “I want you to lie down on the grave.”