“I’m worried about you,” Jo said.
“Fine. Worry about me,” said Pellerin. “But don’t get all fucked up behind it.”
The doorbell bonged and a man’s voice called out, “Room service.”
“I’ll get it,” I said.
I prevented the room service guy from entering, but he peered over my shoulder as I signed for the coffee and rolls. After I had poured coffee for me and Jo, Pellerin asked if I’d see whether the girls wanted anything, so I walked back to the bedroom to check and found Tammy and Thomasina engaged in activity that would have made the White Goddess blush. I returned to the living room and, in response to Pellerin’s inquiring look, said, “They’re good.”
“We were thinking,” Jo said, “that we should have a Plan B.”
I joined her on the sofa, tore open a package of Sweet ’n Low and dumped the contents into my coffee. “I didn’t realize we had a Plan A.”
“Confessing to Ruddle,” said Pellerin.
“That’s our plan? Okay.” I stirred the coffee. “Maybe we could create a disturbance. Get away in the confusion. I don’t know.”
Pellerin said, “You’re not exactly an expert criminal, are you?”
“I’m not a criminal at all. I arrange things, I put people together. It’s a gray area.”
“He’s an entrepreneur.” Jo smiled at me as if to cut the sting of what she’d said.
A shift in alignment seemed to have occurred—judging by that remark, she had repositioned herself closer to Pellerin than to me. I wondered if she were aware of this. A cruel comment came to mind, but I chose not to make it.
“We could cause a major earthquake, and I doubt it would help,” I said. “Josey can walk pretty good, but I expect running’s going to be called for and he’s not up to that.”
Even the coffee sucked at Seminole Paradise—I set my cup down. Pellerin fiddled with the sash of his robe and Jo clinked a spoon against her cup, tapping out a nervous rhythm.
“What about the stuff I saw you doing on the island?” I asked Pellerin. “The night we had that dust-up on the beach, you were doing things with the water. Pushing waves around.”
A hunted expression flashed across his face, and I had the thought that he might be hiding something. “I can do a few parlor tricks,” he said.
“What’s your best one?” I asked. “Give us a demonstration.”
“All right.” He leaned over the table and put a napkin in an ashtray. “Sometimes I can do it, but other times…not so much.”
He concentrated on the napkin, wiggled his fingers like a guitar player lightly fingering the strings. After about twenty, thirty seconds, smoke began to trickle up from the napkin, followed by a tiny flame. He snuffed it out with a spoon. Jo made a speech-like noise, but didn’t follow up.
“That’s my biggie,” he said, leaning back. “If we had another month, I might could do something more impressive. But…” He shrugged, then said to Jo, “If we come through this, I want you to tell me about Ogoun Badagris. How that relates to me.”
She nodded.
“You know, that might have possibilities,” I said. “If you could start an electrical fire, we…”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” he said. “After you get back from Ruddle’s, we’ll talk then.”
“I’ll tell you now if you want,” Jo said. “About Ogoun. It won’t take too long.”
Pellerin suddenly appeared tired, pale and hollow-cheeked, slumping in his chair, but he said, “Yeah, why don’t you?”
I was tired, too. Tired of talking, tired of the Seminole Paradise, tired of whatever game Jo was playing, tired of listening to my own thoughts. I told them I was off to Ruddle’s place and would return later that afternoon. On my way out, I heard a hissing from down the hallway. Tammy, wearing bra and panties, waved to me and retreated toward the bedroom, stopping near the door.
“Is your friend going to stay?” she asked in a stage whisper.
“For a while.”
She frowned. “Well, I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?”
“We didn’t bargain on a four-way, especially with another woman.”
“You got something against women? It didn’t look like you did.”
Tammy didn’t catch my drift and I told her what I had witnessed.
“That’s different,” she said primly.
“Would more money help?”
She perked up. “Money always helps.”
“I’m going out now, but I’ll take care of you. I promise?”
“Okay!” She stood on tip-toe and kissed my cheek.
“One more thing,” I said. “Jo’s kind of shy, but once you start her up, she’s a tigress.”
“I bet.” Tammy shivered with delight. “Those long legs!”
“So in a few minutes why don’t you…maybe the both of you. Why don’t you go out there and warm her up? She really loves intimate touching. You know what I mean? She likes to be fondled. She may object at first, but stay with it and she’ll melt. I’ll get you your money. Deal?”
“Deal! Don’t worry. We’ll get her going.”
“I’m sure you will,” I said.
The one salient thing I learned at Ruddle’s was that a pier extended out about a hundred feet into the water from a strip of beach, and at the end of the pier was moored a sleek white Chris Craft that had been set up for sports fishing—the keys to the boat, the Mystery Girl, were kept in a small room off the kitchen that also contained the controls to the security system. The house itself was a post card. Big and white and ultramodern, it looked like the Chris Craft’s birth mother. An Olympic-sized pool fronted the beach, tennis courts were off to the side. The grounds were a small nation of landscaped palms and airbrushed lawn, its borders defined by a decorous electric fence topped with razor wire and guarded by a pink gatehouse with a uniform on duty. There was a plaque on the gate announcing that the whole shebang was called The Sea Ranch, but it would have been more apt if it had been named The Sea What I Got.
Ruddle’s son showed me around—a blond super-preppie with a Cracker accent that had acquired a New Englander gloss. During our brief time together he said both “y’all” and “wicked haahd,” as if he hadn’t decided which act suited him best. He was impatient to get back to his tanned, perfect girlfriend, an aspiring young coke whore clearly high on more than life. She sat by the pool, listening to reggae, painting faces on her toenails, and flashed me an addled smile that gave me a contact high. I made sure to ask the kid a slew of inane questions (“Is that door sealed with a double gromit?” “What kind of infrared package does that sensor use?”), delaying and stalling in order to annoy him until, growing desperate, he gave me the run of the house and scurried back to her side.
The card room could be isolated from the remainder of the house. It had no windows and soundproofed walls, a bar, and, against the rear wall, three trophy cases celebrating Ruddle’s skill at poker. The place of honor was held by a ring won at a World Series of Poker circuit tournament in Tunica, Mississippi. It was flanked by several photographs of Ruddle with poker notables, Phil Ivey and Chris “Jesus” Ferguson and the like, who were apparently among those he had defeated. I was inspecting the table, an elegance of teak and emerald felt lit by a hanging lamp, when a lean, longhaired, thirtyish man in cut-offs walked in, holding an apple, and asked in a Eurotrash accent what I was doing. I told him I was casing the joint.
“No, no!” He wagged a finger at me. “This is not good…the drugs.”
I explained that “casing the joint” meant I was looking the house over, seeing whether it would be possible to burglarize it.
He took a bite of his apple and, after chewing, said, “I am Torsten. And you are?”
I thought he had misunderstood me again, but when I had introduced myself, he said, “You have chosen a bad time. There will be many here this weekend. Many guards, many guests.”
“How many guards?” I asked.
&
nbsp; “Perhaps five…six.” He fingered the edge of the table. “This is excellent work.”
“Are you a friend of the family?”
“Yes, of course. Torsten is everyone’s friend.” He strolled around the table, trailing a hand across the felt, and said, “Now I must go. I wish you will have success with your crime.”
Later that afternoon as I was preparing to leave, sitting in my rental car and making some notes, I spotted him outside the house. He was carrying a Weed Whacker, yelling at an older man who was pruning bushes, speaking without a trace of an accent, cussing in purest American. There might be, I thought, a lesson to be drawn from this incident, but I decided that puzzling it out wasn’t worth the effort. While driving back to the hotel, I noticed that a motorcyclist in a helmet with a tinted faceplate was traveling at a sedate rate of speed and keeping behind me. Whenever I slowed, he dropped back or switched lanes, and when I parked in the hotel lot, he placed a call on his cell phone. Aggravated and wanting to convey that feeling, I walked toward him, but he kicked over the engine and sped off before I could get near.
A Do Not Disturb card was affixed to the doorknob of the Everglades Suite, so I went down to 1138. Jo, who had been napping, let me in and went into the bathroom to wash her face. I sat at her table and put my feet up. She came back out and lay down on the bed, turned to face me. After I’d briefed her on what I had learned, she said softly, “I’m glad you’re back.”
“I’m glad you’re glad,” I said glibly, wondering at the intimacy implied by her tone.
She shut her eyes and I thought for a moment she had drifted off. “I’m afraid,” she said.
“Yeah. Me, too.”
“You don’t act afraid.”
“If I let myself think about Saturday, I get to shaking in my boots.” I leaned toward her, resting my elbows on my knees. “We got to tough it out.”
“I’m not feeling very tough.”
I said something neutral and she reached out her hand, inviting me to take it. She caressed my wrist with her fingertip. Holding her hand while sitting on the edge of the chair grew awkward, and I moved to the bed. She curled up against me. I stroked her hair, murmured an assurance, but that seemed insufficient, so I kicked off my shoes and lay down, wrapping my arms around her from behind.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
“For how I behaved on the island. For this morning. You must think I’m a terrible tease. But when I see Josey like that, I feel I should comfort him, even though…”
“What?”
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
“Say.”
Her eyes teared; she pressed my hand against her breast. “It’s not him I want to comfort. You know that.”
I told her not to cry.
She drew a deep breath, steadying herself. “That’s how I was brought up,” she said. “I was taught to deny what I wanted, that I had to let it come second to what everyone else wanted.”
“It’s okay.”
“No! It’s not! I watched my mother wither away taking care of my daddy, his brothers, of every stray that wandered by. She could scarcely let a second pass without doing something for him. I swore I wouldn’t be like her. But I’m exactly like her.”
I came to realize that we were less having a conversation than engaging in a litany: she, the priestess, delivering the oration, and I, the acolyte, offering appropriate responses. And as we continued this ritual of confession and assurance, the words served to focus me on the hollow of her throat, the pale skin below her collarbone, the lace trim of a brassiere peeking out between the buttons of her shirt, until the only things in the world were the sound of her voice and the particulars of her body. For all it mattered, she could have been reciting a butcher’s list or reading from a manual on automotive maintenance.
“Feeling that way screwed up almost every relationship I ever had,” she said. “Because I didn’t feel that way. Not at heart…not really. It was just a rule I couldn’t break. I resented men for making me obey the rule, but they didn’t enforce it. I did. I couldn’t simply be with them, I couldn’t enjoy them. And now I don’t care about rules, I finally don’t care, and it’s too late.”
I told her it wasn’t too late, we’d pull through somehow.
Dominus vobiscum,
Et cum spiritus tuo.
Tears slipped along the almost imperceptible lines beside her eyes. I propped myself up on an elbow, intending to invoke some further optimistic cliché, wanting to make certain that she had taken it to heart. Lying half-beneath me, searching my face, her expression grew strangely grave, and then her tongue flicked out to taste my mouth, her hips arched against mine. The solicitude, the tenderness I felt…all that was peeled away to reveal a more urgent affinity, and I tore at her clothing, fumbling with buttons, buckle, snaps, rough with her in my hurry. She cried out in abandon, as if suffering the pain of her broken principles. Cities of thought crumbled, my awareness of our circumstance dissolved, and a last snatch of bleak self-commentary captioned my desire—I saw in my mind’s eye the image of a red burning thing in a fiery sky, not a true sun but a great shear of light in which was embedded an indistinct shape, like that of a bird flying sideways or a woman’s genital smile, and beneath it a low, smoldering wreckage that stretched from horizon to horizon, in which the shadows of men crouched and scuttered and fled with hands clamped to their ears so as to muffle the echoes of an apocalyptic pronouncement.
We spent that night and most of the next day in 1138. Every so often I would run up and check on Pellerin, but my concern was perfunctory. We stayed in bed through the afternoon and, late in the day, as Jo drowsed beside me, I analyzed what had happened and how we had ended up like this, who had said what and who had done what. Our mutual approach seemed to have been thoroughly crude and awkward, but I thought that, if examined closely, all the axiomatic beams that supported us, the scheme and structure of every being, could be perceived as equally crude and awkward…yet those scraps of physical and emotional poetry of which we were capable could transform the rest into an architecture of Doric elegance and simplicity. The romantic character of the idea cut against my grain, but I couldn’t deny it. One touch of her skin could make sense out of stupidity and put the world in right order.
About seven o’clock, simply because we felt we should do something else with the day, we walked down to the strip mall, to the Baskin-Robbins, and sat by the window in the frosty air conditioning. I had two scoops of vanilla; she had a butterscotch sundae. We ate while the high school girls back of the counter listened to the same Fiona Apple song again and again, arguing over the content of the lyrics as if they espoused an abstruse dialectic. Jo and I talked, or rather I talked and she questioned me about my childhood. I told her my father had been a saxophone player in New Orleans and that my mother had run off when I was seven, leaving me in his care. Jo remarked that this must have been hard on me, and I said, “He wasn’t much of a dad. I spent a lot of time running the streets. He was primarily concerned with dope and women, but when he was in the mood, he could be fun. He taught me to play sax and guitar, and made up songs for me and got me to learn them. I could have done worse.”
“Do you remember the songs?”
“Bits and pieces.”
“Let’s hear one!”
After considerable persuasion, I tapped out a rhythm on the tabletop and sang in a whispery voice:
“I said, Hey, hey! Devil get away!
Get a move on, boy…
I’ll lay the saint’s ray on ya.
Shake a calabash skull,
Make the sign of the jay…
Don’t you give me no trouble,
or as sure as you’re born,
I’ll make you jump now, Satan,
’cause I got your shinbone.”
“They most of them were like that one,” I said. “The old man was a bear for religion. He’d haul me down to the temple once or twice a week and have me anointed with som
e remedy or another.”
“I can picture you singing that when you were a little boy,” she said. “You must have been cute.”
In the darkened parking lot, I saw the black car I had noticed a few days earlier, the occupants invisible behind smoked glass. The sight banished my nostalgia. I asked Jo what she had told Pellerin the previous day when she talked to him about Ogoun Badagris.
“I told him about Donnell,” she said.
“About the big copper veve and all?”
“Yes.” She licked the bottom of her spoon.
“How about your theory? About the Ezawa process being an analog of possession. You tell him about that?”
“I couldn’t lie to him anymore.”
“What’d he say?”
“He was depressed. I told him if we got out of this situation, he’d live a long time. Long enough to understand everything that was happening to him. That depressed him even more. He said that didn’t motivate him to want to live that long. I tried to cheer him up, but…” She pinned me with a stern look. “Did you sic those girls on me?”
“What girls?” I asked innocently.
“You know which ones.”
“I was pissed at you. I’m over it now, but I was seriously pissed.”
“Then you would have been delighted by my reaction.” She dabbed at her lips with a napkin. “Once they came in, that was it for the conversation.”
“So y’all had some fun, did you?”
“Maybe,” she said, drawing out the first syllable of the word, giving it a playful reading. “I thought the dark-haired girl was very attractive. You never know, do you, when love will strike?”
“Is that right?”
“Mm-hmm. Think I should have gotten her number?”
“We could invite her on the honeymoon, if you want.”
“Is that what we’re having? A honeymoon?”
“It might have to do for one,” I said.
Not long afterward, we left the Baskin-Robbins and, as we crossed the lot, I noticed a motorcyclist, the same one, judging by his bike, who had tailed me the day before. He was parked about ten slots down from the black car. I thought Billy must be getting paranoid, now that he was close to his goal, and had doubled up on security. We walked along the shoulder through the warm black night. Moths whirled under the arc lamps like scraps of pale ash. Jo’s shampoo overbore the bitter scents of the roadside weeds. She slipped a hand into mine and by that simple gesture charged me with confidence. Despite the broken paths we had traveled to reach this night, this sorry patch of earth, I believed we had arrived at our appointed place.
Dagger Key and Other Stories Page 34