Dagger Key and Other Stories

Stars Seen Through Stone

I made my living for a decade as a rock musician, mostly in the Detroit area. Though many of my collaborators were excellent technicians, most of the musicians I played with were not terrific human beings. Speaking generally, they had enormous egos and the attention span of gerbils, and tended to sulk when their every whim wasn’t being catered to. A case in point, I recall a rhythm guitar player who had been in a mood, unresponsive and scowling and occasionally belligerent. After a couple of weeks, he made his difficulty known to me, drawing me aside and asking in a surly tone, “How come you write all the songs?”

I was surprised, since he had never expressed any previous interest in writing, and I said, “I don’t know, man. Why don’t you write one?”

He was nonplussed by this, having expected me to argue for my creative primacy, but soon recovered and said that he would get right on it. I never heard any more about songwriting from him, but his mood improved immeasurably.

Minor problems of this sort were endemic, but from time to time they escalated. On one occasion, we were playing an outdoor concert in front of seven or eight thousand people, when the rhythm section fell apart behind me. I turned and discovered that the drummer and the keyboard player were having a fistfight on stage. All bands have these personality conflicts to one degree or another, but I would wager that most bands never had to deal with anyone like the man upon whom the character of Joe Stanky is modeled.

Not only are all the episodes concerning Stanky are solidly grounded in fact; I have underplayed the pain-in-the-ass that he actually was and omitted the most egregious of his malefactions for fear he would be perceived as unrealistic. For example, when he broke up with his inamorata, “Liz,” Stanky, displaying a zeal and—I must say—a certain stick-to-it-iveness that he had never shown with the band, waited until she went home to visit her mother and proceeded to masturbate on all her possessions, paying especial attention to her books and records. He then fled the premises.

He was like a great, ugly child who had to be watched over, nurtured, punished, and fed. I was forced to see to his dental care. A trumpet player without teeth is scarcely an asset, and his teeth were in a state of dire neglect. Despite the fact that he made my life difficult for a couple of years, he was an immensely talented musician, and I was, like Vernon in the story, a fool for talent. Perhaps this was the root of my downfall in the music business. But I wasn’t a complete fool—eventually I severed all ties with him. A few years later, I was chopping wood in front of my house, when I saw a penguin-like figure walking down the street toward me. A chill swept over me. As the figure drew near, I realized it was, indeed, Stanky. He came up, all smiles, exhibiting the body language of a dog who has been beaten, and began talking about “the good old days,” what a great band we’d had, etc. He asked if I had a band currently and suggested that we should get together and play some music.

I had the ax in my hand, and perhaps I made some twitch that persuaded him I might be feeling murderous, for he quickly dropped that topic and, after fumbling around for a bit, he tried another tack, coming at the subject obliquely, and began telling me how he was a changed man due to his acceptance of Jesus Christ. I never saw him again after that day, but I kept expecting him, like a curse, to reappear.

And now, in this story, he has.

Emerald Street Expansions

I’m not much of a reader. I read a lot when I was a kid, but after I got to college I stopped for about fifteen years, partly because the way literature was taught put me off the good stuff. I still don’t read as much now as I suppose I should. But once in a while I’ve gone on jags during which I read an author’s entire output…or as much as I can tolerate. I read Foucault and Celine in this fashion, also Balzac and de Maupassant, Cendrars and Mallarmé and Genet, Proust and Michaud…It seems I have something of a passion for French writing. When I was sixteen or so, I read all of what remains of the work of Francois Villon and was struck by the lines:

I’ve been unable since to find the poem that contains those lines, so this story may be based on a misapprehension (though it’s as likely that my attempt at finding it was desultory). Anyway, I was fascinated by Villon, who was a thief and a poet. I also fancied myself a poet and a criminal (though, in truth, I was far more criminal than poet, having been arrested for several minor offenses and having no published work), and I greatly admired Villon for his career flexibility. And so, later in life, I wrote this story for no other reason than to express that admiration and for the opportunity to do a pastiche of his style.

I should mention, because she will vilify me if I don’t, that the aspect and character of Amorise is derived partly from Villon’s poem, “The Testament,” and partly from a friend of mine, Elle Mauruzak, who played in the Goth-punk band, The Hiss, and worked by day in what is fondly referred to by some Seattle-ites as the Ban Roll-on Building, due to its similarity in appearance to that product.

Limbo

I knew a guy in Detroit named Alkazoff who was a member of the Armenian Mafia, who were reputed to be behind most of the organized crime in the area. I first met him in this vast, dingy poolroom on Woodward Avenue, a major artery of Detroit, and, as we shared a common background in music and were equally matched as pool players, we wound up spending time together. We both were devotees of boxing and, since Alkazoff was connected, he could get great seats and would occasionally take me along. Sometimes we went to the fights in the company of his associates and on those occasions I felt like a chicken among foxes. I never really felt in danger among them, but Alkazoff had told me stories, carefully edited, about his life and I suspected that some of these men had figured in those stories and that there was blood on their hands. When I became a writer, I started a piece based on the stories that Alkazoff had told me, but I lost interest in the factual material and turned it into a story about a criminal hiding from other criminals, using Alkazoff as the protagonist.

The setting of the story, the town of Champion, the lake and the cabin, reflects a place in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where my ex-wife and I spent a pleasant vacation one autumn. My most salient memory of the time (a memory I tried unsuccessfully to fit into “Limbo”) is that one morning I dropped acid, took my National Steel guitar (a lovely old thing with a painting of a girl waterskiing on the back), and went into the woods to write songs. I found a sunny spot between two fallen trees that lay about thirty feet apart, and sat with my back against one and plunked away. It was incredibly peaceful there, with birds chittering, lots of little sounds, the sun warming my bones, and that peace infected me. I felt in absolute harmony with my environment, and perhaps I was, for soon birds and squirrels began hopping about me, coming close enough to touch. It was like a damn Disney movie. I smiled beatifically at them and made incidental music for the film. I’d been in this state for perhaps an hour when suddenly an animal popped up from behind the fallen tree opposite me, bracing with its forepaws on the trunk. I stared at it inquisitively, wondering what delightful forest creature had now been sent my way. It was, I’d estimate, about 40 pounds in weight, with a bear-like body and a head like a cross between those of a raccoon and a dog. It stared back at me for five or six seconds, and emitted a fierce, high-pitched growl, rather like the outcry of a tiny jaguar; then it disappeared behind the trunk and, apparently, went to tend other business. When I returned to the cabin that afternoon, I told the wife, a native of Michigan, about my day and described the animal to her and asked if she knew what it was.

“You’re lucky it didn’t tear you apart,” she said, busy doing something at the sink. “That was a wolverine.”

“No shit?”

She proceeded to tell me in brief about the ferocity of wolverines, relating an anecdote or two by way of illustration, and repeated, “You were lucky.”

“Huh,” I said.

Liar’s House

“Liar’s House” is one of several stories I’ve written about the dragon Griaule, (the first being “The Man Who Painted The Dragon Griaule”) and there will be at least two more. The idea of Griaule occurred to me when I was stuck for something to write while attending the Clarion Workshop—I went out onto the campus of Michigan State University and sat under a tree and smoked a joint to jog my brain. I then wrote down in my notebook the words “big fucking dragon.” I felt exceptionally clever. Big stuff, I thought, is cool.

The notion of an immense paralyzed dragon, more than a mile in length and seven hundred feet high, which dominates the world around him by means of its mental energies, seemed appropriate to the Reagan Administration; but even a paralyzed dragon must grow and change, and for this story I decided, during the course of writing it, that Griaule would want children—how then would he go about it? Well, who cares, really? I understand that Griaule is representative of Christ or Oprah or some other mythic figure, but we’re talking about a bloody dragon here. However, in case you do care, such was—stated in question form—my idiot thesis.

I don’t know what it is that brings me back to Griaule. I hate elves, wizards, halflings, and dragons with equal intensity. Maybe it’s because I saw a list once of fictional dragons ordered by size and mine was the biggest. And the stories are fairly popular. It makes me think that I might make a career of this, writing stories about the biggest whatever. The biggest gopher, an aphid the size of a small planet, a gargantuan dust bunny. Anyway, the next story in the Griaule cycle or whatever it is will be “Beautiful Blood,” which will be published by Night Shade Books in ’08 and details certain unusual properties of the dragon’s blood. And the last story, a short novel of approximately 60,000 words, will be entitled The Grand Tour, and will be included with the other stories, collected in a single volume.

Unlike the majority of my stuff, there’s little autobiographical material in “Liar’s House”, the exception being that the sketch of the hotel’s owner is based on one of my old landlords, a man who surely will have his own special boutique hell. God bless you, Mr. Weimer, wherever you are. When it comes time for you to pass, I’ll be there with itching powder and a ball gag to make certain your last moments are a joy.

Dead Money

For a long time now, I’ve intended to revisit the materials of my first novel, Green Eyes, and the female protagonist of that novel, Jocundra Verret.

“Dead Money” is the result. I had wanted to put a poker game into the novel, but Terry Carr thought it would break the continuity of the narrative and I see now that, as was his habit, Terry was right.

Occasionally I play poker at a local card room. I never win much, never lose much, but I like the game and the environment, and I could easily lose a whole lot more if I let myself go. There’s a guy who comes into the card room who sometimes uses a cane, sometimes not. I have no idea if he’s a good player or bad, but he’s the model for Josey Pellerin in the story. I’ve never exchanged a word with him, so I have no idea what he’s about, but he looks cool in his black cowboy hat and shades, and I’ve imagined various sinister reasons for his condition.

Some relationships are like self-inflicted wounds. Jack’s relationship with Jocundra is like that—he knows it’s going to be bad for him, but he goes ahead in spite of that and, though he reads innumerable signs along the way directing him to desist, he continues pursuing it to the bitter end. Obviously, many people have this same propensity. For my part, show me a woman who’s a psychological wreck and, better, doesn’t know she’s a wreck and, better yet, has a prescription for anti-depressants, a trouble-plagued, ongoing relationship, and bursts into tears every few minutes…hey, I’m there! I assume that this signals some sort of mental problem, but why fix it if it ain’t broke? I’m considering having T-shirts printed that bear the legend, “You’re Beautiful—Just Shoot Me Now”, and business cards that say…Well, never mind.

Enough of matters sub-textual.

The Seminole Hard Rock Casino and Hotel in Hollywood, Florida is one of God’s most egregious errors. I recommend you spend a night there if you ever get down South Florida way and are, like myself, an aficionado of the grotesque and love the smell of terminal despair. Perhaps the International Conference on the Fantastic could be moved there—it might liven things up. Judging by the chests of the waitresses, hostesses, and pros who populate the place, there must be a silicon mine nearby. Look too closely, you could lose an eye. Gaping old men with ghastly complexions teeter on the bar stools; old women with leathery tanned skin, heavy gold bracelets adorning their liver-spotted wrists, lounge by the pool like alligators who have put on a human guise, their cold eyes tracking the cabana boys. It is home to mutants of every imaginable stamp. Aliens could land on the grounds and people would believe it was a publicity stunt. After a while they’d embrace those nine-foot-tall green beans with eyes and fangs as part of their natural surroundings. Seriously, folks.

The Seminole Paradise. Check it out.

Dinner at Baldassaro’s

My stories often begin life with, not an idea, but a phrase or a sentence, often not part of the opening, though in this instance it was. This particular sentence (“Giacinta had a beautiful sneeze.”) originally was in a story set in present-day Havana, concerning a CIA agent recuperating from a broken hip in his Havana apartment, stoned on painkillers, who is alternately keeping tabs on the progress of an operation and remembering his days in the Canal Zone and a young brother-and-sister whom he caught gleaning the high-security dumpsite. That story has been stewing in my pot for many years, and I’m beginning to doubt it will ever be done; so I lifted the sentence and used it to open the present story.

I spent a few days in Diamante not too long ago directly following the town’s chile pepper festival, a week during which the townspeople decorate everything, including themselves, with peppers, an event I was happy to avoid. I prefer to visit places in the off-season, when they let drop the disguise they have adopted for the tourist trade. While there, I had a dream in which the waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea were transformed overnight into a garden of heroic statuary. The story developed backward from that point and deals with one of my favorite recurring paranoid fantasies: I have always suspected (though I doubt it’s true) that the world would not have gotten this fucked-up unless someone was orchestrating things toward that end.

There simply aren’t enough Cro Magnon stories for my tastes. Let’s leave it at that.

Abimagique

When I lived in Seattle, I sometimes took lunch in a little teriyaki place in the University District (Teriyaki Plus, near the corner of 45th and Roosevelt). It was notable for the fact that Bill Gates had eaten there, an event commemorated by a Polaroid of The World’s Richest Nerd on the wall above one of the tables. Often I would find a zaftig woman with orange and black hair eating alone at one of the tables, reading a paperback. Despite being slightly overweight, she was quite attractive and I wondered why no one ever hit on her—the restaurant was frequented by students at the University of Washington, many of them males who targeted her with stares.

One afternoon I went home and wrote the paragraph that opens this story, except in the first person. It sat in my computer for several years, then, while I was recovering from a serious back injury, unable to write in other than short bursts, I opened the file and, on a whim, changed the paragraph to the second person. That inspired me to write a couple of pages. When I picked up the story a few months later, I quickly realized I was writing a novella in the second person, present tense, a difficult chore; but I thought, What the hell. I made the narrator callow in the extreme so I could have him drift along cluelessly while the plot happened around him and at the end he’d be no more knowledgeable than, say, you or I would after an intense experience with a Tantric witch and her crippled minions that ended in her death. Human beings are lousy at figuring things out, yet their fictive creations are often brilliant at it, and this strikes me as highly unrealistic; thus I was striving for a kind of bungling naturalism in the character. Bungling naturalism being one of my strengths as a writer, I’m confident I succeeded.

The Lepidopterist

The island of Roatan off the Caribbean coast of Honduras is a place rife with storytellers. John Anderson McCrae, now deceased, was not among the best of them. The best I knew was Devlin Walker, who’s mentioned in the story as having two left feet…which, in fact, he did. McCrae was always drunk and usually his stories became incoherent ramblings after he had a few. But he had a couple of interesting narrative twitches, not least among them the habit of exclaiming, “God Bless America!,” whenever he thought he was losing his audience or preparatory to asking to be bought another drink. So I decided to use him as the narrator for this little political fable.

I originally approached McCrae because I wanted to ask him about Lee Christmas, an American railroad engineer who became, first, a general in the Honduran army and, second, a mercenary who played a major role in establishing the United Fruit Company, a man whom, according to my informants, McCrae had known as a boy. After ten or twelve beers, he took to acting out his story. When he talked about his childhood, telling how his father, a mean drunk, told him to get under the table, he got under the table to demonstrate how he’d obeyed, an exertion that caused him nearly to pass out. We (my brother-in-law and I) hauled him up and tried to get him talking again, but he was too far gone to do other than babble incoherently, punctuating his half-sentences with loud, “God Bless America!”s. This caused some unpleasantness with a group of Americans who were staying at a nearby resort and thought that he was putting them on. I imagine he was, in a way, putting all of us on. But McCrae’s attitude toward Americans was not informed by hostility, rather by a gentle humor.

I realize I may have painted him as a colorful relic, a memory souvenir of the Caribbean, but that’s not how I viewed him. He was a man who’d seen a lot. His father actually had been a wrecker, and he was afflicted by the fact that he had participated in his father’s crimes, which included smuggling and gun-running. He knew a lot, too, and, had he been born to a better estate, who can say what he might have done.

The last time I saw him, he was scuttling from bar to bar in Coxxen Hole, the island’s capital. I was impatient to be on my way, let him hustle me for a dollar, and hurried off. He yelled something after me, which I’m certain was a colorful island tribute, but I paid no attention—I was hurrying to meet someone; I can’t recall who—and thus it is forever lost. When I returned to Coxxen Hole five years later, McCrae was dead and it was too late (if I ever had the necessary funds) to realize my dream for him. I wanted to buy a TV station and give him an hour in the seven PM slot, usually handed over to reruns, and a set dressed to resemble an island bar. I’d prime him with a six-pack and let him shout “God Bless America!” to his heart’s content, using these exclamations as parentheses to enclose his wit and wisdom, gradually sinking into a stuporous condition and passing out just before the last commercial break. I think he’d be huge. No one would believe he wasn’t the latest thinking man’s comic. It’d be paradise for McCrae. He’d have guests to hustle, pretty girls at whom to leer, and he could afford a liver transplant. And I’m fairly sure that “God Bless America!” would become a catchphrase meaning, more-or-less, “You bet your ass!”

Dagger Key

I wanted to write an old-time pirate story, complete with ship-boardings and chases across the Spanish Main, but I hate doing research. I don’t even like being close to more than a few books. Libraries put me to sleep. There must be some chemical given off by all those old books that has a soporific effect on me. The Internet helps, but even there, after a short while, I find myself drifting over to my message board, or I buy something online or visit a sports site…In short, I guess I’m lazy. So the problem was to write such a story, yet set in a time with which I was familiar.

When I was a boy, I’d read about Anne Bonny and her lover, Mary Reade, and I decided to write about Annie who, by all accounts, was more bloodthirsty than the men with whom she sailed. I hated to think that, as is commonly held, she wound up as Southern Belle in South Carolina, so I put her on a remote key off the coast of Belize (or in Fredo’s head, depending on your interpretation of the story).

Fredo and Emily are based on a couple I met in Guyana fourteen years ago. They had, to my mind, the most equitable marriage I’ve ever been privy to. They were so reasonable with one another, I assumed that one or both had to be deeply twisted, if not insane, and I was intrigued by the idea that this marriage could be sustained by the lurid fantasy of a serialist or the violent nature of a family ghost.

I’ve long been an admirer of Peter Mathiessen, the author and naturalist, especially of his classic novel, Far Tortuga. In this story, I wanted to do homage to him and to the experimental typography of that novel. I wanted to go him one better and incorporate bits of poetry into the prose, because life along the Caribbean littoral strikes me as being intensely poetic in character due to a constant interaction with the natural world, and to the speech of those indigenous to the region, which can be scanned as poetry.

There are other, more significant reasons, of course, why I wrote the story, but this is the sort of thing I tell people who ask.

Lucius Shepard’s latest novel is Softspoken and he is currently at work on a non-fiction book about Central America and a long, crypto-vampire novel. He lives in Vancouver, Washington.