Dagger Key and Other Stories

Long ago, after the murder of Mary Reade, before Annie conceived her first child, she was in the habit of walking into the hills, carrying with her a bottle of rum. There she would sit in a secluded spot and drink herself blind, grieving, weeping, lamenting the sins of her young life. That spot, shadowed by banana trees and sabal palms, is near the top of Dagger Key’s tallest hill, a weedy notch some twenty feet wide and twelve feet deep. Bromeliads, ferns and vines festoon walls of dark conglomerate rock; and, matting one section of wall, is a mass of vines that have been interwoven with dozens of cowrie shells, bits of ribbon and oddly shaped pieces of driftwood. Fredo doesn’t know who tends the notch. It must be tended, he thinks. The ribbons must fade, the shells must fall away as the vines wither; yet the vines are always green, the shells white, and the ribbons unfaded whenever he comes. It seems unlikely that an islander would be responsible—most recognize the notch to be a duppy place and keep their distance. Many of those who have trespassed will testify to having night terrors for months after the fact and rarely return.

Maybe, Fredo thinks, it’s Annie.

That was his father’s view. The first time he brought Fredo to the notch, he voiced the opinion that the vines were tended either by Annie or the Caribe wizard whose spirit has befriended her—or, perhaps, served her—through the centuries.

Fredo arrives at the notch shortly past noon and begins drinking from a fifth of unrefined rum purchased at John Wayne’s. Though not usually a drinking man, indulging in a beer now and then, he has been taught that he has to open himself to Annie, to attune himself to her drunken grief, her guilt and rage. He can’t abide the taste of rum, but he forces the raw stuff down and soon grows bleary and addled. The sun veers across the sky when he looks up, and the fringe of vegetation that hides the notch from all but the most discerning eye appears to undulate with unseen currents.

Mired in a complicated

shadow of banana fronds,

he feels that he’s being lowered

into a deep well,

a spiritual depth,

a hole bored into the bottom of the world

from the world below…

…and the more he drinks, the deeper he sinks, until it’s as if he’s at the end of a long tunnel, a place that the sun, although he sees it shining, cannot warm, and the wind, although it stirs the leaves around him, cannot reach. And it’s then that he starts to sense Annie’s presence and the presence of other spirits, too. The grass at his feet ripples with the passage of a snake duppy, the shade of a lizard, and the vine matte shakes itself as if some old ghost is shouldering on its cloak, the cowrie shells clacking together. The base of his neck prickles as Annie begins to settle over him, a cloud obscuring his soul. On the verge of passing out, he sees the vine matte shift forward, moving at the pace of a very old man taking hobbling steps. Something is dislodged from the matte, a bundle wrapped in a grimy sack, bulky, dropping with a clank onto the ground. Drool escapes the corner of Fredo’s lips, eels onto his chin. His head lolls, his eyelids flutter and a thick, glutinous noise issues from his throat. He stretches a hand out toward the sack, wanting to touch his treasure, to see its golden glory…but a crunching in the brush stays him. A voice, Wilton Barrios’ voice, says, “Fredo…” The remainder of his utterance is obliterated by Annie’s fury, a fuming hiss, like fire drowning in rain, that swirls around Fredo, seeming to occupy a space both inside his head and without. In his confusion, he’s inspired to struggle to his knees. Ignoring Wilton’s booming, unintelligible speech, he pushes up to his feet, staggers, braces with one hand on the ground, inadvertently gripping a fist-sized rock, and then he straightens, swaying, half-possessed, blinking in sunlight that has suddenly grown too warm and too bright. The world steadies around him. The vine matte snaps back to its customary position against the rock face; the vegetation seethes with the ordinary actions of the wind. Wilton swims into focus, wearing a sweated-through Cuban-style shirt that’s hiked up over the revolver stuck in his waistband, a confident look on his jaundiced, jowly face.

Effortfully, Fredo says, “Best you go from here, Wilton.”

“Now what I want to do that for? You going to shoot me with that rock?” He draws the revolver, trains it on Fredo’s chest, and nods at the sack. “This what you been hiding up here? Mon, you got to show me where you hide it. I been searching three years, ever since you put the fear of god in that professor, and I ain’t never find it.”

“You not going to steal my property, mon.”

“I ain’t going to do nothing but. Drunk as you is, think you stop me?” Again, he indicates the sack. “What you got in there? The professor say it a bag of pirate gold. You shouldn’t have scared that mon so bad. He couldn’t leave off talking, and him so angry with you.”