Dagger Key and Other Stories

Without hesitation, Annie seizes the opportunity, drives the blade of the dagger deep into his abdomen, gives it a twist as she pulls it free. Before he can cry out, she yanks back his head, exposing his throat, and slashes him across the windpipe. The watchman falls, convulsing, and he is still convulsing when she wrenches off his belt and nudges his body off the pier. She hops down into the water, dragging the body under, holding her breath. Working blind, she secures him to a piling with the belt, leaving him among barnacles and tubeworms and crabs, all the little feeders for which he’ll provide a delightful feast, floating beneath the pier at a depth that will hide him until any urgency attaching to his loss has been forgotten. She strikes out for the beach, swimming with a strong, confident stroke. She’ll take the dory, go after Klose and his bitch. When she finds them, and find them she will, they’ll wish the Devil had come in her stead.

Early morning on the Chinchorro Bank. The sun burns a ragged hole through a pale blue, papery sky. A string of bone-white, lizard-haunted islands rises out of waters a thousand meters deep, the visible portion of a coral reef that stretches forty miles and more, from Belize into the waters off Quintana Roo. Fringed with mangrove, dabbed with spinach-colored vegetation, some of the islands bear living trees, but dead trees abound, their naked limbs hung with osprey nests. Overlying the reef, the sea is a patchwork of light and shadow, here dark over a bottom of yellow-green manatee grass, here a sun-dazzled expanse of aquamarine over white sand, dark again where a forest of feathery gorgonians overgrows a sloping shelf, brightening as Annie crosses a shallows above a bed of lettuce coral…She feels the slow, persistent beat of the coral’s mind on the perimeters of her consciousness, watches the reef’s traffic of angelfish and sergeant majors, tangs and jackknife, obeying the direction of that mind, flitting back and forth in schools, slaves to its unguessable purpose. She knows these waters, as much as they can be known. Ships out of Cartagena would ply north to Havana, then sail the western passage along the bank, and the William would lurk by Cay Lobo, picking off the weakest, though Annie would urge Jack to seek bigger prizes. She was ever hard on him. On the day he was taken to be hanged, she told him she was sorry to see him in chains and on his way to Deadman’s Key, but if he’d been more of a man, put up more of a fight, he might have avoided that fate.

There’s no sign of the Selkie. Perhaps, she thinks, she has miscalculated. She should have sighted them by now, and she wonders if they were foolish enough to try the windward passage. If so, they may have gone down, down into a graveyard already populated by hundreds of ships, some sent there by Annie’s hand. And yet she feels they’re close by. Engineless, they wouldn’t want to be caught out in the channel with weather coming and the cross on board; they would have allowed the boat to drift close to shore before trying to effect repairs. Leaden clouds are pushing in from the west, black brooms of rain sweeping the sea. She needs to find them before the squall hits.

Sputter and pop

of the dory’s outboard.

Annie cuts the motor and drifts.

Winded silence.

It was a day like this she first met Jack. Clear, with a squall in the offing. In the market at New Providence. She carrying a basket, tarrying by a fishwife’s stall, inspecting a fresh-caught bonita, and there he was, walking with his mates, like a lion among dogs, handsome in a tri-corner and an embroidered frock coat, a full head taller than the rest. In answer to her inquiry, the fishwife said, “Why that’s Calico Jack, miss. The pirate.” He was not much of a pirate, Annie learned. Too cautious by half. Cock like an Irish toothpick. Still, if he’d had a lion’s heart, she would never have strayed…though Mary would have tested her loyalties, no matter the circumstance, teaching her the woman’s way. The night Jack caught them at it, scissoring their quims in the sail locker, he made a show of outrage and wounded pride, but was intrigued by their display and let himself be drawn into a game of rub-and-tickle, seduced by shy looks and clever smiles. La, but that was a merry voyage! The crew rarely saw their captain abovedecks, and then only when they would anchor off the edge of the reef, lower a longboat and go fishing for shark, she and Jack and Mary, bait fish flopping in the bilge, their mineral reds and blues and yellows glistening like rare gemstones. The William might have sailed in circles and mutiny been muttered had not the first mate been a man of sober purpose and scant imagination.

God’s light! Where are they?