Dagger Key and Other Stories

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.