Dagger Key and Other Stories

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.