Lucius Shepard - Dagger Key and Other Stories

of scrutiny. I found him watching Star Trek in the dark, remote in one hand, TV Guide (he called it “The Guide”) resting on his lap, gnawing on a Butterfingers. Seeing him so at home in his filthy nest turned up the flame under my anger.

  “Sabela refuses to clean down here,” I said. “I don’t blame her.”

  “I don’t care if she cleans,” he said with a truculent air.

  “Well, I do. You’ve turned this place into a shithole. I had a metal band down here for a month, it never got this bad. I want you to keep it presentable. No stacks of dirty dishes. No crud on the floor. And put your damn sex toys in a drawer. Understand?”

  He glowered at me.

  “And don’t mess with Sabela,” I went on. “When she wants to clean down here, you clear out. Go up to the studio. I hear about you groping her again, you can hump your way back to Mckeesport. I need her one hell of a lot more than I need you.”

  He muttered something about “another producer.”

  “You want another producer? Go for it! No doubt major labels are beating down my door this very minute, lusting after your sorry ass.”

  Stanky fiddled with the remote and lowered his eyes, offering me a look at his infant bald spot. Authority having been established, I thought I’d tell him what I had in mind for the next weeks, knowing that his objections—given the temper of the moment—would be minimal; yet there was something so repellent about him, I still wanted to give him the boot. I had the idea that one of Hell’s lesser creatures, a grotesque, impotent toad, banished by the Powers of Darkness, had landed with a foul stink on my sofa. But I’ve always been a sucker for talent and I felt sorry for him. His past was plain. Branded as a nerd early on and bullied throughout high school, he had retreated into a life of flipping burgers and getting off on a 4-track in his mother’s basement. Now he had gravitated to another basement, albeit one with a more hopeful prospect and a better recording system.

  “Why did you get into music?” I asked, sitting beside him. “Women, right? It’s always women. Hell, I was married to a good-looking woman, smart, sexy, and that was my reason.”

  He allowed that this had been his reason as well.

  “So how’s that working out? They’re not exactly crawling all over you, huh?”

  He cut his eyes toward me and it was as if his furnace door had slid open a crack, a blast of heat and resentment shooting out. “Not great,” he said.

  “Here’s what I’m going to do.” I tapped out a cigarette from his pack, rolled it between my fingers. “Next week, I’m bringing in a drummer and a bass player to work with you. I own a part-interest in the Crucible, the alternative club in town. As soon as you get it together, we’ll put you in there for a set and showcase you for some people.”

  Stanky started to speak, but I beat him to the punch. “You follow my lead, you do what I know you can…” I said, leaving a significant pause. “I guarantee you won’t be going home alone.”

  He waited to hear more, he wanted to bask in my vision of his future, but I knew I had to use rat psychology; now that I had supplied a hit of his favorite drug, I needed to buzz him with a jolt of electricity.

  “First off,” I said, “we’re going to have to get you into shape. Work off some of those man-tits.”

  “I’m not much for exercise.”

  “That doesn’t come as a shock,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to make a new man out of you, I just want to make you a better act. Eat what I eat for a month or so, do a little cardio. You’ll drop ten or fifteen pounds.” Falsely convivial, I clapped him on the shoulder and felt a twinge of disgust, as if I had touched a hypo-allergenic cat. “The other thing,” I said. “That Local Profitt Junior name won’t fly. It sounds too much like a country band.”

  “I like it,” he said defiantly.

  “If you want the name back later, that’s up to you. For now, I’m billing you as Joe Stanky.”

  I laid the unlit cigarette on the coffee table and asked what he was watching, thinking that, for the sake of harmony, I’d bond with him a while.

  “Trek marathon,” he said.

  We sat silently, staring at the flickering black-and-white picture. My mind sang a song of commitments, duties, other places I could be. Stanky laughed, a cross between a wheeze and a hiccup.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “John Colicos sucks, man!”

  He pointed to the screen, where a swarthy man with Groucho Marx eyebrows, pointy sideburns, and a holstered ray gun seemed to be undergoing an agonizing inner crisis. “Michael Ansaara’s the only real Vulcan,” Stanky looked at me as if seeking validation. “At least,” he said, anxious lest he offend, “on the original Trek.”

  Absently, I agreed with him. My mind rejoined its song. “Okay,” I said, and stood. “I got things to do. We straight about Sabela? About keeping the place…you know? Keeping the damage down to normal levels?”

  He nodded.

  “Okay. Catch you later.”

  I started for the door, but he called to me, employing that wheedling tone with which I had become all too familiar. “Hey, Vernon?” he said. “Can you get me a trumpet?” This asked with an imploring expression, screwing up his face like a child, as if he were begging me to grant a wish.

  “You play the trumpet?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “If you promise to take care of it. Yeah, I can get hold of one.”

  Stanky rocked forward on the couch and gave a tight little fist-pump. “Decent!”

  I don’t know when Stanky and I got married, but it must have been sometime between the incident with Sabela and the night Mia went home to her mother. Certainly my reaction to the latter was more restrained than was my reaction to the former, and I attribute this in part to our union having been joined. It was a typical rock and roll marriage: talent and money making beautiful music together and doomed from the start, on occasion producing episodes in which the relationship seemed to be crystallized, allowing you to see (if you wanted to) the messy bed you had made for yourself.

  Late one evening, or maybe it wasn’t so late—it was starting to get dark early—Mia came downstairs and stepped into my office and set a smallish suitcase on my desk. She had on a jacket with a fake fur collar and hood, tight jeans, and her nice boots. She’d put a fresh raspberry streak in her black hair and her make-up did a sort of Nefertiti-meets-Liza thing. All I said was, “What did I do this time?”

  Mia’s lips pursed in a moue—it was her favorite expression and she used it at every opportunity, whether appropriate or not. She would become infuriated when I caught her practicing it in the bathroom mirror.

  “It’s not what you did,” she said. “It’s that clammy little troll in the basement.”

  “Stanky?”

  “Do you have another troll? Stanky! God, that’s the perfect name for him.” Another moue. “I’m sick of him rubbing up against me.”

  Mia had, as she was fond of saying, “been through some stuff,” and, if Stanky had done anything truly objectionable, she would have dealt with him. I figured she needed a break or else there was someone in town with whom she wanted to sleep.

  “I take it this wasn’t consensual rubbing,” I said.

  “You think you’re so funny! He comes up behind me in tight places. Like in the kitchen. And he pretends he has to squeeze past.”

  “He’s in our kitchen?”

  “You send him up to use the treadmill, don’t you?”

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