Duma Key

  I lay there a moment, confirming to myself that I was still alive, then got to my knees, my hip aching fiercely, holding my throbbing right arm up in front of my eyes. There was no arm there. I set my chair up on its legs, leaned on it with my left forearm . . . then darted my head forward and bit my right arm.

  I felt the crescents of my teeth sink in just below the elbow. The pain.

  I felt more. I felt the flesh of my forearm against my lips. Then I drew back, panting. "Jesus! Jesus! What's happening? What is this?"

  I almost expected to see the arm swirl into existence. It didn't, but it was there, all right. I reached across the seat of my chair for one of my brushes. I could feel my fingers grasp it, but the brush didn't move. I thought: So this is what it's like to be a ghost.

  I scrambled into the chair. My hip was snarling, but that pain seemed to be happening far downriver. With my left hand I snatched up the brush I'd cleaned and put it behind my left ear. Cleaned another and put it in the gutter of the easel. Cleaned a third and put that in the gutter, as well. Thought about cleaning a fourth and decided I didn't want to take the time. That fever was on me again, that hunger. It was as sudden and violent as my fits of rage. If the smoke detectors had gone off downstairs, announcing the house was on fire, I would have paid no attention. I stripped the cellophane from a brand-new brush, dipped black, and began to paint.

  As with the picture I'd called The End of the Game, I don't remember much about the actual creation of Friends with Benefits. All I know is it happened in a violent explosion, and sunsets had nothing to do with it. It was mostly black and blue, the color of bruises, and when it was done, my left arm ached from the exercise. My hand was splattered with paint all the way to the wrist.

  The finished canvas reminded me a little of those noir paperback covers I used to see back when I was a kid, the ones that always featured some roundheels dame headed for hell. Only on the paperback covers, the dame was usually blond and twenty-twoish. In my picture, she had dark hair and looked on the plus side of forty. This dame was my ex-wife.

  She was sitting on a rumpled bed, wearing nothing but a pair of blue panties. The strap of a matching bra trailed across one leg. Her head was slightly bent, but there was no mistaking her features; I had caught her BRILLIANTLY in just a few harsh strokes of black that were almost like Chinese ideograms. On the slope of one breast was the picture's only real spot of brightness: a rose tattoo. I wondered when she'd gotten it, and why. Pam wearing ink seemed as unlikely to me as Pam racing a dirtbike at Mission Hill, but I had no doubt whatever that it was true; it was just a fact, like Carson Jones's Torii Hunter tee-shirt.

  There were also two men in the picture, both naked. One stood at the window, half-turned. He had a perfectly typical body for a white middle-class man of fifty or so, one I imagined you could see in any Gold's Gym changing room: poochy stomach, flat little no-cheeks ass, moderate man-tits. His face was intelligent and well-bred. On that face now was a melancholy she's-almost-gone look. A nothing-will-change-it look. This was Max from Palm Desert. He might as well have been wearing a sign around his neck. Max who had lost his father last year, Max who had started by offering Pam coffee and had ended up offering her more. She'd taken him up on the coffee and the more, but not all the more he would have given. His face said that. You couldn't see all of it, but what you could see was a lot more naked than his ass.

  The other man leaned in the doorway with his ankles crossed, a position that pressed his thighs together and pushed his considerable package forward. He was maybe ten years older than the man at the window, in better shape. No belly. No lovehandles. Long muscles in the thighs. His arms were folded below his chest and he was looking at Pam with a little smile on his face. I knew that smile well, because Tom Riley had been my accountant--and my friend--for thirty-five years. If it had not been custom in our family to ask your father to be your best man, I would have asked Tom.

  I looked at him standing naked in the doorway, looking at my wife on the bed, and remembered him helping me move my stuff out to Lake Phalen. Remembered him saying You don't give up the house, that's like giving up home field advantage in a playoff game.

  Then catching him with tears in his eyes. Boss, I can't get used to seeing you this way.

  Had he been fucking her then? I thought not. But--

  I'm going to give you an offer to take back to her, I'd said. And he had. Only maybe he'd done more than make my offer.

  I limped to the big window, not using my crutch. Sunset was still hours off, but the light was westering strongly, beating a reflection off the water. I made myself look directly into that glaring track, wiping my eyes repeatedly.

  I tried to tell myself the picture might be no more than a figment of a mind that was still trying to heal itself. It wouldn't wash. All my voices were speaking clearly and coherently to one another, and I knew what I knew. Pam had fucked Max out there in Palm Desert, and when he had suggested a longer, deeper commitment, she had refused. Pam had also fucked my oldest friend and business associate, and might still be fucking him. The only unanswered question was which guy had talked her into the rose on her tit.

  "I need to let this go," I said, and leaned my throbbing forehead against the glass. Beyond me, the sun burned on the Gulf of Mexico. "I really need to let this go."

  Then snap your fingers, I thought.

  I snapped the fingers of my right hand and heard the sound--a brisk little click. "All right, over-done with-gone!" I said brightly. But then I closed my eyes and saw Pam sitting on the bed--some bed--in her panties, with a bra-strap lying across her leg like a dead snake.

  Friends with benefits.

  Fucking friends, with fucking benefits.

  vii

  That evening I didn't watch the sunset from Little Pink. I left my crutch leaning against the corner of the house, limped down the beach, and walked into the water until I was up to my knees. The water was cold, the way it gets a couple of months after hurricane season has blown itself out, but I hardly noticed. Now the track beating across the water was bitter orange, and that was what I was looking at.

  "Experiment, my ass," I said, and the water surged around me. I rocked unsteadily on my feet, holding my arm out for balance. "My fucking ass."

  Overhead a heron glided across the darkening sky, a silent long-neck projectile.

  "Snooping is what it was, snooping is all it was, and I paid the price."

  True. If I sort of felt like strangling her all over again, it was nobody's fault but my own. Peek not through a keyhole, lest ye be vexed, my dear old mother used to say. I peeked, I was vexed, end of story. It was her life now, and what she did in it was her business. My business was to drop it. My question was whether or not I could. It was harder than snapping your fingers; even than snapping the fingers of a hand that wasn't there.

  A wave surged in, one big enough to knock me down. For a moment I was under, and breathing water. I came up spluttering. The backrun tried to pull me out with the sand and shells. I pushed shoreward with my good foot, even kicking feebly with my bad one, and managed to get some purchase. I might be confused about some things, but I didn't want to drown in the Gulf of Mexico. I wasn't confused about that. I crawled out of the water with my hair hanging in my eyes, spitting and coughing, dragging my right leg behind me like so much soaked luggage.

  When I finally got to dry sand, I rolled over and stared up into the sky. A fat crescent moon sailed the deepening velvet above Big Pink's roofpeak. It looked very serene up there. Down here was a man who felt the opposite of serene: shaking and sad and angry. I turned my head to look at the stump of my arm, then up at the moon again.

  "No more peeking," I said. "The new deal starts tonight. No more peeking and no more experiments."

  I meant it, too. But as I've said (and Wireman was there before me), we fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.

  5--Wireman

  i

  The first time Wireman and I actually met he laughed s
o hard he broke the chair he was sitting in, and I laughed so hard I almost fainted--did in fact go into that half-swooning state that's called "a gray-out." That was the last thing I would have expected a day after finding out that Tom Riley was having an affair with my ex-wife (not that my evidence would have stood up in any court of law), but it was an augury of things to come. It wasn't the only time we laughed together. Wireman was many things to me--not least of all my fate--but most of all, he was my friend.

  ii

  "So," he said, when I finally reached his table with the striped umbrella shading it and the empty chair across from his own. "The limping stranger arriveth, bearing a bread-bag filled with shells. Sit down, limping stranger. Wet thy whistle. That glass has been waiting for some days now."

  I put my plastic bag--it was indeed a bread-bag--on the table and reached across to him. "Edgar Freemantle."

  His hand was short, the fingers blunt, the grip strong. "Jerome Wireman. I go by Wireman, mostly."

  I looked at the beach chair meant for me. It was the kind with a high back and a low fanny-sling, like the bucket seat in a Porsche.

  "Something wrong with that, muchacho?" Wireman asked, raising an eyebrow. He had a lot of eyebrow to raise, tufted and half-gray.

  "Not as long as you don't laugh when I have to get out of it," I said.

  He smiled. "Honey, live like you got to live. Chuck Berry, nineteen sixty-nine."

  I positioned myself beside the empty chair, said a little prayer, and dropped. I leaned left as always, to spare my bad hip. I didn't land quite square, but I grabbed the wooden arms, pushed with my strong foot, and the chair only teetered. A month before I would have spilled, but I was stronger now. I could imagine Kathi Green applauding.

  "Good job, Edgar," he said. "Or are you an Eddie?"

  "Pick your poison, I answer to either. What might you have in that pitcher?"

  "Iced green tea," he said. "Very cooling. Try some?"

  "I'd love to."

  He poured me a glass, then topped up his own and raised it. The tea was only faintly green. His eyes, caught in fine nets of wrinkles, were greener. His hair was black, streaking in white at the temples, and quite long indeed. When the wind lifted it, I could see a scar at the top of his hairline on the right side, coin-shaped but smaller. He was wearing a bathing suit today, and his legs were as brown as his arms. He looked fit, but I thought he also looked tired.

  "Let's drink to you, muchacho. You made it."

  "All right," I said. "To me."

  We clinked glasses and drank. I'd had green tea before and thought it was okay, but this was heavenly--like drinking cold silk, with just a faint tang of sweetness.

  "Do you taste the honey?" he asked, and smiled when I nodded. "Not everyone does. I just put in a tablespoonful per pitcher. It releases the natural sweetness of the tea. I learned that cooking on a tramp steamer in the China Sea." He held up his glass and squinted through it. "We fought off many pirates and mated with strange and dusky women 'neath tropic skies."

  "That sounds a trifle bullshitty to me, Mr. Wireman."

  He laughed. "I actually read about the honey thing in one of Miss Eastlake's cookery books."

  "Is she the lady you come out with in the mornings? The one in the wheelchair?"

  "Indeed she is."

  And without thinking much about what I was saying--it was her enormous blue sneakers propped up on the chrome footrests of her wheelchair I was thinking about--I said: "The Bride of the Godfather."

  Wireman gaped, those green eyes of his so wide I was about to apologize for my faux pas. Then he really began to laugh. It was the kind of balls-to-the-wall bellowing you give out on those rare occasions when something sneaks past all your defenses and gets to the sweet spot of your funnybone. I mean the man was busting a gut, and when he saw I didn't have the slightest idea what had gotten him, he laughed even harder, his not inconsiderable belly heaving. He tried to put his glass back on the little table and missed. The glass plummeted straight down to the sand and stuck there, perfectly upright, like a cigarette-butt in one of those urns of sand you used to see beside the elevators in hotel lobbies. That struck him even funnier, and he pointed at it.

  "I couldn't have done that if I was trying!" he managed, and then was off again, gale upon gale, heaving in his chair, one hand clutching his stomach, the other planted on his chest. A snatch of poetry read in high school, over thirty years before, suddenly came back to me with haunting clarity: Men do not sham convulsion, Nor simulate a throe.

  I was smiling myself, smiling and chuckling, because that kind of high hilarity is catching, even when you don't know what the joke is. And the glass falling that way, with every drop of Wireman's tea staying inside . . . that was funny. Like a gag in a Road Runner cartoon. But the plummeting glass hadn't been the source of Wireman's hilarity.

  "I don't get it. I mean I'm sorry if I--"

  "She sort of is!" Wireman cried, cackling so crazily he was almost incoherent. "She sort of is, that's the thing! Only it's daughter, of course, she's The Daughter of the Godfa--"

  But he had been rocking from side to side as well as up and down--no sham, authentic throe--and that was when his beach chair finally gave up the ghost with a loud crrrack, first snapping him forward with an extremely comical look of surprise on his face and then spilling him onto the sand. One of his flailing arms caught the post of the umbrella and upended the table. A gust of wind caught the umbrella, puffed it like a sail, and began to drag the table down the beach. What got me laughing wasn't the bug-eyed look of amazement on Wireman's face when his disintegrating beach chair tried to clamp on him like a striped jaw, nor his sudden barrel-roll onto the sand. It wasn't even the sight of that table trying to escape, tugged by its own umbrella. It was Wireman's glass, still standing placidly upright between the sprawling man's side and left arm.

  Acme Iced Tea Company, I thought, still stuck on those old Road Runner cartoons. Meep-meep! And that, of course, made me think of the crane that had done the damage, the one with the fucked-up beeper that hadn't beeped, and all at once I saw myself as Wile E. Coyote in the cab of my disintegrating pickup truck, eyes bugged in bewilderment, frazzled ears sticking off in two opposite directions and maybe smoking a little at the tips.

  That did it. I laughed until I rolled bonelessly out of my own chair and plopped onto the sand beside Wireman . . . but I also missed the glass, which still stood perfectly upright like a cigarette-butt in an urn of sand. It was impossible for me to laugh any harder, but I did. Tears gushed down my cheeks and the world had begun to dim out as my brain went into oxygen-deprivation mode.

  Wireman, still howling, went crawling after his runaway table, locomoting on knees and elbows. He made a grab for the base and it skittered away as if sensing his approach. Wireman plowed face-first into the sand and came up laughing and sneezing. I rolled over on my back and gasped for breath, on the verge of passing out but still laughing.

  That was how I met Wireman.

  iii

  Twenty minutes later the table had been placed in a rough approximation of its original position. That was all very well, but neither of us could look at the umbrella without breaking into fits of the giggles. One of its pie-wedges was torn, and it now rose crookedly from the table, giving it the look of a drunken man trying to pretend he's sober. Wireman had moved the remaining chair down to the end of the wooden walk, and had taken it at my insistence. I was sitting on the walk itself, which, although backless, would make getting up an easier (not to mention more dignified) proposition. Wireman had offered to replace the spilled pitcher of iced tea with a fresh one. I refused this, but agreed to split the miraculously unspilled glass with him.

  "Now we're water-brothers," he said when it was gone.

  "Is that some Indian ritual?" I asked.

  "Nope, from Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein. Bless his memory."

  It occurred to me that I'd never seen him reading as he sat in his striped chair, but I didn't m
ention it. Lots of people don't read on the beach; the glare gives them headaches. I sympathized with people who got headaches.

  He began to laugh again. He covered his mouth with both hands--like a child--but the laughter burst through. "No more. Jesus, no more. I feel like I sprung every muscle in my stomach."

  "Me too," I said.

  For a moment we said nothing more. The breeze off the Gulf was cool and fresh that day, with a rueful salt tang. The rip in the umbrella flapped. The dark spot on the sand where the iced tea pitcher had spilled was already almost dry.

  He snickered. "Did you see the table trying to escape? The fucking table?"

  I also snickered. My hip hurt and my stomach-muscles ached, but I felt pretty good for a man who had almost laughed himself unconscious. " 'Alabama Getaway,' " I said.

  He nodded, still wiping sand from his face. "Grateful Dead. Nineteen seventy-nine. Or thereabouts." He giggled, the giggle broadened into a chuckle, and the chuckle became another bellow of full-throated laughter. He held his belly and groaned. "I can't, I have to stop, but . . . Bride of the Godfather! Jesus!" And he was off again.

  "Don't you ever tell her I said that," I said.

  He quit laughing, but not smiling. "I ain't that indiscreet, muchacho. But . . . it was the hat, right? That big straw hat she wears. Like Marlon Brando in the garden, playing with the little kid."

  It had actually been as much the sneakers, but I nodded and we laughed some more.

  "If we crack up when I introduce you," he said (cracking up again, probably at the idea of cracking up; it goes that way when the fit is on you), "we're gonna say it's because I broke my chair, right?"

  "Right," I said. "What did you mean when you said she sort of is?"

  "You really don't know?"

  "No clue."

  He pointed at Big Pink, which was looking very small in the distance. Looking like a long walk back. "Who do you think owns your place, amigo? I mean, I'm sure you pay a real estate agent, or Vacation Homes Be Us, but where do you think the balance of your check finally ends up?"

  "I'm going to guess in Miss Eastlake's bank account."

  "Correct. Miss Elizabeth Eastlake. Given the lady's age--eighty-five--I guess you could call her Ole Miss." He began laughing again, shook his head, and said: "I have to stop. But in fairness to myself, it's been a long time since I had anything to belly-laugh about."