Duma Key

  "Yeah. Yeah, that's the human condition, ain't it? But I thank you for trying." And before I knew he was going to do it, he had taken my hand and kissed the back of it. A gentle kiss in spite of the bristles on his upper lip. Then he told me adios and was gone into the dark and the only sound was the sigh of the Gulf and the whispering conversation of the shells under the house. Then there was another sound. The phone was ringing.

  x

  It was Ilse, calling to chat. Yes, her classes were going fine, yes, she felt well--great, in fact--yes, she was calling her mother once a week and staying in touch with Lin by e-mail. In Ilse's opinion, Lin's strep was probably so much self-diagnosed bullcrap. I told her I was stunned by her generosity of feeling and she laughed.

  I told her there was a possibility that I might be showing my work at a gallery in Sarasota, and she shrieked so loudly I had to hold the phone away from my ear.

  "Daddy, that's wonderful! When? Can I come?"

  "Sure, if you want to," I said. "I'm going to invite everybody." This was a decision I hadn't entirely made until I heard myself telling her. "We're thinking mid-April."

  "Shit! That's when I was planning to catch up with The Hummingbirds tour." She paused. Thinking. Then: "I can work them both in. A little tour of my own."

  "You think?"

  "Yes, of course. You just give me the date and I am there."

  Tears pricked the backs of my eyelids. I don't know what it's like to have sons, but I'm sure it can't be as rewarding--as plain nice--as having daughters. "I appreciate that, hon. Do you think . . . is there any possibility your sister might come?"

  "You know what, I think she will," Ilse said, "She'll be crazy to see what you're doing that's got people in the know so excited. Will you get written up?"

  "My friend Wireman thinks so. One-armed artist, and all that."

  "But you're just good, Daddy!"

  I thanked her, then moved on to Carson Jones. Asked what she heard from him.

  "He's fine," she said.

  "Really?"

  "Sure--why?"

  "I don't know. I just thought I heard a little cloud in your voice."

  She laughed ruefully. "You know me too well. The fact is, they're SRO everyplace they play now--word's getting around. The tour was supposed to end on May fifteenth because four of the singers have other commitments, but the booking agent found three new ones. And Bridget Andreisson, who's become quite the star, got them to push back the start of her understudy pastorate in Arizona. Which was lucky." Her voice flattened as she said this last, and became the voice of some adult woman I didn't know. "So instead of finishing in mid-May, the tour has been extended to the end of June, with dates in the Midwest and a final concert at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Some bigga-time, huh?" This was my phrase, used when Illy and Lin were little girls putting on what they called "ballet super-shows" in the garage, but I couldn't recall ever saying it in that sad tone of not-quite-sarcasm.

  "Are you worried about your guy and this Bridget?"

  "No!" she said at once, and laughed. "He says she has a great voice and he's lucky to be singing with her--they have two songs now instead of just one--but she's shallow and stuck-up. Also, he wishes she'd pop some Certs before he has to, you know, share a mike with her."

  I waited.

  "Okay," Ilse said at last.

  "Okay what?"

  "Okay, I'm worried." A pause. "A little bit, because he's with her on a bus every day and on stage with her every night and I'm here." Another, longer pause. Then: "And he doesn't sound the same when I talk to him on the phone. Almost . . . but not quite."

  "That could be your imagination."

  "Yes. It could. And in any case, if something's going on--nothing is, I'm sure nothing is--but if something is, better now rather than after . . . you know, than after we . . ."

  "Yes," I said, thinking that was so adult it hurt. I remembered finding the picture of them at the roadside stand with their arms around each other, and touching it with my missing right hand. Then rushing up to Little Pink with Reba clamped between my stump and my right side. A long time ago, that seemed. I love you, Punkin! "Smiley" had written, but the picture I'd done that day with my Venus colored pencils (they also seemed a long time ago) had somehow mocked the idea of enduring love: the little girl in her little tennis dress, looking out at the enormous Gulf. Tennis balls all around her feet. More floating in on the incoming waves.

  That girl had been Reba, but also Ilse, and . . . who else? Elizabeth Eastlake?

  The idea came out of nowhere, but I thought yes.

  The water runs faster now, Elizabeth had said. Soon come the rapids. Do you feel that?

  I felt it.

  "Daddy, are you there?"

  "Yes," I said again. "Honey, be good to yourself, okay? And try not to get too spun up. My friend down here says in the end we wear out our worries. I sort of believe that."

  "You always make me feel better," she said. "That's why I call. I love you, Daddy."

  "I love you too."

  "How many bunches?"

  How many years since she'd asked that? Twelve? Fourteen? It didn't matter, I remembered the answer.

  "A million and one for under your pillow," I said.

  Then I said goodbye and hung up and thought that if Carson Jones hurt my daughter, I'd kill him. The thought made me smile a little, wondering how many fathers had had the same thought and made the same promise. But of all those fathers, I might be the only one who could kill a heedless, daughter-hurting suitor with a few strokes of a paintbrush.

  xi

  Dario Nannuzzi and one of his partners, Jimmy Yoshida, came out the very next day. Yoshida was a Japanese-American Dorian Gray. Getting out of Nannuzzi's Jaguar in my driveway, dressed in faded straight-leg jeans and an even more faded Rihanna Pon De Replay tee-shirt, long black hair blowing in the breeze off the Gulf, he looked eighteen. By the time he got to the end of the walk, he looked twenty-eight. When he shook my hand, up close and personal, I could see the lines tattooed around his eyes and mouth and put him somewhere in his late forties.

  "Pleased to meet you," he said. "The gallery is still buzzing over your visit. Mary Ire has been back three times to ask when we're going to sign you up."

  "Come on in," I said. "Our friend down the beach--Wireman--has called me twice already to make sure I don't sign anything without him."

  Nannuzzi smiled. "We're not in the business of cheating artists, Mr. Freemantle."

  "Edgar, remember? Would you like some coffee?"

  "Look first," Jimmy Yoshida said. "Coffee later."

  I took a breath. "Fine. Come on upstairs."

  xii

  I'd covered my portrait of Wireman (which was still little more than a vague shape with a brain floating in it three-quarters of the way up), and my picture of Tina Garibaldi and Candy Brown had gone bye-bye in the downstairs closet (along with Friends with Benefits and the red-robe figure), but I had left my other stuff out. There was now enough to lean against two walls and part of a third; forty-one canvases in all, including five versions of Girl and Ship.

  When their silence was more than I could bear, I broke it. "Thanks for the tip on that Liquin stuff. It's great. What my daughters would call da bomb."

  Nannuzzi seemed not to have heard. He was going in one direction, Yoshida in the other. Neither asked about the big, sheet-draped canvas on the easel; I guessed that doing that might be considered poor etiquette in their world. Beneath us, the shells murmured. Somewhere, far off, a Jet-ski blatted. My right arm itched, but faint and very deep, telling me it wanted to paint but could wait--it knew the time would come. Before the sun went down. I'd paint and at first I would consult the photographs clipped to the sides of the easel and then something else would take over and the shells would grind louder and the chrome of the Gulf would change color, first to peach and then to pink and then to orange and finally to RED, and it would be well, it would be well, all manner of things would be well.

 
Nannuzzi and Yoshida met back by the stairs leading down from Little Pink. They conferred briefly, then came toward me. From the hip pocket of his jeans, Yoshida produced a business-size envelope with the words SAMPLE CONTRACT/SCOTO GALLERY neatly typed on the front. "Here," he said. "Tell Mr. Wireman we'll make any reasonable accommodation in order to represent your work."

  "Really?" I asked. "Are you sure?"

  Yoshida didn't smile. "Yes, Edgar. We're sure."

  "Thank you," I said. "Thank you both." I looked past Yoshida to Nannuzzi, who was smiling. "Dario, I really appreciate this."

  Dario looked around at the paintings, gave a little laugh, then lifted his hands and dropped them. "I think we should be the ones expressing appreciation, Edgar."

  "I'm impressed by their clarity," Yoshida said. "And their . . . I don't know, but . . . I think . . . lucidity. These images carry the viewer along without drowning him. The other thing that amazes me is how fast you've worked. You're unbottling."

  "I don't know that word."

  "Artists who begin late are sometimes said to unbottle," Nannuzzi said. "It's as if they're trying to make up for lost time. Still . . . forty paintings in a matter of months . . . of weeks, really . . ."

  And you didn't even see the one that killed the child-murderer, I thought.

  Dario laughed without much humor. "Try not to let the place burn down, all right?"

  "Yes--that would be bad. Assuming we make a deal, could I store some of my work at your gallery?"

  "Of course," Nannuzzi said.

  "That's great." Thinking I'd like to sign as soon as possible no matter what Wireman thought of the contract, just to get these pictures off the Key . . . and it wasn't fire I was worried about. Unbottling might be fairly common among artists who began later in life, but forty-one paintings on Duma Key were at least three dozen too many. I could feel their live presence in this room, like electricity in a bell jar.

  Of course, Dario and Jimmy felt it, too. That was part of what made those fucking pictures so effective. They were catching.

  xiii

  I joined Wireman and Elizabeth for coffee at the end of El Palacio's boardwalk the next morning. I was down to nothing but aspirin to get going, and my Great Beach Walks were now a pleasure instead of a challenge. Especially since the weather had warmed up.

  Elizabeth was in her wheelchair with the remains of a breakfast pastry scattered across her tray. It looked to me as if he'd also managed to get some juice and half a cup of coffee into her. She was staring out at the Gulf with an expression of stern disapproval, looking this morning more like Captain Bligh of HMS Bounty than a Mafia don's daughter.

  "Buenos dias, mi amigo," Wireman said. And to Elizabeth: "It's Edgar, Miss Eastlake. He came for sevens. Want to say hello?"

  "Piss shit head rat," she said. I think. In any case, she said it to the Gulf, which was still dark blue and mostly asleep.

  "Still not so good, I take it," I said.

  "No. She's gone down before and come back up, but she's never gone down so far."

  "I still haven't brought her any of my pictures to look at."

  "No point right now." He handed me a cup of black coffee. "Here. Get your bad self around this."

  I passed him the envelope with the sample contract in it. As Wireman pulled it out, I turned to Elizabeth. "Would you like some poems later today?" I asked her.

  Nothing. She only looked out at the Gulf with that stony frown: Captain Bligh about to order someone strapped to the foremast and flogged raw.

  For no reason at all, I asked: "Was your father a skin diver, Elizabeth?"

  She turned her head slightly and cut her ancient eyes in my direction. Her upper lip lifted in a dog's grin. There was a moment--it was brief, but seemed long--when I felt another person looking at me. Or not a person at all. An entity that was wearing Elizabeth Eastlake's old, doughy body like a sock. My right hand clenched briefly, and once more I felt nonexistent, too-long fingernails bite into a nonexistent palm. Then she looked back at the Gulf, simultaneously feeling across the tray until her fingers happened on a piece of the breakfast pastry, and I was calling myself an idiot who had to stop letting his nerves get the best of him. There were undoubtedly strange forces at work here, but not every shadow was a ghost.

  "He was," Wireman said absently, unfolding the contract. "John Eastlake was a regular Ricou Browning--you know, the guy who played the Creature from the Black Lagoon back in the fifties."

  "Wireman, you're an artesian well of useless information."

  "Yeah, ain't I cool? Her old man didn't buy that harpoon pistol in a store, you know; Miss Eastlake says he had it commissioned. It probably ought to be in a museum."

  But I didn't care about John Eastlake's harpoon gun, not just then. "Are you reading that contract?"

  He dropped it on the tray and looked at me, bemused. "I was trying."

  "And your left eye?"

  "Nothing. But hey, no reason to be disappointed. The doctor said--"

  "Do me a favor. Cover your left peeper."

  He did.

  "What do you see?"

  "You, Edgar. One hombre muy feo."

  "Yeah, yeah. Cover the right one."

  He did. "Now I just see black. Only . . ." He paused. "Maybe not as black." He dropped his hand again. "I can't tell for sure. These days I can't separate the truth from the wishful thinking." He shook his head hard enough to make his hair fly, then thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand.

  "Take it easy."

  "Easy for you to say." He sat silent for a few moments, then picked the piece of breakfast pastry out of Elizabeth's hand and fed it to her. When it was tucked safely away in her mouth, he turned to me. "Would you mind her while I go get something?"

  "Happy to."

  He jogged up the boardwalk and I was left with Elizabeth. I tried feeding her one of the remaining pieces of breakfast pastry and she nibbled it out of my hand, bringing back a fleeting recollection of a rabbit I'd had when I was seven or eight. Mr. Hitchens had been its name, although I no longer knew why--memory's a funny thing, isn't it? Her lips were toothless and soft, but not unpleasant. I stroked the side of her head, where her white hair--wiry, rather coarse--was pulled back toward a bun. It occurred to me that Wireman must comb that hair each morning, and make that bun. That Wireman must have dressed her this morning, including diapers, for surely she wasn't continent when she was like this. I wondered if he thought of Esmeralda when he pinned the pins or secured the ties. I wondered if he thought of Julia when he made the bun.

  I picked up another piece of breakfast pastry. She opened her mouth obediently for it . . . but I hesitated. "What's in the red picnic basket, Elizabeth? The one in the attic?"

  She seemed to think. And hard. Then: "Any old pipe-dip." She hesitated. Shrugged. "Any old pipe-dip Adie wants. Shoot!" And cackled. It was a startling, witchlike sound. I fed her the rest of her breakfast pastry, piece by piece, and asked no more questions.

  xiv

  When Wireman returned, he had a microcassette recorder. He handed it to me. "I hate to ask you to put that contract on tape, but I have to. At least the damn thing's only two pages long. I'd like it back this afternoon, if that's possible."

  "It is. And if some of my pictures actually sell, you're on commission, my friend. Fifteen per cent. That should cover both legal and talent."

  He sat back in his chair, laughing and groaning at the same time. "Por Dios! Just when I thought I couldn't sink any lower in life, I become a fucking talent agent! Excuse the language, Miss Eastlake."

  She took no notice, only stared sternly out at the Gulf, where--at the farthest, bluest edge of vision--a tanker was dreaming north toward Tampa. It fascinated me at once. Boats on the Gulf had a way of doing that to me.

  Then I forced my attention back to Wireman. "You're responsible for all of this, so--"

  "Bull shit you say!"

  "--so you have to be prepared to stand up and take your cut like a man."

 
"I'll take ten per cent, and that's probably too much. Take it, muchacho, or we start discussing eight."

  "All right. Ten it is." I stuck out my hand and we shook over Elizabeth's crumb-littered tray. I put the little recorder in my pocket. "And you'll let me know if there's any change in your . . ." I pointed at his red eye. Which really wasn't as red as it had been.

  "Of course." He picked up the contract. There were crumbs on it from Elizabeth's pastry. He brushed them off and handed it to me, then leaned forward, hands clasped between his knees, gazing at me over the imposing shelf of Elizabeth's bosom. "If I had another X-ray, what would it show? That the slug was smaller? That it was gone?"

  "I don't know."

  "Are you still working on my portrait?"

  "Yes."

  "Don't stop, muchacho. Please don't stop."

  "I don't plan to. But don't get your hopes up too high, okay?"

  "I won't." Then another thought struck him, one that was eerily similar to Dario's stated concern. "What do you think would happen if lightning struck Big Pink and it burned flat with that picture inside? What do you think would happen to me?"

  I shook my head. I didn't want to think about it. I did think about asking Wireman if I could go up to El Palacio's attic and look around for a certain picnic basket (it was RED), then decided not to. I was sure it was there, less sure that I wanted to know what was in it. There were strange things kicking around Duma Key, and I had reason to believe they weren't all nice things, and what I wanted to do about most of them was nothing. If I left them alone, then maybe they'd leave me alone. I'd send most of my pictures off-island to keep everything nice and peaceful; sell them, too, if people wanted to buy them. I could watch them go without a pang. I was passionate about them while I was working on them, but when they were done, they meant no more to me than the hard semi circles of callus I'd sometimes sand off the sides of my great toes so my workboots wouldn't pinch at the end of a hot August day on some job site.

  I'd hold back the Girl and Ship series, not out of any special affection, but because the series wasn't done; those paintings were still live flesh. I might show them and sell them later, but for now I meant to keep them right where they were, in Little Pink.

  xv

  There were no boats on the horizon by the time I got back to my place, and the urge to paint had passed for the time being. I used Wireman's micro-recorder instead, and put the sample contract on tape. I was no lawyer, but I'd seen and signed my share of legal paper in my other life, and this struck me as pretty simple.