Duma Key

  I went downstairs one tentative step at a time, like a man in his eighties, and made the lights my first priority: living room, kitchen, both bedrooms, Florida room. I even turned on the lights in the bathrooms, reaching into the darkness to do it, bracing myself in case something cold and wet and draped in seaweed should reach back. Nothing did. With all the lights on, I relaxed enough to realize I was hungry again. Starving. It was the only time I felt that way after working on Wireman's portrait . . . but of course, that last session had been a lulu.

  I stooped to examine the mess that had blown in through the open door. Just sand and water, the water already beading atop the wax my housekeeper used to keep the cypress gleaming. There was some dampness on the lower stair risers, which were carpeted, but dampness was all it was.

  I wouldn't admit to myself that I'd been looking for footprints.

  I went to the kitchen, made a chicken sandwich, and gobbled it standing at the counter. I grabbed a beer from the fridge to wash it down. When the sandwich was gone, I ate the remains of the previous day's salad, more or less floating in Newman's Own French. Then I went into the living room to call El Palacio. Wireman answered on the first ring. I was prepared to tell him I'd been outside, looking to see if the storm had done any damage to the house, but my whereabouts at the time of his call were the last thing on Wireman's mind. Wireman was crying and laughing.

  "I can see! As well as ever! Left eye's as clear as a bell. I can't believe it, but--"

  "Slow down, Wireman, I can barely make you out."

  He didn't slow down. Maybe he couldn't. "A pain went through my bad eye at the height of the storm . . . pain like you wouldn't believe . . . like a hot wire . . . I thought we'd been struck by lightning, so help me God . . . I tore off the eyepatch . . . and I could see! Do you understand what I'm telling you? I can see!"

  "Yes," I said. "I understand. That's wonderful."

  "Was it you? It was, wasn't it?"

  I said, "Maybe. Probably. I've got a painting for you. I'll bring it tomorrow." I hesitated. "I'd take good care of it, amigo. I don't think it matters what happens to them once they're done, but I also thought Kerry was gonna beat Bush."

  He laughed wildly. "Oh, verdad, I heard that. Was it hard?"

  A thought struck me before I could answer. "Was the storm hard on Elizabeth?"

  "Oh man, awful. They always scare her, but this one . . . she was in terror. Screaming about her sisters. Tessie and Lo-Lo, the ones who drowned back in the nineteen-twenties. She even had me going for awhile there . . . but it's over now. Are you okay? Was it hard?"

  I looked at the scatterings of sand on the floor between the front door and the stairs. Surely no footprints there. If I thought I was seeing more than sand, that was just my fucking artistic imagination. "A little. But it's all over now."

  I hoped that was true.

  xxi

  We talked for another five minutes . . . or rather Wireman talked. Babbled, actually. The last thing he said was that he was afraid to go to sleep. He was afraid he might wake up to discover he was blind in his left eye again. I told him I didn't think he had to worry about that, wished him a good night, and hung up. What I was worried about was waking up in the middle of the night to discover Tessie and Laura--Lo-Lo, to Elizabeth--sitting on either side of my bed.

  One of them perhaps holding Reba on her damp lap.

  I took another beer and went back upstairs. I approached the easel with my head down, staring at my feet, then looked up quickly, as if hoping to catch the portrait by surprise. Part of me--a rational part--expected to see it defaced by paint splattered from hell to breakfast, a partial Wireman obscured by the daubs and blotches I'd thrown at the canvas during the thunderstorm, when my only real light had been lightning. The rest of me knew better. The rest of me knew that I'd been painting by some other light (just as blinded knife-throwers use some other sense to guide their hands). That part knew Wireman Looks West had turned out just fine, and that part was right.

  In some ways it was the best work I did on Duma Key, because it was my most rational work--up until the end, remember, Wireman Looks West had been done in daylight. And by a man in his right mind. The ghost haunting my canvas had become a sweetheart of a face, young and calm and vulnerable. The hair was a fine clear black. A little smile lurked at the corners of the mouth; in the green eyes, as well. The eyebrows were thick and handsome. The forehead above them was broad, an open window where this man bent his thoughts toward the Gulf of Mexico. There was no slug in that visible brain. I could just as easily have taken away an aneurism or a malignant tumor. The cost of finishing the job had been high, but the bill had been paid.

  The storm had faded to a few faint rumbles somewhere over the Florida panhandle. I thought I could sleep, and I could do it with the bedside lamp on if I wanted to; Reba would never tell. I could even sleep with her nestled in between my stump and my side. I'd done it before. And Wireman could see again. Although even that seemed beside the point right then. The point seemed to be that I had finally painted something great.

  And it was mine.

  I thought I could sleep on that.

  How to Draw a Picture (VI)

  Keep your focus. It's the difference between a good picture and just one more image cluttering up a world filled with them.

  Elizabeth Eastlake was a demon when it came to focus; remember that she literally drew herself back into the world. And when the voice inhabiting Noveen told her about the treasure, she focused on that and drew pictures of it littered on the sandy floor of the Gulf. Once the storm had uncovered it, that entrancing strew was close enough to the surface so that the sun must have picked out gleams on it at midday--gleams that would have searched all the way to the surface.

  She wanted to please her Daddy. All she wanted for herself was the china doll.

  Daddy says Any doll is yours--fair salvage, and God help him for that.

  She waded in beside him, up to her chubby knees, pointing, saying It's right out there. Swim n kick til I say stop.

  He waded out farther while she stood there, and when he rolled forward, giving his body to the caldo, his flippers looked to her the size of small rowboats. Later she would draw them just that way. He spat in his mask, rinsed it, and put it on. Popped the mouthpiece of his snorkel behind his lips. Went fin-trudging out into the sunny blue with his face in the water, his body merging with the moving sun-sparks that turned the glassy rollers to gold.

  I know all this. Elizabeth drew some and I drew some.

  I win, you win.

  She stood up to her knees in the water with Noveen tucked under her arm, watching, until Nan Melda, worried about the rip, hollered her back to what they called Shade Beach. Then they all stood together. Elizabeth shouted for John to stop. They saw his flippers go up as he made his first dive. He was down maybe forty seconds, then surfaced in a spray, spitting the snorkel's mouthpiece.

  He says I'll be damned if there isn't something down there!

  And when he came back to little Libbit, he hug her hug her hug her.

  I knew it. I drew it. With the red picnic basket on a blanket nearby and the speargun sitting on top of the basket.

  He went out again, and the next time he came in with an armload of antiquity held awkwardly against his chest. Later he would begin using Nan Melda's market basket, a lead weight in the bottom to pull it down more easily. Later still came a newspaper photo with much of the rescued rickrack--the "treasure"--spread out before a smiling John Eastlake and his talented, fiercely focused daughter. But no china doll in that picture.

  Because the china doll was special. It belonged to Libbit. It was her fair salvage.

  Was it the doll-thing that drove Tessie and Lo-Lo to their deaths? That created the big boy? Just how much did Elizabeth have to do with it by then? Who was the artist, who the blank surface?

  Some questions I have never answered to my own satisfaction, but I have drawn my own pictures and I know that when it comes to art, it's pe
rfectly okay to paraphrase Nietzsche: if you keep your focus, eventually your focus will keep you. Sometimes without parole.

  11--The View from Duma

  i

  The next morning, early, Wireman and I stood in the Gulf--plenty cold enough to be an eye-popper--up to our shins. He had walked in, and I had followed without question. Without a single word. Both of us were holding coffee cups. He was wearing shorts; I had paused just long enough to roll my pants to my knees. Behind us, at the end of the boardwalk, Elizabeth slouched in her chair, looking grimly out at the horizon and grizzling down her chin. A large part of her breakfast still lay before her. She had eaten some, scattered the rest. Her hair was loose, blowing in a warm breeze from the south.

  The water surged around us. Once I got used to it, I loved the silky feel of that surge: first the lift that made me feel as if I'd magically dieted off twelve pounds or so, then the backrun that pulled sand out from between my toes in small, tickling whirlpools. Seventy or eighty yards beyond us, two fat pelicans drew a line across the morning. Then they folded their wings and dropped like stones. One came up empty, but the other had breakfast in its bill. The small fish disappeared down the hatch even as the pelican rose. It was an ancient ballet, but no less pleasing for that. South and inland, where the green tangles rose, another bird cried "Oh-oh! Oh-oh!" over and over.

  Wireman turned toward me. He didn't look twenty-five, but he looked younger than at any time since I'd met him. There was no redness at all in his left eye, and it had lost that disjointed, I'm-looking-my-own-way cast. I had no doubt that it was seeing me; that it was seeing me very well.

  "Anything I can ever do for you," he said. "Ever. In my life. You call, I come. You ask, I do. It's a blank check. Are you clear on that?"

  "Yes," I said. I was clear on something else, as well: when someone offers you a blank check, you must never, ever cash it. That wasn't a thing I thought out. Sometimes understanding bypasses the brain and proceeds directly from the heart.

  "All right, then," he said. "It's all I'm going to say."

  I heard snoring. I looked around and saw that Elizabeth's chin had sunk to her chest. One hand was fisted around a piece of toast. Her hair whirled around her head.

  "She looks thinner," I said.

  "She's lost twenty pounds since New Year's. I'm slipping her those maxi-shakes--Ensure, they're called--once a day, but she won't always take em. What about you? Is it just too much work that's got you looking that way?"

  "What way?"

  "Like the Hound of the Baskervilles recently bit off your left asscheek. If it's overwork, maybe you ought to knock off and stretch out a little." He shrugged. " 'That's our opinion, we welcome yours,' as they say on Channel 6."

  I stood where I was, feeling the lift and drop of the waves, and thinking about what I could tell Wireman. About how much I could tell Wireman. The answer seemed self-evident: all or nothing.

  "I think I better fill you in on what happened last night. You just have to promise not to call for the men in the white coats."

  "All right."

  I told him about how I'd finished his portrait mostly in the dark. I told him about seeing my right arm and hand. Then seeing the two dead girls at the foot of the stairs and passing out. By the time I finished, we'd waded back out of the water and walked to where Elizabeth was snoring. Wireman began to clean her tray, sweeping the refuse into a bag he took from the pouch hanging on one arm of her chair.

  "Nothing else?" he asked.

  "That isn't enough?"

  "I'm just asking."

  "Nothing else. I slept like a baby until six o'clock. Then I put you--the painting of you--in the back of the car and drove down here. When you're ready to see it, by the way--"

  "All in good time. Think of a number between one and ten."

  "What?"

  "Just humor me, muchacho."

  I thought of a number. "Okay."

  He was silent for a moment, looking out at the Gulf. Then he said, "Nine?"

  "Nope. Seven."

  He nodded. "Seven." He drummed his fingers against his chest for a few moments, then dropped them into his lap. "Yesterday I could have told you. Today I can't. My telepathy thing--that little twinkle--is gone. It's more than a fair trade. Wireman is as Wireman was, and Wireman says muchas gracias."

  "What's your point? Or did you have one?"

  "I did. The point is you're not going crazy, if that's what you're afraid of. On Duma Key, broken people seem to be special people. When they cease being broken, they cease being special. Me, I'm mended. You're still broken, so you're still special."

  "I'm not sure what you're getting at."

  "Because you're trying to make a simple thing hard. Look in front of you, muchacho, what do you see?"

  "The Gulf. What you call the caldo largo."

  "And what do you spend most of your time painting?"

  "The Gulf. Sunsets on the Gulf."

  "And what is painting?"

  "Painting is seeing, I guess."

  "No guess about it. And what is seeing on Duma Key?"

  Feeling like a child reciting a lesson of which he's not quite sure, I said: "Special seeing?"

  "Yes. So what do you think, Edgar? Were those dead girls there last night or not?"

  I felt a chill up my back. "Probably they were."

  "I think so, too. I think you saw the ghosts of her sisters."

  "I'm frightened of them." I said this in a low voice.

  "Edgar . . . I don't think ghosts can hurt people."

  "Maybe not ordinary people in an ordinary place," I said.

  He nodded, rather reluctantly. "All right. So what do you want to do?"

  "What I don't want to do is leave. I'm not done here yet."

  I wasn't just thinking of the show--the bubble reputation. There was more. I just didn't know what the more was. Not yet. If I'd attempted putting it into words, it would have come out sounding stupid, like something written on a fortune cookie. Something with the word fate in it.

  "Do you want to come down here to the Palacio? Move in with us?"

  "No." I thought that might make matters even worse, somehow. And besides, Big Pink was my place. I had fallen in love with it. "But Wireman, will you see how much you can find out about the Eastlake family in general and those two girls in particular? If you can read again, then maybe you could dig around on the Internet--"

  He gripped my arm. "I'll dig like a motherfucker. Maybe you could do some good in that direction, as well. You're going to do an interview with Mary Ire, right?"

  "Yes. They've scheduled it for the week after my so-called lecture."

  "Ask her about the Eastlakes. Maybe you'll hit the jackpot. Miss Eastlake was a big patron of the arts in her time."

  "Okay."

  He grasped the handles of the sleeping old woman's wheelchair and turned it around so it faced the orange roofs of the estate house again. "Now let's go look at my portrait. I want to see what I looked like back when I still thought Jerry Garcia could save the world."

  ii

  I'd parked my car in the courtyard, beside Elizabeth Eastlake's silver Vietnam War-era Mercedes-Benz. I slid the portrait from my much humbler Chevrolet, set it on end, and held it up for Wireman to look at. As he stood there silently regarding it, a strange thought occurred to me: I was like a tailor standing beside a mirror in a men's clothing store. Soon my customer would either tell me he liked the suit I'd made for him, or shake his head regretfully and say it wouldn't do.

  Far off to the south, in what I was coming to think of as the Duma Jungle, that bird took up its warning "Oh-oh!" cry again.

  Finally I couldn't take it anymore. "Say something, Wireman. Say anything."

  "I can't. I'm speechless."

  "You? Not possible."

  But when he looked up from the portrait, I realized it was true. He looked like someone had walloped him on the head with a hammer. I understood by then that what I was doing affected people, but none of those react
ions were quite like Wireman's on that March morning.

  What finally woke him up was a sharp knocking sound. It was Elizabeth. She was awake and rapping on her tray. "Smoke!" she cried. "Smoke! Smoke!" Some things survived even the fog of Alzheimer's, it seemed. The part of her brain that craved nicotine never decayed. She'd smoke until the end.

  Wireman took a pack of American Spirits from the pocket of his shorts, shook one out, put it in his mouth, and lit it. Then he held it out to her. "If I let you handle this yourself, are you going to light yourself on fire, Miss Eastlake?"

  "Smoke!"

  "That's not very encouraging, dear."

  But he gave it to her, and Alzheimer's or no Alzheimer's, she handled it like a pro, drawing in a deep drag and jetting it out through her nostrils. Then she settled back in her chair, looking for the moment not like Captain Bligh on the poop deck but FDR on the reviewing stand. All she needed was a cigarette-holder to clamp between her teeth. And, of course, some teeth.

  Wireman returned his gaze to the portrait. "You don't seriously mean to just give this away, do you? You can't. It's incredible work."

  "It's yours," I said. "No arguments."

  "You have to put it in your show."

  "I don't know if that's such a good idea--"

  "You yourself said once they're done, any effect on the subject's probably over--"

  "Yeah, probably."

  "Probably's good enough for me, and the Scoto's safer than this house. Edgar, this deserves to be seen. Hell, it needs to be seen."

  "Is it you, Wireman?" I was honestly curious.

  "Yes. No." He stood looking at it a moment longer. Then he turned to me. "It's how I wanted to be. Maybe it's how I was, on the few best days of my best year." He added, almost reluctantly: "My most idealistic year."

  For a little while we said nothing, only looked at the portrait while Elizabeth puffed like a choo-choo train. An old choo-choo train.

  Then Wireman said: "There are many things I wonder about, Edgar. Since coming to Duma Key, I have more questions than a four-year-old at bedtime. But one thing I don't wonder about is why you want to stay here. If I could do something like this, I'd want to stay here forever."

  "Last year at this time I was doodling on phone pads while I was on hold," I said.