Duma Key

  I lurched into the house on my crutch, head swimming from the Oxycontin, got a frypan from the drawer under the stove, and slung it onto one of the burners. I turned the dial to HIGH, barely hearing the flump of igniting gas. I was too busy tearing the plastic wrap from a package of ground sirloin. I threw it in the frypan and mashed it flat with the palm of my hand before scrabbling a spatula out of the drawer beside the stove.

  Coming back into the house, shucking my clothes and climbing into the shower, I'd been able to mistake the flutters in my stomach for nausea--it seemed like a reasonable explanation. By the time I was rinsing away the soap, though, the flutters had settled into a steady low rumble like the idle of a powerful motor. The drugs had damped it down a little bit, but now it was back, worse than ever. If I'd ever been this hungry in my life, I couldn't remember when.

  I flipped the grotesquely large meat-patty and tried to count to thirty. I figured a thirty-count on high heat would be at least a nod in the direction of what people mean when they say "cooking meat." If I'd thought to flip on the fan and vent the aroma, I might have made it. As it was, I didn't even get to twenty. At seventeen I snatched a paper plate, flipped the hamburger onto it, and wolfed the half-raw ground beef while I leaned against the cabinet. About halfway through I saw the red juice seeping out of the red meat and got a momentary but brilliant picture of Gandalf looking up at me while blood and shit oozed from the wrecked remains of his hindquarters, matting the fur on his broken rear legs. My stomach didn't so much as quiver, just cried impatiently for more food. I was hungry.

  Hungry.

  xi

  That night I dreamed I was in the bedroom I had shared for so many years with Pam. She was asleep beside me and couldn't hear the croaking voice coming from somewhere below in the darkened house: "Newly wed, nearly dead, newly wed, nearly dead." It sounded like some mechanical device stuck in a groove. I shook my wife but she just turned over. Turned away from me. Dreams mostly tell the truth, don't they?

  I got up and went downstairs, holding the banister to compensate for my bad leg. And there was something odd about how I was holding that familiar length of polished rail. As I approached the bottom of the staircase, I realized what it was. Fair or not, it's a rightie's world--guitars are made for righties, and school desks, and the control panels on American cars. The banister of the house I'd lived in with my family was no exception; it was on the right because, although my company had built the house from my plans, my wife and both our daughters were right-handers, and majority rules.

  But still, my hand was trailing down the banister.

  Of course, I thought. Because it's a dream. Just like this afternoon. You know?

  Gandalf was no dream, I thought back, and the voice of the stranger in my house--closer than ever--repeated "Newly wed, nearly dead" over and over. Whoever it was, the person was in the living room. I didn't want to go in there.

  No, Gandalf was no dream, I thought. Maybe it was my phantom right hand having these thoughts. The dream was killing him.

  Had he died on his own, then? Was that what the voice was trying to tell me? Because I didn't think Gandalf had died on his own. I thought he had needed help.

  I went into my old living room. I wasn't conscious of moving my feet; I went in the way you move in dreams, as if it's really the world moving around you, streaming backward like some extravagant trick of projection. And there, sitting in Pam's old Boston rocker, was Reba the Anger-Management Doll, now grown to the size of an actual child. Her feet, clad in black Mary Janes, swung back and forth just above the floor at the end of horrible boneless pink legs. Her shallow eyes stared at me. Her lifeless strawberry curls bounced back and forth. Her mouth was smeared with blood, and in my dream I knew it wasn't human blood or dog's blood but the stuff that had oozed out of my mostly raw hamburger--the stuff I had licked off the paper plate when the meat was gone.

  The bad frog chased us! Reba cried. It has TEEF!

  xii

  That word--TEEF!--was still ringing in my head when I sat up with a cold puddle of October moonlight in my lap. I was trying to scream and producing only a series of silent gasps. My heart was thundering. I reached for the bedside lamp and mercifully avoided knocking it on the floor, although once it was on, I saw that I'd pushed the base halfway out over the drop. The clock-radio claimed it was 3:19 AM.

  I swung my legs out of bed and reached for the phone. If you really need me, call me, Kamen had said. Any time, day or night. And if his number had been in the bedroom phone's memory, I probably would've. But as reality re-asserted itself--the cottage by Lake Phalen, not the house in Mendota Heights, no croaking voice downstairs--the urge passed.

  Reba the Anger-Management Doll in the Boston rocker, and grown to the size of an actual child. Well, why not? I had been angry, although at Mrs. Fevereau rather than at poor Gandalf, and I had no idea what toothy frogs had to do with the price of beans in Boston. The real question, it seemed to me, was about Monica's dog. Had I killed Gandalf, or had he just expired?

  Or maybe the question was why I'd been so hungry afterward. Maybe that was the question.

  So hungry for meat.

  "I took him in my arms," I whispered.

  Your arm, you mean, because now one is all you've got. Your good left.

  But my memory was taking him in my arms, plural. Channeling my anger

  (it was RED)

  away from that foolish woman with her cigarette and cell phone and somehow back into myself, in some kind of crazy closed loop . . . taking him in my arms . . . surely a hallucination, but yes, that was my memory.

  Taking him in my arms.

  Cradling his neck with my left elbow so I could strangle him with my right hand.

  Strangle him and put him out of his misery.

  I slept shirtless, so it was easy to look at my stump. I only had to turn my head. I could wiggle it, but not much more. I did that a couple of times, and then I looked up at the ceiling. My heartbeat was slowing a little.

  "The dog died of his injuries," I said. "And shock. An autopsy would confirm that."

  Except no one did autopsies on dogs that died after being crushed to bones and jelly by Hummers driven by careless, distracted women.

  I looked at the ceiling and I wished this life was over. This unhappy life that had started out so confidently. I thought I would sleep no more that night, but eventually I did. In the end we always wear out our worries.

  That's what Wireman says.

  How to Draw a Picture (II)

  Remember that the truth is in the details. No matter how you see the world or what style it imposes on your work as an artist, the truth is in the details. Of course the devil's there, too--everyone says so--but maybe truth and the devil are words for the same thing. It could be, you know.

  Imagine that baby girl again, the one who fell from the carriage. She struck the right side of her head, but it was the left side of her brain that suffered the worst insult--contracoup, remember? The left side is where Broca's area is--not that anyone knew that in the 1920s. Broca's area processes language. Smack it hard enough and you lose your language, sometimes for a little while, sometimes forever. But--although they are closely related--saying is not seeing.

  The little girl still sees.

  She sees her five sisters. Their dresses. How their hair is crazy-combed by the wind when they come in from outside. She sees her father's mustache, now threaded with gray. She sees Nan Melda--not just the housekeeper but the closest thing to a mother this little girl knows. She sees the scarf Nanny wraps around her head when she cleans; she sees the knot in the front, at the very top of Nan Melda's high brown forehead; she sees Nan Melda's silver bracelets, and how they flash starpoints in the sunshine that falls through the windows.

  Details, details, the truth is in the details.

  And does seeing cry out to saying, even in a damaged mind? A wounded brain? Oh, it must, it must.

  She thinks My head hurts.

  She thinks Somet
hing bad happened, and I don't know who I am. Or where I am. Or what all these bright surrounding images are.

  She thinks Libbit? Is my name Libbit? I used to know. I could talk in the used-to-know, but now my words are like fish in the water. I want the man with the hair on his lip.

  She thinks That's my Daddy, but when I try to say his name I call "Ird! Ird!" instead, because one flies past my window. I see every feather. I see its eye like glass. I see its leg, how it bends like broke, and that word is crookit. My head hurts.

  Girls come in. Maria and Hannah come in. She doesn't like them the way she likes the twins. The twins are little, like her.

  She thinks I called Maria and Hannah the Big Meanies in the used-to-know and realizes she knows again. It's another thing that's come back. The name for another detail. She will forget again, but the next time she remembers, she will remember longer. She's almost sure of it.

  She thinks When I try to say Hannah I say "Ird! Ird!" When I try to say Maria I say "Wee! Wee!" And they laugh, those meanies. I cry. I want my Daddy and can't remember how to say him; that word is gone again. Words like birds, they fly and fly and fly away. My sisters talk. Talk, talk, talk. My throat is dry. I try to say thirsty. I say "First! First!" But they only laugh, those meanies. I'm under the bandage, smelling the iodine, smelly the sweaty, listening to them laugh. I scream at them, scream loud, and they run away. Nan Melda comes, her head all red because her hair is wrapped in the snarf. Her roundies flash flash flash in the sun and you call those roundies bracelets. I say "First, first!" and Nan Melda doesn't know. So then I say "Ass! Ass!" and Nan makes me go potty even though I don't need to go potty. I'm on the potty and see and point. "Ass! Ass!" Daddy comes in. "What's this shouting about?" with all white bubbles on his face except for one smoothie. That's where he slid the thing that makes the hair go away. He sees how I point. He understands. "Why she is thirsty." Fills up the glass. The room is full of sunny. Dust floats in the sunny and his hand goes through the sunny with the glass and you call that pretty. I drink every drink. I cry more afterwards, but from better. He kiss me kiss me kiss me, hug me hug me hug me, and I try to say him--"Daddy!"--and still can't. Then I think around sideways to his name, and John is there, so I think that in my mind and while I think John I "Daddy!" out my mouth and he hug me hug me some more.

  She thinks Daddy is my first word on this side of the bad thing.

  The truth is in the details.

  2--Big Pink

  i

  Kamen's geographical worked, but when it came to fixing what was wrong with my head, I think the Florida part was coincidental. It's true that I lived there, but I never really lived there. No, Kamen's geographical worked because of Duma Key, and Big Pink. For me, those places came to constitute their own world.

  I left St. Paul on November tenth with hope in my heart but no real expectations. Kathi Green the Rehab Queen came to see me off. She kissed me on the mouth, hugged me hard, and whispered "May all your dreams come true, Eddie."

  "Thanks, Kathi," I said. I was touched even though the dream I fixed on was of Reba the Anger-Management Doll, grown to the size of an actual child, sitting in the moonlit living room of the house I'd shared with Pam. That dream coming true I could live without.

  "And send me a picture from Disney World. I long to see you in mouse ears."

  "I will," I said, but I never got to Disney World. Sea World, Busch Gardens, or Daytona Speedway, either.

  When I left St. Paul, flying in a Lear 55 (successful retirement has its privileges), it was twenty-four and spitting the first snowflakes of another long northern winter. When I landed in Sarasota it was eighty-five and sunny. Even crossing the tarmac to the private air terminal, still clumping along on my trusty red crutch, I thought I could feel my hip saying thank you.

  When I look back on that time, it's with the strangest stew of emotions: love, longing, terror, horror, regret, and the deep sweetness only those who've been near death can know. I think it's how Adam and Eve must have felt. Surely they looked back at Eden, don't you think, as they started barefoot down the path to where we are now, in our glum political world of bullets and bombs and satellite TV? Looked past the angel guarding the shut gate with his fiery sword? Sure. I think they must have wanted one more look at the green world they had lost, with its sweet water and kind-hearted animals. And its snake, of course.

  ii

  There's a charm-bracelet of keys lying off the west coast of Florida. If you had your seven-league boots on, you could step from Longboat to Lido, from Lido to Siesta, from Siesta to Casey. The next step takes you to Duma Key, nine miles long and half a mile wide at its widest, between Casey Key and Don Pedro Island. Most of it's uninhabited, a tangle of banyans, palms, and Australian pines with an uneven, dune-rumpled beach running along the Gulf edge. The beach is guarded by a waist-high band of sea oats. "The sea oats belong," Wireman once told me, "but the rest of that shit has no business growing without irrigation." For much of the time I spent on Duma Key, no one lived there but Wireman, the Bride of the Godfather, and me.

  Sandy Smith was my Realtor in St. Paul. I had asked her to find me a place that was quiet--I'm not sure I used the word isolated, but I may have--but still within reach of services. Thinking of Kamen's advice, I told Sandy I wanted to lease for a year, and price wasn't an object, as long as I wasn't getting skint too bad. Even depressed and in more or less constant pain, I was averse to being taken advantage of. Sandy fed my requirements into her computer, and Big Pink was what came out. It was just the luck of the draw.

  Except I don't really believe that. Because even my earliest pictures seem to have, I don't know, something.

  Something.

  iii

  On the day I arrived in my rental car (driven by Jack Cantori, the young man Sandy Smith had hired through a Sarasota employment agency), I knew nothing about the history of Duma Key. I only knew one reached it by crossing a WPA-era drawbridge from Casey Key. Once over this bridge, I observed that the northern tip of the island was free of the vegetation that tangled the rest. Instead there was actual landscaping (in Florida this means palms and grass undergoing nearly constant irrigation). I could see half a dozen houses strung along the narrow, patchy band of road leading south, the last one of them a huge and undeniably elegant hacienda.

  And close by, less than a football field's length from the Duma Key end of the drawbridge, I could see a pink house hanging over the Gulf.

  "Is that it?" I asked, thinking Please let that be it. That's the one I want. "It is, isn't it?"

  "I don't know, Mr. Freemantle," Jack said. "I know Sarasota, but this is the first time I've ever been on Duma. Never had any reason to come here." He pulled up to the mailbox, which had a big red 13 on it. He glanced at the folder lying between us on the seat. "This is it, all right. Salmon Point, number thirteen. I hope you're not superstitious."

  I shook my head, not taking my eyes off it. I didn't worry about broken mirrors or crossing black cats' paths, but I'm very much a believer in . . . well, maybe not love at first sight, that's a little too Rhett-and-Scarlett for me, but instant attraction? Sure. It's the way I felt about Pam the first time I met her, on a double date (she was with the other guy). And it's the way I felt about Big Pink from the very first.

  She stood on pilings with her chin jutting over the high-tide line. There was a NO TRESPASSING sign slanting askew on an old gray stick beside the driveway, but I guessed that didn't apply to me. "Once you sign the lease, you have it for a year," Sandy told me. "Even if it's sold, the owner can't kick you out until your time is up."

  Jack drove slowly up to the back door . . . only with its face hanging over the Gulf of Mexico, that was the only door. "I'm surprised they were ever allowed to build this far out," he said. "I suppose they did things different in the old days." To him the old days probably meant the nineteen-eighties. "There's your car. Hope it's okay."

  The car drawn up on the square of cracked pavement to the right of the house was the sort of
anonymous American mid-size the rental companies specialize in. I hadn't driven since the day Mrs. Fevereau hit Gandalf, and barely gave it a glance. I was more interested in the boxy pink elephant I'd rented. "Aren't there ordinances about building too close to the Gulf of Mexico?"

  "Now, sure, but not when this place went up. From a practical standpoint, it's all about beach erosion. I doubt if this place hung out that way when it was built."

  He was undoubtedly right. I thought I could see at least six feet of the pilings supporting the screened porch--the so-called Florida room. Unless those pilings were sunk sixty feet into the underlying bedrock, eventually the place was going into the Gulf of Mexico. It was only a matter of time.

  As I was thinking it, Jack Cantori was saying it. Then he grinned. "Don't worry, though; I'm sure you'll get plenty of warning. You'll hear it groaning."

  "Like the House of Usher," I said.

  His grin widened. "But it's probably good for another five years or so. Otherwise it'd be condemned."

  "Don't be so sure," I said. Jack had reversed to the driveway door, so the trunk would be easy to unload. Not a lot in there; three suitcases, one garment bag, a steel hardcase with my laptop inside, and a knapsack containing some primitive art supplies--mostly pads and colored pencils. I traveled light when I left my other life. I figured what I'd need most in my new one was my checkbook and my American Express card.

  "What do you mean?" he asked.

  "Someone who could afford to build here in the first place could probably talk a couple of B-and-C inspectors around."

  "B-and-C? What's that?"

  For a moment I couldn't tell him. I could see what I meant: men in white shirts and ties, wearing yellow hi-impact plastic hardhats on their heads and carrying clipboards in their hands. I could even see the pens in their shirt pockets, and the plastic pocket-protectors to which they were clipped. The devil's in the details, right? But I couldn't think of what B-and-C stood for, although I knew it as well as my own name. And instantly I was furious. Instantly it seemed that making my left hand into a fist and driving it sideways into the unprotected Adam's apple of the young man sitting beside me was the most reasonable thing in the world. Almost imperative. Because it was his question that had hung me up.