Duma Key

  But Melda says nour.

  I stopped, holding the sheet of paper in my left hand. The hand the crane hadn't been able to get to. Was that an actual memory, something that had come drifting out of the picture, or just something I'd made up? Just my mind, trying to be obliging?

  "It's not a picture," I said, looking at the hesitant line.

  No, but it tried to be a picture.

  My ass went back onto the seat of my chair with a thump. It wasn't a voluntary act of sitting; it was more a case of my knees losing their lock and letting go. I looked at the line, then out the window. From the Gulf to the line. From the line to the Gulf.

  She had tried to draw the horizon. It had been her first thing.

  Yes.

  I picked up my pad and seized one of her pencils. It didn't matter which one as long as it was hers. It felt too big, too fat, in my hand. It also felt just right. I began to draw.

  On Duma Key, it was what I did best.

  iii

  I sketched a child sitting on a potty chair. Her head was bandaged. She had a drinking glass in one hand. Her other arm was slung around her father's neck. He was wearing a strap-style undershirt and had shaving cream on his cheeks. Standing in the background, just a shadow, was the housekeeper. No bracelets in this sketch, because she didn't always wear them, but the kerchief was wrapped around her head, the knot in front. Nan Melda, the closest thing to a mother Libbit ever knew.

  Libbit?

  Yes, that was what they called her. What she called herself. Libbit, little Libbit.

  "The littlest one of all," I murmured, and flicked back the first page of the sketch-pad. The pencil--too short, too fat, unused for over three-quarters of a century--was the perfect tool, the perfect channel. It began to move again.

  I sketched the little girl in a room. Books appeared on the wall behind her and it was a study. Daddy's study. The bandage was wound around her head. She was at a desk. She was wearing what looked like a housecoat. She had a

  (ben-cil)

  pencil in her hand. One of the colored pencils? Probably not--not then, not yet--but it didn't matter. She had found her thing, her focus, her metier. And how hungry it made her! How ravenous!

  She thinks I will have more paper, please.

  She thinks I am ELIZABETH.

  "She literally drew herself back into the world," I said, and my body broke out in gooseflesh from head to toe--for hadn't I done the same? Hadn't I done exactly the same, here on Duma Key?

  I had more work to do. I thought it was going to be a long and exhausting evening, but I felt I was on the verge of great discoveries, and what I felt wasn't fright--not then--but a kind of copper-mouthed excitement.

  I bent down and picked up Elizabeth's third drawing. The fourth. The fifth. The sixth. Moving with greater and greater speed. Sometimes I stopped to draw, but mostly I didn't have to. The pictures were forming in my head, now, and the reason I didn't have to put them down on paper seemed clear to me: Elizabeth had already done that work, long ago, when she had been recovering from the accident that nearly killed her.

  In the happy days before Noveen began to talk.

  iv

  At one point during my interview with Mary Ire, she said discovering in my middle age that I could paint with the best of them must have been like having someone give me the keys to a souped-up muscle car--a Roadrunner or a GTO. I said yes, it was like that. At another point she said it must have been like having someone give me the keys to a fully furnished house. A mansion, really. I said yes, like that, too. And if she had gone on? Said it must have been like inheriting a million shares of Microsoft stock, or being elected ruler for life of some oil-rich (and peaceful) emirate in the mideast? I would have said yeah, sure, you bet. To soothe her. Because those questions were about her. I could see the longing look in her eyes when she asked them. They were the eyes of a kid who knows the closest she's ever going to get to realizing her dream of the high trapeze is sitting on the bleachers at the Saturday matinee performance. She was a critic, and lots of critics who aren't called to do what they write about grow jealous and mean and small in their disappointment. Mary wasn't like that. Mary still loved it all. She drank whiskey from a water-glass and wanted to know what it was like when Tinker Bell flew out of nowhere and tapped you on the shoulder and you discovered that, even though you were on the wrinkle-neck side of fifty, you had suddenly gained the ability to fly past the face of the moon. So even though it wasn't like having a fast car or being handed the keys to a fully furnished house, I told her it was. Because you can't tell anyone what it's like. You can only talk around it until everyone's exhausted and it's time to go to sleep.

  But Elizabeth had known what it was like.

  It was in her drawings, then in her paintings.

  It was like being given a tongue when you had been mute. And more. Better. It was like being given back your memory, and a person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you. Even from that first line--that incredibly brave first line meant to show where the Gulf met the sky--she had understood that seeing and memory were interchangeable, and had set out to mend herself.

  Perse hadn't been in it. Not at first.

  I was sure of that.

  v

  For the next four hours, I slipped in and out of Libbit's world. It was a wonderful, frightening place to be. Sometimes I scribbled words--The gift is always hungry, start with what you know--but mostly it was pictures. Pictures were the real language we shared.

  I understood her family's quick arc from amazement to acceptance to boredom. It had happened partly because the girl was so prolific, maybe more because she was part of them, she was their little Libbit, and there's always that feeling that no good can come out of Nazareth, isn't there? But their boredom only made her hunger stronger. She looked for new ways to wow them, sought new ways of seeing.

  And found them, God help her.

  I drew birds flying upside-down, and animals walking on the swimming pool.

  I drew a horse with a smile so big it ran off the sides of its face. I thought it was right around then that Perse had entered the picture. Only--

  "Only Libbit didn't know it was Perse," I said. "She thought--"

  I thumbed back through her drawings, almost to the beginning. To the round black face with the smiling mouth. At first glance I had dismissed this one as Elizabeth's portrait of Nan Melda, but I should have known better--it was a child's face, not a woman's. A doll's face. Suddenly my hand was printing NOVEEN beside it in strokes so hard that Elizabeth's old canary-yellow pencil snapped on the last stroke of the second N. I threw it on the floor and grabbed another.

  It was Noveen that Perse had spoken through first, so as not to frighten her little genius. What could be less threatening than a little black girl-dolly who smiled and wore a red kerchief around her head, just like the beloved Nan Melda?

  And was Elizabeth shocked or frightened when the doll began to speak on its own? I didn't think so. She might have been fiercely talented in that one narrow way, but she was still only a child of three.

  Noveen told her things to draw, and Elizabeth--

  I grabbed my sketch-pad again. Drew a cake lying on the floor. Splattered on the floor. Little Libbit thought that prank was Noveen's idea, but it had been Perse, testing Elizabeth's power. Perse experimenting as I had experimented, trying to find out how powerful this new tool might be.

  Next had come the Alice.

  Because, her doll whispered, there was treasure and a storm would uncover it.

  So not an Alice at all, not really. And not an Elizabeth, because she hadn't been Elizabeth yet--not to her family, not to herself. The big blow of '27 had been Hurricane Libbit.

  Because Daddy would like finding a treasure. And because Daddy needed to think of something besides--

  "She's made her bed," I said in a harsh voice that didn't sound like my own. "Let her sleep in it."

  --besides how mad he was at Adie for running off with Eme
ry, that Celluloid Collar.

  Yes. That was how it had been on the south end of Duma Key, back in '27.

  I drew John Eastlake--only it was just his fins showing against the sky, and the tip of his snorkel, and a shadow beneath. John Eastlake diving for treasure.

  Diving for his youngest daughter's new doll, although he probably didn't believe it.

  Beside one flipper I printed the words FAIR SALVAGE.

  The images rose in my mind, clearer and clearer, as if they had been waiting all these years to be liberated, and I wondered briefly if every painting (and every implement used to make them), from those on the walls of caves in central Asia to the Mona Lisa, held such hidden memories of their making and makers, encoded in their strokes like DNA.

  Swim n kick til I say stop.

  I added Elizabeth to the picture of Diving Daddy, standing up to her chubby knees in the water, Noveen tucked under her arm. Libbit almost could have been the doll-girl in the sketch Ilse had demanded--the one I had titled The End of the Game.

  And after he saw all those things, he hug me hug me hug me.

  I made a hurried little sketch of John Eastlake doing just that, his facemask pushed up on top of his head. The picnic basket was nearby, on a blanket, and the speargun was resting on top of it.

  He hug me hug me hug me.

  Draw her, a voice whispered. Draw Elizabeth's fair salvage. Draw Perse.

  But I wouldn't. I was afraid of what I might see. And what it might do to me.

  And what about Daddy? What about John? How much had he known?

  I flipped through her drawings to the picture of John Eastlake screaming, with blood running from his nose and one eye. He had known plenty. Probably too late, but he had known.

  What exactly had happened to Tessie and Lo-Lo?

  And to Perse, to shut her up for all those years?

  What exactly was she? Not a doll, that much seemed sure.

  I could have gone on--a picture of Tessie and Lo-Lo running down a path, some path, hand-in-hand, was already asking to be drawn--but I was beginning to come out of my half-trance and was scared almost to death. Besides, I thought I knew enough to be going on with; Wireman could help me figure out the rest, I was almost sure of it. I closed my sketch-pad. I put down that long-gone little girl's brown pencil--now just a nubbin--and realized I was hungry. Ravenous, in fact. But that kind of hangover wasn't new to me, and there was plenty to eat in the refrigerator.

  vi

  I went downstairs slowly, my head spinning with images--an upside-down heron with blue gimlet eyes, the smiling horses, the boat-size swim-fins on Daddy's feet--and I didn't bother with the living room lights. There was no need to; by April I could have navigated the route from the foot of the stairs to the kitchen in pitch blackness. By then I had made that solitary house with its chin jutting over the edge of the water my own, and in spite of everything, I couldn't imagine leaving it. Halfway across the room I stopped, looking out through the Florida room to the Gulf.

  There, riding at anchor no more than a hundred yards from the beach, clear and unmistakable in the light of a quarter-moon and a million stars, was the Perse. Her sails had been furled, but nets of rope sagged from her ancient masts like spiderwebs. The shrouds, I thought. Those are its shrouds. She bobbed up and down like a long dead child's rotten toy. The decks were empty, so far as I could see--of both life and souvenirs--but who knew what might be belowdecks?

  I was going to faint. At the same instant I realized this, I realized why: I had stopped breathing. I told myself to inhale, but for one terrible second, nothing happened. My chest remained as flat as a page in a closed book. When it rose at last, I heard a whooping sound. That was me, struggling to go on with life in a conscious state. I blew out the air I had just taken in and inhaled more, a little less noisily. Black specks flocked in front of my eyes in the dimness, then faded. I expected the ship out there to do the same--surely it had to be a hallucination--but it remained, perhaps a hundred and twenty feet long and a little less than half that in the beam. Bobbing on the waves. Rocking from side to side just a little, too. Bowsprit wagging like a finger, seeming to say Ouuu, you nasty man, you're in for it n--

  I slapped myself across the face hard enough to bring water to my left eye and the ship was still right there. I realized that if it was there--truly there--then Jack would be able to see it from the boardwalk at El Palacio. There was a phone on the far side of the living room, but from where I was standing, the one on the kitchen counter was closer. And it had the advantage of being right under the light switches. I wanted lights, especially the ones in the kitchen, those good hard fluorescents. I backed out of the living room, not taking my eyes off the ship, and hit all three switches with the back of my hand. The lights came on, and I lost sight of the Perse--of everything beyond the Florida room--in their bright, no-nonsense glare. I reached for the phone, then stopped.

  There was a man in my kitchen. He was standing by my refrigerator. He was wearing soaked rags that might once have been blue jeans and the kind of shirt that's called a boat-neck. What appeared to be moss was growing on his throat, cheeks, forehead, and forearms. The right side of his skull was crushed in. Petals of bone protruded through the lank foliage of his dark hair. One of his eyes--the right--was gone. What remained was a spongy socket. The other was an alien, disheartening silver that had nothing to do with humanity. His feet were bare, swollen, purple, and burst through to the bone at the ankles.

  It grinned at me, lips splitting as they drew back, revealing two lines of yellow teeth set into old black gums. It raised its right arm, and here I saw what must have been another relic of the Perse. It was a manacle. One old and rusty circlet was clamped around the thing's wrist. The other one hung open like a loose jaw.

  The other one was for me.

  It emitted a loose hissing sound, perhaps all its decayed vocal cords could produce, and began to walk toward me under the bright no-nonsense fluorescents. It left footprints on the hardwood floor. It cast a shadow. I could hear a faint creaking and saw it was wearing a soaked leather belt--rotten, but for the time being, still holding.

  A queer soft paralysis had come over me. I was conscious, but I couldn't run even though I understood what that open manacle meant, and what this thing was: a one-man press gang. He would clamp me and take me aboard yonder frigate, or schooner, or barquentine, or whatever-the-hell-it-was. I would become part of the crew. And while there might not be cabin boys on the Perse, I thought there were at least two cabin girls, one named Tessie and one named Lo-Lo.

  You have to run. At least clock it one with the phone, for Christ's sake!

  But I couldn't. I was like a bird hypnotized by a snake. The best I could do was to take one numb step backward into the living room . . . then another . . . then a third. Now I was in the shadows again. It stood in the kitchen doorway with the white light of the fluorescents striking across its damp and rotted face and throwing its shadow across the living room carpet. Still grinning. I considered closing my eyes and trying to wish it away, but that wasn't going to work; I could smell it, like a Dumpster behind a restaurant that specializes in fish dinners. And--

  "Time to go, Edgar."

  --it could talk, after all. The words were slushy but understandable.

  It took a step into the living room. I took another of my numb steps backward, knowing in my heart it would do no good, that compensation wasn't enough, that when it got tired of playing it would simply dart forward and clamp that iron manacle on my wrist and drag me, screaming, down to the water, down to the caldo largo, and the last sound I'd hear on the living side would be the grating conversation of the shells under the house. Then the water would fill my ears.

  I took another step back just the same, not sure I was even moving toward the door, only hoping, then another . . . and a hand fell on my shoulder.

  I shrieked.

  vii

  "What the fuck is that thing?" Wireman whispered in my ear.

  "I don
't know," I said, and I was sobbing. Sobbing with fear. "Yes I do. I do know. Look out at the Gulf, Wireman."

  "I can't. I don't dare take my eyes off it."

  But the thing in the doorway had seen Wireman now--Wireman who'd come in through the open door just as it had itself, Wireman who had arrived like the cavalry in a John Wayne Western--and had stopped three steps inside the living room, its head slightly lowered, the manacle swinging back and forth from its outstretched arm.

  "Christ," Wireman said. "That ship! The one in the paintings!"

  "Go on," the thing said. "We have no business with you. Go on, and you may live."

  "It's lying," I said.

  "Tell me something I don't know," Wireman said, then raised his voice. He was standing just behind me, and he almost blew out my eardrum. "Leave! You're trespassing!"

  The drowned young man made no reply, but it was every bit as fast as I had feared. At one moment it was standing three steps inside the living room. At the next it was right in front of me, and I had only the vaguest, flickering impression of it crossing the distance between. Its smell--rot and seaweed and dead fish turning to soup in the sun--bloomed and became overwhelming. I felt its hands, freezing cold, close over my forearm, and cried out in shock and horror. It wasn't the cold, it was how soft they were. How flabby. That one silver eye peered at me, seeming to drill into my brain, and for a moment there was a sensation of being filled with pure darkness. Then the manacle clamped on my wrist with a flat hard clacking sound.

  "Wireman!" I screamed, but Wireman was gone. He was running away from me, across the room, as fast as he could.

  The drowned thing and I were chained together. It dragged me toward the door.

  viii

  Wireman was back just before the dead man could pull me over the threshold. He had something in his hand that looked like a blunt dagger. For a moment I thought it must be one of the silver harpoons, but that was only a powerful bit of wishful thinking; the silver harpoons were upstairs with the red picnic basket. "Hey!" he said. "Hey, you! Yeah, I'm talking to you! Cojudo de puta madre!"

  Its head snapped around as fast as the head of a snake about to strike. Wireman was almost as fast. Holding the blunt object in both hands, he drove it into the thing's face, striking home just above the right eye-socket. The thing shrieked, a sound that went through my head like shards of glass. I saw Wireman wince and stagger back; saw him struggle to hold onto his weapon and drop it to the sandy floor of the entryway. It didn't matter. The man-thing which had seemed so solid spun into insubstantiality, clothes and all. I felt the manacle around my wrist also lose its solidity. For a moment I could still see it and then it was only water, dripping onto my sneakers and the carpet. There was a larger wet patch where the demon sailor had been only a moment before.