Duma Key (35 page)

He shrugged and nodded. “You're getting that artist thang going. That groove.”

“Don't start with me.”

“Matters have come to a sad pass when I offer respect and you hear sarcasm.”

“Sorry.”

He waved it away. “Eat your
huevos
. Grow up big and strong like Wireman.”

I ate my
huevos
. Elizabeth snored. The TV chattered. Now it was Tina Garibaldi's aunt in the electronic center ring, a girl not much older than my daughter Melinda. She was saying that God had decided
the State of Florida would be too slow and had punished “that monster” Himself. I thought,
Got a point there,
muchacha,
only it
wasn't God.

“Turn that shit-carnival off,” I said.

He killed the tube, then turned to me attentively.

“Maybe you were right about the artist thang. I've decided to show my stuff at the Scoto, if that guy Nannuzzi still wants to show it.”

Wireman smiled and patted his hands together softly, so as not to wake Elizabeth. “Excellent! Edgar seeks the bubble reputation! And why not? Just why the hell not?”

“I don't seek the bubble anything,” I said, wondering if that were completely true. “But if they offer me a contract, would you come out of retirement long enough to look it over?”

His smile faded. “I will if I'm around, but I don't know how long I'll be around.” He saw the look on my face and raised his hand. “I ain't tuning up the Dead March yet, but ask yourself this,
mi amigo
: am I still the right man to take care of Miss Eastlake? In my current condition?”

And because that was a can of worms I didn't want to open—not this morning—I asked, “How did you get the job in the first place?”

“Does it matter?”

“It might,” I said.

I was thinking of how I'd started my time on Duma Key with one assumption—that I had chosen the place—and had since come to believe that maybe it had chosen me. I had even wondered, usually lying in bed and listening to the shells whisper, if my accident had really been an accident. Of course it had been,
must
have been, but it was still easy to see similarities
between mine and Julia Wireman's. I got the crane; she got the Public Works truck. But of course there are people—functioning human beings in most respects—who will tell you they've seen the face of Christ on a taco.

“Well,” he said, “if you expect another long story, you can forget it. It takes a lot to story me out, but for the time being, the well's almost dry.” He looked at Elizabeth moodily. And perhaps with a shade of envy. “I didn't sleep very well last night.”

“Short version, then.”

He shrugged. His febrile good cheer had disappeared like the foam on top of a glass of beer. His big shoulders were slumped forward, giving his chest a caved-in look.

“After Jack Fineham ‘furloughed' me, I decided Tampa was reasonably close to Disney World. Only when I got there, I was bored titless.”

“Sure you were,” I said.

“I also felt that some atonement was in order. I didn't want to go to Darfur or to New Orleans and work storefront
pro bono,
although that crossed my mind. I felt like maybe the little balls with the lottery numbers on them were still bouncing somewhere and one more was waiting to go up the pipe. The last number.”

“Yeah,” I said. A cold finger touched the base of my neck. Very lightly. “One more number. I know the feeling.”

“
Sí, señor,
I know you do. I was waiting to do good, hoping to balance the books again. Because I felt they needed balancing. And one day I saw an ad in the Tampa
Tribune
. ‘Wanted, Companion for elderly lady and Caretaker for several premium island rental
properties. Applicant must supply resume and recommendations to match excellent salary and benefits. This is a challenging position which the right person will find rewarding. Must be bonded.' Well, I was bonded and I liked the sound of it. I interviewed with Miss Eastlake's lawyer. He told me the couple who'd previously filled the position had been called back to New England when the parent of one or the other had suffered a catastrophic accident.”

“And you got the job. What about—?” I pointed in the general direction of his temple.

“Never told him. He was dubious enough already—wondered, I think, why a legal beagle from Omaha would want to spend a year putting an old lady to bed and rattling the locks on houses that are empty most of the time—but Miss Eastlake . . .” He reached out and stroked her gnarled hand. “We saw eye-to-eye from the first, didn't we dear?”

She only snored, but I saw the look on Wireman's face and felt that cold finger touch the back of my neck again, a little more firmly this time. I felt it and knew: the three of us were here because something wanted us here. My knowing wasn't based on the kind of logic I'd grown up with and built my business on, but that was all right. Here on Duma I was a different person, and the only logic I needed was in my nerve-endings.

“I think the world of her, you know,” Wireman said. He picked up his napkin with a sigh, as though it were something heavy, and wiped his eyes. “By the time I got here, all that crazy, febrile shit I told you about was gone. I was husked out, a gray man in a blue and sunny clime who could only read the newspaper in short bursts without getting a blinder of a
headache. I was holding onto one basic idea: I had a debt to pay. Work to do. I'd find it and do it. After that I didn't care. Miss Eastlake didn't hire me, not really; she took me in. When I came here she wasn't like this, Edgar. She was bright, she was funny, she was haughty, flirty, capricious, demanding—she could hector me or humor me out of a blue mood if she chose to, and she often chose to.”

“She sounds smokin.”

“She
was
smokin. Another woman would have given in completely to the wheelchair by now. Not her. She hauls her hundred and eighty up on that walker and plods around this air-conditioned museum, the courtyard outside . . . she even used to enjoy target-shooting, sometimes with one of her father's old handguns, more often with that harpoon pistol, because it's got less kick. And because she says she likes the sound. You see her with that thing, and she really
does
look like the Bride of the Godfather.”

“That's how I first saw her,” I said.

“I took to her right away, and I've come to love her. Julia used to call me
mi compañero
. I think of that often when I'm with Miss Eastlake. She's
mi compañera, mi amiga
. She helped me find my heart when I thought my heart was gone.”

“I'd say you struck lucky.”

“Maybe
sí,
maybe
no.
Tell you this, it's going to be hard to leave her. What's she gonna do when a new person shows up? A new person won't know about how she likes to have her coffee at the end of the boardwalk in the morning . . . or about pretending to throw that fucking cookie-tin in the goldfish pond . . . and she won't be able to explain, because she's headed into the fog for good now.”

He turned to me, looking haggard and more than a little frantic.

“I'll write everything down, that's what I'll do—our whole routine. Morning to night. And you'll see that the new caretaker keeps to it. Won't you, Edgar? I mean, you like her, too, don't you? You wouldn't want to see her hurt. And Jack! Maybe he could pitch in a little. I know it's wrong to ask, but—”

A new thought struck him. He got to his feet and stared out at the water. He'd lost weight. The skin was so tight on his cheekbones that it shone. His hair hung over his ears in clumps, badly needing a wash.

“If I die—and I could, I could go out in a wink just like
Señor
Brown—you'll have to take over here until the estate can find a new live-in. It won't be much of a hardship, you can paint right out here. The light's great, isn't it? The light's terrific!”

He was starting to scare me. “Wireman—”

He whirled around and now his eyes were blazing, the left one seemingly through a net of blood. “Promise, Edgar! We need a plan! If we don't have one, they'll cart her away and put her in a home and she'll be dead in a month! In a week! I know it! So promise!”

I thought he might be right. And I thought that if I wasn't able to take some of the pressure off his boiler, he was apt to have another seizure right in front of me. So I promised. Then I said, “You may end up living a lot longer than you think, Wireman.”

“Sure. But I'll write everything down anyway. Just in case.”

iii

He once more offered me the
Palacio
golf cart for the return trip to Big Pink. I told him I'd be fine walking, but I wouldn't mind having a glass of juice before setting out.

Now I enjoy fresh-squeezed Florida oj as much as anyone, but I confess to having an ulterior motive that particular morning. He left me in the little receiving room at the beach end of
El Palacio'
s glassed-in center hall. He used this room as an office, although how a man who couldn't read for more than five minutes at a stretch could deal with correspondence was beyond me. I guessed—and this touched me—that Elizabeth might have helped him, and quite a lot, before her own condition began to worsen.

Coming in for breakfast, I had glanced into this room and spied a certain gray folder lying on the closed lid of a laptop for which Wireman probably had little use these days. I flipped it open now and took one of the three X-rays.

“Big glass or little glass?” Wireman called from the kitchen, startling me so badly that I almost dropped the sheet in my hand.

“Medium's fine!” I called back. I tucked the X-ray film into my collection pouch and flipped the folder closed again. Five minutes later I was trudging back up the beach.

iv

I didn't like the idea of stealing from a friend—not even a single X-ray photograph. Nor did I like keeping
silent about what I was sure I'd done to Candy Brown. I could have told him; after the Tom Riley business, he would have believed me. Even without that little twinkle of ESP, he would have believed me. That was the trouble, actually. Wireman wasn't stupid. If I could send Candy Brown to the Sarasota County Morgue with a paintbrush, then maybe I could do for a certain brain-damaged ex-lawyer what the doctors could not. But what if I couldn't? Better not to raise false hopes . . . at least outside of my own heart, where they were outrageously high.

By the time I got back to Big Pink, my hip was yelling. I slung my duffle coat into the closet, took a couple of Oxycontins, and saw the message-light on my answering machine was blinking.

It was Nannuzzi. He was delighted to hear from me. Yes indeed, he said, if the rest of my work was on a par with what he'd seen, the Scoto would be pleased and proud to sponsor an exhibition of my work, and before Easter, when the winter people went home. Would it be possible for him and one or more of his partners to come out, visit me in my studio, and look at some of my other completed work? They would be happy to bring a sample contract for me to look at.

It was good news—exciting news—but in a way it seemed to be happening on some other planet, to some other Edgar Freemantle. I saved the message, started to go upstairs with the pilfered X-ray, then stopped. Little Pink wasn't right because the
easel
wasn't right. Canvas and oil paints weren't right, either. Not for this.

I limped back down to my big living room. There was a stack of Artisan pads and several boxes of colored pencils on the coffee table, but they weren't
right, either. There was a low, vague itching in my missing right arm, and for the first time I thought that I might really be able to do this . . . if I could find the right medium for the message, that was.

It occurred to me that a medium was also a person who took dictation from the Great Beyond, and that made me laugh. A little nervously, it's true.

I went into the bedroom, at first not sure what I was after. Then I looked at the closet and knew. The week before, I'd had Jack take me shopping—not at the Crossroads Mall but at one of the men's shops on St. Armand's Circle—and I'd bought half a dozen shirts, the kind that button up the front. When she was a little kid, Ilse used to call them Big People Shirts. They were still in their cellophane bags. I tore the bags off, pulled out the pins, and tossed the shirts back into the closet, where they landed in a heap. I didn't want the shirts. What I wanted were the cardboard inserts.

Those bright white rectangles of cardboard.

I found a Sharpie in a pocket of my PowerBook carrying case. In my old life I'd hated Sharpies for both the smell of the ink and their tendency to smear. In this one I'd come to love the fat boldness of the lines they created, lines that seem to insist on their own absolute reality. I took the cardboard inserts, the Sharpie, and the X-ray of Wireman's brain out to the Florida room, where the light was bright and declamatory.

The itch in my missing arm deepened. By now it felt almost like a friend.

I didn't have the sort of light-box doctors stick X-rays and MRI scans on when they want to study them, but the Florida room's glass wall made a very
acceptable substitute. I didn't even need Scotch tape. I was able to snap the X-ray into the crack between the glass and the chrome facing, and there it was, a thing many claimed did not exist: the brain of a lawyer. It floated against the Gulf. I stared at it for awhile, I don't know how long—two minutes? four?—fascinated by the way the blue water looked when viewed through the gray crenellations, how those folds changed the water to fog.

The slug was a black chip, slightly fragmented. It looked a little like a small ship. Like a rowboat floating on the
caldo
.