Duma Key (71 page)

“Okay,” I said. I had done Jack in blue and Wireman in blaze orange. Neither was perfect, but I thought both sketches caught the essentials. “There's just one more thing.”

Wireman groaned. “
Edgar!
”

“Nothing I need to draw,” I said, and flipped the cover of the pad closed on the two sketches. “Just smile for the artist, Wireman. But before you do, think of something that makes you feel particularly good.”

“Are you serious?”

“As a heart attack.”

His brow furrowed . . . then smoothed out. He smiled. As always, it lit up his whole face and made him a new man.

I turned to Jack. “Now you.”

And because I really did feel that he was the more important of the two, I watched him very closely when he did.

vi

We didn't have a four-wheel drive, but Elizabeth's old Mercedes sedan seemed a reasonable substitute; it was built like a tank. We drove to
El Palacio
in Jack's car, and parked just inside the gate. Jack and I switched our supplies over to the SEL 500. Wireman's job was the picnic basket.

“A few other things while you're in there, if you can,” I said. “Bug-spray, and a really good flashlight. Have you got one of those?”

He nodded. “There's an eight-cell job in the gardening shed. It's a searchlight.”

“Good. And Wireman?”

He gave me a
what now
look—the exasperated kind you do mostly with your eyebrows—but said nothing.

“The spear-pistol?”

He actually grinned.
“Sí, señor. Para fijaciono
.”

While he was gone, I stood leaning against the Mercedes, looking at the tennis court. The door at the far end had been left open. Elizabeth's semi-domesticated heron was inside, standing by the net. It looked at me with accusing blue eyes.

“Edgar?” Jack touched my elbow. “Okay?”

I was not okay, and wouldn't be okay for a long time again. But . . .

I can do this,
I thought.
I have to do this. She does not get to win.

“Fine,” I said.

“I don't like it that you're so pale. You look like you did when you first came here.” Jack's voice cracked on the last couple of words.

“I'm fine,” I said again, and briefly cupped the back of his neck. I realized that, other than shaking his hand, it was probably the only time I had touched him.

Wireman came out clutching the handles of the picnic basket in both hands. He had three long-billed hats stacked on his head. John Eastlake's harpoon pistol was tucked under his arm. “Flashlight's in the basket,” he said. “Ditto Deep Woods Off, and three pairs of gardening gloves I found in the shed.”

“Brilliant,” I said.

“
Sí.
But it's quarter of one, Edgar. If we're going, can we please go?”

I looked at the heron on the tennis court. It stood by the net, as still as a hand on a broken clock, and looked back at me pitilessly. That was all right; it is, for the most part, a pitiless world.

“Yes,” I said. “Let's go.”

vii

Now I had memory. It was no longer in perfect working order, and to this day I sometimes get confused about names and the order in which certain things happened, but every moment of our expedition to the
house at the south end of Duma Key remains clear in my mind—like the first movie that ever amazed me or the first painting that ever took my breath away (
The Hailstorm,
by Thomas Hart Benton). Yet at first I felt cold, divorced from it all, like a slightly jaded patron of the arts looking at a picture in a second-rate museum. It wasn't until Jack found the doll inside the staircase going up to nowhere that I started to realize I was
in
the picture instead of just looking at it. And that there was no going back for any of us unless we could stop her. I knew she was strong; if she could reach all the way to Omaha and Minneapolis to get what she wanted, then all the way to Providence to keep it, of course she was strong. And still I underestimated her. Until we were actually in that house at the south end of Duma Key, I didn't realize how strong Perse was.

viii

I wanted Jack to drive, and Wireman to sit in the back seat. When Wireman asked why, I said I had my reasons, and I thought they'd become apparent in short order. “And if I'm wrong about that,” I added, “no one will be any more delighted than me.”

Jack backed onto the road and turned south. More out of curiosity than anything else, I punched on the radio and was rewarded with Billy Ray Cyrus, bellowing about his achy breaky heart. Jack groaned and reached for it, probably meaning to find The Bone. Before he could, Billy Ray was swallowed in a burst of deafening static.

“
Jesus, turn it off!
” Wireman yelped.

But first I turned it down. Reducing the volume made no difference. If anything, the static grew louder. I could feel it rattling the fillings of my teeth, and I punched the OFF button before my eardrums could start bleeding.

“What was
that
?” Jack asked. He had pulled over. His eyes were wide.

“Call it bad environment, why don't you,” I said. “A little something left over from those Army Air Corps tests sixty years ago.”

“Very funny,” Wireman said.

Jack was looking at the radio. “I want to try it again.”

“Be my guest,” I told him, and placed my hand over my left ear.

Jack pushed the power button. The static that came roaring out of the Mercedes's four speakers this time seemed as loud as a jet fighter's engine. Even with my palm over one ear, it ripped through my head. I thought I heard Wireman yell, but I wasn't sure.

Jack pushed the power button again and the hellish blizzard of noise cut out. “I think we should skip the tunes,” he said.

“Wireman? All right?” My voice seemed to be coming from far away, through a steady low ringing noise.

“Rockin,” he said.

ix

Jack might have made it a little way beyond the point where Ilse got sick; maybe not. It was hard to
tell once the growth got high. The road narrowed to a stripe, its surface humped and buckled by the roots running beneath it. The foliage had interlaced above us, blotting out most of the sky. It was like being in a living tunnel. The windows were rolled up, but even so, the car was filling with a green and fecund jungle smell.

Jack tested the old Mercedes's springs on a particularly egregious pothole, thumped up over a ridge in the pavement on the far side, then slammed to a stop and put the transmission in
PARK
.

“I'm sorry,” he said. His mouth was quivering and his eyes were too big. “I'm—”

I knew perfectly well what he was.

Jack fumbled open the door, leaned out, and vomited. I'd thought the smell of the jungle (that's what it was once you were a mile past
El Palacio
) was strong in the car, but what came rolling in with the door open was ten times headier, thick and green and viciously alive. Yet I did not hear a single bird calling in that mass of junk foliage. The only sound was Jack losing his breakfast.

Then his lunch. At last he collapsed back against the seat. He thought
I
looked like a snowbird again? That was sort of funny, because on that early afternoon in mid-April, Jack Cantori was as pale as March in Minnesota. Instead of twenty-one, he looked a sickly forty-five.
It must have been the tuna salad,
Ilse had said, but it hadn't been the tuna. Something from the sea, all right, but not the tuna.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I don't know what's wrong with me. The smell, I guess—that rotten jungle smell—” His chest hitched, he made a
gurk
sound deep in his throat, and leaned out the door again.
That time he missed his hold on the steering wheel, and if I hadn't grabbed him by the collar and yanked him back, he would have gone sprawling face-first into his own whoop.

He leaned back, eyes closed, face wet with sweat, panting rapidly.

“We better take him back to
El Palacio,
” Wireman said. “I don't like to lose the time—hell, I don't like to lose
him
—but this shit ain't right.”

“As far as Perse's concerned, it's
exactly
right,” I said. Now my bad leg was itching almost as much as my arm. It felt like electricity. “It's her little poison belt. How about you, Wireman? How's your gut?”

“Fine, but my bad eye—the one that used to be bad—is itching like a bastard, and my head's kind of humming. Probably from that damn radio.”

“It's not the radio. And the reason it's getting to Jack and not to us is because we've been . . . well . . . call it immunized. Sort of ironic, isn't it?”

Behind the wheel, Jack groaned.

“What can you do for him,
muchacho
? Anything?”

“I think so. I hope so.”

I had my pads on my lap and my pencils and erasers in a belt-pack. Now I flipped to the picture of Jack and found one of my art-gum erasers. I took away his mouth and the lower arcs of his eyes, all the way up to the corners. The itching in my right arm was fiercer than ever, and I actually had no doubt that what I planned to do would work. I summoned up the memory of Jack's smile in my kitchen—the one I'd asked him to give me while thinking of something particularly good—and drew it quickly with my Midnight Blue pencil. It took no more than thirty seconds (the eyes were really
the key, when it comes to smiles, they always are), but those few lines changed the whole
idea
of Jack Cantori's face.

And I got something I hadn't expected. As I drew, I saw him kissing a girl in a bikini. No, more than saw. I could feel her smooth skin, even a few little grains of sand nestling in the hollow at the small of her back. I could smell her shampoo and taste a faint ghost of salt on her lips. I knew her name was Caitlin and he called her Kate.

I put my pencil back in the little belt-pack and zipped it closed. “Jack?” Speaking quietly. His eyes were closed, and sweat still stood out on his cheeks and forehead, but I thought his breathing had slowed. “How are you now? Any better?”

“Yeah,” he said without opening his eyes. “What'd you do?”

“Well, as long as it's just the three of us, we might as well call it what it is: magic. A little counterspell I tossed your way.”

Wireman reached over my shoulder, picked up the pad, studied the picture, and nodded. “I'm beginning to believe she should have left you alone,
muchacho
.”

I said, “It was my daughter she should have left alone.”

x

We stayed where we were for five minutes, letting Jack get his second wind. At last he said he felt able to go on. His color was back. I wondered if we would have run into the same problems if we had gone around by water.

“Wireman, have you seen any fishing boats anchored off the south end of the Key?”

He considered. “You know, I haven't. They usually stay on the Don Pedro side of the strait. That's odd, isn't it?”

“It's not odd, it's fucking sinister,” Jack said. “Like this road.” It was down to nothing but a strip. Seagrape and banyan branches scraped along the sides of the slowly trundling Mercedes, making hellish
screee
-ing sounds. The road, lumped upward with tunneling roots and broken down to gravel and potholes in some places, continued to bend inland, and now it had also begun to climb.

We crept along, mile after slow mile, with the leaves and branches slapping and whacking. I kept expecting the road to break down entirely, but the thick interlacing foliage overhead had protected it from the elements to some degree, and it never quite did. The banyans gave way to an oppressive forest of Brazilian Peppers, and there we saw our first wildlife: a huge bobcat that stood for a moment in the rubbly remains of the road, hissing at us with its ears laid flat, then fled into the underbrush. A little farther on, a dozen plump black caterpillars fell onto the windshield and burst open, spreading gummy guts that the wipers and washer-fluid could do little to clear; they only spread the remains around until looking out through the windshield was like looking out of an eye with a cataract on it.

I told Jack to stop. I got out, opened the trunk, and found a little supply of clean rags. I used one to wipe the windshield, being careful to don a pair of the gloves Wireman had found—I was already wearing
a hat. But so far as I could tell, they were only caterpillars; messy, but not supernatural.

“Not bad,” Jack said from the open driver's-side window. “Now I'll pop the hood so you can check the—” He stopped, looking beyond me.

I turned. The road was down to little more than a path, cluttered with old chunks of asphalt and overgrown with Creeping Oxeye. Crossing it about thirty yards up was a line of five frogs the size of Cocker Spaniel puppies. The first three were a brilliant solid green that rarely if ever occurs in nature; the fourth was blue; the fifth was a faded orange that might once have been red. They were smiling, but there was something fixed and weary about those smiles. They were hopping slowly, as if their hoppers were almost busted. Like the bobcat, they reached the underbrush and disappeared into it.

“What the blue fuck were
those
?” Jack asked.

“Ghosts,” I said. “Leftovers from a little girl's powerful imagination. And they won't last much longer, from the look of them.” I got back in. “Go on, Jack. Let's ride while we can.”

He began to creep forward again. I asked Wireman what time it was.

“A little past two.”

We were able to ride all the way to the gate of the first Heron's Roost. I never would have bet on it, but we did. The foliage closed in one final time—banyans and scrub pines choked with gray beards of Spanish Moss—but Jack bulled the Mercedes through, and all at once the undergrowth drew back. Here the elements had washed the tar away completely and the end of the road was only a rutty memory, but it was good enough for the Mercedes, which jounced
and bucketed up a long hill toward two stone pillars. A great unruly hedge, easily eighteen feet high and God knew how thick, ran away from the pillars on either side; it had also begun to spread fat green fingers down the hill toward the jungle growth. There were gates, but they stood rusty and halfway open. I didn't think the Mercedes would quite fit.