Duma Key (75 page)

“I just do. I bet she could have talked to
you,
Wireman. Before I fixed you. When you still had that little twinkle.”

“Too late now,” Wireman said. He rummaged in the food-stash, found the cucumber strips, and ate a couple. “So what do we do? Go back? Because I have an idea that if we go back,
'chacho,
we'll never summon the testicular fortitude to return.”

I thought he was right. And meanwhile, the afternoon was passing all around us.

Jack was sitting on the stairs, his butt on a riser two or three above the ha-ha. He was holding the doll on his knee. Sunshine fell through the shattered top of the house and dusted them with light. They were strangely evocative, would have made a terrific painting:
Young Man and Doll
. The way he was holding Noveen reminded me of something, but I couldn't put my finger on just what. Noveen's black shoebutton eyes seemed to look at me, almost smugly.
I seen a lot, you nasty man. I seen it all. I
know
it all. Too bad I'm not a picture you can touch with your phantom hand, ain't it?

Yes. It was.

“There was a time when
I
could have made her talk,” Jack said.

Wireman looked puzzled, but I felt that little
click
you get when a connection you've been trying to make finally goes through. Now I knew why the way he was holding the doll looked so familiar.

“Into ventriloquism, were you?” I hoped I sounded casual, but my heart was starting to bump against my ribs again. I had an idea that here at the south end of Duma Key, many things were possible. Even in broad daylight.

“Yeah,” Jack said with a smile that was half-embarrassed, half-reminiscent. “I bought a book about it when I was only eight, and stuck with it mostly because my Dad said it was like throwing money away, I gave up on everything.” He shrugged, and Noveen bobbed a bit on his leg. As if she were also trying to shrug. “I never got
great
at it, but I got good enough to win the sixth-grade Talent Competition. My Dad hung the medal on his office wall. That meant a lot to me.”

“Yeah,” Wireman said. “There's nothing like an atta-boy from a doubtful dad.”

Jack smiled, and as always, it illuminated his whole face. He shifted a little, and Noveen shifted with him. “Best thing, though? I was a shy kid, and ventriloquism broke me out a little. It got easier to talk to people—I'd sort of pretend I was Morton. My dummy, you know. Morton was a wiseass who'd say anything to anybody.”

“They all are,” I said. “It's a rule, I think.”

“Then I got into junior high, and ventriloquism started to seem like a nerd talent compared to skateboarding,
so I gave it up. I don't know what happened to the book.
Throw Your Voice,
it was called.”

We were silent. The house breathed dankly around us. A little while ago, Wireman had killed a charging alligator. I could hardly believe that now, even though my ears were still ringing from the gunshots.

Then Wireman said: “I want to hear you do it. Make her say, ‘
Buenos días, amigos, mi nombre es Noveen,
and
la mesa
is leaking.' ”

Jack laughed. “Yeah, right.”

“No—I'm serious.”

“I can't. If you don't do it for awhile, you forget how.”

And from my own research, I knew he could be right. In the matter of learned skills, memory comes to a fork in the road. Down one branch are the it's-like-riding-a-bicycle skills; things which, once learned, are almost never forgotten. But the creative, ever-changing forebrain skills have to be practiced almost daily, and they are easily damaged or destroyed. Jack was saying ventriloquism was like that. And while I had no reason to doubt him—it involved creating a new personality, after all, as well as throwing one's voice—I said: “Give it a try.”

“What?” He looked at me. Smiling. Puzzled.

“Go on, take a shot.”

“I told you, I can't—”

“Try, anyway.”

“Edgar, I have no idea what she would sound like even if I
could
still throw my voice.”

“Yeah, but you've got her on your knee, and it's just us chickens, so go ahead.”

“Well, shit.” He blew hair off his forehead. “What do you want her to say?”

Wireman said, very quietly indeed: “Why don't we just see what comes out?”

v

Jack sat with Noveen on his knee for a moment longer, their heads in the sun, little bits of disturbed dust from the stairs and the ancient hall carpet floating around their faces. Then he shifted his grip so that his fingers were on the doll's rudiment of a neck and her cloth shoulders. Her head came up.

“Hello, boys,” Jack said, only he was trying not to move his lips and it came out
Hello, oys.

He shook his head; the disturbed dust flew. “Wait a minute,” he said. “That sucks.”

“Got all the time in the world,” I told him. I think I sounded calm, but my heart was thudding harder than ever. Part of what I was feeling was fear for Jack. If this worked, it might be dangerous for him.

He stretched out his throat and used his free hand to massage his Adam's apple. He looked like a tenor getting ready to sing. Or like a bird, I thought. A Gospel Hummingbird, maybe. Then he said, “Hello, boys.” It was better, but—

“No,” he said. “Shit-on-toast. Sounds like that old blond chick, Mae West. Wait.”

He massaged his throat again. He was looking up into the cascading bright as he did it, and I'm not sure he knew that his other hand—the one on the doll—was moving. Noveen looked first at me, then at Wireman, then back at me. Black shoebutton eyes. Black beribboned hair cascading
around a chocolate-cookie face. Red
O
of a mouth. An
Ouuu, you nasty man
mouth if ever there was one.

Wireman's hand gripped mine. It was cold.

“Hello, boys,” Noveen said, and although Jack's Adam's apple bobbed up and down, his lips barely moved on the
b
at all.

“Hey! How was that?”

“Good.” Wireman said, sounding as calm as I didn't feel. “Have her say something else.”

“I get paid extra for this, don't I, boss?”

“Sure,” I said. “Time and a ha—”

“Ain't you gone draw nuthin?” Noveen asked, looking at me with those round black eyes. They really were shoebuttons, I was almost sure of it.

“I have nothing to draw,” I said. “Noveen.”

“I tell you sumpin you c'n draw. Whereat yo pad?” Jack was now looking off to the side, into the shadows leading to the ruined parlor, bemused, eyes distant. He looked neither conscious nor unconscious; he looked someplace between.

Wireman let go of me and reached into the food-bag, where I had stowed the two Artisan pads. He handed me one. Jack's hand flexed a bit, and Noveen appeared to bend her head slightly to study it as I first flipped back the cover and then unzipped the pouch that held my pencils. I took one.

“Naw, naw. Use one of hers.”

I rummaged again, and took out Libbit's pale green. It was the only one still long enough to afford a decent grip. It must not have been her favorite color. Or maybe it was just that Duma's greens were darker.

“All right, now what?”

“Draw me in the kitchen. Put me up agin the breadbox, that do fine.”

“On the counter, do you mean?”

“Think I was talkin bout on the flo?”

“Christ,” Wireman muttered. The voice had been changing steadily with each exchange; now it wasn't Jack's at all. And whose was it, given the fact that in its prime the only ventriloquism available to make the doll speak had been provided by a little girl's imagination? I thought it had been Nan Melda's then, and that we were listening to a version of that voice now.

As soon as I began to work, the itch swept down my missing arm, defining it, making it
there
. I sketched her sitting against an old-fashioned breadbox, then drew her legs dangling over the edge of the counter. With no pause or hesitation—something deep inside me, where the pictures came from, said that to hesitate would be to break the spell while it was still forming, while it was still fragile—I went on and drew the little girl standing beside the counter. Standing beside the counter and looking up. Little four-year-old girl in a pinafore. I could not have told you what a pinafore was before I drew one over little Libbit's dress as she stood there in the kitchen beside her doll, as she stood there looking up, as she stood there—

Shhhhh
—

—with one finger to her lips.

Now, moving quicker than ever, the pencil racing, I added Nan Melda, seeing her for the first time outside that photograph where she was holding the red picnic basket bunched in her arms. Nan Melda bent over the little girl, her face set and angry.

No, not angry—

vi

Scared.

That's what Nan Melda is, scared near to death. She knows something is going on, Libbit knows something is going on, and the twins know, too
—
Tessie and Lo-Lo are as scared as she is. Even that fool Shannington knows something's wrong. That's why he's taken to staying away as much as he can, preferring to work on the farm shoreside instead of coming out to the Key.

And the Mister? When he's here, the Mister's too mad about Adie, who's run off to Atlanta, to see what's right in front of his eyes.

At first Nan Melda thought what was in front of her eyes was just her own imagination, picking up on the babbyuns' games; surely she never
really
saw no pelicans or herons flying upside-down, or the hosses smiling at her when Shannington brought over the two-team from Nokomis to give the girls a ride. And she guessed she knew why the little ones were scairt of Charley; there might be mysteries on Duma now, but that
ain't one of em. That was her own fault, although she meant well
—

vii

“Charley!” I said. “His name's Charley!”

Noveen cawed her laughing assent.

I took the other pad out of the food-sack—almost
ripped
it out—and threw back the cover so savagely that I tore it half off. I groped among the pencils and found the stub of Libbit's black. I wanted black for this side-drawing, and there was just enough to pinch between my thumb and finger.

“Edgar,” Wireman said. “For a minute there I thought I saw . . . it looked like—”

“Shut up!” Noveen cried. “Ne'mine no mojo arm! You gone want to see this, I bet!”

I drew quickly, and the jockey came out of the white like a figure out of heavy fog. It was quick, the strokes careless and hurried, but the essence was there: the knowing eyes and the broad lips that might have been grinning with either mirth or malevolence. I had no time to color the shirt and the breeches, but I fumbled for the pencil stamped Plain Red (one of mine) along its barrel and added the awful cap, scribbling it in. And once the cap was there you knew what that grin really was: a nightmare.

“Show me!” Noveen cried. “I want to see if y'got it right!”

I held the picture up to the doll, who now sat straight on Jack's leg while Jack slumped against the wall beside the staircase, looking off into the parlor.

“Yep,” Noveen said. “That's the bugger who scared Melda's girls. Mos' certainly.”

“What—?” Wireman began, and shook his head. “I'm lost.”

“Melda seen the frog, too,” Noveen said. “The one the babbies call the big boy. The one wit d'
teef
. That's when Melda finally corner Libbit in d'kitchen. To make her talk.”

“At first Melda thought the stuff about Charley was just little kids scaring each other, didn't she?”

Noveen cawed again, but her shoebutton eyes stared with what could have been horror. Of course, eyes like that can look like anything you want them to, can't they? “That's right, sugar. But when she
seen ole Big Boy down there at the foot of the lawn, crossin the driveway and goin into the trees . . .”

Jack's hand flexed. Noveen's head shook slowly back and forth, indicating the collapse of Nan Melda's defenses.

I shuffled the pad with Charley the jockey on it to the bottom and went back to the picture of the kitchen: Nan Melda looking down, the little girl looking up with her finger on her lips—
Shhhh!
—and the doll bearing silent witness from her place against the breadbox. “Do you see it?” I asked Wireman. “Do you understand?”

“Sort of . . .”

“Sugar-candy was mos'ly done, once
she
was out,” Noveen said. “Thass what it come down to.”

“Maybe at first Melda thought Shannington was moving the lawn jockey around as a kind of joke—because he knew the three little girls were scared of it.”

“Why in God's name would they be?” Wireman asked.

Noveen said nothing, so I passed my missing hand over the Noveen in my drawing—the Noveen leaning against the breadbox—and then the one on Jack's knee spoke up. As I sort of knew she would.

“Nanny din' mean nothin bad. She knew they 'us scairt of Charley—this 'us befo the bad things started—an so she tole em a bedtime story to try an make it better. Made it worse instead, as sometimes happens with small chirrun. Then the bad woman come—the bad white woman from the sea—n dat bitch made it worse still. She made Libbit draw Charley alive, for a joke. She had other jokes, too.”

I threw back the sheet with Libbit going
Shhhh,
seized my Burnt Umber from my pack—now it didn't seem to matter whose pencils I used—and sketched the kitchen again. Here was the table, with Noveen lying on her side, one arm cast up over her head, as if in supplication. Here was Libbit, now wearing a sundress and an expression of dismay achieved in no more than half a dozen racing lines. And here was Nan Melda, backing away from the open breadbox and screaming, because inside—