Duma Key

i

Things slowed down for awhile. Sometimes that happens. The pot boils, and then, just before it can boil over, some hand — God, fate, maybe plain coincidence — lowers the heat. I mentioned this once to Wireman and he said life is like Friday on a soap opera. It gives you the illusion that everything is going to wrap up, and then the same old shit starts up on Monday.

I thought he’d go with me to see a doctor and we’d find out what was wrong with him. I thought he’d tell me why he’d shot himself in the head and how a man survives that sort of thing. The answer seemed to be, “With seizures and a lot of trouble reading the fine print.” Maybe he’d even be able to tell me why his employer had a bee in her bonnet about keeping Ilse off the island. And the capper: I’d decide on what came next in the life of Edgar Freemantle, the Great American Primitive.

None of those things actually happened, at least for awhile. Life does produce changes, and the end results are sometimes explosive, but in soap operas and in real life, big bangs often have a long fuse.

Wireman did agree to go see a doctor with me and “get his head examined,” but not until March. February was too busy, he said. Winter residents — what Wireman called “the monthlies,” as if they were menstrual periods instead of tenants — would start moving into all the Eastlake properties the coming weekend. The first snowbirds to arrive would be the ones Wireman liked least. These were the Godfreys from Rhode Island, known to Wireman (and hence to me) as Joe and Rita Mean Dog. They came for ten weeks every winter and stayed in the house closest to the Eastlake estate. The signs warning of their Rotties and their Pit Bull were out; Ilse and I had seen them. Wireman said Joe Mean Dog was an ex–Green Beret, in a tone of voice which seemed to indicate that explained everything.

“Mr. Dirisko won’t even get out of his car when he has a package for them,” Wireman said. He was referring to the U.S. Postal Service’s fat and jolly representative on the south end of Casey and all of Duma Key. We were sitting on the sawhorses in front of the Mean Dog house a day or two before the Godfreys were scheduled to arrive. The crushed-shell driveway was glistening a damp pink. Wireman had turned on the sprinklers. “He just leaves whatever he’s got at the foot of the mailbox post, honks, and then rolls wheels for El Palacio. And do I blame him? Non, non, Nannette.”

“Wireman, about the doctor—”

“March, muchacho, and before the Ides. I promise.”

“You’re just putting it off,” I said.

“I’m not. I have only one busy season, and this be it. I got caught a little off-guard last year, but it’s not going to happen this time around. It can’t happen this time around, because this year Miss Eastlake’s going to be far less capable of pitching in. At least the Mean Dogs are returners, known quantities, and so are the Baumgartens. I like the Baumgartens. Two kids.”

“Either of them girls?” I asked, thinking about Elizabeth’s prejudice concerning daughters and Duma.

“Nope, both the kind of boys who ought to have GOT IT MADE BUT DON’T HOLD IT AGAINST US stamped on their foreheads. The people coming into the other four houses are all new. I can hope that none of them will be the rock-and-roll-all-night, party-every-day type, but what are the odds?”

“Not good, but you can at least hope they left their Slipknot CDs home.”

“Who’s Slipknot? What’s Slipknot?”

“Wireman, you don’t want to know. Especially not while you’re busy working yourself into a state.”

“I’m not. Wireman is just explaining February on Duma Key, muchacho. I’m going to be fielding everything from emergency queries about what to do if one of the Baumgarten boys gets stung by a jellyfish to where Rita Mean Dog can get a fan for her grandmother, who they’ll probably stash in the back bedroom again for a week or so. You think Miss Eastlake’s getting on? I’ve seen Mexican mummies hauled through the streets of Guadalajara on the Day of the Dead who looked better than Gramma Mean Dog. She’s got two basic lines of conversation. There’s the inquisitive line — ‘Did you bring me a cookie?’ — and the declarative — ‘Get me a towel, Rita, I think that last fart had a lump in it.’”

I burst out laughing.

Wireman scraped a sneaker through the shells, creating a smile with his foot. Beyond us, our shadows lay on Duma Key Road, which was paved and smooth and even. Here, at least. Farther south was a different story. “The answer to the fan problem, should you care, is Dan’s Fan City. Is that a great name, or what? And I’ll tell you something: I actually like solving these problems. Defusing little crises. I make folks a hell of a lot happier here on Duma Key than I ever did in court.”

But you haven’t lost the knack for leading people away from the things you don’t want to discuss, I thought. “Wireman, it would only take half an hour to get a physician to look into your eyes and tap your skull—”

“You’re wrong, muchacho,” he said patiently. “At this time of year it takes a minimum of two hours to get looked at in a roadside Doc-in-the-Box for a lousy strep throat. When you add on an hour of travel time — more now, because it’s Snowbird Season and none of them know where they’re going — you’re talking about three daylight hours I just can’t give up. Not with appointments to see the air conditioning guy at 17… the meter-reader at 27… the cable guy right here, if he ever shows up.” He pointed to the next house down the road, which happened to be 39. “Youngsters from Toledo are taking that one until March fifteenth, and they’re paying an extra seven hundred bucks for something called Wi-Fi, which I don’t even know what it is.”

“Wave of the future, that’s what it is. I’ve got it. Jack took care of it. Wave of the father-raping, mother-stabbing future.”

“Good one. Arlo Guthrie, 1967.”

“Movie was 1969, I think,” I said.

“Whenever it was, viva the wave of the mother-raping, froggy-stabbing future. Doesn’t change the fact that I’m busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest… plus come on, Edgar. You know it’s going to be more than a quick tap and peek with the old doctor-flashlight. That’s just where it starts.”

“But if you need it—”

“For the time being I’m good to go.”

“Sure. That’s why I’m the one reading her poems every afternoon.”

“A little literary culture won’t hurt you, you fucking cannibal.”

“I know it won’t, and you know that’s not what I’m talking about.” I thought — and not for the first time — that Wireman was one of the very few men I ever met in my adult life who could consistently tell me no without making me angry. He was a genius of no. Sometimes I thought it was him; sometimes I thought the accident had changed something in me; sometimes I thought it was both.

“I can read, you know,” Wireman said. “In short bursts. Enough to get by. Medicine bottle labels, phone numbers, things like that. And I will get looked at, so relax that Type-A compulsion of yours to set the whole world straight. Christ, you must have driven your wife crazy.” He glanced at me sideways and said, “Oops. Did Wireman step on a corn there?”

“Ready to talk about that little round scar on the side of your head yet? Muchacho?”

He grinned. “Touché, touché. All apologies.”

“Kurt Cobain,” I said. “1993. Or thereabouts.”

He blinked. “Really? I would have said ’95, but rock music has largely left me behind. Wireman got old, sad but true. As for the seizure thing… sorry, Edgar, I just don’t believe it.”

He did, though. I could see it in his eyes. But before I could say anything else, he climbed down from the sawhorse and pointed north. “Look! White van! I think the Forces of Cable TV have arrived!”

ii

I believed Wireman when he said he had no idea what Elizabeth Eastlake had been talking about on the answering machine tape after I played it for him. He continued to think that her concern for my daughter had something to do with her own long-deceased sisters. He professed to be completely puzzled about why she didn’t want me to stockpile my pictures on the island. About that, he said, he didn’t have a clue.

Joe and Rita Mean Dog moved in; the relentless barking of their menagerie commenced. The Baumgartens also moved in, and I often began to pass their boys playing Frisbee on the beach. They were just as Wireman had said: sturdy, handsome, and polite, one maybe eleven and the other maybe thirteen, with builds that would soon make them gigglebait among the junior high cheerleader set, if not already. They were always willing to share their Frisbee with me for a throw or two as I limped past, and the older — Jeff — usually called something encouraging like “Yo, Mr. Freemantle, nice chuck!”

A couple with a sports car moved into the house just south of Big Pink, and the distressing strains of Toby Keith began to waft to me around the cocktail hour. On the whole, I might have preferred Slipknot. The quartet of young people from Toledo had a golf cart they raced up and down the beach when they weren’t playing volleyball or off on fishing expeditions.

Wireman was more than busy; he was a dervish. Luckily, he had help. One day Jack lent him a hand unclogging the Mean Dog lawn-sprinklers. A day or two later, I helped him push the Toledo visitors’ golf cart out of a dune in which it had gotten stuck — those responsible had left it to go get a six-pack, and the tide was threatening to take it. My hip and leg were still mending, but there was nothing wrong with my remaining arm.

Bad hip and leg or not, I took Great Beach Walks. Some days — mostly when the fog came in during the late afternoon, first obliterating the Gulf with cold amnesia and then taking the houses, as well — I took pain pills from my diminishing stock. Most days I didn’t. Wireman was rarely parked in his beach chair drinking green tea that February, but Elizabeth Eastlake was always in her parlor, she almost always knew who I was, and she usually had a book of poetry near to hand. It wasn’t always Keillor’s Good Poems, but that was the one she liked the best. I liked it, too. Merwin and Sexton and Frost, oh-my.

I did plenty of reading myself that February and March. I read more than I had in years — novels, short stories, three long nonfiction books about how we had stumbled into the Iraq mess (the short answer appeared to have W for a middle initial and a dick for a Vice President). But mostly what I did was paint. Every afternoon and evening I painted until I could barely lift my strengthening arm. Beachscapes, seascapes, still lifes, and sunsets, sunsets, sunsets.

But that fuse continued to smolder. The heat had been turned down but not off. The matter of Candy Brown wasn’t the next thing, only the next obvious thing. And that didn’t come until Valentine’s Day. A hideous irony when you think of it.

Hideous.

iii

My misgivings about the Baptist Hummingbird hadn’t faded, and what I thought was she was asking for trouble. But if she was making a mistake about him, it might be better for her to find out sooner rather than later. So — hoping to God I wasn’t making a mistake — I e-mailed back and told her that sounded like an interesting idea, assuming she was okay on her course-work. (I couldn’t bring myself to go balls-out and tell my beloved younger daughter that spending a week in the company of her boyfriend, even assuming said boyfriend was chaperoned by hardshell Baptists, was a good idea.) I also suggested it might be bad policy to share her plan with her mother. This brought a prompt response.

No, I didn’t think that… but if she caught her tenor doing the horizontal bop with one of the altos when she got to Little Rock, she was going to be one very unhappy If-So-Girl. I had no doubt that everything would then come out to her mother, engagement and all, and Pam would find a lot to say on the subject of my own sanity. I had already asked myself some questions on that score, and mostly decided to give myself a pass. When it comes to your kids, you find yourself making some weird calls from time to time and just hoping they turn out all right — calls and kids. Parenting is the greatest of hum-a-few-bars-and-I’ll-fake-it skills.

Then there was Sandy Smith, the Realtor. On my answering machine, Elizabeth had said I must be one of those who believed in art for art’s sake, or Duma Key would not have called me. What I wanted from Sandy was confirmation that the only thing calling me had been a glossy brochure, one that had probably been shown to potential renters with deep pockets all over the United States. Maybe all over the world.

The response I got wasn’t what I had hoped for, but I’d be lying if I said I was completely surprised. That was my bad-memory year, after all. And then there’s the desire to believe things happened a certain way; when it comes to the past we all stack the deck.

I read this message through twice, then murmured, “Just do the deal and let the deal do you, muchacha.”

I couldn’t remember the other brochures even now, but I remembered the one for Salmon Point. The folder it came in had been a bright pink. A big pink, you might say, and the words that caught my eye hadn’t been Salmon Point but those below it, embossed in gold: YOUR SECRET GULFSIDE RETREAT. So maybe it had called me.

Maybe it had, after all.

iv

He had punctuated “as long as you’re not having seizures” with one of those handy e-mail emoticons, this one a round laughing face with a mouthful of teeth. Having seen Wireman doing a pogo in the shadowy back seat of the rented van with his eyes pointing in different directions, I didn’t feel like laughing myself. But I knew that, short of chains and a tractor hitch, I wouldn’t be getting Wireman examined much before March fifteenth, unless he pitched a grand mal bitch. And of course, Wireman wasn’t Xander Kamen’s problem. I wasn’t either, strictly speaking, and I was touched that he was still bothering. On impulse I clicked the REPLY button and typed:

I was going to shut down the machine after that and make myself a sandwich, but the incoming-mail chime rang before I could.

I was smiling as I shut the computer down. And misting up a little, too.

v

A day later, I went to Nokomis with Wireman to pick up a new sink-trap for the folks at 17 (sports car; shitty country music) and some plastic fencing at the hardware store for the Mean Dogs. Wireman didn’t need my help, and he certainly didn’t need me limping around behind him in the Nokomis TruValue, but it was a crappy, rainy day, and I wanted to get off the island. We had lunch at Ophelia’s and argued about rock and roll, which made it a cheerful outing. When I got back, the message light on my answering machine was blinking. It was Pam. “Call me,” she said, and hung up.

I did, but first — this feels like a confession, and a cowardly one, at that — I went online, surfed to that day’s Minneapolis StarTribune, and clicked on OBITUARIES. I scrolled through the names quickly and made sure Thomas Riley wasn’t one of them, knowing it proved nothing; he might have offed himself too late to make the morning line.

Sometimes she muted the phone and napped in the afternoon, in which case I’d get the answering machine and a little reprieve. Not this afternoon. It was Pam herself, soft but not warm: “Hello.”

“It’s me, Pam. Returning your call.”

“I suppose you were out sunning,” she said. “It’s snowing here. Snowing and as cold as a well-digger’s belt-buckle.”

I relaxed a little. Tom wasn’t dead. If Tom had been dead, we wouldn’t be settling in for a little impromptu bitcharee.

“Actually, it’s cold and rainy where I am,” I said.

“Good. I hope you catch bronchitis. Tom Riley stormed out of here this morning after calling me a meddlesome cunt and throwing a vase on the floor. I suppose I should be glad he didn’t throw it at me.” Pam started to cry. She honked, then surprised me by laughing. It was bitter, but also surprisingly good-humored. “When do you suppose your strange ability to induce my tears runs out?”

“Tell me what happened, Panda.”

“And no more of that. Call me that again and I’m hanging up. Then you can buzz Tom and ask him what happened. Probably that’s what I ought to make you do, anyway. It would serve you right.”

I put my hand to my head and began to massage my temples: thumb in the left hollow, first two fingers in the right. It’s sort of amazing that one hand can encompass so many dreams and so much pain. Not to mention the potential to hatch so much plain and fancy fuckery.

“Tell me, Pam. Please. I’ll listen and not get angry.”

“Getting past that, are you? Give me a second.” There was a clunk as the phone went down, probably on the kitchen counter. For a moment I heard the distant babble of the TV and then it was gone. When she came back she said, “All right, now I can hear myself think.” There was another mighty honk as she blew her nose once more. When she started talking again, she was composed, with no hint of tears in her voice.

“I asked Myra to call me when he got back home — Myra Devorkian, who lives across the street from him. I told her I was worried about his state of mind. No reason to keep that much to myself, was there?”

“No.”

“And bango! Myra said she’d been worried, too — she and Ben both. Said he was drinking too much, for one thing, and sometimes going in to his office with a ten o’clock shadow. Although she said he looked spiffy enough when he went off on his trip. Amazing how much neighbors see, even when they’re not really close friends. Ben and Myra didn’t know about… us, of course, but they knew damn well that Tom had been depressed.”

You think they didn’t know, I didn’t say.

“Anyway, long story short, I invited him over. There was a look in his eyes when he came in… this look… as if he thought maybe I intended to… you know…”

“Pick up where you left off,” I said.

“Am I telling this or are you?”

“Sorry.”

“Well, you’re right. Of course you’re right. I wanted to ask him into the kitchen for coffee, but we never got any farther than the hall. He wanted to kiss me.” She said this with a kind of defiant pride. “I let him… once… but when it became obvious that he wanted more, I pushed him back and said I had something to say. He said he knew it was bad from the way I looked, but nothing could hurt the way I hurt him when I said we couldn’t see each other any more. That’s men for you — and they say we’re the ones who know how to lay on the guilt.

“I said that just because we couldn’t go on seeing each other romantically didn’t mean I didn’t still care about him. Then I said several people had told me he was acting strange — not like himself — and I put that together with him not taking his antidepressant pills and began to worry. I said I thought he was planning to kill himself.”

She stopped for a moment, then went on.

“Before he came, I never meant to say it right out like that. But it’s funny — the minute he walked through the door I was almost positive, and when he kissed me I knew for a fact. His lips were cold. And dry. It was like kissing a corpse.”

“I’ll bet,” I said, and tried to scratch my right arm.

“His face tightened up and I mean really. Every line smoothed out, and his mouth almost disappeared. He asked me who put an idea like that in my head. And then, before I could even answer, he said it was bullshit. That’s the word he used, and it’s not a Tom Riley word at all.”

She was right about that. The Tom I’d known in the old days wouldn’t have said bullshit if he’d had a mouthful.

“I didn’t want to give him any names — certainly not yours, because he would have thought I was crazy, and not Illy’s, because I didn’t know what he might say to her if—”

“I told you, Illy had nothing to do with—”

“Be quiet. I’m almost through. I just said these people who were talking about how funny he was acting didn’t even know about the pills he’s been taking since the second divorce, and how he quit taking them last May. He calls them stupid-pills. I said if he thought he was keeping everything that was wrong with him under wraps, he was mistaken. Then I said that if he did something to himself, I’d tell his mother and brother it was suicide, and it would break their hearts. That was your idea, Edgar, and it worked. I hope you’re proud. That was when he broke my vase and called me a meddlesome cunt, see? He was as white as a sheet. I bet…” She swallowed. I could hear the click in her throat across all the miles. “I bet he had the way he was going to do it all planned out.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I said. “What do you think he’ll do now?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t.”

“Maybe I better call him.”

“Maybe you better not. Maybe finding out we talked would push him right over the edge.” With a touch of malice she added, “Then you’ll be the one losing sleep.”

It was a possibility I hadn’t thought of, but she had a point. Tom and Wireman were alike in one way: both needed help and I couldn’t drag them to it. An old bon mot bounced into my head, maybe apropos, maybe not: you can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think. Maybe Wireman could tell me who had said it. And when.

“So how did you know he meant to kill himself?” she asked. “I want to know, and by God you’re going to tell me before I hang up. I did my part and you’re going to tell me.”

There it was, the question she hadn’t asked before; she’d been too fixated on how I’d found out about her and Tom in the first place. Well, Wireman wasn’t the only one with sayings; my father had a few, as well. One was, when a lie won’t suffice, the truth will have to do.

“Since the accident, I’ve been painting,” I said. “You know that.”

“So?”

I told her about the sketch I’d drawn of her, Max from Palm Desert, and Tom Riley. About some of my Internet explorations into the world of phantom limb phenomena. And about seeing Tom Riley standing at the head of the stairs in what I supposed was now my studio, naked except for his pajama pants, one eye gone, replaced by a socket filled with congealed gore.

When I finished, there was a long silence. I didn’t break it. At last she said, in a new and cautious voice: “Do you really believe that, Edgar — any of it?”

“Wireman, the guy from down the beach…” I stopped, infuriated in spite of myself. And not because I didn’t have any words. Or not exactly. Was I going to tell her the guy from down the beach was an occasional telepath, so he believed me?

“What about the guy from down the beach, Edgar?” Her voice was calm and soft. I recognized it from the first month or so after my accident. It was her Edgar’s-Going-Section-Eight voice.

“Nothing,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“You need to call Dr. Kamen and tell him about this new idea of yours,” she said. “This idea that you’re psychic. Don’t e-mail him, call him. Please.”

“All right, Pam.” I felt very tired. Not to mention frustrated and pissed off.

“All right what?”

“All right, I’m hearing you. You’re coming in loud and clear. No misunderstandings whatsoever. Perish the goddam thought. All I wanted was to save Tom Riley’s life.”

To that she had no answer. And no rational explanation for what I had known about Tom, either. So that was where we left it. My thought as I hung up the phone was No good deed goes unpunished.

Maybe it was hers, too.

vi

I felt angry and lost. The dank, dreary weather didn’t help. I tried to paint and couldn’t. I went downstairs, took up one of my sketch-pads, and found myself reduced to the sort of doodles I’d done in my other life while taking phone calls: cartoon shmoos with big ears. I was about to toss the pad aside in disgust when the phone rang. It was Wireman.

“Are you coming this afternoon?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“I thought maybe with the rain—”

“I planned on creeping down in the car. I’m certainly not doing squat here.”

“Good. Just don’t plan on Poetry Hour. She’s in the fog.”

“Bad?”

“As bad as I’ve seen her. Disconnected. Drifting. Confused.” He took a deep breath and let it out. It was like listening to a gust of wind blow through the telephone. “Listen, Edgar, I hate to ask this, but could I leave her with you for awhile? Forty-five minutes, tops. The Baumgartens have been having trouble with the sauna — it’s the damned heater — and the guy coming out to fix it needs to show me a cut-off switch or something. And to sign his work-order, of course.”

“Not a problem.”

“You’re a prince. I’d kiss you, but for those sore-raddled lips of yours.”

“Fuck you very much, Wireman.”

“Yeah, everyone loves me, it’s my curse.”

“Pam called me. She talked to my friend Tom Riley.” Considering what the two of them had been up to it felt strange to be calling Tom a friend, but what the hell. “I think she took the air out of his suicide plan.”

“That’s good. So why do I hear lead in your voice?”

“She wanted to know how I knew.”

“Not how you knew she was bumping uglies with this guy, but—”

“How I diagnosed his suicidal depression from fifteen hundred miles away.”

“Ah! And what did you say?”

“Not having a good lawyer present, I was reduced to the truth.”

“And she thought you were un poco loco.”

“No, Wireman, she thought I was muy loco.”

“Does it matter?”

“No. But she’s going to brood about this — believe me when I say Pam’s U.S. Olympic Brooding Team material — and I’m afraid my good deed could explode in my younger daughter’s face.”

“Assuming your wife’s looking for someone to blame.”

“It’s a safe assumption. I know her.”

“That would be bad.”

“It’d rock Ilse’s world more than it deserves to be rocked. Tom’s been like an uncle to her and Melinda their whole lives.”

“Then you’ll have to convince your wife that you really saw what you saw, and your daughter had nothing to do with it.”

“How do I do that?”

“How about you tell her something about herself you have no way of knowing?”

“Wireman, you’re crazy! I can’t just make something like that happen!”

“How do you know? I have to get off the phone, amigo — by the sound, Miss Eastlake’s lunch just went on the floor. I’ll see you later?”

“Yeah,” I said. I was about to add goodbye, but he was already gone. I hung up, wondering where I had put Pam’s gardening gloves, the ones that said HANDS OFF. Maybe if I had those, Wireman’s idea might not turn out to be so crazy after all.

I looked for them all over the house and came up empty. Maybe I threw them away after making the Friends with Benefits drawing, but I couldn’t remember doing it. I can’t remember now. All I know is that I never saw them again.

vii

The room which Wireman and Elizabeth called the China Parlor was filled with a sad, subtropical winterlight that afternoon. The rain was heavier now, drumming against the walls and windows in waves, and a wind had gotten up, clattering through the palms surrounding El Palacio and sending shadows flying across the walls. For the first time since I’d been coming there, I could see no sense to the china figures on the long table; there were no tableaux, only a clutter of people, animals, and buildings. A unicorn and one of the blackface guys lay side by side next to the overturned schoolhouse. If there was a story on the table today, it was a disaster movie. Near the Tara-style mansion stood a Sweet Owen cookie-tin. Wireman had explained the routine I should follow if Elizabeth called for it.

The lady herself was in her wheelchair, slumped a bit sideways, vacantly overseeing the disheveltry on her play-table, which was usually so neatly kept. She was wearing a blue dress that almost matched the enormous blue Chuck Taylors on her feet. Her slump had stretched the boat neck of the dress into a lopsided gawp that revealed an ivory-colored slip-strap. I found myself wondering who had dressed her that morning, she or Wireman.

She spoke rationally at first, calling me by my correct name and enquiring after my health. She said goodbye to Wireman when he left for the Baumgartens’ and asked him to please wear a hat and take an umbrella. All that was good. But when I brought her her snack from the kitchen fifteen minutes later, there had been a change. She was looking into the corner and I heard her murmur, “Go back, go back, Tessie, you don’t belong here. And make the big boy go away.”

Tessie. I knew that name. I used my thinking-sideways technique, looking for associations, and found one: a newspaper headline reading THEY ARE GONE. Tessie had been one of Elizabeth’s twin sisters. Wireman had told me that. I heard him saying The presumption is they drowned, and a chill like a knife slipped into my side.

“Bring me that,” she said, pointing to the cookie-tin, and I did. From her pocket she drew a figurine wrapped in a hankie. She took the lid off the tin, gave me a look that combined slyness and confusion in a way that was hard to look at, then popped the figure inside. It made a soft hollow bonk. She fumbled the lid back on, pushing my hand away when I tried to help. Then she handed it to me.

“Do you know what to do with this?” she asked. “Did… did…” I could see her struggling. The word was there, but dancing just out of reach. Mocking her. I could give it to her, but I remembered how furious it made me when people did that, and waited. “Did him tell you what to do with it?”

“Yes.”

“Then what are you waiting for? Take the bitch.”

I carried the tin up one side of the tennis court to the little pond. The fish were jumping at the surface, a lot more excited by the rain than I was. There was a little pile of stones beside the bench, just as Wireman had said there would be. I tossed one in (“You might not think she could hear that, but her ears are very sharp,” Wireman had told me), being careful to avoid beaning one of the carp. Then I took the tin, with the figurine still inside, back into the house. But not into the China Parlor. I went into the kitchen, removed the lid, and pulled out the wrapped figure. This hadn’t been in Wireman’s set of contingency instructions, but I was curious.

It was a china woman, but the face had been chipped away. There was only a ragged blank where it had been.

“Who’s there?” Elizabeth shrieked, making me jump. I almost dropped the creepy little thing on the floor, where it surely would have shattered on the tiles.

“Just me, Elizabeth,” I called back, laying the figure on the counter.

“Edmund? Or Edgar, or whatever your name is?”

“Right.” I went back into the parlor.

“Did you take care of that business of mine?”

“Yes, ma’am, I sure did.”

“Have I had my snack yet?”

“Yes.”

“All right.” She sighed.

“Do you want something else? I’m sure I could—”

“No thanks, hon. I’m sure the train will be here soon, and you know I don’t like to travel on a full stomach. I always end up in one of the backwards seats and with food in my stomach I should certainly be train-sick. Have you seen my tin, my Sweet Owen tin?”

“I think it was in the kitchen. Should I bring it?”

“Not on such a wet day,” she said. “I thought I’d have you throw her in the pond, the pond would do, but I’ve changed my mind. It seems unnecessary on such a wet day. The quality of mercy is not strained, you know. It droppeth like the gentle rain.”

“From heaven,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah.” She flapped her hand as if that part were of no matter.

“Why don’t you arrange your chinas, Elizabeth? They’re all mixed up today.”

She cast a glance at the table, then looked at the window when an especially strong gust of wind slapped it with rain. “Fuck,” she said. “I’m so fucking confused.” And then, with a spite I would not have guessed she had in her: “They all died and left me to this.”

I was the last one to be repulsed by her lapse into vulgarity; I understood it too well. Maybe the quality of mercy isn’t strained, there are millions of us who live and die by the idea, but… we have things like this waiting. Yes.

She said, “He never should have got that thing, but he didn’t know.”

“What thing?”

“What thing,” she agreed, and nodded. “I want the train. I want to get out of here before the big boy comes.”

After that we both lapsed into silence. Elizabeth closed her eyes and appeared to doze off in her wheelchair.

For something to do, I got out of my own chair, which would have looked at home in a gentlemen’s club, and approached the table. I plucked up a china girl and boy, looked at them, then put them aside. I scratched absently at the arm that wasn’t there, studying the senseless litter before me. There had to be at least a hundred figures on the polished length of oak. Maybe two hundred. Among them was a china woman with an old-fashioned cap on — a milkmaid’s cap, I thought — but I didn’t want her, either. The cap was wrong, and besides, she was too young. I found another woman with long painted hair, and she was better. That hair was a little too long and a little too dark, but —

No it wasn’t, because Pam had been to the beauty parlor, sometimes known as the Midlife Crisis Fountain of Youth.

I held the china figure, wishing I had a house to put her in and a book for her to read.

I tried to switch the figurine to my right hand — perfectly natural because my right hand was there, I could feel it — and it fell to the table with a clack. It didn’t break, but Elizabeth’s eyes opened. “Dick! Was that the train? Did it whistle? Did it cry?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Why don’t you nap a little?”

“Oh, you’ll find it on the second floor landing,” she said as if I had asked her something else, and closed her eyes again. “Call me when the train comes. I’m so sick of this station. And watch for the big boy, that cuntlicker could be anywhere.”

“I will,” I said. My right arm itched horribly. I reached into my back pocket, hoping my notebook was there. It wasn’t. I’d left it on the kitchen counter back at Big Pink. But that made me think of the Palacio kitchen. There was a notepad for messages on the counter where I’d left the tin. I hurried back, snatched up the pad, stuck it between my teeth, then almost ran back to the China Parlor, already pulling my Uni-ball pen from my breast pocket. I sat down in my wingback chair and began to sketch the china doll rapidly while the rain whipped the windows and Elizabeth sat leaning in her wheelchair across the table from me, dozing with her mouth ajar. The wind-driven shadows of the palms flew around the walls like bats.

It didn’t take long, and I realized something as I worked: I was pouring the itch out through the tip of the pen, decanting it onto the page. The woman in my drawing was the china figure, but she was also Pam. The woman was Pam, but she was also the china figure. Her hair was longer than when I’d last seen her, and spread out on her shoulders. She was sitting in

(the BURN, the CHAR)

a chair. What chair? A rocking chair. Hadn’t been any such item in our house when I left it, but there was now. Something was on the table beside her. I didn’t know what it was at first, but it emerged from the tip of the pen and became a box with printing across the top. Sweet Owen? Did it say Sweet Owen? No, it said Grandma’s. My Uni-ball put something on the table beside the box. An oatmeal cookie. Pam’s favorite. While I was looking at it, the pen drew the book in Pam’s hand. Couldn’t read the title because the angle was wrong. By now my pen was adding lines between the window and her feet. She’d said it was snowing, but now the snow was over. The lines were meant to be sunrays.

I thought the picture was finished, but apparently there were two more things. My pen moved to the far left side of the paper and added the television, quick as a flash. New television, flat screen like Elizabeth’s. And below it —

The pen finished and fell away. The itch was gone. My fingers were stiff. On the other side of the long table, Elizabeth’s doze had deepened into real sleep. Once she might have been young and beautiful. Once she might have been some young man’s dream baby. Now she was snoring with her mostly toothless mouth pointed at the ceiling. If there’s a God, I think He needs to try a little harder.

viii

I had seen a phone in the library as well as the kitchen, and the library was closer to the China Parlor. I decided neither Wireman nor Elizabeth would begrudge me a long-distance call to Minnesota. I picked up the phone, then paused with it curled to my chest. On a wall next to the suit of armor, highlighted by several cunning little pin-spots in the ceiling, was a display of antique weapons: a long-barreled muzzle-loader that looked of Revolutionary War vintage, a flintlock pistol, a derringer that would have been at home in a riverboat gambler’s boot, a Winchester carbine. Mounted above the carbine was the gadget Elizabeth had been holding in her lap the day Ilse and I had seen her. To either side, making an inverted V, were four loads for the thing. You couldn’t call them arrows; they were too short. Harpoonlets still seemed like the right word. Their tips were very bright, and looked very sharp.

I thought, You could do some real damage with a thing like that. Then I thought: My father was a skin diver.

I pushed it out of my mind and called what used to be home.

ix

“Hi, Pam, it’s me again.”

“I don’t want to talk to you any more, Edgar. We finished what we have to say.”

“Not quite. But this will be short. I have an old lady to look after. She’s sleeping now, but I don’t like to leave her long.”

Pam, curious in spite of herself: “What old lady?”

“Her name’s Elizabeth Eastlake. She’s in her mid-eighties, and she’s got a good start on Alzheimer’s. Her principal caregiver is taking care of an electrical problem with someone’s sauna, and I’m helping out.”

“Did you want a gold star to paste on the Helping Others page of your workbook?”

“No, I called to convince you I’m not crazy.” I had brought in my drawing. Now I crooked the handset between my shoulder and my ear so I could pick it up.

“Why do you care?”

“Because you’re convinced that all this started with Ilse, and it didn’t.”

“My God, you’re unbelievable! If she called from Santa Fe and said she’d broken a shoelace, you’d fly out there to take her a new one!”

“I also don’t like you thinking that I’m down here going insane when I’m not. So… are you listening?”

Only silence from the other end, but silence was good enough. She was listening.

“You’re ten or maybe fifteen minutes out of the shower. I think that because your hair is down on the back of your housecoat. I guess you still don’t like the hairdryer.”

“How—”

“I don’t know how. You were sitting in a rocking chair when I called. You must have gotten it since the divorce. Reading a book and eating a cookie. A Grandma’s oatmeal cookie. The sun’s out now, and it’s coming in the window. You have a new television, the kind with a flat screen.” I paused. “And a cat. You got a cat. It’s sleeping under the TV.”

Dead silence from her end. On my end the wind blew and the rain slapped the windows. I was about to ask her if she was there when she spoke again, in a dull voice that didn’t sound like Pam at all. I had thought she was done hurting my heart, but I was wrong. “Stop spying on me. If you ever loved me — stop spying on me.”

“Then stop blaming me,” I said in a hoarse, not-quite-breaking voice. Suddenly I remembered Ilse getting ready to go back to Brown, Ilse standing in the strong tropical sun outside the Delta terminal, looking up at me and saying, You deserve to get better. Sometimes I wonder if you really believe that. “What’s happened to me isn’t my fault. The accident wasn’t my fault and neither is this. I didn’t ask for it.”

She screamed, “Do you think I did?”

I closed my eyes, begging something, anything, to keep me from giving back anger for anger. “No, of course not.”

“Then leave me out of it! Stop calling me! Stop SCARING me!”

She hung up. I stood holding the phone to my ear. There was silence, then a loud click. It was followed by that distinctive Duma Key warbling hum. Today it sounded rather subaqueous. Maybe because of the rain. I hung the phone up and stood looking at the suit of armor. “I think that went very well, Sir Lancelot,” I said.

No reply, which was exactly what I deserved.

x

I crossed the plant-lined main hall to the doorway of the China Parlor, looked in at Elizabeth, and saw she was sleeping in the same head-cocked position. Her snores, which had earlier struck me as pathetic in their naked antiquity, were now actually comforting; otherwise, it would have been too easy to imagine her sitting there dead with her neck broken. I wondered if I should wake her, and decided to let her sleep. Then I glanced right, toward the wide main staircase, and thought of her saying Oh, you’ll find it on the second floor landing.

Find what?

Probably it had been just another bit of gibberish, but I had nothing better to do, so I walked down the hall that would have been a dogtrot in a humbler house — the rain tapping the glass ceiling — and then climbed the wide staircase. I stopped five risers from the top, staring, then slowly climbed the rest of the way. There was something, after all: an enormous black-and-white photograph in a frame of narrow banded gold. I asked Wireman later how a black-and-white from the nineteen-twenties could have been blown up to such a size — it had to have been at least five feet tall by four wide — with so little blurring. He said it had probably been taken with a Hasselblad, the finest non-digital camera ever made.

There were eight people in the photograph, standing on white sand with the Gulf of Mexico in the background. The man was tall and handsome and appeared to be in his mid-forties. He was wearing a black bathing singlet that consisted of a strap-style shirt and trunks that looked like the close-fitting underwear basketball players wear nowadays. Ranged on either side of him stood five girls, the oldest a ripe teenager, the youngest identical towheads that made me think of the Bobbsey Twins from my earliest adventures in reading. The twins were wearing identical bathing dresses with frilled skirts, and holding hands. In their free hands they clasped dangly-legged, apron-wearing Raggedy Ann dolls that made me think of Reba… and the dark yarn hair above the vacantly smiling faces of the twins’ dolls was surely RED. In the crook of one arm, the man — John Eastlake, I had no doubt — held girl number six, the toddler who would eventually become the snoring crone below me. Behind the white folks stood a young black woman of perhaps twenty-two, with her hair tied in a kerchief. She was holding a picnic basket, and judging from the way the not-inconsiderable muscles in her arms were bunched, it was heavy. Three bangled silver bracelets clung to one forearm.

Elizabeth was smiling and holding out her chubby little hands to whoever had taken this family portrait. No one else was smiling, although there might have been the ghost of one lurking around the corners of the man’s mouth; he had a mustache, and that made it hard to tell. The young black nanny looked positively grim.

In the hand not occupied with supporting the toddler, John Eastlake held two items. One was a skin diver’s facemask. The other was the harpoon pistol I had seen mounted on the wall of the library with the other weapons. The question, it seemed to me, was whether or not some rational Elizabeth had come out of the mental fog long enough to send me up here.

Before I could consider this further, the front door opened below me. “I’m back!” Wireman called. “Mission accomplished! Now who wants a drink?”