Duma Key

i

I got on the plane that brought me to Florida wearing a heavy duffle coat, and I wore it that morning when I limped down the beach from Big Pink to El Palacio de Asesinos. It was cold, with a stiff wind blowing in from the Gulf, where the water looked like broken steel under an empty sky. If I had known that was to be the last cold day I’d ever experience on Duma Key, I might have relished it… but probably not. I had lost my knack for suffering the cold gladly.

In any case, I hardly knew where I was. I had my canvas collection pouch slung over my shoulder, because carrying it when I was on the beach was now second nature, but I never put a single shell or bit of flotsam in it. I just plodded along, swinging my bad leg without really feeling it, listening to the wind whistle past my ears without really hearing it, and watching the peeps scurry in and out of the surf without really seeing them.

I thought: I killed him just as surely as I killed Monica Goldstein’s dog. I know that sounds like bullshit, but —

Only it didn’t sound like bullshit. It wasn’t bullshit.

I had stopped his breath.

ii

There was a glassed-in sunporch on the south side of El Palacio. It looked toward the tangles of tropical overgrowth in one direction and out at the metallic blue of the Gulf in the other. Elizabeth was seated there in her wheelchair, with a breakfast tray attached to the arms. For the first time since I’d met her, she was strapped in. The tray, littered with curds of scrambled egg and pieces of toast, looked like the aftermath of a toddler’s meal. Wireman had even been feeding her juice from a sippy cup. The small table-model television in the corner was tuned to Channel 6. It was still All Candy, All of the Time. He was dead and Channel 6 was beating off on the body. He undoubtedly deserved no better, but it was still gruesome.

“I think she’s finished,” Wireman said, “but maybe you’d sit with her while I scramble you a couple and burn the toast.”

“Happy to, but you don’t have to go to any trouble on my part. I worked late and had a bite afterward.” A bite. Sure. I’d spied the empty mixing bowl in the kitchen sink on my way out.

“It’s no trouble. How’s your leg this morning?”

“Not bad.” It was the truth. “Et tu, Brute?”

“I’m all right, thanks.” But he looked tired; his left eye was still red and drippy. “This won’t take five minutes.”

Elizabeth was almost completely AWOL. When I offered her the sippy cup, she took a little and then turned her head away. Her face looked ancient and bewildered in the unforgiving winterlight. I thought that we made quite a trio: the senile woman, the ex-lawyer with the slug in his brain, and the amputee ex-contractor. All with battle-scars on the right side of our heads. On TV, Candy Brown’s lawyer — now ex-lawyer, I guess — was calling for a full investigation. Elizabeth perhaps spoke for all of Sarasota County on this issue by closing her eyes, slumping down against the restraining strap so that her considerable breastworks pushed up, and going to sleep.

Wireman came back in with eggs enough for both of us, and I ate with surprising gusto. Elizabeth began to snore. One thing was certain; if she had sleep apnea, she wouldn’t die young.

“Missed a spot on your ear, muchacho,” Wireman said, and tapped the lobe of his own with his fork.

“Huh?”

“Paint. On your buggerlug.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be scrubbing it off everywhere for a couple of days. I splashed it around pretty good.”

“What were you painting in the middle of the night?”

“I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

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.

I began to draw. I had meant only to draw his brain intact — no slug — but it ended up being more than that. I went on and added the water, you see, because the picture seemed to demand it. Or my missing arm. Or maybe they were the same. It was just a suggestion of the Gulf, but it was there, and it was enough to be successful, because I really was a talented sonofabitch. It only took twenty minutes, and when I was done I had drawn a human brain floating on the Gulf of Mexico. It was, in a way, way cool.

It was also horrifying. It isn’t a word I want to use about my own work, but it’s unavoidable. As I took the X-ray down and compared it to my picture — slug in the science, no slug in the art — I realized something I perhaps should have seen much earlier. Certainly after I started the Girl and Ship series. What I was doing didn’t work just because it played on the nerve-endings; it worked because people knew — on some level they really did know — that what they were looking at had come from a place beyond talent. The feeling those Duma pictures conveyed was horror, barely held in check. Horror waiting to happen. Inbound on rotted sails.

v

I was hungry again. I made myself a sandwich and ate it in front of my computer. I was catching up with The Hummingbirds — they had become quite the little obsession with me — when the phone rang. It was Wireman.

“My headache’s gone,” he said.

“Do you always say hello like that?” I asked. “Can I maybe expect your next call to begin ‘I just evacuated my bowels’?”

“Don’t make light of this. My head has ached ever since I woke up on the dining room floor after shooting myself. Sometimes it’s just background noise and sometimes it rings like New Year’s Eve in hell, but it always aches. And then, half an hour ago, it just quit. I was making myself a cup of coffee and it quit. I couldn’t believe it. At first I thought I was dead. I’ve been walking around on eggshells, waiting for it to come back and really wallop me with Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, and it hasn’t.”

“Lennon-McCartney,” I said. “1968. And don’t tell me I’m wrong on that one.”

He didn’t tell me anything. Not for a long time. But I could hear him breathing. Then, at last, he said: “Did you do something, Edgar? Tell Wireman. Tell your Daddy.”

I thought about telling him I hadn’t done a damn thing. Then I considered him checking his X-ray folder and finding one was gone. I also considered my sandwich, wounded but far from dead. “What about your vision? Any change there?”

“Nope, the left lamp is still out. And according to Principe, it ain’t coming back. Not in this life.”

Shit. But hadn’t part of me known the job wasn’t done? This morning’s diddling with Sharpie and Cardboard had been nothing like the previous night’s full-blown orgasm. I was tired. I didn’t want to do anything more today but sit and stare at the Gulf. Watch the sun go down in the caldo largo without painting the fucking thing. Only this was Wireman. Wireman, goddammit.

“You still there, muchacho?”

“Yes,” I said. “Can you get Annmarie Whistler for a few hours later today?”

“Why? What for?”

“So you can sit for your portrait,” I said. “If your eye’s still out, I guess I need the actual Wireman.”

“You did do something.” His voice was low. “Did you paint me already? From memory?”

“Check the folder with your X-rays in it,” I said. “Be here around four. I want to take a nap first. And bring something to eat. Painting makes me hungry.” I thought of amending that to a certain kind of painting, and didn’t. I thought I’d said enough.

vi

I wasn’t sure I’d be able to nap, but I did. The alarm roused me at three o’clock. I went up to Little Pink and considered my store of blank canvases. The biggest was five feet long by three wide, and this was the one I chose. I pulled my easel’s support-strut to full extension and set up the blank canvas longways. That blank shape, like a white coffin on end, touched off a little flutter of excitement in my stomach and down my right arm. I flexed those fingers. I couldn’t see them, but I could feel them opening and closing. I could feel the nails digging into the palm. They were long, those nails. They had grown since the accident and there was no way to cut them.

vii

I was cleaning my brushes when Wireman came striding up the beach in his shambling, bearlike gait, the peeps fleeing before him. He was wearing jeans and a sweater, no coat. The temperatures had begun to moderate.

He hollered a hello at the front door and I yelled for him to come on upstairs. He got most of the way and saw the big canvas on the easel. “Holy shit, amigo, when you said portrait, I got the idea we were talking about a headshot.”

“That’s sort of what I’m planning,” I said, “but I’m afraid it’s not going to be that realistic. I’ve already done a little advance work. Take a look.”

The pilfered X-ray and Sharpie sketch were on the bottom shelf of my workbench. I handed them to Wireman, then sat down again in front of my easel. The canvas waiting there was no longer completely blank and white. Three-quarters of the way up was a faintly drawn rectangle. I had made it by holding the shirt-cardboard against the canvas and running a No. 2 pencil around the edge.

Wireman said nothing for almost two minutes. He kept looking back and forth between the X-ray and the picture I had drawn from it. Then, in a voice almost too low to hear: “What are we talking about here, muchacho? What are we saying?”

“We’re not,” I said. “Not yet. Hand me the shirt-cardboard.”

“Is that what this is?”

“Yes, and be careful. I need it. We need it. The X-ray doesn’t matter anymore.”

He passed me the shirt-cardboard picture with a hand that wasn’t quite steady.

“Now go over to the wall where the finished pictures are. Look at the one on the far left. In the corner.”

He went over, looked, and recoiled. “Holy shit! When did you do this?”

“Last night.”

He picked it up and turned it toward the light streaming through the big window. He looked at Tina, who was looking up at the mouthless, noseless Candy Brown.

“No mouth, no nose, Brown dies, case closed,” Wireman said. His voice was no more than a whisper. “Jesus Christ, I’d hate to be the maricón de playa who kicked sand in your face.” He set the picture back down and stepped away from it… carefully, like it might explode if it were joggled. “What got into you? What possessed you?”

“Goddam good question,” I said. “I almost didn’t show you. But… considering what we’re up to here…”

“What are we up to here?”

“Wireman, you know.”

He staggered a little bit, as if he were the one with the bad leg. And he had come over sweaty. His face shone with it. His left eye was still red, but maybe not as red. Of course that might only have been the Department of Wishful Thinking. “Can you do it?”

“I can try,” I said. “If you want me to.”

He nodded, then stripped off his sweater. “Go for it.”

“I need you by the window, so the light falls on your face nice and strong as the sun starts going down. There’s a stool in the kitchen you can sit on. How long have you got Annmarie for?”

“She said she could stay until eight, and she’ll give Miss Eastlake dinner. I brought us lasagna. I’ll put it in your oven at five-thirty.”

“Good.” By the time the lasagna was ready, the light would be gone, anyway. I could take some digital photos of Wireman, clip them to the easel, and work from those. I was a fast worker, but I already knew this was going to be a longer process — days, at least.

When Wireman came back upstairs with the stool, he stopped dead. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Cutting a hole in a perfectly good canvas.”

“Go to the head of the class.” I laid aside the cut rectangle, then picked up the cardboard insert with the floating brain on it. I went behind the easel. “Help me glue this in place.”

“When did you figure all this out, vato?”

“I didn’t,” I said.

“You didn’t?” He was looking at me through the canvas, like a thousand lookie-loos I’d seen peering through a thousand peepholes at construction sites in my other life.

“Nope. Something’s kind of telling me as I go along. Come around to this side.”

With Wireman’s help, the rest of the prep only took a couple of minutes. He blocked the rectangle with the shirt-cardboard. I fished a little tube of Elmer’s Glue from my breast pocket, and began fixing it in place. When I came back around, it was perfect. Looked that way to me, anyway.

I pointed at Wireman’s forehead. “This is your brain,” I said. Then I pointed at my easel. “This is your brain on canvas.”

He looked blank.

“It’s a joke, Wireman.”

“I don’t get it,” he said.

viii

We ate like football players that night. I asked Wireman if he was seeing any better and he shook his head regretfully. “Things are still mighty black on the left side of my world, Edgar. Wish I could tell you different, but I can’t.”

I played him Nannuzzi’s message. Wireman laughed and pumped his fist. It was hard not to be touched by his pleasure, which bordered on glee. “You’re on your way, muchacho — this is your other life for sure. Can’t wait to see you on the cover of Time.” He held his hands up, as if framing a cover.

“There’s only one thing about it that worries me,” I said… and then had to laugh. Actually a lot of things about it worried me, including the fact that I had not the slightest idea what I was letting myself in for. “My daughter may want to come. The one who visited me down here.”

“What’s wrong with that? Most men would be delighted to have their daughters watch them turn pro. You going to eat that last piece of lasagna?”

We split it. Being of artistic temperament, I took the bigger half.

“I’d love her to come. But your boss-lady says Duma Key is no place for daughters, and I sort of believe her.”

“My boss-lady has Alzheimer’s, and it’s really starting to bite. The bad news about that is she doesn’t know her ass from her elbow anymore. The good news is she meets new people every day. Including me.”

“She said the thing about daughters twice, and she wasn’t fogged out either time.”

“And maybe she’s right,” he said. “Or possibly it’s just a bee in Miss Eastlake’s bonnet, based on the fact that a couple of her sisters died here when she was four.”

“Ilse vomited down the side of my car. When we got back here she was still so sick she could hardly walk.”

“She probably just ate the wrong thing on top of too much sun. Look — you don’t want to take a chance and I respect that. So what you’re going to do is put both daughters up in a good hotel where there’s twenty-four-hour room service and the concierge sucks up harder than an Oreck. I suggest the Ritz-Carlton.”

“Both? Melinda won’t be able to—”

He took a last bite of his lasagna and put it aside. “You ain’t looking at this straight, muchacho, but Wireman, grateful bastard that he is—”

“You’ve got nothing to be grateful for yet—”

“ — will set you straight. Because I can’t stand to see a bunch of needless worries steal away your happiness. And Jesus-Krispies, you should be happy. Do you know how many people there are on the west coast of Florida who’d kill for a show on Palm Avenue?”

“Wireman, did you just say Jesus-Krispies?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“They haven’t exactly offered me a show yet.”

“They will. They ain’t bringing a sample contract out here to the willi-wags just for shits and giggles. So listen to me, now. Are you listening?”

“Sure.”

“Once this show is scheduled — and it will be — you’re going to do what any artist new on the scene would be expected to do: publicity. Interviews, starting with Mary Ire and going on from there to the newspapers and Channel 6. If they want to play up your missing arm, so much the better.” He did the framing thing with his hands again. “Edgar Freemantle Bursts Upon the Suncoast Art Scene Like a Phoenix from the Smoking Ashes of Tragedy!”

“Smoke this, amigo,” I said, and gripped my crotch. But I couldn’t help smiling.

Wireman took no notice of my vulgarity. He was on a roll. “That missing brazo of yours gonna be golden.”

“Wireman, you are one cynical mongrel.”

He took this for the compliment it sort of was. He nodded and waved it aside magnanimously. “I’ll serve as your lawyer. You’re going to pick the paintings; Nannuzzi consults. Nannuzzi sets the show arrangement; you consult. Sound about right?”

“I guess so, yeah. If that’s how it’s done.”

“It’s how this is going to be done. And, Edgar — last but very far from least — you’re going to call everyone you care for and invite them to your show.”

“But—”

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “Everyone. Your shrink, your ex, both daughters, this guy Tom Riley, the woman who rehabbed you—”

“Kathi Green,” I said, bemused. “Wireman, Tom won’t come. No way in hell. Neither will Pam. And Lin’s in France. With strep, for God’s sake.”

Wireman took no notice. “You mentioned a lawyer—”

“William Bozeman the Third. Bozie.”

“Invite him. Oh, your mom and dad, of course. Your sisters and brothers.”

“My parents are dead and I was an only child. Bozie…” I nodded. “Bozie would come. But don’t call him that, Wireman. Not to his face.”

“Call another lawyer Bozie? Do you think I’m stupid?” He considered. “I shot myself in the head and didn’t manage to kill myself, so you better not answer that.”

I wasn’t paying much attention, because I was thinking. For the first time I understood that I could throw a coming-out party for my other life… and people might show up. The idea was both thrilling and daunting.

“They might all come, you know,” he said. “Your ex, your globe-trotting daughter, and your suicidal accountant. Think of it — a mob of Michiganders.”

“Minnesotans.”

He shrugged and flipped up his hands, indicating they were both the same to him. Pretty snooty for a guy from Nebraska.

“I could charter a plane,” I said. “A Gulfstream. Take a whole floor at the Ritz-Carlton. Blow a big wad. Why the fuck not?”

“That’s right,” he said, and snickered. “Really do the starving artist bit.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Put out a sign in the window. ‘WILL WORK FOR TRUFFLES.’”

Then we were both laughing.

ix

After our plates and glasses were in the dishwasher, I led him back upstairs, but just long enough so I could take half a dozen digital photos of him — big, charmless close-ups. I have taken a few good photographs in my life, but always by accident. I hate cameras, and the cameras seem to know it. When I was done, I told him he could go home and spell Annmarie. It was dark outside, and I offered him my Malibu.

“Gonna walk. The air will be good for me.” Then he pointed at the canvas. “Can I take a look?”

“Actually, I’d rather you didn’t.”

I thought he might protest, but he just nodded and went back downstairs, almost trotting. There was a new spring in his step — that was surely not my imagination. At the door he said, “Call Nannuzzi in the morning. Don’t let the grass grow under your heels.”

“All right. And you call me if anything changes with your…” I gestured at his face with my paint-stippled hand.

He grinned. “You’ll be the first to know. For the time being, I can settle for being headache-free.” The grin faded. “Are you sure it won’t come back?”

“I’m sure of nothing.”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s the human condition, ain’t it? But I thank you for trying.” And before I knew he was going to do it, he had taken my hand and kissed the back of it. A gentle kiss in spite of the bristles on his upper lip. Then he told me adiós and was gone into the dark and the only sound was the sigh of the Gulf and the whispering conversation of the shells under the house. Then there was another sound. The phone was ringing.

x

It was Ilse, calling to chat. Yes, her classes were going fine, yes, she felt well — great, in fact — yes, she was calling her mother once a week and staying in touch with Lin by e-mail. In Ilse’s opinion, Lin’s strep was probably so much self-diagnosed bullcrap. I told her I was stunned by her generosity of feeling and she laughed.

I told her there was a possibility that I might be showing my work at a gallery in Sarasota, and she shrieked so loudly I had to hold the phone away from my ear.

“Daddy, that’s wonderful! When? Can I come?”

“Sure, if you want to,” I said. “I’m going to invite everybody.” This was a decision I hadn’t entirely made until I heard myself telling her. “We’re thinking mid-April.”

“Shit! That’s when I was planning to catch up with The Hummingbirds tour.” She paused. Thinking. Then: “I can work them both in. A little tour of my own.”

“You think?”

“Yes, of course. You just give me the date and I am there.”

Tears pricked the backs of my eyelids. I don’t know what it’s like to have sons, but I’m sure it can’t be as rewarding — as plain nice — as having daughters. “I appreciate that, hon. Do you think… is there any possibility your sister might come?”

“You know what, I think she will,” Ilse said, “She’ll be crazy to see what you’re doing that’s got people in the know so excited. Will you get written up?”

“My friend Wireman thinks so. One-armed artist, and all that.”

“But you’re just good, Daddy!”

I thanked her, then moved on to Carson Jones. Asked what she heard from him.

“He’s fine,” she said.

“Really?”

“Sure — why?”

“I don’t know. I just thought I heard a little cloud in your voice.”

She laughed ruefully. “You know me too well. The fact is, they’re SRO everyplace they play now — word’s getting around. The tour was supposed to end on May fifteenth because four of the singers have other commitments, but the booking agent found three new ones. And Bridget Andreisson, who’s become quite the star, got them to push back the start of her understudy pastorate in Arizona. Which was lucky.” Her voice flattened as she said this last, and became the voice of some adult woman I didn’t know. “So instead of finishing in mid-May, the tour has been extended to the end of June, with dates in the Midwest and a final concert at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Some bigga-time, huh?” This was my phrase, used when Illy and Lin were little girls putting on what they called “ballet super-shows” in the garage, but I couldn’t recall ever saying it in that sad tone of not-quite-sarcasm.

“Are you worried about your guy and this Bridget?”

“No!” she said at once, and laughed. “He says she has a great voice and he’s lucky to be singing with her — they have two songs now instead of just one — but she’s shallow and stuck-up. Also, he wishes she’d pop some Certs before he has to, you know, share a mike with her.”

I waited.

“Okay,” Ilse said at last.

“Okay what?”

“Okay, I’m worried.” A pause. “A little bit, because he’s with her on a bus every day and on stage with her every night and I’m here.” Another, longer pause. Then: “And he doesn’t sound the same when I talk to him on the phone. Almost… but not quite.”

“That could be your imagination.”

“Yes. It could. And in any case, if something’s going on — nothing is, I’m sure nothing is — but if something is, better now rather than after… you know, than after we…”

“Yes,” I said, thinking that was so adult it hurt. I remembered finding the picture of them at the roadside stand with their arms around each other, and touching it with my missing right hand. Then rushing up to Little Pink with Reba clamped between my stump and my right side. A long time ago, that seemed. I love you, Punkin! “Smiley” had written, but the picture I’d done that day with my Venus colored pencils (they also seemed a long time ago) had somehow mocked the idea of enduring love: the little girl in her little tennis dress, looking out at the enormous Gulf. Tennis balls all around her feet. More floating in on the incoming waves.

That girl had been Reba, but also Ilse, and… who else? Elizabeth Eastlake?

The idea came out of nowhere, but I thought yes.

The water runs faster now, Elizabeth had said. Soon come the rapids. Do you feel that?

I felt it.

“Daddy, are you there?”

“Yes,” I said again. “Honey, be good to yourself, okay? And try not to get too spun up. My friend down here says in the end we wear out our worries. I sort of believe that.”

“You always make me feel better,” she said. “That’s why I call. I love you, Daddy.”

“I love you too.”

“How many bunches?”

How many years since she’d asked that? Twelve? Fourteen? It didn’t matter, I remembered the answer.

“A million and one for under your pillow,” I said.

Then I said goodbye and hung up and thought that if Carson Jones hurt my daughter, I’d kill him. The thought made me smile a little, wondering how many fathers had had the same thought and made the same promise. But of all those fathers, I might be the only one who could kill a heedless, daughter-hurting suitor with a few strokes of a paintbrush.

xi

Dario Nannuzzi and one of his partners, Jimmy Yoshida, came out the very next day. Yoshida was a Japanese-American Dorian Gray. Getting out of Nannuzzi’s Jaguar in my driveway, dressed in faded straight-leg jeans and an even more faded Rihanna Pon De Replay tee-shirt, long black hair blowing in the breeze off the Gulf, he looked eighteen. By the time he got to the end of the walk, he looked twenty-eight. When he shook my hand, up close and personal, I could see the lines tattooed around his eyes and mouth and put him somewhere in his late forties.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said. “The gallery is still buzzing over your visit. Mary Ire has been back three times to ask when we’re going to sign you up.”

“Come on in,” I said. “Our friend down the beach — Wireman — has called me twice already to make sure I don’t sign anything without him.”

Nannuzzi smiled. “We’re not in the business of cheating artists, Mr. Freemantle.”

“Edgar, remember? Would you like some coffee?”

“Look first,” Jimmy Yoshida said. “Coffee later.”

I took a breath. “Fine. Come on upstairs.”

xii

I’d covered my portrait of Wireman (which was still little more than a vague shape with a brain floating in it three-quarters of the way up), and my picture of Tina Garibaldi and Candy Brown had gone bye-bye in the downstairs closet (along with Friends with Benefits and the red-robe figure), but I had left my other stuff out. There was now enough to lean against two walls and part of a third; forty-one canvases in all, including five versions of Girl and Ship.

When their silence was more than I could bear, I broke it. “Thanks for the tip on that Liquin stuff. It’s great. What my daughters would call da bomb.”

Nannuzzi seemed not to have heard. He was going in one direction, Yoshida in the other. Neither asked about the big, sheet-draped canvas on the easel; I guessed that doing that might be considered poor etiquette in their world. Beneath us, the shells murmured. Somewhere, far off, a Jet-ski blatted. My right arm itched, but faint and very deep, telling me it wanted to paint but could wait — it knew the time would come. Before the sun went down. I’d paint and at first I would consult the photographs clipped to the sides of the easel and then something else would take over and the shells would grind louder and the chrome of the Gulf would change color, first to peach and then to pink and then to orange and finally to RED, and it would be well, it would be well, all manner of things would be well.

Nannuzzi and Yoshida met back by the stairs leading down from Little Pink. They conferred briefly, then came toward me. From the hip pocket of his jeans, Yoshida produced a business-size envelope with the words SAMPLE CONTRACT/SCOTO GALLERY neatly typed on the front. “Here,” he said. “Tell Mr. Wireman we’ll make any reasonable accommodation in order to represent your work.”

“Really?” I asked. “Are you sure?”

Yoshida didn’t smile. “Yes, Edgar. We’re sure.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you both.” I looked past Yoshida to Nannuzzi, who was smiling. “Dario, I really appreciate this.”

Dario looked around at the paintings, gave a little laugh, then lifted his hands and dropped them. “I think we should be the ones expressing appreciation, Edgar.”

“I’m impressed by their clarity,” Yoshida said. “And their… I don’t know, but… I think… lucidity. These images carry the viewer along without drowning him. The other thing that amazes me is how fast you’ve worked. You’re unbottling.”

“I don’t know that word.”

“Artists who begin late are sometimes said to unbottle,” Nannuzzi said. “It’s as if they’re trying to make up for lost time. Still… forty paintings in a matter of months… of weeks, really…”

And you didn’t even see the one that killed the child-murderer, I thought.

Dario laughed without much humor. “Try not to let the place burn down, all right?”

“Yes — that would be bad. Assuming we make a deal, could I store some of my work at your gallery?”

“Of course,” Nannuzzi said.

“That’s great.” Thinking I’d like to sign as soon as possible no matter what Wireman thought of the contract, just to get these pictures off the Key… and it wasn’t fire I was worried about. Unbottling might be fairly common among artists who began later in life, but forty-one paintings on Duma Key were at least three dozen too many. I could feel their live presence in this room, like electricity in a bell jar.

Of course, Dario and Jimmy felt it, too. That was part of what made those fucking pictures so effective. They were catching.

xiii

I joined Wireman and Elizabeth for coffee at the end of El Palacio’s boardwalk the next morning. I was down to nothing but aspirin to get going, and my Great Beach Walks were now a pleasure instead of a challenge. Especially since the weather had warmed up.

Elizabeth was in her wheelchair with the remains of a breakfast pastry scattered across her tray. It looked to me as if he’d also managed to get some juice and half a cup of coffee into her. She was staring out at the Gulf with an expression of stern disapproval, looking this morning more like Captain Bligh of HMS Bounty than a Mafia don’s daughter.

“Buenos días, mi amigo,” Wireman said. And to Elizabeth: “It’s Edgar, Miss Eastlake. He came for sevens. Want to say hello?”

“Piss shit head rat,” she said. I think. In any case, she said it to the Gulf, which was still dark blue and mostly asleep.

“Still not so good, I take it,” I said.

“No. She’s gone down before and come back up, but she’s never gone down so far.”

“I still haven’t brought her any of my pictures to look at.”

“No point right now.” He handed me a cup of black coffee. “Here. Get your bad self around this.”

I passed him the envelope with the sample contract in it. As Wireman pulled it out, I turned to Elizabeth. “Would you like some poems later today?” I asked her.

Nothing. She only looked out at the Gulf with that stony frown: Captain Bligh about to order someone strapped to the foremast and flogged raw.

For no reason at all, I asked: “Was your father a skin diver, Elizabeth?”

She turned her head slightly and cut her ancient eyes in my direction. Her upper lip lifted in a dog’s grin. There was a moment — it was brief, but seemed long — when I felt another person looking at me. Or not a person at all. An entity that was wearing Elizabeth Eastlake’s old, doughy body like a sock. My right hand clenched briefly, and once more I felt nonexistent, too-long fingernails bite into a nonexistent palm. Then she looked back at the Gulf, simultaneously feeling across the tray until her fingers happened on a piece of the breakfast pastry, and I was calling myself an idiot who had to stop letting his nerves get the best of him. There were undoubtedly strange forces at work here, but not every shadow was a ghost.

“He was,” Wireman said absently, unfolding the contract. “John Eastlake was a regular Ricou Browning — you know, the guy who played the Creature from the Black Lagoon back in the fifties.”

“Wireman, you’re an artesian well of useless information.”

“Yeah, ain’t I cool? Her old man didn’t buy that harpoon pistol in a store, you know; Miss Eastlake says he had it commissioned. It probably ought to be in a museum.”

But I didn’t care about John Eastlake’s harpoon gun, not just then. “Are you reading that contract?”

He dropped it on the tray and looked at me, bemused. “I was trying.”

“And your left eye?”

“Nothing. But hey, no reason to be disappointed. The doctor said—”

“Do me a favor. Cover your left peeper.”

He did.

“What do you see?”

“You, Edgar. One hombre muy feo.”

“Yeah, yeah. Cover the right one.”

He did. “Now I just see black. Only…” He paused. “Maybe not as black.” He dropped his hand again. “I can’t tell for sure. These days I can’t separate the truth from the wishful thinking.” He shook his head hard enough to make his hair fly, then thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand.

“Take it easy.”

“Easy for you to say.” He sat silent for a few moments, then picked the piece of breakfast pastry out of Elizabeth’s hand and fed it to her. When it was tucked safely away in her mouth, he turned to me. “Would you mind her while I go get something?”

“Happy to.”

He jogged up the boardwalk and I was left with Elizabeth. I tried feeding her one of the remaining pieces of breakfast pastry and she nibbled it out of my hand, bringing back a fleeting recollection of a rabbit I’d had when I was seven or eight. Mr. Hitchens had been its name, although I no longer knew why — memory’s a funny thing, isn’t it? Her lips were toothless and soft, but not unpleasant. I stroked the side of her head, where her white hair — wiry, rather coarse — was pulled back toward a bun. It occurred to me that Wireman must comb that hair each morning, and make that bun. That Wireman must have dressed her this morning, including diapers, for surely she wasn’t continent when she was like this. I wondered if he thought of Esmeralda when he pinned the pins or secured the ties. I wondered if he thought of Julia when he made the bun.

I picked up another piece of breakfast pastry. She opened her mouth obediently for it… but I hesitated. “What’s in the red picnic basket, Elizabeth? The one in the attic?”

She seemed to think. And hard. Then: “Any old pipe-dip.” She hesitated. Shrugged. “Any old pipe-dip Adie wants. Shoot!” And cackled. It was a startling, witchlike sound. I fed her the rest of her breakfast pastry, piece by piece, and asked no more questions.

xiv

When Wireman returned, he had a microcassette recorder. He handed it to me. “I hate to ask you to put that contract on tape, but I have to. At least the damn thing’s only two pages long. I’d like it back this afternoon, if that’s possible.”

“It is. And if some of my pictures actually sell, you’re on commission, my friend. Fifteen per cent. That should cover both legal and talent.”

He sat back in his chair, laughing and groaning at the same time. “Por Dios! Just when I thought I couldn’t sink any lower in life, I become a fucking talent agent! Excuse the language, Miss Eastlake.”

She took no notice, only stared sternly out at the Gulf, where — at the farthest, bluest edge of vision — a tanker was dreaming north toward Tampa. It fascinated me at once. Boats on the Gulf had a way of doing that to me.

Then I forced my attention back to Wireman. “You’re responsible for all of this, so—”

“Bullshit you say!”

“ — so you have to be prepared to stand up and take your cut like a man.”

“I’ll take ten per cent, and that’s probably too much. Take it, muchacho, or we start discussing eight.”

“All right. Ten it is.” I stuck out my hand and we shook over Elizabeth’s crumb-littered tray. I put the little recorder in my pocket. “And you’ll let me know if there’s any change in your…” I pointed at his red eye. Which really wasn’t as red as it had been.

“Of course.” He picked up the contract. There were crumbs on it from Elizabeth’s pastry. He brushed them off and handed it to me, then leaned forward, hands clasped between his knees, gazing at me over the imposing shelf of Elizabeth’s bosom. “If I had another X-ray, what would it show? That the slug was smaller? That it was gone?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you still working on my portrait?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t stop, muchacho. Please don’t stop.”

“I don’t plan to. But don’t get your hopes up too high, okay?”

“I won’t.” Then another thought struck him, one that was eerily similar to Dario’s stated concern. “What do you think would happen if lightning struck Big Pink and it burned flat with that picture inside? What do you think would happen to me?”

I shook my head. I didn’t want to think about it. I did think about asking Wireman if I could go up to El Palacio’s attic and look around for a certain picnic basket (it was RED), then decided not to. I was sure it was there, less sure that I wanted to know what was in it. There were strange things kicking around Duma Key, and I had reason to believe they weren’t all nice things, and what I wanted to do about most of them was nothing. If I left them alone, then maybe they’d leave me alone. I’d send most of my pictures off-island to keep everything nice and peaceful; sell them, too, if people wanted to buy them. I could watch them go without a pang. I was passionate about them while I was working on them, but when they were done, they meant no more to me than the hard semi circles of callus I’d sometimes sand off the sides of my great toes so my workboots wouldn’t pinch at the end of a hot August day on some job site.

I’d hold back the Girl and Ship series, not out of any special affection, but because the series wasn’t done; those paintings were still live flesh. I might show them and sell them later, but for now I meant to keep them right where they were, in Little Pink.

xv

There were no boats on the horizon by the time I got back to my place, and the urge to paint had passed for the time being. I used Wireman’s micro-recorder instead, and put the sample contract on tape. I was no lawyer, but I’d seen and signed my share of legal paper in my other life, and this struck me as pretty simple.

That evening I took both the contract and the tape recorder back down to El Palacio. Wireman was making supper. Elizabeth was sitting in the China Parlor. The gimlet-eyed heron — which was a kind of unofficial housepet — stood on the walk outside, peering in with grim disapproval. The late-day sun filled the room with light. Yet it was not light. China Town was in disarray, the people and animals tumbled here and there, the buildings scattered to the four corners of the bamboo table. The pillared plantation-house was actually overturned. In her chair beside it, wearing her Captain Bligh expression, Elizabeth seemed to dare me to put things right.

Wireman spoke from behind me, making me jump. “If I try to set things back up in any kind of pattern, she sweeps it apart again. She’s knocked a bunch to the floor and broken them.”

“Are they valuable?”

“Some, but that’s really not the point. When she’s herself, she knows every one of them. Knows and loves. If she comes around and asks where Bo Peep is… or the Coaling Man… and I have to tell her she broke them, she’ll be sad all day.”

“If she comes around.”

“Yes. Well.”

“Think I’ll head on home, Wireman.”

“Gonna paint?”

“That’s the plan.” I turned to the disarray on the table. “Wireman?”

“Right here, vato.”

“Why does she mess them up when she’s like this?”

“I think… because she can’t stand looking at what she’s not.”

I started to turn around. He put a hand on my shoulder.

“I’d just as soon you didn’t look at me just now,” he said. His voice was barely under control. “I’m not myself just now. Go out the front door and then cut back through the courtyard, if you want to take the beach. Would you do that?”

I did that. And when I got back, I worked on his portrait. It was all right. By which I suppose I mean it was good. I could see his face in there, wanting to come out. Starting to rise. There was nothing special, but that was fine. It was always best when it was nothing special. I was happy, I remember that. I was at peace. The shells murmured. My right arm itched, but very low and deep. The window giving on the Gulf was a rectangle of blackness. Once I went downstairs and ate a sandwich. I turned on the radio and found The Bone: J. Geils doing “Hold Your Lovin.” J. Geils was nothing special, only great — a gift from the gods of rock and roll. I painted and Wireman’s face rose a little more. It was a ghost now. It was a ghost haunting the canvas. But it was a harmless ghost. If I turned around, Wireman wouldn’t be standing at the head of the stairs where Tom Riley had been standing, and down the beach at El Palacio de Asesinos, the left side of Wireman’s world was still dark; it was just a thing I knew. I painted. The radio played. Below the music, the shells whispered.

At some point I quit, showered, and went to bed. There were no dreams.

When I think back to my time on Duma Key, those days in February and March when I was working on Wireman’s portrait seem like the best days.

xvi

Wireman called the next day at ten. I was already at my easel. “Am I interrupting?”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I can use a break.” This was a lie.

“We missed you this morning.” A pause. “Well, you know. I missed you. She…”

“Yeah,” I said.

“The contract’s a bunny-hug. Very little to fuck with. It says you and the gallery split right down the middle, but I’m gonna cap that. Fifty-fifty shall not live after gross sales reach a quarter-mil. Once you pass that point, the split goes to sixty-forty, your favor.”

“Wireman, I’ll never sell a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of paintings!”

“I’m hoping they’ll feel exactly the same way, muchacho, which is why I’m also going to propose that the split goes to seventy-thirty at half a million.”

“Plus a handjob from Miss Florida,” I said feebly. “Get that in there.”

“Noted. The other thing is this one-hundred-and-eighty-day termination clause. It ought to be ninety. I don’t foresee a problem there, but I think it’s interesting. They’re afraid some big New York gallery is going to swoop down and carry you off.”

“Anything else about the contract I should know?”

“Nope, and I sense you want to get back to work. I’ll get in touch with Mr. Yoshida about these changes.”

“Any change in your vision?”

“No, amigo. Wish I could say there was. But you keep painting.”

I was taking the phone away from my ear when he said, “Did you happen to see the news this morning?”

“No, never turned it on. Why?”

“County coroner says Candy Brown died of congestive heart failure. Just thought you’d like to know.”

xvii

I painted. It was a slow go but far from a no go. Wireman swam into existence around the window where his brain swam on the Gulf. It was a younger Wireman than the one in the photos clipped to the sides of my easel, but that was okay; I consulted them less and less, and on the third day I took them down altogether. I didn’t need them anymore. Still, I painted the way I supposed most other artists painted: as if it were a job instead of some speed-trip insanity that came and went in spasms. I did it with the radio on, now always tuned to The Bone.

On the fourth day, Wireman brought me a revised contract and told me I could sign. He said Nannuzzi wanted to photograph my paintings and make slides for a lecture at the Selby Library in Sarasota in mid-March, a month before my show opened. The lecture, Wireman said, would be attended by sixty or seventy art patrons from the Tampa-Sarasota area. I told him fine and signed the contract.

Dario came out that afternoon. I was impatient for him to click his pix and be gone so I could go back to work. Mostly to make conversation, I asked him who would be giving the lecture at the Selby Library.

Dario looked at me with one eyebrow cocked, as if I had made a joke. “The one person in the world who is now conversant with your work,” he said. “You.”

I gaped at him. “I can’t give a lecture! I don’t know anything about art!”

He swept his arm at the paintings, which Jack and two part-timers from the Scoto were going to crate and transport to Sarasota the following week. They would remain crated, I assumed, in the storage area at the back of the gallery, until just before the show opened. “These say different, my friend.”

“Dario, these people know stuff! They’ve taken courses! I’ll bet most of them were art majors, for Christ’s sake! What do you want me to do, stand up there and say duh?”

“That’s pretty much what Jackson Pollock did when he talked about his work. Often while drunk. And it made him rich.” Dario came over to me and took me by the stump. That impressed me. Very few people will touch the stump of a limb; it’s as if they believe, down deep, that amputation might be catching. “Listen, my friend, these are important people. Not just because they have money, but because they’re interested in new artists and each one knows three more who feel the same. After the lecture — your lecture — the talk will start. The kind of talk that almost always turns into that magical thing called ‘buzz.’”

He paused, twiddling the strap of his camera and smiling a little.

“All you have to do is talk about how you began, and how you grew—”

“Dario, I don’t know how I grew!”

“Then say that. Say anything! You’re an artist, for God’s sake!”

I left it at that. The threatened lecture still seemed distant to me, and I wanted him out of there. I wanted to turn on The Bone, pull the cloth off the painting on the easel, and go back to work on Wireman Looks West. Want the dirty-ass truth? The painting was no longer about some hypothetical magic trick. Now it was its own magic trick. I had become very selfish about it, and anything that might come after — a promised interview with Mary Ire, the lecture, the show itself — seemed to be not ahead of me but somehow far above me. The way rain on the surface of the Gulf must seem to a fish.

During that first week of March, it was all about daylight. Not sunset light but daylight. How it filled Little Pink and seemed to lift it. That week it was about the music from the radio, anything by the Allman Brothers, Molly Hatchet, Foghat. It was about J. J. Cale beginning “Call Me the Breeze” by saying “Here’s another of your old rock n roll favorites; shuffle on down to Broadway,” and how when I turned the radio off and cleaned my brushes, I could hear the shells under the house. It was about the ghostface I saw, the one belonging to a younger man who had yet to see the view from Duma. There was a song — I think by Paul Simon — with the line If I’d never loved, I never would have cried. That was this face. It wasn’t a real face, not quite real, but I was making it real. It was growing around the brain that was floating on the Gulf. I didn’t need photographs anymore, because this was a face I knew. This one was a memory.

xviii

March fourth was hot all day, but I didn’t bother turning on the air conditioning. I painted in nothing but a pair of gym shorts, with the sweat trickling down my face and sides. The telephone rang twice. The first time it was Wireman.

“We haven’t seen much of you in these parts lately, Edgar. Come to supper?”

“I think I’m going to pass, Wireman. Thanks.”

“Painting, or tired of our society down here at El Palacio? Or both?”

“Just the painting part. I’m almost done. Any change in the vision department?”

“The left lamp is still out, but I bought an eyepatch for it, and when I wear it, I can read with my right eye for as long as fifteen minutes at a stretch. This is a great leap forward, and I think I owe it to you.”

“I don’t know if you do or not,” I said. “This isn’t the same as the picture I did of Candy Brown and Tina Garibaldi. Or of my wife and her… her friends, for that matter. This time there’s no bam. Do you know what I mean when I say bam?”

“Yes, muchacho.”

“But if something’s going to happen, I think it’ll happen soon. If not, you’ll at least have a portrait of how you looked — maybe how you looked — when you were twenty-five.”

“Are you kiddin, amigo?”

“No.”

“I don’t think I even remember what I looked like when I was twenty-five.”

“How’s Elizabeth? Any change in her?”

He sighed. “She seemed a little better yesterday morning, so I set her up in the back parlor — there’s a smaller table there, what I call the China Suburbs — and she threw a set of Wallendorf ballerinas on the floor. Smashed all eight. Irreplaceable, of course.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Last fall I never thought it could get this bad, and God punishes us for what we can’t imagine.”

My second call came fifteen minutes later, and I threw my brush down on my work-table in exasperation. It was Jimmy Yoshida. It was hard to stay exasperated after being exposed to his excitement, which bordered on exuberance. He’d seen the slides, which he claimed were going to “knock everyone on their asses.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said. “At my lecture I intend to tell them, ‘Get up off your asses’… and then walk out.”

He laughed as though this were the funniest thing he’d ever heard, then said, “Mainly I called to ask if there are any pictures you want marked NFS — not for sale.”

Outside there was a rumble that sounded like a big, heavily loaded truck crossing a plank bridge. I looked toward the Gulf — where there were no plank bridges — and realized I’d heard thunder far off to the west.

“Edgar? Are you still there?”

“Still here,” I said. “Assuming anyone wants to buy, you can sell everything but the Girl and Ship series.”

“Ah.”

“That sounded like a disappointed ah.”

“I was hoping to buy one of those for the gallery. I had my eye on Number 2.” And considering the terms of the contract, he would be buying it at a fifty per cent discount. Not bad, lad, my father might have said.

“That series isn’t done yet. Maybe when the rest of them are painted.”

“How many more will there be?”

I’ll keep painting them until I can read the fucking ghost-ship’s name on the transom.

I might have said this aloud if more thunder hadn’t rumbled out in the west. “I guess I’ll know when the time comes. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

“You’re working. Sorry. I’ll let you get back to it.”

When I killed the cordless, I considered whether or not I did want to go back to work. But… I was close. If I forged ahead, I might be able to finish tonight. And I sort of liked the idea of painting while a thunderstorm blew in from the Gulf.

God help me, the idea struck me as romantic.

So I turned up the radio, which I’d turned down to talk on the phone, and there was Axl Rose, screaming ever deeper into “Welcome to the Jungle.” I picked up a brush and put it behind my ear. Then I picked up another and began to paint.

xix

The thunderheads stacked up, huge flatboats black on the bottom and bruise-purple through the middle. Every now and then lightning would flash inside them, and then they looked like brains filled with bad ideas. The Gulf lost its color and went dead. Sunset was a yellow band that flicked feeble orange and went out. Little Pink filled with gloom. The radio began to bray static with each burst of lightning. I paused long enough to turn it off, but I didn’t turn on the lights.

I don’t remember exactly when it stopped being me that was doing the painting… and to this day I’m not sure that it ever stopped being me; maybe sí, maybe no. All I know is that at some point I looked down and saw my right arm in the last of the failing daylight and the occasional stutters of lightning. The stump was tanned, the rest dead white. The muscles hung loose and flabby. There was no scar, no seam except the tan-line, but below there it itched like old dry fire. Then the lightning flashed again and there was no arm, there had never been an arm — not on Duma Key, at least — but the itch was still there, so bad it made you want to bite a piece out of something.

I turned back to the canvas and the second I did, the itch poured in that direction like water let out of a bag, and the frenzy fell on me. The storm dropped on the Key as the dark came down and I thought of certain circus acts where the guy throws knives blindfolded at a pretty girl spreadeagled on a spinning wooden platter, and I think I laughed because I was painting blindfold, or almost. Every now and then the lightning would flash and Wireman would leap at me, Wireman at twenty-five, Wireman before Julia, before Esmeralda, before la lotería.

I win, you win.

A huge flash of lightning lit my window purple-white, and a great whooping gust of gale rode that electricity in from the Gulf, driving rain against the glass so hard I thought (in the part of my mind still capable of thought) that it must surely break. A munitions dump exploded directly overhead. And beneath me the murmur of the shells had become the gossip of dead things telling secrets in bone voices. How could I not have heard that before? Dead things, yes! A ship had come here, a ship of the dead with rotted sails, and it had offloaded living corpses. They were under this house, and the storm had brought them to life. I could see them pushing up through the boneyard blanket of the shells, pallid jellies with green hair and seagull eyes, crawling over each other in the dark and talking, talking, talking. Yes! Because they had a lot to catch up on, and who knew when the next storm might come and bring them to life again?

Yet still I painted. I did it in terror and in the dark, my arm moving up and down so that for a little while there I seemed to actually be conducting the storm. I couldn’t have stopped. And at some point, Wireman Looks West was done. My right arm told me so. I slashed my initials — EF — in the lower left corner and then broke the brush in two, using both hands to do it. The pieces I dropped on the floor. I staggered away from my easel, crying out for whatever was going on to stop. And it would; surely it would; the picture was done and surely now it would.

I came to the head of the stairs and looked down, and there at the bottom were two small dripping figures. I thought: Apple, orange. I thought, I win, you win. Then the lightning flashed and I saw two girls of about six, surely twins and surely Elizabeth Eastlake’s drowned sisters. They wore dresses that were plastered to their bodies. Their hair was plastered to their cheeks. Their faces were pale horrors.

I knew where they had come from. They had crawled out of the shells.

They started up the stairs toward me, hand in hand. Thunder exploded a mile overhead. I tried to scream. I couldn’t. I thought, I am not seeing this. I thought, I am.

“I can do this,” one of the girls said. She spoke in the voice of the shells.

“It was red,” the other girl said. She spoke in the voice of the shells. They were halfway up now. Their heads were little more than skulls with wet hair draggling down the sides.

“Sit in the char,” they said together, like girls chanting a skip-rope rhyme… but they spoke in the voice of the shells. “Sit in the burn.”

They reached up for me with terrible fishbelly fingers.

I fainted at the head of the stairs.

xx

The telephone was ringing. That was my Telephone Winter.

I opened my eyes and groped for the bedside lamp, wanting light right away because I’d just had the worst nightmare of my life. Instead of finding the lamp, my fingers struck a wall. At the moment they did, I became aware that my head was cocked at a strange, painful angle against that same wall. Thunder rumbled — but faint and sullen; it was going-away thunder now — and that was enough to bring everything back with painful, frightening clarity. I wasn’t in bed. I was in Little Pink. I had fainted because —

My eyes flew open. My ass was on the landing, my legs trailing down the stairs. I thought of the two drowned girls — no, it was more, it was an instant of total, brilliant recall — and shot to my feet without feeling my bad hip at all. My concentration was fixed entirely on the three light-switches at the head of the stairs, but even as my fingers found them I thought: Won’t work, the storm will have knocked out the power.

But they did work, banishing the dark in the studio and the stairwell. I had a nasty moment when I saw sand and water at the foot of the stairs, but the light reached far enough for me to see that the front door had blown open.

Surely it had just blown open.

In the living room, the phone quit and the answering machine kicked in. My recorded voice invited the caller to leave a message at the sound of the beep. The caller was Wireman.

“Edgar, where are you?” I was too disoriented to tell if I was hearing excitement, dismay, or terror in his voice. “Call me, you need to call me right away!” And then a click.

I went downstairs one tentative step at a time, like a man in his eighties, and made the lights my first priority: living room, kitchen, both bedrooms, Florida room. I even turned on the lights in the bathrooms, reaching into the darkness to do it, bracing myself in case something cold and wet and draped in seaweed should reach back. Nothing did. With all the lights on, I relaxed enough to realize I was hungry again. Starving. It was the only time I felt that way after working on Wireman’s portrait… but of course, that last session had been a lulu.

I stooped to examine the mess that had blown in through the open door. Just sand and water, the water already beading atop the wax my housekeeper used to keep the cypress gleaming. There was some dampness on the lower stair risers, which were carpeted, but dampness was all it was.

I wouldn’t admit to myself that I’d been looking for footprints.

I went to the kitchen, made a chicken sandwich, and gobbled it standing at the counter. I grabbed a beer from the fridge to wash it down. When the sandwich was gone, I ate the remains of the previous day’s salad, more or less floating in Newman’s Own French. Then I went into the living room to call El Palacio. Wireman answered on the first ring. I was prepared to tell him I’d been outside, looking to see if the storm had done any damage to the house, but my whereabouts at the time of his call were the last thing on Wireman’s mind. Wireman was crying and laughing.

“I can see! As well as ever! Left eye’s as clear as a bell. I can’t believe it, but—”

“Slow down, Wireman, I can barely make you out.”

He didn’t slow down. Maybe he couldn’t. “A pain went through my bad eye at the height of the storm… pain like you wouldn’t believe… like a hot wire… I thought we’d been struck by lightning, so help me God… I tore off the eyepatch… and I could see! Do you understand what I’m telling you? I can see!”

“Yes,” I said. “I understand. That’s wonderful.”

“Was it you? It was, wasn’t it?”

I said, “Maybe. Probably. I’ve got a painting for you. I’ll bring it tomorrow.” I hesitated. “I’d take good care of it, amigo. I don’t think it matters what happens to them once they’re done, but I also thought Kerry was gonna beat Bush.”

He laughed wildly. “Oh, verdad, I heard that. Was it hard?”

A thought struck me before I could answer. “Was the storm hard on Elizabeth?”

“Oh man, awful. They always scare her, but this one… she was in terror. Screaming about her sisters. Tessie and Lo-Lo, the ones who drowned back in the nineteen-twenties. She even had me going for awhile there… but it’s over now. Are you okay? Was it hard?”

I looked at the scatterings of sand on the floor between the front door and the stairs. Surely no footprints there. If I thought I was seeing more than sand, that was just my fucking artistic imagination. “A little. But it’s all over now.”

I hoped that was true.

xxi

We talked for another five minutes… or rather Wireman talked. Babbled, actually. The last thing he said was that he was afraid to go to sleep. He was afraid he might wake up to discover he was blind in his left eye again. I told him I didn’t think he had to worry about that, wished him a good night, and hung up. What I was worried about was waking up in the middle of the night to discover Tessie and Laura — Lo-Lo, to Elizabeth — sitting on either side of my bed.

One of them perhaps holding Reba on her damp lap.

I took another beer and went back upstairs. I approached the easel with my head down, staring at my feet, then looked up quickly, as if hoping to catch the portrait by surprise. Part of me — a rational part — expected to see it defaced by paint splattered from hell to breakfast, a partial Wireman obscured by the daubs and blotches I’d thrown at the canvas during the thunderstorm, when my only real light had been lightning. The rest of me knew better. The rest of me knew that I’d been painting by some other light (just as blinded knife-throwers use some other sense to guide their hands). That part knew Wireman Looks West had turned out just fine, and that part was right.

In some ways it was the best work I did on Duma Key, because it was my most rational work — up until the end, remember, Wireman Looks West had been done in daylight. And by a man in his right mind. The ghost haunting my canvas had become a sweetheart of a face, young and calm and vulnerable. The hair was a fine clear black. A little smile lurked at the corners of the mouth; in the green eyes, as well. The eyebrows were thick and handsome. The forehead above them was broad, an open window where this man bent his thoughts toward the Gulf of Mexico. There was no slug in that visible brain. I could just as easily have taken away an aneurism or a malignant tumor. The cost of finishing the job had been high, but the bill had been paid.

The storm had faded to a few faint rumbles somewhere over the Florida panhandle. I thought I could sleep, and I could do it with the bedside lamp on if I wanted to; Reba would never tell. I could even sleep with her nestled in between my stump and my side. I’d done it before. And Wireman could see again. Although even that seemed beside the point right then. The point seemed to be that I had finally painted something great.

And it was mine.

I thought I could sleep on that.