Duma Key

i

Kamen’s geographical worked, but when it came to fixing what was wrong with my head, I think the Florida part was coincidental. It’s true that I lived there, but I never really lived there. No, Kamen’s geographical worked because of Duma Key, and Big Pink. For me, those places came to constitute their own world.

I left St. Paul on November tenth with hope in my heart but no real expectations. Kathi Green the Rehab Queen came to see me off. She kissed me on the mouth, hugged me hard, and whispered “May all your dreams come true, Eddie.”

“Thanks, Kathi,” I said. I was touched even though the dream I fixed on was of Reba the Anger-Management Doll, grown to the size of an actual child, sitting in the moonlit living room of the house I’d shared with Pam. That dream coming true I could live without.

“And send me a picture from Disney World. I long to see you in mouse ears.”

“I will,” I said, but I never got to Disney World. Sea World, Busch Gardens, or Daytona Speedway, either.

When I left St. Paul, flying in a Lear 55 (successful retirement has its privileges), it was twenty-four and spitting the first snowflakes of another long northern winter. When I landed in Sarasota it was eighty-five and sunny. Even crossing the tarmac to the private air terminal, still clumping along on my trusty red crutch, I thought I could feel my hip saying thank you.

When I look back on that time, it’s with the strangest stew of emotions: love, longing, terror, horror, regret, and the deep sweetness only those who’ve been near death can know. I think it’s how Adam and Eve must have felt. Surely they looked back at Eden, don’t you think, as they started barefoot down the path to where we are now, in our glum political world of bullets and bombs and satellite TV? Looked past the angel guarding the shut gate with his fiery sword? Sure. I think they must have wanted one more look at the green world they had lost, with its sweet water and kind-hearted animals. And its snake, of course.

ii

There’s a charm-bracelet of keys lying off the west coast of Florida. If you had your seven-league boots on, you could step from Longboat to Lido, from Lido to Siesta, from Siesta to Casey. The next step takes you to Duma Key, nine miles long and half a mile wide at its widest, between Casey Key and Don Pedro Island. Most of it’s uninhabited, a tangle of banyans, palms, and Australian pines with an uneven, dune-rumpled beach running along the Gulf edge. The beach is guarded by a waist-high band of sea oats. “The sea oats belong,” Wireman once told me, “but the rest of that shit has no business growing without irrigation.” For much of the time I spent on Duma Key, no one lived there but Wireman, the Bride of the Godfather, and me.

Sandy Smith was my Realtor in St. Paul. I had asked her to find me a place that was quiet — I’m not sure I used the word isolated, but I may have — but still within reach of services. Thinking of Kamen’s advice, I told Sandy I wanted to lease for a year, and price wasn’t an object, as long as I wasn’t getting skint too bad. Even depressed and in more or less constant pain, I was averse to being taken advantage of. Sandy fed my requirements into her computer, and Big Pink was what came out. It was just the luck of the draw.

Except I don’t really believe that. Because even my earliest pictures seem to have, I don’t know, something.

Something.

iii

On the day I arrived in my rental car (driven by Jack Cantori, the young man Sandy Smith had hired through a Sarasota employment agency), I knew nothing about the history of Duma Key. I only knew one reached it by crossing a WPA-era drawbridge from Casey Key. Once over this bridge, I observed that the northern tip of the island was free of the vegetation that tangled the rest. Instead there was actual landscaping (in Florida this means palms and grass undergoing nearly constant irrigation). I could see half a dozen houses strung along the narrow, patchy band of road leading south, the last one of them a huge and undeniably elegant hacienda.

And close by, less than a football field’s length from the Duma Key end of the drawbridge, I could see a pink house hanging over the Gulf.

“Is that it?” I asked, thinking Please let that be it. That’s the one I want. “It is, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Freemantle,” Jack said. “I know Sarasota, but this is the first time I’ve ever been on Duma. Never had any reason to come here.” He pulled up to the mailbox, which had a big red 13 on it. He glanced at the folder lying between us on the seat. “This is it, all right. Salmon Point, number thirteen. I hope you’re not superstitious.”

I shook my head, not taking my eyes off it. I didn’t worry about broken mirrors or crossing black cats’ paths, but I’m very much a believer in… well, maybe not love at first sight, that’s a little too Rhett-and-Scarlett for me, but instant attraction? Sure. It’s the way I felt about Pam the first time I met her, on a double date (she was with the other guy). And it’s the way I felt about Big Pink from the very first.

She stood on pilings with her chin jutting over the high-tide line. There was a NO TRESPASSING sign slanting askew on an old gray stick beside the driveway, but I guessed that didn’t apply to me. “Once you sign the lease, you have it for a year,” Sandy told me. “Even if it’s sold, the owner can’t kick you out until your time is up.”

Jack drove slowly up to the back door… only with its face hanging over the Gulf of Mexico, that was the only door. “I’m surprised they were ever allowed to build this far out,” he said. “I suppose they did things different in the old days.” To him the old days probably meant the nineteen-eighties. “There’s your car. Hope it’s okay.”

The car drawn up on the square of cracked pavement to the right of the house was the sort of anonymous American mid-size the rental companies specialize in. I hadn’t driven since the day Mrs. Fevereau hit Gandalf, and barely gave it a glance. I was more interested in the boxy pink elephant I’d rented. “Aren’t there ordinances about building too close to the Gulf of Mexico?”

“Now, sure, but not when this place went up. From a practical standpoint, it’s all about beach erosion. I doubt if this place hung out that way when it was built.”

He was undoubtedly right. I thought I could see at least six feet of the pilings supporting the screened porch — the so-called Florida room. Unless those pilings were sunk sixty feet into the underlying bedrock, eventually the place was going into the Gulf of Mexico. It was only a matter of time.

As I was thinking it, Jack Cantori was saying it. Then he grinned. “Don’t worry, though; I’m sure you’ll get plenty of warning. You’ll hear it groaning.”

“Like the House of Usher,” I said.

His grin widened. “But it’s probably good for another five years or so. Otherwise it’d be condemned.”

“Don’t be so sure,” I said. Jack had reversed to the driveway door, so the trunk would be easy to unload. Not a lot in there; three suitcases, one garment bag, a steel hardcase with my laptop inside, and a knapsack containing some primitive art supplies — mostly pads and colored pencils. I traveled light when I left my other life. I figured what I’d need most in my new one was my checkbook and my American Express card.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Someone who could afford to build here in the first place could probably talk a couple of B-and-C inspectors around.”

“B-and-C? What’s that?”

For a moment I couldn’t tell him. I could see what I meant: men in white shirts and ties, wearing yellow hi-impact plastic hardhats on their heads and carrying clipboards in their hands. I could even see the pens in their shirt pockets, and the plastic pocket-protectors to which they were clipped. The devil’s in the details, right? But I couldn’t think of what B-and-C stood for, although I knew it as well as my own name. And instantly I was furious. Instantly it seemed that making my left hand into a fist and driving it sideways into the unprotected Adam’s apple of the young man sitting beside me was the most reasonable thing in the world. Almost imperative. Because it was his question that had hung me up.

“Mr. Freemantle?”

“Just a sec,” I said, and thought: I can do this.

I thought of Don Field, the guy who had inspected at least half of my buildings in the nineties (or so it seemed), and my mind did its crosspatch thing. I realized I’d been sitting bolt upright, my hands clenched in my lap. I could see why the kid had sounded concerned. I looked like a man having a gastric episode. Or a heart attack.

“Sorry,” I said. “I had an accident. Banged my head. Sometimes my mind stutters.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Jack said. “No biggie.”

“B-and-C is Building and Code. Basically they’re the guys who decide if your building is going to fall down or not.”

“You talking about bribes?” My new young employee looked glum. “Well, I’m sure it happens, especially down here. Money talks.”

“Don’t be so cynical. Sometimes it’s just a matter of friendship. Your builders, your contractors, your building-code inspectors, even your OSHA guys… they usually drink in the same bars, and they all went to the same schools.” I laughed. “Reform schools, in some cases.”

Jack said, “They condemned a couple beach houses at the north end of Casey Key when the erosion there sped up. One of em actually did fall into the drink.”

“Well, as you say, I’ll probably hear it groaning, and it looks safe enough for the time being. Let’s get my stuff inside.”

I opened my door, got out, then staggered as my bad hip locked up. If I hadn’t gotten my crutch planted in time, I would have said hello to Big Pink by sprawling on her stone doorstep.

“I’ll get the stuff in,” Jack said. “You better go in and sit down, Mr. Freemantle. A cold drink wouldn’t hurt, either. You look really tired.”

iv

The traveling had caught up with me, and I was more than tired. By the time I eased into a living room armchair (listing to the left, as usual, and trying to keep my right leg as straight as possible), I was willing to admit to myself that I was exhausted.

Yet not homesick, at least not yet. As Jack went back and forth, stowing my bags in the bigger of the two bedrooms and putting the laptop on the desk in the smaller one, my eye kept being drawn to the living room’s western wall, which was all glass, and the Florida room beyond it, and the Gulf of Mexico beyond that. It was a vast blue expanse, flat as a plate on that hot November afternoon, and even with the sliding glass window-wall shut, I could hear its mild and steady sighing. I thought, It has no memory. It was an odd thought, and strangely optimistic. When it came to memory — and anger — I still had my issues.

Jack came back from the guest room and sat on the arm of the couch — the perch, I thought, of a young man who wants to be gone. “You’ve got all your basic staples,” he said, “plus salad-in-a-bag, hamburger, and one of those cooked chickens in a plastic capsule — we call em Astronaut Chickens at my house. I hope that’s okay with you.”

“Fine.”

“Two per cent milk—”

“Also fine.”

“ — and Half-n-Half. I can get you real cream next time, if you want it.”

“You want to clog my one remaining artery?”

He laughed. “There’s a little pantry with all kinds of canned shi… stuff. The cable’s hooked up, the computer’s Internet-ready — I got you Wi-Fi, costs a little extra, but it’s way cool — and I can get satellite installed if you want it.”

I shook my head. He was a good kid, but I wanted to listen to the Gulf, sweet-talking me with words it wouldn’t remember a minute later. And I wanted to listen to the house, see if it had anything to say. I had an idea maybe it did.

“The keys’re in an envelope on the kitchen table — car keys, too — and a list of numbers you might need are on the fridge. I’ve got classes at FSU in Sarasota every day except Monday, but I’ll be carrying my cell, and I’ll be coming by Tuesdays and Thursdays at five unless we make a different arrangement. Is that okay?”

“Yes.” I reached in my pocket and brought out my money-clip. “I want to give you a little extra. You’ve been great.”

He waved it away. “Nah. This is a sweet gig, Mr. Freemantle. Good pay and good hours. I’d feel like a hound taking any extra.”

That made me laugh, and I put my dough back in my pocket. “Okay.”

“Maybe you ought to take a nap,” he said, getting up.

“Maybe I will.” It was odd to be treated like Grandpa Walton, but I supposed I’d better get used to it. “What happened to the other house at the north end of Casey Key?”

“Huh?”

“You said one went into the drink. What happened to the other one?”

“Far as I know, it’s still there. Although if a big storm like Charley ever hits this part of the coast dead-on, it’s gonna be like a going-out-of-business sale: everything must go.” He walked over to me, and stuck out his hand. “Anyway, Mr. Freemantle, welcome to Florida. I hope it treats you real well.”

I shook with him. “Thank you…” I hesitated, probably not long enough for him to notice, and I didn’t get angry. Not at him, anyway. “Thanks for everything.”

“Sure.” He gave me the smallest of puzzled looks as he went out, so maybe he did notice. Maybe he did notice, at that. I didn’t care. I was on my own at last. I listened to shells and gravel popping under his tires as his car started to roll. I listened to the motor fade. Less, least, gone. Now there was only the mild steady sighing of the Gulf. And the beat of my own heart, soft and low. No clocks. Not ringing, not bonging, not even ticking. I breathed deep and smelled the musty, slightly damp aroma of a place that’s been shut up for a fairly long time except for the weekly (or bi-weekly) ritual airing. I thought I could also smell salt and subtropical grasses for which I as yet had no names.

Mostly I listened to the sigh of the waves, so like the breath of some large sleeping creature, and looked out through the glass wall that fronted on the water. Because of Big Pink’s elevation, I couldn’t see the beach at all from where I was sitting, fairly deep in the living room; from my armchair I might have been on one of those big tankers that trudge their oily courses from Venezuela to Galveston. A high haze had crept over the dome of the sky, muting the pinpricks of light on the water. To the left were three palm trees silhouetted against the sky, their fronds ruffling in the mildest of breezes: the subjects of my first tentative post-accident sketch. Don’t look much like Minnesota, dere, Tom Riley had said.

Looking at them made me want to draw again — it was like a dry hunger, but not precisely in the belly; it made my mind itch. And, oddly, the stump of my amputated arm. “Not now,” I said. “Later. I’m whipped.”

I heaved myself out of the chair on my second try, glad the kid wasn’t there to see the first backward flop and hear my childish (“Cuntlicker!”) cry of exasperation. Once I was up I stood swaying on my crutch for a moment, marveling at just how tired I was. Usually “whipped” was just something you said, but at that moment it was exactly how I felt.

Moving slowly — I had no intention of falling in here on my first day — I made my way into the master bedroom. The bed was a king, and I wanted nothing more than to go to it, sit on it, sweep the foolish decorative throw-pillows (one bearing the likenessness of two cavorting Cockers and the rather startling idea that MAYBE DOGS ARE ONLY PEOPLE AT THEIR BEST) to the floor with my crutch, lie down, and sleep for two hours. Maybe three. But first I went to the bench at the end of the bed — still moving carefully, knowing how very easy it would be to tangle my feet and fall when I was at this level of exhaustion — where the kid had stacked two of my three suitcases. The one I wanted was on the bottom, of course. I shoved the one on top to the floor without hesitation and unzipped the front pocket of the other.

Glassy blue eyes looked out with their expression of eternal disapproving surprise: Oouuu, you nasty man! I been in here all this time! A fluff of lifeless orange-red hair sprang from confinement. Reba the Anger-Management Doll in her best blue dress and black Mary Janes.

I lay on the bed with her crooked between my stump and my side. When I had made an adequate space for myself among the ornamental pillows (it was mostly the cavorting Cockers I’d wanted on the floor), I laid her beside me.

“I forgot his name,” I said. “I remembered it the whole way out here, then forgot it.” Reba looked up at the ceiling, where the blades of the overhead fan were still and unmoving. I’d forgotten to turn it on. Reba didn’t care if my new part-time hired man was Ike, Mike, or Andy Van Slyke. It was all the same to her, she was just rags stuffed into a pink body, probably by some unhappy child laborer in Cambodia or fucking Uruguay.

“What is it?” I asked her. Tired as I was, I could feel the old dismal panic setting in. The old dismal anger. The fear that this would go on for the rest of my life. Or get worse! Yes, possible! They’d take me back into the convalescent home, which was really just hell with a fresh coat of paint.

Reba didn’t answer, that boneless bitch.

“I can do this,” I said, although I didn’t believe it. And I thought: Jerry. No, Jeff. Then You’re thinking about Jerry Jeff Walker, asshole. Johnson? Gerald? Great Jumping Jehosaphat?

Starting to drift away. Starting to drift into sleep in spite of the anger and panic. Tuning in to the mild respiration of the Gulf.

I can do this, I thought. Crosspatch. Like when you remembered what B-and-C stood for.

I thought of the kid saying They condemned a couple beach houses at the north end of Casey Key and there was something there. My stump was itching like a mad bastard. But pretend that’s some other guy’s stump in some other universe, meantime chase that thing, that rag, that bone, that connection —

— drifting away —

Although if a big storm like Charley ever hits this part of the coast dead-on —

And bingo.

Charley was a hurricane, and when hurricanes struck, I peeked at The Weather Channel, like the rest of America, and their hurricane guy was…

I picked up Reba. She seemed to weigh at least twenty pounds in my soupy, half-asleep state. “The hurricane guy is Jim Cantore,” I said. “My help-out guy is Jack Cantori. Case fuckin closed.” I flopped her back down and closed my eyes. I might have heard that faint sigh from the Gulf for another ten or fifteen seconds. Then I was asleep.

I slept until sundown. It was the deepest, most satisfying sleep I’d had in eight months.

v

I had done no more than nibble on the plane, and consequently woke up ravenous. I did a dozen heel-slides instead of the usual twenty-five to loosen my hip, made a quick trip to the bathroom, then lurched toward the kitchen. I was leaning on my crutch, but not as heavily as I might have expected, given the length of my nap. My plan was to make myself a sandwich, maybe two. I hoped for sliced bologna, but reckoned any lunchmeat I found in the fridge would be okay. I’d call Ilse after I ate and tell her I’d arrived safely. Ilse could be depended upon to e-mail everyone else with an interest in the welfare of Edgar Freemantle. Then I could take tonight’s dose of pain medication and explore the rest of my new environment. The whole second floor awaited.

What my plan hadn’t taken into account was how the westward view had changed.

The sun was gone, but there was still a brilliant orange band above the flat line of the Gulf. It was broken in only one place, by the silhouette of some large ship. Its shape was as simple as a first-grader’s drawing. A cable stretched taut from the bow to what I assumed was the radio tower, creating a triangle of light. As that light skied upward, orange faded to a breathless Maxfield Parrish blue-green that I had never seen before with my own eyes… and yet I had a sense of déjà vu, as if maybe I had seen it, in my dreams. Maybe we all see skies like that in our dreams, and our waking minds can never quite translate them into colors that have names.

Above, in the deepening black, the first stars.

I was no longer hungry, and no longer wanted to call Ilse. All I wanted to do was draw what I was looking at. I knew I couldn’t get all of it, but I didn’t care — that was the beauty part. I didn’t give Shit One.

My new employee (for a moment I blanked on his name again, then I thought Weather Channel, then I thought Jack: case fuckin closed) had put my knapsack of art supplies in the second bedroom. I flailed my way out to the Florida room with it, carrying it awkwardly and trying to use my crutch at the same time. A mildly curious breeze lifted my hair. The idea that such a breeze and snow in St. Paul might exist at the same time, in the same world, seemed absurd to me — science fiction.

I set the sack down on the long, rough wooden table, thought about snapping on a light, and decided against it. I would draw until I couldn’t see to draw, and then call it a night. I sat in my awkward fashion, unzipped the bag, pulled out my pad. ARTISAN, it said on the front. Given the level of my current skills, that was a joke. I grubbed deeper and brought out my box of colored pencils.

I drew and colored quickly, hardly looking at what I was doing. I shaded up from an arbitrary horizon-line, stroking my Venus Yellow from side to side with wild abandon, sometimes going over the ship (it would be the first tanker in the world to come down with yellow jaundice, I reckoned) and not caring. When I had the sunset band to what seemed like the right depth — it was dying fast now — I grabbed the orange and shaded more, and heavier. Then I went back to the ship, not thinking, just putting a series of angular black lines on my paper. That was what I saw.

When I was done, it was almost full dark.

To the left, the three palms clattered.

Below and beyond me — but not so far beyond now, the tide was coming back in — the Gulf of Mexico sighed, as if it had had a long day and there was more work to do yet.

Overhead there were now thousands of stars, and more appearing even as I looked.

This was here all the time, I thought, and recalled something Melinda used to say when she heard a song she really liked on the radio: It had me from hello. Below my rudimentary tanker, I scratched the word HELLO in small letters. So far as I can remember (and I’m better at that now), it was the first time in my life I named a picture. And as names go, it’s a good one, isn’t it? In spite of all the damage that followed, I still think that’s the perfect name for a picture drawn by a man who was trying his best not to be sad anymore — who was trying to remember how it felt to be happy.

It was done. I put my pencil down, and that was when Big Pink spoke to me for the first time. Its voice was softer than the sigh of the Gulf’s breathing, but I heard it quite well just the same.

I’ve been waiting for you, it said.

vi

That was my year for talking to myself, and answering myself back. Sometimes other voices answered back as well, but that night it was just me, myself, and I.

“Houston, this is Freemantle, do you copy, Houston?” Leaning into the fridge. Thinking, Christ, if this is basic staples, I’d hate to see what it would look like if the kid really decided to load up — I could wait out World War III.

“Ah, roger, Freemantle, we copy.”

“Ah, we have bologna, Houston, that’s a go on the bologna, do you copy?”

“Roger, Freemantle, we read you loud and clear. What’s your mayo situation?”

We were a go for mayo, too. I made two bologna sandwiches on white — where I grew up, children are raised to believe mayonnaise, bologna, and white bread are the food of the gods — and ate them at the kitchen table. In the pantry I found a stack of Table Talk Pies, both apple and blueberry. I began to think of changing my will in favor of Jack Cantori.

Almost sloshing with food, I went back to the living room, snapped on all the lights, and looked at Hello. It wasn’t very good. But it was interesting. The scribbled afterglow had a sullen, furnacey quality that was startling. The ship wasn’t the one I’d seen, but mine was interesting in a spooky sort of way. It was little more than a scarecrow ship, and the overlapping scribbles of yellow and orange had turned it into a ghost-ship, as well, as if that peculiar sunset were shining right through it.

I propped it atop the TV, against the sign reading THE OWNER REQUESTS THAT YOU AND YOUR GUESTS DO NOT SMOKE INDOORS. I looked at it a moment longer, thinking it needed something in the foreground — a smaller boat, maybe, just to lend the one on the horizon some perspective — but I no longer wanted to draw. Besides, adding something might fuck up what little charm the thing had. I tried the telephone instead, thinking if it wasn’t working yet I could call Ilse on my cell, but Jack had been on top of that, too.

I thought I’d probably get her machine — college girls are busy girls — but she answered on the first ring. “Daddy?” That startled me so much that at first I couldn’t speak and she said it again. “Dad?”

“Yes,” I said. “How did you know?”

“The callback number’s got a 941 area code. That’s where that Duma place is. I checked.”

“Modern technology. I can’t catch up. How are you, kiddo?”

“Fine. The question is, how are you?”

“I’m all right. Better than all right, actually.”

“The fellow you hired —?”

“He’s got game. The bed’s made and the fridge is full. I got here and took a five-hour nap.”

There was a pause, and when she spoke again she sounded more concerned than ever. “You’re not hitting those pain pills too hard, are you? Because Oxycontin’s supposed to be sort of a Trojan horse. Not that I’m telling you anything you didn’t already know.”

“Nope, I stick to the prescribed dosage. In fact—” I stopped.

“What, Daddy? What?” Now she sounded almost ready to hail a cab and take a plane.

“I was just realizing I skipped the five o’clock Vicodin… ” I checked my watch. “And the eight o’clock Oxycontin, too. I’ll be damned.”

“How bad’s the pain?”

“Nothing a couple of Tylenol won’t handle. At least until midnight.”

“It’s probably the change in climate,” she said. “And the nap.”

I had no doubt those things were part of it, but I didn’t think they were all of it. Maybe it was crazy, but I thought drawing had played a part. In fact, it was something I sort of knew.

We talked for awhile, and little by little I could hear that concern going out of her voice. What replaced it was unhappiness. She was understanding, I suppose, that this thing was really happening, that her mother and father weren’t just going to wake up one morning and take it back. But she promised to call Pam and e-mail Melinda, let them know I was still in the land of the living.

“Don’t you have e-mail there, Dad?”

“I do, but tonight you’re my e-mail, Cookie.”

She laughed, sniffed, laughed again. I thought to ask if she was crying, then thought again. Better not to, maybe.

“Ilse? I better let you go now, honey. I want to shower off the day.”

“Okay, but…” A pause. Then she burst out: “I hate to think of you all the way down there in Florida by yourself! Maybe falling on your ass in the shower! It’s not right!”

“Cookie, I’m fine. Really. The kid — his name’s…” Hurricanes, I thought. Weather Channel. “His name’s Jim Cantori.” But that was a case of right church, wrong pew. “Jack, I mean.”

“That’s not the same, and you know it. Do you want me to come?”

“Not unless you want your mother to scalp us both bald,” I said. “What I want is for you to stay right where you are and TCB, darlin. I’ll stay in touch.”

“’Kay. But take care of yourself. No stupid shit.”

“No stupid shit. Roger that, Houston.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.”

“I still want to hear you promise, Dad.”

For one terrible and surpassingly eerie moment I saw Ilse at eleven, Ilse dressed in a Girl Scout’s uniform and looking at me with Monica Goldstein’s shocked eyes. Before I could stop the words, I heard myself saying, “Promise. Big swear. Mother’s name.”

She giggled. “Never heard that one before.”

“There’s a lot about me you don’t know. I’m a deep one.”

“If you say so.” A pause. Then: “Love you.”

“Love you, too.”

I put the phone gently back into its cradle and stared at it for a long time.

vii

Instead of showering, I walked down the beach to the water. I quickly discovered my crutch was no help on the sand — was, in fact, a hindrance — but once I was around the corner of the house, the water’s edge was less than two dozen steps away. That was easy if I went slow. The surge was mild, the incoming wavelets only inches high. It was hard to imagine this water whipped into a destructive hurricane frenzy. Impossible, actually. Later, Wireman would tell me God always punishes us for what we can’t imagine.

That was one of his better ones.

I turned to go back to the house, then paused. There was just enough light to see a deep carpet of shells — a drift of shells — under the jutting Florida room. At high tide, I realized, the front half of my new house would be almost like the foredeck of a ship. I remembered Jack saying I’d get plenty of warning if the Gulf of Mexico decided to eat the place, that I’d hear it groaning. He was probably right… but then, I was also supposed to get plenty of warning on a job site when a heavy piece of equipment was backing up.

I limped back to where my crutch leaned against the side of the house and took the short plank walk around to the door. I thought about the shower and took a bath instead, going in and coming out in the careful sidesaddle way Kathi Green had shown me in my other life, both of us dressed in bathing suits, me with my right leg looking like a badly butchered cut of meat. Now the butchery was in the past; my body was doing its miracle work. The scars would last a lifetime, but even they were fading. Already fading.

Dried off and with my teeth brushed, I crutched into the master bedroom and surveyed the king, now divested of decorative pillows. “Houston,” I said, “we have bed.”

“Roger, Freemantle,” I replied. “You are go for bed.”

Sure, why not? I’d never sleep, not after that whopper of a nap, but I could lie down for awhile. My leg still felt pretty good, even after my expedition to the water, but there was a knot in my lower back and another at the base of my neck. I lay down. No, sleep was out of the question, but I turned off the lamp anyway. Just to rest my eyes. I’d lie there until my back and neck felt better, then dig a paperback out of my suitcase and read.

Just lie here for awhile, that was…

I got that far, and then I was gone again. There were no dreams.

viii

I slipped back to some sort of consciousness in the middle of the night with my right arm itching and my right hand tingling and no idea of where I was, only that from below me something vast was grinding and grinding and grinding. At first I thought it was machinery, but it was too uneven to be machinery. And too organic, somehow. Then I thought of teeth, but nothing had teeth that vast. Nothing in the known world, at least.

Breathing, I thought, and that seemed right, but what kind of animal made such a vast grinding sound when it drew in breath? And God, that itch was driving me crazy, all the way up my forearm to the crease of the elbow. I went to scratch it, reaching across my chest with my left hand, and of course there was no elbow, no forearm, and I scratched nothing but the bedsheet.

That brought me fully awake and I sat up. Although the room was still very dark, enough starlight came in through the westward-facing window for me to see the foot of the bed, where one of my suitcases rested on a bench. That locked me in place. I was on Duma Key, just off the west coast of Florida — home of the newly wed and the nearly dead. I was in the house I was already thinking of as Big Pink, and that grinding sound —

“It’s shells,” I murmured, lying back down. “Shells under the house. The tide’s in.”

I loved that sound from the first, when I woke up and heard it in the dark of night, when I didn’t know where I was, who I was, or what parts were still attached. It was mine.

It had me from hello.