Duma Key

i

On New Year’s afternoon, I woke from a brief but refreshing nap thinking of a certain kind of shell — the orangey kind with white speckles. I don’t know if I dreamed about it or not, but I wanted one. I was ready to start experimenting with paints, and I thought one of those orange shells would be just the thing to plop down in the middle of a Gulf of Mexico sunset.

I began prospecting southward along the beach, accompanied only by my shadow and two or three dozen of the tiny birds — Ilse called them peeps — that prospect endlessly for food at the edge of the water. Farther out, pelicans cruised, then folded their wings and dropped like stones. I wasn’t thinking of exercise that afternoon, I wasn’t monitoring the pain in my hip, and I wasn’t counting steps. I wasn’t thinking of anything, really; my mind was gliding like the pelicans before they spotted dinner in the caldo largo below them. Consequently, when I finally spotted the kind of shell I wanted and looked back, I was stunned at how small Big Pink had become.

I stood bouncing the orange shell up and down in my hand, all at once feeling the broken-glass throb in my hip. It started there and went pulsing all the way down my leg. Yet the tracks I saw stretching back toward my house hardly dragged at all. It occurred to me then that I’d been babying myself — maybe a little, maybe quite a lot. Me and my stupid little Numbers Game. Today I had forgotten about giving myself an anxious mini-physical every five minutes or so. I’d simply… gone for a walk. Like any normal person.

So I had a choice. I could baby myself going back, stopping every now and then to do one of Kathi Green’s side-stretches, which hurt like hell and didn’t seem to do much of anything else, or I could just walk. Like any normal unhurt person.

I decided to go with that. But before I started, I glanced over my shoulder and saw a striped beach chair a ways farther south. There was a table beside it with an umbrella, striped like the chair, over it. A man was sitting in the chair. What was only a speck glimpsed from Big Pink had become a tall, heavyset guy dressed in jeans and a white shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbows. His hair was long and blowing in the breeze. I couldn’t make out his features; we were still too far apart for that. He saw me looking and waved. I waved back, then turned and began trudging for home along my own footprints. That was my first encounter with Wireman.

ii

My final thought before turning in that night was that I’d probably find myself hobbling through the second day of the New Year almost too sore to walk. I was delighted to find that wasn’t true; a hot bath seemed to take care of the residual stiffness.

So of course I struck off again the following afternoon. No set goal; no New Year’s resolution; no Numbers Game. Just a guy strolling on the beach, sometimes veering close enough to the mild run of the waves to scatter the peeps aloft in a smutchy cloud. Sometimes I’d pick up a shell and put it in my pocket (in a week I’d be carrying a plastic bag to store my treasures in). When I got close enough to make out the heavyset guy in some detail — today wearing a blue shirt and khakis, almost certainly barefoot — I once again turned and headed back to Big Pink. But not before giving him a wave, which he returned.

That was the real beginning of my Great Beach Walks. Every afternoon they got a little longer, and I saw the heavyset man in his striped beach chair a little more clearly. It seemed obvious to me that he had his own routine; in the mornings he came out with the old lady, pushing her down a wooden tongue of decking that I hadn’t been able to see from Big Pink. In the afternoons he came out on his own. He never took off his shirt, but his arms and face were as dark as old furniture in a formal home. Beside him, on his table, were a tall glass and a pitcher that might have held ice water, lemonade, or gin and tonic. He always waved; I always waved back.

One day in late January, when I had closed the distance between us to not much more than an eighth of a mile, a second striped chair appeared on the sand. A second glass, empty (but tall and terribly inviting), appeared on the table. When I waved, he first waved back and then pointed at the empty chair.

“Thanks, but not yet!” I called.

“Hell, come on down!” he called back. “I’ll give you a ride back in the golf cart!”

I smiled at that. Ilse had been all in favor of a golf cart, so I could go racing up and down the beach, scaring the peeps. “Not in the game-plan,” I yelled, “but I’ll get there in time! Whatever’s in that pitcher — keep it on ice for me!”

“You know best, muchacho!” He sketched a little salute. “Meantime, do the day and let the day do you!”

I remember all sorts of things Wireman said, but I believe that’s the one I associate with him the most strongly, maybe because I heard him say it before I knew his name or had even shaken his hand: Do the day and let the day do you.

iii

Walking wasn’t all Freemantle was about that winter; Freemantle started to be about living again. And that felt fucking great. I came to a decision one windy night when the waves were pounding and the shells were arguing instead of just conversing: When I knew this new way of feeling was for real, I was going to take Reba the Anger-Management Doll down to the beach, douse her with charcoal lighter-fluid, and set her ablaze. Give my other life a true Viking funeral. Why the hell not?

In the meantime there was painting, and I took to it like peeps and pelicans take to water. After a week, I regretted having spent so much time farting around with colored pencils. I sent Ilse an e-mail thanking her for bullying me, and she sent me one back, telling me she hardly needed encouragement in that department. She also told me that The Hummingbirds had played a big church in Pawtucket, Rhode Island — sort of a tour warm-up — and the congregation had gone wild, clapping and shouting out hallelujahs. “There was a good deal of swaying in the aisles,” she wrote. “It’s the Baptist substitute for dancing.”

That winter I also made the Internet in general and Google in particular my close personal friends, pecking away one-handed. When it came to Duma Key, I found little more than a map. I could have dug deeper and harder, but something told me to leave that alone for the time being. What I was really interested in were peculiar events following the loss of limbs, and I found a mother-lode.

I should tell you that while I took all the stories Google led me to with a grain of salt, I didn’t reject even the wildest completely, because I never doubted that my own strange experiences were related to the injuries I’d suffered — the insult to Broca’s area, my missing arm, or both. I could look at my sketch of Carson Jones in his Torii Hunter tee-shirt anytime I wanted to, and I was sure Mr. Jones had purchased Ilse’s engagement ring at Zales. Less concrete, but just as persuasive to me, were my increasingly surreal drawings. The phone-pad doodles of my previous life gave no hint of the haunted sunsets I was now doing.

I wasn’t the first person to lose a body-part only to gain something else. In Fredonia, New York, a logger cut off his own hand in the woods and then saved his life by cauterizing the spouting stump of his wrist. The hand he took home, put in a jar of alcohol, and stored in the cellar. Three years later the hand that was no longer south of his wrist nevertheless began to feel freezing cold. He went downstairs and discovered a cellar window had broken and the winter wind was blowing in on the jar with his preserved hand floating inside. When the ex-logger moved the jar next to the furnace, that sense of freezing cold disappeared.

A Russian peasant from Tura, deep in Siberia, lost his left arm up to the elbow in a piece of farming equipment and spent the rest of his life as a dowser. When he stood over a spot where there was water, his left hand and arm, although no longer there, would grow cool, with an accompanying sensation of wetness. According to the articles I read (there were three), his skills never failed.

There was a guy in Nebraska who could predict tornadoes by the corns on his missing foot. A legless sailor in England who was used by his mates as a kind of human fish-finder. A Japanese double amputee who became a respected poet — not a bad trick for a fellow who’d been illiterate at the time of the train accident in which he lost his arms.

Of all the stories, maybe the strangest was that of Kearney Jaffords of New Jersey, a child born without arms. Shortly after his thirteenth birthday, this formerly well-adjusted handicapped child became hysterical, insisting to his parents that his arms were “hurting and buried on a farm.” He said he could show them where. They drove two days, finishing up on a dirt road in Iowa, somewhere between Nowhere and Nowhere in Particular. The kid led them into a cornfield, took a sighting on a nearby barn with a MAIL POUCH advertisement on the roof, and insisted that they dig. The parents did, not because they expected to find anything but because they hoped to set the child’s mind and body at rest again. Three feet down they found two skeletons. One was a female child between twelve and fifteen. The other was a man, age undetermined. The Adair County Coroner estimated these bodies had been in the ground approximately twelve years… but of course it could have been thirteen, which was the span of Kearney Jaffords’s life. Neither body was ever identified. The arms of the female child’s skeleton had been removed. Those bones were mixed with the bones of the unidentified man.

Fascinating as this story was, there were two others that interested me even more, especially when I thought of how I’d gone rooting through my daughter’s purse.

I found them in an article called “They See with What’s Missing,” from The North American Journal of Parapsychology. It chronicled the histories of two psychics, one a woman from Phoenix, the other a man from Río Gallegos, Argentina. The woman was missing her right hand; the man was missing his entire right arm. Both had had several successes in helping the police find missing persons (perhaps failures as well, but these were not set out in the piece).

According to the article, both amputee psychics used the same technique. They would be provided with a piece of the missing person’s clothes, or a sample of his handwriting. They would shut their eyes and visualize touching the item with the missing hand (there was a huggermugger footnote here about something called the Hand of Glory, aka the Mojo Hand). The Phoenix woman would then “get an image,” which she would relay to her interlocutors. The Argentinian, however, followed up his communings with brief, furious spates of automatic writing with his remaining hand, a process I saw as analogous to my paintings.

And, as I say, I might have doubted a few of the wilder anecdotes I ran across during my Internet explorations, but I never doubted something was happening to me. Even without the picture of Carson Jones, I think I would have believed it. Because of the quiet, mostly. Except when Jack dropped by, or when Wireman — ever closer — waved and called “Buenos días, muchacho!” I saw no one and spoke to no one but myself. The extraneous dropped away almost entirely, and when that happens, you begin to hear yourself clearly. And clear communication between selves — the surface self and the deep self is what I mean — is the enemy of self-doubt. It slays confusion.

But to be sure, I settled on what I told myself was an experiment.

iv

This response came that evening, from a Pam who was by then back home in St. Paul:

Her PS zinger was a perfect example of my ex-wife’s unlovelier side: lie back… lie back… lie back… then bite and “make yrself scarce.” She was right, though. I should have told her to pass on best wishes from the Commiecrat when she spoke to her old man on the phone. That ass-cancer’s a bitch.

The whole e-mail was a symphony of irritation, from the mention of the Mustang that I’d never had time to finish to her concerns about my mistaken word-choices. Said concerns delivered by a woman who thought Xander came with a Z.

And with that petty spleen out of my system (spoken to the empty house, and in loud tones, if you must know), I did review the e-mail I’d sent her, and yes, I was worried. A little, anyway.

On the other hand, maybe it was just the wind.

v

The second striped beach chair had become a fixture at the heavyset guy’s table, and as I drew closer to it, we sometimes shouted a little conversation back and forth. It was a strange way to strike up an acquaintance, but pleasant. The day after Pam’s e-mail, with its surface concerns and buried subtext (You could be as sick as my father, Eddie, maybe even sicker), the fellow down the beach yelled: “How long before you get here, do you think?”

“Four days!” I yelled back. “Maybe three!”

“You that set on making a round trip?”

“I am!” I said. “What’s your name?”

His deeply tanned face, although growing fleshy, was still handsome. Now white teeth flashed there, and his incipient jowls disappeared when he grinned. “Tell you when you get here! What’s yours?”

“It’s on the mailbox!” I called.

“The day I stoop to reading mailboxes is the day I start getting my news from talk radio!”

I gave him a wave, he gave me one in turn, called “Hasta mañana!” and turned to look at the water and the cruising birds once more.

When I got back to Big Pink, the flag of my computer mailbox was sticking up, and I found this:

I thought he’d refer, and I might even keep the appointment, but right then a few dropped words and linguistic oddities weren’t a priority. Walking was a priority, and reaching the striped beach chair that had been set out for me was also sort of a priority, but my main ones as January waned were Internet searches and painting pictures. I had reached Sunset with Shell No. 16 only the night before.

On January twenty-seventh, after turning back only two hundred yards or so shy of the waiting beach chair, I arrived at Big Pink to find UPS had left a package. Inside were two gardening gloves, one with HANDS printed in faded red on the back and the other similarly printed with OFF. They were beat-up from many seasons in the garden but clean — she’d laundered them, as I had expected. As I had, in fact, hoped. It wasn’t the Pam who had worn them during the years of our marriage that I was interested in, not even the Pam who might have worn them in the Mendota Heights garden the past fall, while I was out at Lake Phalen. That Pam was a known quantity. But… I’ll tell you something else that’s happening, my If-So-Girl had said, unaware of how eerily like her mother she had looked when she was saying it. She’s seeing an awful lot of this guy down the street.

That was the Pam I was interested in — the one who had seen an awful lot of the guy down the street. The guy named Max. That Pam’s hands had laundered these gloves, then picked them up and put them in the white box inside the UPS package.

That Pam was the experiment… or so I told myself, but we fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living. That’s what Wireman says, and he’s often right. Probably too often. Even now.

vi

I didn’t wait for sunset, because at least I didn’t fool myself that I was interested in painting a picture; I was interested in painting information. I took my wife’s unnaturally clean gardening gloves (she must have really rammed the bleach to them) up to Little Pink and sat down in front of my easel. There was a fresh canvas there, waiting. To the left were two tables. One was for photos from my digital camera and various found objects. The other stood on a small green tarpaulin. It held about two dozen paint-pots, several jars partly filled with turpentine, and several bottles of the Zephyr Hills water I used as rinse. It was quite the messy, busy little work-station.

I held the gloves in my lap, closed my eyes, and pretended I was touching them with my right hand. There was nothing. No pain, no itching, no sense of phantom fingers caressing the rough, worn fabric. I sat there willing it to come — whatever it was — and got more nothing. I might as well have been commanding my body to shit when it didn’t need to. After five long minutes, I opened my eyes again and looked down at the gloves on my lap: HANDS… OFF.

Useless things. Useless fucking things.

Don’t get mad, get even, I thought. And then I thought, Too late. I am mad. At these gloves and the woman who wore them. As for getting even?

“Too late for that, too,” I said, and looked at my stump. “I’ll never be heaven again.”

The wrong word. Always the wrong word, and it would go on like that for-fucking-ever. I felt like knocking everything off my stupid goddam play-tables and onto the floor.

“Even,” I said, deliberately low and deliberately slow. “I’ll never be eeee-ven again. I’m odd-arm-out.” That wasn’t very funny (or even very sensible), but the anger started seeping away just the same. Hearing myself say the right word helped. It usually did.

I turned my thoughts from my stump to my wife’s gloves. HANDS OFF, indeed.

With a sigh — there might have been some relief in it, I don’t remember for sure, but it’s likely — I set them on the table where I put my model objects, took a brush out of a turp jar, cleaned it with a rag, rinsed it, and looked at the blank canvas. Did I mean to paint the gloves anyway? Why, for fuck’s sake? Why?

All at once the idea that I had been painting at all seemed ridiculous. The idea that I didn’t know how seemed a hell of a lot more plausible. If I dipped this brush in black and then put it on that forbidding white-space, surely the best I’d be able to do would be a series of marching stick figures: Ten little Indians went out to dine, One drowned her baby self, Then there were nine. Nine little Indians, Stayed up very late —

That was spooky. I got up from my chair, and fast. Suddenly I didn’t want to be here, not in Little Pink, not in Big Pink, not on Duma Key, not in my stupid pointless limping retired retarded life. How many lies was I telling? That I was an artist? Ridiculous. Kamen could cry STUNNED and YOU MUST NOT STOP in his patented e-mail capitals, but Kamen specialized in tricking the victims of terrible accidents into believing the pallid imitations of life they were living were as good as the real thing. When it came to positive reinforcement, Kamen and Kathi Green the Rehab Queen were a tag-steam. They were FUCKING BRILLIANT, and most of their grateful patients cried YOU MUST NOT STOP. Was I telling myself I was psychic? Possessed of a phantom arm capable of seeing into the unknown? That wasn’t ridiculous, it was pitiful and insane.

There was a 7-Eleven in Nokomis. I decided I would try my driving skills, pick up a couple of six-packs, and get drunk. Things might look better tomorrow, through the haze of a hangover. I did not see how they could look much worse. I reached for my crutch and my foot — my left one, my good foot, for Christ’s sake — caught under my chair. I stumbled. My right leg wasn’t strong enough to hold me up and I fell full-length, reaching out with my right arm to break my fall.

Just instinct, of course… except it did break my fall. It did. I didn’t see it — my eyes were squeezed shut, the way you squeeze them when you know you’re going to take one for the team — but if I hadn’t broken my fall, I would almost certainly have done myself significant damage, carpet or no carpet. I could have sprained my neck, or even broken it.

I lay there a moment, confirming to myself that I was still alive, then got to my knees, my hip aching fiercely, holding my throbbing right arm up in front of my eyes. There was no arm there. I set my chair up on its legs, leaned on it with my left forearm… then darted my head forward and bit my right arm.

I felt the crescents of my teeth sink in just below the elbow. The pain.

I felt more. I felt the flesh of my forearm against my lips. Then I drew back, panting. “Jesus! Jesus! What’s happening? What is this?”

I almost expected to see the arm swirl into existence. It didn’t, but it was there, all right. I reached across the seat of my chair for one of my brushes. I could feel my fingers grasp it, but the brush didn’t move. I thought: So this is what it’s like to be a ghost.

I scrambled into the chair. My hip was snarling, but that pain seemed to be happening far downriver. With my left hand I snatched up the brush I’d cleaned and put it behind my left ear. Cleaned another and put it in the gutter of the easel. Cleaned a third and put that in the gutter, as well. Thought about cleaning a fourth and decided I didn’t want to take the time. That fever was on me again, that hunger. It was as sudden and violent as my fits of rage. If the smoke detectors had gone off downstairs, announcing the house was on fire, I would have paid no attention. I stripped the cellophane from a brand-new brush, dipped black, and began to paint.

As with the picture I’d called The End of the Game, I don’t remember much about the actual creation of Friends with Benefits. All I know is it happened in a violent explosion, and sunsets had nothing to do with it. It was mostly black and blue, the color of bruises, and when it was done, my left arm ached from the exercise. My hand was splattered with paint all the way to the wrist.

The finished canvas reminded me a little of those noir paperback covers I used to see back when I was a kid, the ones that always featured some roundheels dame headed for hell. Only on the paperback covers, the dame was usually blond and twenty-twoish. In my picture, she had dark hair and looked on the plus side of forty. This dame was my ex-wife.

She was sitting on a rumpled bed, wearing nothing but a pair of blue panties. The strap of a matching bra trailed across one leg. Her head was slightly bent, but there was no mistaking her features; I had caught her BRILLIANTLY in just a few harsh strokes of black that were almost like Chinese ideograms. On the slope of one breast was the picture’s only real spot of brightness: a rose tattoo. I wondered when she’d gotten it, and why. Pam wearing ink seemed as unlikely to me as Pam racing a dirt-bike at Mission Hill, but I had no doubt whatever that it was true; it was just a fact, like Carson Jones’s Torii Hunter tee-shirt.

There were also two men in the picture, both naked. One stood at the window, half-turned. He had a perfectly typical body for a white middle-class man of fifty or so, one I imagined you could see in any Gold’s Gym changing room: poochy stomach, flat little no-cheeks ass, moderate man-tits. His face was intelligent and well-bred. On that face now was a melancholy she’s-almost-gone look. A nothing-will-change-it look. This was Max from Palm Desert. He might as well have been wearing a sign around his neck. Max who had lost his father last year, Max who had started by offering Pam coffee and had ended up offering her more. She’d taken him up on the coffee and the more, but not all the more he would have given. His face said that. You couldn’t see all of it, but what you could see was a lot more naked than his ass.

The other man leaned in the doorway with his ankles crossed, a position that pressed his thighs together and pushed his considerable package forward. He was maybe ten years older than the man at the window, in better shape. No belly. No lovehandles. Long muscles in the thighs. His arms were folded below his chest and he was looking at Pam with a little smile on his face. I knew that smile well, because Tom Riley had been my accountant — and my friend — for thirty-five years. If it had not been custom in our family to ask your father to be your best man, I would have asked Tom.

I looked at him standing naked in the doorway, looking at my wife on the bed, and remembered him helping me move my stuff out to Lake Phalen. Remembered him saying You don’t give up the house, that’s like giving up home field advantage in a playoff game.

Then catching him with tears in his eyes. Boss, I can’t get used to seeing you this way.

Had he been fucking her then? I thought not. But —

I’m going to give you an offer to take back to her, I’d said. And he had. Only maybe he’d done more than make my offer.

I limped to the big window, not using my crutch. Sunset was still hours off, but the light was westering strongly, beating a reflection off the water. I made myself look directly into that glaring track, wiping my eyes repeatedly.

I tried to tell myself the picture might be no more than a figment of a mind that was still trying to heal itself. It wouldn’t wash. All my voices were speaking clearly and coherently to one another, and I knew what I knew. Pam had fucked Max out there in Palm Desert, and when he had suggested a longer, deeper commitment, she had refused. Pam had also fucked my oldest friend and business associate, and might still be fucking him. The only unanswered question was which guy had talked her into the rose on her tit.

“I need to let this go,” I said, and leaned my throbbing forehead against the glass. Beyond me, the sun burned on the Gulf of Mexico. “I really need to let this go.”

Then snap your fingers, I thought.

I snapped the fingers of my right hand and heard the sound — a brisk little click. “All right, over-done with-gone!” I said brightly. But then I closed my eyes and saw Pam sitting on the bed — some bed — in her panties, with a bra-strap lying across her leg like a dead snake.

Friends with benefits.

Fucking friends, with fucking benefits.

vii

That evening I didn’t watch the sunset from Little Pink. I left my crutch leaning against the corner of the house, limped down the beach, and walked into the water until I was up to my knees. The water was cold, the way it gets a couple of months after hurricane season has blown itself out, but I hardly noticed. Now the track beating across the water was bitter orange, and that was what I was looking at.

“Experiment, my ass,” I said, and the water surged around me. I rocked unsteadily on my feet, holding my arm out for balance. “My fucking ass.”

Overhead a heron glided across the darkening sky, a silent long-neck projectile.

“Snooping is what it was, snooping is all it was, and I paid the price.”

True. If I sort of felt like strangling her all over again, it was nobody’s fault but my own. Peek not through a keyhole, lest ye be vexed, my dear old mother used to say. I peeked, I was vexed, end of story. It was her life now, and what she did in it was her business. My business was to drop it. My question was whether or not I could. It was harder than snapping your fingers; even than snapping the fingers of a hand that wasn’t there.

A wave surged in, one big enough to knock me down. For a moment I was under, and breathing water. I came up spluttering. The backrun tried to pull me out with the sand and shells. I pushed shoreward with my good foot, even kicking feebly with my bad one, and managed to get some purchase. I might be confused about some things, but I didn’t want to drown in the Gulf of Mexico. I wasn’t confused about that. I crawled out of the water with my hair hanging in my eyes, spitting and coughing, dragging my right leg behind me like so much soaked luggage.

When I finally got to dry sand, I rolled over and stared up into the sky. A fat crescent moon sailed the deepening velvet above Big Pink’s roofpeak. It looked very serene up there. Down here was a man who felt the opposite of serene: shaking and sad and angry. I turned my head to look at the stump of my arm, then up at the moon again.

“No more peeking,” I said. “The new deal starts tonight. No more peeking and no more experiments.”

I meant it, too. But as I’ve said (and Wireman was there before me), we fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.