Duma Key (49 page)

“Did she want anything besides a cigarette?”

“She asked for food. But before that, she asked to go to the China Village. She wanted her chinas, Edgar! Do you know how long it's been?”

I did, actually. And it was good to hear him excited on her behalf.

“She started to fade after I got her there, though. She looked around and asked me where Percy was. She said she wanted Percy, that Percy needed to go in the cookie-tin.”

I looked at my painting. At my ship. It was mine now, all right. My
Perse
. I licked my lips, which suddenly felt leathery. The way they always had when I first woke up after the accident. When some of the time I couldn't remember who I was. Do you know what's queer? Remembering forgetting. It's like looking into a hall of mirrors. “Which one is Percy?”

“Damned if I know. When she wants me to throw the cookie-tin in the goldfish pond, she always insists on putting a girl china in it. Usually the shepherdess with her face chipped off.”

“Did she say anything else?”

“She wanted food, I told you. Tomato soup. And peaches. By then she'd stopped looking at the chinas, and she was getting confused again.”

Had she gotten confused because Percy wasn't there? Or the
Perse
? Maybe . . . but if she'd ever had a china boat, I'd never seen it. I thought—not for the first time—that Perse was a funny word. You couldn't trust it. It kept changing.

Wireman said, “At one point she told me the table was leaking.”

“And was it?”

There was a brief pause. Then he said, not very humorously: “Are we having a little joke at Wireman's expense,
mi amigo
?”

“No, I'm curious. What did she say? Exactly?”

“Just that. ‘The table is leaking.' But her chinas are on a table-table, as you well know, not a water-table.”

“Calm down. Don't lose your good thoughts.”

“I'm trying not to, but I have to say you seem a little off your conversational game, Edster.”

“Don't call me Edster, it sounds like a vintage Ford. You brought her soup, and she was . . . what? Gone again?”

“Pretty much, yeah. She'd broken a couple of her china figures on the floor—a horse and a rodeo girl.” He sighed.

“Did she say ‘It's leaking' before or after you brought her the food?”

“After, before, what does it matter?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Which was it?”

“Before. I think. Yes, before. Afterward, she'd pretty much lost interest in everything, including
chucking the Sweet Owen tin into the pond for the umpteenth time. I brought the soup in her favorite mug, but she pushed it away so hard she slopped some on her poor old arm. She didn't even seem to feel it. Edgar, why are you asking these questions? What do you know?” He was pacing around with the cell phone to his ear. I could see him doing it.

“Nothing. I'm feeling around in the dark, for Chrissake.”

“Yeah? Which arm you doing it with?”

That stopped me for a moment, but we had come too far and shared too much for lies, even when the truth was nuts. “My right one.”

“All right,” he said. “All right, Edgar. I wish I knew what was going on, that's all. Because
something
is.”

“
Maybe
something is. How is she now?”

“Sleeping. And I'm interrupting you. You're working.”

“No,” I said, and tossed the brush aside. “I think this is done, and I think I'm also done for awhile. Just walking and shelling for me between now and the show.”

“Noble aspirations, but I don't think you can do it. Not a workaholic like you.”

“I think you're wrong.”

“Okay, I'm wrong. Won't be the first time. Are you going to come down and visit with us tomorrow? I want you to see it if she lights up again.”

“Count on it. And maybe we could hit a few tennis balls.”

“Fine by me.”

“Wireman, there's one other thing. Did Elizabeth ever paint?”

He laughed. “Who knows? I asked her once and
she said she could hardly draw stick figures. She said her interest in the arts wasn't much different from the interest some wealthy alumni have in football and basketball. She joked about it, said—”

“If you can't be an athlete, be an athletic supporter.”

“Exactly. How'd you know?”

“It's an old one,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

I hung up and stood where I was, watching the long light of evening fire up a Gulf sunset I had no urge to paint. They were the same words she'd used with Gene Hadlock. And I had no doubt that if I asked others, I'd hear the same anecdote once or twice or a dozen times:
She said I can't even draw stick figures, she said if you can't be an athlete, be an athletic supporter.
And why? Because an honest woman may occasionally goof the truth, but a good liar never varies her story.

I hadn't asked him about the red picnic basket, but I told myself that was all right; if it was in the attic of
El Palacio,
it would still be there the next day, and the day after that. I told myself there was time. Of course, that's what we always tell ourselves, isn't it? We can't imagine time running out, and God punishes us for what we can't imagine.

I looked at
Girl and Ship No. 8
with something approaching distaste and threw the cover-sheet over it. I never added the red picnic hamper to the bowsprit; I never put a brush to that particular painting again—the final mad descendent of my first sketch in Big Pink, the one I'd named
Hello. No. 8
may have been the best thing I ever did, but in a strange way, I almost forgot it. Until the show, that was. After that I could never forget it.

vi

The picnic basket.

That damned red picnic basket full of her drawings.

How that haunts me.

Even now, four years later, I find myself playing the what-if game, wondering how much would have changed if I'd pushed everything else aside and gone hunting for it. It
was
found—by Jack Cantori—but by then it was too late.

And maybe—I can't say for sure—it wouldn't have changed anything, because some force was at work, both on Duma Key and inside Edgar Freemantle. Can I say that force brought me there? No. Can I say it didn't? No, I can't say that, either. But by the time March became April, it had begun to gain strength and ever so stealthily extend its reach.

That basket.

Elizabeth's damned picnic basket.

It was
red
.

vii

Wireman's hope that Elizabeth was coming around began to seem unjustified. She remained a muttering lump in her wheelchair, every now and then stirring enough to cry out for a cigarette in the cracked voice of an aging parrot. He hired Annmarie Whistler away from Bay Area Private Nursing to come in and help him four days a week. The extra help might have eased Wireman's workload, but it did little to comfort him; he was heartsore.

But that was something I only glimpsed from the corner of my eye as April rolled in, sunny and hot. Because, speaking of hot . . . there I was.

Once Mary Ire's interview was published, I became a local celebrity. Why not? Artist was good, especially in the Sarasota area. Artist Who Used to Build Banks and Then Turned His Back on Mammon was better. One-Armed Artist of Blazing Talent was the absolute Golden Motherfucker. Dario and Jimmy scheduled a number of follow-up interviews, including one with Channel 6. I emerged from their Sarasota studio with a blinding headache and a complimentary CHANNEL 6 SUNCOAST WEATHER-WATCHER bumper sticker, which I ended up plastering on one of the
MEAN DOGS
sawhorses. Don't ask me why.

I also took over the Florida end of the travel-and-hospitality arrangements. Wireman was by then too busy trying to get Elizabeth to ingest anything but cigarette smoke. I found myself consulting with Pam every two or three days about the guest-list from Minnesota and travel arrangements from other parts of the country. Ilse called twice. I thought she was making an effort to sound cheerful, but I could have been wrong. My attempts to find out how her love-life was progressing were kindly but firmly blocked. Melinda called—to ask for my hat-size, of all things. When I asked why, she wouldn't tell. Fifteen minutes after she hung up, I realized: she and her French
ami
really were buying me a fucking beret. I burst out laughing.

An AP reporter from Tampa came to Sarasota—he wanted to come to Duma, but I didn't like the idea of a reporter tramping around in Big Pink, listening to what I now thought of as my shells. He interviewed
me at the Scoto instead, while a photographer took pictures of three carefully selected paintings:
Roses Grow from Shells, Sunset with Sophora,
and
Duma Road
. I was wearing a Casey Key Fish House tee-shirt, and a photo of me—baseball cap on backwards and one short sleeve empty except for a nub of stump—ran nationwide. After that, my telephone rang off the hook. Angel Slobotnik called and talked for twenty minutes. At one point, he said he always knew I had it in me. “What?” I asked. His reply was “Bullshit, boss,” and we laughed like maniacs. Kathi Green called; I heard all about her new boyfriend (not so good) and her new self-help program (wonderful). I told her about how Kamen had shown up at the lecture and saved my ass. By the end of that call she was crying and saying she'd never had such a gutty, come-from-behind patient. Then she said when she saw me she was going to tell me to drop and give her fifty sit-ups. That sounded like the old Kathi. To top it all off, Todd Jamieson, the doctor who had probably saved me from a decade or two as a human rutabaga, sent me a bottle of champagne with a card reading,
Cannot wait to see your work
.

If Wireman had bet me on whether or not I'd get bored and pick up a brush again before the show, he would have lost. When I wasn't getting ready for my big moment, I was walking, reading, or sleeping. I mentioned this to him on one of the rare afternoons when we were together at the end of
El Palacio
's boardwalk, drinking green tea under the striped umbrella. This was less than a week before the show.

“I'm glad,” he said simply. “You needed to rest.”

“What about you, Wireman? How are you doing?”

“Not great, but I will survive—Gloria Gaynor, 1978.
It's sadness, mostly.” He sighed. “I'm going to lose her. I kidded myself that maybe she was coming back, but . . . I'm going to lose her. It's not like Julia and Esmeralda, thank God, but it still weighs on me.”

“I'm sorry.” I laid my hand over his. “For her
and
for you.”

“Thanks.” He looked out at the waves. “Sometimes I think she won't die at all.”

“No?”

“No. I think the Walrus and the Carpenter will come for her, instead. That they'll just lead her away like they did those trusting Oysters. Lead her away down the beach. Do you remember what the Walrus says?”

I shook my head.

“ ‘It seems a shame to play them such a trick, After we've brought them out so far, And made them trot so quick.' ” He swiped an arm across his face. “Look at me,
muchacho,
crying just like the Walrus. Ain't I stupid.”

“No,” I said.

“I hate to face the idea that this time she's gone for good, that the best part of her went off down the beach with the Walrus and the Carpenter and there's nothing left but a fat old piece of suet that hasn't quite forgotten how to breathe yet.”

I said nothing. He wiped his eyes again with his forearm and drew in a long, watery breath. Then he said, “I looked into the story of John Eastlake, and how his daughters were drowned, and what happened after—do you remember asking me to do that?”

I did, but it seemed long ago, and unimportant. What I think now is that something
wanted
it to seem that way to me.

“I went surfing around on the Internet and came up with a good deal from the local newspapers and a couple of memoirs that are available for download. One of them—I shit you not,
muchacho
—is called
Boat Trips and Beeswax, A Girlhood in Nokomis,
by Stephanie Weider Gravel-Miller.”

“Sounds like quite a trip down memory lane.”

“It was. She talks about ‘the happy darkies, picking oranges and singing simple songs of praise in their mellifluous voices.' ”

“I guess that was before Jay-Z.”

“Got that right. Even better, I talked to Chris Shannington, over on Casey Key—you've almost certainly seen him. Colorful old geezer who walks everyplace with this gnarled briarwood cane, almost as tall as he is, and a big straw hat on his head. His father, Ellis Shannington, was John Eastlake's gardener. According to Chris, it was Ellis who took Maria and Hannah, Elizabeth's two older sisters, back to the Braden School ten days or so after the drowning. He said, ‘Those chirrun were heartbroken for the babby-uns.' ”

Wireman's imitation of the old man's southern accent was eerily good, and I found myself for some reason thinking of the Walrus and the Carpenter again, walking up the beach with the little Oysters. The only part of the poem I could remember clearly was the Carpenter telling them they'd had a pleasant run, but of course the Oysters couldn't answer, for they'd been eaten—every one.

“Do you want to hear this now?” Wireman asked.

“Have you got time to tell me now?”

“Sure. Annmarie's got the duty until seven, although as a matter of practical fact, we share it most
days. Why don't we walk up to the house? I've got a file. There isn't much in it, but there's at least one picture that's worth looking at. Chris Shannington had it in a box of his father's things. I walked up to the Casey Key Public Library with him and copied it.” He paused. “It's a picture of Heron's Roost.”