Duma Key (73 page)

We turned and saw a heron alight on the driveway. It could have been the same one that had been giving me the cold-eye from
El Palacio'
s tennis court. Certainly the gaze was the same: blue and sharp and without an ounce of pity.

“Is that real?” Wireman asked. “What do you think, Edgar?”

“It's real,” I said.

“How do you know?”

I could have pointed out that the heron was casting a shadow, but for all I knew, the lawn jockey had been casting one, as well; I had been too amazed to notice. “I just do. Come on, let's go inside. And don't bother knocking. This isn't a social call.”

xiii

“Uh, this could be a problem,” Jack said.

The veranda was deeply shadowed by mats of hanging Spanish Moss, but once our eyes had adjusted to the gloom, we could see a thick and rusty chain encircling the double doors. Not one but two padlocks hung down from it. The chain had been run through hooks on either jamb.

Wireman stepped forward for a closer look. “You know,” he said, “Jack and I might be able to snap one or both of those hooks right off. They've seen better days.”

“Better
years,
” Jack said.

“Maybe,” I said, “but the doors themselves are almost certainly locked, and if you go rattling chains and snapping hooks, you're going to disturb the neighbors.”

“Neighbors?” Wireman asked.

I pointed straight up. Wireman and Jack followed my finger and saw what I already had: a large colony of brown bats sleeping in what looked like a vast hanging cloud of cobweb. I glanced down and saw the porch was not just coated but plated with guano. It made me very glad I was wearing a hat.

When I looked up again, Jack Cantori was at the foot of the steps. “No way, baby,” he said. “Call me a chicken, call me a candy-ass, call me any name in the book, I'm not going there. With Wireman it's snakes. With me it's bats. Once—” He looked like he had more to say, maybe a lot, but didn't know how to say it. He took another step back, instead. I had a moment to contemplate the eccentricity of fear: what the weird jockey hadn't been able to accomplish (close, but that only counts in horseshoes), a colony of sleeping brown bats had. For Jack, at least.

Wireman said, “They can carry rabies,
muchacho
—did you know that?”

I nodded. “I think we should look for the tradesman's entrance.”

xiv

We made our way slowly along the side of the house, Jack in the lead and carrying the red picnic basket. His shirt was dark with sweat, but he no longer showed the slightest sign of nausea. He should have; probably we all should have. The stench from the pool was nearly overpowering. Thigh-high grass whickered against our pants; stiff fiddlewood stems poked at our ankles. There were windows, but unless
Jack wanted to try standing on Wireman's shoulders, they were all too high.

“What time is it?” Jack puffed.

“Time for you to move a little faster,
mi amigo,
” Wireman said. “You want me to spell you on that basket?”

“Sure,” Jack said, sounding really out of temper for the first time since I'd met him. “Then you can have a heart attack and me and the boss can try out our CPR technique.”

“Are you suggesting I'm not in shape?”

“In shape, but I still put you fifty pounds into the cardiac danger zone.”

“Quit it,” I said. “Both of you.”

“Put it down, son,” Wireman said. “Put that
cesto de puta madre
down and I'll carry it the rest of the way.”

“No. Forget it.”

Something black moved in the corner of my eye. I almost didn't look. I thought it was the lawn jockey again, this time darting alongside the pool. Or skimming its buggy, smelly surface. Thank God I decided to make sure.

Wireman, meanwhile, was glowering at Jack. His manhood had been impugned. “I want to spell you.”

A piece of the pool's turgid nastiness had come alive. It detached itself from the blackness and flopped onto the cracked, weed-sprouting concrete lip, splattering muck about itself in a dirty starburst.

“No, Wireman, I got it.”

A piece of nastiness with eyes.

“Jack, I'm telling you for the last time.”

Then I saw the tail, and realized what I was looking at.

“And I'm telling
you
—”

“Wireman,” I said, and grabbed his shoulder.

“
No,
Edgar, I can do this.”

I can do this
. How those words clanged in my head. I forced myself to speak slowly, loudly, and emphatically.

“Wireman, shut up. There's an alligator. It just came out of the pool.”

Wireman was afraid of snakes, Jack was afraid of bats. I had no idea I was afraid of alligators until I saw that chunk of prehistoric darkness separate itself from the decaying stew in the old pool and come for us, first across the overgrown concrete (brushing aside the last surviving, tipped-over lawn chair as it did) and then sliding into the weeds and vines trailing down from the nearest Brazilian Peppers. I caught one glimpse of its snout wrinkling back, one black eye squeezing shut in what could have been a wink, and then there was only its dripping back protruding here and there through the shivering greenery, like a submarine that's three-quarters under. It was coming for us, and after telling Wireman, I could do no more. Grayness came over my sight. I leaned back against the old warped boards of Heron's Roost. They were warm. I leaned there and waited to be eaten by the twelve-foot-long horror that lived in John Eastlake's old swimming pool.

Wireman never hesitated. He stripped the red basket from Jack's hands, dropped it on the ground, and knelt beside it, flipping back one end as he did so. He reached in and produced the largest handgun I had ever seen outside of a motion picture. Kneeling there in the high grass with the open picnic basket in front of him, Wireman gripped it in both hands. I had a good
angle on his face, and I thought then and still think now that he looked perfectly serene . . . especially for a man facing what could be seen as a snake writ large. He waited.

“Shoot it!”
Jack screamed.

Wireman waited. And beyond him, I saw the heron. It was floating in the air above the long, overgrown utility building behind the tennis court. It was floating upside down.

“Wireman?” I said. “Safety catch?”

“Caray,”
he murmured, and flicked something with his thumb. A red spot high on the pistol's handgrip winked out of view. He never took his eyes from the high grass, which had now begun to shake. Then it parted, and the alligator came at him. I had seen them on the Discovery Channel and
National Geographic
specials, but nothing prepared me for how fast that thing could move on those stub-legs. The grass had brushed most of the mud from its rudiment of a face, and I could see its enormous smile.

“Now!”
Jack screamed.

Wireman shot. The report was tremendous—it went rolling away like something solid, something made of stone—and the result was tremendous, as well. The top half of the alligator's head came off in a cloud of mud, blood, and flesh. It didn't slow down; to the contrary, those stubby legs seemed to speed up as it ran off the last thirty feet or so. I could hear the grass whickering harshly along its plated sides.

The barrel of the gun rose with the recoil. Wireman let it. I've never seen calm like that, and it still amazes me. When the gun came back to dead level, the alligator was no more than fifteen feet away. He fired again, and the second bullet lifted the thing's front
half to the sky, revealing a greenish-white belly. For a moment it seemed to be dancing on its tail, like a happy gator in a Disney cartoon.

“Yahh, you ugly bastard!”
Jack screamed.
“Fuck ya mutha! Fuck ya GRANDmutha!”

The gun again rose with the recoil. Once again, Wireman let it. The alligator thumped down on its side, belly exposed, the stubs of its legs thrashing, its tail whipping and tearing up grass and earth in clots. When the muzzle came back level, Wireman pulled the trigger again, and the center of the thing's belly seemed to disintegrate. All at once the ragged, flattened circle in which it lay was mostly red instead of green.

I looked for the heron. The heron was gone.

Wireman got up, and I saw he was shaking. He walked toward the alligator—although not quite within the radius of the still-whipping tail—and pumped two more rounds into it. The tail gave a final convulsive whack against the ground, the body a final jerk, and then it was still.

He turned to Jack and held up the automatic in a shaking hand. “Desert Eagle, .357,” he said. “One big old handgun, made by badass Hebrews—James McMurtry, two thousand-six. Mostly what added the weight to the basket was the ammo. I tossed in all the clips I had. That was about a dozen.”

Jack walked over to him, embraced him, then kissed him on both cheeks. “I'll carry that basket to Cleveland if you want, and never say a word.”

“At least you won't have to carry the gun,” Wireman said. “From now on, sweet old Betsy McCall goes in my belt.” And he put it there, after loading a fresh clip and carefully re-engaging the safety. This took him two tries, because of his shaking hands.

I came over to him and also kissed him on each cheek.

“Oh gosh,” he said. “Wireman no longer feels Spanish. Wireman is beginning to feel positively French.”

“How do you happen to have a gun in the first place?” I asked.

“It was Miss Eastlake's idea, after the last cocaine skirmish in Tampa–St. Pete.” He turned to Jack. “You remember, don't you?”

“Yeah. Four dead.”

“Anyway, Miss Eastlake suggested I get a gun for home protection. I got a big one. She and I even did some target practice together.” He smiled. “She was good, and she didn't mind the noise, but she
hated
the recoil.” He looked at the splattered alligator. “I guess it did the job. What next,
muchacho
?”

“Around back, but . . . did either of you see that heron?”

Jack shook his head. So did Wireman, looking bemused.

“
I
saw it,” I told him. “And if I see it again . . . or if either of you do . . . I want you to shoot it, Jerome.”

Wireman raised his eyebrows but said nothing. We resumed our tramp along the east side of the deserted estate.

xv

Finding a way in through the back turned out not to be a problem: there
was
no back. All but the most easterly corner of the mansion had been torn off, probably in the same storm that had taken the top
stories. Standing there, looking into the overgrown ruin of what had once been a kitchen and pantry, I realized that Heron's Roost was little more than a moss-festooned façade.

“We can get in from here,” Jack said doubtfully, “but I'm not sure I trust the floor. What do you think, Edgar?”

“I don't know,” I said. I felt very tired. Maybe it was only spent adrenaline from our encounter with the alligator, but it felt like more than that to me. It felt like defeat. There had been too many years, too many storms. And a little girl's drawings were ephemeral things to start with. “What time
is
it, Wireman? Without the bullshit, if you please.”

He looked at his watch. “Two-thirty. What do you say,
muchacho
? Go in?”

“I don't know,” I repeated.

“Well, I do,” he said. “I killed a fucking alligator to get here; I'm not leaving without at least a look around the old homestead. The pantry floor looks solid, and it's the closest to the ground. Come on, you two, let's pile up some shit to stand on. A couple of those beams should do. Jack, you can go first, then help me. We'll pull Edgar up together.”

And that's how we did it, dirty and disheveled and out of breath, scrambling first into the pantry and going from there into the house itself, looking around with wonder, feeling like time travelers, tourists in a world that had ended over eighty years before.

i

The house stank of decaying wood, old plaster, and moldy fabric. There was also an underlying greenish odor. Some of the furniture was left—ruined by time and slumped by moisture—but the fine old wallpaper in the parlor hung in strips, and there was a huge paper nest, ancient and silent, clinging to the ceiling in the rotting front hall. Below it, dead wasps lay in a foot-deep hill on the warped cypress floorboards. Somewhere, in what remained of the upstairs, water was dripping, one isolated drop at a time.

“The cypress and redwood in this place would have been worth a fortune if somebody had come up and got it before it went to hell,” Jack said. He bent down, seized the end of a protruding board, and pulled. It came up, bent almost like taffy, then broke off—not with a snap but a listless
crump
. A few woodlice came strolling from the rectangular hole below it. The smell that puffed up was dank and dark.

“No scavenge, no salvage, and nobody up here partying hearty,” Wireman said. “No discarded condoms or step-ins, not a single JOE LOVES DEBBIE spray-painted on a wall. I don't think anyone's been up here since John chained the door and drove away for the last time. I know that's hard to believe—”

“No,” I said. “It's not. The Heron's Roost at this
end of the Key has belonged to Perse since 1927. John knew it, and made sure to keep it that way when he wrote his will. Elizabeth did the same. But it's not a shrine.” I looked into the room opposite the formal parlor. It might once have been a study. An old rolltop desk sat in a puddle of stinking water. There were bookshelves, but they stood empty. “It's a tomb.”

“So where do we look for these drawings?” Jack asked.

“I have no idea,” I said. “I don't even . . .” A chunk of plaster lay in the doorway, and I kicked it. I wanted to send it flying, but it was too old and wet; it only disintegrated. “I don't think there
are
any more drawings. Not now that I see the place.”