Duma Key: A Novel Read online

  She thinks No more bed all day now. I go Daddy room, Daddy’s study. Sometimes I say study, sometimes I say groody. It has a nice big window. They sit me in the char. I can see down up. Birds and nice. Too nice for me, so it makes me sat. Some clouds have wings. Some have blue eyes. Every sunset I cry from sat. Hurts to see. Hurts the down up in me. I could never say what I see and that makes me sat.

  She thinks SAD, that word is SAD. Sat is for how you feel in the char.

  She thinks If I could stop the hurt. If I could get it out like weewee. I cry and beg beg beg to say what I mean. Nan can’t hep. When I say “Color!” she touch her face and smile and say “Always was, always will be.” Big girls don’t help either. I’m so mad at them, why don’t you listen, YOU BIG MEANIES! Then one day the twins come, Tessie and Lo-Lo. They talk special to each other, listen special to me. They don’t understand me at first, but then. Tessie bring me paper. Lo-Lo bring me pencil and I “Ben-cil!” out my mouth and it makes them claff and lap their hands.

  She thinks I CAN ALMOST SAY THE NAME OF PENCIL!

  She thinks I can make the world on paper. I can draw what the words mean. I see tree, I make tree. I see bird, I make bird. It’s good, like water from a glass.

  This is a little girl with a bandage wound around her head, wearing a little pink housecoat and sitting beside the window in her father’s study. Her doll, Noveen, lies on the floor beside her. She has a board and on the board is a piece of paper. She has just succeeded in drawing a claw that actually does bear a resemblance to the dead loblolly pine outside the window.

  She thinks I will have more paper, please.

  She thinks I am ELIZABETH.

  It must have been like being given back your tongue after you thought it had been stilled forever. And more. Better. It was a gift of herself, of ELIZABETH. Even from those incredibly brave first drawings, she must have understood what was happening. And wanted more.

  Her gift was hungry. The best gifts—and the worst—always are.

  4—Friends with Benefits

  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 f
ound 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 hugger-mugger 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

  EFree19 to Pamorama667

  9:15 AM

  January 24

  Dear Pam: I have an unusual bequest for you. I’ve been painting, and the subjects are odd but kind of fun (at least I think so). Easier to show you what I mean than describe, so I will attach a couple of jpegs to this e-mail. I have been thinking about those gardening gloves you used to have, the ones that said HANDS on one glove and OFF on the other. I would love to put those on a sunset. Do NOT ask me why, these ideas just come to me. Do you still have them? And if you do, would you send them to me? I will happily send them back if you want.

  I’d just as soon you didn’t share the pix with any of the “old crowd.” Bozie in particular would probably laugh like a look if he saw THESE things.

  Eddie

  PS: If you don’t feel good about sending the gloves, perfectly O.K. It’s just a wind.

  E.

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

  Pamorama667 to EFree19

  5:00 PM

  January 24

  Hello Edgar: Ilse told me about yr pictures of course. They certainly are different. Hopefully this hobby will last longer than yr car restoration thing. If not for eBay that old Mustang would still be behind the house I think. Yr right about it being an odd request but after looking at yr pix I can sort of see what yr up-to (putting different things together so people will look at them in new ways, right) and I’m ready for a new pr anyway so “knock yrself out.” I’ll send them UPS only ask that you send me a jpg of the “Finnish Product” ( ) if there ever is one.

  Ilse sd she had a terrific time. I hope she sent a Thank-You card and not just an e-mail, but I know her.

  One more thing to tell you, Eddie, altho I don’t know how much you will like it. I sent a copy of yr e-mail and jpg pictures to Zander Kamen, you remember him I’msure. I thought he would like to see the pix, but mostly I wanted him to see the e-mail and find out if it was cause for concern, because you are doing in yr writing what you used to do in yr speaking: “bequest” for “request,” “laugh like a look” for “laugh like a loon.” At the bottom you wrote “It’s just a wind” and I don’t know what that means but Dr. Kamen says maybe “whim.”

  I’m just thinking of you.

  Pam

  PS: My father is a little better, came through the operation well (the doctors say they might have “got all of it” but I bet they always say that). He seems to be handling the chemo well and is at home. Walking already. Thanks for yr concern.

  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 m
istaken 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:

  KamenDoc to EFree19

  2:49 PM

  January 25

  Edgar: Pam sent me copies of your latest e-mail and your pictures. Let me say first and foremost that I am STUNNED by the rapidity of your growth as an artist. I can see you shying away from the word with that patented sidelong frown of yours, but there is no other word. YOU MUST NOT STOP. Concerning her worries: there’s probably nothing to them. Still, an MRI would be a good idea. Do you have a doctor down there? You’re due for a physical—soup to nuts, my friend.