Duma Key: A Novel Read online

  Wireman gaped, those green eyes of his so wide I was about to apologize for my faux pas. Then he really began to laugh. It was the kind of balls-to-the-wall bellowing you give out on those rare occasions when something sneaks past all your defenses and gets to the sweet spot of your funnybone. I mean the man was busting a gut, and when he saw I didn’t have the slightest idea what had gotten him, he laughed even harder, his not inconsiderable belly heaving. He tried to put his glass back on the little table and missed. The glass plummeted straight down to the sand and stuck there, perfectly upright, like a cigarette-butt in one of those urns of sand you used to see beside the elevators in hotel lobbies. That struck him even funnier, and he pointed at it.

  “I couldn’t have done that if I was trying!” he managed, and then was off again, gale upon gale, heaving in his chair, one hand clutching his stomach, the other planted on his chest. A snatch of poetry read in high school, over thirty years before, suddenly came back to me with haunting clarity: Men do not sham convulsion, Nor simulate a throe.

  I was smiling myself, smiling and chuckling, because that kind of high hilarity is catching, even when you don’t know what the joke is. And the glass falling that way, with every drop of Wireman’s tea staying inside … that was funny. Like a gag in a Road Runner cartoon. But the plummeting glass hadn’t been the source of Wireman’s hilarity.

  “I don’t get it. I mean I’m sorry if I—”

  “She sort of is!” Wireman cried, cackling so crazily he was almost incoherent. “She sort of is, that’s the thing! Only it’s daughter, of course, she’s The Daughter of the Godfa—”

  But he had been rocking from side to side as well as up and down—no sham, authentic throe—and that was when his beach chair finally gave up the ghost with a loud crrrack, first snapping him forward with an extremely comical look of surprise on his face and then spilling him onto the sand. One of his flailing arms caught the post of the umbrella and upended the table. A gust of wind caught the umbrella, puffed it like a sail, and began to drag the table down the beach. What got me laughing wasn’t the bug-eyed look of amazement on Wireman’s face when his disintegrating beach chair tried to clamp on him like a striped jaw, nor his sudden barrel-roll onto the sand. It wasn’t even the sight of that table trying to escape, tugged by its own umbrella. It was Wireman’s glass, still standing placidly upright between the sprawling man’s side and left arm.

  Acme Iced Tea Company, I thought, still stuck on those old Road Runner cartoons. Meep-meep! And that, of course, made me think of the crane that had done the damage, the one with the fucked-up beeper that hadn’t beeped, and all at once I saw myself as Wile E. Coyote in the cab of my disintegrating pickup truck, eyes bugged in bewilderment, frazzled ears sticking off in two opposite directions and maybe smoking a little at the tips.

  That did it. I laughed until I rolled bonelessly out of my own chair and plopped onto the sand beside Wireman … but I also missed the glass, which still stood perfectly upright like a cigarette-butt in an urn of sand. It was impossible for me to laugh any harder, but I did. Tears gushed down my cheeks and the world had begun to dim out as my brain went into oxygen-deprivation mode.

  Wireman, still howling, went crawling after his runaway table, locomoting on knees and elbows. He made a grab for the base and it skittered away as if sensing his approach. Wireman plowed face-first into the sand and came up laughing and sneezing. I rolled over on my back and gasped for breath, on the verge of passing out but still laughing.

  That was how I met Wireman.

  iii

  Twenty minutes later the table had been placed in a rough approximation of its original position. That was all very well, but neither of us could look at the umbrella without breaking into fits of the giggles. One of its pie-wedges was torn, and it now rose crookedly from the table, giving it the look of a drunken man trying to pretend he’s sober. Wireman had moved the remaining chair down to the end of the wooden walk, and had taken it at my insistence. I was sitting on the walk itself, which, although backless, would make getting up an easier (not to mention more dignified) proposition. Wireman had offered to replace the spilled pitcher of iced tea with a fresh one. I refused this, but agreed to split the miraculously unspilled glass with him.

  “Now we’re water-brothers,” he said when it was gone.

  “Is that some Indian ritual?” I asked.

  “Nope, from Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein. Bless his memory.”

  It occurred to me that I’d never seen him reading as he sat in his striped chair, but I didn’t mention it. Lots of people don’t read on the beach; the glare gives them headaches. I sympathized with people who got headaches.

  He began to laugh again. He covered his mouth with both hands—like a child—but the laughter burst through. “No more. Jesus, no more. I feel like I sprung every muscle in my stomach.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  For a moment we said nothing more. The breeze off the Gulf was cool and fresh that day, with a rueful salt tang. The rip in the umbrella flapped. The dark spot on the sand where the iced tea pitcher had spilled was already almost dry.

  He snickered. “Did you see the table trying to escape? The fucking table?”

  I also snickered. My hip hurt and my stomach-muscles ached, but I felt pretty good for a man who had almost laughed himself unconscious. “ ‘Alabama Getaway,’ ” I said.

  He nodded, still wiping sand from his face. “Grateful Dead. Nineteen seventy-nine. Or thereabouts.” He giggled, the giggle broadened into a chuckle, and the chuckle became another bellow of full-throated laughter. He held his belly and groaned. “I can’t, I have to stop, but … Bride of the Godfather! Jesus!” And he was off again.

  “Don’t you ever tell her I said that,” I said.

  He quit laughing, but not smiling. “I ain’t that indiscreet, muchacho. But … it was the hat, right? That big straw hat she wears. Like Marlon Brando in the garden, playing with the little kid.”

  It had actually been as much the sneakers, but I nodded and we laughed some more.

  “If we crack up when I introduce you,” he said (cracking up again, probably at the idea of cracking up; it goes that way when the fit is on you), “we’re gonna say it’s because I broke my chair, right?”

  “Right,” I said. “What did you mean when you said she sort of is?”

  “You really don’t know?”

  “No clue.”

  He pointed at Big Pink, which was looking very small in the distance. Looking like a long walk back. “Who do you think owns your place, amigo? I mean, I’m sure you pay a real estate agent, or Vacation Homes Be Us, but where do you think the balance of your check finally ends up?”

  “I’m going to guess in Miss Eastlake’s bank account.”

  “Correct. Miss Elizabeth Eastlake. Given the lady’s age—eighty-five—I guess you could call her Ole Miss.” He began laughing again, shook his head, and said: “I have to stop. But in fairness to myself, it’s been a long time since I had anything to belly-laugh about.”

  “Same here.”

  He looked at me—armless, all patchy-haired on one side—and nodded. Then for a little while we just looked out at the Gulf. I know that people come to Florida when they’re old and sick because it’s warm pretty much year-round, but I think the Gulf of Mexico has something else going for it. Just looking into that mild flat sunlit calm is healing. It’s a big word, isn’t it? Gulf, I mean. Big enough to drop a lot of things into and watch them disappear.

  After awhile Wireman said, “And who do you think owns the houses between your place and this one?” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the white walls and orange tile. “Which, by the way, is listed on the county plat-maps as Heron’s Roost and I call El Palacio de Asesinos.”

  “Would that also be Miss Eastlake?”

  “You’re two for two,” he said.

  “Why do you call it Palace of Assassins?”

  “Well, it’s ‘Outlaw Hideout’ when I thin
k in English,” Wireman said with an apologetic smile. “Because it looks like the place where the head bad guy in a Sam Peckinpah Western would hang his hat. Anyway, you’ve got six rather nice homes between Heron’s Roost and Salmon Point—”

  “Which I call Big Pink,” I said. “When I think in English.”

  He nodded. “El Rosado Grande. Good name. I like it. You’ll be there … how long?”

  “I have the place for a year, but I honestly don’t know. I’m not afraid of hot weather—I guess they call it the mean season—but there’s hurricanes to consider.”

  “Yep, down here we all consider hurricane season, especially since Charley and Katrina. But the houses between Salmon Point and Heron’s Roost will be empty long before hurricane season. Like the rest of Duma Key. Which could as easily have been called Eastlake Island, by the way.”

  “Are you saying this is all hers?”

  “That’s complicated even for a guy like me, who was a lawyer in his other life,” Wireman said. “Once upon a time her father owned it all, along with a good swatch of the Florida mainland east of here. He sold everything in the thirties except for Duma. Miss Eastlake does own the north end, of that there is no doubt.” Wireman waved his arm to indicate the northern tip of the island, the part he would later characterize as being as bald as a stripper’s pussy. “The land and the houses on it, from Heron’s Roost—the most luxurious—to your Big Pink, the most adventurous. They bring her an income she hardly needs, because her father also left her and her siblings mucho dinero.”

  “How many of her brothers and sisters are still—”

  “None,” Wireman said. “The Daughter of the Godfather is the last.” He snorted and shook his head. “I have to quit calling her that,” he said, more to himself than to me.

  “If you say so. What I really wonder about is why the rest of the island isn’t developed. Given the never-ending housing and building boom in Florida, that’s seemed insane to me from the first day I crossed the bridge.”

  “You speak like a man with specialized knowledge. What are you in your other life, Edgar?”

  “A building contractor.”

  “And those days are behind you now?”

  I could have hedged—I didn’t know him well enough to put myself on the line—but I didn’t. I’m sure our mutual fit of hysterics had a lot to do with that. “Yes,” I said.

  “And what are you in this life?”

  I sighed and looked away from him. Out at the Gulf, where you could put all your old miseries and watch them disappear without a trace. “Can’t tell yet for sure. I’ve been doing some painting.” And waited for him to laugh.

  He didn’t. “You wouldn’t be the first painter to stay at Salm … Big Pink. It has quite an artistic history.”

  “You’re kidding.” There was nothing in the house to suggest such a thing.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “Alexander Calder stayed there. Keith Haring. Marcel Duchamp. All back before beach erosion put the place in danger of falling into the water.” He paused. “Salvador Dalí.”

  “No shucking way!” I cried, then flushed when he cocked his head. For a moment I felt all the old frustrated rage rush in, seeming to clog my head and throat. I can do this, I thought. “Sorry. I had an accident awhile back, and—” Then I stopped.

  “Not hard to figure that one out,” Wireman said. “In case you didn’t notice, you’re short a gizmo on the right side, muchacho.”

  “Yes. And sometimes I get … I don’t know … aphasic, I guess.”

  “Uh-huh. In any case, I tell no lie about Dalí. He stayed in your house for three weeks in nineteen eighty-one.” Then, with hardly a pause: “I know what you’re going through.”

  “I seriously doubt that.” I didn’t mean to sound harsh, but that was how it sounded. That was how I felt, actually.

  Wireman said nothing for a little while. The torn umbrella flapped. I had time to think, Well this was a potentially interesting friendship that’s not going to happen, but when he next spoke, his voice was calm and pleasant. It was as if our little side-trip had never occurred.

  “Part of Duma’s development problem is simple overgrowth. The sea oats belong, but the rest of that shit has no business growing without irrigation. Somebody better investigate, that’s what I think.”

  “My daughter and I went exploring one day. It looked like outright jungle south of here.”

  Wireman looked alarmed. “Duma Key Road’s no excursion for a guy in your condition. It’s in shit shape.”

  “Tell me about it. What I want to know is how come it isn’t four lanes wide with bike-paths on both sides and condos every eight hundred yards.”

  “Because no one knows who owns the land? How about that, for a start?”

  “You serious?”

  “Yup. Miss Eastlake has owned from the tip of the island south to Heron’s Roost free and clear since 1950. About that there’s absolutely no doubt. It was in the wills.”

  “Wills? Plural?”

  “Three of them. All holographic, all witnessed by different people, all different when it comes to Duma Key. All of them, however, make the north end of Duma a nostrings bequest to Elizabeth Eastlake from her father, John. The rest has been in the courts ever since. Sixty years of squabbling that makes Bleak House look like Dick and Jane.”

  “I thought you said all Miss Eastlake’s siblings were dead.”

  “They are, but she has nieces and nephews and grandnieces and grandnephews. Like Sherwin-Williams Paint, they cover the earth. They’re the ones doing the squabbling, but they squabble with each other, not her. Her only mention in the old man’s multiple wills had to do with this piece of Duma Key, which was carefully marked off by two surveying companies, one just before World War II and one just after. This is all a matter of public record. And do you know what, amigo?”

  I shook my head.

  “Miss Eastlake thinks that’s exactly what her old man wanted to happen. And, having cast my lawyerly eye over copies of the wills, so do I.”

  “Who pays the taxes?”

  He looked surprised, then laughed. “I enjoy you more and more, vato.”

  “My other life,” I reminded him. I was already liking the sound of that other-life thing.

  “Right. Then you’ll appreciate this,” he said. “It’s clever. All three of John Eastlake’s last wills and testaments contained identical clauses setting up a trust fund to pay the taxes. The original investment company administering the trust has been absorbed since then—in fact the absorbing company has been absorbed—”

  “It’s the way America does business,” I said.

  “It is indeed. In any case, the fund has never been in danger of going broke and the taxes are paid like clockwork every year.”

  “Money talks, bullshit walks.”

  “It’s the truth.” He stood up, put his hands in the small of his back, and twisted it. “Would you like to come up to the house and meet the boss? She should be arising from her nap just about now. She has her problems, but even at eighty-five she’s quite the babe.”

  This wasn’t the time to tell him I thought I already had met her—briefly—courtesy of my answering machine. “Another day. When the hilarity subsides.”

  He nodded. “Walk down tomorrow afternoon, if you like.”

  “Maybe I will. It’s been real.” I held out my hand again. He shook it again, looking at the stump of my right arm as he did so.

  “No prosthesis? Or do you just leave it off when you’re not among the hoi polloi?”

  I had a story I told people about that—nerve-pain in the stump—but it was a lie, and I didn’t want to lie to Wireman. Partly because he had a nose attuned to the delicate smell of bullshit, but mostly because I just didn’t want to lie to him.

  “I was measured for one while I was still in the hospital, of course, and I got the hard sell on it from just about everyone—especially my physical therapist and this psychologist friend of mine. They said the quicker I learned to
use it, the quicker I’d be able to get on with my life—”

  “Just put the whole thing behind you and go on dancing—”

  “Yes.”

  “Only sometimes putting a thing behind you isn’t so easy to do.”

  “No.”

  “Sometimes it’s not even right,” Wireman said.

  “That isn’t it, exactly, but it’s …” I trailed off and seesawed my hand in the air.

  “Close enough for rock and roll?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Thanks for the cold drink.”

  “Come on back and get another one. I only take the sun between two and three—an hour a day is enough for me—but Miss Eastlake either sleeps or rearranges her china figurines most of the afternoon, and of course she never misses Oprah, so I have time. More than I know what to do with, actually. Who knows? We might find a lot to talk about.”

  “All right,” I said. “Sounds good.”

  Wireman grinned. It made him handsome. He offered his hand and I shook with him again. “You know what I think? Friendships founded on laughter are always fortuitous.”

  “Maybe your next job will be writing the fortunes in Chinese cookies,” I said.

  “There could be worse jobs, muchacho. Far worse.”

  iv

  Walking back, my thoughts turned to Miss Eastlake, an old lady in big blue sneakers and a wide straw hat who just happened to own (sort of) her own Florida Key. Not the Bride of the Godfather after all, but Daughter of the Land Baron and, apparently, Patroness of the Arts. My mind had done another of those weird slip-slides and I couldn’t remember her father’s name (something simple, only one syllable), but I remembered the basic situation as Wireman had outlined it. I’d never heard of anything similar, and when you build for a living, you see all sorts of strange property arrangements. I thought it was actually rather ingenious … if, that was, you wanted to keep most of your little kingdom in a state of undeveloped grace. The question was, why?

  I was most of the way back to Big Pink before I realized my leg was aching like a bastard. I limped inside, slurped water directly from the kitchen tap, then made my way across the living room to the main bedroom. I saw the light on the answering machine was blinking, but I wanted nothing to do with messages from the outside world right then. All I wanted was to get off my feet.