Duma Key: A Novel Page 26

  “Take a number and get in line,” he said, and hung up.

  xiii

  Because the remote was broken, I had to tune the TV manually, an antique skill but one I found I still possessed. On 6, All Tina, All the Time had been replaced by a new show: All Candy, All the Time. I turned the volume up to an earsplitting level and listened while I scrubbed the paint off.

  George “Candy” Brown appeared to have died in his sleep. A guard who was interviewed said, “The guy was the loudest snorer we ever had—we used to joke that the inmates would have killed him just for that, if he’d been in gen-pop.” A doctor said that sounded like sleep apnea and opined that Brown might have died from a resulting complication. He said such deaths in adults were uncommon but far from unheard-of.

  Sleep apnea sounded like a good call to me, but I thought I had been the complication. With most of the paint washed off, I climbed the stairs to Little Pink for a look at my version of The Picture in the long light of morning. I didn’t think it would be as good as I’d believed when I staggered downstairs to eat an entire box of cereal—it couldn’t be, considering how fast I’d worked.

  Only it was. There was Tina, dressed in jeans and a clean pink tee-shirt, with her pack on her back. There was Candy Brown, also dressed in jeans, with his hand upon her wrist. Her eyes were turned up to his and her mouth was slightly open, as if to ask a question—What do you want, mister? being the most likely. His eyes were looking down at her, and they were full of dark intent, but the rest of his face showed nothing at all, because the rest of his face wasn’t there. I hadn’t painted his mouth and nose.

  Below the eyes, my version of Candy Brown was a perfect blank.

  10—The Bubble Reputation

  i

  I got on the plane that brought me to Florida wearing a heavy duffle coat, and I wore it that morning when I limped down the beach from Big Pink to El Palacio de Asesinos. It was cold, with a stiff wind blowing in from the Gulf, where the water looked like broken steel under an empty sky. If I had known that was to be the last cold day I’d ever experience on Duma Key, I might have relished it … but probably not. I had lost my knack for suffering the cold gladly.

  In any case, I hardly knew where I was. I had my canvas collection pouch slung over my shoulder, because carrying it when I was on the beach was now second nature, but I never put a single shell or bit of flotsam in it. I just plodded along, swinging my bad leg without really feeling it, listening to the wind whistle past my ears without really hearing it, and watching the peeps scurry in and out of the surf without really seeing them.

  I thought: I killed him just as surely as I killed Monica Goldstein’s dog. I know that sounds like bullshit, but—

  Only it didn’t sound like bullshit. It wasn’t bullshit.

  I had stopped his breath.

  ii

  There was a glassed-in sunporch on the south side of El Palacio. It looked toward the tangles of tropical overgrowth in one direction and out at the metallic blue of the Gulf in the other. Elizabeth was seated there in her wheelchair, with a breakfast tray attached to the arms. For the first time since I’d met her, she was strapped in. The tray, littered with curds of scrambled egg and pieces of toast, looked like the aftermath of a toddler’s meal. Wireman had even been feeding her juice from a sippy cup. The small table-model television in the corner was tuned to Channel 6. It was still All Candy, All of the Time. He was dead and Channel 6 was beating off on the body. He undoubtedly deserved no better, but it was still gruesome.

  “I think she’s finished,” Wireman said, “but maybe you’d sit with her while I scramble you a couple and burn the toast.”

  “Happy to, but you don’t have to go to any trouble on my part. I worked late and had a bite afterward.” A bite. Sure. I’d spied the empty mixing bowl in the kitchen sink on my way out.

  “It’s no trouble. How’s your leg this morning?”

  “Not bad.” It was the truth. “Et tu, Brute?”

  “I’m all right, thanks.” But he looked tired; his left eye was still red and drippy. “This won’t take five minutes.”

  Elizabeth was almost completely AWOL. When I offered her the sippy cup, she took a little and then turned her head away. Her face looked ancient and bewildered in the unforgiving winterlight. I thought that we made quite a trio: the senile woman, the exlawyer with the slug in his brain, and the amputee ex-contractor. All with battle-scars on the right side of our heads. On TV, Candy Brown’s lawyer—now exlawyer, I guess—was calling for a full investigation. Elizabeth perhaps spoke for all of Sarasota County on this issue by closing her eyes, slumping down against the restraining strap so that her considerable breastworks pushed up, and going to sleep.

  Wireman came back in with eggs enough for both of us, and I ate with surprising gusto. Elizabeth began to snore. One thing was certain; if she had sleep apnea, she wouldn’t die young.

  “Missed a spot on your ear, muchacho,” Wireman said, and tapped the lobe of his own with his fork.

  “Huh?”

  “Paint. On your buggerlug.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be scrubbing it off everywhere for a couple of days. I splashed it around pretty good.”

  “What were you painting in the middle of the night?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

  He shrugged and nodded. “You’re getting that artist thang going. That groove.”

  “Don’t start with me.”

  “Matters have come to a sad pass when I offer respect and you hear sarcasm.”

  “Sorry.”

  He waved it away. “Eat your huevos. Grow up big and strong like Wireman.”

  I ate my huevos. Elizabeth snored. The TV chattered. Now it was Tina Garibaldi’s aunt in the electronic center ring, a girl not much older than my daughter Melinda. She was saying that God had decided the State of Florida would be too slow and had punished “that monster” Himself. I thought, Got a point there, muchacha, only it wasn’t God.

  “Turn that shit-carnival off,” I said.

  He killed the tube, then turned to me attentively.

  “Maybe you were right about the artist thang. I’ve decided to show my stuff at the Scoto, if that guy Nannuzzi still wants to show it.”

  Wireman smiled and patted his hands together softly, so as not to wake Elizabeth. “Excellent! Edgar seeks the bubble reputation! And why not? Just why the hell not?”

  “I don’t seek the bubble anything,” I said, wondering if that were completely true. “But if they offer me a contract, would you come out of retirement long enough to look it over?”

  His smile faded. “I will if I’m around, but I don’t know how long I’ll be around.” He saw the look on my face and raised his hand. “I ain’t tuning up the Dead March yet, but ask yourself this, mi amigo: am I still the right man to take care of Miss Eastlake? In my current condition?”

  And because that was a can of worms I didn’t want to open—not this morning—I asked, “How did you get the job in the first place?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It might,” I said.

  I was thinking of how I’d started my time on Duma Key with one assumption—that I had chosen the place—and had since come to believe that maybe it had chosen me. I had even wondered, usually lying in bed and listening to the shells whisper, if my accident had really been an accident. Of course it had been, must have been, but it was still easy to see similarities between mine and Julia Wireman’s. I got the crane; she got the Public Works truck. But of course there are people—functioning human beings in most respects—who will tell you they’ve seen the face of Christ on a taco.

  “Well,” he said, “if you expect another long story, you can forget it. It takes a lot to story me out, but for the time being, the well’s almost dry.” He looked at Elizabeth moodily. And perhaps with a shade of envy. “I didn’t sleep very well last night.”

  “Short version, then.”

  He shrugged. His febrile good chee
r had disappeared like the foam on top of a glass of beer. His big shoulders were slumped forward, giving his chest a caved-in look.

  “After Jack Fineham ‘furloughed’ me, I decided Tampa was reasonably close to Disney World. Only when I got there, I was bored titless.”

  “Sure you were,” I said.

  “I also felt that some atonement was in order. I didn’t want to go to Darfur or to New Orleans and work storefront pro bono, although that crossed my mind. I felt like maybe the little balls with the lottery numbers on them were still bouncing somewhere and one more was waiting to go up the pipe. The last number.”

  “Yeah,” I said. A cold finger touched the base of my neck. Very lightly. “One more number. I know the feeling.”

  “Sí, señor, I know you do. I was waiting to do good, hoping to balance the books again. Because I felt they needed balancing. And one day I saw an ad in the Tampa Tribune. ‘Wanted, Companion for elderly lady and Caretaker for several premium island rental properties. Applicant must supply resume and recommendations to match excellent salary and benefits. This is a challenging position which the right person will find rewarding. Must be bonded.’ Well, I was bonded and I liked the sound of it. I interviewed with Miss Eastlake’s lawyer. He told me the couple who’d previously filled the position had been called back to New England when the parent of one or the other had suffered a catastrophic accident.”

  “And you got the job. What about—?” I pointed in the general direction of his temple.

  “Never told him. He was dubious enough already—wondered, I think, why a legal beagle from Omaha would want to spend a year putting an old lady to bed and rattling the locks on houses that are empty most of the time—but Miss Eastlake …” He reached out and stroked her gnarled hand. “We saw eye-to-eye from the first, didn’t we dear?”

  She only snored, but I saw the look on Wireman’s face and felt that cold finger touch the back of my neck again, a little more firmly this time. I felt it and knew: the three of us were here because something wanted us here. My knowing wasn’t based on the kind of logic I’d grown up with and built my business on, but that was all right. Here on Duma I was a different person, and the only logic I needed was in my nerve-endings.

  “I think the world of her, you know,” Wireman said. He picked up his napkin with a sigh, as though it were something heavy, and wiped his eyes. “By the time I got here, all that crazy, febrile shit I told you about was gone. I was husked out, a gray man in a blue and sunny clime who could only read the newspaper in short bursts without getting a blinder of a headache. I was holding onto one basic idea: I had a debt to pay. Work to do. I’d find it and do it. After that I didn’t care. Miss Eastlake didn’t hire me, not really; she took me in. When I came here she wasn’t like this, Edgar. She was bright, she was funny, she was haughty, flirty, capricious, demanding—she could hector me or humor me out of a blue mood if she chose to, and she often chose to.”

  “She sounds smokin.”

  “She was smokin. Another woman would have given in completely to the wheelchair by now. Not her. She hauls her hundred and eighty up on that walker and plods around this air-conditioned museum, the courtyard outside … she even used to enjoy target-shooting, sometimes with one of her father’s old handguns, more often with that harpoon pistol, because it’s got less kick. And because she says she likes the sound. You see her with that thing, and she really does look like the Bride of the Godfather.”

  “That’s how I first saw her,” I said.

  “I took to her right away, and I’ve come to love her. Julia used to call me mi compañero. I think of that often when I’m with Miss Eastlake. She’s mi compañera, mi amiga. She helped me find my heart when I thought my heart was gone.”

  “I’d say you struck lucky.”

  “Maybe sí, maybe no. Tell you this, it’s going to be hard to leave her. What’s she gonna do when a new person shows up? A new person won’t know about how she likes to have her coffee at the end of the boardwalk in the morning … or about pretending to throw that fucking cookie-tin in the goldfish pond … and she won’t be able to explain, because she’s headed into the fog for good now.”

  He turned to me, looking haggard and more than a little frantic.

  “I’ll write everything down, that’s what I’ll do—our whole routine. Morning to night. And you’ll see that the new caretaker keeps to it. Won’t you, Edgar? I mean, you like her, too, don’t you? You wouldn’t want to see her hurt. And Jack! Maybe he could pitch in a little. I know it’s wrong to ask, but—”

  A new thought struck him. He got to his feet and stared out at the water. He’d lost weight. The skin was so tight on his cheekbones that it shone. His hair hung over his ears in clumps, badly needing a wash.

  “If I die—and I could, I could go out in a wink just like Señor Brown—you’ll have to take over here until the estate can find a new live-in. It won’t be much of a hardship, you can paint right out here. The light’s great, isn’t it? The light’s terrific!”

  He was starting to scare me. “Wireman—”

  He whirled around and now his eyes were blazing, the left one seemingly through a net of blood. “Promise, Edgar! We need a plan! If we don’t have one, they’ll cart her away and put her in a home and she’ll be dead in a month! In a week! I know it! So promise!”

  I thought he might be right. And I thought that if I wasn’t able to take some of the pressure off his boiler, he was apt to have another seizure right in front of me. So I promised. Then I said, “You may end up living a lot longer than you think, Wireman.”

  “Sure. But I’ll write everything down anyway. Just in case.”

  iii

  He once more offered me the Palacio golf cart for the return trip to Big Pink. I told him I’d be fine walking, but I wouldn’t mind having a glass of juice before setting out.

  Now I enjoy fresh-squeezed Florida oj as much as anyone, but I confess to having an ulterior motive that particular morning. He left me in the little receiving room at the beach end of El Palacio’s glassed-in center hall. He used this room as an office, although how a man who couldn’t read for more than five minutes at a stretch could deal with correspondence was beyond me. I guessed—and this touched me—that Elizabeth might have helped him, and quite a lot, before her own condition began to worsen.

  Coming in for breakfast, I had glanced into this room and spied a certain gray folder lying on the closed lid of a laptop for which Wireman probably had little use these days. I flipped it open now and took one of the three X-rays.

  “Big glass or little glass?” Wireman called from the kitchen, startling me so badly that I almost dropped the sheet in my hand.

  “Medium’s fine!” I called back. I tucked the X-ray film into my collection pouch and flipped the folder closed again. Five minutes later I was trudging back up the beach.

  iv

  I didn’t like the idea of stealing from a friend—not even a single X-ray photograph. Nor did I like keeping silent about what I was sure I’d done to Candy Brown. I could have told him; after the Tom Riley business, he would have believed me. Even without that little twinkle of ESP, he would have believed me. That was the trouble, actually. Wireman wasn’t stupid. If I could send Candy Brown to the Sarasota County Morgue with a paintbrush, then maybe I could do for a certain brain-damaged exlawyer what the doctors could not. But what if I couldn’t? Better not to raise false hopes … at least outside of my own heart, where they were outrageously high.

  By the time I got back to Big Pink, my hip was yelling. I slung my duffle coat into the closet, took a couple of Oxycontins, and saw the message-light on my answering machine was blinking.

  It was Nannuzzi. He was delighted to hear from me. Yes indeed, he said, if the rest of my work was on a par with what he’d seen, the Scoto would be pleased and proud to sponsor an exhibition of my work, and before Easter, when the winter people went home. Would it be possible for him and one or more of his partners to come out, visit me in my studio, a
nd look at some of my other completed work? They would be happy to bring a sample contract for me to look at.

  It was good news—exciting news—but in a way it seemed to be happening on some other planet, to some other Edgar Freemantle. I saved the message, started to go upstairs with the pilfered X-ray, then stopped. Little Pink wasn’t right because the easel wasn’t right. Canvas and oil paints weren’t right, either. Not for this.

  I limped back down to my big living room. There was a stack of Artisan pads and several boxes of colored pencils on the coffee table, but they weren’t right, either. There was a low, vague itching in my missing right arm, and for the first time I thought that I might really be able to do this … if I could find the right medium for the message, that was.

  It occurred to me that a medium was also a person who took dictation from the Great Beyond, and that made me laugh. A little nervously, it’s true.

  I went into the bedroom, at first not sure what I was after. Then I looked at the closet and knew. The week before, I’d had Jack take me shopping—not at the Crossroads Mall but at one of the men’s shops on St. Armand’s Circle—and I’d bought half a dozen shirts, the kind that button up the front. When she was a little kid, Ilse used to call them Big People Shirts. They were still in their cellophane bags. I tore the bags off, pulled out the pins, and tossed the shirts back into the closet, where they landed in a heap. I didn’t want the shirts. What I wanted were the cardboard inserts.

  Those bright white rectangles of cardboard.

  I found a Sharpie in a pocket of my PowerBook carrying case. In my old life I’d hated Sharpies for both the smell of the ink and their tendency to smear. In this one I’d come to love the fat boldness of the lines they created, lines that seem to insist on their own absolute reality. I took the cardboard inserts, the Sharpie, and the X-ray of Wireman’s brain out to the Florida room, where the light was bright and declamatory.

  The itch in my missing arm deepened. By now it felt almost like a friend.

  I didn’t have the sort of light-box doctors stick X-rays and MRI scans on when they want to study them, but the Florida room’s glass wall made a very acceptable substitute. I didn’t even need Scotch tape. I was able to snap the X-ray into the crack between the glass and the chrome facing, and there it was, a thing many claimed did not exist: the brain of a lawyer. It floated against the Gulf. I stared at it for awhile, I don’t know how long—two minutes? four?—fascinated by the way the blue water looked when viewed through the gray crenellations, how those folds changed the water to fog.