Duma Key: A Novel Read online

  Almost sloshing with food, I went back to the living room, snapped on all the lights, and looked at Hello. It wasn’t very good. But it was interesting. The scribbled afterglow had a sullen, furnacey quality that was startling. The ship wasn’t the one I’d seen, but mine was interesting in a spooky sort of way. It was little more than a scarecrow ship, and the overlapping scribbles of yellow and orange had turned it into a ghost-ship, as well, as if that peculiar sunset were shining right through it.

  I propped it atop the TV, against the sign reading THE OWNER REQUESTS THAT YOU AND YOUR GUESTS DO NOT SMOKE INDOORS. I looked at it a moment longer, thinking it needed something in the foreground—a smaller boat, maybe, just to lend the one on the horizon some perspective—but I no longer wanted to draw. Besides, adding something might fuck up what little charm the thing had. I tried the telephone instead, thinking if it wasn’t working yet I could call Ilse on my cell, but Jack had been on top of that, too.

  I thought I’d probably get her machine—college girls are busy girls—but she answered on the first ring. “Daddy?” That startled me so much that at first I couldn’t speak and she said it again. “Dad?”

  “Yes,” I said. “How did you know?”

  “The callback number’s got a 941 area code. That’s where that Duma place is. I checked.”

  “Modern technology. I can’t catch up. How are you, kiddo?”

  “Fine. The question is, how are you?”

  “I’m all right. Better than all right, actually.”

  “The fellow you hired—?”

  “He’s got game. The bed’s made and the fridge is full. I got here and took a five-hour nap.”

  There was a pause, and when she spoke again she sounded more concerned than ever. “You’re not hitting those pain pills too hard, are you? Because Oxycontin’s supposed to be sort of a Trojan horse. Not that I’m telling you anything you didn’t already know.”

  “Nope, I stick to the prescribed dosage. In fact—” I stopped.

  “What, Daddy? What?” Now she sounded almost ready to hail a cab and take a plane.

  “I was just realizing I skipped the five o’clock Vicodin …” I checked my watch. “And the eight o’clock Oxycontin, too. I’ll be damned.”

  “How bad’s the pain?”

  “Nothing a couple of Tylenol won’t handle. At least until midnight.”

  “It’s probably the change in climate,” she said. “And the nap.”

  I had no doubt those things were part of it, but I didn’t think they were all of it. Maybe it was crazy, but I thought drawing had played a part. In fact, it was something I sort of knew.

  We talked for awhile, and little by little I could hear that concern going out of her voice. What replaced it was unhappiness. She was understanding, I suppose, that this thing was really happening, that her mother and father weren’t just going to wake up one morning and take it back. But she promised to call Pam and e-mail Melinda, let them know I was still in the land of the living.

  “Don’t you have e-mail there, Dad?”

  “I do, but tonight you’re my e-mail, Cookie.”

  She laughed, sniffed, laughed again. I thought to ask if she was crying, then thought again. Better not to, maybe.

  “Ilse? I better let you go now, honey. I want to shower off the day.”

  “Okay, but …” A pause. Then she burst out: “I hate to think of you all the way down there in Florida by yourself! Maybe falling on your ass in the shower! It’s not right!”

  “Cookie, I’m fine. Really. The kid—his name’s …” Hurricanes, I thought. Weather Channel. “His name’s Jim Cantori.” But that was a case of right church, wrong pew. “Jack, I mean.”

  “That’s not the same, and you know it. Do you want me to come?”

  “Not unless you want your mother to scalp us both bald,” I said. “What I want is for you to stay right where you are and TCB, darlin. I’ll stay in touch.”

  “ ’Kay. But take care of yourself. No stupid shit.”

  “No stupid shit. Roger that, Houston.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind.”

  “I still want to hear you promise, Dad.”

  For one terrible and surpassingly eerie moment I saw Ilse at eleven, Ilse dressed in a Girl Scout’s uniform and looking at me with Monica Goldstein’s shocked eyes. Before I could stop the words, I heard myself saying, “Promise. Big swear. Mother’s name.”

  She giggled. “Never heard that one before.”

  “There’s a lot about me you don’t know. I’m a deep one.”

  “If you say so.” A pause. Then: “Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  I put the phone gently back into its cradle and stared at it for a long time.

  vii

  Instead of showering, I walked down the beach to the water. I quickly discovered my crutch was no help on the sand—was, in fact, a hindrance—but once I was around the corner of the house, the water’s edge was less than two dozen steps away. That was easy if I went slow. The surge was mild, the incoming wavelets only inches high. It was hard to imagine this water whipped into a destructive hurricane frenzy. Impossible, actually. Later, Wireman would tell me God always punishes us for what we can’t imagine.

  That was one of his better ones.

  I turned to go back to the house, then paused. There was just enough light to see a deep carpet of shells—a drift of shells—under the jutting Florida room. At high tide, I realized, the front half of my new house would be almost like the foredeck of a ship. I remembered Jack saying I’d get plenty of warning if the Gulf of Mexico decided to eat the place, that I’d hear it groaning. He was probably right … but then, I was also supposed to get plenty of warning on a job site when a heavy piece of equipment was backing up.

  I limped back to where my crutch leaned against the side of the house and took the short plank walk around to the door. I thought about the shower and took a bath instead, going in and coming out in the careful sidesaddle way Kathi Green had shown me in my other life, both of us dressed in bathing suits, me with my right leg looking like a badly butchered cut of meat. Now the butchery was in the past; my body was doing its miracle work. The scars would last a lifetime, but even they were fading. Already fading.

  Dried off and with my teeth brushed, I crutched into the master bedroom and surveyed the king, now divested of decorative pillows. “Houston,” I said, “we have bed.”

  “Roger, Freemantle,” I replied. “You are go for bed.”

  Sure, why not? I’d never sleep, not after that whopper of a nap, but I could lie down for awhile. My leg still felt pretty good, even after my expedition to the water, but there was a knot in my lower back and another at the base of my neck. I lay down. No, sleep was out of the question, but I turned off the lamp anyway. Just to rest my eyes. I’d lie there until my back and neck felt better, then dig a paperback out of my suitcase and read.

  Just lie here for awhile, that was …

  I got that far, and then I was gone again. There were no dreams.

  viii

  I slipped back to some sort of consciousness in the middle of the night with my right arm itching and my right hand tingling and no idea of where I was, only that from below me something vast was grinding and grinding and grinding. At first I thought it was machinery, but it was too uneven to be machinery. And too organic, somehow. Then I thought of teeth, but nothing had teeth that vast. Nothing in the known world, at least.

  Breathing, I thought, and that seemed right, but what kind of animal made such a vast grinding sound when it drew in breath? And God, that itch was driving me crazy, all the way up my forearm to the crease of the elbow. I went to scratch it, reaching across my chest with my left hand, and of course there was no elbow, no forearm, and I scratched nothing but the bedsheet.

  That brought me fully awake and I sat up. Although the room was still very dark, enough starlight came in through the westward-facing window for me to see the foot of the bed, where one of
my suitcases rested on a bench. That locked me in place. I was on Duma Key, just off the west coast of Florida—home of the newly wed and the nearly dead. I was in the house I was already thinking of as Big Pink, and that grinding sound—

  “It’s shells,” I murmured, lying back down. “Shells under the house. The tide’s in.”

  I loved that sound from the first, when I woke up and heard it in the dark of night, when I didn’t know where I was, who I was, or what parts were still attached. It was mine.

  It had me from hello.

  3—Drawing on New Resources

  i

  What came next was a period of recovery and transition from my other life to the one I lived on Duma Key. Dr. Kamen probably knew that during times like that, most of the big changes are going on inside: civil unrest, revolt, revolution, and finally, mass executions as the heads of the old regime tumble into the basket at the foot of the guillotine. I’m sure the big man had seen such revolutions succeed and seen them fail. Because not everyone makes it into the next life, you know. And those who do don’t always discover heaven’s golden shore.

  My new hobby helped in my transition, and Ilse helped, too. I’ll always be grateful for that. But I’m ashamed of going through her purse while she was asleep. All I can say is that at the time I seemed to have no choice.

  ii

  I woke up the morning after my arrival feeling better than I had since my accident—but not so well I skipped my morning pain cocktail. I took the pills with orange juice, then went outside. It was seven o’clock. In St. Paul the air would have been cold enough to gnaw on the end of my nose, but on Duma it felt like a kiss.

  I leaned my crutch where I’d leaned it the night before and walked down to those docile waves again. To my right, any view of the drawbridge and Casey Key beyond was blocked out by my own house. To the left, however—

  In that direction the beach seemed to stretch on forever, a dazzling white margin between the blue-gray Gulf and the sea oats. I could see one speck far down, or maybe it was two. Otherwise, that fabulous picture-postcard shore was entirely deserted. None of the other houses were near the beach, and when I faced south, I could only see a single roof: what looked like an acre of orange tile mostly buried in palms. It was the hacienda I had noticed the day before. I could block that out with the palm of my hand and feel like Robinson Crusoe.

  I walked that way, partly because as a southpaw, turning left had come naturally to me my whole life. Mostly because that was the direction I could see in. And I didn’t go far, no Great Beach Walk that day, I wanted to make sure I could get back to my crutch, but that was still the first. I remember turning around and marveling at my own footprints in the sand. In the morning light each left one was as firm and bold as something produced by a stamping-press. Most of the right ones were blurry, because I had a tendency to drag that foot, but setting out, even those had been clear. I counted my steps back. The total was thirty-eight. By then my hip was throbbing. I was more than ready to go in, grab a yogurt cup from the fridge, and see if the cable TV worked as well as Jack Cantori claimed.

  Turned out it did.

  iii

  And that became my morning routine: orange juice, walk, yogurt, current events. I became quite chummy with Robin Meade, the young woman who anchors Headline News from six to ten AM. Boring routine, right? But the surface events of a country laboring under a dictatorship can appear boring, too—dictators like boring, dictators love boring—even as great changes are approaching beneath the surface.

  A hurt body and mind aren’t just like a dictatorship; they are a dictatorship. There is no tyrant as merciless as pain, no despot so cruel as confusion. That my mind had been as badly hurt as my body was a thing I only came to realize once I was alone and all other voices dropped away. The fact that I had tried to choke my wife of twenty-five years for doing no more than trying to wipe the sweat off my forehead after I told her to leave the room was the very least of it. The fact that we hadn’t made love a single time in the months between the accident and the separation, didn’t even try, wasn’t at the heart of it, either, although I thought it was suggestive of the larger problem. Even the sudden and distressing bursts of anger weren’t at the heart of the matter.

  That heart was a kind of pulling-away. I don’t know how else to describe it. My wife had come to seem like someone … other. Most of the people in my life also felt other, and the dismaying thing was that I didn’t much care. In the beginning I had tried to tell myself that the otherness I felt when I thought about my wife and my life was probably natural enough in a man who sometimes couldn’t even remember the name of that thing you pulled up to close your pants—the zoomer, the zimmer, the zippity-doo-dah. I told myself it would pass, and when it didn’t and Pam told me she wanted a divorce, what followed my anger was relief. Because now that other feeling was okay to have, at least toward her. Now she really was other. She’d taken off the Freemantle uniform and quit the team.

  During my first weeks on Duma, that sense of otherness allowed me to prevaricate easily and fluently. I answered letters and e-mails from people like Tom Riley, Kathi Green, and William Bozeman III—the immortal Bozie—with short jottings (I’m fine, the weather’s fine, the bones are mending) that bore little resemblance to my actual life. And when their communications first slowed and then stopped, I wasn’t sorry.

  Only Ilse still seemed to be on my team. Only Ilse refused to turn in her uniform. I never got that other feeling about her. Ilse was still on my side of the glass window, always reaching out. If I didn’t e-mail her every day, she called. If I didn’t call her once every third day, she called me. And to her I didn’t lie about my plans to fish in the Gulf or check out the Everglades. To Ilse I told the truth, or as much of it as I could without sounding crazy.

  I told her, for instance, about my morning walks along the beach, and that I was walking a little farther each day, but not about the Numbers Game, because it sounded too silly … or maybe obsessive-compulsive is the term I actually want.

  Just thirty-eight steps from Big Pink on that first morning. On my second one I helped myself to another huge glass of orange juice and then walked south along the beach again. This time I walked forty-five steps, which was a long distance for me to totter crutchless in those days. I managed by telling myself it was really only nine. That sleight-of-mind is the basis of the Numbers Game. You walk one step, then two steps, then three, then four, rolling your mental odometer back to zero each time until you reach nine. And when you add the numbers one through nine together, you come out with forty-five. If that strikes you as nuts, I won’t argue.

  The third morning I coaxed myself into walking ten steps from Big Pink sans crutch, which is really fifty-five, or about ninety yards, round-trip. A week later and I was up to seventeen … and when you add all those numbers, you come out with a hundred and fifty-three. I’d get to the end of that distance, look back at my house, and marvel at how far away it looked. I’d also sag a little at the thought of having to walk all the way back again.

  You can do it, I’d tell myself. It’s easy. Just seventeen steps, is all.

  That’s what I’d tell myself, but I didn’t tell Ilse.

  A little farther each day, stamping out footprints behind me. By the time Santa Claus showed up at the Beneva Road Mall, where Jack Cantori sometimes took me shopping, I realized an amazing thing: all my southbound footprints were clear. The right sneaker-print didn’t start to drag and blur until I was on my way back.

  Exercise becomes addictive, and rainy days didn’t put a stop to mine. The second floor of Big Pink was one large room. There was an industrial-strength rose-colored carpet on the floor and a huge window facing the Gulf of Mexico. There was nothing else. Jack suggested that I make a list of furniture I wanted up there, and said he’d get it from the same rental place where he’d gotten the downstairs stuff … assuming the downstairs stuff was all right. I assured him it was fine, but said I wouldn’t need much on the second floor. I l
iked the emptiness of that room. It called to my imagination. What I wanted, I said, was three things: a plain straight-backed chair, an artist’s easel, and a Cybex treadmill. Could Jack provide those things? He could and did. In three days. From then until the end it was the second floor for me when I wanted to draw or paint, and it was the second floor for exercise on days when the weather closed in. The single straight-backed chair was the only real piece of furniture that ever lived up there during my tenure in Big Pink.

  In any case, there weren’t that many rainy days—not for nothing is Florida called the Sunshine State. As my southward strolls grew longer, the speck or specks I’d seen on that first morning eventually resolved into two people—at least, on most days it was two. One was in a wheelchair and wearing what I thought was a straw hat. The other pushed her, then sat beside her. They appeared on the beach around seven AM. Sometimes the one who could walk left the one in the wheelchair for a little while, only to come back with something that glittered in the early sun. I suspected a coffee pot, a breakfast tray, or both. I further suspected they came from the huge hacienda with the acre or so of orange tiled roof. That was the last house visible on Duma Key before the road ran into the enthusiastic overgrowth that covered most of the island.

  iv

  I couldn’t quite get used to the emptiness of the place. “It’s supposed to be very quiet,” Sandy Smith had told me, but I had still pictured the beach filling up by midday: couples sunning on blankets and slathering each other with tanning lotion, college kids playing volleyball with iPods strapped to their biceps, little kids in saggy swimsuits paddling at the edge of the water while Jet-Skis buzzed back and forth forty feet out.

  Jack reminded me that it was only December. “When it comes to Florida tourism,” he said, “the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas is Morgue City. Not as bad as August, but still pretty dead. Also …” He gestured with his arm. We were standing out by the mailbox with the red 13 on it, me leaning on my crutch, Jack looking sporty in a pair of denim cut-offs and a fashionably tattered Tampa Devil Rays shirt. “It’s not exactly tourist country here. See any trained dolphins? What you got is seven houses, counting that big ’un down there … and the jungle. Where there’s another house falling apart, by the way. That’s according to some of the stories I’ve heard on Casey Key.”