Duma Key: A Novel Read online

  “It’s not all right and it does matter! You need to get some fucking paints!” She replayed what she’d just said and clapped a hand over her mouth.

  “You probably won’t believe this,” I said, “but I’ve heard that word a time or two. Although I have an idea that maybe your boyfriend … might not exactly …”

  “You got that right,” she said. A little glumly. Then she smiled. “But he can let out a pretty good gosh-darn when somebody cuts him off in traffic. Dad, about your pictures—”

  “I’m just happy you like them.”

  “It’s more than liking. I’m amazed.” She yawned. “I’m also dead on my feet.”

  “I think maybe you need a cup of hot cocoa and then bed.”

  “That sounds wonderful.”

  “Which?”

  She laughed. It was wonderful to hear her laugh. It filled the place up. “Both.”

  xi

  We stood on the beach the next morning with coffee cups in hand and our ankles in the surf. The sun had just hoisted itself over the low rise of the Key behind us, and our shadows seemed to stretch out onto the quiet water for miles.

  Ilse looked at me solemnly. “Is this the most beautiful place on earth, Dad?”

  “No, but you’re young and I can’t blame you for thinking it might be. It’s number four on the Most Beautiful list, actually, but the top three are places nobody can spell.”

  She smiled over the rim of her cup. “Do tell.”

  “If you insist. Number one, Machu Picchu. Number two, Marrakech. Number three, Petroglyph National Monument. Then, at number four, Duma Key, just off the west coast of Florida.”

  Her smile widened for a second or two. Then it faded and she was giving me the solemn stare again. I remembered her looking at me the same way when she was four, asking me if there was any magic like in fairy tales. I had told her yes, of course, thinking it was a lie. Now I wasn’t so sure. But the air was warm, my bare feet were in the Gulf, and I just didn’t want Ilse to be hurt. I thought she was going to be. But everyone gets their share, don’t they? Sure. Pow, in the nose. Pow, in the eye. Pow, below the belt, down you go, and the ref just went out for a hot dog. Except the ones you love can really multiply that hurt and pass it around. Pain is the biggest power of love. That’s what Wireman says.

  “See anything green, sweetheart?” I asked.

  “No, I was just thinking again how glad I am that I came. I pictured you rotting away between an old folks’ retirement home and some horrible tiki bar featuring Wet Tee-Shirt Thursdays. I guess I’ve been reading too much Carl Hiaasen.”

  “There are plenty of places like that down here,” I said.

  “And are there other places like Duma?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a few.” But based on what Jack had told me, I guessed that there were not.

  “Well, you deserve this one,” she said. “Time to rest and heal. And if all this”—she waved to the Gulf—“won’t heal you, I don’t know what will. The only thing …”

  “Ye-ess?” I said, and made a picking-out gesture at the air with two fingers. Families have their own interior language, and that includes sign-language. My gesture would have meant nothing to an outsider, but Ilse knew and laughed.

  “All right, smarty. The only fly in the ointment is the sound the tide makes when it comes in. I woke up in the middle of the night and almost screamed before I realized it was the shells moving around in the water. I mean, that’s it, right? Please tell me that’s it.”

  “That’s it. What did you think it was?”

  She actually shivered. “My first thought … don’t laugh … was skeletons on parade. Hundreds, marching around the house.”

  I’d never thought of it that way, but I knew what she meant. “I find it sort of soothing.”

  She gave a small and doubtful shrug. “Well … okay, then. To each his own. Are you ready to go back? I could scramble us some eggs. Even throw in some peppers and mushrooms.”

  “You’re on.”

  “I haven’t seen you off your crutch for so long since the accident.”

  “I hope to be walking a quarter-mile south along the beach by the middle of January.”

  She whistled. “A quarter of a mile and back?”

  I shook my head. “No, no. Just a quarter of a mile. I plan to glide back.” I extended my arm to demonstrate.

  She snorted, started toward the house again, then paused as a point of light heliographed in our direction from the south. Once, then twice. The two specks were down there.

  “People,” Ilse said, shading her eyes.

  “My neighbors. My only neighbors, right now. At least, I think so.”

  “Have you met them?”

  “Nope. All I know is that it’s a man and a woman in a wheelchair. I think she has her breakfast down by the water most days. I think the tray is the glinty thing.”

  “You should get yourself a golf cart. Then you could buzz down and say hi.”

  “Eventually I’ll walk down and say hi,” I said. “No golf cart for the kid. Dr. Kamen said to set goals, and I’m setting em.”

  “You didn’t need a shrink to tell you about setting goals, Daddy,” she said, still peering south. “Which house do they belong to? The big one that looks like a rancho in a western movie?”

  “I’m pretty sure, yes.”

  “And no one else lives here?”

  “Not now. Jack says there are folks who rent some of the other houses in January and February, but for now I guess it’s just me and them. The rest of the island is pure botanical pornography. Plants gone wild.”

  “My God, why?”

  “Haven’t the slightest idea. I mean to find out—to try, anyway—but for now I’m still trying to get my feet under me. And I mean that literally.”

  We were walking back to the house now. Ilse said, “An almost empty island in the sun—there should be a story. There almost has to be a story, don’t you think?”

  “I do,” I said. “Jack Cantori offered to snoop, but I told him not to bother—thinking I might look on my own.” I snagged my crutch, fitted my arm into its two steel sleeves—always comforting after spending time on the beach without its support—and started thumping up the walk. But Ilse wasn’t with me. I turned and looked back. She was facing south, her hand once more shading her eyes. “Coming, hon?”

  “Yes.” There was one more flash from down the beach—the breakfast tray. Or a coffeepot. “Maybe they know the story,” Ilse said, catching up.

  “Maybe they do.”

  She pointed to the road. “What about that? How far does it go?”

  “Don’t know,” I said.

  “Would you like to drive down it this afternoon and see?”

  “Are you willing to pilot a Chevy Malibu from Hertz?”

  “Sure,” she said. She put her hands on her slim hips, pretended to spit, and affected a Southern drawl. “I’ll drive until yonder road runs out.”

  xii

  But we didn’t get even close to the end of Duma Road. Not that day. Our southward exploration began well, ended badly.

  We both felt fine when we left. I’d had an hour off my feet, plus my midday Oxycontin. My daughter had changed to shorts and a halter top, and laughed when I insisted on anointing her nose with zinc oxide. “Bobo the clown,” she said, looking at herself in the mirror. She was in great spirits, I was happier than I’d been since the accident, so what happened to us that afternoon came as a total surprise. Ilse blamed lunch—maybe bad mayo in the tuna salad—and I let her, but I don’t think it was bad mayo at all. Bad mojo, more like it.

  The road was narrow, bumpy, and badly patched. Until we reached the place where it ran into the overgrowth that covered most of the Key, it was also ridged with bone-colored sand dunes that had blown inland from the beach. The rental Chevy thudded gamely over most of these, but when the road curved a little closer to the water—this was just before we reached the hacienda Wireman called Palacio de Asesinos—the drifts grew
thicker and the car waddled instead of bumping. Ilse, who had learned to drive in snow country, handled this without complaint or comment.

  The houses between Big Pink and El Palacio were all in the style I came to think of as Florida Pastel Ugly. Most were shuttered and the driveways of all but one were gated shut. The driveway of the one exception had been barred with two sawhorses, bearing this faded stenciled warning: MEAN DOGS MEAN DOGS. Beyond the Mean Dog house, the grounds of the hacienda commenced. They were enclosed by a sturdy faux-stucco wall about ten feet high and topped with orange tile. More orange tile—the roof of the mansion inside—rose in slants and angles against the blameless blue sky.

  “Jumping jeepers,” Ilse said—that was one she must have gotten from her Baptist boyfriend. “This place belongs in Beverly Hills.”

  The wall ran along the east side of the narrow, buckled road for at least eighty yards. There weren’t any NO TRESPASSING signs; given that wall, the owner’s stance on door-to-door salesmen and proselytizing Mormons seemed perfectly clear. In the center was a two-piece iron gate, standing ajar. And sitting just inside its open halves—

  “There she is,” I murmured. “The lady from down the beach. Holy shit, it’s The Bride of the Godfather.”

  “Daddy!” Ilse said, laughing and shocked at the same time.

  The woman was seriously old, mid-eighties at least. She was in her wheelchair. An enormous pair of blue Converse Hi-Tops were propped up on the chrome footrests. Although the temperature was in the mid-seventies, she wore a gray two-piece sweatsuit. In one gnarled hand a cigarette smoldered. Clapped on her head was the straw hat I’d seen on my walks, but on my walks I hadn’t realized how enormous it was—not just a hat but a battered sombrero. Her resemblance to Marlon Brando at the end of The Godfather—when he’s playing with his grandson in the garden—was unmistakable. There was something in her lap that did not quite look like a pistol.

  Ilse and I both waved. For a moment she did nothing. Then she raised one hand, palm out, in an Indian How gesture, and broke into a sunny and nearly toothless grin. What seemed like a thousand wrinkles creased her face, turning her into a benign witch. I never even glimpsed the house behind her; I was still trying to cope with her sudden appearance, her cool blue sneakers, her delta of wrinkles, and her—

  “Daddy, was that a gun?” Ilse was looking into the rear-view mirror, wide-eyed. “Did that old lady have a gun?”

  The car was drifting, and I saw a real possibility of clipping the hacienda’s far corner. I touched the wheel and made a course correction. “I think so. Of a kind. Mind your driving, honey. There ain’t much road in this road.”

  She faced front again. We’d been driving in bright sunshine, but that ended with the hacienda’s wall. “What do you mean, of a kind?”

  “It looked like … I don’t know, a crossbow-pistol. Or something. Maybe she shoots snakes with it.”

  “Thank God she smiled,” Ilse said. “And it was a great smile, wasn’t it?”

  I nodded. “It was.”

  The hacienda was the last house on Duma Key’s open north end. Beyond it, the road swung inland and the foliage crowded up in a way I found first interesting, then awesome, then claustrophobic. The masses of greenery towered to a height of twelve feet at least, the round leaves streaked a dark vermillion that looked like dried blood.

  “What is that stuff, Daddy?”

  “Seagrape. The green stuff with the yellow flowers is called wedelia. It grows everywhere. There’s also rhododendron. The trees are mostly just slash pine, I think, although—”

  She slowed to a crawl and pointed to the left, craning to look up through the corner of the windshield to do so. “Those are palms of some kind. And look … right up there …”

  The road bent still farther inland, and here the trunks flanking the road looked like knotted masses of gray rope. Their roots had buckled the tar. We’d be able to get over now, I judged, but cars passing this way a few years hence? No way.

  “Strangler fig,” I said.

  “Nice name, right out of Alfred Hitchcock. And they just grow wild?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  She bumped the Chevy carefully over the tunneling roots and drove on. We were down to no more than five miles an hour. There was more strangler fig growing out of the masses of seagrape and rhododendron. The high growth cast the road into deep shadow. It was impossible to see any distance at all on either side. Except for an occasional wedge of blue or errant sunray, even the sky was gone. And now we began to see sprays of sawgrass and tough, waxy fiddlewood growing right up through cracks in the tar.

  My arm began to itch. The one that wasn’t there. I reached to scratch it without thinking and only scratched my still-sore ribs, as I always did. At the same time the left side of my head started to itch. That I could scratch, and did.

  “Daddy?”

  “I’m okay. Why are you stopping?”

  “Because … I don’t feel so great myself.”

  Nor, I realized, did she look it. Her complexion had gone almost as white as the dab of zinc oxide on her nose. “Ilse? What is it?”

  “My stomach. I’m starting to have serious questions about that tuna salad I made for lunch.” She gave me a sickly coming-down-with-the-flu smile. “I’m also wondering how I’m going to get us out of here.”

  Not a bad question. All at once the seagrape seemed to be pushing in and the interweaving palms overhead seemed thicker. I realized I could smell the growth around us, a ropy aroma that seemed to come to life halfway down my throat. And why not? It came from live things, after all; they were crowded in on both sides. And above.

  “Dad?”

  The itch was worse. It was red, that itch, as red as the stink in my nose and throat was green. That itch you got when you were stuck in the burn, stuck in the char.

  “Daddy, I’m sorry but I think I’m going to vomit.”

  Not a burn, not a char, it was a car, she opened the door of the car and leaned out, holding onto the wheel with one ham, and then I heard her sowing up.

  My right eye came over red and I thought I can do this. I can do this. I just have to get my poor old shit together.

  I opened my door, reaching cross-body to do it, and got out. Lurched out, holding the top of the door to keep from sprawling headfirst into a wall of seagrape and the interwoven branches of a half-buried banyan. I itched all over. The bushes and branches were so close to the side of the car that they scraped me as I made my way up to the front. Half my vision

  (RED)

  seemed to be bleeding scarlet, I felt the tip of a pine-bough scrape across the wrist of—I could have sworn it—my right arm, and I thought I can do this, I MUST do this as I heard Ilse vomit again. I was aware that it was much hotter in that narrow lane than it should have been, even with the greenroof overhead. I had enough mind left in my mind to wonder what we’d been thinking, coming down this road in the first place. But of course it had seemed like nothing but a lark at the time.

  Ilse was still leaning out, hanging onto the wheel with her right hand. Sweat stood on her forehead in clear beads. She looked up at me. “Oh boy—”

  “Push over, Ilse.”

  “Daddy, what are you going to do?”

  As if she couldn’t see. And all at once both the words drive and back were unavailable to me, anyway. All I could have articulated in that moment was us, the most useless word in the English language when it stands by itself. I felt the anger rising in my throat like hot water. Or blood. Yes, more like that. Because the anger was, of course, red.

  “Get us out of here. Push over.” Thinking: Don’t you get mad at her. Don’t you start shouting no matter what. Oh for Christ’s sake, please don’t.

  “Daddy, you, can’t—”

  “Yes. I can do this. Push over.”

  The habit of obedience dies hard—especially hard, maybe, between fathers and daughters. And of course she was sick. She pushed over and I got behind the wheel, sitting down in my clum
sy stupid backwards fashion and using my hand to lift in my rotten right leg. My whole right side was buzzing, as if undergoing a low-level electric shock.

  I closed my eyes tightly and thought: I CAN do this, goddammit, and I don’t need any stuffed rag bitch to see me through, either.

  When I looked at the world again, some of that redness—and some of the anger, thank God—had drained out of it. I dropped the transmission into reverse and began to back up slowly. I couldn’t lean out as Ilse had done, because I had no right hand to steer with. I used the rear-view instead. In my head, ghostly, I heard: Meep-meep-meep.

  “Please don’t drive us off the road,” Ilse said. “We can’t walk. I’m too sick and you’re too crippled-up.”

  “I won’t, Monica,” I said, but at that moment she leaned out the window to vomit again and I don’t think she heard me.

  xiii

  Slowly, slowly, I backed away from the place where Ilse had stopped, telling myself Easy does it and Slow and steady wins the race. My hip snarled as we thumped back over the strangler fig roots burrowing under the road. On a couple of occasions I heard seagrape branches scree along the side of the car. The Hertz people weren’t going to be happy, but they were the least of my worries that afternoon.

  Little by little the light brightened as the foliage cleared out overhead. That was good. My vision was also clearing, that mad itch subsiding. Those things were even better.

  “I see the big place with the wall around it,” Ilse said, looking back over her shoulder.

  “Do you feel any better?”

  “Maybe a little, but my stomach’s still sudsing like a Maytag.” She made a gagging noise. “Oh God, I should never have said that.” She leaned out, threw up again, then collapsed back onto the seat, laughing and groaning. Her bangs were sticking to her forehead in clumps. “I just shellacked the side of your car. Please tell me you have a hose.”

  “Don’t worry about that. Just sit still and take long, slow breaths.”

  She saluted feebly and closed her eyes.

  The old woman in the big straw hat was nowhere in evidence, but the two halves of the iron gate were now standing wide open, as if she was expecting company. Or knew we’d need a place to turn around.