Duma Key, Page 52

  I took a quick inventory. Wireman had the red basket; Jack had the bag with the food in it; I had my art supplies. I wasn't sure just what we were going to do if the rest of Elizabeth's drawings had blown away in the storm that had torn the roof off the ruin just ahead (or if there were no more pictures), but we had come this far and we had to do something. Ilse insisted on that, from my bones and heart.

  "Yes," I said. "On we go."

  xii

  We had reached the point where the driveway began to be overgrown with strangler fig when I saw that black thing go flickering through the high tangle of weeds to the right of the house. This time Jack saw it, too.

  "Someone's there," he said.

  "I didn't see anyone," Wireman said. He set down the picnic basket and armed sweat from his brow. "Switch with me awhile, Jack. You take the basket and I'll take the food. You're young and strong. Wireman's old and used up. He'll die soo--holy shit what's that!"

  He staggered back from the basket and would have fallen if I hadn't caught him around the waist. Jack shouted with surprise and horror.

  The man came bursting from the undergrowth just ahead on our left. There was no way he could have been there--Jack and I had glimpsed him fifty yards away only seconds before--but he was. He was a black man but not a human being. We never mistook him for an actual human being. For one thing, his legs, cocked and clad in blue breeches, did not move as he passed in front of us. Nor did he stir the thick mat of strangler fig springing up all around him. Yet his lips grinned; his eyes rolled with jolly malevolence. He wore a peaked cap with a button on top, and that was somehow the worst.

  I thought if I had to look at that cap for long, it would drive me mad.

  The thing disappeared into the grass on our right, a black man in blue breeches, about five and a half feet tall. The grass was no more than five feet high, and simple mathematics said he had no business disappearing into it, but he did.

  A moment later he--it--was on the porch, grinning at us like De Ole Family Retainer, and then, with no pause, he--it--was at the bottom of the steps, and once more darting into the weeds, grinning at us all the time.

  Grinning at us from beneath its cap.

  Its cap was RED.

  Jack turned to flee. There was nothing on his face but mindless, blabbering panic. I let go of Wireman to grab him, and if Wireman had also decided to flee, I think that would have been the end of our expedition; I had only the one arm, after all, and couldn't restrain them both. Couldn't restrain either of them, if they really meant to turn tail.

  Terrified as I was, I never even came close to running. And Wireman, God bless him, stood his ground, watching with his mouth hung open as the black man next appeared from the grove of banana trees between the pool and the outbuilding.

  I got Jack by the belt and yanked him back. I couldn't slap him in the face--I had no hand to slap with--and so I settled for shouting. "It's not real! It's her nightmare!"

  "Her . . . nightmare?" Something like comprehension dawned in Jack's eyes. Or maybe just a little consciousness. I'd settle for that.

  "Her nightmare, her boogeyman, whatever she was afraid of when the lights went out," I said. "It's just another ghost, Jack."

  "How do you know?"

  "For one thing, it's flickering like an old movie," Wireman said. "Look at it."

  The black man was gone, then there again, this time in front of the rust-encrusted ladder leading up to the pool's diving platform. It grinned at us from beneath its red cap. Its shirt, I saw, was as blue as its breeches. It slid from place to place with its unmoving legs always cocked in the same position, like a figure in a shooting gallery. It was gone again, then appeared on the porch. A moment later it was in the driveway, almost directly in front of us. Looking at it made my head hurt, and it still made me afraid . . . but only because she had been afraid. Libbit.

  The next time it showed itself, it was on the double-rutted path to the Shade Beach, and this time we could see the Gulf shining through its blouse and breeches. It winked out of sight, and Wireman began to laugh hysterically.

  "What?" Jack turned to him. Almost turned on him. "What?"

  "It's a fuckin lawn jockey!" Wireman said, laughing harder than ever. "One of those black lawn jockeys that are now so politically verboten, blown up to three, maybe four times its normal size! Elizabeth's boogeyman was the house lawn jockey!"

  He tried to say more, but couldn't. He leaned over, laughing so hard he had to brace his hands on his knees. I saw the joke, but couldn't share it . . . and not only because my daughter was dead in Rhode Island. Wireman was only laughing now because at first he had been as frightened as Jack and I, as frightened as Libbit must have been. And why had she been frightened? Because someone, quite likely by accident, had put the wrong idea in her imaginative little head. My money was on Nan Melda, and--maybe--a bedtime story meant only to soothe a child who was still fretful from her head injury. Maybe even insomniac. Only this bedtime story had lodged in the wrong place, and grown TEEF.

  Mr. Blue Breeches wasn't like the frogs we'd seen back on the road, either. Those had been all Elizabeth, and there'd been no malevolence about them. The lawn jockey, however . . . he might originally have come from little Libbit's battered head, but I had an idea that Perse had long since appropriated him for her own purposes. If anyone got this close to Elizabeth's first home, there it was, all ready to scare the intruder away. Into a stay at the nearest lunatic asylum, maybe.

  Which meant there might be something here to find, after all.

  Jack looked nervously toward where the sunken path--which really did look as if it had been big enough to accommodate a cart or even a truck, once upon a time--dropped down and out of sight. "Will it be back?"

  "It doesn't matter, muchacho," Wireman said. "It's not real. That picnic basket, on the other hand, needs to be carried. So mush. On, you huskies."

  "Just looking at it made me feel like I was losing my mind," Jack said. "Do you understand that, Edgar?"

  "Of course. Libbit had a very powerful imagination, back in the day."

  "What happened to it, then?"

  "She forgot how to use it."

  "Jesus," Jack said. "That's horrible."

  "Yes. And I think that kind of forgetting is easy. Which is even more horrible."

  Jack bent down, picked up the basket, then looked at Wireman. "What's in here? Gold bars?"

  Wireman grabbed the bag of food and smiled serenely. "I packed a few extras."

  We worked our way up the overgrown driveway, keeping an eye out for the lawn jockey. It did not return. At the top of the porch steps, Jack set the picnic basket down with a little sigh of relief. From behind us came a flurry and flutter of wings.

  We turned and saw a heron alight on the driveway. It could have been the same one that had been giving me the cold-eye from El Palacio's tennis court. Certainly the gaze was the same: blue and sharp and without an ounce of pity.

  "Is that real?" Wireman asked. "What do you think, Edgar?"

  "It's real," I said.

  "How do you know?"

  I could have pointed out that the heron was casting a shadow, but for all I knew, the lawn jockey had been casting one, as well; I had been too amazed to notice. "I just do. Come on, let's go inside. And don't bother knocking. This isn't a social call."

  xiii

  "Uh, this could be a problem," Jack said.

  The veranda was deeply shadowed by mats of hanging Spanish Moss, but once our eyes had adjusted to the gloom, we could see a thick and rusty chain encircling the double doors. Not one but two padlocks hung down from it. The chain had been run through hooks on either jamb.

  Wireman stepped forward for a closer look. "You know," he said, "Jack and I might be able to snap one or both of those hooks right off. They've seen better days."

  "Better years," Jack said.

  "Maybe," I said, "but the doors themselves are almost certainly locked, and if you go rattling chains and snapping hooks, you're goin
g to disturb the neighbors."

  "Neighbors?" Wireman asked.

  I pointed straight up. Wireman and Jack followed my finger and saw what I already had: a large colony of brown bats sleeping in what looked like a vast hanging cloud of cobweb. I glanced down and saw the porch was not just coated but plated with guano. It made me very glad I was wearing a hat.

  When I looked up again, Jack Cantori was at the foot of the steps. "No way, baby," he said. "Call me a chicken, call me a candy-ass, call me any name in the book, I'm not going there. With Wireman it's snakes. With me it's bats. Once--" He looked like he had more to say, maybe a lot, but didn't know how to say it. He took another step back, instead. I had a moment to contemplate the eccentricity of fear: what the weird jockey hadn't been able to accomplish (close, but that only counts in horseshoes), a colony of sleeping brown bats had. For Jack, at least.

  Wireman said, "They can carry rabies, muchacho--did you know that?"

  I nodded. "I think we should look for the tradesman's entrance."

  xiv

  We made our way slowly along the side of the house, Jack in the lead and carrying the red picnic basket. His shirt was dark with sweat, but he no longer showed the slightest sign of nausea. He should have; probably we all should have. The stench from the pool was nearly overpowering. Thigh-high grass whickered against our pants; stiff fiddlewood stems poked at our ankles. There were windows, but unless Jack wanted to try standing on Wireman's shoulders, they were all too high.

  "What time is it?" Jack puffed.

  "Time for you to move a little faster, mi amigo," Wireman said. "You want me to spell you on that basket?"

  "Sure," Jack said, sounding really out of temper for the first time since I'd met him. "Then you can have a heart attack and me and the boss can try out our CPR technique."

  "Are you suggesting I'm not in shape?"

  "In shape, but I still put you fifty pounds into the cardiac danger zone."

  "Quit it," I said. "Both of you."

  "Put it down, son," Wireman said. "Put that cesto de puta madre down and I'll carry it the rest of the way."

  "No. Forget it."

  Something black moved in the corner of my eye. I almost didn't look. I thought it was the lawn jockey again, this time darting alongside the pool. Or skimming its buggy, smelly surface. Thank God I decided to make sure.

  Wireman, meanwhile, was glowering at Jack. His manhood had been impugned. "I want to spell you."

  A piece of the pool's turgid nastiness had come alive. It detached itself from the blackness and flopped onto the cracked, weed-sprouting concrete lip, splattering muck about itself in a dirty starburst.

  "No, Wireman, I got it."

  A piece of nastiness with eyes.

  "Jack, I'm telling you for the last time."

  Then I saw the tail, and realized what I was looking at.

  "And I'm telling you--"

  "Wireman," I said, and grabbed his shoulder.

  "No, Edgar, I can do this."

  I can do this. How those words clanged in my head. I forced myself to speak slowly, loudly, and emphatically.

  "Wireman, shut up. There's an alligator. It just came out of the pool."

  Wireman was afraid of snakes, Jack was afraid of bats. I had no idea I was afraid of alligators until I saw that chunk of prehistoric darkness separate itself from the decaying stew in the old pool and come for us, first across the overgrown concrete (brushing aside the last surviving, tipped-over lawn chair as it did) and then sliding into the weeds and vines trailing down from the nearest Brazilian Peppers. I caught one glimpse of its snout wrinkling back, one black eye squeezing shut in what could have been a wink, and then there was only its dripping back protruding here and there through the shivering greenery, like a submarine that's three-quarters under. It was coming for us, and after telling Wireman, I could do no more. Grayness came over my sight. I leaned back against the old warped boards of Heron's Roost. They were warm. I leaned there and waited to be eaten by the twelve-foot-long horror that lived in John Eastlake's old swimming pool.

  Wireman never hesitated. He stripped the red basket from Jack's hands, dropped it on the ground, and knelt beside it, flipping back one end as he did so. He reached in and produced the largest handgun I had ever seen outside of a motion picture. Kneeling there in the high grass with the open picnic basket in front of him, Wireman gripped it in both hands. I had a good angle on his face, and I thought then and still think now that he looked perfectly serene . . . especially for a man facing what could be seen as a snake writ large. He waited.

  "Shoot it!" Jack screamed.

  Wireman waited. And beyond him, I saw the heron. It was floating in the air above the long, overgrown utility building behind the tennis court. It was floating upside down.

  "Wireman?" I said. "Safety catch?"

  "Caray," he murmured, and flicked something with his thumb. A red spot high on the pistol's handgrip winked out of view. He never took his eyes from the high grass, which had now begun to shake. Then it parted, and the alligator came at him. I had seen them on the Discovery Channel and National Geographic specials, but nothing prepared me for how fast that thing could move on those stub-legs. The grass had brushed most of the mud from its rudiment of a face, and I could see its enormous smile.

  "Now!" Jack screamed.

  Wireman shot. The report was tremendous--it went rolling away like something solid, something made of stone--and the result was tremendous, as well. The top half of the alligator's head came off in a cloud of mud, blood, and flesh. It didn't slow down; to the contrary, those stubby legs seemed to speed up as it ran off the last thirty feet or so. I could hear the grass whickering harshly along its plated sides.

  The barrel of the gun rose with the recoil. Wireman let it. I've never seen calm like that, and it still amazes me. When the gun came back to dead level, the alligator was no more than fifteen feet away. He fired again, and the second bullet lifted the thing's front half to the sky, revealing a greenish-white belly. For a moment it seemed to be dancing on its tail, like a happy gator in a Disney cartoon.

  "Yahh, you ugly bastard!" Jack screamed. "Fuck ya mutha! Fuck ya GRANDmutha!"

  The gun again rose with the recoil. Once again, Wireman let it. The alligator thumped down on its side, belly exposed, the stubs of its legs thrashing, its tail whipping and tearing up grass and earth in clots. When the muzzle came back level, Wireman pulled the trigger again, and the center of the thing's belly seemed to disintegrate. All at once the ragged, flattened circle in which it lay was mostly red instead of green.

  I looked for the heron. The heron was gone.

  Wireman got up, and I saw he was shaking. He walked toward the alligator--although not quite within the radius of the still-whipping tail--and pumped two more rounds into it. The tail gave a final convulsive whack against the ground, the body a final jerk, and then it was still.

  He turned to Jack and held up the automatic in a shaking hand. "Desert Eagle, .357," he said. "One big old handgun, made by badass Hebrews--James McMurtry, two thousand-six. Mostly what added the weight to the basket was the ammo. I tossed in all the clips I had. That was about a dozen."

  Jack walked over to him, embraced him, then kissed him on both cheeks. "I'll carry that basket to Cleveland if you want, and never say a word."

  "At least you won't have to carry the gun," Wireman said. "From now on, sweet old Betsy McCall goes in my belt." And he put it there, after loading a fresh clip and carefully re-engaging the safety. This took him two tries, because of his shaking hands.

  I came over to him and also kissed him on each cheek.

  "Oh gosh," he said. "Wireman no longer feels Spanish. Wireman is beginning to feel positively French."

  "How do you happen to have a gun in the first place?" I asked.

  "It was Miss Eastlake's idea, after the last cocaine skirmish in Tampa-St. Pete." He turned to Jack. "You remember, don't you?"

  "Yeah. Four dead."

  "Anyway, Miss Eas
tlake suggested I get a gun for home protection. I got a big one. She and I even did some target practice together." He smiled. "She was good, and she didn't mind the noise, but she hated the recoil." He looked at the splattered alligator. "I guess it did the job. What next, muchacho?"

  "Around back, but . . . did either of you see that heron?"

  Jack shook his head. So did Wireman, looking bemused.

  "I saw it," I told him. "And if I see it again . . . or if either of you do . . . I want you to shoot it, Jerome."

  Wireman raised his eyebrows but said nothing. We resumed our tramp along the east side of the deserted estate.

  xv

  Finding a way in through the back turned out not to be a problem: there was no back. All but the most easterly corner of the mansion had been torn off, probably in the same storm that had taken the top stories. Standing there, looking into the overgrown ruin of what had once been a kitchen and pantry, I realized that Heron's Roost was little more than a moss-festooned facade.

  "We can get in from here," Jack said doubtfully, "but I'm not sure I trust the floor. What do you think, Edgar?"

  "I don't know," I said. I felt very tired. Maybe it was only spent adrenaline from our encounter with the alligator, but it felt like more than that to me. It felt like defeat. There had been too many years, too many storms. And a little girl's drawings were ephemeral things to start with. "What time is it, Wireman? Without the bullshit, if you please."

  He looked at his watch. "Two-thirty. What do you say, muchacho? Go in?"

  "I don't know," I repeated.

  "Well, I do," he said. "I killed a fucking alligator to get here; I'm not leaving without at least a look around the old homestead. The pantry floor looks solid, and it's the closest to the ground. Come on, you two, let's pile up some shit to stand on. A couple of those beams should do. Jack, you can go first, then help me. We'll pull Edgar up together."

  And that's how we did it, dirty and disheveled and out of breath, scrambling first into the pantry and going from there into the house itself, looking around with wonder, feeling like time travelers, tourists in a world that had ended over eighty years before.

  18--Noveen

  i

  The house stank of decaying wood, old plaster, and moldy fabric. There was also an underlying greenish odor. Some of the furniture was left--ruined by time and slumped by moisture--but the fine old wallpaper in the parlor hung in strips, and there was a huge paper nest, ancient and silent, clinging to the ceiling in the rotting front hall. Below it, dead wasps lay in a foot-deep hill on the warped cypress floorboards. Somewhere, in what remained of the upstairs, water was dripping, one isolated drop at a time.