Duma Key, Page 22

  Silhouetted against that furnace light was a three-masted derelict. The ship's rotted sails hung limp with red fire glaring through the holes and rips. There was no one alive on board. You only had to look to know that. There was a feeling of hollow menace about the thing, as though it had housed some plague that had burned through the crew, leaving only this rotting corpse of wood, hemp, and sailcloth. I remember feeling that if a gull or pelican flew over it, the bird would drop dead on the deck with its feathers smoking.

  Floating about forty yards away was a small rowboat. Sitting in it was a girl, her back to me. Her hair was red, but the hair was false--no live girl had tangled yarn hair like that. What gave away her identity was the dress she wore. It was covered with tic-tac-toe grids and the printed words I WIN, YOU WIN, over and over. Ilse had that dress when she was four or five . . . about the age of the twin girls in the family portrait I'd seen on the second floor landing of El Palacio de Asesinos.

  I tried to shout, to warn her not to go near the derelict. I couldn't. I was helpless. In any case it didn't seem to matter. She only sat there in her sweet little rowboat on the mild red rollers, watching and wearing Illy's tic-tac-toe dress.

  I fell out of my bed, and on my bad side. I cried out in pain and rolled over on my back, listening to the waves from outside and the soft grinding of the shells under the house. They told me where I was but did not comfort me. I win, they said. I win, you win. You win, I win. The gun, I win. The fruit, you win. I win, you win.

  My missing arm seemed to burn. I had to put a stop to it or go crazy, and there was only one way to do that. I went upstairs and painted like a lunatic for the next three hours. I had no model on my table, no object in view out my window. Nor did I need any. It was all in my head. And as I worked, I realized this was what all the pictures had been struggling toward. Not the girl in the rowboat, necessarily; she was probably just an added attraction, a toehold in reality. It was the ship I had been after all along. The ship and the sunset. When I thought back, I realized the irony of that: Hello, the pencil-sketch I'd made on the day I came, had been the closest.

  iii

  I tumbled into bed around three-thirty and slept until nine. I woke feeling refreshed, cleaned out, brand-new. The weather was fine: cloudless and warmer than it had been in a week. The Baumgartens were getting ready to return north, but I had a spirited game of Frisbee with their boys on the beach before they left. My appetite was high, my pain-level low. It was nice to feel like one of the guys again, even for an hour.

  Elizabeth's weather had also cleared. I read her a number of poems while she arranged her chinas. Wireman was there, caught up for once and in good spirits. The world felt fine that day. It occurred to me only later that George "Candy" Brown might well have been abducting twelve-year-old Tina Garibaldi at the same time I was reading Richard Wilbur's poem about laundry, "Love Calls Us to the Things of the World," to Elizabeth. I chose it because I happened to see an item in that day's paper saying it had become something of a Valentine's Day favorite. The Garibaldi kidnapping happened to be recorded. It occurred at exactly 3:16 PM, according to the time-stamp on the tape, and that would have been just about the time I paused to sip from my glass of Wireman's green tea and unfold the Wilbur poem, which I had printed off the Internet.

  There were closed-circuit cameras installed to watch the loading-dock areas behind the Crossroads Mall. To guard against pilferage, I suppose. What they caught in this case was the pilferage of a child's life. She comes into view crossing right to left, a slim kid dressed in jeans with a pack on her back. She was probably planning to duck into the mall before going the rest of the way home. On the tape, which the TV stations replayed obsessively, you see him emerge from a rampway and take her by the wrist. She turns her face up to his and appears to ask him a question. Brown nods in reply and leads her away. At first she's not struggling, but then--just before they disappear behind a Dumpster--she attempts to pull free. But he's still holding her firmly by the wrist when they disappear from the camera's view. He killed her less than six hours later, according to the county medical examiner, but judging by the terrible evidence of her body, those hours must have seemed very long to that little girl, who never harmed anyone. They must have seemed endless.

  Outside the open window, The morning air is all awash with angels, Richard Wilbur writes in "Love Calls Us to the Things of the World." But no, Richard. No.

  Those were only sheets.

  iv

  The Baumgartens departed. The Godfreys' dogs barked them goodbye. A Merry Maids crew went into the house where the Baumgartens had been staying and gave it a good cleaning. The Godfreys' dogs barked them hello (and goodbye). Tina Garibaldi's body was found in a ditch behind the Wilk Park Little League field, naked from the waist down and discarded like a bag of garbage. Her mother was shown on Channel 6 screaming and harrowing at her cheeks. The Kintners replaced the Baumgartens. The folks from Toledo vacated #39 and three pleasant old ladies from Michigan moved in. The old ladies laughed a lot and actually said Yoo-hoo when they saw me or Wireman coming. I have no idea if they put the newly installed Wi-Fi at #39 to use or not, but the first time I played Scrabble with them, they fed me my lunch. The Godfreys' dogs barked tirelessly when the old ladies went on their afternoon walks. A man who worked at the Sarasota E-Z JetWash called the police and said the guy on the Tina Garibaldi tape looked very much like one of his fellow car-washers, a guy named George Brown, known to everyone as Candy. Candy Brown had left work around 2:30 on Valentine's Day afternoon, this man said, and hadn't returned until the next morning. Claimed he hadn't felt well. The E-Z JetWash was only a block from the Crossroads Mall. Two days after Valentine's, I came into the Palacio kitchen and found Wireman sitting at the table with his head thrown back, shaking all over. When the shakes subsided, he told me he was fine. When I said he didn't look fine, he told me to keep my opinions to myself, speaking in a brusque tone that was unlike him. I held up three fingers and asked him how many he saw. He said three. I held up two and he said two. I decided--not without misgivings--to let it go. Again. I was not, after all, my Wireman's keeper. I painted Girl and Ship Nos. 2 and 3. In No. 2, the child in the rowboat was wearing Reba's polka-dotted blue dress, but I was pretty sure it was still Ilse. And in No. 3 there was no doubt. Her hair had returned to the fine cornsilk I remembered from those days, and she was wearing a sailor-blouse with blue curlicue stitching around the collar that I had reason to remember very well: she'd been wearing it one Sunday when she'd fallen out of the apple tree in our back yard and broken her arm. In No. 3 the ship had turned slightly, and I could read the first letters of its name on the prow in flaking paint: PER. I had no idea what the rest of the letters might be. That was also the first painting with John Eastlake's spear-pistol in it. It was lying loaded on one of the rowboat's seats. On the eighteenth of February, a friend of Jack's showed up to help with repairs to some of the rental properties. The Godfreys' dogs barked gregariously at him, inviting him to come on over any time he felt like having a chunk removed from his hip-hop-jeans-clad buttsky. Police questioned Candy Brown's wife (she also called him Candy, everyone called him Candy, he had probably invited Tina Garibaldi to call him Candy before torturing and killing her) about his whereabouts on the afternoon of Valentine's Day. She said maybe he was sick, but he hadn't been sick at home. He hadn't come home until eight o'clock or so that night. She said he had brought her a box of chocolates. She said he was an old sweetie about things like that. On the twenty-first of February, the country-music folks took their sports car and went boot-scootin back to the northern climes from whence they'd come. No one else moved in to take their place. Wireman said it signaled the turn of the snowbird tide. He said it always turned earlier on Duma Key, which had zero restaurants and tourist attractions (not even a lousy alligator farm!). The Godfreys' dogs barked ceaselessly, as if to proclaim the tide of winter vacationers might have turned, but it was a long way from out. On the same day the boot-scooters left Duma, the po
lice showed up at Candy Brown's home in Sarasota with a search warrant. According to Channel 6, they took several items. A day later, the three old ladies at #39 once more fed me my lunch at Scrabble; I never so much as sniffed a Triple Word Score, but I did learn that qiviut is a word. When I got home and snapped on the TV, the BREAKING NEWS logo was on Channel 6, which is All Suncoast, All of the Time. Candy Brown had been arrested. According to "sources close to the investigation," two of the items taken in the search of the Brown house were undergarments, one spotted with blood. DNA testing would follow as day follows night. Candy Brown didn't wait. The following day's newspaper quoted him as saying to police, "I got high and did a terrible thing." This was what I read as I drank my morning juice. Above the story was The Picture, already as familiar to me as the photo of Kennedy being shot in Dallas. The Picture showed Candy with his hand locked on Tina Garibaldi's wrist, her face turned up to his questioningly. The telephone rang. I picked it up without looking at it and said hello. I was preoccupied with Tina Garibaldi. It was Wireman. He asked if maybe I could come down to the house for a little while. I said sure, of course, started to say goodbye, and then realized I was hearing something, not in his voice but just under it, that was a long way from normal. I asked him what was wrong.

  "I seem to have gone blind in my left eye, muchacho."

  He laughed a little. It was a strange, lost sound.

  "I knew it was coming, but it's still a shock. I suppose we'll all feel that way when we wake up d-d--" He drew a shuddering breath. "Can you come? I tried to get Annmarie from Bay Area Private Nursing, but she's out on a call, and . . . can you come, Edgar? Please?"

  "I'll be right there. Just hang on, Wireman. Stay where you are and hang on."

  v

  I hadn't had trouble with my own eyesight in weeks. The accident had caused some loss of peripheral vision and I tended to turn right to look at things I'd formerly picked up easily while looking straight ahead, but otherwise I was fine in the vision department. Going out to my anonymous rental Chevy, I wondered how I'd feel if that bloody redness started to creep over things again . . . or if I woke up some morning with nothing but a black hole on one side of my world. That made me wonder how Wireman could have managed a laugh. Even a little one.

  I had my hand on the Malibu's doorhandle when I remembered him saying that Annmarie Whistler, whom he depended upon to stay with Elizabeth when he had to be gone for any length of time, was on a call. I hurried back to the house and called Jack's mobile, praying that he'd answer and that he could come. He did, and he could. That was one for the home team.

  vi

  I drove off the island for the first time that morning, and I broke my cherry in a big way, joining the bumper-to-bumper northbound traffic on the Tamiami Trail. We were bound for Sarasota Memorial Hospital. This was on the recommendation of Elizabeth's doctor, who I'd called over Wireman's weak protests. And now Wireman kept asking me if I was all right, if I was sure I could do this, if it wouldn't have been better to let Jack drive him so I could stay with Elizabeth.

  "I'm fine," I said.

  "Well, you look scared to death. I can see that much." His right eye had shifted in my direction. His left tried to follow suit, but without much success. It was bloodshot, slightly upturned, and welling careless tears. "You gonna freak out, muchacho?"

  "No. Besides, you heard Elizabeth. If you hadn't gone on your own, she would have taken a broom and beaten you right out the door."

  He hadn't meant "Miss Eastlake" to know there was anything wrong with him, but she'd been coming into the kitchen on her walker and overheard his end of our conversation. And besides, she had a little of what Wireman had. It went unacknowledged between us, but it was there.

  "If they want to admit you--" I began.

  "Oh, they'll want to, it's a fucking reflex with them, but it's not going to happen. If they could fix it, that would be different. I'm only going because Hadlock may be able to tell me that this isn't a permanent clusterfuck but just a temporary blip on the radar." He smiled wanly.

  "Wireman, what the hell's wrong with you?"

  "All in good time, muchacho. What are you painting these days?"

  "Never mind right now."

  "Oh dear," Wireman said. "Looks like I'm not the only one who's tired of questions. Did you know that during the winter months, one out of every forty regular users of the Tamiami Trail will have a vehicular mishap? It's true. And according to something I heard on the news the other day, the chances of an asteroid the size of the Houston Astrodome hitting the earth are actually better than the chances of--"

  I reached for the radio and said, "Why don't we have some music?"

  "Good idea," he said. "But no fucking country."

  For a second I didn't understand, and then I remembered the recently departed boot-scooters. I found the area's loudest, dumbest rock station, which styles itself The Bone. There Nazareth was screaming its way through "Hair of the Dog."

  "Ah, puke-on-your-shoes rock and roll," Wireman said. "Now you're talkin, mi hijo."

  vii

  That was a long day. Any day you drop your bod onto the conveyor belt of modern medicine--especially as it's practiced in a city overstuffed with elderly, often ailing winter visitors--you're in for a long day. We were there until six. They did indeed want to admit Wireman. He refused.

  I spent most of my time in those purgatorial waiting rooms where the magazines are old, the cushions on the chairs are thin, and the TV is always bolted high in one corner. I sat, I listened to worried conversations compete with the TV-cackle, and every now and then I went to one of the areas where cell phones were allowed and used Wireman's to call Jack. Was she good? She was terrific. They were playing Parcheesi. Then reconfiguring China Town. The third time they were eating sandwiches and watching Oprah. The fourth time she was sleeping.

  "Tell him she's made all her restroom calls," Jack said. "So far."

  I did. Wireman was pleased to hear it. And the conveyor belt trundled slowly along.

  Three waiting rooms, one outside General Admitting, where Wireman refused to even take a clipboard with a form on it--possibly because he couldn't read it (I filled in the necessary information), one outside Neurology, where I met both Gene Hadlock, Elizabeth's doctor, and a pallid, goateed fellow named Herbert Principe. Dr. Hadlock claimed that Principe was the best neurologist in Sarasota. Principe did not deny this, nor did he say shucks. The last waiting room was on the second floor, home of Big Fancy Equipment. Here Wireman was taken not to Magnetic Resonance Imaging, a process with which I was very familiar, but instead to X-Ray at the far end of the hall, a room I imagined to be dusty and neglected in this modern age. Wireman gave me his Mary medallion to hold and I was left to wonder why Sarasota's best neurologist would resort to such old-fashioned technology. No one bothered to enlighten me.

  The TVs in all three waiting rooms were tuned to Channel 6, where again and again I was subjected to The Picture: Candy Brown with his hand locked on Tina Garibaldi's wrist, her face turned up to his, frozen in a look that was terrible because anyone brought up in a halfway decent home knew, in his or her heart, exactly what it meant. You told your children be careful, very careful, that a stranger could mean danger, and maybe they believed it, but kids from nice homes had also been raised to believe safety was their birthright. So the eyes said Sure, mister, tell me what I'm supposed to do. The eyes said You're the adult, I'm the kid, so tell me what you want. The eyes said I've been raised to respect my elders. And most of all, what killed you, were the eyes saying I've never been hurt before.

  I don't think that endless, looping coverage and near-constant repetition of The Picture accounts for everything that followed, but did it play a part? Yeah.

  Sure it did.

  viii

  It was past dark when I finally drove out of the parking garage and turned south on the Trail, headed back toward Duma. At first I hardly thought about Wireman; I was totally absorbed in my driving, somehow positive this time m
y luck would run out and we would have an accident. Once we got past the Siesta Key turnoffs and the traffic thinned a little, I started to relax. When we got to the Crossroads Mall, Wireman said: "Pull in."

  "Need something at The Gap? Joe Boxers? Couple of tee-shirts with pockets?"

  "Don't be a smartass, just pull in. Park under a light."

  I parked under one of the lights and turned off the engine. I found it moderately creepy there, even though the lot was well over half full and I knew that Candy Brown had taken Tina Garibaldi on the other side, the loading dock side.

  "I guess I can tell this once," Wireman said. "And you deserve to hear. Because you've been good to me. And you've been good for me."

  "Right back atcha on that, Wireman."

  His hands were resting on a slim gray folder he had carried out of the hospital with him. His name was on the tab. He raised one finger off it to still me without looking at me--he was looking straight ahead, at the Bealls Department Store anchoring this end of the mall. "I want to do this all at once. That work for you?"

  "Sure."

  "My story is like . . ." He turned to me, suddenly animated. His left eye was bright red and weeping steadily, but at least now it was pointing at me along with the other one. "Muchacho, have you ever seen one of those happynews stories about a guy winning two or three hundred million bucks on the Powerball?"

  "Everyone has."

  "They get him up on stage, they give him a great big fake cardboard check, and he says something which is almost always inarticulate, but that's good, in a situation like that inarticulate is the point, because picking all those numbers is fucking outrageous. Absurd. In a situation like that the best you can do is 'I'm going to fucking Disney World.' Are you with me so far?"