Duma Key, Page 23

  "So far, yeah."

  Wireman went back to studying the people going in and out of Bealls, behind which Tina Garibaldi had met Candy Brown to her pain and sorrow.

  "I won la loteria, too. Only not in a good way. In fact, I'd say it was just about the world's worst way. The lawyering I did in my other life was in Omaha. I worked for a firm called Fineham, Dooling, and Allen. Wits--of which I considered myself one--sometimes called it Findum, Fuckum, and Forgettum. It was actually a great firm, honest as the day. We did good business, and I was well positioned there. I was a bachelor, and by that time--I was thirty-seven--I thought that was probably my lot in life. Then the circus came to town, Edgar. I mean an actual circus, one with big cats and aerialists. Most of the performers were of other nationalities, as is often the case. The aerialist troupe and their families were from Mexico. One of the circus accountants, Julia Taveres, was also from Mexico. As well as keeping the books, she functioned as translator for the fliers."

  He gave her name the Spanish pronunciation--Hulia.

  "I did not go to the circus. Wireman does the occasional rock-show; he doesn't do circuses. But here's the lottery again. Every few days, the circus's clerical staff would draw slips from a hat to see who'd go shopping for the office snacks--chips, dips, coffee, soda. One day in Omaha, Julia drew the marked slip. While coming back across the supermarket parking lot to the van, a produce truck entering the lot at a high rate of speed struck a line of shopping carts--you know how they stack them up?"

  "Yes."

  "Okay. Bang! The carts roll thirty feet, strike Julia, break her leg. She was blindsided, had no chance to get out of the way. There happened to be a cop parked nearby, and he heard her screaming. He called an ambulance. He also Breathalyzed the produce truck driver. He blew a one-seven."

  "Is that bad?"

  "Yes, muchacho. In Nebraska, a one-seven means do not collect two hundred dollars, go directly to drunk. Julia, on the advice of the doctor who saw her in the Emergency Room, came to us. There were thirty-five lawyers in Findum, Fuckum, and Forgettum back then, and Julia's personal-injury case could have ended up with any one of fifteen. I got it. Do you see the numbers starting to roll into place?"

  "Yes."

  "I did more than represent her; I married her. She wins the suit and a large chunk of change. The circus rolls out of town, as circuses have a way of doing, only minus one accountant. Shall I tell you we were very much in love?"

  "No," I said. "I hear it every time you say her name."

  "Thank you, Edgar. Thanks." He sat there with his head bowed and his hands on his folder. Then he dragged a battered, bulging wallet from his hip pocket. I had no idea how he could bear to sit on such a rock. He flipped through the little windows meant for photographs and important documents, then stopped and slid out a photograph of a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman in a white sleeveless blouse. She looked about thirty. She was a heart-stopper.

  "Mi Julia," he said. I started to hand the picture back and he shook his head. He was choosing another photo. I dreaded to see it. I took it, though, when he handed it over.

  It was Julia Wireman in miniature. That same dark hair, framing a pale, perfect face. Those same dark solemn eyes.

  "Esmeralda," Wireman said. "The other half of my heart."

  "Esmeralda," I said. I thought the eyes looking out of this photograph and the eyes looking up at Candy Brown in The Picture were almost the same. But maybe all children's eyes are the same. My arm began to itch. The one that had been burnt up in a hospital incinerator. I scratched at it and got my ribs. No news there.

  Wireman took the pictures back, kissed each with a brief, dry ardor that was terrible to see, and returned them to their transparent sleeves. It took him a little while, because his hands had picked up a tremble. And, I suppose, he was having trouble seeing. "You actually don't even have to watch those old numbers, amigo. If you close your eyes you can hear them falling into place: Click and click and click. Some guys just strike lucky. Hotcha!" He popped his tongue against the roof of his mouth. The sound was shockingly loud in the little sedan.

  "When Ez was three, Julia signed on part-time with an outfit called Work Fair, Immigration Solutions in downtown Omaha. She helped Spanish-speakers with and without green cards get jobs, and she helped start illegals who wanted citizenship on the right road. Just a little storefront outfit, low profile, but they did a lot more practical good than all the marches and sign-waving. In Wireman's humble opinion."

  He pressed his hands against his eyes and drew a deep, shuddering breath. Then he let his palms fall on top of the file-folder with a thump.

  "When it happened, I was in Kansas City on business. Julia spent Monday to Thursday mornings at Work Fair. Ez went to a daycare. A good one. I could have sued and broken that place--beggared the women who ran it--but I didn't. Because even in my grief, I understood that what happened to Esmeralda could have happened to anyone's child. It's all just la loteria, entiendes? Once our firm sued a Venetian blind company--I wasn't personally involved--when a baby lying in his crib got hold of the draw-cord, swallowed it, and choked to death. The parents won and there was a payout, but their baby was just as dead, and if it hadn't been the cord, it might have been something else. A Matchbox car. The ID tag off the dog's collar. A marble." Wireman shrugged. "With Ez it was the marble. She pulled it down her throat during playtime and choked to death."

  "Wireman, Jesus! I'm so sorry!"

  "She was still alive when they got her to the hospital. The woman from the daycare called both Julia's office and mine. She was babbling-crazy, insane. Julia went tearing out of Work Fair, got into her car, drove like hell. Three blocks from the hospital she had a head-on collision with an Omaha Public Works truck. She was killed instantly. By then our daughter had probably already been dead for twenty minutes. That Mary medallion you held for me . . . that was Julia's."

  He fell silent, and the silence spun out. I didn't fill it; there's nothing to say to a story like that. Eventually he resumed.

  "Just another version of the Powerball. Five numbers, plus that all-important Bonus Number. Click, click, click, click, click. And then clack for good measure. Did I think such a thing could happen to me? No, muchacho, never in my wildest, and God punishes us for what we can't imagine. My mother and dad begged me to go see a psychiatrist, and for a little while--eight months after the funerals--I did indeed go. I was tired of floating through the world like a balloon tethered three feet over my own head."

  "I know the feeling," I said.

  "I know you do. We checked into hell on different shifts, you and me. And out again, I suppose, although my heels are still smoking. How about yours?"

  "Yeah."

  "The psychiatrist . . . nice man, but I couldn't talk to him. With him I was inarticulate. With him I found myself grinning a lot. I kept expecting a cute chick in a bathing suit to trot out my big cardboard check. The audience would see it and applaud. And eventually a check did come. When we married, I'd taken out a joint life insurance policy. When Ez came, I added to it. So I really did win la loteria. Especially when you add in the compensation Julia received from the accident in the supermarket parking lot. Which brings us to this."

  He held up the slim gray folder.

  "The thought of suicide had been out there, circling closer and closer. The primary attraction was the idea that Julia and Esmeralda might also still be out there, waiting for me to catch up . . . but they might not wait forever. I'm not a conventionally religious man, but I think there's at least a chance that there is life after death, and that we survive as . . . you know, ourselves. But of course . . ." A wintry smile touched the sides of his mouth. "Mostly I was just depressed. I had a gun in my safe. A .22. I bought it for home protection after Esmeralda was born. One night I sat down with it at the dining room table, and . . . I believe you might know this part of the story, muchacho."

  I raised one hand and seesawed it in a maybe si, maybe no gesture.

  "I sat down at t
he dining room table in my empty house. There was a bowl of fruit there, courtesy of the home shopper I employed. I put the gun on the table, and then I closed my eyes. I spun the bowl of fruit around two or three times. I told myself if I picked an apple out of the bowl, I'd put the gun to my temple and end my life. If it was an orange, however . . . then I'd take my lottery winnings and go to Disney World."

  "You could hear the refrigerator," I said.

  "That's right," he said without surprise. "I could hear the fridge--both the hum of the motor and the clunk of the ice-maker. I reached out and I picked an apple."

  "Did you cheat?"

  Wireman smiled. "A fair question. If you mean did I peek, the answer is no. If you mean did I memorize the geography of the fruit in the bowl . . ." He shrugged. "Quien sabe? In any case, I picked an apple: in Adam's fall, sinned we all. I didn't have to bite it or smell it; I could tell what it was by the skin. So without opening my eyes--or giving myself any chance to think--I picked up the gun and put it to my temple." He mimed this with the hand I no longer had, cocking the thumb and placing the first finger against the small circular scar that his long, graying hair usually hid. "My last thought was, 'At least I won't have to listen to that refrigerator anymore, or eat one more gourmet shepherd's pie out of it.' I don't remember any bang. Nevertheless, the whole world went white, and that was the end of Wireman's other life. Now . . . would you like the hallucinogenic shit?"

  "Yes, please."

  "You want to see if it matches yours, don't you?"

  "Yes." And a question occurred to me. One of some import, maybe. "Wireman, did you have any of these telepathic bursts . . . weird receptions . . . whatever you want to call them . . . before you came to Duma Key?" I was thinking of Monica Goldstein's dog, Gandalf, and how I seemed to have choked him with an arm I no longer had.

  "Yes, two or three," he said. "I may tell you about them in time, Edgar, but I don't want to stick Jack with Miss Eastlake for too long. All other considerations aside, she's apt to be worried about me. She's a dear thing."

  I could have said that Jack--also sort of a dear thing--would probably be worried, too, but instead I only told him to go on.

  "You often have a redness about you, muchacho," Wireman said. "I don't think it's an aura, exactly, and it's not exactly a thought . . . except when it is. I've gotten it from you as a word as well as a color on three or four occasions. And yes, once when I was off Duma Key. When we were at the Scoto."

  "When I was stuck for a word."

  "Were you? I don't remember."

  "Neither do I, but I'm sure that was it. Red's a mnemonic for me. A trigger. From a Reba McEntyre song, of all things. I found it almost by accident. And there's something else, I guess. When I forget stuff I tend to get . . . you know . . ."

  "A little pissed off?"

  I thought of how I'd taken Pam by the throat. How I'd tried to choke her.

  "Yeah," I said. "You could say that."

  "Ah."

  "Anyway, I guess that red must have gotten out and stained my . . . my mental suit of clothes? Is that what it's like?"

  "Close. And every time I sense that around you, in you, I think of waking up after putting a bullet in my temple and seeing the whole world was dark red. I thought I was in hell, that that was what hell was going to be like, an eternity of deepest scarlet." He paused. "Then I realized it was just the apple. It was lying right in front of me, maybe an inch from my eyes. It was on the floor and I was on the floor."

  "I'll be damned," I said.

  "Yes, that's what I thought, but it wasn't damnation, only an apple. 'In Adam's fall, sinned we all.' I said that out loud. Then I said, 'Fruit-bowl.' I remember everything that happened and everything that was said over the next ninety-six hours with perfect clarity. Every detail." He laughed. "Of course I know some of the things I remember aren't true, but I remember them with exquisite precision, all the same. No cross-examination could trip me up to this very day, not even concerning the pus-covered roaches I saw crawling out of old Jack Fineham's eyes, mouth, and nostrils.

  "I had a hell of a headache, but once I got over the shock of the apple close-up, I felt pretty much okay otherwise. It was four in the morning. Six hours had gone by. I was lying in a puddle of congealed blood. It was caked on my right cheek like jelly. I remember sitting up and saying, 'I'm a dandy in aspic' and trying to remember if aspic was some kind of jelly. I said, 'No jelly in the fruit-bowl.' And saying that seemed so rational it was like passing a sanity test. I began to doubt that I'd shot myself. It seemed more likely that I'd gone to sleep at the dining room table only thinking of shooting myself, fallen off my chair, and hit my head. That's where the blood came from. In fact, it seemed almost certain, given the fact that I was moving around and talking. I told myself to say something else. To say my mother's name. Instead I said, 'Cash crop in the groun, lan'lord soon be roun.' "

  I nodded, excited. I had had similar experiences, not once but countless times, after coming out of my coma. Sit in the buddy, sit in the chum.

  "Were you angry?"

  "No, serene! Relieved! I could accept a little disorientation from a knock on the head. Only then I saw the gun on the floor. I picked it up and smelled the muzzle. There's no mistaking the smell of a recently fired gun. It's acrid, a smell with claws. Still, I held onto the falling-asleep-and-hitting-my-head idea until I got into the bathroom and saw the hole in my temple. Little round hole with a corona of singe-marks around it." He laughed again, as people do when remembering some crazy boner they've pulled--forgetting to open the garage door, for instance, and then backing into it.

  "That's when I heard the last number clicking into place, Edgar--the Powerball Number! And I knew I was going to Disney World, after all."

  "Or a reasonable facsimile," I said. "Christ, Wireman."

  "I tried to wash the powder-burns off, but bearing down with a facecloth hurt too much. It was like biting down on a bad tooth."

  Suddenly I understood why they'd X-rayed him instead of sticking him in the MRI machine. The bullet was still in his head.

  "Wireman, can I ask you something?"

  "All right."

  "Are a person's optic nerves . . . I don't know . . . bass-ackwards?"

  "Indeed they are."

  "So that's why your left eye is fucked up. It's like . . ." For a moment the word wouldn't come, and I clenched my fists. Then it was there. "It's like contracoup."

  "I guess so, yeah. I shot myself in the right side of my stupid head, but it's my left eye that's fucked up. I put a Band-Aid over the hole. And took some aspirin."

  I laughed. I couldn't help it. Wireman smiled and nodded.

  "Then I went to bed and tried to sleep. I might as well have tried sleeping in the middle of a brass band. I didn't sleep for four days. I felt I would never sleep again. My mind was going four thousand miles an hour. This made cocaine seem like Xanax. I couldn't even lie still for long. I managed twenty minutes, then leaped up and put on a mariachi record. It was five-thirty in the morning. I spent thirty minutes on the exercise bike--first time I'd been on it since Julia and Ez died--showered, and went in to work.

  "For the next three days I was a bird, I was a plane, I was Super Lawyer. My colleagues progressed from being worried about me to being scared for me to being scared for themselves--the non sequiturs were getting worse, and so was my tendency to lapse into both pidgin Spanish and a kind of Pepe Le Pew French--but there can be no doubt that I moved a mountain of paper during those days, and very little of it ever came back on the firm. I checked. The partners in the corner offices and the lawyers in the trenches were united in the belief that I was having a nervous breakdown, and in a sense they were right. It was an organic nervous breakdown. Several people tried to get me to go home, with no success. Dion Knightly, one of my good friends there, all but begged me to let him take me to see a doctor. Know what I told him?"

  I shook my head.

  " 'Corn in the field, deal soon sealed.' I remember it perf
ectly! Then I walked away. Except I was almost skipping. Walking was too slow for Wireman. I pulled two all-nighters. The third night, the security guard escorted me, protesting, from the premises. I informed him that a rigid penis has a million capillaries but not one scruple. I also told him he was a dandy in aspic, and that his father hated him." Wireman brooded down at his folder briefly. "The thing about his father got to him, I think. Actually I know it did." He tapped his scarred temple. "Weird radio, amigo. Weird radio.

  "The next day I was called in to see Jack Fineham, the grand high rajah of our kingdom. I was ordered to take a leave of absence. Not asked, ordered. Jack opined that I'd come back too soon after 'my unfortunate family reversals.' I told him that was silly, I'd had no family reversals. 'Say only that my wife and child et a rotten apple,' I told him. 'Say that, thou white-haired syndic, for it did be mortal full of bugs.' That was when the roaches started to come out of his eyes and nose. And a couple from under his tongue, spilling white scum down his chin when they crawled over his lower lip.

  "I started to scream. And I went for him. If not for the panic button on his desk--I didn't even know the paranoid old geezer had one--I might have killed him. Also, he could run surprisingly fast. I mean he sped around that office, Edgar. Must have been all those years of tennis and golf." He mulled this for a moment. "Still, I had both madness and youth on my side. I had laid hands on him by the time the posse burst in. It took half a dozen lawyers to haul me off him, and I tore his Paul Stuart suit-coat in half. Straight down the back." He shook his head slowly back and forth. "You should have heard that hijo de puta holler. And you should have heard me. The maddest shit you can imagine, including accusations--shouted at the top of my lungs--about his preference for ladies' underwear. And like the thing about the security guard's father, I think that may well have been true. Funny, no? And, crazy or not, valued legal mind or not, that was the end of my career at Findum, Fuckum, and Forgettum."

  "I'm sorry," I said.

  "De nada, all for the best," he said in a businesslike tone. "As the lawyers were wrestling me out of his office--which was trashed--I pitched a fit. The grandest of grand mals. If there hadn't been a legal aide handy with some medical training, I might have died right there. As it was, I was out cold for three days. And hey, I needed the sleep. So now . . ."