Duma Key, Page 9

  "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 clumsy 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.

  I didn't waste time considering that, just backed the Chevy into the archway. For a moment I saw a courtyard paved with cool blue tiles, a tennis court, and an enormous set of double doors with iron rings set into them. Then I turned for home. We were there five minutes later. My vision was as clear as it had been when I woke up that morning, if not clearer. Except for the low itch up and down my right side, I felt fine.

  I also felt a strong desire to draw. I didn't know what, but I would know, when I was sitting in Little Pink with one of my pads propped on my easel. I was sure of that.

  "Let me clean off the side of your car," Ilse said.

  "You're going to lie down. You look beat half to death."

  She offered a wan smile. "That's just the better half. Remember how Mom used to say that?"

  I nodded. "Go on, now. I'll do the rinsing." I pointed to where the hose was coiled on the north side of Big Pink. "It's all hooked up and ready to go."

  "Are you sure you're all right?"

  "Good to go. I think you ate more of the tuna salad than I did."

  She managed another smile. "I always was partial to my own cooking. You were great to get us back here, Daddy. I'd kiss you, but my breath . . ."

  I kissed her. On the forehead. The skin was cool and damp. "Put your feet up, Miss Cookie--orders from headquarters."

  She went. I turned on the faucet and hosed off the side of the Malibu, taking more time than the job really needed, wanting to make sure she was down for the count. And she was. When I peeked in through the half-open door of the second bedroom, I saw her lying on her side, sleeping just as she had as a kid: one hand tucked under her cheek and one knee drawn up almost to her chest. We think we change, but we don't really--that's what Wireman says.

  Maybe si, maybe no--that's what Freemantle says.

  xiv

  There was something pulling me--maybe something that had been in me since the accident, but surely something that had come back from Duma Key Road with me. I let it pull. I'm not sure I could have stood against it in any case, but I didn't even try; I was curious.

  My daughter's purse was on the coffee table in the living room. I opened it, took out her wallet, and flipped through the pictures inside. Doing this made me feel a little like a cad, but only a little. It's not as if you're stealing anything, I told myself, but of course there are many ways of stealing, aren't there?

  Here was the photo of Carson Jones she'd shown me at the airport, but I didn't want that. I didn't want him by himself. I wanted him with her. I wanted a picture of them as a couple. And I found one. It looked as if it had been taken at a roadside stand; there were baskets of cucumbers and corn behind them. They were smiling and young and beautiful. Their arms were around each other, and one of Carson Jones's palms appeared to be resting on the swell of my daughter's blue jeans-clad ass. Oh you crazy Christian. My right arm was still itching, a low, steady skin-crawl like prickly heat. I scratched at it, scratched through it, and got my ribs instead for the ten
thousandth time. This picture was also in a protective see-through envelope. I slid it out, glanced over my shoulder--nervous as a burglar on his first job--at the partially open door of the room where Ilse was sleeping, then turned the picture over.

  I love you, Punkin!

  "Smiley"

  Could I trust a suitor who called my daughter Punkin and signed himself Smiley? I didn't think so. It might not be fair, but no--I didn't think so. Nevertheless, I had found what I was looking for. Not one, but both. I turned the picture over again, closed my eyes, and pretended I was touching their Kodachrome images with my right hand. Although pretending wasn't what it felt like; I suppose I don't have to tell you that by now.

  After some passage of time--I don't know exactly how long--I returned the picture to its plastic sleeve and submerged her wallet beneath the tissues and cosmetics to approximately the same depth at which I had found it. Then I put her purse back on the coffee table and went into my bedroom to get Reba the Anger-Management Doll. I limped upstairs to Little Pink with her clamped between my stump and my side. I think I remember saying "I'm going to make you into Monica Seles" when I set Reba down in front of the window, but it could as easily have been Monica Goldstein; when it comes to memory, we all stack the deck. The gospel according to Wireman.

  I'm clearer than I want to be about most of what happened on Duma, but that particular afternoon seems very vague to me. I know that I fell into a frenzy of drawing, and that the maddening itch in my nonexistent right arm disappeared completely while I was working; I do not know but am almost sure that the reddish haze which always hung over my vision in those days, growing thicker when I was tired, disappeared for awhile.

  I don't know how long I was in that state. I think quite awhile. Long enough so I was both exhausted and famished when I was finished.

  I went back downstairs and gobbled lunchmeat by the fridge's frosty glow. I didn't want to make an actual sandwich, because I didn't want Ilse to know I'd felt well enough to eat. Let her go on thinking our problems had been caused by bad mayonnaise. That way we wouldn't have to spend time hunting for other explanations.

  None of the other explanations I could think of were rational.

  After eating half a package of sliced salami and swilling a pint or so of sweet tea, I went into my bedroom, lay down, and fell into a sodden sleep.