Duma Key (17 page)

I put my plastic bag—it was indeed a bread-bag—on the table and reached across to him. “Edgar Freemantle.”

His hand was short, the fingers blunt, the grip strong. “Jerome Wireman. I go by Wireman, mostly.”

I looked at the beach chair meant for me. It was the kind with a high back and a low fanny-sling, like the bucket seat in a Porsche.

“Something wrong with that,
muchacho
?” Wireman asked, raising an eyebrow. He had a lot of eyebrow to raise, tufted and half-gray.

“Not as long as you don't laugh when I have to get out of it,” I said.

He smiled. “Honey, live like you got to live. Chuck Berry, nineteen sixty-nine.”

I positioned myself beside the empty chair, said a little prayer, and dropped. I leaned left as always, to spare my bad hip. I didn't land quite square, but I grabbed the wooden arms, pushed with my strong foot, and the chair only teetered. A month before I would have spilled, but I was stronger now. I could imagine Kathi Green applauding.

“Good job, Edgar,” he said. “Or are you an Eddie?”

“Pick your poison, I answer to either. What might you have in that pitcher?”

“Iced green tea,” he said. “Very cooling. Try some?”

“I'd love to.”

He poured me a glass, then topped up his own and raised it. The tea was only faintly green. His eyes, caught in fine nets of wrinkles, were greener. His hair was black, streaking in white at the temples, and quite long indeed. When the wind lifted it, I could see a scar at the top of his hairline on the right side, coin-shaped but smaller. He was wearing a bathing
suit today, and his legs were as brown as his arms. He looked fit, but I thought he also looked tired.

“Let's drink to you,
muchacho
. You made it.”

“All right,” I said. “To me.”

We clinked glasses and drank. I'd had green tea before and thought it was okay, but this was heavenly—like drinking cold silk, with just a faint tang of sweetness.

“Do you taste the honey?” he asked, and smiled when I nodded. “Not everyone does. I just put in a tablespoonful per pitcher. It releases the natural sweetness of the tea. I learned that cooking on a tramp steamer in the China Sea.” He held up his glass and squinted through it. “We fought off many pirates and mated with strange and dusky women 'neath tropic skies.”

“That sounds a trifle bullshitty to me, Mr. Wireman.”

He laughed. “I actually read about the honey thing in one of Miss Eastlake's cookery books.”

“Is she the lady you come out with in the mornings? The one in the wheelchair?”

“Indeed she is.”

And without thinking much about what I was saying—it was her enormous blue sneakers propped up on the chrome footrests of her wheelchair I was thinking about—I said: “The Bride of the Godfather.”

Wireman gaped, those green eyes of his so wide I was about to apologize for my
faux pas
. Then he
really
began to laugh. It was the kind of balls-to-the-wall bellowing you give out on those rare occasions when something sneaks past all your defenses and gets to the sweet spot of your funnybone. I mean the man was busting a gut, and when he saw I didn't have the
slightest idea what had gotten him, he laughed even harder, his not inconsiderable belly heaving. He tried to put his glass back on the little table and missed. The glass plummeted straight down to the sand and
stuck
there, perfectly upright, like a cigarette-butt in one of those urns of sand you used to see beside the elevators in hotel lobbies. That struck him even funnier, and he pointed at it.

“I couldn't have done that if I was
trying
!” he managed, and then was off again, gale upon gale, heaving in his chair, one hand clutching his stomach, the other planted on his chest. A snatch of poetry read in high school, over thirty years before, suddenly came back to me with haunting clarity:
Men do not sham convulsion, Nor simulate a throe.

I was smiling myself, smiling and chuckling, because that kind of high hilarity is catching, even when you don't know what the joke is. And the glass falling that way, with every drop of Wireman's tea staying inside . . . that
was
funny. Like a gag in a Road Runner cartoon. But the plummeting glass hadn't been the source of Wireman's hilarity.

“I don't get it. I mean I'm sorry if I—”

“She sort of
is
!” Wireman cried, cackling so crazily he was almost incoherent. “She sort of
is,
that's the thing! Only it's
daughter,
of course, she's The
Daughter
of the Godfa—”

But he had been rocking from side to side as well as up and down—no sham, authentic throe—and that was when his beach chair finally gave up the ghost with a loud
crrrack,
first snapping him forward with an extremely comical look of surprise on his face and then spilling him onto the sand. One of his flailing arms caught the post of the umbrella and upended
the table. A gust of wind caught the umbrella, puffed it like a sail, and began to drag the table down the beach. What got me laughing wasn't the bug-eyed look of amazement on Wireman's face when his disintegrating beach chair tried to clamp on him like a striped jaw, nor his sudden barrel-roll onto the sand. It wasn't even the sight of that table trying to escape, tugged by its own umbrella. It was Wireman's glass, still standing placidly upright between the sprawling man's side and left arm.

Acme Iced Tea Company,
I thought, still stuck on those old Road Runner cartoons.
Meep-meep!
And that, of course, made me think of the crane that had done the damage, the one with the fucked-up beeper that hadn't beeped, and all at once I saw myself as Wile E. Coyote in the cab of my disintegrating pickup truck, eyes bugged in bewilderment, frazzled ears sticking off in two opposite directions and maybe smoking a little at the tips.

That did it. I laughed until I rolled bonelessly out of my own chair and plopped onto the sand beside Wireman . . . but I also missed the glass, which still stood perfectly upright like a cigarette-butt in an urn of sand. It was impossible for me to laugh any harder, but I did. Tears gushed down my cheeks and the world had begun to dim out as my brain went into oxygen-deprivation mode.

Wireman, still howling, went crawling after his runaway table, locomoting on knees and elbows. He made a grab for the base and it skittered away as if sensing his approach. Wireman plowed face-first into the sand and came up laughing and sneezing. I rolled over on my back and gasped for breath, on the verge of passing out but still laughing.

That was how I met Wireman.

iii

Twenty minutes later the table had been placed in a rough approximation of its original position. That was all very well, but neither of us could look at the umbrella without breaking into fits of the giggles. One of its pie-wedges was torn, and it now rose crookedly from the table, giving it the look of a drunken man trying to pretend he's sober. Wireman had moved the remaining chair down to the end of the wooden walk, and had taken it at my insistence. I was sitting on the walk itself, which, although backless, would make getting up an easier (not to mention more dignified) proposition. Wireman had offered to replace the spilled pitcher of iced tea with a fresh one. I refused this, but agreed to split the miraculously unspilled glass with him.

“Now we're water-brothers,” he said when it was gone.

“Is that some Indian ritual?” I asked.

“Nope, from
Stranger in a Strange Land,
by Robert Heinlein. Bless his memory.”

It occurred to me that I'd never seen him reading as he sat in his striped chair, but I didn't mention it. Lots of people don't read on the beach; the glare gives them headaches. I sympathized with people who got headaches.

He began to laugh again. He covered his mouth with both hands—like a child—but the laughter burst through. “No more. Jesus, no more. I feel like I sprung every muscle in my stomach.”

“Me too,” I said.

For a moment we said nothing more. The breeze off the Gulf was cool and fresh that day, with a rueful
salt tang. The rip in the umbrella flapped. The dark spot on the sand where the iced tea pitcher had spilled was already almost dry.

He snickered. “Did you see the table trying to escape? The fucking
table
?”

I also snickered. My hip hurt and my stomach-muscles ached, but I felt pretty good for a man who had almost laughed himself unconscious. “ ‘Alabama Getaway,' ” I said.

He nodded, still wiping sand from his face. “Grateful Dead. Nineteen seventy-nine. Or thereabouts.” He giggled, the giggle broadened into a chuckle, and the chuckle became another bellow of full-throated laughter. He held his belly and groaned. “I can't, I have to stop, but . . . Bride of the Godfather!
Jesus!
” And he was off again.

“Don't you ever tell her I said that,” I said.

He quit laughing, but not smiling. “I ain't that indiscreet,
muchacho
. But . . . it was the hat, right? That big straw hat she wears. Like Marlon Brando in the garden, playing with the little kid.”

It had actually been as much the sneakers, but I nodded and we laughed some more.

“If we crack up when I introduce you,” he said (cracking up again, probably at the idea of cracking up; it goes that way when the fit is on you), “we're gonna say it's because I broke my chair, right?”

“Right,” I said. “What did you mean when you said she sort of is?”

“You really don't know?”

“No clue.”

He pointed at Big Pink, which was looking very small in the distance. Looking like a long walk back. “Who do you think owns your place,
amigo
? I mean,
I'm sure you pay a real estate agent, or Vacation Homes Be Us, but where do you think the balance of your check finally ends up?”

“I'm going to guess in Miss Eastlake's bank account.”

“Correct. Miss Elizabeth Eastlake. Given the lady's age—eighty-five—I guess you could call her Ole Miss.” He began laughing again, shook his head, and said: “I have to stop. But in fairness to myself, it's been a long time since I had anything to belly-laugh about.”

“Same here.”

He looked at me—armless, all patchy-haired on one side—and nodded. Then for a little while we just looked out at the Gulf. I know that people come to Florida when they're old and sick because it's warm pretty much year-round, but I think the Gulf of Mexico has something else going for it. Just looking into that mild flat sunlit calm is healing. It's a big word, isn't it?
Gulf,
I mean. Big enough to drop a lot of things into and watch them disappear.

After awhile Wireman said, “And who do you think owns the houses between your place and this one?” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the white walls and orange tile. “Which, by the way, is listed on the county plat-maps as
Heron's Roost
and I call
El Palacio de Asesinos
.”

“Would that also be Miss Eastlake?”

“You're two for two,” he said.

“Why do you call it
Palace of Assassins
?”

“Well, it's ‘Outlaw Hideout' when I think in English,” Wireman said with an apologetic smile. “Because it looks like the place where the head bad guy in a Sam Peckinpah Western would hang his hat.
Anyway, you've got six rather nice homes between Heron's Roost and Salmon Point—”

“Which I call Big Pink,” I said. “When I think in English.”

He nodded. “
El Rosado Grande.
Good name. I like it. You'll be there . . . how long?”

“I have the place for a year, but I honestly don't know. I'm not afraid of hot weather—I guess they call it the mean season—but there's hurricanes to consider.”

“Yep, down here we all consider hurricane season, especially since Charley and Katrina. But the houses between Salmon Point and Heron's Roost will be empty long before hurricane season. Like the rest of Duma Key. Which could as easily have been called Eastlake Island, by the way.”

“Are you saying this is all hers?”

“That's complicated even for a guy like me, who was a lawyer in his other life,” Wireman said. “Once upon a time her
father
owned it all, along with a good swatch of the Florida mainland east of here. He sold everything in the thirties except for Duma. Miss Eastlake does own the north end, of that there is no doubt.” Wireman waved his arm to indicate the northern tip of the island, the part he would later characterize as being as bald as a stripper's pussy. “The land and the houses on it, from Heron's Roost—the most luxurious—to your Big Pink, the most adventurous. They bring her an income she hardly needs, because her father also left her and her siblings
mucho dinero
.”

“How many of her brothers and sisters are still—”

“None,” Wireman said. “The Daughter of the
Godfather is the last.” He snorted and shook his head. “I have to quit calling her that,” he said, more to himself than to me.

“If you say so. What I really wonder about is why the rest of the island isn't developed. Given the never-ending housing and building boom in Florida, that's seemed insane to me from the first day I crossed the bridge.”

“You speak like a man with specialized knowledge. What are you in your other life, Edgar?”

“A building contractor.”

“And those days are behind you now?”

I could have hedged—I didn't know him well enough to put myself on the line—but I didn't. I'm sure our mutual fit of hysterics had a lot to do with that. “Yes,” I said.

“And what are you in this life?”

I sighed and looked away from him. Out at the Gulf, where you could put all your old miseries and watch them disappear without a trace. “Can't tell yet for sure. I've been doing some painting.” And waited for him to laugh.