Duma Key (26 page)

Leave it until tomorrow,
I thought, and a craven voice I hadn't even known was in my mental repertoire (maybe it was new) was willing to go further. It suggested I simply delete the message without listening to it at all.

“That's right, sure,” I said. “And when whichever one it is calls back, I can just tell her the dog ate my answering machine.”

I pushed PLAY. And as so often happens when we are sure we know what to expect, I drew a wild card. It wasn't Pam and it wasn't Ilse. The wheezy, slightly emphysematic voice coming from the answering machine belonged to Elizabeth Eastlake.

“Hello, Edgar,” she said. “One hopes you had a fruitful afternoon and are enjoying your evening out with Wireman as much as I am my evening in with Miss . . . well, I forget her name, but she's very pleasant. And one hopes you'll notice that I
have
remembered
your
name. I'm enjoying one of my clear patches. I love and treasure them, but they make me sad, as well. It's like being in a glider and rising on a gust of wind above a low-lying groundmist. For a little while one can see everything so clearly . . . and at the same time one knows the wind will die and one's glider will sink back into the mist again. Do you see?”

I saw, all right. Things were better for me now, but that was the world I'd woken up to, one where words clanged senselessly and memories were scattered like lawn furniture after a windstorm. It was a world where I had tried to communicate by hitting people and the only two emotions I really seemed capable of were fear and fury. One progresses beyond that state (as Elizabeth might say), but afterward one never quite loses the conviction that reality is gossamer.
Behind its webwork? Chaos. Madness. The real truth, maybe, and the real truth is red.

“But enough of me, Edgar. I called to ask a question. Are you one who creates art for money, or do you believe in art for art's sake? I'm sure I asked when I met you—I'm almost positive—but I can't remember your answer. I believe it must be art for art's sake, or Duma should not have called you. But if you stay here for long . . .”

Clear anxiety crept into her voice.

“Edgar, one is sure you'll make a very nice neighbor, I have no doubts on that score, but you must take precautions. I think you have a daughter, and I believe she visited you. Didn't she? I seem to remember her waving to me. A pretty thing with blond hair? I may be confusing her with my sister Hannah—I tend to do that, I know I do—but in this case, I think I'm right. If you mean to stay, Edgar, you mustn't invite your daughter back. Under no circumstances. Duma Key isn't a safe place for daughters.”

I stood looking down at the recorder. Not safe. Before she had said not lucky, or at least that was
my
recollection. Did those two things come to the same or not?

“And your art. There is the matter of your art.” She sounded apologetic and a little breathless. “One does not like to tell an artist what to do; really, one
cannot
tell an artist what to do, and yet . . . oh dear . . .” She broke out in the loose, rattlebox cough of the lifelong smoker. “One does not like to speak of these things directly . . . or even know
how
to speak of them directly . . . but might I give you a word of advice, Edgar? As one who only appreciates, to one who creates? Might I be allowed that?”

I waited. The machine was silent. I thought perhaps the tape had run its course. Under my feet the shells murmured quietly, as if sharing secrets.
The gun, the fruit. The fruit, the gun.
Then she began again.

“If the people who run the Scoto or the Avenida should offer you a chance to show your work, I would advise you most strongly to say yes. So others can enjoy it, of course, but mainly to get as much of it off Duma as soon as you can.” She took a deep, audible breath, sounding like a woman preparing to finish some arduous chore. She also sounded completely and utterly sane, totally there and in the moment. “
Do not let it accumulate
. That is my advice to you, well-meant and without any . . . any personal agenda? Yes, that's what I mean. Letting artistic work accumulate here is like letting too much electricity accumulate in a battery. If you do that, the battery may explode.”

I didn't know if that was actually true or not, but I took her meaning.

“I can't tell you why that should be, but it is,” she went on . . . and I had a sudden intuition that she was lying about that. “And surely if you believe in art for art's sake, the painting is the important part, isn't it?” Her voice was almost wheedling now. “Even if you don't need to sell your paintings to buy your daily bread, sharing work . . . giving it to the world . . . surely artists care about such things, don't they? The giving?”

How would I know what was important to artists? I had only that day learned what sort of finish to put on my pictures to preserve them when I was done with them. I was a . . . what had Nannuzzi and Mary Ire called me? An American primitive.

Another pause. Then: “I think I'll stop now. I've
said my piece. Just please think about what I've said if you mean to stay, Edward. And I look forward to you reading to me. Many poems, I hope. That will be a treat. Goodbye for now. Thank you for listening to an old woman.” A pause. Then she said, “The table is leaking. It must be. I'm so sorry.”

I waited twenty seconds, then thirty. I had just about decided that she'd forgotten to hang up on her end and was reaching to push the STOP button on the answering machine when she spoke again. Just six words, and they made no more sense than the thing about the leaking table, but still they brought gooseflesh out on my arm and turned the hair on the nape of my neck into hackles.

“My father was a skin diver,” Elizabeth Eastlake said. Each word was clearly enunciated. Then came the clear click of the phone being hung up on her end.

“No more messages,” the phone robot said. “The message tape is full.”

I stood staring down at the machine, thought of erasing the tape, then decided to save it and play it for Wireman. I undressed, brushed my teeth, and went to bed. I lay in the dark, feeling the soft throb of my head, while below me the shells whispered the last thing she'd said over and over:
My father was a skin diver
.

i

Things slowed down for awhile. Sometimes that happens. The pot boils, and then, just before it can boil over, some hand—God, fate, maybe plain coincidence—lowers the heat. I mentioned this once to Wireman and he said life is like Friday on a soap opera. It gives you the illusion that everything is going to wrap up, and then the same old shit starts up on Monday.

I thought he'd go with me to see a doctor and we'd find out what was wrong with him. I thought he'd tell me why he'd shot himself in the head and how a man survives that sort of thing. The answer seemed to be, “With seizures and a lot of trouble reading the fine print.” Maybe he'd even be able to tell me why his employer had a bee in her bonnet about keeping Ilse off the island. And the capper: I'd decide on what came next in the life of Edgar Freemantle, the Great American Primitive.

None of those things actually happened, at least for awhile. Life does produce changes, and the end results are sometimes explosive, but in soap operas and in real life, big bangs often have a long fuse.

Wireman did agree to go see a doctor with me and “get his head examined,” but not until March. February was too busy, he said. Winter residents—
what Wireman called “the monthlies,” as if they were menstrual periods instead of tenants—would start moving into all the Eastlake properties the coming weekend. The first snowbirds to arrive would be the ones Wireman liked least. These were the Godfreys from Rhode Island, known to Wireman (and hence to me) as Joe and Rita Mean Dog. They came for ten weeks every winter and stayed in the house closest to the Eastlake estate. The signs warning of their Rotties and their Pit Bull were out; Ilse and I had seen them. Wireman said Joe Mean Dog was an ex–Green Beret, in a tone of voice which seemed to indicate that explained everything.

“Mr. Dirisko won't even get out of his car when he has a package for them,” Wireman said. He was referring to the U.S. Postal Service's fat and jolly representative on the south end of Casey and all of Duma Key. We were sitting on the sawhorses in front of the Mean Dog house a day or two before the Godfreys were scheduled to arrive. The crushed-shell driveway was glistening a damp pink. Wireman had turned on the sprinklers. “He just leaves whatever he's got at the foot of the mailbox post, honks, and then rolls wheels for
El Palacio
. And do I blame him?
Non, non,
Nannette.”

“Wireman, about the doctor—”

“March,
muchacho,
and before the Ides. I promise.”

“You're just putting it off,” I said.

“I'm not. I have only one busy season, and this be it. I got caught a little off-guard last year, but it's not going to happen this time around. It
can't
happen this time around, because this year Miss Eastlake's going to be far less capable of pitching in. At least
the Mean Dogs are returners, known quantities, and so are the Baumgartens. I like the Baumgartens. Two kids.”

“Either of them girls?” I asked, thinking about Elizabeth's prejudice concerning daughters and Duma.

“Nope, both the kind of boys who ought to have GOT IT MADE BUT DON'T HOLD IT AGAINST US stamped on their foreheads. The people coming into the other four houses are all new. I can hope that none of them will be the rock-and-roll-all-night, party-every-day type, but what are the odds?”

“Not good, but you can at least hope they left their Slipknot CDs home.”

“Who's Slipknot?
What's
Slipknot?”

“Wireman, you don't want to know. Especially not while you're busy working yourself into a state.”

“I'm not. Wireman is just explaining February on Duma Key,
muchacho
. I'm going to be fielding everything from emergency queries about what to do if one of the Baumgarten boys gets stung by a jellyfish to where Rita Mean Dog can get a fan for her grandmother, who they'll probably stash in the back bedroom again for a week or so. You think Miss Eastlake's getting on? I've seen Mexican mummies hauled through the streets of Guadalajara on the Day of the Dead who looked better than Gramma Mean Dog. She's got two basic lines of conversation. There's the inquisitive line—‘Did you bring me a cookie?'—and the declarative—‘Get me a towel, Rita, I think that last fart had a lump in it.' ”

I burst out laughing.

Wireman scraped a sneaker through the shells, creating a smile with his foot. Beyond us, our shadows
lay on Duma Key Road, which was paved and smooth and even. Here, at least. Farther south was a different story. “The answer to the fan problem, should you care, is Dan's Fan City. Is that a great name, or what? And I'll tell you something: I actually
like
solving these problems. Defusing little crises. I make folks a hell of a lot happier here on Duma Key than I ever did in court.”

But you
haven't lost the knack for leading people away from the things you
don't want to discuss,
I thought. “Wireman, it would only take half an hour to get a physician to look into your eyes and tap your skull—”

“You're wrong,
muchacho,
” he said patiently. “At this time of year it takes a minimum of two hours to get looked at in a roadside Doc-in-the-Box for a lousy strep throat. When you add on an hour of travel time—more now, because it's Snowbird Season and none of them know where they're going—you're talking about three daylight hours I just can't give up. Not with appointments to see the air conditioning guy at 17 . . . the meter-reader at 27 . . . the cable guy right here, if he ever shows up.” He pointed to the next house down the road, which happened to be 39. “Youngsters from Toledo are taking that one until March fifteenth, and they're paying an extra seven hundred bucks for something called Wi-Fi, which I don't even know what it is.”

“Wave of the future, that's what it is. I've got it. Jack took care of it. Wave of the father-raping, mother-stabbing future.”

“Good one. Arlo Guthrie, 1967.”

“Movie was 1969, I think,” I said.

“Whenever it was,
viva
the wave of the mother-raping,
froggy-stabbing future. Doesn't change the fact that I'm busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest . . . plus come on, Edgar. You
know
it's going to be more than a quick tap and peek with the old doctor-flashlight. That's just where it starts.”

“But if you need it—”

“For the time being I'm good to go.”

“Sure. That's why I'm the one reading her poems every afternoon.”

“A little literary culture won't hurt you, you fucking cannibal.”

“I know it won't, and
you
know that's not what I'm talking about.” I thought—and not for the first time—that Wireman was one of the very few men I ever met in my adult life who could consistently tell me no without making me angry. He was a genius of no. Sometimes I thought it was him; sometimes I thought the accident had changed something in me; sometimes I thought it was both.

“I
can
read, you know,” Wireman said. “In short bursts. Enough to get by. Medicine bottle labels, phone numbers, things like that. And I
will
get looked at, so relax that Type-A compulsion of yours to set the whole world straight. Christ, you must have driven your wife crazy.” He glanced at me sideways and said, “Oops. Did Wireman step on a corn there?”

“Ready to talk about that little round scar on the side of your head yet?
Muchacho?
”