Duma Key(123)

An AP reporter from Tampa came to Sarasota he wanted to come to Duma, but I didn't like the idea of a reporter tramping around in Big Pink, listening to what I now thought of as my shells. He interviewed me at the Scoto instead, while a photographer took pictures of three carefully selected paintings: Roses Grow from Shells, Sunset with Sophora, and Duma Road. I was wearing a Casey Key Fish House tee-shirt, and a photo of me baseball cap on backwards and one short sleeve empty except for a nub of stump ran nationwide. After that, my telephone rang off the hook. Angel Slobotnik called and talked for twenty minutes. At one point, he said he always knew I had it in me. "What?" I asked. His reply was "Bullshit, boss," and we laughed like maniacs. Kathi Green called; I heard all about her new boyfriend (not so good) and her new self-help program (wonderful). I told her about how Kamen had shown up at the lecture and saved my ass. By the end of that call she was crying and saying she'd never had such a gutty, come-from-behind patient. Then she said when she saw me she was going to tell me to drop and give her fifty sit-ups. That sounded like the old Kathi. To top it all off, Todd Jamieson, the doctor who had probably saved me from a decade or two as a human rutabaga, sent me a bottle of champagne with a card reading, Cannot wait to see your work.

If Wireman had bet me on whether or not I'd get bored and pick up a brush again before the show, he would have lost. When I wasn't getting ready for my big moment, I was walking, reading, or sleeping. I mentioned this to him on one of the rare afternoons when we were together at the end of El Palacio 's boardwalk, drinking green tea under the striped umbrella. This was less than a week before the show.

"I'm glad," he said simply. "You needed to rest."

"What about you, Wireman? How are you doing?"

"Not great, but I will survive Gloria Gaynor, 1978. It's sadness, mostly." He sighed. "I'm going to lose her. I kidded myself that maybe she was coming back, but... I'm going to lose her. It's not like Julia and Esmeralda, thank God, but it still weighs on me."

"I'm sorry." I laid my hand over his. "For her and for you."

"Thanks." He looked out at the waves. "Sometimes I think she won't die at all."

"No?"

"No. I think the Walrus and the Carpenter will come for her, instead. That they'll just lead her away like they did those trusting Oysters. Lead her away down the beach. Do you remember what the Walrus says?"

I shook my head.

"'It seems a shame to play them such a trick, After we've brought them out so far, And made them trot so quick.'" He swiped an arm across his face. "Look at me, muchacho, crying just like the Walrus. Ain't I stupid."

"No," I said.

"I hate to face the idea that this time she's gone for good, that the best part of her went off down the beach with the Walrus and the Carpenter and there's nothing left but a fat old piece of suet that hasn't quite forgotten how to breathe yet."

I said nothing. He wiped his eyes again with his forearm and drew in a long, watery breath. Then he said, "I looked into the story of John Eastlake, and how his daughters were drowned, and what happened after do you remember asking me to do that?"

I did, but it seemed long ago, and unimportant. What I think now is that something wanted it to seem that way to me.

"I went surfing around on the Internet and came up with a good deal from the local newspapers and a couple of memoirs that are available for download. One of them I shit you not, muchacho is called Boat Trips and Beeswax, A Girlhood in Nokomis, by Stephanie Weider Gravel-Miller."

"Sounds like quite a trip down memory lane."

"It was. She talks about 'the happy darkies, picking oranges and singing simple songs of praise in their mellifluous voices.'"

"I guess that was before Jay-Z."

"Got that right. Even better, I talked to Chris Shannington, over on Casey Key you've almost certainly seen him. Colorful old geezer who walks everyplace with this gnarled briarwood cane, almost as tall as he is, and a big straw hat on his head. His father, Ellis Shannington, was John Eastlake's gardener. According to Chris, it was Ellis who took Maria and Hannah, Elizabeth's two older sisters, back to the Braden School ten days or so after the drowning. He said, 'Those chirrun were heartbroken for the babby-uns.'"

Wireman's imitation of the old man's southern accent was eerily good, and I found myself for some reason thinking of the Walrus and the Carpenter again, walking up the beach with the little Oysters. The only part of the poem I could remember clearly was the Carpenter telling them they'd had a pleasant run, but of course the Oysters couldn't answer, for they'd been eaten every one.

"Do you want to hear this now?" Wireman asked.

"Have you got time to tell me now?"

"Sure. Annmarie's got the duty until seven, although as a matter of practical fact, we share it most days. Why don't we walk up to the house? I've got a file. There isn't much in it, but there's at least one picture that's worth looking at. Chris Shannington had it in a box of his father's things. I walked up to the Casey Key Public Library with him and copied it." He paused. "It's a picture of Heron's Roost."

"As it was back then, you mean?"

We had started to stroll back up the boardwalk, but Wireman stopped. "No, amigo, you misunderstand. I'm talking about the original Heron's Roost. El Palacio is the second Roost, built almost twenty-five years after the little girls drowned. By then, John Eastlake's ten or twenty million had grown to a hundred and fifty million or so. War Is Good Business, Invest Your Son."