Duma Key(17)

vii

Instead of showering, I walked down the beach to the water. I quickly discovered my crutch was no help on the sand - was, in fact, a hindrance - but once I was around the corner of the house, the water's edge was less than two dozen steps away. That was easy if I went slow. The surge was mild, the incoming wavelets only inches high. It was hard to imagine this water whipped into a destructive hurricane frenzy. Impossible, actually. Later, Wireman would tell me God always punishes us for what we can't imagine.

That was one of his better ones.

I turned to go back to the house, then paused. There was just enough light to see a deep carpet of shells - a drift of shells - under the jutting Florida room. At high tide, I realized, the front half of my new house would be almost like the foredeck of a ship. I remembered Jack saying I'd get plenty of warning if the Gulf of Mexico decided to eat the place, that I'd hear it groaning. He was probably right... but then, I was also supposed to get plenty of warning on a job site when a heavy piece of equipment was backing up.

I limped back to where my crutch leaned against the side of the house and took the short plank walk around to the door. I thought about the shower and took a bath instead, going in and coming out in the careful sidesaddle way Kathi Green had shown me in my other life, both of us dressed in bathing suits, me with my right leg looking like a badly butchered cut of meat. Now the butchery was in the past; my body was doing its miracle work. The scars would last a lifetime, but even they were fading. Already fading.

Dried off and with my teeth brushed, I crutched into the master bedroom and surveyed the king, now divested of decorative pillows. "Houston," I said, "we have bed."

"Roger, Freemantle," I replied. "You are go for bed."

Sure, why not? I'd never sleep, not after that whopper of a nap, but I could lie down for awhile. My leg still felt pretty good, even after my expedition to the water, but there was a knot in my lower back and another at the base of my neck. I lay down. No, sleep was out of the question, but I turned off the lamp anyway. Just to rest my eyes. I'd lie there until my back and neck felt better, then dig a paperback out of my suitcase and read.

Just lie here for awhile, that was...

I got that far, and then I was gone again. There were no dreams.

viii

I slipped back to some sort of consciousness in the middle of the night with my right arm itching and my right hand tingling and no idea of where I was, only that from below me something vast was grinding and grinding and grinding. At first I thought it was machinery, but it was too uneven to be machinery. And too organic, somehow. Then I thought of teeth, but nothing had teeth that vast. Nothing in the known world, at least.

Breathing, I thought, and that seemed right, but what kind of animal made such a vast grinding sound when it drew in breath? And God, that itch was driving me crazy, all the way up my forearm to the crease of the elbow. I went to scratch it, reaching across my chest with my left hand, and of course there was no elbow, no forearm, and I scratched nothing but the bedsheet.

That brought me fully awake and I sat up. Although the room was still very dark, enough starlight came in through the westward-facing window for me to see the foot of the bed, where one of my suitcases rested on a bench. That locked me in place. I was on Duma Key, just off the west coast of Florida - home of the newly wed and the nearly dead. I was in the house I was already thinking of as Big Pink, and that grinding sound -

"It's shells," I murmured, lying back down. "Shells under the house. The tide's in."

I loved that sound from the first, when I woke up and heard it in the dark of night, when I didn't know where I was, who I was, or what parts were still attached. It was mine.

It had me from hello.

Chapter 2 Big Pink

i

Kamen's geographical worked, but when it came to fixing what was wrong with my head, I think the Florida part was coincidental. It's true that I lived there, but I never really lived there. No, Kamen's geographical worked because of Duma Key, and Big Pink. For me, those places came to constitute their own world.

I left St. Paul on November tenth with hope in my heart but no real expectations. Kathi Green the Rehab Queen came to see me off. She kissed me on the mouth, hugged me hard, and whispered "May all your dreams come true, Eddie."

"Thanks, Kathi," I said. I was touched even though the dream I fixed on was of Reba the Anger-Management Doll, grown to the size of an actual child, sitting in the moonlit living room of the house I'd shared with Pam. That dream coming true I could live without.

"And send me a picture from Disney World. I long to see you in mouse ears."

"I will," I said, but I never got to Disney World. Sea World, Busch Gardens, or Daytona Speedway, either.

When I left St. Paul, flying in a Lear 55 (successful retirement has its privileges), it was twenty-four and spitting the first snowflakes of another long northern winter. When I landed in Sarasota it was eighty-five and sunny. Even crossing the tarmac to the private air terminal, still clumping along on my trusty red crutch, I thought I could feel my hip saying thank you.

When I look back on that time, it's with the strangest stew of emotions: love, longing, terror, horror, regret, and the deep sweetness only those who've been near death can know. I think it's how Adam and Eve must have felt. Surely they looked back at Eden, don't you think, as they started barefoot down the path to where we are now, in our glum political world of bullets and bombs and satellite TV? Looked past the angel guarding the shut gate with his fiery sword? Sure. I think they must have wanted one more look at the green world they had lost, with its sweet water and kind-hearted animals. And its snake, of course.